Julius and Sharny Kieser with their new book Never Diet Again.

John Mccutcheon

NEVER diet again: it's a bold claim, but one that two Sunshine Coast authors say is more realistic than you think.

Energetic Tanawha couple Julius and Sharny Kieser, who own and operate Stripfit Health and Fitness Studio in Warana, have produced a book that they say can help anyone keep their health on track.

The young authors said their new book, Never Diet Again, aimed to give people the tools they needed to ditch diet shakes and give up counting calories.

The book serves as a comprehensive guide to healthy eating and helps readers plan their own step-by-step guide to achieving weight loss.

The authors describe the book as a humorous and simple guide to slimming down, but admit that writing a book was something they did not plan.

Inspired by their own attempts at various diets, the couple said their book had sprung to life after the health programs they started writing for their gym members turned into a minor phenomenon.

"We started writing programs for our clients - they absolutely loved it and got amazing results," Sharny said.

"People started asking us all the time, 'Can you please put this into a book so I can send it to a friend because they can't afford your $2500 program'," she said.

See the original post here:
Ditch diets for good health

In mice, high-fat chow spurs birth of neurons that encourage weight gain

Web edition : Sunday, March 25th, 2012

Cheeseburgers pack on the pounds, but in mice a high-fat diet also packs on new nerve cells in the brain. More brain cells may seem like a good thing, but these newly sprouted cells appear to trigger weight gain in the animals, a new study finds.

The results offer insight into how the brain controls weight. If the same thing happens in humans, these nerve cells may be a target for anti-obesity treatments.

This kind of work will definitely inform how we think about the underlying factors that relate to obesity, says endocrinologist Jeffrey Flier of Harvard Medical School in Boston. Theres increasing interest, he says, in how long-term changes in brain circuitry like new nerve cell production affect eating and hunger. That is going to be a very interesting frontier.

With some key exceptions, most regions in the adult brain dont make new nerve cells. But in a small sliver of brain tissue called the median eminence, new nerve cells are born throughout life, neuroscientist Seth Blackshaw of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and colleagues report online March 25 in Nature Neuroscience. The median eminence is part of the brains metabolism hub known as the hypothalamus.

And one signal to step up production in the median eminence, the team found, is a diet high in fat.

In the study, mice that ate the rodent version of a steady stream of Big Macs gained weight. This unhealthy diet also kicked nerve cell production into high gear, the scientists found. After eating a fatty diet for several weeks, adult mice pumped out about four times as many new nerve cells in the median eminence as mice that ate regular chow.

To see whether these newborn nerve cells were up to no good, Blackshaw and his team shut down production with a carefully targeted laser. Even while continuing to gorge on a high-fat diet, these mice started moving around more and didnt gain as much weight as mice on a high-fat diet that could still make the new nerve cells. Take away the steady stream of new nerve cells, and the pounds didnt pile on as fast.

The newborn cells parents turn out to be a mysterious kind of brain cell that resides in the median eminence. Both mice and people have these cells, called tanycytes, but no one knew what their role was. Theres been a lot of speculation about what their function may be, says Blackshaw.

Read this article:
Fatty diet leads to fat-loving brain cells

24 March 2012 Last updated at 22:10 ET By Kate McGeown BBC News, Manila

Nestled at the back of a small courtyard in the north of Manila, there is a little restaurant with an unusual name and an even more unusual concept.

It is called Van Gogh is Bipolar, in homage to the Dutch painter who is believed to have had a life-long battle with mental illness, much like the restaurant's owner, Jetro Rafael.

Mr Rafael believes that certain foods can make you happy, and everything on the menu has been created with this in mind.

Ingredients such as salmon, honey, turkey and cabbage - all of which are thought to have mood-enhancing properties - have been worked into the dishes to create what Mr Rafael refers to as his "bipolar diet".

This is a very personal project. Mr Rafael said he developed his recipes after years of struggling with mood swings and depression.

"I started to look in books to learn how to manage my condition, and I found out about the properties of different foods. And now I want to share that knowledge," he said.

It is not just people with mental illnesses whom Mr Rafael aims to serve.

He also says his food can help those who just want to be a bit happier and calmer - perhaps they have had a stressful day at work, argued with their partner, got caught in Manila's terrible traffic or just feel a bit down.

"I see people come here who are tired and stressed, and when they leave I can see the difference," he said.

