Category: food

How closing your eyes and counting before meals may aid weight loss – Business Insider

Nutritionists have recently come to an exciting find in a new study on eating habits, recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

According to the study’s findings, small rituals prior to meals could assist us in eating more consciously and with more discipline.

Comprised of six rounds of assessment on 1800 participants, the study was conducted by assistant professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Allen Ding Tian.

How closing your eyes and counting before meals may aid weight loss – Business Insider

The Scientists Who Shape What and How We Eat – The Ringer

You are not what you eat. Though you may have brought home bags of groceries from the store and put them together in the form of a meal (or accidentally left them to rot in the crisper like every other bag of salad I’ve ever purchased), your choices aren’t strictly your own. Bernays was only one of the first to realize how easily people can be swayed by the right kind of advertising — a kind that speaks to our unconscious minds and pulls at our emotions. It’s no coincidence that Bernays — these days known as the “father of public relations” to communications students across the country — was the nephew of Sigmund Freud.

In 2014, there was a huge outcry when it was revealed that Facebook had secretly tinkered with over half a million users’ News Feeds to make some of them see more negative posts and others more positive. The emotions were contagious — those shown happy posts got happier and vice versa. The reaction to Facebook’s psychological manipulations was uniformly swift and angry. Yet when a group of psychologists remodels a cafeteria or grocery store to see if it changes people’s eating habits, we hardly think twice about it.

The Scientists Who Shape What and How We Eat – The Ringer

Nitrate-Cured Meats Like Jerky Linked to Hospitalization for Mania | Inverse

Eating lots of hot dogs and beef jerky is perhaps not the wisest choice for physical health, but until recently, doing so seemed fine as far as mental health was concerned. But a new paper, released Wednesday in Molecular Psychiatry, has raised concerns about the connection between eating nitrated dry-cured meats and mania. One author of the study, Johns Hopkins pediatrics professor Dr. Robert Yolken, is here to set the record straight.

In the study, Yolken and his colleagues conducted a ten-year analysis of health and nutrition data on 1,101 people with and without psychiatric disorders, including mania, bipolar depression, major depression, and schizophrenia. The analysis showed that a history of eating nitrated dry-cured meat is linked to an increased likelihood of being hospitalized for mania — a complex and poorly understood characteristic feature of bipolar disorder. The link only applied to people hospitalized for manic episodes in particular — not bipolar disorder in general — and no causal relationship has been established. The researchers hypothesize that the underlying cause of the connection is the the consumption of nitrites and nitrates.

Nitrate-Cured Meats Like Jerky Linked to Hospitalization for Mania | Inverse

How Cheese, Wheat and Alcohol Shaped Human Evolution | Science | Smithsonian

You aren’t what you eat, exactly. But over many generations, what we eat does shape our evolutionary path. “Diet,” says anthropologist John Hawks, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “has been a fundamental story throughout our evolutionary history. Over the last million years there have been changes in human anatomy, teeth and the skull, that we think are probably related to changes in diet.”

As our evolution continues, the crucial role of diet hasn’t gone away. Genetic studies show that humans are still evolving, with evidence of natural selection pressures on genes impacting everything from Alzheimer’s disease to skin color to menstruation age. And what we eat today will influence the direction we will take tomorrow.

How Cheese, Wheat and Alcohol Shaped Human Evolution | Science | Smithsonian

Chew it over: a guide to eating slowly | Life and style | The Guardian

Chew your deep-dish filled-crust pizza slowly. Slurp your thickshake with care. Do not pour cooking oil down your neck to act as a slide for your next Cinnabon.

Eat slowly. Get thin. This is the promise underlined by researchers at Japan’s Kyushu University, who pored over the data of 60,000 Japanese health insurance claimants. Slow eaters were 42% less likely to be overweight or obese than fast eaters. Even normal-speed eaters had a 29% lower risk of being overweight.

“It’s all to do with the signal to the brain,” explains performance nutritionist Elly Rees. “Studies show that it takes up to 20 minutes for us to register that we’re full. So people who overeat tend to eat too quickly.”

That 20-minute gap can be vast. If people eat more slowly they “find that they’re actually full,” Rees says.

