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Faculty Forum / Crash diet tied to gallstone risk

« on: June 13, 2013, 11:13:51 AM »

Crash diet tied to gallstone risk

People who go on an extremely low calorie diet are more likely to develop gallstones than people on a moderately low calorie diet, according to a new study.

Dr. Michael Jensen, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, said dieters typically end up with similar weight loss in the long run whether they use extreme calorie restriction or more moderately restricted diets.

"You're going to end up in the same place (weight-wise), so why take the risk of ending up in the hospital with a gall bladder problem just to lose weight faster?" said Jensen, who was not part of the study.

Gallstones affect as many as 20 million people in the US.

Dr. Kari Johansson, the lead author of the study and a researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, said quick weight loss from very low calorie diets is thought to impact the salt and cholesterol contents of bile and the emptying of the gallbladder, both of which can contribute to gallstones.

To see how these diets affect gallstone risk in a real-world setting, Johansson and her colleagues collected information on customers' progress from a weight loss company in Sweden called Intrim.

Some of the study authors have worked for the company or serve on its scientific advisory board.

Their study included 6,640 dieters, half of whom went on a crash diet and the other half of whom went on a low calorie diet.

The crash diet involved liquid meals of just 500 calories a day for six to 10 weeks, followed by the gradual introduction of normal food, and then nine months of a weight maintenance regime of exercise and healthy eating.

The other dieters ate 1,200 to 1,500 calories a day, including two liquid meals, for three months, followed by the nine month weight maintenance period.

Health coaches at Intrim collected weight and body size information, which the researchers linked to a national health database that has records on gallstone treatments.

After three months in the weight loss program, the crash dieters lost about 30 pounds, compared to roughly 17 pounds lost among people on the low calorie diet.

One year out from the start of the diet, the extremely low calorie group had lost an average of 24.5 pounds, while the other group lost about 18 pounds.

Among those on the crash diet, 48 people developed gallstones requiring hospital treatment, and 16 people in the other group developed gallstones, Johansson and her colleagues report in the International Journal of Obesity.

They could not determine why gallstones were more common among people in the extremely low calorie group.

"One contributing factor was that they lost more weight during follow-up... another may be that they may have had a lower fat intake," Johansson said in an email to Reuters Health.

Jensen said people should have doctors supervise their health when going on a very low calorie diet, something that is recommended in the US.

"They should be informed about the risk/benefit tradeoff compared to using the less intensive, but also less effective, (low calorie diet) alternative," Johansson said.

Source: Internet
Abu Kalam Shamsuddin
Lecturer
Department of Multimedia Technology and Creative Arts
Daffodil International University
Dhaka

77

Faculty Forum / About 48% Indian children are stunted: UNICEF

« on: June 12, 2013, 09:30:27 AM »

About 48% Indian children are stunted: UNICEF


Some 165 million children worldwide are stunted by malnutrition as babies and face a future of ill health, poor education, low earnings and poverty, the head of the United Nations children's fund said on Friday.


Anthony Lake, executive director of UNICEF, told Reuters the problem of malnutrition is vastly under-appreciated, largely because poor nutrition is often mistaken for a lack of food.

In reality, he said, malnutrition and its irreversible health consequences also affect relatively well-off countries, such as India where there is plenty of food, but access to it is unequal and nutritional content can be low.

"Undernutrition, and especially stunting, is one of the least recognised crises for children in the world," Lake said. "It's a horrible thing. These children are condemned."

Stunting is the consequence of undernutrition in the first 1,000 or so days of a baby's life, including during gestation.

Stunted children learn less in school and are more likely themselves to live in poverty and go on to have children also stunted by poor nutrition. These in turn increase poverty in affected countries and regions, and drive greater gaps between the rich and the poor, Lake said.

"The numbers are phenomenal. In India, for example, about 48 percent of children are stunted, and in Yemen it's almost 60 percent. Just think of the drag on development," Lake said.

"And the key point is that it is absolutely irreversible. You can feed up an underweight child, but with a stunted child, because of the effects on the brain, it has a permanently reduced cognitive capacity by the age of around two years old."

"Nutrition for growth"

Lake spoke to Reuters in London ahead of a "Nutrition for Growth" summit on Saturday co-hosted by the British and Brazilian governments and the Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), at which donor countries are expected to pledge more funding to tackle the problem.

The summit coincides with the publication in The Lancet medical journal of a series of studies on the issue, which found that as well as the 165 million children stunted by poor nutrition, nearly half of all deaths among under fives - 3.1 million deaths a year - are caused by malnutrition.

UNICEF says it wants to focus global efforts for now on 20 countries - mostly in Africa and Asia - which are home to 70 percent of the world's stunted children.

The cost of tackling poor nutrition in these countries is estimated to be about $7 billion a year, Lake said. Saturday's summit aims to secure pledges for about half that amount.

Securing those funds and using them effectively to improve nutrition would be "extraordinarily cost-effective", Lake said, since the negative effects of malnutrition and stunting currently cost an estimated 11 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) economic output in Africa and Asia.

Achieving food security - ensuring countries have enough food to go around - however, should not be mistaken for addressing the problem of poor nutrition, he said.

"The fact is that India, with 48 percent (childhood) stunting, is considered food secure - but that doesn't mean food is distributed equitably within India.

"And in Africa, for instance, if you only eat cassava, then your belly may be full and you may technically have food security, but that doesn't mean you're getting the nutrition needed to prevent stunting."

Lake also stressed that increased funding was only part of the solution and that spending donor funds wisely in trusted community-based programmes is essential.

Such programmes need to cover a range of measures, including promoting more nutritious foods, recommending exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of a baby's life and using micronutrient supplements to boost vitamin A, folic acid, zinc and iron.

Source: Internet
Abu Kalam Shamsuddin
Lecturer
MTCA
DIU