Blogs / Discoblog

It’s tough to get people to make healthier decisions about the way they live their lives. Public health officials have tried for decades to stem the obesity epidemic by getting people to exercise more, but all their tactics–lecturing, scolding, scaring, informing, inspiring, empowering–have had very little effect.

But at a subway station in Stockholm, a band of inventive social engineers had amazing results when they decided to get commuters off the escalators and onto the stairs. They asked themselves, “Can we get more people to choose the stairs by making it fun to do?” And then they turned the staircase into a piano keyboard, complete with black and white keys.

The project was part of a larger initiative sponsored by Volkswagen called “The Fun Theory,” which aims to prove that people will change their behavior for the better if you let them have a little fun in the bargain. Have you pulled off a similar trick? Tell Volkswagen about it and you can win more than $4,000.

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Video: Volkswagen

The weekend is finally here, and to make sure that you don’t stray off your diet, we’ll leave you with a new video on the science of overeating.

Basically your eyes are your enemy. The evidence lies in a bottomless soup bowl experiment devised by the 2007 Ig Nobel prize winner in Nutrition, Brian Wansink. Participants in the experiment were 73 percent more likely to eat a larger portion of soup if their bowl was imperceptibly refilled as they ate, according to the research titled Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake, published in the journal Obesity.

For Wansink’s take on the results, check out the episode:

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Video: minimovies.org

Yes, children are getting fatter in the U.S. And reactions are ranging from none at all to borderline extreme. On the latter end of this spectrum comes the announcement that bake sales are being banned in all New York City schools. The New York Times reports:

In an effort to limit how much sugar and fat students put in their bellies at school, the Education Department has effectively banned most bake sales, the lucrative if not quite healthy fund-raising tool for generations of teams and clubs.

The change is part of a new wellness policy that also limits what can be sold in vending machines and student-run stores, which use profits to help finance activities like pep rallies and proms. The elaborate rules were outlined in a three-page memo issued at the end of June, but in the new school year, principals and parents are just beginning to, well, digest them.

Granted, all hope is not lost for sweets-craving sugar addicts:

Parent groups and Parent-Teacher Associations are conspicuously given an exception: once a month they are allowed to sell as many dark fudge brownies and lemon bars as they please, so long as lunch has ended.

Sticks of butter will also be available at a discount.

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Image: iStockphoto

Why do some people never get fat, while most of Americans do? Sure, one can blame eating too much popcorn and junk food and not getting enough exercise for the extra weight—but our eating habits may not be the only factor that determines our chubby destiny, argues University of California, Irvine’s Bruce Blumberg. There’s growing evidence that our exposure to plastic compounds —specifically obesogens—can disrupt the body’s metabolism, enough to make us gain weight.

Planet Green reports:

No one’s blaming these compounds for the country’s entire obesity epidemic—fast food and lack of exercise are not off the hook—but emerging research points to them as one cause of the unexplained tendency for some individuals to gain weight no matter what (or how little) they eat or how much they exercise. Obesogens seem to have the ability to disrupt the fundamental rule of weight management and body chemistry: weight gain occurs when calorie consumption exceeds the amount of energy burned.

It’s all about the timing and the amount of exposure to the plastic. Preventing adult weight loss might be too late, if it’s really childhood exposure to plastics that leads to a lifetime of weight problems.

Newsweek reported recently that:

In 2006 scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health reported that the prevalence of obesity in infants under 6 months had risen 73 percent since 1980. “This epidemic of obese 6-month-olds,” as endocrinologist Robert Lustig of the University of California, San Francisco, calls it, poses a problem for conventional explanations of the fattening of America. “Since they’re eating only formula or breast milk, and never exactly got a lot of exercise, the obvious explanations for obesity don’t work for babies,” he points out. “You have to look beyond the obvious.”

While plastics appear to be linked to obesity, scientists aren’t exactly sure how yet. In the meantime, it doesn’t hurt to exercise and eat right, minimize your exposure to plastics, and yes, hope that you have the skinny gene.

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Image: flickr/ Phoney Nickle

So your date this weekend didn’t turn out like you’d hoped. A pint of Ben and Jerry’s  sounds like the perfect remedy, right? But while a bowl of Phish Food might make you feel good now, if a recent study is any indication, the ice cream binge may trick your brain into scarfing high-fat foods for the next several days.

From PhysOrg.com:

Findings from a new UT Southwestern Medical Center study suggest that fat from certain foods we eat makes its way to the brain. Once there, the fat molecules cause the brain to send messages to the body’s cells, warning them to ignore the appetite-suppressing signals from leptin and insulin, hormones involved in weight regulation.

While we’ve known full well that a high-fat diet is bad for you, and that obesity is on the rise, the study’s results helps explain fats’ role in thwarting the hormones that control appetite. One type of fat, palmitic acid—a saturated fatty acid found in foods like butter, cheese, milk and beef—is particularly skilled at shutting your brain up and letting your body eat more. The effect can last up to three days, which is bad news for those trying to watch their weight during beer-and-wing-fueled football weekends.

