Experimental Philosophy of Everyday Life
Following closely the real life adventures in Thought Experiments of my dear friend MC-a mixture of self-realization, applied psychology and Philosophy-I wanted to delve more into the realm of Philosophy in everyday life.
Two prominent findings stood out:
1. Most of the personal conflicts are self-made or man-made and the person confirms it by their self-made or imagined justifications.
2. Most people do not wish to do anything about it, find reasons not do so or follow charlatan advice that reinforces their reluctance, at times adding an exotic note.
The story of a man who was walking with a stone in his shoes all his life, as explained by the Philosopher Counsellor Dr Lou Merinoff is a good illustration of the latter finding and the former finding is contrary to many of the Mental Health professional’s idea of why personal conflicts rise.
A good woman friend of mine, who lives in Teheran, Iran, sent me a link to an Iranian website where educated men posed nude in their blogs, as a protest in a country where women are subjected to extreme violence regarding the exhibition of their bodies, also to demonstrate that the beauty of something being exhibited is not in the object itself but in your thoughts, how you interpret it.
Without context, things have no meaning, I thought to myself. Having lived in countries known for its freedom: Australia, Sweden, UK and USA with forays into the closed political systems of Cuba and Burma, the photographs did not appear to be beautiful to me, appeared somewhat rude. Whereas photos of young women being hoarded into police vans by stern looking head to toe covered policewomen appeared very violent.
This is where the Experimental Philosophy or its use as a counselling tool comes in handy.
The photos themselves are not inherently bad, but my interpretation attaches values to them. Sounds very yogic as well, this western idea of experimental philosophy.
So what we call our “core values” can be seen to be influenced by context: time, distance, lack of awareness, ignorance among others.
Something to think about on this Sunday morning under grey skies in Paris but not an unpleasant day expected.
Regarding the man who has a stone in his shoes, IF he requests your help, if he is ready to accept your help, you should ask him to take the stone out of his shoes!
Those who are interested in reading about Knobe effect, please refer to ScientificAmerican/nov2011/knobe
Sunday, 27 November 2011
Omega 3 Fatty Acids Protect the Heart in patients with Diabetes
Omega-3 fatty acids may stave off CV events in high-risk patients with diabetes
Kromhout D. Diabetes Care. 2011;34:2515-2520.
Low-dose supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids may protect patients with diabetes and a history of myocardial infarction from ventricular arrhythmia-related events, new data from the Alpha Omega Trial suggest.
Daan Kromhout, MPH, PhD, of the division of human nutrition at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and colleagues randomly assigned 1,014 patients aged 60 to 80 years with diabetes to consume one of four margarines supplemented with daily recommended doses of omega-3 fatty acids: 400 mg eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) per day; 2 g alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) per day; a combination of the recommended daily doses of EPA, DHA and ALA; or placebo for 40 months. All patients had MI within the past 10 years.
On average, patients consumed 18.6 g margarine daily, according to the researchers, leading to additional intakes of 223 mg EPA, 149 mg DHA and 1.9 g ALA per day. During a median follow-up period of 40.7 months, 29 patients developed a ventricular arrhythmia-related event and 27 died of MI. Data indicate that supplementation with any combination of the omega-3 fatty acids decreased ventricular arrhythmia-related events compared with placebo. However, patients assigned EPA and DHA plus ALA supplementation experienced the lowest incidence, with adjusted analyses suggesting that supplementation decreased these events by 84% vs. placebo (HR=0.16; 95% CI, 0.04-0.69). Results were similar for the combined endpoint of cardiac arrest and sudden death (HR=0.13; 95% CI, 0.02-1.09) and placement of cardioverter defibrillators(HR=0.19; 95% CI, 0.02-1.55).
Although the researchers found no significant reductions in fatal MI among the treatment groups, after adjustment for potential confounders, combined supplementation of EPA and DHA plus ALA appeared to reduce the combined endpoint of ventricular arrhythmia-related events and fatal MI by 72% (HR=0.28; 95% CI, 0.11-0.71), the researchers said.
