New Hampshire Health News Digest

The ‘Healthy Obese’ and Their Healthy Fat Cells By ANAHAD O'CONNOR They are a mystery to researchers: people who are significantly overweight and yet show none of the usual metabolic red flags. Despite their obesity, they have normal cholesterol levels, healthy blood pressure levels and no apparent signs of impending diabetes. Researchers call them the metabolically healthy obese, and by some estimates they represent as many as a third of all obese adults. Scientists have known very little about them, but new research may shed some light on the cause of their unusual metabolic profile. A study in the journal Diabetologia has found that compared with their healthier counterparts, people who are obese but metabolically unhealthy have impaired mitochondria, the cellular powerhouses that harvest energy from food, as well as a reduced ability to generate new fat cells. Unlike fat tissue in healthy obese people, which generates new cells to help store fat as it accumulates, the fat...

Maps: States where doctors prescribe more antibiotics also have the highest obesity rates. Why? Indeed, a growing body of evidence suggests that antibiotics might be linked to weight gain. A 2012 New York University study found that antibiotic use in the first six months of life was linked with obesity later on. Another 2012 NYU study found that mice given antibiotics gained more weight than their drug-free counterparts. As my colleague Tom Philpott has noted repeatedly, livestock operations routinely dose animals with low levels of antibiotics to promote growth. No one knows exactly how antibiotics help animals (and possibly humans) pack on the pounds, but there are some theories. One is that antibiotics change the composition of the microbiome, the community of microorganisms in your body that scientists are just beginning to understand. (For a more in-depth look at the connection between bacteria and weight loss, read Moises Velasquez-Manoff's piece on the topic.) Hicks say...

Harvard Study: Eating White Rice Increases Risk Of Type 2 Diabetes A recent Harvard study has discovered a link between higher white rice intake and a significantly elevated risk of type 2 diabetes, especially among Asian populations. White rice is the predominant type of rice eaten worldwide and has high glycemic index (GI) values. High GI diets have been shown to be associated with an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Compared to brown rice, it has a lower content of nutrients including fiber, magnesium, and vitamins, which may contribute to the increased risk, the authors report. The authors caution that an increased intake of other sources of refined carbohydrates such as pastries, white bread, and sugar sweetened beverages may also contribute to type 2 diabetes, not simply just white rice. They recommend eating whole grains instead of refined carbohydrates, which they hope will help slow down the global diabetes epidemic. Both Asian and Western cultures are suscepti...

Excess Glucose May Harden Heart and Lungs Excess Glucose May Harden Heart and Lungs Research found that glucose suppressed ferroelectricity up to 50%.... New research conducted at the University of Washington and Boston University has shown that excess glucose in the body could damage the elastic proteins found in important organs such as the heart and lungs, which aid in breathing and pumping blood. In this study, aortic tissue was separated into two types of proteins, elastin and collagen. Ferroelectric switching is what allows the elastin to be flexible and convey repeated pulses, in organs such as the arteries. It is a response to an electric field in which a molecule switches from having a positive charge to a negative charge. Recent discoveries in animal tissue have traced this property to elastin in animal tissues. When researchers treated the elastin with sugar, they noticed a 50% suppression of the ferroelectric switching. The sugar-protein interaction mimics glycati...

The Inter-Relationships between Vegetarianism and Eating Disorders among Females The Inter-Relationships between Vegetarianism and Eating Disorders among Females Accepted 24 April 2012. Abstract When individuals with a suspected or diagnosed eating disorder adopt a vegetarian diet, health care professionals might worry that this choice could function as a socially acceptable way to legitimize food avoidance. Yet only limited research has examined vegetarianism in relation to eating disorders. Our study objectives were to compare individuals with and without an eating disorder history and individuals at different stages of eating disorder recovery on past and current vegetarianism and motivations for and age at becoming vegetarian. [...] The three recovery status groups (fully recovered, partially recovered, and active eating disorder) did not differ significantly in percentiles endorsing a history of vegetarianism or weight-related reasons as primary, but they differed signif...

