Author: KYIAS

(Reuters Health) – – A brief program that encouraged people to track their weight and to be mindful of the excess energy in every holiday cookie or cup of nog seems to have helped participants get through the holiday season without gaining weight.

The trial in the UK recruited participants in November and December of 2016 and 2017, and followed up with them about 45 days later. Those assigned to the weight-gain prevention program ended up losing 0.13 kg (about one third of a pound), on average, while the control group gained 0.37 kg (nearly a pound), the study team reported December 10 online in The BMJ.

“On Christmas Day alone, someone might consume 6,000 calories, or three times the recommended daily allowance,” said a coauthor of the study, Amanda Farley of the University of Birmingham.

“We were unsure how well the public would respond to the idea of controlling their food and drink over Christmas,” Farley told Reuters Health by email. “But we found that participants were very motivated.”

Past research has found that holiday periods are often when people put on extra pounds, but they don’t tend to lose that weight after the holidays are over. Since even a holiday weight gain of just a pound or two each year will add up over a decade, the study team wanted to explore tactics to help prevent putting on weight in the first place.

They recruited 272 adults who were told only that they would participate in a study of winter weight gain. About half were randomly assigned to receive a general brochure on healthy living.

The other half got advice to weigh themselves frequently, ideally every day, record their weight, and “reflect on weight trajectory.” They also got 10 tips for weight management, as well as a graphical list of holiday foods showing the amount of exercise that would be required to offset the calorie content of each – for instance, expending the calories in a mince pie requires 21 minutes of running, and a small glass of mulled wine requires 32 minutes of walking.

The 10 tips for weight management included sticking to a regular meal routine, choosing reduced fat options, walking 10,000 steps daily, opting for healthy snacks, reading food labels, thinking twice about large portions and seconds, breaking up sitting time, reducing alcoholic and sweet drinks, slowing down while eating and aiming to include five servings of fruits and vegetables each day.

About 80 percent of the participants were women, roughly one third in the normal weight range, more than one third overweight, and the rest obese.

The researchers’ goal was for participants to gain no more than half a kilo, or about one pound, over the holiday period.

Instead, the research team found that the intervention group, on average, lost a little weight while the control group gained a bit. The difference in weight gain between the groups was 0.49 kg, a little over one pound, a statistically meaningful amount, the study team concludes.

Based on questionnaire responses at the follow-up, people in the intervention group also scored higher for practicing “cognitive restraint.” However, there were no significant differences between the groups in changes in body fat percentage, emotional eating or uncontrolled eating.

“Many people gain weight over Christmas, but that is not inevitable,” Farley said. “It is possible to demonstrate some restraint of eating and drinking and build in simple ways to be active while still enjoying the festive season.”

Few randomized controlled trials have studied effective programs to combat the year-end bloat, noted Dale Schoeller of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Although this study showed a change, it’s hard to say which aspect was effective, Schoeller said.

“It would be interesting to take this program apart and try to understand what changes led to the prevention of weight gain,” he said in a phone interview. “Did restraint with food or alcohol, or compensating with exercise, make the difference, or was it a combination?”

In this study, the majority of participants were white women in their 40s. Future studies should include different communities and could tailor the tips to appeal to different audiences and countries, said Rolando Giovanni Diaz Zavala of the University of Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico, who also wasn’t involved in the research.

“Once people are overweight, there are metabolic and neuroendocrine changes (possibly irreversible) that fight to regain weight lost,” he said in an email. “Preventing weight gain seems to be the smartest strategy.”

It costs the global economy an estimated US$2 trillion annually and has been dubbed a modern day health epidemic, but new research from the University of South Australia has unearthed a possible cure for obesity — and it is as plain as dirt!

Investigating how clay materials can improve drug delivery, UniSA researcher and PhD candidate, Tahnee Dening serendipitously discovered that the clay materials she was using had a unique ability to “soak up” fat droplets in the gut.

Dening says this accidental discovery could potentially be a cure for obesity.

