Category Archives: Food & Diet
Easter Plays a Part in Deconstructing Myth About Ulcers
Today, scientists aren’t just celebrating Easter, they are commemorating the emergence of a quite modest bacterium called Helicobacter pylori. The bacterium contaminates more than 50 percent of the entire globe’s population – most who will never experience or even recognize any of the symptoms that characterize the infection. Yet, it is the perpetrator behind a majorty of the ulcers people develop as well as the culprit behind a number of stomach cancers. H. pylori actually remained concealed and unidentified in human stomachs for thousands of years until 33 years ago. The bacterium is believed so ancient that it tagged along with humans out of Africa. Today, many credit the Easter holiday with its unveiling for reasons soon to be explained here…
The story begins about 35 Easters ago with a pathologist at the Royal Perth Hospital in Australia, Robert Warren. The doctor observed that of all the biopsies he obtained from patients with ulcers and stomach cancers, about half of them simultaneously carried a corkscrew-shaped bacterium later termed Helicobacter pylori.
It wasn’t long before Warren began collaborating in the early 1980s with Barry Marshall, an eager young scientist in mid-training for internal medicine, in an attempt to grow H. pylori for the purpose of studying it further. To begin, the duo had trouble replicating the bacterium which they were trying to cultivate in the agar dishes customarily used for growing Campylobacter, a bacterium responsible for causing food poisoning in human beings. After about two days of zero growth, Warren and Marshall tossed the dishes in trash bins in the lab.
“Anything that didn’t grow in two days didn’t exist. But Heliobacter is slow-growing, we discovered,”
reported Marshall to Discover magazine in 2010. It was the Easter holiday that kept the researchers out of the laboratory for the following four days, only to return to find colonies of H. pylori growing in the lab.
Having an ulcer has been stereotyped as being the result of an unhealthy, overly-stressful lifestyle marked also by bingeing on too much spicy food. That perception has lingered as current thought. However, thanks to Warren and Marshall who were once scoffed at for their contrasting notion, the perception has gradually grown into a medical myth. The doctors were able to support their theory that ulcers are actually caused by infection with succeeding experiments such as one that entailed Marshall infecting himself with H. pylori by drinking a consomme made with the bacteria which caused him to come down with gastritis. Via further experiments, the doctors were also able to prove the correlation between the bacterial infection with some stomach cancers. Flash forward to current times, and scientific journals and academic papers galore have been published on H. pylori.
By closely examining the bacteria’s assorted strains, scientists have tested their theories about how humans colonized Pacific islands about 30,000 years ago. Recent studies indicate that H. pylori may have actually played a significant role in ridding the elder portion of a population to make way for the young. Traces of the microbe have been unearthed in the gastric tissues of 600-year-old Mexican mummies.
Marshall and Warren won the 2005 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine because of their discoveries, and nowadays peptic ulcers can be treated with short courses of antibiotics or over-the-counter acid-relieving medications.
Can Mac N’ Cheese Make You less Lonely? According to One Study, it Can
Food has played a major role in families and communities around the globe for hundreds of thousands of years. When mom gets a promotion, when Sally gets a A on her math test, when dad’s favorite baseball team wins the World Series, or even when a grandparent passes or other traumatic event happens, it is more likely than not that a family uses the dinner table as a platform for celebrating, grieving or simply talking about their day.
Jordan Troisi, graduate of the Univerisy of Buffalo and lead author of a study conducted alongisde co-author Shira Gabriel who has spent years working with social surrogates (non-human things that make people feel as though they belong) engaged in experiements which found that lots of people, in an effort to cure their lonliness, are inclined to create bonds with their favorite television shows, create “relationships” with ther favorite charactes or celebrities from films they have seen, or even foster relationships with a loved one after weeding through old pictures or mementos and latching onto that “special someone.”
Tossing a monkey wrench into the experiment, Troisi and Gabriel were curious as to whether or not comfort food could have the same soothing effect in a person as would a consolating, “real-life” relationship. To begin, in one experiment, researchers had the initial goal of making people feel lonely. To instill this uncomfortable lack of attachment, researchers had a group of subjects do a 6-minute writing exercise in which they were to write about nothing else but a fight they’ve recently had with somone they are close to. Next, they split the initial groups into smaller groups. Within that larger initial group, one subsequent group was assigned to write about a recent experience eating a “comfort food” (the word comfort being in quotes because the idea of a comfort food depends largely on individual taste). The other group was assigned to write about eating a new food. The last part of the study had all participants answer questions pertaining to their lonliness.
