Novel way to lose weight: Eat less and exercise more.
Shortly after the year started, in early January, Australian researchers announced the only reliable way to lose weight was to eat less, exercise, or do both. But the eye-rolling should be directed toward the magical, fat-burning promises made by some products and eaten up by some consumers.
The researchers intended to disprove the idea that a person can lose weight by simply tricking his or her body into burning calories from fat, not carbohydrates, and thus make stored fat evaporate. Their study showed that mice, genetically altered to burn fats rather than carbohydrates, had body compositions similar to that of normal mice. That’s because their bodies simply converted the unused carbs into stored fat.
“Our data urges a correction in people’s concept of a magic bullet – something that will miraculously make them thin while they sit on the couch watching television,” said Greg Cooney, one of the study researchers and a scientist at Sydney’s Garvan Institute for Medical Research.
Caffeine affects kids’ sleep.
That stuff we drink in the morning to stay alert seems to do just that. Kids who consume caffeine sleep less, and the more they consume, the less they sleep, a study found. A survey of children’s snack and beverage consumption revealed that kids ages 8 to 12 took in the equivalent of nearly three cans of caffeinated soda per day. They also slept an average of 8.47 hours per night, less than is recommended by the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC).
The survey, conducted by William Warzak, a psychology professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and colleagues, queried parents of 200 children ages 5 to 12. Despite caffeine’s diuretic effect, the kids who drank it didn’t appear prone to bed-wetting.
Kids who study abroad drink more alcohol.
Hey, parents, if you send your kids abroad (to study), a pond away from parental guidance and punishment, they’re going to live a little. In October, researchers reported in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors that students doubled how much they drank while they were away, upping their consumption from about four alcoholic drinks per week while at home to about eight weekly drinks abroad.
The findings also support the idea that students younger than 21, the legal drinking age in the United States, take advantage of relaxed drinking laws abroad. The underage students in the study nearly tripled their drinking, whereas students over 21 doubled their intake of alcohol.