From Sleep Study, Clues to Happiness - NYTimes.com A little over a decade ago, scientists discovered that narcolepsy, the neurological disorder that leads to episodes of irresistible sleepiness, is caused by the loss of brain cells that produce hypocretin, a neurotransmitter that promotes wakefulness. But the discovery did not shed light on two other mysterious problems associated with the disorder. Narcoleptics have profoundly high rates of depression — up to six times the rate in the general population — and they have a tendency to collapse when swept by some emotions, a phenomenon known as cataplexy. Now research shows that in addition to regulating sleep, hypocretin also appears to govern emotion, particularly experiences of joy and happiness. The study has implications that extend beyond narcolepsy. It suggests that the brain has several different arousal systems, and that one of them, driven by hypocretin, has the specific function of keeping people awake for pleasure.

Lol, this is rich. "Ketogenic Diet Reverses Kidney Disease (Nephropathy)" OMG! This is incredible! Kidney failure is irreversible! But eating this strange high fat diet COMPLETELY CURED IT within 2 months for mice! Let's start testing the diet on people whose total lack of kidney function is a death sentence, right? Wrong- quote "a high fat diet could have other problems. We don't want to actually put people on the diet, we want to figure out how the diet works and make a drug that does the same thing", Lol. Yeah,  not like kids with epilepsy have been on ketogenic diets for years since the 1950's with no ill effects. Maybe someday someone will find evidence dietary fat causes heart disease, ha ha Ketogenic Diet Reverses Kidney Disease (Nephropathy) - YouTube : Ketogenic Diet Reverses Kidney Disease (Nephropathy) Charles Mobbs, a scientist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, discovers how a low carb, ketogenic diet reverses k...

After weight-loss surgery, new gut bacteria keep obesity away | Reuters The logic behind weight-loss surgery seems simple: rearrange the digestive tract so the stomach can hold less food and the food bypasses part of the small intestine, allowing fewer of a meal's calories to be absorbed. Bye-bye, obesity. A study of lab mice, published on Wednesday, begs to differ. It concludes that one of the most common and effective forms of bariatric surgery, called Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, melts away pounds not - or not only - by re-routing the digestive tract, as long thought, but by changing the bacteria in the gut. Or, in non-scientific terms, the surgery somehow replaces fattening microbes with slimming ones. If that occurs in people, too, then the same bacteria-changing legerdemain achieved by gastric bypass might be accomplished without putting obese patients under the knife in an expensive and risky operation. [...] For many obese patients, particularly those with type 2 d...

Whole Milk Linked to Slimmer Kids - Neatorama The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children switch from whole milk to a lower fat milk at age two. The conventional wisdom is that getting children used to reduced fat milk will help keep them at a healthy weight. Skim, 1%, or 2% milk has fewer calories per cup. It just makes sense, doesn't it? So here's where things gets confusing. A new study of preschool-aged children published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, a sister publication of the British Medical Journal, finds that low-fat milk was associated with higher weight. That's right, kids drinking low-fat milk tended to be heavier.

Changes in the basal metabolic rate of a normal woman induced by short-term and long-term alterations of energy intake. [J Nutr Sci Vitaminol (Tokyo). 1989] - PubMed - NCBI Abstract A long-term experiment was carried out to study the effects of alterations in energy intake and meal contents on basal metabolic rate (BMR) of a normal woman. Alterations of energy intake induced changes in BMR and pulse rate in addition to body weight changes. Whether BMR was expressed per whole body, per unit body weight, or per unit body surface area, it increased progressively during long-term overeating periods, and decreased markedly during long-term undereating periods. These results suggest that there exists 'Luxuskonsumption', or adaptive diet-induced thermogenesis, during an overeating period and hypometabolism during an undereating period. BMR was affected significantly by the menstrual cycle but not by nutrient composition when daily energy intake was fixed at 2000 kcal for a long ti...

