Chickpeas to fight obesity diseases?

Chinese researchers feeding chickpeas to obese rats believe chickpeas may help overweight and obese people to fight high cholesterol and insulin resistance.

They compared rats on a normal-fat diet, a high-fat diet, and a high-fat diet with added chickpeas over an eight-month period. 

Not surprisingly, the rats on the high-fat diet became obese, their blood lipids (blood-cholesterol, etc) became undesirable and they became insulin-resistant (a pre-cursor to type 2 diabetes).

However, the rats fed chickpeas with the high-fat diet had less visceral fat – the dangerous fat deposits around internal organs – lower blood lipid measurements and better insulin resistance.

While these results have yet to be shown in human trials, chickpeas are known to be beneficial in the diet.

Source: British Journal of Nutrition, September 2007