Insomnia Can Hinder Your Weight Loss

Sleepless Nights Stop Progress


So you already know that a well-balanced diet and a regular exercise program are keys to your weight loss plan. But are you listening to that other recommendation you’ve heard more than once in your life? Get plenty of sleep. Recent medical studies show that sleep loss can increase hunger and affect your body’s metabolism in a way that makes weight loss more difficult. So if you’re making a good effort in your nutrition and fitness plans, you still might be able to improve your success with better sleep.

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Pumping Iron Helps Smokers Quit Without Weight Gain

Researchers found those who lifted weights regularly were twice as likely to kick the habit



Would-be ex-smokers may want to try weight lifting to help them kick the habit for good, a new study suggests.


The researchers found that three months of pumping iron seemed to help curb cigarette cravings and withdrawal symptoms, while lessening the weight gain that sometimes accompanies quitting.


Overall, men and women who completed the resistance training program were twice as likely to kick the habit as smokers who didn't lift weights.


"Cigarette smoking kills more than a thousand Americans every day, and while the large majority of smokers want to quit, less than 5 percent are able to do it without help," the study's lead author, Joseph Ciccolo, an exercise psychologist with the Miriam Hospital's Centers for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine, in Providence, said in a news release from the Lifespan health system.


"We need any new tools that can help smokers successfully quit and it appears resistance training could potentially be an effective strategy," he added.


In the study, which was funded by the U.S. National Cancer Institute, Ciccolo's team recruited 25 male and female smokers between the ages of 18 and 65 who had smoked at least five cigarettes per day for the past year or more.


All of the participants were counseled on quitting smoking for 15 to 20 minutes and given an eight-week supply of the nicotine patch, before being randomized into two groups, the authors noted.


The first group of smokers was asked to complete two one-hour full-body resistance training sessions involving 10 exercises each week for 12 weeks. The intensity of the training program was also increased every three weeks.


Meanwhile, the second group of smokers ("controls") simply watched a brief health and wellness video twice a week.


After completing the 12-week regimen, 16 percent of smokers in the weight-lifting group had successfully quit smoking, according to the study published in the August issue of the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research. As an added bonus, they had also lost body weight and body fat.


In contrast, only 8 percent of the smokers in the control group had quit, and they had also gained both weight and body fat, the results showed.


Three months later, 15 percent of those in the weight-lifting group had still not started smoking again, compared to 8 percent of the control group.


However, despite "promising" results, the study authors noted that more research is needed on resistance training before it can be considered a clinical treatment for smoking cessation.


SOURCE: Lifespan, news release, Aug. 9, 2011

Harvard Study finds: Daily Hot Dog May Feed Diabetes Risk

Eating red meat -- especially processed products such as hot dogs -- increases your risk of type 2 diabetes, a new study warns.

It also found that you can significantly lower your diabetes risk by replacing red meat with healthier proteins, such as nuts, whole grains or low-fat dairy products.

Harvard School of Public Health researchers looked at 20 years of data from men in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, 28 years of data from women in the Nurses' Health Study I, and 14 years of data from women in the Nurses' Health Study II, which involved more than 200,000 participants in all.

They combined that data with data from other studies that involved a total of 442,101 people, including 28,228 who developed diabetes while participating in a study.

After adjusting for lifestyle and dietary risk factors, the researchers determined that a daily 100-gram serving (about the size of a deck of cards) of unprocessed red meat was associated with a 19 percent increased risk for type 2 diabetes.

A daily serving of 50 grams of processed meat -- equivalent to one hot dog or sausage or two slices of bacon -- was associated with a 51 percent increased risk of diabetes.

Among people who ate one daily serving of red meat, substituting one serving of whole grains per day reduced the risk of diabetes by 23 percent. Substituting nuts resulted in a 21 percent lower risk, and substituting a low-fat dairy product, a 17 percent lower risk.

The study appears online Aug. 10 and in the October print issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

"Clearly, the results from this study have huge public health implications given the rising type 2 diabetes epidemic and increasing consumption of red meats worldwide," senior author Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology, said in a Harvard news release. "The good news is that such troubling risk factors can be offset by swapping red meat for a healthier protein."

