Advice and Help

Gastric implants may prove to be the cure for people with compulsive eating problems:

“We found that implantable gastric stimulators induced significant changes in metabolism in brain regions associated with controlling emotions, effectively shutting down these obese subjects’ desire to eat,” said Dr Wang.

The changes were most noticeable in the hippocampus area of the brain. This is linked to emotional behaviour, learning and memory, movement, and processing of sensory information.

Obese may be food junkies

Richard
October 04, 2006 • Permalink • Leave a comment • Top↑

I know I’ve made many a visit to RXList.

The average cyberchondriac, Harris says, searches the web for information five times a month. But these net users are also becoming more savvy, with the number of people describing the information they find as “very reliable” falling from 37 per cent in 2005 to just 25 per cent this year.

US becomes nation of cyberchondriacs

Richard
August 02, 2006 • Permalink • Leave a comment • Top↑

Chicago alderman Edward M. Burke joined the ranks of politicians who want to make selling unhealthy food a crime.

Under Mr. Burke’s proposal, establishments that failed to remove “artificial trans fats” from their kitchens would be fined $200 to $1,000 a day. In the crowd at the Taste of Chicago on a recent evening, most people seemed amused at the prospect that City Hall might legislate their waistlines. Others chuckled at what they considered naïve earnestness, to think that a city’s long love affair with big, tasty, greasy food could be undone with a simple vote of 50 aldermen (some of whom appear to have some appreciation of the affair).

Chicago Weighs New Prohibition: Bad-for-You Fats

Richard
July 18, 2006 • Permalink • Leave a comment • Top↑

Why do parents allow their children to stuff themselves with junk food?

We might ask what kind of society we have created in which so many parents do not control the diet of their own children, and what such a lack of control - surely not confined to diet - bodes for the future. Perhaps parents are just too busy nowadays to make the effort; or perhaps they subscribe to the sentimental (and lazy) idea that to give children what they want exactly when and how they want it is an expression of deep love.

PC Among the Docs

Richard
July 13, 2006 • Permalink • Leave a comment • Top↑

A New York City politician has proposed limiting the number of fast food places that are allowed in low-income neighborhoods. Here are some reactions:

“People love it to eat, and they’re working here. Why would politicians cut them?” he said.

“This is the United States, everyone’s just trying to make money,” said one smoothie-carrying customer.

“I think it’s an absurd solution - not just from the point of individual choice, it just wouldn’t work. If you love fast-food and you’re fat, you’d just go to another neighbourhood - and you probably wouldn’t jog there, you’d probably take a cab,” she told the BBC.

While I’ve felt sad when I’ve seen someone use their Food Stamps or subsidized food EBT card to buy a cart of junk food this kind of restriction of choice will never fly.

Bid to thin out NY fast-food outlets

Richard
July 12, 2006 • Permalink • Leave a comment • Top↑

This is hardly the first time this has been suggested for leucine. But the only thing rat research is good for is creating misleading propaganda for health food companies.

Brazilian researchers have found that leucine supplements reduced body fat in rats, but Seeley believes that could simply be explained by the rats not liking the taste of the leucine in their diet. (Leucine is found naturally in meat and dairy protein.)

The next big winner in the diet industry could come from micronutrients like amino acids

Richard
July 06, 2006 • Permalink • Leave a comment • Top↑

What your mother ate during her pregnancy affected what you enjoy eating:

… One group drank water during the last trimester of pregnancy and then carrot juice during the first two months of lactation; a second group drank carrot juice during pregnancy, and water during lactation; and a third group drank just water during both pregnancy and lactation.

A few weeks after the babies began eating cereal but before they had ever been exposed to the taste of carrots, the researchers videotaped the infants as they were fed cereal prepared with water, then cereal prepared with carrot juice.

They found that infants who had been previously exposed to carrots exhibited fewer negative facial expressions while eating the carrot-flavored cereal compared with the plain cereal, whereas infants in the control group - whose mothers drank only water - displayed no difference. Moreover, those babies exposed to carrots prenatally ate more of, and were perceived to enjoy, the carrot-flavored cereal compared with the cereal and water.

If you want your kids to eat their vegetables, then you better eat yours

Richard
July 06, 2006 • Permalink • Leave a comment • Top↑

We have seen the fads come and go. Some into bankruptcy and others into the archives labelled under ‘don’t work’. What happens when a non fad diet with hundreds of years in the making and formal research on the outcomes of these many years is proving to swing the elderly as well as the young? At last, a traditional way of eating rather than a diet seems to be a part answer to many relating to the minimising of heart disease and many cancer ailments. To add further ammunition, the Mediterranean diet is famous for helping people to stay slim and improve longevity. If this is already known, what’s new?

Continue reading "The Mediterranean Diet" »

Richard
July 05, 2006 • Permalink • Leave a comment • Top↑

Geneva, Switzerland (PRWEB) July 5, 2006 — The world’s food standards setting body is divided by a deepening conflict over the importance of protecting consumer’s health and health freedoms vs. the importance of trade considerations and multinational corporate health. Although the disconnect between these agendas has been brewing since the founding of the Codex Alimentarius Commission as a Special Project of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) at the request of the United Nations. During its last session (July 4-9, 2005, Rome, Italy) the WHO and FAO chastised Codex for “failing to make a significant contribution to human health (Dr. Kirsten Leitner of WHO), suggested that Codex “determine whether it has a relationship to nutrition and, if so, what that relationship is [sic.” and, finally, find ways to implement the WHO GS. The Codex Committee on Nutrition and Food for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU) and Codex Committee on Food Labeling (CCFL) were mandated to provide full discussion during their meeting before the current Codex Commission meeting currently taking place.

Continue reading "Codex Aliementarius Commission" »

Richard
July 05, 2006 • Permalink • Leave a comment • Top↑

Type-2 diabetes – the body’s inability to regulate sugars, largely caused by lifestyle factors such as obesity, inactivity and smoking – is nearing epidemic proportions in the U.S. The Harvard School of Public Health estimates that more than 21 million Americans are currently living with the chronic disease (though up to a third of them don’t know it), while another 41 million have “pre-diabetes.” What’s more, while Type-2 Diabetes is often called “adult-onset” diabetes, about 46% of the overall cases of diabetes currently diagnosed in children are of the “Type-2” classification.

Continue reading "Diabetes & Proper Hydration" »

Richard
July 02, 2006 • Permalink • Leave a comment • Top↑