“In the midst of America’s obesity epidemic, physicians frequently advise their patients to reduce the number of calories they are consuming on a daily basis. This research shows that simply dieting will not likely cause substantial weight loss. Instead, diet and exercise must be combined to achieve this goal,” explained Judy Cameron Ph.D., a senior scientist at OHSU’s Oregon National Primate Research Center, and a professor of behavioral neuroscience and obstetrics & gynecology in the OHSU School of Medicine, as well as a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh.

To conduct the research, Cameron and OHSU post-doctoral fellow Elinor Sullivan, Ph.D., studied 18 female rhesus macaque monkeys at the Oregon National Primate Research Center. The monkeys were placed on a high-fat diet for several years. They were then returned to a lower-fat diet (standard monkey food) with a 30 percent reduction in calories. For a one-month period, the monkeys’ weight and activity levels were closely tracked. Activity was tracked through the use of an activity monitor worn on a collar.

“Surprisingly, there was no significant weight loss at the end of the month,” explained Sullivan. “However, there was a significant change in the activity levels for these monkeys. Naturally occurring levels of physical activity for the animals began to diminish soon after the reduced-calorie diet began. When caloric intake was further reduced in a second month, physical activity in the monkeys diminished even further.”

A comparison group of three monkeys was fed a normal monkey diet and was trained to exercise for one hour daily on a treadmill. This comparison group did lose weight.

“This study demonstrates that there is a natural body mechanism which conserves energy in response to a reduction in calories. Food is not always plentiful for humans and animals and the body seems to have developed a strategy for responding to these fluctuations,” added Cameron. “These findings will assist medical professionals in advising their patients. It may also impact the development of community interventions to battle the childhood obesity epidemic and lead to programs that emphasize both diet and exercise.”

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Source:
Oregon Health & Science University

Thankfully, it’s not too late to shed those extra pounds you’ve been battling since New Year’s Day and keep them off.

“This time of year offers us a greater variety of healthy foods to choose from, which makes this an ideal time to lose weight and keep it off,” says Megan Fendt, a registered dietitian at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center.

Michele Murphy, a registered dietitian at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, adds that “Every season offers us new ways to improve our diets and the summertime is no exception.”

Megan Fendt and Michele Murphy offer the following tips to help trim the fat this summer:

– Take advantage of the warm weather to increase your exercise regimen. Play a game of Frisbee, volleyball or tennis; take long walks; or swim.

– Make seasonal vegetables the focus of your meal. Indulge in salads and steamed vegetables. Season vegetables with spices, lemon and balsamic vinegar, a little Parmesan cheese and low-fat dressings. Make these the largest items on your plate and add small portions of protein and/or starch.

– Grilling your food is a great way to add flavor while reducing fat and calories. Grilling meats allows some fat to drip off, which lowers fat and calorie content. Try wrapping fish or chicken in foil and add vegetables and seasonings to the grill.

– Satisfy your sweet tooth with fresh fruits. Bypass cakes, cookies and ice cream and opt for fresh berries, melons and even some of the more exotic fruits that are available instead. Fruit is fat-free, high in nutrients and fiber, and a natural energizer.

– Try “calorie banking.” Cookouts with family and friends should not signal a diet disaster. By cutting back on your calories a week before special occasions, you can indulge a little more and enjoy yourself. However, try to restrict high-fat foods such as potato chips and mayonnaise-based salads.

– Stay away from empty calories. It is important to drink plenty of fluids during these warm summer months, but juice, whole milk, regular soda and alcoholic beverages are high-calorie drinks that you want to avoid. Alcoholic beverages contain empty calories and may stimulate your appetite. Instead, fill up on water, seltzer, juice diluted with seltzer, low-fat milk or iced tea.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, based in New York City, is the nation’s largest not-for-profit, non-sectarian hospital, with 2,353 beds. The Hospital has more than 1 million inpatient and outpatient visits in a year, including more than 220,000 visits to its emergency departments more than any other area hospital. NewYork-Presbyterian provides state-of-the-art inpatient, ambulatory and preventive care in all areas of medicine at five major centers: NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/The Allen Hospital and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Westchester Division. One of the largest and most comprehensive health care institutions in the world, the Hospital is committed to excellence in patient care, research, education and community service. NewYork-Presbyterian is the #1 hospital in the New York metropolitan area and is consistently ranked among the best academic medical institutions in the nation, according to U.S.News & World Report. The Hospital has academic affiliations with two of the nation’s leading medical colleges: Weill Cornell Medical College and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Source: NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital

