SHR

No one likes being sick, especially when that sickness causes diarrhea, nausea, and bloating. It is thus unfortunate for the 58 healthy young adults participating in Bruggencate et al’s latest study, as they had to be infected with a live, but attenuated, enterotoxigenic E. coli bug that mimics food poisoning. The participants had to undergo infection after 4-weeks of supplementing with milk concentrate rich in milk fat globule membrane (MFGM) phospholipids or a sodium caseinate placebo. To blind the participants to the intervention, the supplement powders were provided alongside 250 mL of soy milk that was consumed twice per day (125 mL with breakfast and again with dinner). The participants also had to abstain from all dairy products and products containing probiotics. On the first day after infection, the participants experienced a significant increase in fecal wet weight and significant decrease in fecal dry weight, which is the confusing way of...

What defines healthy obesity? Observational studies have established that not all obese individuals display the same risk for developing cardiovascular disease or type-2 diabetes (T2DM). This phenotype has been called “metabolically healthy obesity.” The mechanism underlying the switch in phenotype from the metabolically healthy status to unhealthy status is still unclear.Thanks to a recent study by Pujia et al, we may be one-step closer to filling this knowledge gap. These researchers performed a cross-sectional analysis of 172 middle-aged, overweight-obese Caucasian subjects who were undergoing health-screening tests at their outpatient nutrition clinic.The participants were divided into three groups: healthy overweight-obese (max of two criteria for metabolic syndrome and no glucose intolerance); metabolic syndrome (three or more criteria without T2DM) and T2DM (only those with fasting glucose ≥126 mg/dL or antidiabetic treatment). The focus of this research was on differences in the respiratory quotient (RQ) between groups, whereby a lower value signifies increased...

Brain regulation of satiety in twins The modern food environment is highly stimulatory to brain areas that regulate energy homeostasis and reward processing. Research using MRI imaging has shown that visual food cues evoke differential brain responses in obese than in lean individuals, but the genetic contribution has yet to be evaluated. This led Melhorn et al to use a study design involving 21 healthy monozygotic twin pairs (42 individuals) and integrated MRI to test if inherited factors contribute to individual differences in meal-induced satiety and the brain regulation of appetite. The study protocol is outlines in figure 1 above. The twin pairs included both men and women and were primarily white. There were 10 normal-weight pairs, one overweight pair, and 6 obese pairs. On average, twins consumed 51% of their estimated daily caloric needs at the buffet meal. Total caloric intake and the percentage of estimated daily needs showed consistent...

Weight loss is easy – it is keeping the weight off that is difficult. It isn’t impossible by any means, but the fact that only 20% of overweight individuals are successful weight losers speaks to why many people view weight loss as hopeless. An area of controversy regarding both weight loss and weight maintenance is the role of non-nutritive sweeteners (NNS) such as sucralose, aspartame, and stevia. It is therefore worth discussing the latest publication by Peters et al, which reports data from a year-long trial comparing beverages sweetened with NNS to water as part of a behavioral weight management program consisting of 12 weeks of active weight loss and 40 weeks of weight maintenance. The study participants included 303 healthy overweight-obese men and women who drank NNS beverages at least three times per week. For the initial 12-week weight loss period, all participants received a cognitive-behavioral weight loss intervention that...

There is a pervasive belief in the dieting world that drinking water can help with fat loss. There are many reasons why this may be true (e.g., through displacing caloric beverages in the diet), but one oft-mentioned and popular idea is that it may aid fat loss through increasing metabolism. We have the work of Boschmann et al to thank for this idea. In his study of 14 young and healthy adults, it was reported that drinking 500 mL of room-temperature water significantly increased resting energy expenditure (REE) by a whopping 30% within an hour.  This led Boschmann et al to conclude that simply increasing water consumption by 1.5 liters per day would increase energy expenditure by ~50 kcal. Boschmann subsequently extended these findings to overweight and obese adults, in whom 500 ml of water was reported to increase REE by 24%. How then can it be that many studies of human...