Hungry Shoppers Pile High-Calorie Foods in Their Carts

Your body shifts to survival mode at the grocery store, expert says

By Steven Reinberg

HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, May 6 (HealthDay News) -- People who grocery shop when hungry tend to load up their carts with higher-calorie foods and more of them, a new study suggests.

Not only does that affect the meal they will be eating at home that night, but their meals throughout the week, according to researchers Brian Wansink and Aner Tal, with the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University.

"It's known that hungry people buy more food in the grocery store, but what happens more is that people shift their shopping patterns to contain more high-calorie foods," Tal said. "When you are hungry, you think high-calorie food can provide you with more energy."

Dieting by skipping meals might not be a good idea, Tal added. If you shop while hungry you might wind up compensating for it with the high-calorie foods that will make up meals for the next several days, he said.

Candy, salty snacks and red meat were deemed higher-calorie foods in the study. Meanwhile, fruits, vegetables and chicken breasts counted as lower-calorie choices.

Tal is now investigating whether having a snack before food shopping will tip the scale toward choosing lower-calorie foods.

The report was published as a research letter in the May 6 online edition of JAMA Internal Medicine.

Another expert explained what might be driving the urge to shop for calorie-rich foods.

"Your body does not know the difference between purposely depriving yourself of food, as in fasting or dieting, or a lack of food or a famine," said Samantha Heller, a senior clinical nutritionist at the NYU Langone Medical Center, in New York City. "Your body does not know there are grocery stores and that you can have pizza delivered 24/7. The human body has not evolved as quickly as our agriculture or technology. It thinks we still have to go out and catch breakfast."

Therefore, she said, when the body is deprived of food it goes into survival mode because it does not know when there will be another meal.

"This complex defensive response affects both psychological and physiological parameters. When you do start choosing and eating foods, the body directs you to go for high-calorie foods to replace calories lost and to store up in case of another famine," Heller said.

To make their point, the researchers did two experiments. The first was a lab experiment in which people were told not to eat five hours before the study.

Before the test began, some of the 68 participants were given crackers to appease their hunger. Then, they all were asked to "shop" in a simulated, online grocery store. Hungry people tended to choose higher-calorie foods such as regular ice cream over low-fat ice cream, the researchers found.

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Want Tots Without Allergies? Try Sucking on Their Pacifiers

Study suggests transferring adult bacteria to infants' mouths through saliva may train immune system to ignore allergens

By Barbara Bronson Gray

HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, May 6 (HealthDay News) -- A new Swedish study suggests that parents who want to protect their infants from developing allergies should try a simple approach to introducing their children to the wide world of microbes: Just pop their pacifiers into their own mouths before giving them back to their babies.

Although that may sound disgusting or even risky to some, researchers found that the transfer of oral bacteria from adults to infants seems to help train the immune system to ignore germs that don't pose a threat.

"The immune system's purpose is to differentiate between harmless and harmful," said Dr. Ron Ferdman, a pediatric allergist at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. "If your immune system is not presented with enough microbes, it just defaults to doing harmful attacks against things that are not harmful, like food, cat dander or dust mites."

A report released last week from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics showed that the number of American children with allergies has increased dramatically in recent years: about 13 percent have skin allergies and 17 percent have respiratory allergies.

The Swedish researchers set out to learn whether very early microbial exposure during the first months of life affects allergy development. They found that children whose parents sucked on their pacifiers to clean them were less likely to have asthma, eczema and sensitivity to allergens than children whose parents did not clean the pacifiers this way.

The authors concluded that parental sucking of their baby's pacifiers may help decrease the risk of allergy caused by transfer of microbes through the parent's saliva.

For the study, published online May 6 in the journal Pediatrics, 206 pregnant women in Sweden were initially recruited as participants, and 187 of their infants were included in the research. The scientists sought families with at least one allergic parent to see if they could identify a different immune response in the children.

The researchers studied the transfer of microbes in the parents' saliva by fingerprinting bacterial DNA in 33 infants' saliva, of which 21 had parents who sucked on their pacifiers.

A total of 187 babies were followed until the child was 18 months old, and 174 were followed until they were 36 months old. The researchers chose to evaluate the children at those specific points in time because some diseases, such as eczema, develop early in life, said Dr. Bill Hesselmar, an associate professor at Queen Silvia Children's Hospital, in Gothenberg, Sweden.

Introducing solid foods into an infant's diet did not seem to affect the study results, Hesselmar said. "We found differences in the oral microbial flora already at 4 months of age, at an age when most children are still on breast milk."