Prior to the experiment, the subjects were given assessments concerning how secure or unsecure they felt in their current relationships. Writing about having a quarrel with a close friend or relative made people feel lonely. However, there was an interesting find: those who had been found previously somewhat secure in their relationships before the experiment were able to untangle themselves from the web of lonliness by writing about comfort food! Says Troisi,
“We have found that comfort foods are foods which are consistently assosicated with those close to us…Thinking about or consuming these foods later then serves as a reminder of those people we are close to.”
In their writings about comfort food, many people wrote about the connection of eating food in association with family, friends, and other close ones.
In a separate experiment, spooning in hearty helpings of chicken soup in a lab made people think more about relationships, but only if they considered chicken soup a comfort food – something they’d been asked before the experiement, along with a series of other questions so that they would not remember that they’d been asked in the first place.
Can comfort food serve as a ready-made, easy resource for remedying lonliness as much as it can be “a cure” for the common cold? Who knows? Only mac n’ cheese and mashed potatoes – and of course, chicken soup – will tell.
Orthorexia nervosa: when righteous eating becomes an obsession
Orthorexia nervosa, the “health food eating disorder”, gets its name from the Greek word ortho, meaning straight, proper or correct. This exaggerated focus on food can be seen today in some people who follow lifestyle movements such as “raw”, “clean” and “paleo”.
American doctor Steven Bratman coined the term “orthorexia nervosa” in 1997 some time after his experience in a commune in upstate New York. It was there he developed an unhealthy obsession with eating “proper” food:
All I could think about was food. But even when I became aware that my scrabbling in the dirt after raw vegetables and wild plants had become an obsession, I found it terribly difficult to free myself. I had been seduced by righteous eating.
Bratman’s description draws parallels with many modern dietary fads that promise superior health by restricting whole food groups without a medical reason or even a valid scientific explanation.
Raw food followers might meet regularly to “align their bodies, minds and souls” by feasting on “cleansing and immune-boosting” raw foods. Such foods are never heated above 44˚C, so “all the living enzymes in the food remain intact”. No gluten, dairy or “sugar” is allowed.
Clean eaters may follow similar regimes, removing gluten, dairy and even meat from their diets. You might overhear a discussion about “superfood green smoothie” recipes after a yoga class that also happened to “cleanse your gall bladder”.
And finally, around the corner, paleo pushers may “beef up” together with a Crossfit class, followed by a few steaks. Again, with paleo, there is no gluten – or any grains for that matter – and no dairy or other such “toxins” are allowed.
How common is orthorexia?
There is a blurry line separating “normal” healthy eating and orthorexia nervosa, but one way to define the condition is when eating “healthily” causes significant distress or negative consequences in a person’s life.
They may be “plunged into gloom” by eating a piece of bread, become anxious about when their next kale, chia or quinoa hit is coming, or eat only at home where “superfood” intake can be tightly controlled.
Such behaviours can have a significant impact on relationships with family members and friends, let alone on their mental health.
Orthorexia nervosa is not a clinically recognised eating disorder but researchers have developed and tested questionnaires in various populations to get an idea of its prevalence.
Italian researchers developed the ORTO-15 questionnaire in 2005, with a cut-off score below 40 to signify orthorexia nervosa. Scores above 40 can still signify a tendency to pathological eating behaviours and/or obsessive-phobic personality traits.
Questions include: “Does the thought about food worry you for more than three hours a day?” and “Do you feel guilty when transgressing your healthy eating rules?”
Using this questionnaire and cut-off value of 40, another Italian research group reported a prevalence of orthorexia nervosa of 57.6%, with a female-male ratio of two-to-one. However, using a cut-off value of 35, the prevalence reduced to 21%.
Most studies have been conducted in population sub-groups that may be at increased risk for orthorexia nervosa, such as health professionals. Again using the ORTO-15 and a cut-off value of 40, the prevalence of orthorexia nervosa in Turkish medical doctors was 45.5%, in Turkish performance artists it was 56.4% (81.8% in opera singers to 32.1% in ballet dancers) and in ashtanga yoga teachers in Spain, 86.0%.
Using another questionnaire, the Bratman Test, 12.8% of Austrian dietitians were classified as having orthorexia.
You can test your own tendencies towards orthorexia nervosa using this Bratman test here and access support services via the National Eating Disorder Collaboration page and Body Matters Australasia.
Is it a mental disorder?