The study was performed on rats and mice, but the scientists say their results reinforce common dietary recommendations. Next up, the research team wants to investigate how long it takes to rebound from short-term, high- fat intake.

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Image: flickr/stu_spivack

Will showing pictures of cake to dieting women send them running for the Entenmann’s outlet? Or strengthen their resolve to avoid sweets? The answer is option B, according to a study of 54 women out of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. New Scientist reports:

[Study leader Floor] Kroese and her colleagues asked 54 female students to look at a picture of either a slice of chocolate cake or a flower under the guise of a memory test. The researchers then questioned the students about any plans to eat more healthily and offered them a choice between a chocolate or oatmeal cookie.

Women shown the cake picture gave a higher priority to their healthy eating intentions than their counterparts shown the flower. They were also significantly more likely to pick the oatmeal cookie – which earlier tests showed was generally perceived as the healthier option.

Kroese  speculates that in this case, viewing pictures of the objects of their temptation—not the cake itself, mind you, but pics of it—” reminded people of their goal to watch their weight, and helped them act accordingly.” Of course, it’s doubtful that we should start papering billboards with German chocolate cake to curb the obesity epidemic:

Kroese suggests that sticking pictures of tempting foods on the fridge door may help to bring weight-watching goals to mind. But she cautions that the results can only be applied to women wanting to lose weight: it is unclear whether they would hold in the general population.

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Image: iStockphoto

We know that obesity levels aren’t going anywhere near down. We also know that the biggest increase is among the lower-income segment of the population. Now we have data that proves a logical assumption from these two facts: Being on food stamps makes you more likely to be obese.

New research in the current issue of Economics and Human Biology (hat tip: Sci Am) found that people who receive food stamps have, on average, a BMI of more than 1 point higher than people not participating in the food stamp program. “Every way we looked at the data, it was clear that the use of food stamps was associated with weight gain,” said Jay Zagorsky, co-author of the study.

Why is this? Because food stamps offer a very small amount of credit—$81 a month for the average recipient in 2002—with which to purchase food. As such, people relying on the stamps have a strong incentive to buy cheap foods that are filling—in other words, the exact type of foods contributing to the obesity epidemic.

As we’ve said before, there are two camps when it comes to fighting obesity: punishing or restricting bad behavior (like oh, say, banning new fast food restaurants in poorer neighborhoods) and rewarding good behavior. We’ve come out in favor of the second option before, and this time is no exception. Rather than penalize food stamp recipients who buy unhealthy foods, we should offer incentives and rewards for purchasing produce, whole grains, and other ingredients that don’t pack on the pounds.

Luckily, we’re not the only ones who think this is a good idea.

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Experts have long suspected that swine flu is more fatal among obese people, along with children and pregnant women. Now, doctors have linked an increased risk of dying from swine flu to having a body mass index, or BMI, above 40, which indicates morbid obesity. Studies in mice have yielded a similar conclusion. Bloomberg tells us:

It’s the first time that the prominence of obesity has been noticed among severely ill flu sufferers, [director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony] Fauci said in an interview yesterday. “It’s very likely that if we went back retrospectively and looked at people who did poorly during seasonal flu, what would shake out is that obesity would be one of the risks,” he said….

In mouse studies, [swine] flu killed about half of the rodents made obese by a high-fat diet, compared with a mortality rate of about 4 percent in lean animals…. [Scientists are] studying whether obese humans might need stronger doses of vaccine or a different method of delivery.

The correlation between a high BMI and a higher swine flu mortality rate might be due to the way excess weight compresses the lungs. Or it could be complications of obesity, such as insulin resistance and increased inflammation, that makes swine flu more deadly. In any case, it’s just one more reason for us Americans to get up off the couch…while we still can.

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Image: flickr / Mandj98

Former FDA head David Kessler’s much-lauded book The End of Overeating discusses in detail the use of technology by the food industry to provide the maximum caloric/fat bang for the consumer’s buck. And nowhere is this more beautifully illustrated than in the following video, an unusually candid inside look at the making of pork rinds. Which are hardly an example of healthy food (and we’re using the word “food” liberally). Fried pig skin squares, anyone?

We already knew that a diet based on junk food is bad for people and crows. Now a study shows that the health of cockroaches also suffers when the critters eat an unbalanced diet.

In fact, roaches fed a poor-quality diet matured more slowly and were fatter than those fed a well-balanced one. Females who ate badly also were less willing to mate than their well-nourished peers. LiveScience reports:

[Researchers] picked young female cockroach nymphs and divided them into two dietary groups. Half were fed a good-quality balanced diet of protein-rich fish food and high-carbohydrate oatmeal, while the rest were raised on fish food only. Both groups were allowed to eat as much as they wanted….When the nymphs became adults, the team switched the diets of some animals.

Half of the cockroaches raised with good quality diet lost their oatmeal, while half of the bugs fed poorly were promoted to a good-quality diet. Eighteen days after the switch, the diet control ended and some of the surviving cockroaches were dissected. The effects of unbalanced meals continued throughout the cockroaches’ lives, even for the few that were switched to good-quality food.

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