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Lots of Americans Want Health Care Via Their Smartphone

But all too often, the demand outpaces the technology to deliver it, Harris Interactive/HealthDay poll finds

By Amy Norton

HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, June 18 (HealthDay News) -- Plenty of Americans are eager to use their mobile phones and tablet computers to better manage their health care, a new poll finds -- though the nation has a way to go before we're all consulting Dr. Smartphone.

In a Harris Interactive/HealthDay survey released Tuesday, more than one-third of respondents who are online said they were "very" or "extremely" interested in using smartphones or tablets to ask their doctors questions, make appointments or get medical test results.

Similar numbers of respondents were eager to use mobile phones and tablets for actual health-care services -- such as monitoring blood pressure or blood sugar, or even getting a diagnosis. Such phone and tablet apps are, however, either just getting off the ground or not yet on the market.

The survey results show that the demand for digital assists to health care is "strong and likely to grow," said Humphrey Taylor, chairman of The Harris Poll.

But he added that big questions remain: What types of services will consumers be able to get with their mobile devices, and when?

"The devil will surely be in the details," Taylor said, "and these are very big details."

An expert in health-care information agreed. "Right now, we're looking at a patchwork system," said Titus Schleyer, who heads the Center for Biomedical Informatics at the Regenstrief Institute, based at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis.

Companies are developing a number of apps that, along with equipment attached to your phone or tablet, can help diagnose everything from ear infections and eye diseases to irregular heartbeats and malaria. One goal is to bring better health care to remote parts of the world.

But there are already apps out there designed for the masses -- including ones to manage your blood pressure or blood sugar readings, for example. You take the reading via a monitor that plugs into your smartphone, and the app records all the information, which can then be e-mailed to your doctor or sent to your electronic health record, Schleyer said.

Of course, your doctor has to have the systems in place to do something with that information. And, Schleyer added, depending on where you live, and what health system you're in, that may or may not be the reality.

Schleyer said he has first-hand experience with the obstacles. His wife found an app that let her record and organize her blood pressure readings, only to discover that her smartphone "couldn't talk" to their health-care system's portal.

She ended up just bringing her smartphone to her doctor's visit.

"This poll shows us that the public is interested in using these apps," Schleyer said. "But the health-care system has to make it easier for them to do it."

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People Happier When They Get More Sex Than Their Friends: Study

By Randy Dotinga
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, April 18 (HealthDay News) -- A hefty chunk of your happiness may depend on whether you believe you're having as much sex as your peers are, new research suggests.

The findings raise the possibility that conversations with friends about sex -- plus reading all those sexual surveys in popular magazines -- create a perception about how much sex you should be having. If you have more, the study's theory goes, you are more likely to be happier. If you have less, the reverse holds true.

However, the researcher pointed out that perceptions about sex vary, and so do reactions to it. "Obviously, we're dealing with statistical averages here," said study author Tim Wadsworth, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "I'm sure there are lots of people who aren't having any sex, and are leading incredibly happy lives."

And it's possible, although Wadsworth discounts the idea, that some other factor better explains the differences in happiness that seem to be linked to perceptions of keeping up with everyone else in the bedroom.

The study doesn't closely track people over a period of time, nor is it based on extensive personal details about their lives. Instead, it relies entirely on surveys of English-speaking adults in the United States from 1993 to 2006. The responses of more than 15,000 people were studied.

At issue: Do people's perceptions of their happiness as judged by survey responses (happy, pretty happy, not too happy) differ, depending on whether they're having as much sex as people similar to them do?

Wadsworth said he decided to study the question because previous research has indicated that getting richer doesn't contribute as much to happiness as people might think. Instead, as people get wealthier, they simply compare themselves to a wealthier group of peers and may still feel like they don't measure up.

The study found that the same thing happens with sex. The more sex people have, the happier they are. And if they think they're having more sex than people in their peer group are having -- even if they don't actually know how much sex their friends and colleagues are having -- their happiness goes up even more.

The study design relies on a complicated statistical analysis and doesn't allow the amount of differences in happiness to be expressed in simple terms. But the findings told the story: People who were having sex at least once a week were 44 percent more likely to report a higher level of happiness than those who had not had sex for a year. However, people who were having sex two to three times a month but believed their peers were doing it once a week were 14 percent less likely to report a higher level of happiness.

Is it possible that happy people just have more sex than their peers? That the happiness comes first and then (not surprisingly) more sex? Wadsworth believes his study debunks that possibility.

And how would you even know how much sex your peers are having, to develop more or less happiness by comparing yourself to them? Wadsworth said conversations about sex (especially among women) and certain magazines like Men's Health and Cosmopolitan give ideas.

