What Would You Be If You Eat Fast and Eat Until Full?

The pace of eating and the amount of food consumed vary among people. Some people eat slowly and modestly while some eat fast and eat until they are full.

Japanese researchers from Osaka University pointed out in their study, published online on October 22, 2008 in The British Medical Journal (BMJ), that the latter are 3 times more likely to grow fat compared with the former.

As we all know, once a person gets fatter, many unwanted medical ailments like high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, etc. might just be developed.

1,122 men and 2,165 women aged between 30 and 69 were recruited for the study. These participants were asked to closely track their own eating habits and BMI (body mass index), which has been used as a benchmark of obesity.

The results showed that about half of the men and just over half of the women were reported that they ate until they were full, while just under half of the men and a little more than a third were found to eat quickly.

Participants who ate until they felt full were twice as likely to be overweight comparing to those who did not eat until full. For those who ate both quickly and to satiety were 3 times likelier to be overweight.

In the study, distinction was made between people who ate until full and those who reported binge eating. One interesting finding of the study was that those who ate until full had a higher calorie intake than those who gorged.

The act of eating quickly is a survival mechanism, according to health experts. Human beings are such creatures that tend to over consume energy when it is available. Such characteristic would frequently cause humans to consume more calories than they require, especially when the food is cheap and instantly available, and they also eat swiftly.

Nowadays, family members seldom have meals together either because of the long working hours or other reasons. When eating alone, people are more likely to enter into fast-eating mode. In the meantime, more and more people like to eat while watching television or doing other things. When people are distracted, there is a tendency to eat faster. Last but not least, people on the go mostly turn to fast food when it comes to mealtime. The increased availability of relatively cheap food that is served in larger portions also promotes eating beyond satiety.

How Many of The Americans Are At Risk of Heart Disease?

Heart disease is the number one killer in the United States and many other countries. A recent study showed that 90 percent of American adults have at least one risk factor for heart disease.

According to the researchers from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), almost all the Americans who have hypertension (high blood pressure), high cholesterol or high blood sugar are overweight, smoking or exercising too little. Their report was presented on September 14, 2009 in the journal Circulation.

4 national studies that covered tens of thousands of Americans aged between 25 and 74 were examined, and it was found that only 10 percent of them had low risk scores in all 5 categories.

The 5 categories used refer to tobacco use, cholesterol level, blood pressure, BMI and diabetes. BMI is the short form for body mass index, which is a measure of overweight and obesity.

While tobacco use and cholesterol are still headed in the right direction, blood pressure, BMI and diabetes are all moving in the wrong direction, as indicated in the report.

Despite the effort being made during the 1970s and 1980s, situation deteriorated as a result of the increases in excess weight, diabetes and hypertension since the early 1990s.

Looking at the lifestyle adopted by people for the past decades, it will be very difficult for the situation to turn around unless people are willing to change their lifestyle and engage with regular exercise. This can never be an easy task, as it requires a great deal of effort from the people themselves as well as the authorities concerned.

Is There An Alternative to Heart Transplant?

About a million heart disease patients died of heart failure worldwide every year while there were only about 3,000 cases of heart transplant being carried out. Heart transplant requires traumatic surgery and patients have to take large amounts of medications to avoid rejection. Many of the victims of heart failure could have survived if suitable organs (hearts) could be found in time for heart transplant.

New Zealand researchers from University of Auckland have developed the technology for a wireless heart pump that they believed could not only save thousands of lives but also offer an alternative to heart transplant.

According to the announcement made by the researchers on September 16, 2009, the technology uses magnetic fields to transfer power to heart pumps through a person’s skin instead of using wire cables that would often cause serious infections.

A coil, which can be put in a pocket, is placed outside the patient’s body, while another coil is placed inside the body near the collarbone to pick up the magnetic field for producing the power for the pump. A battery installed inside the body can also store enough power to operate the pump for about an hour.

Traditional wired heart pumps have been used to keep patients alive while they await heart surgery. However, the wire cable that is required to go through the patients’ stomachs and chests can just cause serious, and sometimes fatal, infections for about 40 percent of patients. Meanwhile, the wires can also break and restrict a patient's movement.

This is certainly not a new concept, but previous attempts in making wireless heart pumps produced too much heat. The new technology is able to eliminate the heating problem by delivering exactly the right amount of power.

