You've probably seen variations on the headlines above. They sound too good to be true - or are they? We're not quite at the "Everything you know is wrong" stage yet, but Science keeps redefining what we do know. In the process of doing so, we find an expanded understanding of something can seemingly contradict first impressions. The above may seem like tabloid fodder, but it turns out there is some substance to it all.
If you are worried about your health, if you want to do what you can to stay active and feeling good for as long as possible, then keeping track of what we are learning and how we can use it in our own lives is of no small passing interest. The increasingly powerful tools we have today for biology, things like molecular tools for investigation, new imaging tools, powerful computational models, etc., are overturning earlier health paradigms. And, it just might have implications for the whole planet.
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
The 40 (*or 35) Inch Test
Let's start with a simple test to get thinking about health. How much is too much weight? What are the consequences? One of the problems of obesity is the risk of adult onset diabetes, Type 2 as it is known.
Rates of type 2 diabetes have increased markedly since 1960 in parallel with obesity. As of 2010 there were approximately 285 million people diagnosed with the disease compared to around 30 million in 1985.[4][5] Long-term complications from high blood sugar can include heart disease, strokes, diabetic retinopathy where eyesight is affected, kidney failure which may require dialysis, and poor blood flow in the limbs leading to amputations. The acute complication of ketoacidosis, a feature of type 1 diabetes, is uncommon,[6] however hyperosmolar hyperglycemic state may occur.
James Gallagher at the BBC Health website reports on a simple measurement that gives a measure of the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes:
measure your waist size at your bellybutton.
Public Health England said there was a "very high risk" of diabetes with waistlines over 40in (102cm) in men or 35in (88cm) in women.
And…
Public Health England (PHE) says men with a 40in (102cm) waist are five times more likely to get type 2 diabetes than those with a slimmer waistline.
Women were at three times greater risk once they reached 35in (88cm).
The PHE report also warns men with a 37-40in waistline (94-102cm) or women at 31-35in (80-88cm) may not be in the most dangerous group, but still faced a "higher risk" of the disease.
Some caveats apply, of course. This is a 'rule of thumb' meaning it's only a rough measure that needs to be considered with others, such as family history, ethnicity, exercise, age, other health risk factors (drinking, smoking, etc.), and so on. That being said, however, a waist measurement at the belly button in an adult in the kind of population typically found in the U.K. in the range given is a warning sign. If you don't have diabetes and don't want to - get that waist size down! (If you don't fit that profile, your health care provider can and should be able to help you determine your own level of risk.)
Where Is Your Head At?
If you're determined to do something about your weight, you are not alone. It's a big public health issue, and one that can be tough to address. How do you get people motivated to lose weight? The psychology of the approach turns out to be a factor. How you think about losing weight affects your response to the problem.
A study by Crystal L. Hoyt and Jeni L. Burnette compared the reactions of people who were given the message of treating obesity as a disease versus obesity as a consequence of a control condition. ("... argued that obesity should not be a disease or stressed the importance of eating less and exercising more.") The results: tell people obesity is a disease, and they are less likely to believe it's something they can/should do something about. Tell them it's a matter of eating and exercise, they're more likely to act. Framing can be critical. As the study noted:
Psychological research on the unanticipated effects of public health messages goes beyond the obesity epidemic. For example, critics of behavioral interventions aimed at reducing teen pregnancy and HIV argue that educational messages about condoms encourage adolescent sexual behavior. However, the opposite occurs. The interventions not only reduce the frequency of sex but also decrease the number of sexual partners while also encouraging greater condom use. Another example involves messages designed to promote sunscreen use. At first glance, it may seem irrelevant whether this message tells people, “using sunscreen decreases your risk of cancer” or whether it says, “not using sunscreen increases your risk of developing cancer.” However, this difference is meaningful for motivating healthy behavior: the first message is gain-based and is more effective at encouraging prevention behaviors, such as using sunscreen. The latter message is loss-based framing and is more effective at promoting detection behaviors such as cancer screenings.