“While more research is needed to definitively determine the role of these fatty acids in protecting people from ventricular arrhythmias, they seem to provide a benefit to the heart attack patients who also had diabetes,” Kromhout said in a press release. “This is the first study that showed a significant protective effect of omega-3 fatty acids in high-risk patients with diabetes who were on state-of-the-art drug treatment for their heart attack.”
Disclosure: Unilever provided an unrestricted grant for distribution of trial margarines to the patients, and one researcher reports being an employee of Unilever.
Kromhout D. Diabetes Care. 2011;34:2515-2520.
Low-dose supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids may protect patients with diabetes and a history of myocardial infarction from ventricular arrhythmia-related events, new data from the Alpha Omega Trial suggest.
Daan Kromhout, MPH, PhD, of the division of human nutrition at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and colleagues randomly assigned 1,014 patients aged 60 to 80 years with diabetes to consume one of four margarines supplemented with daily recommended doses of omega-3 fatty acids: 400 mg eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) per day; 2 g alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) per day; a combination of the recommended daily doses of EPA, DHA and ALA; or placebo for 40 months. All patients had MI within the past 10 years.
On average, patients consumed 18.6 g margarine daily, according to the researchers, leading to additional intakes of 223 mg EPA, 149 mg DHA and 1.9 g ALA per day. During a median follow-up period of 40.7 months, 29 patients developed a ventricular arrhythmia-related event and 27 died of MI. Data indicate that supplementation with any combination of the omega-3 fatty acids decreased ventricular arrhythmia-related events compared with placebo. However, patients assigned EPA and DHA plus ALA supplementation experienced the lowest incidence, with adjusted analyses suggesting that supplementation decreased these events by 84% vs. placebo (HR=0.16; 95% CI, 0.04-0.69). Results were similar for the combined endpoint of cardiac arrest and sudden death (HR=0.13; 95% CI, 0.02-1.09) and placement of cardioverter defibrillators(HR=0.19; 95% CI, 0.02-1.55).
Although the researchers found no significant reductions in fatal MI among the treatment groups, after adjustment for potential confounders, combined supplementation of EPA and DHA plus ALA appeared to reduce the combined endpoint of ventricular arrhythmia-related events and fatal MI by 72% (HR=0.28; 95% CI, 0.11-0.71), the researchers said.
“While more research is needed to definitively determine the role of these fatty acids in protecting people from ventricular arrhythmias, they seem to provide a benefit to the heart attack patients who also had diabetes,” Kromhout said in a press release. “This is the first study that showed a significant protective effect of omega-3 fatty acids in high-risk patients with diabetes who were on state-of-the-art drug treatment for their heart attack.”
Disclosure: Unilever provided an unrestricted grant for distribution of trial margarines to the patients, and one researcher reports being an employee of Unilever.
Sunday, 20 November 2011
Nature Vs Nurture Once again, this time Nature vs Practice
November 19, 2011
Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters
By DAVID Z. HAMBRICK and ELIZABETH J. MEINZ
HOW do people acquire high levels of skill in science, business, music, the arts and sports? This has long been a topic of intense debate in psychology.
Research in recent decades has shown that a big part of the answer is simply practice — and a lot of it. In a pioneering study, the Florida State University psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues asked violin students at a music academy to estimate the amount of time they had devoted to practice since they started playing. By age 20, the students whom the faculty nominated as the “best” players had accumulated an average of over 10,000 hours, compared with just under 8,000 hours for the “good” players and not even 5,000 hours for the least skilled.
Those findings have been enthusiastically championed, perhaps because of their meritocratic appeal: what seems to separate the great from the merely good is hard work, not intellectual ability. Summing up Mr. Ericsson’s research in his book “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell observes that practice isn’t “the thing you do once you’re good” but “the thing you do that makes you good.” He adds that intellectual ability — the trait that an I.Q. score reflects — turns out not to be that important. “Once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120,” he writes, “having additional I.Q. points doesn’t seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.”
