The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Could an earlier lunchtime help you lose weight? Posted: 30 Jan 2013 07:41 AM PST  A study finds that dieters who ate early lunches tended to lose more weight than those who had their midday meal on the later side. — Reuters pic Dieters who ate early lunches tended to lose more weight than those who had their midday meal on the later side, according to a Spanish study published in the International Journal of Obesity. The finding doesn't prove that bumping up your lunch hour will help you shed that extra weight, but it is possible that eating times play a role in how the body regulates its weight, researchers said. "We should now seriously start to consider the timing of food — not just what we eat, but also when we eat," said study co-author Frank Scheer, from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. His group's research included 420 people attending nutrition clinics in southeast Spain. Along with going to regular group therapy sessions with nutrition and exercise counseling, dieters measured, weighed and recorded their food and reported on their daily physical activity. Study participants were on a so-called Mediterranean diet, in which about 40 per cent of each day's calories are consumed at lunch. About half of the people said they ate lunch before 3:00 p.m. and half after. Over 20 weeks of counseling, early and late lunchers ate a similar amount of food, based on their food journals, and burned a similar amount of calories through daily activities. However, early eaters lost an average of 10 kilograms (22 lbs) — just over 11 per cent of their starting weight — while late eaters dropped 7.7kg (17 lb), or nine per cent of their initial weight. What time dieters ate breakfast or dinner wasn't linked to their ultimate weight loss. One limitation of the study is that the researchers didn't randomly assign people to eat early or late, so it's possible there were other underlying differences between dieters with different mealtimes. Certain gene variants that have been linked to obesity were more common in late lunchers, for example. People who eat later may have extra food in their stomach when they go to sleep, which could mean more of it isn't burned and ends up being stored as fat, said Yunsheng Ma, a nutrition researcher from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. How often people eat during the day and whether they bring food from home or eat out may also contribute to weight loss, added Ma, who wasn't involved in the new research. He said any implications of late eating could be exacerbated among people in the United States. "The pattern of consumption of meals is very different in the US," Ma told Reuters Health. Many people skip breakfast or lunch, then end up overdoing it on calories at dinner. Scheer said that in the United States, where dinner is typically the biggest meal, researchers would expect people who eat later dinners to have more trouble losing weight based on his team's findings. Regardless of exact mealtimes, Ma said it's important for people to spread their calories out through the day. "Have a good breakfast and a good lunch, and at dinner, people should eat lightly," he said. — Reuters |
| Cancer gene mutation linked to earlier menopause Posted: 30 Jan 2013 07:35 AM PST  An estimated one in 600 US women carries the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation. — AFP pic Doctors already discuss with those women whether they want immediate surgery to remove their ovaries and breasts, or if they want to start a family first and hold off on ovary removal. "Now they have an additional issue to deal with," said Mitchell Rosen, who worked on the study at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. An estimated one in 600 US women carries the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation. Those mutations greatly increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancer. According to the National Cancer Institute, a woman's chance of getting breast cancer at some point in her life increases from 12 to 60 per cent with a BRCA mutation, and ovarian cancer from 1.4 per cent to between 15 and 40 per cent. What has been less well studied is whether those mutations also affect a woman's egg stores and her chance of getting pregnant For the study, which appeared in the journal Cancer, the researchers surveyed 382 California women who carried the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation and nother 765 women who weren't known carriers. The study team focused specifically on women who went through menopause naturally, and not those who had their ovaries removed before menopause. Women with the genetic mutations said they'd stopped getting their periods at age 50, on average, compared to age 53 for other women. The youngest natural menopause, at age 46, came for women with a BRCA mutation who were also heavy smokers, Rosen and his colleagues reported. Their study only included white women, so it's unknown whether the findings apply to other racial and ethnic groups. It's also not clear whether mutation carriers had any trouble conceiving, although it's more likely, they said. But the last thing BRCA mutation carriers need is to have another thing to seriously worry about, said Ellen Matloff, director of cancer genetic counselling at the Yale Cancer Center in New Haven, Connecticut. Those women are already advised to get their ovaries taken out b y age 40, which puts a "huge burden" on them to find a partner and start a family, she said. "This study does not mean that you can't have children, and it doesn't mean that you have less time than you thought you did," said Matloff, who added that more research will be needed to confirm these findings and their impact, if any. Almost all women who carry the mutations have their ovaries removed surgically before going through natural menopause anyway, she added. — Reuters |
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