Weight Loss
Mom’s weight gain may affect cleft palate risk
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A substantial amount of weight gain between pregnancies seems to be a factor increasing the risk of cleft palate in offspring, according to US and Swedish researchers.
Cleft lip or palate occurs when the tissues that form the palate, or roof of the mouth, and the upper lip do not join correctly. Surgery is often performed to repair the condition.
“We found that large increases in maternal body weight between the first and the second pregnancies were associated with greater risk of having a baby with cleft palate,” lead investigator Dr. Eduardo Villamor told Reuters Health.
Weight gain no big deal in type 1 diabetes: study
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Becoming overweight or obese may not be so bad for people who are battling type 1 diabetes, the less common form of the disease, researchers said on Friday.
People who put on weight over time were less likely to die than others studied, and those classified as underweight were at the greatest risk for death, according to the study.
Even people who were technically obese were less likely to die if they had type 1 diabetes, the team at the University of Pittsburgh found.
U of I study shows how to lose weight without losing bone
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A higher-protein diet that emphasizes lean meats and low-fat dairy foods as sources of protein and calcium can mean weight loss without bone loss—and the evidence is in bone scans taken throughout a new University of Illinois study.
The research, which compared the results of a high-protein, dairy-intensive diet with a conventional weight-loss diet based on the food-guide pyramid, was published in this month’s Journal of Nutrition.
“This is an important finding because many people, especially women in mid-life, are concerned with both obesity and osteoporosis,” said Ellen Evans, a U of I associate professor of kinesiology and community health and member of the U of I Division of Nutritional Sciences.
Thinness vs. obesity not directly linked to eating habits, study suggests
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Whether you are fat or thin isn’t directly determined by your eating habits, suggest researchers who report new findings made in worms in the June issue of Cell Metabolism, a publication of Cell Press. While both feeding and fat in worms depends on serotonin levels in the nervous system, they found evidence that the nerve messenger acts through independent channels to control whether you eat versus what to do with those calories once you’ve eaten them.
“It says that the nervous system is a key regulator coordinating all energy-related processes through distinct molecular pathways,” said Kaveh Ashrafi of the University of California, San Francisco. “The nervous system makes a decision about its state leading to effects on behavior, reproduction, growth and metabolism. These outputs are related, but they are not consequences of each other. It’s not that feeding isn’t important, but the neural control of fat is distinct from feeding.”
If the results in worms can be extrapolated to humans, as Ashrafi suspects at a fundamental level they can given serotonin’s ancient evolutionary origins, then the finding may have clinical implications.
Low-carb diets work for overweight diabetics
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Overweight people with type 2 diabetes can keep their weight and blood sugar under control over the long term by following a low-carbohydrate diet, Swedish researchers report.
“It is indeed possible to have a lasting success in the treatment of some of these patients,” Dr. Jorgen Vesti Nielsen told Reuters Health.
The participants in the study limited their carbohydrate intake to 20 percent of total calories. The most significant effect of this low-carb diet is the absence of hunger, Nielsen added.
Less TV, more breakfast helps teens keep weight off
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Eating breakfast, skipping snacks and cutting down on TV and computer time may help adolescents maintain a healthy weight after being treated for obesity, new research from France shows.
Teens who adopted these habits—and ate fewer calories while getting more of their energy from protein—were more likely to have kept the weight off two years after the conclusion of a weight-reduction program, Dr. Marie Francoise Rolland-Cachera of the University of Paris and colleagues found.
While certain behavior strategies are known to help formerly obese adults stay slim, such as monitoring one’s weight and food intake, less is known about the characteristics that distinguish adolescents who lose weight and keep it off, the researchers note.
Unilever says new milkshake helps control appetite
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A new weight loss drink that tastes like a milkshake significantly reduces appetite and could soon join Unilever’s $400 million Slim-Fast weight-loss brand, the company’s researchers said on Wednesday.
A study showed that the drink, which works by trapping gas in foods to make people feel full, worked even better than the company’s Slim-Fast weight-loss drink, they said.
The researchers, who presented their findings at the 2008 European Congress on Obesity, said the company has patented the technology.
After-school Activity Reduces Excess Weight Gain in Adolescent Girls
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The middle school years is the time when time kids spend begin to spend less time in physical activity, a growing concern as youth obesity rates rise. A new study of middle school girls shows that after-school programs, in addition to school physical education classes, may be one answer to reducing obesity in teens. The just-released results of the Trial of Activity for Adolescent Girls (TAAG) showed that moderate to vigorous after-school physical activity, in programs that can range from hip hop dancing to surfing, can modestly increase the amount of physical activity for young teenage girls, to the point that it could prevent excess weight gain of about two pounds per year. If sustained, that extra activity could prevent a girl from becoming overweight as a teenager or adult. Results are published in the article, “Promoting Physical Activity in Middle School Girls,” in the March issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Deborah Young, professor and interim chair of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics in the University of Maryland, College Park, School of Public Health, was a researcher on the TAAG study. Below she answers questions about the study and increasing physical activity in adolescent girls.