University of Illinois at Chicago researchers have found that a modified version of a plan called “alternate-day fasting” may be easier to abide and has the added bonus of improving cardio health. The findings appear in the November 1 issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

“This diet has been around about 20 years, but its effect on weight loss hadn’t really been studied,” said Krista Varady, assistant professor of kinesiology and nutrition, who led the UIC research team.

The 10-week trial studied 16 clinically obese people — 12 women and four men — between the ages of 35 and 65 who all weighed more than 210 pounds, had kept their weight stable for the previous three months, and had body mass indexes of between 30 and 39.9. None was diabetic, had a history of cardiovascular disease, was taking weight-loss or lipid- or glucose-lowering medications, or smoked.

The study was divided into three phases:

The first two weeks, participants ate and exercised normally.

Between weeks three and six, participants ate normal meals one day then would fast the next. On fast days, participants ate the equivalent of a three-course lunch prepared by UIC’s Human Nutritional Research Center. The meal provided between 20 and 25 percent of daily energy needs.

For the final four weeks, participants were counseled by dietitians on menu options, but essentially chose on their own what to eat, based on what they had learned about meal sizes and food choices.

“We wanted to see if they could actually do it by themselves — because what’s the point of studying this diet if you have to feed people meals prepared at metabolic kitchens all the time?” said Varady.

Weight loss ranged from 10 to 30 pounds; the researchers expected an average loss of only five pounds. Blood pressure and heart rate were also lowered, along with total cholesterol and circulating fat levels.

Varady hopes now to study the effects of staying on the diet for at least six months, looking for evidence of self-motivation and to see if the diet helps in maintaining proper weight.

“Why are some able to do it but others not? It takes about two weeks to adjust to the diet, after which people don’t feel hungry on the fast day,” she said.

“We need to find out how long they can stay on this diet — and if they go off it, do they automatically regain the weight?”

Co-authors on the study are doctoral students Surabhi Bhutani and Monica Klempel, and Emily Church, clinical coordinator in physical therapy at UIC. The study was supported by UIC departmental funding.

Source
University of Illinois at Chicago

The research group focused on the function of “orexin” neurons in brain. Orexin is a kind of brain hormones related to sleep/wakefulness and food intake. They found that orexin released in the brain from “orexin” neurons activates glucose metabolism in muscle but not adipose tissue in mice through the preferential activation of the sympathetic nervous system. Furthermore, they found that a pleasant meal with sweet taste stimulation and its anticipation activates orexin neurons and curbs the rise of blood glucose level by activating muscle metabolism via the sympathetic nervous system.

It is known that orexin plays an important role in the regulation of sleep/wakefulness and autonomic nervous system in human as well as experimental animals. Therefore, this finding implies the strong relationship between habits of diet and our health. Pleasant meal with tasty foods (of course, not high calorie) and with family and friends may prevent hyperglycemia by activating orexin neurons. In contrast, irregular dietary habits, especially eating fast food just before sleeping, may cause hyperglycemia and possibly obesity. “Orexin neurons have been shown to decrease the activity at night. Thus, eating just before sleeping may not be able to activate orexin neurons effectively, then resulting in hyperglycemia”, said Prof Minokoshi.

Source:
Prof Yasuhiko Minokoshi
National Institute for Physiological Sciences

For decades, scientists have had inklings that a diet that derives about 40 percent of its calories from healthy fat and about half from complex carbohydrates such as whole grains, fruit and vegetables, combined with daily exercise, could promote health and reduce premature death.

