June 26, 2012

Connie K. Ho for redOrbit.com

Chocolate cake. Crme filled donuts. These are some of the options people can look forward to having for breakfast after a new study highlighted the role dessert has in breakfast for dieters. Researchers at Tel Aviv University recently found that a diet focused on dessert with breakfast can actually help people avoid weight gain by decreasing the cravings they have.

The findings were presented at the Endocrine Societys 94 Annual Meeting recently in Houston and published in the March issue of the journal Steroids. The researchers believe that a carbohydrate-rich, protein-packed breakfast with dessert will help dieters be less hungry and not have as many cravings throughout the day. This, in turn, will help dieters keep off lost weight.

The goal of a weight loss diet should be not only weight reduction but also reduction of hunger and cravings, thus helping prevent weight regain, remarked Dr. Daniela Jakubowicz, the studys principal investigator, in a prepared statement.

Jakubowicz, a senior physician at the Wolfson Medical Center of Tel Aviv University, and co-authors looked at 200 nondiabetic obese adults. These individuals participated in one of two low-calories diets. Both diets had the same number of daily calories, around 1,600 calories for men and 1,400 for women. However, the diets were composed of different items. While one group had a low-carbohydrate diet that had a 304-calorie breakfast with only 10 grams of carbohydrates, the other group had a 600-calorie breakfast with 60 grams of carbs of a small sweet like chocolate, cake, cookie or doughnut. Both diets had protein options like egg whites, cheese, low-fat milk, and tuna at breakfast. However, the dessert with breakfast diet featured 45 grams of protein, 15 more grams than the low-crab diet.

The study was done over an eight-month period and, midway through the experiment, participants reported an average of 33 pounds lost per person. Jakubowicz believes that these results show that both diets work the same. In the last months of the study though, the low-carbohydrate group regained around 22 pounds per person. On the other hand, study subjects of the dessert with breakfast diet group lost another 15 pounds each.

Furthermore, those participants who ate dessert with breakfast stated that they felt less hungry and had fewer cravings when compared to the other group. The food diaries from these subjects showed that they had less difficulty in sticking with their calorie requirements. Women who were part of the dessert with breakfast diet group were able to have 500 calories for lunch and 300 calories for dinner. Men in the same group could consume a 600-calorie lunch and as much as 464 calories for dinner. Further evidence shows that a hunger hormone called ghrelin had lower levels after breakfast in the dessert with breakfast diet group than the low-carbohydrate diet group (45.2 percent versus 29.5 percent).

Researchers propose that the better results from the dessert with breakfast diet group were based on meal timing and composition. In particular, Jakubowic credits the diets high protein content to reducing hunger. She also believes that the mix of protein and carbohydrates made people feel fuller and decreased their wants for sweet, starchy, and fatty foods. These cravings normally arise or come about when a diet limits the amount of sweets a person can have, which can cause people to eat more fattening foods.

Source: Connie K. Ho for redOrbit.com

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Eating Dessert With Breakfast Helps Dieters

The Harvard lab of Bauer Fellow Peter Turnbaugh (above) is working to identify the mysterious microbes living in our intestines, and to better understand how the bacteria that live within us affect the drugs we take and the exotic foods we eat, collectively called xenobiotics. There are very few examples where we know the link between gut microbes and xenobiotics thats one thing Id like to change, Turnbaugh said. Credit: Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Without the bacteria that live in our intestines, a drug used against rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease wouldnt work.

The microbes produce an enzyme that cleaves and activates a key molecule in the drug. Scientists know the microbes responsible are there and that this activity is important, but they dont know which microbes are responsible, or even how many kinds provide this service.

Another type of intestinal bacteria can keep drugs from reaching target tissue, altering a Parkinsons disease treatment in the same way the brain would, preventing absorption. Researchers believe that differences in patients microbial communities could account for the drugs variable effectiveness. The culprit microbe, again, is unknown.

The Harvard lab of Bauer Fellow Peter Turnbaugh is working to identify these mysterious microbes, and to better understand how the bacteria that live within us affect the drugs we take and the exotic foods we eat, collectively called xenobiotics.

There are very few examples where we know the link between gut microbes and xenobiotics thats one thing Id like to change, Turnbaugh said. I think were really at the very beginning.

This month, some 200 scientists from 80 institutions, including Harvard and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, filled in some of the blanks. They announced results from the massive Human Microbiome Project, a government-funded effort to uncover the scale and diversity of the microbes we carry and to analyze their genomes to provide tools for future researchers.

The scientists found that we carry some 100 trillion bacteria from some 1,000 different strains, many of which are new to science and some of which, though known to cause disease, were found living peaceably among 250 healthy volunteers.