Discovery Lecture explores brain’s sensitivity to insulin | VUMC Reporter | Vanderbilt University Diabetes has a big impact on the brain. Patients with diabetes have more cognitive dysfunction, are at increased risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease, and have higher rates of depression and eating disorders. What’s going on is the brain is actually a metabolic organ, exquisitely sensitive to insulin, internationally known diabetes researcher C. Ronald Kahn, M.D., said during last week’s Flexner Discovery Lecture/Irwin Eskind Lecture in Biomedical Science at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “Changing insulin signaling in the brain changes brain function in terms of things the brain normally does, which is mood and behavior activity,” said Kahn, the Mary K. Iaccoca Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Through studies of genetically manipulated “knock-out” mice lacking brain receptors for insulin, Kahn and his colleagues have shown that insulin signaling affects...

Desk workers - stand up for your health: Millions may be making themselves ill by spending their working lives sitting down - Health News - Health & Families - The Independent The research, published in the journal Diabetologica, found a range of behaviours: some of the people in the study spent as little as three hours a day sitting, but most spent more than 10 hours in a chair, and a few regularly sat down for 16 hours a day. The conclusion was that people at risk of diabetes could be well advised to spend less time sitting and more time standing up, said Joseph Henson, a diabetes researcher at Leicester University. "The longer the time you spend sitting, the higher the amount of sugars and fats that accumulate in your bloodstream regardless of the time you spend exercising," Dr Henson said. "There's a significant difference between people who sit a lot and those who don't. Those who spend the least time sitting have the lowest values of glucose and f...

Normal cardiac rhythm during hypocaloric die... [Arch Intern Med. 1983] - PubMed - NCBI Normal cardiac rhythm during hypocaloric diets of varying carbohydrate content. Phinney SD, Bistrian BR, Kosinski E, Chan DP, Hoffer LJ, Rolla A, Schachtel B, Blackburn GL. Abstract Cardiac arrhythmias have been implicated in the deaths of 17 morbidly obese individuals subsisting on a collagen hydrolysate preparation ("liquid protein") during a modified fasting regimen for weight loss. Serious cardiac arrhythmias have been noted in three of six subjects studied prospectively within 28 days of starting a similar regimen, which used an inadequate protein source and was nearly devoid of all essential minerals. A comparative study of three 28-day weight loss diets of varying carbohydrate, protein, and energy content (450 to 820 kcal/day) but employing protein of good quality and adequate in micronutrients did not disclose substantial diet-related arrhythmias in five subjects on each of t...

Metabolic consequences of very-low-calorie diet the... [Diabetes. 1986] - PubMed - NCBI : Abstract To determine the effects of very-low-calorie diets on the metabolic abnormalities of diabetes and obesity, we have studied 10 obese, non-insulin-dependent diabetic (NIDDM) and 5 obese, nondiabetic subjects for 36 days on a metabolic ward during consumption of a liquid diet of 300 kcal/day with 30 g of protein. [...] The composition of the weight lost at completion was similar in both groups and ranged from 21.6% to 31.3% water, 3.9% to 7.8% protein, and 60.9% to 74.5% fat. [...] This study demonstrates that short-term treatment with a very-low-calorie diet in both obese diabetic and nondiabetic subjects results in: safe and effective weight loss associated with the normalization of elevated glucose and lipid levels, a large individual variability in total nitrogen loss determined principally by the initial lean body mass, and progressive increments in the contribution of ...

Ebony - Google Books http://books.google.com/books?id=-1rJTL1zGTwC&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=Ernst+J.+Drenick+fasting&source=bl&ots=HM8xJVbpW0&sig=-p7prWjJ7oFjLo_CJUhu8Co0hjI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Af8DUaXmKa3h0wHh4YCIDg&ved=0CGoQ6AEwBzgK#v=onepage&q=Ernst%20J.%20Drenick%20fasting&f=false