David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, restates this idea in his book “The Social Animal,” while Geoff Colvin, in his book “Talent Is Overrated,” adds that “I.Q. is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, I.Q. predicts little or nothing about performance.”
But this isn’t quite the story that science tells. Research has shown that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields — and not just up to a point.
Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised” intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.
In our own recent research, we have discovered that “working memory capacity,” a core component of intellectual ability, predicts success in a wide variety of complex activities. In one study, we assessed the practice habits of pianists and then gauged their working memory capacity, which is measured by having a person try to remember information (like a list of random digits) while performing another task. We then had the pianists sight read pieces of music without preparation.
Not surprisingly, there was a strong positive correlation between practice habits and sight-reading performance. In fact, the total amount of practice the pianists had accumulated in their piano careers accounted for nearly half of the performance differences across participants. But working memory capacity made a statistically significant contribution as well (about 7 percent, a medium-size effect). In other words, if you took two pianists with the same amount of practice, but different levels of working memory capacity, it’s likely that the one higher in working memory capacity would have performed considerably better on the sight-reading task.
It would be nice if intellectual ability and the capacities that underlie it were important for success only up to a point. In fact, it would be nice if they weren’t important at all, because research shows that those factors are highly stable across an individual’s life span. But wishing doesn’t make it so.
None of this is to deny the power of practice. Nor is it to say that it’s impossible for a person with an average I.Q. to, say, earn a Ph.D. in physics. It’s just unlikely, relatively speaking. Sometimes the story that science tells us isn’t the story we want to hear.
David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz are associate professors of psychology at Michigan State University and Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, respectively.
Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters
By DAVID Z. HAMBRICK and ELIZABETH J. MEINZ
HOW do people acquire high levels of skill in science, business, music, the arts and sports? This has long been a topic of intense debate in psychology.
Research in recent decades has shown that a big part of the answer is simply practice — and a lot of it. In a pioneering study, the Florida State University psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues asked violin students at a music academy to estimate the amount of time they had devoted to practice since they started playing. By age 20, the students whom the faculty nominated as the “best” players had accumulated an average of over 10,000 hours, compared with just under 8,000 hours for the “good” players and not even 5,000 hours for the least skilled.
Those findings have been enthusiastically championed, perhaps because of their meritocratic appeal: what seems to separate the great from the merely good is hard work, not intellectual ability. Summing up Mr. Ericsson’s research in his book “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell observes that practice isn’t “the thing you do once you’re good” but “the thing you do that makes you good.” He adds that intellectual ability — the trait that an I.Q. score reflects — turns out not to be that important. “Once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120,” he writes, “having additional I.Q. points doesn’t seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.”
David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, restates this idea in his book “The Social Animal,” while Geoff Colvin, in his book “Talent Is Overrated,” adds that “I.Q. is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, I.Q. predicts little or nothing about performance.”
But this isn’t quite the story that science tells. Research has shown that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields — and not just up to a point.
Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised” intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.
In our own recent research, we have discovered that “working memory capacity,” a core component of intellectual ability, predicts success in a wide variety of complex activities. In one study, we assessed the practice habits of pianists and then gauged their working memory capacity, which is measured by having a person try to remember information (like a list of random digits) while performing another task. We then had the pianists sight read pieces of music without preparation.
Not surprisingly, there was a strong positive correlation between practice habits and sight-reading performance. In fact, the total amount of practice the pianists had accumulated in their piano careers accounted for nearly half of the performance differences across participants. But working memory capacity made a statistically significant contribution as well (about 7 percent, a medium-size effect). In other words, if you took two pianists with the same amount of practice, but different levels of working memory capacity, it’s likely that the one higher in working memory capacity would have performed considerably better on the sight-reading task.
It would be nice if intellectual ability and the capacities that underlie it were important for success only up to a point. In fact, it would be nice if they weren’t important at all, because research shows that those factors are highly stable across an individual’s life span. But wishing doesn’t make it so.