Orthorexia nervosa is not listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), which psychologists and psychiatrists use to diagnose mental disorders. The DSM-5 currently lists anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge-eating disorder, “other specified feeding or eating disorder” and “unspecified feeding or eating disorder”.
Some clinicians argue orthorexia nervosa should be recognised as a separate eating disorder and have proposed clinical DSM diagnostic criteria. They note distinct pathological behaviours with orthorexia nervosa, including a motivation for feelings of perfection or purity rather than weight loss, as they see with anorexia and bulimia.
Others disagree and argue that it falls in current eating disorder or other mental disorder categories. As Bratman explained in 2010:
At times (but not at all times) orthorexia seems to have elements of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). It may also have elements of standard anorexia. But it is often not very much like typical OCD or typical anorexia.
It’s clear that more research is needed on orthorexia nervosa, including its diagnosis and potential DSM listing as an independent eating disorder.
It’s also important to consider that people can move between mental disorder classifications. Sometimes labels may not be as important as providing solutions to patients with disordered eating, such as cognitive-behavioural therapy.
Striking a balance
As a nutritionist and a recovered sufferer of bulimia, I leave you with some advice:
Don’t trust all-devoted kale consumers, including health professionals and celebrities, if their advice isn’t based on scientific evidence.
Don’t make food the most important focus of your life. As Bratman says:
Rather than eat my sprouts (or kale) alone, it would be better for me to share a pizza with some friends.
Try to be a balanced food consumer with a “mostly and sometimes” mantra.
Rebecca will be on hand for an Author Q&A session between 2 and 3pm AEDT on Friday March 27. Post your questions about the article in the comments section below.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
Feast then famine – how fasting might make our cells more resilient to stress
Intermittent fasting (also called alternate day fasting) has become a popular diet. In most versions of intermittent fasting, people fast or eat very little a few days each week and then eat normal amounts during the remaining days.
Fasting is something that human beings have practiced throughout history, often out of circumstance rather than choice. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were probably expert fasters, indulging in feasts in times of plenty, and then facing long periods of scarcity in between. With this in mind, it makes sense that our bodies’ cells could perform well under the harsh conditions of feast and famine.
As a group of medical and research students, we wanted to know if fasting causes our cells to become more resilient to damage in the absence of weight loss. And do these benefits depend on the temporary stress that fasting causes in our cells?
Intermittent fasting may have anti-ageing benefits
Scientists have been looking at the possible health benefits of calorie restriction for years.
A prominent theory suggests these health benefits are related to the drop in blood sugar that results from fasting, which pushes our cells to work harder to utilize other forms of energy.
Rhesus monkeys eating only 70% of their normal caloric intake have been shown to live much longer and are much healthier at older ages. These anti-aging benefits have also been seen in animals that are put on an intermittent fasting diet, alternating between days of normal eating and days where calories are restricted. More recently, scientists have discovered some similar effects in humans.
What isn’t clear, though, is why intermittent fasting seems to have a benefit in the fight against aging. This question is complicated by the fact that in all studies performed in people, fasting led to weight loss. The health benefits of weight loss might be overshadowing the other benefits obtained from fasting alone.
Free radicals damage cells, but fasting may help
One way that our cells can become damaged is when they encounter oxidative stress. And preventing or repairing cell damage from oxidative stress is helpful against ageing. This stress happens when there is higher-than-normal production of free radicals, unstable molecules that carry a loosely bound extra electron.
When the free radical encounters another molecule, this extra electron is passed along in a rapid chain reaction from molecule to molecule. When it reaches the end of the chain, it can break apart connections between atoms within important components of the cell, like the cellular membrane, essential proteins or even DNA. Anti-oxidants work by absorbing the unstable electrons before they can do any harm.
Although fasting seems to help our cells combat damage from this process, it isn’t clear exactly how that happens.
Free radicals can be generated by poorly functioning mitochondria (the powerhouses of the cell). The switch between eating normally and fasting causes cells to temporarily experience lower-than-usual levels of glucose (blood sugar), and they are forced to begin using other sources of less readily available energy, like fatty acids. This can cause the cells to turn on survival processes to remove the unhealthy mitochondria and replace them with healthy ones over time, thus reducing the production of free radicals in the long-term.
It might also be true that fasting itself results in a small increase in free radical production early on during fasting.
The cells may respond by increasing their levels of natural anti-oxidants to fight against future free radicals. And although free radicals are commonly seen as harmful because of their ability to damage our cells, they might be important short-term signals for our body in this case, triggering cells to cope better with more severe stresses that may come in the future.
