Diet Soda Doesn’t Help You Lose Weight

2013-12-10

Sales of diet soda beverages is the only number on the decline

By Alexandra Sifferlin

Diet soda is falling out of favor. According to new research from Wells Fargo, low-calorie and zero-calorie soda sales slipped about 7% over the past year. Regular soda has fallen just over 2%.

The reason remains a mystery, but perhaps folks are realizing that the benefits of drinking diet soda are just not there. At least, if you’re trying to shed pounds.

Several studies in the past couple of years have torn holes in the theory that zero-calorie sodas mean zero weight gain. Indeed, research presented at the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA) Scientific Sessions in 2011 showed the opposite is true—diet sodas can actually contribute to weight gain.

(MORE: Studies: Why Diet Sodas Are No Benefit to Dieters)

How? There are a few theories. First, scientists speculate that artificial sweeteners fool more than just your palate; they also fool your brain. When you taste something sweet, your body naturally expects a calorie-load that diet beverages don’t deliver. As a reaction, the metabolic system may start converting the sugar that’s already circulating in the blood into fat, on the assumption that more has just come in that can be used as energy. In the alternative, the body may go in the other direction, burning though the circulating sugar so that the incoming soda doesn’t leave you with too much. But since the soda has no sugar at all, you wind up with a net loss—which may lead to a craving for candy or some other high-sugar snack.

It’s also possible that the lack of calories causes diet-soda drinkers to overeat later for psychological reasons. They either feel unsatisfied and eat more to make up for it, or they think they saved on calories earlier by opting for diet soda—a handy justification for eating more.

The plunging sales numbers may suggest that consumers are catching wise to all of this. The solution: it’s better to kick the soda habit and stick to water.

You Can’t Be Fit and Fat

2013-12-03

By Alexandra Sifferlin

It’s okay to be heavy, as long as you don’t have diabetes or hypertension–right? Not so fast, says the latest research.

There are always exceptions to the rule, and that’s true of health issues too. While the bulk of studies warn about the dangers — to the heart, liver, kidneys and other body systems — of gaining weight, a small number of trials suggested that some overweight or obese individuals may be as healthy as their normal weight counterparts, since they had normal blood pressure, no diabetes and relatively stable cholesterol levels. In fact, one study found that overweight individuals (but not obese people) tended to live longer than those of normal weight.

But in a comprehensive review of studies dating back to the 1950s, scientists contradict that idea, with evidence that it’s not possible to be both overweight and healthy.

The researchers, from Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada, found that people who tipped the scales at above their recommended body mass index (BMI) but did not have abnormal cholesterol or blood pressure, for example, still had a higher risk of dying from heart disease over an average of about 10 years compared to metabolically healthy individuals within normal weight ranges. In their analysis, published in Annals of Internal Medicine, the researchers separated individuals in the previous studies into six groups: normal weight and healthy, normal weight and unhealthy, overweight and healthy, overweight and unhealthy, obese and healthy, and obese and unhealthy. Their results showed that regardless of the person’s BMI, an unhealthy metabolic state — such as having hypertension, diabetes or high cholesterol levels — was consistently linked to an increased risk of dying during the study period or having a heart event. And contrary to previous studies that suggested that heavier people with normal metabolic readings could have “benign obesity” or “metabolically healthy obesity,” the team also reported that metabolically healthy obese participants had a higher risk of dying earlier or having heart-related problems than those who were normal weight and also metabolically healthy.

Why did previous studies suggest that people could be fit and fat? According to the current study’s lead author, Dr. Caroline Kramer, the discrepancy likely has to do with how the various studies were set up. For instance, some large studies only compared weight and the risk of adverse events instead of looking closely at people’s metabolic health. So some of the apparently healthy but overweight or obese individuals might have had signs of diabetes or hypertension or high cholesterol that simply weren’t recorded in the study. Other trials compared healthy obese people to unhealthy obese people, instead of comparing them to people of normal or healthy weights, and other studies relied on small groups of participants who were only studied over short time periods.