None of this is to deny the power of practice. Nor is it to say that it’s impossible for a person with an average I.Q. to, say, earn a Ph.D. in physics. It’s just unlikely, relatively speaking. Sometimes the story that science tells us isn’t the story we want to hear.
David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz are associate professors of psychology at Michigan State University and Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, respectively.
Tuesday, 1 November 2011
High Fructose Corn Syrup and Fatty Liver Disease
High-fructose corn syrup consumption may push fatty livers to the brink
March 18, 2010 | 6:12 pm
Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is one of the many consequences of obesity, as fat accumulates not only across the body and around the visceral organs, but inside the organ that helps break down fats, filter toxins from the bloodstream and create useable fuel from the food we eat. About 3 in 10 American adults suffer from nonalcoholic fatty liver. But it's a population of patients that's grown so fast, there isn't a lot known about their risks, and what factors aggravate those risks.
Researchers know those with nonalcoholic fatty liver are more likely than those without such fatty deposits to develop cirrhosis, liver cancer and liver failure requiring transplant. Still, a minority of those patients will do so, and doctors wish they could identify what factors may push those with fatty liver toward those outcomes.
The development of tough scar tissue in the liver can be a sign that liver failure may lie ahead. For heavy alcohol consumers, an alcoholic bender can cause scarring, or fibrosis, and lead to trouble. That's why those with signs of alcoholic fatty liver are urged to stop drinking alcohol.
A new study suggests that for those with nonalcoholic fatty liver, drinking a lot of beverages sweetened with fructose may do the same thing as liquor.
The study, published in the journal Hepatology, tracked 427 patients with fatty liver disease to see whether consumption of fructose made a difference in the progression of fatty liver to the organ's failure. The Duke University researchers asked subjects only about how many fructose-sweetened beverages a week they drank, including fruit juices and soft drinks sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup -- yielding a conservative accounting, since the stuff is also used in baking and other processed foods. Though only 19% of the fatty liver patients consumed few or no fructose sweetened beverages, 28% drank at least one a day.
Best represented among the heavy fructose consumers were subjects who were younger, male and Latino, and who had a higher BMI.
Compared to subjects who drank the least fructose beverages, those who drank the most were significantly more likely to have the hepatic scarring that will more often progress to cirrhosis or liver cancer. And older subjects who regularly consumed fructose beverages showed more signs of liver inflammation. After they stripped out the effects of age, gender and body-mass index, the researchers also found that the heavy fructose drinkers also have lower levels of HDL (or "good") cholesterol.
Duke University hepatologist Dr. Manal Abdelmalek said in a news release that high-fructose corn syrup, which was first introduced into the human diet in the 1970s and has accounted for an average of 10% of Americans' caloric intake over the last decade, "may not be as benign as we previously thought." While researchers have demonstrated clearly that the stuff has "fueled the fire of the obesity epidemic," added Abdelmalek, "untill now, no one has ever suggested it contributes to liver disease and/or liver injury."
March 18, 2010 | 6:12 pm
Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is one of the many consequences of obesity, as fat accumulates not only across the body and around the visceral organs, but inside the organ that helps break down fats, filter toxins from the bloodstream and create useable fuel from the food we eat. About 3 in 10 American adults suffer from nonalcoholic fatty liver. But it's a population of patients that's grown so fast, there isn't a lot known about their risks, and what factors aggravate those risks.
Researchers know those with nonalcoholic fatty liver are more likely than those without such fatty deposits to develop cirrhosis, liver cancer and liver failure requiring transplant. Still, a minority of those patients will do so, and doctors wish they could identify what factors may push those with fatty liver toward those outcomes.
The development of tough scar tissue in the liver can be a sign that liver failure may lie ahead. For heavy alcohol consumers, an alcoholic bender can cause scarring, or fibrosis, and lead to trouble. That's why those with signs of alcoholic fatty liver are urged to stop drinking alcohol.