“It’s quite amazing really,” Dening says. “I was investigating the capacity of specifically clay materials to improve the oral delivery and absorption of antipsychotic drugs, when I noticed that the clay particles weren’t behaving as I’d expected.

“Instead of breaking down to release drugs, the clay materials were attracting fat droplets and literally soaking them up.

“Not only were the clay materials trapping the fats within their particle structure, but they were also preventing them from being absorbed by the body, ensuring that fat simply passed through the digestive system.

“It’s this unique behaviour that immediately signalled we could be onto something significant — potentially a cure for obesity.”

Being overweight can cause serious health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and some cancers.

According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, obesity is increasing with almost two in three adults, and one in four children, now overweight or obese. And if its prevalence continues, we can expect nearly half the world’s population to be overweight or obese by 2030.

With few effective drugs existing to counteract obesity, many companies are investing huge amounts to discover and develop alternative treatments for obesity.

Dening’s research investigated the effects of montmorillonite — a natural clay material, purified from dirt and laponite — a synthetic clay — in rats fed a high-fat diet, comparing against placebo and a leading weight loss drug — orlistat. Monitoring over a two-week period, she found that while both the engineered clay formulations and orlistat delivered weight loss effects, the clay material outperformed the drug.

Dening says the findings offer new insights for obesity and weight-management, particularly when used in combination with the commercial drug, where there is potential for synergy.

“Our processed clay has an unusually high surface area which means it has a huge capacity to interact with and soak up digested fats and oils present in the foods we eat,” Dening says.

“Orlistat on the other hand, is an enzyme inhibitor that blocks up to 30 per cent of dietary fat digestion and absorption, which leads to weight loss, but has unpleasant side effects such as stomach aches, bloating, flatulence and diarrhoea, which limits its use in weight loss as people choose to stop using it.

“What we’re researching now is a synergistic approach with both the clay material and orlistat: the orlistat blocks the enzyme that digests fat molecules, and the clay particles trap these fats so they’re excreted out of the body without causing gastrointestinal disturbances.

“We’re essentially attacking fat digestion and absorption in two different ways and we hope this will lead to greater weight loss with fewer side effects.”

UniSA Professor Clive Prestidge, and Dening’s research supervisor, says the research has already captured the attention of potential investors.

“This is a significant discovery that provides new and exciting avenues for weight loss research which naturally attracts potential commercial partners,” Prof Prestidge says.

“With a finding like this, people will naturally be keen to find out when they can try it. Given that the material is generally considered safe and is widely used in food and nutraceutical products, it is feasible that human clinical trials could start reasonably soon.

Left gastric artery embolization, a novel interventional procedure used to treat obesity, leads to the loss of both fat and muscle, according to a new study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). Researchers said the loss of muscle mass is concerning and underscores the importance of proper nutritional counseling after the procedure.

Obesity is a major health issue worldwide, linked with serious conditions like heart disease, cancer and diabetes. First-line treatments such as diet and exercise often don’t work, leading many patients to opt for gastric bypass surgery. The surgery, which reduces the size of the stomach, has been effective in treating obesity, but carries with it significant costs and potential complications.

Currently under investigation in clinical trials, left gastric artery embolization is a less invasive option to surgery. In the procedure, microscopic beads are injected under imaging guidance into the artery that supplies blood to the stomach. The beads block blood flow to the stomach and reduce the production of ghrelin, a hormone that stimulates hunger. Early studies have shown that embolization is effective in helping people lose weight, but information is lacking on how it might change a patient’s composition of muscle and fat.

“There has been lots of research focused on the efficacy of gastric artery embolization for weight loss,” said the study’s lead author, Edwin A. Takahashi, M.D., vascular and interventional radiology fellow at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “However, there has been no data on what is contributing to the weight loss, whether the patients are losing fat, as desired, or muscle mass, or some combination of the two.”

To learn more, Dr. Takahashi and colleagues studied CT scans of 16 overweight or obese patients who had undergone left gastric artery embolization to treat gastrointestinal bleeding. CT scans, when used in conjunction with special software, allow for measurements of body composition based on the different densities of tissues like fat and muscle.