“This concept of healthy obesity came in the last 10 years, and it compares people who are obese but metabolically healthy to only metabolically unhealthy overweight people,” says Dr. Kramer. ”Some studies report that if you are obese but metabolically healthy, you are protected in a way. We don’t think that that is true. And I don’t think it will come as much of a surprise.”

But since obesity has different effects on the body for different people, researchers are still investigating how weight gain and its health effects may vary among people whose obesity is due primarily to things such as genetics and environmental exposures as opposed to unhealthy diets and lack of physical activity. Even the studies in the current meta-analysis, for example, did not all include follow-up with the participants, so the final mortality and heart disease rates may be slightly higher or lower than they should be. But for now, the advice about maintaining a healthy weight in order to avoid premature death and disease seems sound — there may not be a way to heavy and healthy at the same time.

Want More Tolerant Kids? Keep Them Away from the TV Read more: TV makes kids less tolerant

2013-11-26

By Alexandra Sifferlin

Too much time in front of the television can blunt young children’s ability to accept and understand others, says the latest research.

Theory of mind is something that children typically develop during the preschool years — it’s the ability to start teasing apart individual mental states, like beliefs, intents  desires, and pretending, and understand that others may not have the same views. Child development experts say that this ability is critical for social development and that without it, it’s difficult for children to understand morality and recognize deception. If it’s not fully developed, for example, a child may think that everyone prefers a cookie over a carrot because that’s his personal preference.

Is Your Teen a Night Owl? That Could Explain His Poor Grades Read more: Is Your Teen a Night Owl? That Could Explain His Poor Grades

2013-11-19

By Francine Russo

Staying up late is almost a rite of passage for teens, but night owl students could be paying the price with lower grades years after high school.

There’s plenty of research showing that the sleep-wake cycle of adolescents is about two hours behind that of pre-pubescent children, which means they are more likely to wake up later in the morning and go to bed later at night. And that also means they’re not well-timed with the school clock, either. But newly published research reveals that this mismatch may have lasting implications that dog high schoolers into their college years.

The study by University of California Berkeley researchers, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, compared how the different sleep habits of 2700 teenagers, aged 13 to 18, affected their academic and emotional development. They found that teens who stayed up later than 11:30 pm on school nights — which included 30% of the study subjects — fared worse than early-to-bed kids, and that these consequences lingered six to eight years later, even into college.

Younger students, aged 14-16, suffered both academically and emotionally, says the study’s lead author, Lauren Asarnow, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at UC Berkeley. They had worse cumulative GPA’s at graduation and more emotional distress, as measured by questionnaires post-graduation. The GPAs of the 16-18-year-olds didn’t suffer as much, possibly because they were more used to being sleep-deprived. However, they were more emotionally troubled than their early rising counterparts in college and beyond. They were more likely to report they were “sad,” “down, or “blue,” and said they cried frequently, or showed other symptoms of depression. “It is really important,” Asarnow says, “to get our teens to bed earlier and to start young.”

Why do some teens stay up so late, even when they could go to sleep earlier? Their internal clocks certainly play a role in setting their sleep and wake cycles. But adolescents may also fail to realize how sleep deprivation affects them, physically and emotionally. And factors like parental monitoring, their dependence on technology, and academic and social pressures, which tend to escalate during middle school and high school also contribute.

But, says Asarnow, “The good news is that sleep behavior is highly modifiable with the right support.”

One controversial strategy is to stop fighting sleepy teens in the classroom and simply adjust their school schedules to start later in the morning. While a few pioneering school districts have tried this approach, and others are studying it, it’s still primarily up to parents to come up with better ways of bringing bedtimes in line with current school realities. Shelby Harris, director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, says, “This study highlights in even more depth the necessity to screen for school year bed time preferences in adolescents.” In order to make the right intervention, she says, it’s important understand why teens stay up so late. While nearly 70% of those in the study went to bed by 11:30pm, about 30% simply couldn’t get to sleep at that hour. Some, says Asarnow, may be the victims of their circadian clocks, while others just more seduced by their smartphones and late night activities, or not instructed enough by their parents to put their computers and phones away when it’s time for bed.