A new study suggests that for those with nonalcoholic fatty liver, drinking a lot of beverages sweetened with fructose may do the same thing as liquor.
The study, published in the journal Hepatology, tracked 427 patients with fatty liver disease to see whether consumption of fructose made a difference in the progression of fatty liver to the organ's failure. The Duke University researchers asked subjects only about how many fructose-sweetened beverages a week they drank, including fruit juices and soft drinks sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup -- yielding a conservative accounting, since the stuff is also used in baking and other processed foods. Though only 19% of the fatty liver patients consumed few or no fructose sweetened beverages, 28% drank at least one a day.
Best represented among the heavy fructose consumers were subjects who were younger, male and Latino, and who had a higher BMI.
Compared to subjects who drank the least fructose beverages, those who drank the most were significantly more likely to have the hepatic scarring that will more often progress to cirrhosis or liver cancer. And older subjects who regularly consumed fructose beverages showed more signs of liver inflammation. After they stripped out the effects of age, gender and body-mass index, the researchers also found that the heavy fructose drinkers also have lower levels of HDL (or "good") cholesterol.
Duke University hepatologist Dr. Manal Abdelmalek said in a news release that high-fructose corn syrup, which was first introduced into the human diet in the 1970s and has accounted for an average of 10% of Americans' caloric intake over the last decade, "may not be as benign as we previously thought." While researchers have demonstrated clearly that the stuff has "fueled the fire of the obesity epidemic," added Abdelmalek, "untill now, no one has ever suggested it contributes to liver disease and/or liver injury."
Thursday, 27 October 2011
Australian Researchers find FAT TASTE
Australian researchers say fat is 'sixth taste'
March 8, 2010
It's a theory set to confirm why humans are so fond of fatty foods such as chips and chocolate cake: in addition to the five tastes already identified lurks another detectable by the palate -- fat.
"We know that the human tongue can detect five tastes -- sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (a savoury, protein-rich taste contained in foods such as soy sauce and chicken stock)," Russell Keast, from Deakin University, said Monday.
"Through our study we can conclude that humans have a sixth taste -- fat."
Researchers tested 30 people's ability to taste a range of fatty acids in otherwise plain solutions and found that all were able to determine the taste -- though some required higher concentrations than others.
They then developed a screening test to see how sensitive people were to the taste and found that, of the 50 people tested, their ability to detect fat was linked to their weight -- a finding which could help counter obesity.
"We found that the people who were sensitive to fat, who could taste very low concentrations, actually consumed less fat than the people who were insensitive," Keast told AFP.
"We also found that they had lower BMIs (Body Mass Indexes)."
Keast said the research, conducted in collaboration with the University of Adelaide, New Zealand's Massey University and Australian science body CSIRO, suggested that the taste of fat could trigger a mechanism in the body.
"We all like eating fatty foods. What we speculate is (that) the mechanism is to do with stopping eating. Your body is able to tell you you've had enough and stop," he explained.
"And if you are insensitive to it, you're not getting that feedback."
With fats easily accessible and commonly consumed, it was possible that people may become desensitised to the taste of fat, leaving some more prone to overindulging in calorie-rich foods, he added.
The results, published in the British Journal of Nutrition, have not definitively classified fat as a taste but Keast says the evidence is strong and mounting.
For something to be classified as a taste there needed to be proven receptor mechanisms on taste cells in the mouth, he said.
"We have what... we will call possible candidate receptors for fat on taste receptor cells," he said.
March 8, 2010
It's a theory set to confirm why humans are so fond of fatty foods such as chips and chocolate cake: in addition to the five tastes already identified lurks another detectable by the palate -- fat.
"We know that the human tongue can detect five tastes -- sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (a savoury, protein-rich taste contained in foods such as soy sauce and chicken stock)," Russell Keast, from Deakin University, said Monday.
"Through our study we can conclude that humans have a sixth taste -- fat."
Researchers tested 30 people's ability to taste a range of fatty acids in otherwise plain solutions and found that all were able to determine the taste -- though some required higher concentrations than others.