Do fasting and feasting fight aging?
To understand how fasting might make cells stronger, we recruited 24 people and asked them to practice an intermittent fasting diet for two three-week periods. During the first fasting period, participants ate a specially calibrated diet and during the second three week period, they ate that diet and took oral supplements of Vitamin C and Vitamin E, which are both anti-oxidants.
Because we just wanted to focus on how intermittent fasting affected cells, and not weight loss, participants ate 175% of their normal daily calorie intake on feasting days, and 25% of their normal daily intake on fasting days to prevent weight loss. We provided and carefully tracked the volunteer’s food. They ate typical American fare – things like pasta, chicken, sandwiches and desserts like ice cream.
We took samples of blood before they started and just after they ended the diet so we could compare levels of byproducts of oxidative stress and markers of strong cell functioning.
During the first three week period we attempted to see if fasting would increase oxidative stress (free radicals) in each person’s cells and to see if this stress actually led to stronger, more resilient cells.
Then we wanted to see if taking antioxidants in the second fasting period would block the free radicals caused by the fasting, preventing the cells from becoming more resilient. In other words, we wanted to know if Vitamin C and E would shelter the cells to the point that they wouldn’t be ready to stand up for themselves later on.
How did intermittent fasting affect people’s bodies?
We found that in response to fasting every other day, the cells made more copies of a gene called SIRT3, which is part of a pathway that works to prevent free radical production and improve cellular repair processes.
We also found a significant decrease in levels of circulating insulin, a sign that the participants bodies were more responsive to this hormone. This is important because when we become less sensitive to insulin, we are at risk for diabetes.
One somewhat surprising finding is that when participants took daily oral supplements of Vitamin C and E, the benefits from fasting disappeared. It seems that because the cells were relatively sheltered from experiencing any oxidative stress that may have been caused by fasting every other day, they didn’t respond by increasing their natural defenses and improving their sensitivity to insulin and other stress signals.
This suggests that low levels of environmental stress from things like fasting are actually good for our bodies, and that antioxidant supplements, while potentially good at certain times, might actually prevent our normal healthy cellular responses in other situations.
Although our study was relatively small and only had people fasting every other day for a short time period, we were able to pick up on a few important health benefits of fasting that happened even when people weren’t losing any weight at all. We look forward to other studies of intermittent fasting that might show more pronounced, longer-term benefits in larger groups of people.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
Why Older Adults Should Stay Away From Diet Soda
What We Talk About When We Talk About Obesity
In philosophy classes, one of the first lessons in logic that students learn is what fallacies are and how to avoid them. One of my favorites is the false dichotomy, mainly because of its crystal-clear examples: you’re either for us or against us; it’s my way or the highway. Of course, the dichotomies are false, because each scenario has more than just the two possible options provided. Political rhetoric is filled with false dichotomies, which provides ample fodder for lighthearted classroom discussion about ways reasoning can go wrong.
It’s less amusing, however, that public discussions about obesity can fall prey to false dichotomies in portraying complex relations among weight, eating, activity and disease risk. Applying the logic of false dichotomies, obesity is either caused by individuals eating too much, or an environment that promotes weight-gain. It’s either a disease or the result of gluttony. To fix the problem ourselves, we should focus either on reducing calorie intake or exercise more.
In the meantime, across the globe we are getting fatter.
Reframing the conversation about obesity
We need to move beyond these dichotomies when we talk about obesity. These either or statements don’t help us develop good policy solutions, or help us understand the myriad causes that can contribute to obesity. If the conversation needs to change, where do we start?
The Lancet, a leading medical journal, recently published a special series on obesity, addressing the lack of progress in combating the global obesity trend. These six research articles, as well as perspectives, commentaries and reviews, were written by a group of experts in the science, policy, treatment and ethics of obesity. Their goal? To take on the weighty task of identifying, defusing and moving beyond simplistic dichotomies in order to reframe the obesity debate and offer useful directions for reducing obesity and its effects on people, communities and governments.
Does reframing the debate help fight obesity? Yes – in fact it’s necessary, says series lead author Christina Roberto in “Patchy progress on obesity prevention: emerging examples, entrenched barriers, and new thinking.” They suggest a variety of new or retooled strategies ranging from educating health care providers about the dangers of weight stigmatization to mobilizing citizens to demand policy changes to address obesity. Their key insights are locating problems of obesity in the interactions between individuals and their environments, and breaking the vicious cycle of unhealthy food environments that reinforce preferences for those foods.