Andrew Oswald, a professor of economics at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom who studies happiness, called the study interesting. "We know that humans care deeply about things like their relative income and relative body weight. Apparently those concerns extend to the bedroom as well," he said. "You just can't take the human out of humans."

However, he cautioned, "in all statistical studies of this kind, it is difficult to reach the standards of causal proof that would be produced by proper randomized controlled trials. I imagine that one day investigators will try to run such experiments, even in the sensitive area of sexual behavior and human happiness, and it will be sensible for society to think through the ethical requirements for such research."

What to do with the findings?

"We tend to compare ourselves to people who are more successful than we are," Wadsworth said. "They tend to have a drain on people's sense of well-being. If we're aware of that process, it gives us some control over the emotional content of our lives."

The study appeared recently in the journal Social Indicators Research.

Copyright © 2013 HealthDay. All rights reserved. SOURCES: Tim Wadsworth, Ph.D., associate professor, sociology, University of Colorado at Boulder; Andrew Oswald, Ph.D., professor, economics, University of Warwick, U.K.; February 2013, Social Indicators Research

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'Bigorexics' Want to Boost Their Masculinity

But anorexic guys may identify with more feminine stereotypes, study suggests

By Robert Preidt

HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, March 28 (HealthDay News) -- Men obsessed with muscle-building lean toward traditional ideas of masculinity, while men fixated on being thin likely associate with more feminine stereotypes, according to new research.

Guys consumed by the idea that they are not muscular enough have a disorder called muscle dysmorphia, popularly known as "bigorexia."

It had been believed that sexuality was one of the main factors behind muscle dysmorphia in men, but this study suggests that how men view themselves is more important, according to the Australian researchers, whose study results are published in the March 27 issue of the Journal of Eating Disorders.

The researchers had a group of men complete a questionnaire designed to find out how they viewed themselves in comparison to common stereotypes of masculine thoughts and behaviors.

Men with a strong desire for being muscular had a greater preference for traditional masculinity, while those with a high drive for thinness (as in anorexia nervosa) leaned more toward feminine roles, the study found.

"This does not mean that that the men with anorexia were any less masculine, nor that the men with muscle dysmorphia were less feminine than the control subjects we recruited," study leader Stuart Murray, a clinical psychologist, said in a journal news release. "It is, however, an indication of the increasing pressures men are under to define their masculinity in the modern world."

He and his colleagues noted that research over the past several decades has shown that a growing number of men say they are unhappy with their body image. This may show itself in either a desire to lose weight and become thinner or to gain weight and build muscle.

This can lead to problems if a person abuses steroids or adopts unhealthy eating habits, or if the compulsion to exercise overwhelms normal life and leads to loss of sleep, reduced quality of life or even an inability to hold a normal job, the researchers said.

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how do fellow juice makers log their home made juice?

I cant find any nutritional info on the website for fresh juices made from veggies or fruits. other than a few that would be sold in store such as carrot. are there any resources on the internet, or books, that might have the nutritional information for plain raw fruit and vegetable juice?

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Many Can Blame Family for Their Bunions

These and other foot disorders are 'highly inheritable,' study finds

By Mary Elizabeth Dallas

HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, May 20 (HealthDay News) -- If you've got bunions, chances are others in your family suffer from the common foot disorder, with a new study finding the condition is often passed down from parents to children.

Reporting in the May issue of Arthritis Care & Research, researchers found that people of European descent often inherit conditions such as bunions or other toe deformities.

"Our study is the largest investigation of the heritability of common foot disorders in older adults," Dr. Marian Hannan, from Hebrew SeniorLife and Harvard Medical School in Boston, said in a journal news release. She said the data confirms "that bunions and lesser toe deformities are highly inheritable in [white] men and women of European descent."

Up to 60 percent of older adults have a foot disorder, which could limit their ability to get around and hamper quality of life. Prior research revealed that 23 percent of people aged 18 to 65, and 36 percent of those older than 65 have bunions, a sometimes painful deformity of the big toe.

The new study involved almost 1,400 people enrolled in the Framingham Foot Study. The participants averaged 66 years of age. Each person underwent a foot exam between 2002 and 2008 to determine if they had bunions, toe deformities such as "hammer toes" (where a toe appears permanently bent), or a condition called plantar soft tissue atrophy, a breakdown of the fatty "cushion" under the ball of the foot.

The researchers also used software that performs genetic analyses to estimate the inheritability of the participants' foot disorders.

Of the participants examined, 31 percent had bunions, 30 percent had toe deformities and 28 percent had plantar soft tissue atrophy. The study revealed bunions and toe deformities were highly inheritable depending on age and gender, but not plantar soft tissue atrophy.