The trials on patient are expected to begin within 2 years. If everything goes fine, these wireless heart pumps could be implanted in about 50,000 patients each year around the world within 10 years, according to the researchers.

It is hoped that the wireless heart pump could eventually replace heart transplants and become a viable alternative for heart failure patients.

How Much Do You Know About Stroke?

Strokes are also known as "brain attacks" because it is an emergency condition involving the brain. It can be caused by a lack of blood to the brain or arteries that are blocked or have burst.

Loss of function of certain limbs and severe weakness in the body are the common disabilities resulting from a stroke. In some patients, speech difficulties might be resulted. Some stroke patients may also forget things easily or become impulsive. Meanwhile, some patients may experience pain while others may not.

Other symptoms of stroke include weakness on one side of the body, loss of vision and balance, numbness, loss of sensation and become confused in thought.

Stroke can be caused by stress, overexertion or an unhealthy diet. The risk of suffering a stroke increases with age, stressful and sedentary lifestyle. Stroke risk doubles after the age of 65. Nevertheless, it does not mean that the young ones can be spared from getting stroke. In fact, patients in their late teens and early twenties are common. It is known that men are more prone to getting a stroke than women.

Other risk factors of stroke include family history of stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, inactivity, obesity and smoking.

It is important to go for a regular health screenings to make sure one's blood pressure is within the safety range, regardless of age. To reduce one's risk of getting stroke, one should deal with underlying risk factors such as controlling hypertension or stopping smoking.

Is Obesity Hard-Wired in The Brain?

The escalating obesity rate has become a tricky issue for many countries. This is because obesity can eventually lead to development of many diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure) and stroke. The expecting cost of dealing with these diseases can be huge, which will become a burden not only on the people but also on the government.

Many health experts have frequently blamed the modern lifestyle of overeating, inappropriate diet and lack of exercise as the cause of overweight and obesity. However, a study by the researchers from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles found that obesity might be hard-wired into the brain from birth so that some people are more prone to overweight than others.

The findings of an animal study, appearing on in the February 2008 issue of Cell Metabolism, showed that obese rats had faulty brain wiring that impaired their response to the hunger-suppressing hormone leptin.

It seemed that appetite and obesity were built into the brain for obesity-prone rats, according to the researchers. The neurodevelopment differences in these animals could be seen as early as the first week. Such results showed that obesity could be wired into the brain from early life.

Leptin, produced by fat tissue, plays a central role in fat metabolism by acting as a signal to the brain about the body's energy status. Though scientists are still not clear about its role in weight regulation, they are aware that the brain calibrates the requirement for food intake partly based on leptin levels.

Learnt from previous research that the brains of obesity-prone rats were insensitive to these leptin signals, the researchers looked for brain abnormalities that could explain this.

In the study, they found defects in the brain circuits that relay leptin signals throughout the hypothalamus. Hypothalamus is the brain’s central switchboard for regulating conditions in the body.

The findings showed that exercising and eating right might improve the rat’s condition, but the propensity to gain weight could not be reversed.

The researchers also pointed out that if the findings are replicated in humans, then those individuals who are genetically predisposed to obesity as a result of their brains’ configuration should carefully pay attention to diet and energy balance.

Meanwhile, they also cautioned that the general belief that weight regulation is all a matter of nutrition or lifestyle choices might not be helpful for people whose biology predisposes them to obesity.

What Can Plavix and Aspirin Do For Heart Disease Patients With AF?

A blood thinner, a common name for an anticoagulant agent, is a drug used to prevent formation of blood clots by hindering coagula. Blood thinner does not really thin the blood; it just prevents the blood from clotting. Doctors usually prescribe blood thinners to heart disease patients who are at risk for heart attack and stroke.

So far, anticoagulants such as warfarin and aspirin have been the only effective therapies in treating heart disease patients suffering from atrial fibrillation (AF). AF is a condition in which the heart's 2 upper chambers, the atria, quiver instead of beating effectively. This will raise the risk of blood clotting or pooling in the chambers that could eventually trigger a heart attack or stroke.

According to the American Heart Association (AHA), there are some 2.2 million Americans suffer from AF. These patients often need to be fitted with a pacemaker. Yet many of them cannot be treated with warfarin to stop blood clotting because warfarin increases the risk of an internal hemorrhage by up to 70 percent.