Weight-loss drugs may harm developing brain: study
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A drug from a new class of weight-loss treatments disrupted wiring needed for brain development in young mice, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday, raising concerns about using such medications in children.
Mark Bear and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied the effects of a chemical that suppresses appetite by blocking cannabinoid receptors in the brain, the same brain mechanisms that make people hungry when they smoke marijuana.
“I think that the cautionary note is that these mechanisms play an important role in ... brain development,” said Bear, whose study appears in the journal Neuron.
Advertisements Saying Dairy Products Help You Lose Weight Are Misleading
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There have been recent claims that dairy products can help people lose weight, and the dairy industry has hyped the assertion by investing millions of dollars in commercial advertising. However, a new review of the evidence published in the journal Nutrition Reviews reveals that neither dairy nor calcium intake promotes weight loss.
Amy Joy Lanou of the University of North Carolina at Asheville and Neal Barnard with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington, DC, evaluated evidence from 49 clinical trials from 1966 to 2007 that assessed the effect of milk, dairy products, or calcium intake on body weight and BMI, with or without the use of dieting.
Birth size linked to weight gain and inflammation
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The results of a study published in the European Heart Journal indicate there is an association between lower birth weight and greater weight gain from childhood to adulthood and with low-grade inflammation in adulthood.
“Impaired fetal growth and growth during infancy or childhood may trigger inflammatory pathways leading to activated low-grade inflammation in adulthood,” Dr. Paul Elliott, of Imperial College London, UK, and colleagues write. They suggest that this inflammation may be an “intermediate factor” that links impaired fetal growth and cardiovascular disease, a relationship that has been previously found.
Using data from a study in northern Finland that began in 1966, the researchers examined the relationships between fetal growth, weight gain from childhood to adulthood, and low-grade inflammation measured by blood levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a “biomarker” for inflammation, meaning higher than normal levels suggest inflammation is occurring.
Obese women disadvantaged in both breast cancer treatment and diagnosis
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Berlin, Germany: Obese women with breast cancer have worse disease outcomes and also tend to present to their doctor for the first time with more advanced disease, two scientists told the 6th European Breast Cancer Conference (EBCC-6) today (Wednesday 16 April).
Dr. Evandro de Azambuja and colleagues at the Jules Bordet Institute, Brussels, Belgium, told the conference that his work, which involved 2887 patients, showed that women who had a body mass index (BMI) of more than 30kg/m2 had poorer outcomes in terms of disease-free and overall survival. “Our data once more stress the global problem of obesity,” he said.
Dr. de Azambuja and colleagues studied patients who were taking part in an international phase III trial (BIG 2-98) which compared two docetaxel regimes with two anthracycline regimes in patients with node-positive breast cancer (where the cancer has spread to the lymph nodes). Obesity was found in 19% of all patients enrolled in this trial. “We found that 5-year disease-free survival in non-obese patients was significantly higher than in the obese group,” he said. “75.9% of the non-obese patients were disease-free after 5 years as compared to 70% of those who were obese. In addition, the 5-year overall survival was 87.5% in the non-obese patients compared to 82.9% in the obese patients.
Low-impact exercise helps obese boys burn more fat
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For obese boys, lower-intensity exercise like walking may be better at burning fat than more-vigorous workouts, a small study suggests.
In exercise tests of 30 thin or obese 12-year-old boys, French researchers found that obese boys burned the most fat when they worked out at a modest intensity—akin to riding a bike on level ground.
Once the activity became more challenging, their bodies began to use substantially less fat compared with normal-weight boys.
The skinny on BMI
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“The definition of obesity is having excess fat,” says Dr. Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and lead author of a study on what researchers are calling “normal weight obesity.” It was presented last week at the American College of Cardiology’s annual science session in Chicago. “For years we’ve been using BMI to diagnose obesity, but the first question we had was ‘Is it possible to be normal weight but have excess fat?’ “
Researchers examined data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and found that among 2,127 men and women of normal weight and BMIs between 18.5 and 24.9, almost half had excess fat—20% of total body composition for men and 30% for women. (Although acceptable levels of body fat vary, most experts agree these numbers are high.) Compared with those without excess fat, they also were 2 1/2 times more likely to have metabolic syndrome.
Sleeping too much, too little speeds weight gain
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People who sleep less than 7 hours or more than 9 hours a night gain more weight over time than individuals who log 8 hours every night, and are also more likely to become obese, research confirms.
People who want to lose weight or prevent weight gain must exercise and eat well, but
“we have to realize that sleep habits are also important,” Dr. Angelo Tremblay, of Laval University in Quebec City, who led the study, told Reuters Health.
