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Big Breakfast Aids Weight Loss
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Big breakfast 'aids weight loss'
Breakfast really could be the most important meal of the day when it comes to losing weight, claims a researcher.
Over several months, obese women who ate half their daily calories first thing fared better than those eating a much smaller amount.
US researcher Dr Daniela Jakubowicz told a San Francisco conference having a small breakfast could actually boost food cravings.
A UK expert said a big breakfast diet might simply be less boring.
Dr Jakubowicz, from Virginia Commonwealth University, has been recommending a hearty breakfast to her patients for 15 years.
She tested it against a low carbohydrate diet in a study of 96 obese and physically inactive women.
This diet involved 1,085 calories a day - the majority of these coming from protein and fat.
Breakfast here was the smallest meal of the day - just 290 calories, with just seven grams of carbohydrates.
Her "big breakfast" diet involved more calories - 1,240 - with a lower proportion of fat and more carbohydrates and protein.
Breakfast here was 610 calories, with 58 grams of carbohydrates, while lunch and dinner were 395 and 235 calories respectively.
Four months on, the low-carb dieters appeared to be doing better, losing an average of 28 pounds to the 23 shed on the "big breakfast" diet.
However, after eight months, the situation had reversed, with the low-carb dieters putting an average of 18 of those pounds back on, while the big breakfasters continued to lose weight, on average 16.5 pounds each.
They lost a fifth of their total body weight on average, compared with less than 5% for the low-carb dieters.
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How America's Children Packed on the Pounds
Thursday, Jun. 12, 2008
How America's Children Packed On the Pounds
By Jeffrey Kluger
Americans disagree about a lot of things, but we rarely quarrel when it comes to our food. For a nation built on grand democratic virtues, there is still nothing that defines us quite like our love of chow time.
We have plenty of reasons to fetishize our food — not the least being that we've always had so much of it. Settlers fleeing the privations of the Old World landed in the new one and found themselves on a fat, juicy center cut of continent, big enough to baste its coasts in two different oceans. The prairies ran so dark with buffalo, you could practically net them like cod; the waters swam so thick with cod, you could bag them like slow-moving buffalo. The soil was the kind of rich stuff in which you could bury a brick and grow a house, and the pioneers grew plenty — fruits and vegetables and grains and gourds and legumes and tubers, in a variety and abundance they'd never seen before.
With all that, was it any wonder that when we had a chance to establish our first national holiday, it was Thanksgiving — a feast that doesn't merely accompany a celebration but in effect is the celebration? Is it any wonder that what might be our most evocative patriotic song is America the Beautiful, in which an ideal like brotherhood doesn't even get mentioned until the second-to-last line, well after rhapsodic references to waves of grain and fruited plains? "We've defined an American version of what it means to succeed," says neuroscientist Randy Seeley, associate director of the Obesity Research Center at the University of Cincinnati Medical School. "And a big part of that is access to an environment in which there is a lot of food to be consumed."
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http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1813700,00.html
Obesity Tied to Risk of Psychiatric Disorders
Obesity tied to risk of psychiatric disorders
By Amy NortonThu May 15, 1:04 PM ET
Obesity is a well known risk factor for certain physical health problems, but a new study suggests that heavy adults also have higher rates of psychiatric disorders.
Using data from a national health survey of more than 40,000 Americans, researchers found that obese adults were up to twice as likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions as normal-weight adults.
In addition, even moderately overweight people had elevated rates of anxiety disorders, the study found.
Whether excess pounds somehow lead to mental health problems is not clear, according to the researchers. But the findings do indicate that a range of psychiatric disorders are more common among overweight people.
They also suggest that briefly screening obese patients for such conditions could be useful, lead researcher Dr. Nancy M. Petry told Reuters Health.
She and her colleagues at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington report their study findings in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.
The findings are based on a government study of 41,654 U.S. adults who were assessed for recent and lifetime psychiatric disorders.
In general, Petry's team found, obese adults had higher risks of major and milder depression, anxiety disorders like panic disorder and phobias, and "manic" episodes. They also showed higher rates of alcohol abuse and personality disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive behavior and paranoid personality disorder.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080515/hl_nm/obesity_psychiatric_dc;_ylt=Ag0U1VOQU999i0YzxtcpkrTVJRIF