Hormonal
Beta-adrenergic receptor blockade with propranolol significantly reduces the thermic effect of glucose and the energy cost of glucose storage in healthy men, indicating that sympathetic nervous system activity drives the facultative component of diet-induced thermogenesis.
Your body burns extra calories after eating carbs partly because your nervous system gets activated by insulin. Blocking this nervous system response (as done in this study with propranolol) significantly reduces that extra calorie burn, bringing it down to the basic energy cost of storing glucose as glycogen. This suggests that the 'thermic effect' of food is not just a chemical cost of storage, but an active neural process.
It is concluded that β-adrenergically mediated sympathetic nervous activity is responsible for almost the entire rise in energy expenditure in excess of the obligatory requirements for processing and storing glucose during conditions of normoglycemia and hyperinsulinemia in healthy man
Why this rating
Randomized controlled crossover design with rigorous clamp techniques and indirect calorimetry in healthy subjects.
Source
Thermic effect of glucose in man. Obligatory and facultative thermogenesis.
K. J. Acheson et al. · Journal of Clinical Investigation · 1984
DOI 10.1172/jci111573
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