New research suggests that consuming red meat may increase appetite and disease risk.

Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found that dietary iron intake, equivalent to heavy red meat consumption, suppresses leptin, a hormone that regulates appetite.

Iron is the one mineral that humans can't excrete, so the more iron that is consumed the greater the likelihood that leptin levels will drop, resulting in increased appetite and the potential to overeat.

"We showed that the amount of food intake increased in animals that had high levels of dietary iron," Don McClain, senior author of the study, said in a statement. "In people, high iron, even in the high-normal range, has been implicated as a contributing factor to many diseases, including diabetes, fatty liver disease and Alzheimer's, so this is yet another reason not to eat so much red meat because the iron in red meat is more readily absorbed than iron from plants."

For the study, researchers used an animal model in which male mice were fed high and low-normal iron diets for two months, followed by measuring the levels of iron in fat tissue. The researchers observed a 215 percent increase of iron in the mice fed a high iron diet as compared to the mice fed the low normal diet. In addition, leptin levels in blood were 42 percent lower in mice on the high iron diet compared to those on the low normal diet.

The results were verified through ferritin blood tests from a large number of human participants in a previous clinical study. Ferritin blood tests measure the amount of iron stored in the body.

The researchers showed that fat tissue responds to iron availability to adjust the expression of leptin, a major regulator of appetite, energy expenditure and metabolism.

"We don't know yet what optimal iron tissue level is, but we are hoping to do a large clinical trial to determine if decreasing iron levels has any effect on weight and diabetes risk," McClain said. "The better we understand how iron works in the body, the better chance we have of finding new pathways that may be targets for the prevention and treatment of diabetes and other diseases."

The findings are detailed in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.