But this is the first large trial of healthy men and women to demonstrate a significant reduction in death rates for heart disease, cancer and all other causes of mortality for those who follow a Mediterranean diet and are physically active.

‘In the past, when we talked about the Mediterranean diet, we usually talked about cardiovascular benefits,’ Frank Hu, associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, said yesterday. ‘This is talking about primary prevention. The better the Mediterranean diet, the lower the cardiovascular disease and cancer mortality. . . . That is very intriguing.’

The results suggest a middle course between the often confusing diet extremes, from the very low-carbohydrate, high-fat Atkins approach to the higher carbohydrate, low-fat U.S. dietary guidelines.

The findings also point to ‘diet as being very important in more ways than we had anticipated,’ said Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, who advocates boosting ‘healthy fat’ in the American diet as well as adding more grains, fruit, vegetables and fish. (So-called healthy fats are found in such foods as olive oil, avocados, nuts, and fish.)

The U.S government’s recommendation of consuming only 30 percent total fat may ‘not be optimal for many people,’ Willett said. But the study also ‘emphasizes that for overall good health, eating porterhouse steak, butter and lard is not the way to go.’

What the results also underscore is the importance of the overall Mediterranean diet approach, rather than any one food type. In an article that accompanies the results, which are published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine, Hu suggests that this could be explained in two ways: either the effects of any one nutrient are too small to detect, or there may be synergistic effects of the Mediterranean diet that are important.

‘That’s interesting,’ Willett said, ‘because any one piece of the Mediterranean diet on its own was not so impressive. It’s the whole package — the fruit and vegetables, the nuts . . . all those things that seem to contribute.’

The study involved 22,043 adults, ages 20 to 86, who live in Greece; people with diabetes and known heart disease were excluded.

Upon entering the study, participants were interviewed in depth about their daily diets and exercise habits. The researchers assigned points for each component of diet and lifestyle.

For example, eating vegetables, legumes and beans, fruit, nuts, whole grains (in cereal, bread and pasta) and fish raised the scores. So did consuming more monounsaturated fats, such as olive oil, rather than saturated fats, such as butter or cream.

Participants also received a point for drinking moderate amounts of alcohol — about a glass of wine a day for women; two glasses for men — but got a zero if they imbibed more or less than that.

Regularly eating meat, poultry, sweets and dairy products, which in Greece are generally high in saturated fat, added no points and resulted in a lower overall diet score.

The research team, which was led by Antonia Trichopoulou of the University of Athens Medical School and Dimitrios Trichopoulos of the Harvard School of Public Health, then tracked participants for an average of nearly four years.

They also took into account age, sex, years of education, smoking status, body mass index (to gauge overweight and obesity) and waist-to-hip ratios, which help determine risk for heart disease and diabetes.

The study found that the higher the healthy diet score, the lower the risk of death. For every two-point rise — achieved, for example, by eating a lot of vegetables and consuming beans and nuts daily — the risk of death dropped by 25 percent, the study found.

‘This says you can get tremendous benefit from simply moving away from unhealthy foods, and there are multiple ways that you can achieve this,’ Hu said.

Daily physical activity also played a critical role in reducing mortality from heart disease and cancer, the study found. People who engaged in at least an hour a day of very vigorous activity, either on the job or at leisure, had a 28 percent reduced risk of mortality compared with their more sedentary counterparts.

The effects of physical activity ‘cannot be overemphasized,’ Hu said.

The findings echo the results of smaller studies, including the Lyon Diet Heart Study in France, that have hinted at health benefits of the Mediterranean lifestyle.

In the Lyon trial, researchers randomly assigned 605 people diagnosed with heart disease to either follow a Mediterranean-style diet or the American Heart Association diet, which has about 30 percent of calories from fat, including 10 or less from saturated fat.

In this study, people assigned to the Mediterranean group were encouraged to eat more fruit, vegetables and fish, to cut back on red meat and to use olive oil instead of butter and cream.

The study found that the Mediterranean diet group suffered 73 percent fewer heart attacks or other heart-related problems and had 70 percent fewer deaths than those on the heart association diet.