So, this study suggests that your mental approach to weight loss shouldn't be ignored. Success or failure will be affected by your expectations and motivation. (
Great diary here by Major Kong on his own weight reduction efforts.) Again, it won't be the whole story - family history, genetics, etc. - but it's a factor.
(Speaking of psychology, a long time ago Larry Niven and Steven Barnes offered up the Barsoom Project (1989). Set in a future Dream Park recreation/adventure enterprise, one of the story lines involves a group of people signed up for a "Fat-Ripper Special". It was a fantasy-adventure game in which the participants were A) put through physical and mental challenges in the course of playing out a story/mystery while B) the park used the physical exhaustion and mental stresses of the game to reset their habitual behavior patterns in the matter of how they approached eating. Whether or not it's an effective approach has yet to be determined by actual science - but the story may make you think very differently about food. Niven and Barnes also combine Inuit mythology with H.P. Lovecraft...)
Don't Eat That - It's Bad For You. Or Maybe Not...
What to eat is another problem. Saturated fats, sugar, salt, supplements - just about everything has come under fire or is advocated as the 'ideal' diet at some point. Well, the latest getting another look is the whole fat issue. Jon White at New Scientist has an interesting article: Heart attack on a plate? The truth about saturated fat
THERE'S a famous scene in Woody Allen's film Sleeper in which two scientists in the year 2173 are discussing the dietary advice of the late 20th century.
"You mean there was no deep fat, no steak or cream pies or hot fudge?" asks one, incredulous. "Those were thought to be unhealthy," replies the other. "Precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true."
We're not quite in Woody Allen territory yet, but steak and cream pies are starting to look a lot less unhealthy than they once did. After 35 years as dietary gospel, the idea that saturated fat is bad for your heart appears to be melting away like a lump of butter in a hot pan.
So is it OK to eat more red meat and cheese? Will the current advice to limit saturated fat be overturned? If it is, how did we get it so wrong for so long?
The summary version is, that a number of studies linked saturated fat to heart disease. More recent work has A) uncovered some flaws in those studies and B) given us a far more detailed understanding of how the body handles those saturated fats. It turns out not all the fats are the same, that what we eat in place of them may be a bigger problem, and it's not just the fats alone but the other things we eat along with them that have a combined effect. In other words, a simple answer - saturated fats are bad - is just that: too simplistic.
The jury is still out, but if this work continues it will be reflected in new nutritional guidelines. In the meantime, we have a vast industry of processed food items based on selling us on low fats, etc. so don't expect the message to get out too quickly. There's a big financial investment in what may turn out to have been incomplete science.
Eat Carefully, For A Healthier Planet
On the other hand, it's not just about us; what we eat and how it's produced affects the larger environment. The taste for meat, specifically beef, has a huge carbon footprint. Matt McGrath at the BBC has some alarming information.
A new study suggests that the production of beef is around 10 times more damaging to the environment than any other form of livestock.
Scientists measured the environment inputs required to produce the main US sources of protein.
Beef cattle need 28 times more land and 11 times more irrigation water than pork, poultry, eggs or dairy.
The research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
And that's just part of the story. The carbon footprint of the beef cattle industry lies heavy on the land.
Michael Slezak at New Scientist elucidates.
In 2011, Jones [Christopher Jones of the University of California, Berkeley] compared all the ways US households can cut their emissions. Although food was not the biggest source of emissions, it was where people could make the biggest and most cost-effective savings, by wasting less food and eating less meat. Jones calculated that saving each tonne of CO2 emissions would also save the household $600 to $700 (Environmental Science & Technology, DOI: 10.1021/es102221h).
Of course, even if you don't eat beef, there's still that matter of dairy products, like milk, cheese, etc. It turns out there's something that might be done about that.
Ryan Pandya has a proposal up at New Scientist on replacing milk production via cows with something a bit different.
...Once I realised it was possible, I became determined to make animal-free milk.
How do we make this milk? Each of the key milk proteins has a known amino acid sequence that can be found in a free database. It is easy to convert the amino acid sequence into a DNA sequence, and it's simple (if not yet cheap) to order this DNA from research companies. From there, you mix these genes into a population of yeast using a chemical or electrical stimulus to get the DNA into the yeast cells. Then the cells' internal machinery starts churning out the proteins, a lot like brewing beer.