But reframing is just the first step in the process of reversing the trend of obesity. Researchers also have to ask the questions that health policy makers want to hear and act on, says food and health policy expert Kelly Brownell in a commentary, co-authored with Roberto. Historian of science Naomi Oreskes says that scientists tend to follow a supply-side model of information, assuming their results will somehow naturally reach those who need it. Brownell and Roberto underscore this error, and strongly advise obesity researchers to frame questions and convey results in ways that understandable and relevant to policy makers’ and the public. Otherwise their work will remain unheard and unused.
Talking to policy makers
Okay, now that the debate has been reframed, and the policy makers are listening, what should we tell them? The Lancet authors offer the many approaches below – some new, some retooled, and all designed to address obesity on multiple fronts.
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Make the public angry. Mobilize citizens’ groups to demand changes in the types of food they can buy and the ways that food is produced, packaged and marketed.
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Improve people’s diets. Use social science and public health interventions to create avenues for people to develop palates for healthier food and sustain those healthier eating patterns.
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Drop the regulatory hammer on Big Food. Empower governments to pass regulation and legislation to reduce junk food and soda marketing targeted at children.
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Treat obese patients better. Shift our health care models to treat obesity with greater sensitivity to its social, political and economic determinants, and teach health professionals to avoid stigmatizing patients about their weight.
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Hold all accountable, all the time. Mobilize and hold all obesity stakeholders accountable – government, community groups, industry, advocacy groups and so on – through an array of strategies, while monitoring progress.
Better communication helps, but we need to understand how these messages come across
All of these approaches come with challenges. Mobilizing the public requires making them aware, making them care, and finding a single message they can agree on – easier said than done. Public health interventions to improve people’s eating habits are well underway, but with limited long-term success so far. The Institute of Medicine and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have noted the need for increased regulation of food marketing to children, but political will on the part of legislatures or federal agencies to implement their recommendations is still lacking.
Improving health-care systems for better treatment and prevention of obesity is key to any successful approach. One suggestion to further reduce the corrosive effects of weight stigmatization that is not mentioned by the authors: de-emphasize BMI in interactions with patients who are overweight and obese. There is ample evidence that it is overly simplistic and can be clinically misleading for individuals, in addition to a trigger for stigmatizing behaviors by health-care providers. Finally, while accountability recommendations for programs are clearly called for, the devil is in the details – they need funding, strong leadership, oversight, more funding, sustained commitment and then even more funding.
In the spirit of reframing and flipping the obesity debate, let me close with a modest proposal. In addition to talking to scientists and doctors and policy makers, let’s do more research to ask the public how they want to eat – what does healthy eating look like to them in the contexts of their lives? Also, keeping in mind that food means taste, pleasure and community for us, researcher Annemarie Mol urges a shift from asking “Am I being good?” to “Is this food good for me?” In focusing on people’s lives, tastes and needs, we may find the low-hanging fruit, as it were – some easier and lower-cost avenues to moderately healthier eating that could create a series of positive effects and lead to greater engagement of the public in food and health policy.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
What are Good Snacks for Diabetics?
Taking Energy Drinks To Heart
Those energy drinks many people gulp down without a second’s thought are giving doctors cause for concern.
“These are the drinks that have a very high concentration of caffeine and other ingredients whose affects we may not know for a long time,” says Dr. Murali Muppala, a cardiologist with Lee Memorial Health System.
A single energy drink may have three to five times the caffeine in a same-size can of soda. Although it occurs naturally in more than 60 plants including coffee beans, tea leaves, and some nuts, the FDA considers caffeine a drug because it stimulates the nervous system. But it is also classified as an additive, meaning manufacturers don’t have to include its amount on a label. And excessive caffeine is at the heart of the matter.
“All the medications that have a stimulant effect can make your heart go- number one faster and also makes your heart beat stronger. And if you take too much of it, it can make significant cardiac arrhythmias,” says Dr. Muppala.
A new report on substance abuse found trips to the emergency room involving energy drinks doubled between 2007 and 2011; the age group between 18 and 39 being the hardest hit. In about half of cases, the buzz was boosted by another drug or alcohol.
“When people drink energy drinks at the same time they’re drinking alcohol,l people may not realize how intoxicated they are even though they’ve been drinking significant quantities,” says Dr. Muppala.
Children and teens, hard-core energy drinkers and people with underlying heart conditions face the biggest risk. And the added boost of stimulant may push them over the edge.