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Study Says Sleep More to Loose Weight

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If you’re trying your best to eat right and exercise, it might be worth it to make sure you get the proper amount of sleep each night, according to a new study that suggests lack of sleep can throw off a diet.

According to CNN Health, research from the University of Chicago showed that dieters who slept for 8.5 hours lost 55 percent more body fat than dieters who slept 5.5 hours

“The dieters who slept less reported feeling hungrier throughout the course of the study,” CNN said, even though “they ate the same diet, consumed multivitamins and performed the same type of work or leisure activities.”

The study authors concluded that “Lack of sufficient sleep may compromise the efficacy of typical dietary interventions for weight loss and related metabolic risk reduction,” CNN said. The study was released October 4 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Source::  CNN Health October 4, 2010

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Gazing at Cake Helps to Lose Weight

Sweet temtation helps to loose weight.
Young woman gazing at a chocolate eclair on a platesweet cake
Women who want to lose weight can have their cake – as long as they don’t eat it, scientists believe.
A study found that showing weight-conscious women pictures of sweet treats strengthens their resolve to eat healthily.
The finding suggests that glossy adverts designed to make cakes, chocolate and desserts irresistible may actually have the opposite effect.

It also means that the secret to losing weight could be as simple as decorating your fridge door with pictures of forbidden tasty treats.

Dutch psychologists asked 54 female students to look at a picture of either a slice of chocolate cake or a flower under the guise of a memory test.
The Utrecht University researchers then questioned the students about any plans to eat more healthily before offering them a choice between a chocolate or oatmeal cookie.

Women shown the cake picture made healthy eating a higher priority than those shown the flower.
They were also significantly more likely to pick the healthier option of the oatmeal cookie, New Scientist reports.
Researcher Floor Kroese said feelings of guilt may help strengthen resolve against temptation.
She said: ‘Food temptations do not always trigger indulgence.
‘It seems that seeing a food temptation reminded people of their goal to watch their weight and helped them act accordingly.’

She said that sticking pictures of tempting foods on the fridge door may help to bring weight-watching goals to mind.

But pictures pinned up should be of the dieter’s favourite forbidden treat, as anything less could backfire and lead to a raid on the biscuit tin.
Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioural studies at the University of Chicago, agreed that looking at pictures of cakes and other sweet treats could benefit slimmers.
‘In moderation, this positive impact of food temptations will overcome the negative impact – the urge to indulge,’ she said.
Previous research has suggested that it is possible to eat chocolate and lose weight, as long as it is early in the day.
Women who ate a big breakfast, complete with a generous slab of chocolate, lost more weight than those who started the day with a small breakfast.
They were also less likely to pile the pounds back on.
The researchers said starting the day with a sweet treat could curb later cravings for calorie-rich foods


Source: Mail Online. 18th. Aug.2009

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Drug Combos Pose Risk for Elderly

Older adults in the United States are popping prescription pills, over-the-counter drugs and dietary supplements in record numbers, and in combinations that could be deadly, US researchers said on Tuesday.

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They said more than half of US adults aged 57 to 85 are using five or more prescription or non-prescription drugs, and one in 25 are taking them in combinations that could cause dangerous drug interactions.

“Older adults in the United States use medicine and they use a lot of it,” said Dr. Stacy Tessler Lindau of the University of Chicago Medical Center in Illinois, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“While medications are often beneficial, they are not always safe,” she said in a telephone interview.

She noted a recent report that estimated U.S. adults over 65 make up more than 175,000 emergency department visits a year for adverse drug reactions, and commonly prescribed drugs accounted for a third of these visits.

For the study, Lindau teamed up with Dima Qato, a pharmacist and researcher at the University of Chicago. They used data from a national survey of adults aged 57 to 85 and interviews with nearly 3,000 people in their homes to get a read on the medications they used on a regular basis.

They analyzed potential interactions among the top 20 prescription and over-the-counter drugs and the top 20 dietary supplements, and found that 68 percent of adults surveyed who took prescription drugs also used over-the-counter drugs or dietary supplements.

Men in the 75 to 85-year-old age group were at the highest risk, they said. “One in 10 men between the ages of 75 to 85 were at risk for a drug-to-drug interaction,” Qato said in a telephone interview.

Nearly half of the potential drug-to-drug interactions could cause bleeding problems. The blood thinner warfarin, often sold by Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. under the brand name Coumadin, was most commonly cited in potentially dangerous combinations.

Some 2 million Americans take warfarin after a heart attack, stroke or major surgery. The team found warfarin was commonly teamed up with aspirin, a drug often taken to prevent heart attacks that also interferes with clotting.

Warfarin and the cholesterol-lowering statin drug simvastatin, which is sold by Merck & Co under the brand name Zocor, was another combination that could cause potential bleeding risks.

Among non-prescription drugs, they found many people were taking the popular nutritional supplement Ginkgo biloba in combination with aspirin, another potential cause of bleeding.

