Fructose Linked to Overeating, and Obesity, New Study shows.

Now more than ever, the importance of knowing what sweeteners and sweets you are eating, could play a role in your health. Maple Syrup is good, High Fructose Corn Syrup is bad. "This is your brain on sugar – for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating." 

Suspicions about high fructose foods have been evident for the last decade, but now more acute study has shown this sugar's serious negative health side effects. 

For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart.

Scans showed that drinking glucose "turns off or suppresses the activity of areas of the brain that are critical for reward and desire for food," said one study leader, Yale University endocrinologist Dr. Robert Sherwin. With fructose, "we don't see those changes," he said. "As a result, the desire to eat continues – it isn't turned off."

What's convincing, said Dr. Jonathan Purnell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Health & Science University, is that the imaging results mirrored how hungry the people said they felt, as well as what earlier studies found in animals.

"It implies that fructose, at least with regards to promoting food intake and weight gain, is a bad actor compared to glucose," said Purnell. He wrote a commentary that appears with the federally funded study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers now are testing obese people to see if they react the same way to fructose and glucose as the normal-weight people in this study did.

Now more than ever, the evidence shows that to stay healthy, we indeed need to watch what we eat, and pass by the processed foods whenever possible. 

High fat diets may be linked to depression.

The latest in the news has multiple stories that are being reported even in the mainstream media on the effects of your diet on your health. However, often we forget that health includes mental health. Various reports have shown certain foods affect mood, and also the ability for one to function at top performance, both physically and mentally. 

This new study though, weighs heavy on the mind.... literally. 

From Scientific American: 

" What is the effect of a high fat diet? Well, it appears to be getting more complicated with each new study.

It looks like diet-induced obesity might produce depressive-like effects in mice. But how the diet is doing that is not so well defined.

*“Diet-induced obesity promotes depressive-like behaviour that is associated with neural adaptations in brain reward circuitry” International Journal of Obesity, 2012.

Several studies in humans have found a correlation between obesity and the development of depression. But it’s important to keep in mind that correlation is not causation. Many people who become obese also have other things going on (socioeconomic status, family history, comorbid disorders) which can influence the development of depression. In order to determine if obesity itself is causing depression, you first have to deliberately cause obesity in a controlled population.

And this is where mice come in. Using a specialty high fat and high sugar diet, Sharma and Fulton fed up a set of mice for 12 weeks, until they were significantly fatter than control mice. They then looked at behavioral tests for anxiety and depression.

Depressive-like behavior has been correlated in the past with changes in stress-responses, so the authors looked at the stress hormone corticosterone (which is cortisol in humans). High-fat diet mice showed slightly higher corticosterone, but much higher levels after stress, suggesting that they may be more sensitive to stress than normal mice.

The authors also looked at alterations in reward pathways like the nucleus accumbens and striatum, and found significant changes. Though changes in these areas are not usually correlated with depressive-like behavior, they have been shown in other high fat studies and are thought to relate to differences in how animals eating high fat diets process rewards.

From these data the authors conclude that their high-fat diet obesity produced depressive-like behavior. And while I think the preliminary data has potential, I also think there could be improvements...." 

Read more from the original story here: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/2012/05/02/high-fat-diets-and-depression-a-look-in-mice/?WT.mc_id=SA_syn_HuffPo

EDITORIAL: Misplaced Blame on Obesity

This editorial piece was written by a contributor for the Frederick News-Post, Md., and brings up some thoughtful consideration on the obesity epidemic currently taking place in the United States of America. 

EDITORIAL: MISPLACED BLAME

Aug. 30--Obese Americans have a lot of company these days, but if a recently released report is correct, by 2030 every other person in the nation will be obese.

The report released last week by the British medical journal the Lancet focused on obesity worldwide, where it is becoming an increasingly unsustainable health care expense.

What caught our attention about this report's findings and recommendations wasn't the global trend towards obesity or what half of all Americans will look and feel like in less than 20 years.

Rather, it was the report's findings on why all this is happening, and its recommendations for addressing it.

According to The Washington Post story that reported on the Lancet article, "Changes over the past century to the way food is made and marketed have contributed to the creation of an 'obesogenic' environment in which personal willpower and efforts to maintain a healthful weight are largely impossible ..."

The fix involves " ... making healthful foods cheaper and less-healthful foods more expensive largely through tax strategies ... Changes in the way foods are marketed would also be called for ..."

The cost of this epidemic is already staggering, but it will increase dramatically if not addressed. Everyone seems to agree that America's health care system is broken, but seems mystified how to fix it. With so many stakeholders with different, even conflicting, concerns, it is a genuinely daunting challenge.

But wouldn't truly addressing this epidemic of obesity be one of the most productive solutions to pursue?

And wouldn't it be great if Americans decided they could do this on their own, individually and collectively as a nation -- without the government's "help"?

This report doesn't seem to believe that's possible. Again from The Post story: "Though the report acknowledged that it's ultimately up to individuals to decide what to eat and how to live, it maintained that governments have largely abdicated the responsibility for addressing obesity to individuals, the private sector, and nongovernmental organizations. Yet the obesity epidemic will not be reversed without government leadership, regulation, and investment in programs, monitoring and research."

In other words, it's the government's fault that we're becoming an obese nation, and now its help is required to fix the problem. Are either one or both of these assertions really true?

If so, that says something awfully sad about what both the American people and their government have become.

Hypertension rates soar to new highs in young adults

Researchers have found that young adults may be much more likely to have high blood pressure — traditionally a problem for older people — than previously thought, the Raleigh News and Observer reported Thursday. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers suspect diet, obesity and sedentary lifestyles are largely to blame for the increase. The study appears in the online version of the journal Epidemiology. Researchers tested more than 14,000 people between the ages of 24 and 32 and found that nearly 1 in 5 had high blood pressure — nearly five times the rate found in an earlier study. High blood pressure, also called hypertension, is a factor in heart disease and strokes, the top- and third-ranked leading causes of death among Americans, respectively. Data were derived from the larger National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, or Add Health, which has been tracking the same group of people since 1995, when they were ages 12 through 19. When the study began, 11 percent of the participants were obese. Five years later, 22 percent were. By the time the blood pressure data were taken, three years ago, 37 percent were obese and 60 percent were overweight.