The scans were done before and approximately 1.5 months after the procedure. The results were compared to those of a control group of 16 outpatients who did not undergo left gastric artery embolization but had CT scans at two different time periods for nonspecific abdominal pain.

All 16 individuals experienced significant weight loss after the embolization procedure, losing an average of 6.4 percent of their body weight over 1.5 months. Body mass index, a measure of body weight relative to a person’s height, dropped by 6.3 percent.

While the weight loss was not surprising to the researchers, the changes in body composition were. The skeletal muscle index, a measure of the amount of muscle that connects to the skeleton and helps move the limbs, fell by 6.8 percent. Skeletal muscle is important to health, and loss of it can impair physical function and metabolism and put a person at higher risk of injury.

“The significant decrease in the amount of skeletal muscle highlights the fact that patients who undergo this procedure are at risk for losing muscle mass and need to be managed accordingly after procedure,” Dr. Takahashi said. “We must make sure they receive adequate nutrition to minimize the amount of muscle tissue they lose.”

The patients also lost a significant amount of body fat. Their overall body fat index dropped by an average of 3.7 percent. However, much of the fat loss was subcutaneous, or the fat that lies directly under the skin. Visceral fat, the more dangerous fat surrounding the organs and associated with serious health problems like heart disease and diabetes, did not decrease significantly over the course of follow-up.

The researchers plan to expand their studies in the future to include people who are specifically undergoing embolization as a treatment for obesity.

Children and teens who are overweight or obese may be more likely to develop asthma, a U.S. study suggests.

While obesity has long been linked to asthma in adults, research to date has offered conflicting evidence about whether this also holds true for young people, researchers note in Pediatrics.

The current study followed more than 500,000 kids, ages two to 17, for an average of four years. Overall, about eight percent had been diagnosed with asthma.

Compared to kids at healthy weight, overweight children were 17 percent more likely to have an asthma diagnosis and obese youth were 26 percent more likely to have an asthma diagnosis, the study found. This was based on a diagnosis or asthma drug prescription but not on breathing test results.

When researchers looked at the connection between asthma and obesity based on so-called spirometry tests that show how easily people can breathe air out of their lungs, the link was stronger. Obesity was associated with a 29 percent higher risk of asthma based on this stricter diagnostic criteria, the study found.

The study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how being overweight or obese might directly cause asthma, but the results offer some of the most compelling evidence to date suggesting that there is indeed a connection, said lead study author Dr. Jason Lang of Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina.

“Experts have speculated that abnormal lung growth associated with obesity causes airflow obstruction,” Lang said by email.

Obesity can also trigger the development of so-called cardiometabolic risk factors like high cholesterol and an inability to use the hormone insulin to contribute blood sugar into energy that may lead to impairment in the airway, Lang added.

“Several studies have shown that asthma symptoms get much better with weight loss but the exact mechanism is unknown,” Lang said.

An estimated 23 percent to 27 percent of new asthma cases in children with obesity may be directly attributable to obesity, researchers calculated.

If no children were overweight or obese, 10 percent of asthma cases would be avoided, they estimated.

One limitation of the study is that researchers relied on medical records kept by clinicians, and documentation of an asthma diagnosis or ordering of spirometry is at doctors’ discretion, the researchers note.

It’s also impossible to determine from the study whether asthma might lead to obesity or whether obesity might lead to asthma.

Even so, the results suggest that it may be possible to prevent the development of asthma by helping children maintain a healthy weight, said Dr. Deepa Rastogi, director of the Pediatric Asthma Center at Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in Bronx, New York.

Even with asthma, kids can exercise to help them achieve and maintain a healthy weight, Rastogi said by email.

“Children with asthma can be as active as they want to be – we have had Olympic level athletes with asthma,” said Rastogi, who wrote an editorial that was published with the study.

“There is no activity that children with asthma need to avoid,” Rastogi added. “They need to be aware of their symptoms and if they associate a particular activity with asthma, they should take their asthma medication called albuterol 20 to 30 minutes before they participate in that activity.”