Of course, tasty milk isn't complete without fats. Luckily, dairy scientists have already developed a method for combining healthy, plant-based oils with small, aromatic fatty acids – the same ones that give fresh cream its full, rich flavour.
And that's about it – once you combine everything with clean water in the right ratios, adding pinches of sugar and minerals as needed to get the taste right, you've got a nutritious, tasty, white liquid. You've got milk.
Elsie the Cow is probably not going to get upstaged by Yvonne the Yeast any time soon, but if Pandya can get funding, it's potentially huge. Moving milk production down the food chain could reduce carbon footprints significantly and have
other benefits.
Right now, we are hard at work developing a proof of concept. Because we are crafting animal-free milk from the bottom up we can choose what goes into it, and what stays out. We'll leave out lactose, which some 75 per cent of adults on Earth can't digest. We will also omit cholesterol, for a product that won't clog your arteries, no matter how much cheese you eat. And we will exclude all bacteria, for a product that needs no pasteurisation and requires no refrigeration. Sound good?
Lose Weight While You Sleep
This sounds like a fantasy, but recent research suggests it's entirely possible. It has to do with the nature of fat as energy storage; mammals have several kinds. Lauren Hitchings at New Scientist reports on research that shows there's white fat, brown fat, and an intermediate type nicknamed beige fat. Cold temperatures trigger biochemical signals in the body that flip the switch on what kind is produced, via the immune system.
Babies and some hibernating animals have lots of these energy-burning cells – known as brown fat – but it almost all disappears as people age. We now know that cold temperatures can trigger a "browning" of white fat in adults – converting some of their white fat into an intermediate form called beige fat.
It may seem counterintuitive for our bodies to use up fat stores when we get cold, but think of the white fat as the wooden walls of a log cabin – having them there is a good way to keep warm generally, but when the cold sets in, you're going to want firewood – brown or beige fat, to burn.
The experiments to test this were carried out using mice bred to have excess amounts of white fat. When researchers injected them with signaling molecules normally produced by the immune system as a response to cold, the molecules alone were sufficient to transform the fat and result in weight loss and a higher metabolic rate. How this would translate to humans is problematic, but promising.
Interestingly enough, this ties in with a separate study coming at it from a slightly different approach. Gretchen Reynolds reports on it in the New York Times.
A similar process seems to take place in humans. For the new study, published in June in Diabetes, researchers affiliated with the National Institutes of Health persuaded five healthy young male volunteers to sleep in climate-controlled chambers at the N.I.H. for four months. The men went about their normal lives during the days, then returned at 8 every evening. All meals, including lunch, were provided, to keep their caloric intakes constant. They slept in hospital scrubs under light sheets.
This is a small scale study, of course, but an interesting one nevertheless. The subjects were subjected to different temperatures over the course of the study. They spent a month sleeping at 75°, a month at 66°, a month at 75° again, and a month at 81°. What were the results?
The cold temperatures, it turned out, changed the men’s bodies noticeably. Most striking, after four weeks of sleeping at 66 degrees, the men had almost doubled their volumes of brown fat. Their insulin sensitivity, which is affected by shifts in blood sugar, improved. The changes were slight but meaningful, says Francesco S. Celi, the study’s senior author and now a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University...
So if cooler night time temperatures translate into a healthier metabolic balance and weight loss...does this mean global warming is going to make us all fat? More seriously, it looks like a seemingly small change in just one thing can have a significant effect. Granted, this is based on a limited sample of a group with little variation, but the mouse studies above suggest the mechanism is there. It also suggests
this story about Nordic child rearing may have an unsuspected dimension. (Do what parents in Scandinavia routinely do, and in the U.S. you'd be facing child abuse charges.)
Just Five Minutes to Fitness, or Even in Only Six Seconds
What is fitness? It's a concept encompassing multiple measures: endurance, strength, flexibility, functionality - and those measures have differing expectations with age and other factors. Research now seems to indicate it is possible to get significant benefits from exercise in just a few minutes a day. Gretchen Reynolds again, at the NY Times looks at a study which uses statistical analysis to show vigorous exercise can have lasting benefits.