They then developed a screening test to see how sensitive people were to the taste and found that, of the 50 people tested, their ability to detect fat was linked to their weight -- a finding which could help counter obesity.
"We found that the people who were sensitive to fat, who could taste very low concentrations, actually consumed less fat than the people who were insensitive," Keast told AFP.
"We also found that they had lower BMIs (Body Mass Indexes)."
Keast said the research, conducted in collaboration with the University of Adelaide, New Zealand's Massey University and Australian science body CSIRO, suggested that the taste of fat could trigger a mechanism in the body.
"We all like eating fatty foods. What we speculate is (that) the mechanism is to do with stopping eating. Your body is able to tell you you've had enough and stop," he explained.
"And if you are insensitive to it, you're not getting that feedback."
With fats easily accessible and commonly consumed, it was possible that people may become desensitised to the taste of fat, leaving some more prone to overindulging in calorie-rich foods, he added.
The results, published in the British Journal of Nutrition, have not definitively classified fat as a taste but Keast says the evidence is strong and mounting.
For something to be classified as a taste there needed to be proven receptor mechanisms on taste cells in the mouth, he said.
"We have what... we will call possible candidate receptors for fat on taste receptor cells," he said.
Study Shows Why It’s Hard to Keep Weight Off By GINA KOLATA Published: October 26, 2011
For years, studies of obesity have found that soon after fat people lost weight, their metabolism slowed and they experienced hormonal changes that increased their appetites. Scientists hypothesized that these biological changes could explain why most obese dieters quickly gained back much of what they had so painfully lost.
GETTY IMAGES
But now a group of Australian researchers have taken those investigations a step further to see if the changes persist over a longer time frame. They recruited healthy people who were either overweight or obese and put them on a highly restricted diet that led them to lose at least 10 percent of their body weight. They then kept them on a diet to maintain that weight loss. A year later, the researchers found that the participants’ metabolism and hormone levels had not returned to the levels before the study started.
The study, being published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, is small and far from perfect, but confirms their convictions about why it is so hard to lose weight and keep it off, say obesity researchers who were not involved the study.
They cautioned that the study had only 50 subjects, and 16 of them quit or did not lose the required 10 percent of body weight. And while the hormones studied have a logical connection with weight gain, the researchers did not show that the hormones were causing the subjects to gain back their weight.
Nonetheless, said Dr. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia, while it is no surprise that hormone levels changed shortly after the participants lost weight, “what is impressive is that these changes don’t go away.”
Dr. Stephen Bloom, an obesity researcher at Hammersmith Hospital in London, said the study needed to be repeated under more rigorous conditions, but added, “It is showing something I believe in deeply — it is very hard to lose weight.” And the reason, he said, is that “your hormones work against you.”
In the study, Joseph Proietto and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne recruited people who weighed an average of 209 pounds. At the start of the study, his team measured the participants’ hormone levels and assessed their hunger and appetites after they ate a boiled egg, toast, margarine, orange juice and crackers for breakfast. The dieters then spent 10 weeks on a very low calorie regimen of 500 to 550 calories a day intended to makes them lose 10 percent of their body weight. In fact, their weight loss averaged 14 percent, or 29 pounds. As expected, their hormone levels changed in a way that increased their appetites, and indeed they were hungrier than when they started the study.
They were then given diets intended to maintain their weight loss. A year after the subjects had lost the weight, the researchers repeated their measurements. The subjects were gaining the weight back despite the maintenance diet — on average, gaining back half of what they had lost — and the hormone levels offered a possible explanation.
One hormone, leptin, which tells the brain how much body fat is present, fell by two-thirds immediately after the subjects lost weight. When leptin falls, appetite increases and metabolism slows. A year after the weight loss diet, leptin levels were still one-third lower than they were at the start of the study, and leptin levels increased as subjects regained their weight.
