After a summer holiday, RagnaRx is back! Non-prescriptive and slightly informative. Mainly just cool stuff from the week. Below – dieting younger increases the risk of later health problems; why everything causes cancer; and the new infection-control craze coming to a hospital near you.
Student eating patterns predict health
Dieting young worsens later health outcomes. This week, the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behaviour (SSIB) had their annual conference. Amongst some incredibly interesting (and also some completely pointless) research regarding eating and behavior, one particular study surfaced into the popular media. It’s only an abstract (find it here), so we can’t look under the hood of the research, but the results come from over 2,000 women studied at college-age over a 30-year period from 1982 to 2012. They found that the younger a woman was when she first started dieting, the more likely she was to develop “extreme” eating behavior 10 years later. Younger dieting also increased the risk of being overweight or obese, or developing alcohol abuse. Obviously there are huge confounding factors here – socioeconomic factors as well as a number of childhood factors (parental psychiatric problems, drug, alcohol or physical abuse to name a few) are also associated with eating disorders and later problems with weight or addiction. Therefore, dieting in younger women could be a symptom of earlier problems rather than the start of future problems. However, an important take-home message is that promoting healthy behaviour in children will almost certainly provide some protection from later health issues .
But what constitutes healthy behaviour? Funnily enough…
Advice from a legend
Interview with Bruce Ames. Bruce Ames is Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Director of the Nutrition & Metabolism Center at the Childrens Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI), where he studies nutrition and health in children. He is 85 years old. He has been studying mutagens, diet and cancer for over 40 years, and developed the Ames test to screen potential cancer-causing agents in our diet. Here is a recent interview with him, where they discuss why we should be eating more fruits and veggies; why even broccoli “causes cancer”; why he doesn’t eat organic food; and, how we should be teaching kids to cook, and play outside.
For those interested in his work on cancer-causing chemicals, his seminal paper “Dietary pesticides (99.99% all natural)” can be found here.
Find the podcast with Professor Ames here. If you’re somewhere on the spectrum, and enjoy the geeky side of nutritional biochemistry, all the body.io podcasts are worth listening to.
If the great scientists had twitter
Here are some great scientific discoveries condensed into 140 characters or less for the Twitter generation, with brilliant results.
Student eating patterns predict health
Dieting young worsens later health outcomes. This week, the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behaviour (SSIB) had their annual conference. Amongst some incredibly interesting (and also some completely pointless) research regarding eating and behavior, one particular study surfaced into the popular media. It’s only an abstract (find it here), so we can’t look under the hood of the research, but the results come from over 2,000 women studied at college-age over a 30-year period from 1982 to 2012. They found that the younger a woman was when she first started dieting, the more likely she was to develop “extreme” eating behavior 10 years later. Younger dieting also increased the risk of being overweight or obese, or developing alcohol abuse. Obviously there are huge confounding factors here – socioeconomic factors as well as a number of childhood factors (parental psychiatric problems, drug, alcohol or physical abuse to name a few) are also associated with eating disorders and later problems with weight or addiction. Therefore, dieting in younger women could be a symptom of earlier problems rather than the start of future problems. However, an important take-home message is that promoting healthy behaviour in children will almost certainly provide some protection from later health issues .
But what constitutes healthy behaviour? Funnily enough…
Advice from a legend
Interview with Bruce Ames. Bruce Ames is Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Director of the Nutrition & Metabolism Center at the Childrens Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI), where he studies nutrition and health in children. He is 85 years old. He has been studying mutagens, diet and cancer for over 40 years, and developed the Ames test to screen potential cancer-causing agents in our diet. Here is a recent interview with him, where they discuss why we should be eating more fruits and veggies; why even broccoli “causes cancer”; why he doesn’t eat organic food; and, how we should be teaching kids to cook, and play outside.
For those interested in his work on cancer-causing chemicals, his seminal paper “Dietary pesticides (99.99% all natural)” can be found here.
Find the podcast with Professor Ames here. If you’re somewhere on the spectrum, and enjoy the geeky side of nutritional biochemistry, all the body.io podcasts are worth listening to.
If the great scientists had twitter
Here are some great scientific discoveries condensed into 140 characters or less for the Twitter generation, with brilliant results.
Fist bumps are more hygienic than handshakes
Science says we shouldn’t shake hands. In an attempt to reduce the spread of infectious diseases, some intrepid scientists at Aberystwyth University have looked at various hand-based greetings and how many bacteria are transferred from one had to the other. High-fives were twice as “hygienic” as shaking hands, and the longer and manlier your handshake, the worse your risk of infection.
However, the fist bump was the real hero - transferring 10 times fewer bacteria than a handshake. I can see hospital Infection Control teams around the world writing new guidelines as we speak. Find the full paper here.