Running for as little as five minutes a day could significantly lower a person’s risk of dying prematurely, according to a large-scale new study of exercise and mortality. The findings suggest that the benefits of even small amounts of vigorous exercise may be much greater than experts had assumed.
In recent years, moderate exercise, such as brisk walking, has been the focus of a great deal of exercise science and most exercise recommendations. The government’s formal 2008 exercise guidelines, for instance, suggest that people should engage in about 30 minutes of moderate exercise on most days of the week. Almost as an afterthought, the recommendations point out that half as much, or about 15 minutes a day of vigorous exercise, should be equally beneficial.
And…
...The runners’ risk of dying from any cause was 30 percent lower than that for the nonrunners, and their risk of dying from heart disease was 45 percent lower than for nonrunners, even when the researchers adjusted for being overweight or for smoking (although not many of the runners smoked). And even overweight smokers who ran were less likely to die prematurely than people who did not run, whatever their weight or smoking habits.
As a group, runners gained about three extra years of life compared with those adults who never ran.
The problem is, there had been little work done on the benefits of small amounts of intense exercise. Now there has, published Monday in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology. There are a number of issues that can be taken with the study, but the overall impact is that people who ran as little as 5 minutes a day seemed to enjoy better health and an improved life span over those who did not. The implication is that the intensity of the exercise is a critical factor; benefits can be gained from a small investment of time.
Does this mean short but intensive exercise is better than moderate exercise over a longer time span? The study doesn't answer that question, but it is already established that some exercise is far better than no exercise at all. A different study coming from researchers in Scotland has findings that seem to bear on this. James Gallagher at the BBC Health site has the details.
A group of pensioners came into the lab twice a week for six weeks and went hell for leather on an exercise bike for six seconds.
They would allow their heart rate to recover and then go for it again, eventually building up to one minute of exercise by the end of the trial.
"They were not exceptionally fast, but for someone of that age they were," researcher Dr John Babraj said.
The results, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, showed participants had reduced their blood pressure by 9%, increased their ability to get oxygen to their muscles and found day-to-day activities like getting out of a chair or walking the dog easier.
This was a small study of only 12 people in their 60's, but it has worked well enough that larger trials are planned. Again, the effects of high intensity exercise seem to yield significant benefits for a short period of exercise. Why should this happen? There seems to be a growing consensus that the stresses of exercise trigger self repair mechanisms within the body, i.e.: gene responses, regulation of cell-signaling pathways,
and so on. It may be akin to a threshold effect, where a certain amount of damage has to occur before the body responds. If that is the case, high intensity exercise over a short period of time may be enough to trigger that response.
Caveats apply to this, of course. Before engaging in any exercise, it's important to have an okay from a health care provider. Effects will differ with age, body condition, and any number of other factors which need to be examined. Not everyone enjoys running; it remains to be seen what other kinds of high intensity exercise are effective, and how efficient they are. There's also correlating this with age, diet, etc. because it's almost impossible to isolate any single element for study in matters like this. It does suggest that someone already doing moderate exercise might want to think about adding a short period of high intensity work to their routine. There's more work to be done to fully understand what's going on here, but it's looking interesting.
Bottom Line
At the risk of repeating the obvious, health and diet are matters with huge implications for not just individuals but the entire planet. Attitudes are important in getting optimum results. The good news is that some small changes look like they can result in real benefits - and we might even be able to enjoy some 'forbidden foods' in moderation again. For a last word, Tristero over at Digby's cites a diet routine gone wrong and closes with some sensible advice.
I suspect it's likely that Michael Pollan's famous motto - Eat food, not too much. Mostly plants - is about all most of us need to know unless you have specific diet-related health problems. Food should be served and enjoyed, not prescribed and endured.
And just for some motivation, here's Robert Preston performing Meredith Wilson's "Chicken Fat". At six minutes, 33 seconds, it's more than long enough for 5 minutes of high intensity exercise.
http://youtu.be/...