"These new findings highlight the importance of furthering our understanding of what causes greater susceptibility to these foot conditions, as knowing more about the pathway may ultimately lead to early prevention or early treatment," concluded Hannan, who is also the journal's editor-in-chief.

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Poll: Many Americans Don't See Their Kids as Overweight

Title: Poll: Many Americans Don't See Their Kids as Overweight
Category: Health News
Created: 2/25/2013 12:36:00 PM
Last Editorial Review: 2/26/2013 12:00:00 AM

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Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie to release their own wine

Brad Pitt and Angelina are reportedly planning to release their own line of wines.

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Teens' Friends Can Influence Their School Performance

Title: Teens' Friends Can Influence Their School Performance
Category: Health News
Created: 2/13/2013 6:36:00 PM
Last Editorial Review: 2/14/2013 12:00:00 AM

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Depressed Dads Affect Their Kids Even Before Born

By Rita Rubin
WebMD Health News

Jan. 7, 2013 -- Children whose dads were depressed during the pregnancy are more likely to exhibit emotional and behavioral problems at age 3, new research suggests.

The finding comes from an ongoing study of more than 30,000 Norwegian children. When their mothers were nearly halfway through their pregnancy, their fathers completed a mental health questionnaire that assessed anxiety and depression symptoms. The researchers also collected information from the parents about the mothers’ pre- and postnatal mental health and the children’s emotional and behavioral development at 36 months of age.

Three percent of the fathers had high levels of psychological distress, and their children had higher levels of emotional and behavioral problems -- even after the researchers took into account other possible contributing factors, such as the dad’s age, education, and marital status, and the mother’s mental health.

“This study suggests that some risk of future child emotional, behavioral, and social problems can be identified during pregnancy,” says researcher Anne Lise Kvalevaag, PsyD, a PhD candidate at the University of Bergen.

The researchers, whose report appears in the journal Pediatrics, cited several possible explanations for a link between fathers’ prenatal psychological distress and young children’s emotional and behavioral problems:

The children may have inherited a genetic susceptibility to such problems from their father.The expectant fathers’ depression may have negatively impacted the pregnant mothers’ mental health. A dad’s prenatal depression might simply predict he’ll be depressed after the baby is born.

“Fathers who have mental health difficulties during the prenatal period are likely to continue to have those difficulties during the child’s infancy, which may directly affect young children’s development,” says psychologist Elizabeth Harvey, PhD, of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Harvey published a study last month in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology about the link between early fathering and children’s behavior problems. The study found that fathers’ depression when the children were 3 predicted behavior problems when they were 6.

In a study published in Maternal and Child Health Journal last August, Michael Weitzman, MD, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at New York University, found that depression in fathers was the single biggest predictor of depression in mothers. The study involved more than 7,000 U.S. moms and dads who lived with children aged 5 to 17.

In another study of approximately 22,000 kids in that same age group, published in the journal Pediatrics in 2011, Weitzman found that living with a father who had symptoms of depression and other mental health problems was associated with higher rates of emotional or behavioral problems in children.

Some of the negative consequences scientists attribute to the mother's depression might actually be due to the father's depression, Weitzman says. In addition, he says, depressed parents may be more likely to report their children as being depressed than non-depressed parents of kids who have the same behaviors.

Studies that follow fathers and children with or without psychological distress over time are needed to clarify the relationship between the mental health of dads and their offspring, Kvalevaag and her colleagues write.

While the Norwegian study has continued to collect mental health information from the mothers and children, it only questioned the fathers at 17 or 18 weeks into the pregnancy, Kvalevaag says.

Unfortunately, Weitzman says, “depression in fathers is a profoundly overlooked public health problem."

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One Direction on the set of their new video for Kiss Me

One Direction took a very literal take on the nautical trend on the set of their new video for Kiss Me, which is set to be unveiled on Monday

Continue reading...

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How a Child's ADHD Affects Their Siblings

Having a child with ADHD means dedicating time to meeting their special needs, and to making sure that doesn't come at the expense of your other children.

"Being a parent of a child with ADHD can be hard," says Terry Dickson, MD, director of the Behavioral Medicine Clinic of NW Michigan, and an ADHD coach.

ADHD Multimodal Treatment

ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, and the inability to control impulses. It affects an estimated 1.5 to 3.5 million school-age children in the U.S. Everyone, especially younger children, may have symptoms of ADHD from time to time. But with ADHD, the ability to function with daily activities is affected. A diagnosis of ADHD can be hard to make, and evaluation must be made by a specialist. There are several different approaches to...