The team was reassured that they found no instances of people taking absolutely forbidden drug combinations, but the finding of widespread use of drugs that could cause major drug reactions was worrisome.

“We think the patient needs to know about these risks,” Qato said.

The researchers recommend patients carry a list in a wallet or purse of all of the drugs and supplements they take.

And they said doctors, pharmacists and other health professionals should remember to ask about all of the medications their patients are taking.

Sources: The Times Of India

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Sleep Less, Put Your Heart at Risk

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Key to good heart?
Study shows – even an extra hour of sleep can be beneficial for coronary arteries.
Skipping sleep may promote the thickening of coronary arteries and increase the risk of heart disease, a new study suggests. Researchers at the University of Chicago Medical Centre in the US have found that people who, on an average, sleep less have a greater chance of developing thickened arteries than people who sleep longer.

The benefit from just one hour of extra sleep per day is similar to the gain available from reducing blood pressure by 16mm, according to the study, to be published tomorrow in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The researchers detected thickened arterial deposits in 6 per cent of people who slept more than seven hours a night, in 11 per cent of people who slept between five and seven hours, and in 27 per cent of people who slept less than five hours.

“The magnitude of the difference was a surprise,” said Diane Lauderdale, associate professor at the University of Chicago Medical Centre’s department of health studies and the study’s director.

“It’s also a mystery. We can only speculate about why those with shorter average sleep duration were more likely to develop the calcification [thickening] of the arteries.”

“This is a large and dramatic effect,” said Batmanabhan Gitanjali, head of a sleep disorders laboratory at the Jawaharlal

Nehru Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research, Puducherry, who was not associated with the study.

The study examined the sleep habits and coronary arteries of 495 men and women between the ages of 35 and 47 over a five-year period. None of the volunteers had any deposits in their arteries at the start of the study.

It revealed a 33 per cent lowered risk of arterial thickening even after the scientists adjusted data to cancel out the effects of other factors that could contribute to arterial thickening such as smoking, age, sex, race and education.

“But we’ll need to validate these findings through larger studies to understand what’s going on,” said Batmanabhan Gitanjali

One current idea among sleep medicine specialists is that healthy people may display a range of sleep habits. Short-sleepers could do with five hours of sleep while long-sleepers are comfortable sleeping eight hours or more.

A number of previous studies have shown that chronic lack of sleep is associated with a number of other risk factors linked to heart disease — weight gain, diabetes and even high blood pressure.

Lauderdale and her colleagues say the stress hormone called cortisol or some as yet unidentified factor may reduce sleep and increase arterial thickening.

Another possible mechanism may involve the blood pressure. Blood pressure decreases during sleep, so people who sleep less during a 24-hour cycle may have higher blood pressure which can contribute to the arterial thickening.

“This study does not prove that short sleep leads to coronary artery disease, but it is safe to recommend at least six hours of sleep a night,” said Lauderdale.

Sources: The Telegraph (Kolkata, India)

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‘Good Cholesterol’ Might Not be Good

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Is ‘good cholesterol’ really good for you; not so, suggests a new study.

University of Chicago (U-C) researchers challenged popular notion that simply having high levels of good cholesterol (HDL) and low levels of bad cholesterol (LDL) is necessary for good heath.

Instead, they show that the good cholesterol has varying degrees of quality and that poor quality HDL is actually bad for you.

Cholesterol is a waxy, fat-like substance used by the body to maintain the proper function of cell membranes and is encapsulated within two types of proteins as it travels in the body – low density lipoproteins (LDL) and high-density lipoproteins (HDL).

High levels of LDL or total cholesterol are an indicator of increased risk for heart disease. High blood cholesterol elicits no physical symptoms, making medical screenings necessary for detection.

“For many years, HDL has been viewed as good cholesterol and has generated a false perception that the more HDL in the blood, the better,” said Angelo Scanu, pioneer in blood lipid chemistry from U-C and co-author of the study.

“It is now apparent that subjects with high HDL are not necessarily protected from heart problems and should ask their doctor to find out whether their HDL is good or bad,” he added.

The researchers came to this conclusion after reviewing published research on this subject. They found that the HDL from people with chronic diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, kidney disease, and diabetes is different from the HDL in healthy individuals, even when blood levels of HDL are comparable.

They observed that normal, ‘good’ HDL reduces inflammation, while the dysfunctional, ‘bad’ HDL does not, according to an U-C release.

“This is yet one more line of research that explains why some people can have perfect cholesterol levels, but still develop cardiovascular disease,” said Gerald Weissmann, editor-in-chief of The FASEB Journal, which published the study in its December edition.

“Just as the discovery of good and bad cholesterol rewrote the book on cholesterol management, the realisation that some of the ‘good cholesterol’ is actually bad will do the same,” he added.

US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said approximately 17% of all American adults have high total cholesterol, putting them at risk for heart disease.

Sources:-The Times Of India

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