Whatever the reason, Asarnow offers these tips from Berkley’s sleep coaches to help night owl teens get more shut-eye:

1) Develop a wind-down routine that includes things like meditation or yoga

2) Start dimming the lights one to two hours before bedtime

3) Make the bedroom a technology-free zone, from 30 minutes to an hour before sleep time

4) Create weekend curfews that are an hour or less later than weekday bedtimes to avoid  “social jetlag,” which Asarnow likens to flying from New York to San Francisco every week.

“Even though kids may squawk about these rules,” says Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist and author of Coping with Terrorism: Dreams Interrupted, “they are really comforted by knowing that their parents care enough to monitor them.”

Getting them to comply with better sleep habits may require some negotiation, says Asarnow. One method that works involves asking teens to pay attention to—and to write down—how they feel on a week when they are sleep-deprived and what consequences they suffer. Referring back to that may help them see the value of getting enough sleep — and going to bed on time. “You really don’t want to feel that way even for a week,” Asarnow says. “So, as you become aware, you start to value sleep more and more.” And that, as her findings show, could have lasting benefits.

Want to Stay Healthy? Don’t Rely on Vitamins Read more: Government Experts Say Supplements Don’t Prevent Heart Disease, Cancer

2013-11-12

By Alexandra Sifferlin

Americans spend nearly $12 billion each year on vitamin supplements, hoping they will steer us away from diseases like cancer and heart attacks. But it turns out they’re just a drain on our wallets.

Should healthy people take supplements to keep them healthy? A panel of experts convened by the government, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, says that for most vitamins and minerals, there is not enough evidence to determine whether the pills can lower risk of heart disease or cancer. And when it comes to beta-carotene (found in carrots and tomatoes) and vitamin E, there is no evidence that they can protect against either heart disease or cancer; in fact, beta-carotene use contributed to an increased risk of lung cancer in smokers.

That will come as a surprise to most Americans, who pop pills of omega-3 fatty acids hoping to fend off a heart attack or down vitamins C and E, which are high in antioxidants, to counteract the free-radical damage that contributes to cancer. “In the absence of clear evidence about the impact of most vitamins and multivitamins on cardiovascular disease and cancer, health care professionals should counsel their patients to eat a healthy, well-balanced diet that is rich in nutrients. They should also continue to consider the latest scientific research, their own experiences, and their patient’s health history and preferences when having conversations about nutritional supplements,” task-force member Dr. Wanda Nicholson said in a statement.

The panel based its conclusion on a review of 26 studies, conducted from 2005 to ’13, some of which involved single supplements and others that investigated multivitamins and their relationship to heart disease, cancer and death outcomes. The review built on the panel’s previous report on supplements, in 2003, in which the task-force members said that there was not enough evidence to recommend vitamin A, C or E supplements, multivitamins or antioxidant combinations to prevent heart disease or cancer. At that time, the members also recommended against beta-carotene supplements because of their connection to a higher risk of lung cancer among smokers. In the current review, the members considered additional data on other vitamins and nutrients, including vitamins B and D, as well as zinc, iron, magnesium, niacin and calcium.

The conclusions apply to otherwise healthy people who take the supplements to prevent disease, so it’s not clear how effective, if at all, the pills can be in those at higher risk of heart problems or cancer. There have been hints, however, that the pills might not be the panacea that many people hoped they would be. In 2012, for example, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that omega-3 supplements, touted as a powerful weapon against heart disease, did not lower risks of heart attack, stroke, or death from heart disease or any cause. Another study published in 2011 even linked vitamin-and-supplement consumption to a higher risk of death, reporting that women who took multivitamins were 6% more likely to die over a 19-year period, compared with women not taking them.