At the annual conference of the American College of Cardiology in Orlando on March 31, 2009, researchers from Ontario's McMaster University revealed that they managed to help AF patients cut the risk of heart attack and stroke by combining Plavix with aspirin.

Plavix is known under the generic name of clopidogrel. It is used to prevent the platelets in blood from coagulating and forming clots.

ACTIVE-A, a clinical trials involving 7,554 patients, aimed to determine whether the addition of clopidogrel to aspirin could reduce major vascular events and stroke in AF patients at an acceptable risk of increased hemorrhage. In the trials, the researchers showed that combination of Plavix and aspirin could help AF patients who are unable to take other blood thinners like warfarin.

The combination of clopidogrel and aspirin reduced major vascular events by 11 percent, including a 28 percent reduction in stroke and a 23 percent reduction in myocardial infarction (also known as heart attack), as found in the study.

It is believed that this is a new treatment for AF for the first time in 20 years.

Why You Should Not Be Too Skinny?

While being overweight or obese is definitely not healthy, people who are skinny are neither preferable. Why?

Because of modern lifestyle, number of people who are overweight or obese is increasing at a fairly fast rate. As we know, overweight or obesity can easily lead to many other diseases including diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure), high cholesterol and heart disease. However, it seems that being very skinny is even more dangerous than being overweight or obese.

Japanese researchers from Tohoku University's Graduate School of Medicine recently (June 2009) found that slightly overweight people at the age of 40 could live 6 to 7 years longer than those very skinny people, who have an average life expectancy that is shorter by some 5 years than that of obese people.

The researchers did expect thin people to have shorter life expectancy but were surprised to discover such a large difference.

Working on middle-aged and elderly people, the long-term study involved 50,000 people between the age of 40 and 79 over a period of 12 years in the modern Japanese prefecture of Miyagi. The participants were divided into 4 groups at the age of 40 according to their BMI (body mass index).

BMI is the ratio of a person’s weight in kilos over the square of height in meters. BMI lower than 18.5 is classified as underweight. When BMI is between 18.5 and 25, the person is considered normal. Once the BMI exceeds 25 but lower than 30, the person is slightly overweight and once BMI exceeds 30, the person is considered as obese.

It was thought that thin people having shorter lives because many of them are either sick or smoke. However, the difference remained almost the same, even eliminating these 2 factors.

The researchers argued that skinny people were of shorter lifespan because they are vulnerable to disease such as pneumonia and the fragility of their blood vessels.

Nevertheless, people were not advised to eat as much as they want. Instead, the researchers recommended that thin people should try to gain normal weight but people with normal weight should never be putting on their weight.

Heart Disease Threats Can Cut Lifespan?

Smoking, high cholesterol and hypertension (high blood pressure) are 3 risk factors that can lead to heart disease. This statement can hardly arouse any objection.

In fact, many studies have confirmed that people, who do not smoke, eat healthily, and exercise, can cut their risk of developing heart disease. However, very few of these studies actually tackled and answered the question: ‘to what extend does having these heart disease risk factors shorten life expectancy?’

In order to seek the answer, researchers from the University of Oxford analyzed the data of 19,000 male British civil servants who were examined in the late 1960s when they were between 40 and 69 years old.

They found out that those male smokers with high cholesterol and hypertension die, on average, a decade sooner than those without any of these risk factors for heart disease. The findings were published on September 18, 2009 in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

The detailed information on medical history, lifestyle and smoking habits were provided by the participants at the outset of the study. Their weight, blood pressure, cholesterol level, blood sugar level and lung function were recorded by the doctors.

In 1997, or 28 years after the initial examination, more than 7,000 of those surviving participants were re-evaluated. It was found that those men who had a triple risk threat at the beginning of the study were 2 to 3 times more likely to have died of heart disease than men who were free from all the 3 risk factors. In other words, their lives were shortened, on average, by a decade.

According to health experts, the percentage of people having fatal stroke or heart attack does decline by about a quarter in many rich countries over the last decade. However, similar downtrend is not seen in many known risk factors for heart disease.

In the United States, the American Heart Association revealed that uncontrolled hypertension has fallen by only 16 percent, high blood cholesterol by 19 percent, and smoking by just over 15 percent since 1999.

Meanwhile, other risk factors of heart disease have remained either constant or even increased. For example, the number of people who exercise does not exceed than that more than 10 years ago. On the other hand, obesity rate have increased tremendously, especially among younger generation.