Depending upon your personality, a new study says, the key to laying off the junk food could be matter of letting yourself wallow in guilt.
Three scientists tested subjects who were impulsive eaters and those who weren’t, asking each group to think about times in the past when they had felt pressure to indulge in some calorie-filled delight. The researchers also secretly watched the subjects when they were given the opportunity to grab some cheese balls or cookies (though given the line of questioning in the test, it seems dubious to suggest that the subjects didn’t know their snacking was being observed).
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There’s more than driving-versus-walking or sitting-versus-standing that has North Americans getting fatter than ever. A study by Canadian researchers suggests that we’re also more likely to stuff our faces after a longer period of mental exertion.
The scientists studied 14 women doing three activities: sitting peacefully; reading and responding to a text; and taking a strenuous exam on a computer. After each exercise, the subjects were allowed to eat whatever they wanted from a buffet, not knowing that this was the true object of the study. The researchers say that the women ate many more calories—between 23 and 30 percent more—after the difficult test than they did after the more relaxing activities.
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American men are getting heftier, but worries that their waistlines and sperm counts are inversely related might be a little overrated.
Nanette Santoro from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx just finished a study finding that men with very high body mass indexes did not show decreased sperm counts or lowered sperm quality, contrary to conventional wisdom. She and her colleagues studied nearly 300 overweight men between the ages of 18 and 50, and found that while many showed lower testosterone levels, the subjects’ sperm production was no different than ordinary men.
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In case you still needed a reason to skip that Hardees triple deluxe burger: a new study has found that women with waists larger than 35 inches have a 79% greater chance of dying prematurely than those with a waist that measures 28 inches or less, regardless of whether the woman is obese or overweight. The Los Angeles Times writes that, according to the report, “[w]omen with the largest waists had twice the risk of dying of cardiovascular disease—even if their weight was normal—and a 63% greater chance of dying of cancer compared with women with smaller waists.”
The data, gathered by researchers at Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, consisted of 44,636 women at an average age of around 50, who were tracked over a period of 16 years. At the beginning, participants recorded their hip and waist measurements, and every two years they answered questionnaires about their health. Over the course of the study, 3,507 women died, with 1,748 succumbing to cancer and 751 to heart disease.
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We here at DiscoBlog would like to introduce the Weekly Science Blog Roundup, in which we bring you the best news from around the sci-blogosphere. Here are some links for this week:
• A group of Japanese researchers discovers that daisies may contain a chemical cocktail that lowers triglycerides in mice. Watch for The Daisy Diet to hit shelves soon.
• If Tom Cruise came out, would it put a dent in homophobia? Perhaps, according to new research showing that exposure to celebrities identified as gay or lesbian decreased the test subjects’ bias.
• Finnish glass plant specializes in making drinking glasses out of recycled beer bottles. The real trick? They’ve never been crushed.
• Discovery of ancient human feces in Oregon cave results in samples of the oldest DNA ever found in the Americas.
• Five of the biggest technological inventions in the history of music.