Why the takedown of vitamins, especially if they are so prevalent in good-for-you foods such as fruits and vegetables? Experts believe that the benefits of nutrients like vitamins may depend on how they are presented to the body; some may need the help of other compounds found in their natural form that are inadvertently stripped from individual pills that try to concentrate the health benefits of specific vitamins or minerals. “[T]he physiologic systems affected by vitamins and other antioxidant supplements are so complex that the effects of supplementing with only 1 or 2 components is generally ineffective or actually does harm,” write the authors in their report, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

They recognize, however, that their conclusions are based on relatively few studies, since few trials have addressed the question of whether supplements can prevent disease in healthy people. So the results hold only until more data become available to understand the association more completely. In the meantime, the best way to take advantage of any health-promoting effects of nutrients like vitamins and minerals is to get them in their natural state, by eating a well-balanced diet high in low-fat dairy, fruits, vegetables and lean proteins.

If Moms Argue With Their Friends, Their Kids Will Too Read more: If Moms Argue With Their Friends, Their Kids Will Too

2013-11-08

By Francine Russo

Do as I say, not as I do. Sounds good in theory, but as every mom and dad knows, it doesn’t work as a parenting tactic. Now there’s more evidence that kids may mimic their parents behaviors, even when it comes to the quality of their friendships.

The latest research delves into a relatively unexplored area of the parent-child dynamic: how mothers’ friendships affect their adolescent kids’ same-sex friendships and overall well-being.

The study, to be published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence, examined whether the positive or negative qualities of mothers’ friendships (not enough fathers agreed to participate) had an effect on their adolescent kids’ friendships. The investigators accomplished this by giving school kids in fifth, eighth and eleventh grades and their mothers questionnaires that explored the quality of their most important friendships.  They also gave the parents and kids tests of emotional health. When mothers reported high levels of negative quality with a good friend (such as getting on each others’ nerves, getting upset or mad at each other often), kids were likely to report similar verbal antagonism and heated arguments with a close friend.

So could moms be good role models for their children by having more positive connections with their friends? Unfortunately, no. The study’s lead author Gary Glick, a doctoral candidate in psychological sciences at the University of Missouri, says the team did not find a strong link between mothers’ positive friendship qualities and those of their teens. “Maybe,” Glick says, “kids are more likely to notice adults screaming at each other.”
The fact that adolescents’ friendships mimic those of a parent, is not surprising, given that development is about learning and imitating behaviors. “Adolescents,” says clinical psychologist Joshua Klapow, are in the midst of forming their internal templates for social norms and therefore parental role models are critical. In fact, watching adolescents interact with their peers often is a mirror of how parents interact with their own peers.”

But the fact that the mothers’ positive friendships did not seem to filter down to their children’s own relationships could simply be the result of the artificial way the relationships were defined in the study. Dr. Gayani DeSilva, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Orange, CA, notes that friendships are often a complicated mix of positive and negative interactions. The study authors, he says, “divide parental friendships into either positive or negative categories, when healthy friendships are much more complex than that. The more helpful and developmentally appropriate perspective would be to examine how teens are influenced by parental conflict resolution patterns within their friendships.”

In fact, Carleton Kendrick, a family therapist and author of “Take Out Your Nose Ring, Honey. We’re Going to Grandma’s,” says he has observed the opposite effect over 40 years of working with families.“If they witness their parents continuing loyalty, commitment and unwavering commitment to friends,” he says, “through both good times and bad times, they see what it takes for them to possess such cherished friendships. They take mental notes and try to imitate and adopt the attitudes, behavior and commitment they see present in their parents’ successful friendships.”

Kendrick says that the study, which is “a snapshot in time,” does not consider enough variables in the teens’ and parents’ lives and that it does not adequately examine other possible reactions that adolescents might have to their mothers’ problems with friends. “Over and over I have heard kids of all ages tell me privately, in confidence,” Kendrick says, “that they are seriously worried about their parents on many levels.” And conflicts with family and friends were among these worries.

Such internalizing of their parents’ conflicts could have more profound implications for adolescents beyond just the types of interactions they have with their own friends. In the study, mothers with high levels of negativity in their friendships were also likelier to have kids who were more anxious and depressed than those with more positive interactions with their friends. And this, says Glick, was independent of whether the mothers were anxious and depressed themselves.

