SHR

Ryan Walker from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Michael Goran from the University of Southern California sought to determine actual sugar content and composition in commonly used infant formulas, baby foods, and other grocery items frequently marketed towards children. After looking through the online shopping databases for three of the U.S.’s largest grocery retailers – Walmart, SuperValu, and Safeway – they selected every tenth product from infant formulas, baby food, yogurt, breakfast cereal, and packaged baked goods and purchased all products from the retailers in a defined zip-code region in Los Angeles to help control for location and inventory. Twenty products per category were chosen for analysis. The results were not pretty The average percent of total calories supplied by sugar in infant formulas was 27.4%, with five having greater than 40%. Since most formula attempts to mimic breast milk, it was no surprise that most were...

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is exactly what its name says – the abnormal accumulation of fat within the liver (steatosis for the nerds like me) from causes other than alcohol. The more severe form of NAFLD is called non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH; literally “fatty inflammation”), which can eventually progress to cirrhosis, permanent liver damage, and cancer. Nonetheless, even simple NAFLD can cause widespread metabolic problems within the body, which should be no surprise considering the tremendous role the liver plays in detoxifying the body and managing nutrients. Anyway, NAFLD prevalence has been increasing over the past few decades and is currently estimated to be around 30% in the U.S. population, with causes ranging from excessive caloric intake and muscular insulin resistance to genetic abnormalities. We can’t really do anything about the genetics, but it is no coincidence that the only tried and true methods for reducing liver fat include weight loss...

Exercise throughout the day is healthy for children!... We need research to tell us this? I would be flabbergasted (awesome word) to find someone who thinks exercise throughout the day isn’t healthy, but at least now we have research documenting it. Nineteen 13-14 year old boys and girls visited the laboratory on four difference occasions where they completed in a randomized order: (1) two, 1 minute intervals at 90% VO2max, separated by 75 seconds of rest (HIIE); (2) ~ 6 min of cycling at 90% GET (MIE); or (3) remained seated and watched TV (control; CON). The exercise bouts were repeated four times, each separated by two hours, and on two occasions the adolescents consumed a milkshake providing 19 kcal/kg bodyweight (75% FAT, 25% CHO, 5% PRO). The exercise protocols had absolutely no effect on post-prandial levels of triglycerides, suggesting that neither high- nor medium-intensity exercise can save a kid from a fat bomb. However,...

The sad truth is that even our young – our children – can and do develop atherosclerosis. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk may be related to the degree of overweight-obesity, and cross-sectional research has provided preliminary insights into the links between blood lipid concentrations, physical activity (PA), cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF), and adiposity. However, cross-sectional data is also intrinsically limited by the fact that it is a snapshot of a single point in time comparing multiple groups on whatever the variable of interest is. Conversely, longitudinal data is collected over a period of time from the same cohort of subjects so as to detect changes in variables of interest.