Other hormones that stimulate hunger, in particular ghrelin, whose levels increased, and peptide YY, whose levels decreased, were also changed a year later in a way that made the subjects’ appetites stronger than at the start of the study.
The results show, once again, Dr. Leibel said, that losing weight “is not a neutral event,” and that it is no accident that more than 90 percent of people who lose a lot of weight gain it back. “You are putting your body into a circumstance it will resist,” he said. “You are, in a sense, more metabolically normal when you are at a higher body weight.”
A solution might be to restore hormones to normal levels by giving drugs after dieters lose weight. But it is also possible, said Dr. Jules Hirsch of Rockefeller University, that researchers just do not know enough about obesity to prescribe solutions.
One thing is clear, he said: “A vast effort to persuade the public to change its habits just hasn’t prevented or cured obesity.”
“We need more knowledge,” Dr. Hirsch said. “Condemning the public for their uncontrollable hedonism and the food industry for its inequities just doesn’t seem to be turning the tide.”
GETTY IMAGES
But now a group of Australian researchers have taken those investigations a step further to see if the changes persist over a longer time frame. They recruited healthy people who were either overweight or obese and put them on a highly restricted diet that led them to lose at least 10 percent of their body weight. They then kept them on a diet to maintain that weight loss. A year later, the researchers found that the participants’ metabolism and hormone levels had not returned to the levels before the study started.
The study, being published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, is small and far from perfect, but confirms their convictions about why it is so hard to lose weight and keep it off, say obesity researchers who were not involved the study.
They cautioned that the study had only 50 subjects, and 16 of them quit or did not lose the required 10 percent of body weight. And while the hormones studied have a logical connection with weight gain, the researchers did not show that the hormones were causing the subjects to gain back their weight.
Nonetheless, said Dr. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia, while it is no surprise that hormone levels changed shortly after the participants lost weight, “what is impressive is that these changes don’t go away.”
Dr. Stephen Bloom, an obesity researcher at Hammersmith Hospital in London, said the study needed to be repeated under more rigorous conditions, but added, “It is showing something I believe in deeply — it is very hard to lose weight.” And the reason, he said, is that “your hormones work against you.”
In the study, Joseph Proietto and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne recruited people who weighed an average of 209 pounds. At the start of the study, his team measured the participants’ hormone levels and assessed their hunger and appetites after they ate a boiled egg, toast, margarine, orange juice and crackers for breakfast. The dieters then spent 10 weeks on a very low calorie regimen of 500 to 550 calories a day intended to makes them lose 10 percent of their body weight. In fact, their weight loss averaged 14 percent, or 29 pounds. As expected, their hormone levels changed in a way that increased their appetites, and indeed they were hungrier than when they started the study.
They were then given diets intended to maintain their weight loss. A year after the subjects had lost the weight, the researchers repeated their measurements. The subjects were gaining the weight back despite the maintenance diet — on average, gaining back half of what they had lost — and the hormone levels offered a possible explanation.
One hormone, leptin, which tells the brain how much body fat is present, fell by two-thirds immediately after the subjects lost weight. When leptin falls, appetite increases and metabolism slows. A year after the weight loss diet, leptin levels were still one-third lower than they were at the start of the study, and leptin levels increased as subjects regained their weight.
Other hormones that stimulate hunger, in particular ghrelin, whose levels increased, and peptide YY, whose levels decreased, were also changed a year later in a way that made the subjects’ appetites stronger than at the start of the study.
The results show, once again, Dr. Leibel said, that losing weight “is not a neutral event,” and that it is no accident that more than 90 percent of people who lose a lot of weight gain it back. “You are putting your body into a circumstance it will resist,” he said. “You are, in a sense, more metabolically normal when you are at a higher body weight.”
A solution might be to restore hormones to normal levels by giving drugs after dieters lose weight. But it is also possible, said Dr. Jules Hirsch of Rockefeller University, that researchers just do not know enough about obesity to prescribe solutions.
One thing is clear, he said: “A vast effort to persuade the public to change its habits just hasn’t prevented or cured obesity.”