Read this article:
Eating your way to happiness in the Philippines

For more than a decade, overweight Americans have been looking for a drug what some health professionals sarcastically call "the magic pill" to help in the never-ending battle with the scale.

The federal government next month may give a diet drug that it once rejected for its side effects a shot at becoming that magic pill.

But whether the new drug, called Qnexa, can perform weight loss wizardry depends on your definition of the word "magic."

Is the pill the missing ingredient for people who desperately want to shed weight as much as 10 percent of their body weight but lack the will or ability to lose excess pounds and keep them off? Or is it a temporary and potentially dangerous solution to a problem that really requires a lifestyle change?

One thing is clear: The nearly 30 percent of adults in Pennsylvania and about 36 percent nationwide who are considered obese need something to help them shed the extra pounds that threaten their health.

Linda Shumberger has been struggling with her weight all her life and is enthusiastic about the thought of a drug that could help her lose pounds.

The 48-year-old Center Valley woman's weight went up and stayed up 22 years ago after the birth of her son. She tried everything the Atkins diet, Nutrisystem, grapefruit. "You name the diet, I tried it," she said.

But then she started to lose control of her diabetes. That's when she knew she had to do something about the extra pounds.

"I wanted the band surgery," she said, referring to a procedure in which the stomach is constricted, limiting the amount of food a person can consume and making them feel full sooner. "But my diabetes was out of control."

She took another route. Working with Lehigh Valley Hospital weight loss specialist Harpreet Singh, Shumberger began taking phentermine, a drug that curbs appetite, and following a low-calorie, high-protein diet. She lost about 50 pounds, she said, and would like to lose more.

Originally posted here:
First new diet pill in 13 years nears FDA approval

Washington, Mar 24 (ANI): Salt beef, sea biscuits and the occasional weevil - the food endured by sailors during the Napoleonic wars is rarely considered to be tempting.

Now a new chemical analysis technique has allowed archaeologists to find out just how dour the diet of Georgian sailors really was.

The team's findings, also reveal how little had changed for sailors in the 200 years between the Elizabethan and Georgian eras.

The research, led by Professor Mark Pollard from the University of Oxford, focused on bones from 80 sailors who served from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries and were buried in Royal Naval Hospital cemeteries in Plymouth and Portsmouth.

"An isotopic analysis of bone collagen from the recovered skeletons allowed us to reconstruct average dietary consumption," said Dr Pollard.

"By comparing these findings to primary documentary evidence we can build a more accurate picture of life in Nelson's navy."

In the late 18th century the Royal Navy employed 70,000 seamen and marines.

Feeding so many men was a huge logistical challenge requiring strictly controlled diets including flour, oatmeal, suet, cheese, dried pork, beer, salted cod and ships biscuits when at sea.

The team's analysis shows that the diet of the sailors was consistent with contemporary documentary records such as manifests and captain's logs.

As well as validating the historical interpretation of sailors' diets, this finding has implications for the amount of marine protein, which can be isotopically detected in human diets.

Read more here:
Diet of Nelson's Navy remained 'virtually unchanged for 200 yrs'

University of Illinois research reports that swine producers can feed distiller's dried grain with solubles (DDGS) to their pigs without concern for sulfur content.

"When you buy DDGS, you don't have to be concerned about the level of sulfur it contains because there doesn't appear to be any impact on pig performance," said U of I animal sciences professor Hans Stein.

According to the researcher, DDGS, a co-product of the ethanol industry, is used as a feed ingredient in diets fed to swine.

To maintain a stable pH in fermentation vats, ethanol producers use sulfuric acid, which results in a sulfur content in the DDGS that varies according to how much sulfuric acid was used.

Until now, the effect of low levels of sulfur in the diet on growth performance in pigs fed DDGS had not been determined, he said.

"Sulfur is toxic to cattle.

"If there is 0.4 percent sulfur in the diet, cattle start getting sick," Stein said.

"Because there hasn't been any work on sulfur toxicity with swine, we wanted to determine how sulfur affects palatability and performance in pigs."

In a recent study, Stein's research team compared a low-sulfur (0.3% sulfur) DDGS diet with a high-sulfur (0.9% sulfur) DDGS diet. The same DDGS was used in both groups.

The researchers compared palatability and growth performance of the pigs fed the low-sulfur and high-sulfur diets.

Excerpt from:
Top Stories