Chew it over: a guide to eating slowly | Life and style | The Guardian

Life after extreme weight loss | Life and style | The Guardian

The opening photo in Half, Julia Kozerski’s series of naked self-portraits, is actually the bookend to a sequence of earlier photos. In those, she appeared unhappily in her wedding dress in a changing room cubicle, more than 300lb (21 stone) and mortified. Here, she appears in the dress again, standing sideways on to the camera, to show how much of the dress is unoccupied. Over the course of a year, Kozerski lost half her body weight, and you might expect the resulting photos to conform to the glib narrative of before and after. Instead, the 28-year-old took pains to show “what real is, what raw is” – in this case stretchmarks, skin folds, contours like sand dunes. Raw is Kozerski naked, and frequently crying.

Nudity is an overused gesture in photography, particularly when it purports to “celebrate” the “ordinary”. You can’t turn on the TV (Lena Dunham), go to a gallery (Spencer Tunick) or, if you’re in San Francisco, enter a civic building these days without tripping over someone getting their kit off in the name of corporeal democracy. That Kozerski still manages to be shocking and interesting is testament to her ideas and her courage. The question most people ask on seeing the photos – after “Why don’t you get surgery to remove the extra skin?” – is “How did you get the weight off?” which she thinks misses the point. Losing the weight was tough, she says: “I had no idea who I was, and while I went through all that I was lost.” But what came after was tougher. Contrary to media everywhere, being thin isn’t enough of an identity to go on. “This is it!” she thought, when she finally got her weight down, and then: “Now what do I do?”

Life after extreme weight loss | Life and style | The Guardian

Losing It in the Anti-Dieting Age – The New York Times

Weight Watchers saw all this happening and concluded that people didn’t have faith in diets. The company decided that what it offered was not a diet program but a lifestyle program. It was a behavior-modification program. (For the sake of expediency here, I will call its program a diet because it prescribes amounts of food.) When Deb Benovitz returned from her travels with news of dieting’s new language changes, the company realized that something had to change more than its marketing approach.

Weight Watchers’ chief science officer is Gary Foster, a psychologist — the first in that position, which previously had been held by dietitians. What he and his team realized from Benovitz’s research was that dieters wanted a holistic approach to eating, one that helped really change their bodies, yes, but in a way that was sustainable and positive. He got to work creating a new approach that would become known as Beyond the Scale: He used all available mind-body research to try to figure out a way for members to appreciate benefits of the program besides weight loss. This would help them stay on the program during setbacks and beyond their weight-loss period and allow the program to infiltrate their lives beyond mealtime and beyond plain old eating suggestions.

The company would move away from giving its members goal weights. It expanded its cognitive-behavioral strategies, which taught members to challenge unhelpful thinking and to respond to their emotions with reason, as opposed to with food or despair. It developed workshops that used meditation and qigong and didn’t once mention food or weight. It updated its apps and introduced a social-media program, Connect. It became as holistic-minded as the people told Benovitz they wanted a program to be.

But Weight Watchers was still a company called Weight Watchers, and it had to figure out a way to communicate all of this change to the public. People had too many associations with the brand. It needed someone other than the usual celebrity spokesdieter, a fat famous person who could be paid somewhere between $250,000 and $2 million to do the talk show circuit and People covers for a year. It needed someone who could fast-track the message that it was worth taking a new look at Weight Watchers.

Losing It in the Anti-Dieting Age – The New York Times

How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.

The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.

“They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the JAMA Internal Medicine paper.

NYTimes

Breaking Down The Science Of Picky Eating

Our food preferences are intensely personal, but scientists have tried to figure out why some people are so picky about the things they eat. Jane Kauer is anthropologist who has studied this topic at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Monell Chemical Sciences Center. She’s also a board member of the youth nutrition company Rebel Ventures. She sits down with Here & Now co-host Jeremy Hobson to talk about the science and culture of picky eating. A transcript of their conversation follows, edited for brevity and clarity.

NPR

The magical thing eating chocolate does to your brain

In the mid 1970s, psychologist Merrill Elias began tracking the cognitive abilities of more than a thousand people in the state of New York. The goal was fairly specific: to observe the relationship between people’s blood pressure and brain performance. And for decades he did just that, eventually expanding the Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study (MSLS) to observe other cardiovascular risk factors, including diabetes, obesity, and smoking. There was never an inkling that his research would lead to any sort of discovery about chocolate.

And yet, 40 years later, it seems to have done just that.

Washington Post