However children are interpreting and responding to their parents’ choices when it comes to friendships, the study suggests that these decisions could have a greater effect on understanding teen friendships and fostering them in a healthy way than previously thought. “Developing more adult-like relationships with their peers,” says Stephen Gray Wallace, Director of the Center for Adolescent Research and Education at Susquehanna University, “is one of the primary developmental tasks of adolescence.” And parents, it seems, can play an important role in pushing that development in a positive direction, even if they aren’t doing so in a direct and conscious way.
Read more: If Moms Argue With Their Friends, Their Kids Will Too | TIME.com http://healthland.time.com/2013/11/07/if-moms-argue-with-their-friends-their-kids-will-too/#ixzz2k3J1qX00

Study: Smoking Makes You Look Older Using twins to determine effect Read more: Study: Smoking Makes You Look Older

2013-11-05

By Laura Stampler

A study of 79 pairs of twins — each with one smoker and one non-smoker — indicates that cigarette users are likely to get wrinkles and bags under their eyes at a more accelerated pace than their genetically identical counterparts.

Unbiased judges, who had no prior knowledge of the twins’ smoking status, said that the smoker looked older more than 50 percent of the time.

The twins were primarily female and in their late 40s.

“Smoking makes you look old,” Dr. Elizabeth Tanzi told Reuters. “That’s all there is to it.”

How Sweden’s New Text Message Plan Is Saving Cardiac Arrest Victims

2013-10-28

Trained volunteers receive notifications in order to shave crucial minutes off emergency response times.

Deep-Voiced Men Make Bad Mates: Study

2013-10-22

By Belinda Luscombe @youselessOct. 17, 2013

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Men with deeper voices have an advantage in attracting women, but mostly if they’re looking for a fling, new research suggests.

Researchers at at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada have previously reported on the link between the depth of a guy’s voice and his attractiveness to women. They also figured that guys with lower voices, and hence probably more testosterone, were more likely to cheat (they were right). What they couldn’t work out was why women preferred the men who were probably going to be cads. So they went back to the audiotape.

In the new study — which may also provide some insight into why Isaac Hayes songs are forever a popular choice for the boudoir — researchers had women listen to men’s voices and asked them first if they thought the speaker was a faithful sort of guy. Then they were asked if they fancied the owner of the voice for a long or short-term relationship. The deep-voiced men were chosen more often for short term relationships, but mostly by certain sorts of women—those who had already expressed a belief that a bass voice often led to fishy behavior.

“Differences in the strength of women’s preferences were accounted for by whether or not they thought the voices belonged to a cheater,” says Jillian O’Connor, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour at McMaster, who was this study’s (and the prior one’s)  lead author. “Women who thought that men with lower pitched voices were cheaters liked them for short-term flings.”  The scientists defined “short-term relationship” more towards the one-night-stand than the May to December fling.

The women who didn’t associate a deep pitch with infidelity tended to prefer those guys for long term relationships. The authors surmised that some women have come to adaptively understand that more macho guys are more likely to cheat — and have thus learned to avoid macho-sounding guys for serious life partnering.

For deep-voiced males, fear not. The study was pretty small, just 87 women, and it didn’t use actual tones. The voices the women heard came from the same guy with his pitch digitally deepened or heightened. Which means the findings probably aren’t conclusive enough to cross off any baritones from anybody’s list of eligible bachelors, even if biology were destiny.

Study: Predicting Whether a Partner Will Cheat Could Be Gender-Specific

The lure for a deep voice for females may have something to do with the woman’s biology too. “Some of my other research has found that women who have more attractive faces have stronger preferences for lower pitched men’s voices,” says O’Connor. “But that was not examined in this study.” Looks like men are not the only ones who respond to siren songs.

Study: Breast Milk Sold Online Can Get Your Baby Sick

Donated or sold breast milk contains bacteria and sometimes salmonella