“We need more knowledge,” Dr. Hirsch said. “Condemning the public for their uncontrollable hedonism and the food industry for its inequities just doesn’t seem to be turning the tide.”
Tuesday, 11 October 2011
Pancreatic Cancer, Diabetes Education, Vitamins, Obesity decreasing..Medical News of Interest this week
Summary of some Health News of Interest
Diabetes Education and Cognitive Change Counseling can bring about a reduction in Blood Glucose in patients struggling to control their Diabetes. Some of the reductions are equal to or better than some of the newer medications for Type 2 Diabetes.
More is not Better, a study among older women in Iowa concludes about Vitamin usage and increased mortality.
Multivitamins, Folate, Iron, Magnesium and Zinc seems to be the culprits with worse results with Iron when used without a medical reason to do so. Calcium is protective and Vitamin D is recommended for people with deficiency in Vitamin D.
Three personalities who died in the past few days all died of Pancreatic Cancer: Steve Jobs, The Nobel Prize winner in Medicine from Rockefeller U and Roger Williams the Pianist. Is there an increase in Pancreatic Cancer? Yes there is, especially in people with lifestyle pattern consistent with Ill health. Steve Jobs’ pancreatic cancer was a rare one.
One in eight, approximately, medical advances touted as bringing benefit to humanity are later withdrawn because of the wrong premises on which the studies were based. Do not be the first one to adopt a study nor be the last one to do so, is a good advice given to me at University of Miami School of Medicine.
Now the Good News is: Americans are tad less Overweight than just one year ago, now 36.6 per cent are of normal weight, one per cent higher than one year ago.
Have we succeeded in getting the message across about nutrition and exercise? Don't be so eager to accept the accolades before you realize that a sagging economy have made more people eat at home.
The take home lesson is EATING OUT IN AMERICA is dangerous to an ordinary American!
The results are in for the Science and Maths scores from around the world, the first two cities whose students came out ahead are…
Both in China
Shanghai and Hong Kong. They both recruit their teachers from the top 30 per cent of the graduate cohorts whereas in the countries in the failing grade recruits teachers from the bottom 30 per cent.
Needless to say this will have some implications on the quality of education of future health care providers. But USA is ahead of Asian 2 dollar Wal-Mart manufacturers and 1 800 Foreign Accents from India in that it is still possible to get a good all round education in the USA and not just a career oriented limited education. Hurrah for that!
Some other good news, which we in the Indian Health Services would recognize, is the value of expressive writing. Indians being much more visual people use Talking Circles in which emotions are expressed freely and openly find good results from this ritual which has also symbolic significance in their historic annals.
Dr Pennebaker from UT in Austin, a psychologist has conducted some experiments and he has concluded”
Stress, trauma, and unexpected life developments — such as a cancer diagnosis, a car accident, or a layoff — can throw people off stride emotionally and mentally. Writing about thoughts and feelings that arise from a traumatic or stressful life experience — called expressive writing — may help some people cope with the emotional fallout of such events. But it’s not a cure-all, and it won’t work for everyone. Expressive writing appears to be more effective for people who are not also struggling with ongoing or severe mental health challenges, such as major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.
I have to admit that Talking Circle is good for people who are suffering from emotional disturbances in addition to their physical problems, such as the PTSD or depression.
Today I was sitting down to a lunch of Alaskan Haddock in Olive oil sprinkled with Zatar from Israel (mentioned in the old testament) and some cilantro and a touch of sweet pepper, and happened to be reading Archives of Internal Medicine published only yesterday and in it there were three studies in three different social contexts about the worth of diabetes education and cognitive changes that help those struggling over the years to control their diabetes. Lo and behold, the education was much better than many of the newer medications for Diabetes! Hats off to our cadre of Diabetes Educators. I rushed with the news to my colleagues who were doing just that over their lunchtime, educating a group of Indian patients with Diabetes… I shared the news with them.
The Indians had a big smile on their faces!
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