Read the ADHD Multimodal Treatment article > >

"It's so important for parents to show all of their children -- both the child with ADHD and the kids without -- that they are equally loved. But given the needs of a child with ADHD, it takes work to keep it balanced."

When there's a child with ADHD in the family, it's common for their siblings to feel jealous and to act out if they sense their parents' attention shifting away from them.

"It works like a squeaky wheel," says Los Angeles psychotherapist Jenn Berman, PhD. "The child who is being the loudest gets the most attention from the parents."

Usually, that's the child with ADHD, so it's normal for parents to spend most of their energy focusing on meeting that child's special needs, whether it's in therapy, extra time at home doing homework, or a special effort on managing disobedience or impulsivity.

The behavior of children with ADHD can also make them hard to get along with as a peer, which means their brothers or sisters simply might not like being around them.

"The child who doesn't have ADHD might prefer to be at a friend's house than at home, might not invite other kids over to hang out, or might be embarrassed socially," says Dickson, who has a child with ADHD.

School is another outlet for kids who have a brother or sister with ADHD.

"It can be a reprieve where kids can get away from the stress they might be experiencing at home, or kids can use it as an opportunity to act out for attention," says Mark Wolraich, MD, a pediatrics professor at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.

The bottom line is that parents need to share the love and the attention with all their children,whether or not they have ADHD.

Balance is the key. Here are tips from the experts on how to help your kids with an ADHD sibling learn, adjust, and grow:

1. Manage expectations. Parents expect immediate obedience from their kids who don't have ADHD, Dickson says. It's common for them to think that their child should know better because they don't have the condition. But remember, they're still kids, and helping them understand boundaries and rules is just as important for them as it is for the child with ADHD.

2. Be fair. Just like you shouldn't be extra hard on your kids who don't have ADHD, you shouldn't be too lenient with the one that does, Dickson says. Be clear about the house rules and enforce them equally with all the kids.

View the original article here

How a Child's ADHD Affects Their Siblings

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WebMD Feature Reviewed byHansa D. Bhargava, MD

Having a child with ADHD means dedicating time to meeting their special needs, and to making sure that doesn't come at the expense of your other children.

"Being a parent of a child with ADHD can be hard," says Terry Dickson, MD, director of the Behavioral Medicine Clinic of NW Michigan, and an ADHD coach.

Recommended Related to ADD-ADHD ADHD Multimodal Treatment

ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, and the inability to control impulses. It affects an estimated 1.5 to 3.5 million school-age children in the U.S.Everyone, especially younger children, may have symptoms of ADHD from time to time. But with ADHD, the ability to function with daily activities is affected. A diagnosis of ADHD can be hard to make, and evaluation must be made by a specialist.There are several different approaches to...

Read the ADHD Multimodal Treatment article > >

"It's so important for parents to show all of their children -- both the child with ADHD and the kids without -- that they are equally loved. But given the needs of a child with ADHD, it takes work to keep it balanced."

Keeping It Equal

When there's a child with ADHD in the family, it's common for their siblings to feel jealous and to act out if they sense their parents' attention shifting away from them.

"It works like a squeaky wheel," says Los Angeles psychotherapist Jenn Berman, PhD. "The child who is being the loudest gets the most attention from the parents."

Usually, that's the child with ADHD, so it's normal for parents to spend most of their energy focusing on meeting that child's special needs, whether it's in therapy, extra time at home doing homework, or a special effort on managing disobedience or impulsivity.

The behavior of children with ADHD can also make them hard to get along with as a peer, which means their brothers or sisters simply might not like being around them.

"The child who doesn't have ADHD might prefer to be at a friend's house than at home, might not invite other kids over to hang out, or might be embarrassed socially," says Dickson, who has a child with ADHD.

School is another outlet for kids who have a brother or sister with ADHD.

"It can be a reprieve where kids can get away from the stress they might be experiencing at home, or kids can use it as an opportunity to act out for attention," says Mark Wolraich, MD, a pediatrics professor at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.

The bottom line is that parents need to share the love and the attention with all their children,whether or not they have ADHD.

10 Tips for Parents

Balance is the key. Here are tips from the experts on how to help your kids with an ADHD sibling learn, adjust, and grow:

1. Manage expectations. Parents expect immediate obedience from their kids who don't have ADHD, Dickson says. It's common for them to think that their child should know better because they don't have the condition. But remember, they're still kids, and helping them understand boundaries and rules is just as important for them as it is for the child with ADHD.

2. Be fair. Just like you shouldn't be extra hard on your kids who don't have ADHD, you shouldn't be too lenient with the one that does, Dickson says. Be clear about the house rules and enforce them equally with all the kids.

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