Though there was understanding in the past that the microbes we carry affect our health, the advanced tools of genomics have fostered recent progress, Turnbaugh said. In a recent article in the journal Science, Turnbaugh and postdoctoral fellow Henry Haiser argued that a better understanding of our microbes metabolic activity and how they interact with our bodies in ways that both promote health and cause illness could revolutionize how we understand and treat disease.

Postdoctoral fellows, interns, and other researchers in Turnbaughs lab, which is not part of the Human Microbiome Project, are at work on 10 to 15 projects. Though the human body has microbes in many places including the mouth, intestines, and skin Turnbaugh has been focusing on those in the intestines. He collects samples from the feces of volunteers and from gnotobiotic laboratory mice, born and maintained in a microbe-free environment before they are colonized experimentally. Using an oxygen-free incubation chamber to grow microbe colonies that favor the anaerobic intestinal conditions, as well as cell-sorters and gear that aids advanced genomic analysis, researchers are investigating a variety of questions.

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Life partner: Microbes, at work inside of us, are of rising interest to researchers for role in health, diet

by Associated Press

KING5.com

Posted on June 27, 2012 at 12:16 PM

WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration has approved Arena Pharmaceutical's anti-obesity pill Belviq, the first new prescription drug for long-term weight loss to enter the U.S. market in over a decade.

Despite only achieving modest weight loss in clinical studies, the drug appeared safe enough to win the FDA's endorsement, amid calls from doctors for new weight-loss treatments.

The agency cleared the pill Wednesday for adults who are obese or are overweight with at least one medical complication, such as diabetes or high cholesterol.

The FDA denied approval for Arena's drug in 2010 after scientists raised concerns about tumors that developed in animals studied with the drug. The company resubmitted the drug with additional data earlier this year, and the FDA said there was little risk of tumors in humans.

With U.S. obesity rates nearing 35 percent of the adult population, many doctors have called on the FDA to approve new weight loss treatments.

But a long line of prescription weight loss offerings have been associated with safety problems, most notably the fen-phen combination, which was linked to heart valve damage in 1997. The cocktail of phentermine and fenfluramine was a popular weight loss combination prescribed by doctors, though it was never approved by FDA.

In a rare move, the FDA explicitly stated in a press release that Belviq "does not appear to activate" a chemical pathway that was linked to the heart problems seen with fen-phen.

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FDA approves first diet prescription pill in 13 years

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com

Diets based on healthy carbohydrates and not on low-fat may offer dieters a better chance of burning calories and keeping weight off and without unwanted side effects, according to a new study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The research suggests that dieters trying to maintain weight loss burned significantly more calories eating a carb-healthy diet rather than a low-fat diet, but some experts say the results are still preliminary.

The National Institutes of Health-funded study, led by Cara Ebbeling, PhD, associate director and David Ludwig, MD, director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center Boston Childrens Hospital, found that diets that reduce the surge in blood sugar after a meal (low-glycemic index or very-low carb) may be more beneficial to those trying to achieve lasting weight loss.

Participants in the study who followed a low-glycemic-index diet, which includes fish, fruit, vegetables, nuts and whole grains, also saw improved cholesterol levels and other important markers that lower the risks of developing heart disease and diabetes. The researchers said that foods such as minimally processed oatmeal, almonds, brown rice, beans and healthy fats like olive oil, and other similar foods also offer beneficial results.

Furthermore, the study found that the low-glycemic diet had similar metabolic benefits to the very-low-carb diet without negative effects of stress and inflammation as seen by participants consuming the foods in the very-low-carb diet.

Ludwig explained that most people struggle to keep weight off. Previous studies have shown that weight loss reduces the bodys daily energy expenditure (how many calories the body burns through activity and just by resting) making it easy to regain weight.

The studys 21 participants, who ranged in age from 18 to 40 years old, lost 10 to 15 percent of their body weight during the three-month diet that contained about 45 percent of total calories from carbohydrates, 30 percent from fat, and 25 percent from protein.

One month after the weight-loss phase of the study, the participants were each placed on one of the three diets: low-fat, very-low-carb, and low-glycemic-index. The participants were then switched to the other two diets during two additional four-week periods.

The low-fat diet consisted of about 20 percent calories from fat, 60 percent from carbs, and 20 percent from protein; the low-carb diet consisted of 10 percent of calories from carbs, 30 percent from proteins, and 60 percent from fat; and the low-glycemic diet was made up of 40 percent calories from carbs, 40 percent from fat, and 20 percent from protein.

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Low-Glycemic Diet Best For Maintaining Weight Loss