Current U.S. guidelines that include red meats in the "protein foods" group along with fish, nuts, beans and poultry should be revised to distinguish red meat from the healthier protein sources, the authors said in the release.

SOURCE: Harvard School of Public Health, news release, Aug. 10, 2011

Gene therapy shown to destroy leukemia tumors

Scientists for the first time have used gene therapy to successfully destroy cancer tumors in patients with advanced disease

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania engineered patients' own pathogen-fighting T-cells to target a molecule found on the surface of leukemia cells.

The altered T-cells were grown outside of the body and infused back into patients suffering from late-stage chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), which affects the blood and bone marrow and is the most common form of leukemia.

Two participants in the Phase I trial have been in remission for up to a year. A third had a strong anti-tumor response, and his cancer remains in check. The research group plans to treat four more patients with CLL before moving into a larger Phase II trial.

"We put a key onto the surface of the T-cells that fits into a lock that only the cancer cells have," said Dr. Michael Kalos, director of translational and correlative studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine and an investigator on the study.

The results provide "a tumor-attack roadmap for the treatment of other cancers," including those of the lung and ovaries as well as myeloma and melanoma, researchers said.

The findings were published simultaneously Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine.

Kalos said past efforts to use the technique, known as "adoptive T-cell transfer," failed either because the T-cell response was too weak or proved too toxic for normal tissue.

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Organic Poultry Farms Have Lower Levels of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

Conventional farms that went organic saw fewer resistant germs in the first flock, researchers found


Poultry farms that have made the transition from conventional to organic farming have significantly lower levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria than conventional poultry farms, a new study finds.


Scientists are concerned about the use of antibiotics in farm animals because it has been shown to contribute to antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can spread to humans.


The researchers said they expected to see some differences in the farm levels of antibiotic-resistant enterococci when poultry farms transitioned to organic practices.


"But we were surprised to see that the differences were so significant across several different classes of antibiotics -- even in the very first flock that was produced after the transition to organic standards," study leader Amy Sapkota, an assistant professor with the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health, said in a university news release. "It is very encouraging."


The University of Maryland researchers tested 10 newly organic and 10 conventional poultry houses for the presence of enterococci bacteria in poultry litter, feed and water. Any enteroccoci bacteria found by the researchers was checked for resistance to 17 common antimicrobials.


"We chose to study enterococci because these microorganisms are found in all poultry, including poultry on both organic and conventional farms. The enterococci are also notable opportunistic pathogens in human patients staying in hospitals," Sapkota said.


As expected, enterococci bacteria was found at all the farms. However, the organic farms had much lower levels of single and multiple antibiotic-resistant enterococci.


The study was published online Aug. 10 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.


"While we know that the dynamics of antibiotic resistance differ by bacterium and antibiotic, these findings show that, at least in the case of enterococci, we begin to reverse resistance on farms even among the first group of animals that are grown without antibiotics. Now we need to look forward and see what happens over five years, 10 years in time," Sapkota said.


SOURCE: University of Maryland, news release, Aug. 10, 2011

Women May Face Greater Heart Risk From Smoking Than Men

Researchers say biological differences may explain 25% higher risk compared to male smokers.



Women who smoke have a 25 percent higher risk of developing heart disease than male smokers do, according to a huge, new study.


Although the reason for the higher risk isn't known, researchers suspect there are biological differences in how women's bodies react to damaging cigarette smoke.


"Women may absorb more carcinogens and other toxic agents in cigarettes compared to men," said lead researcher Rachel R. Huxley, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota.


In addition, women have different smoking habits from men, she added. "Despite smoking fewer cigarettes than men on average, they may smoke more of the cigarette. They might smoke right to the end of the cigarette, compared to men -- we just don't know," she said.


For the study, Huxley and her colleague, Mark Woodward from the department of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, gathered data from 75 studies, involving almost 4 million people, that looked at the risk of heart disease between smokers and nonsmokers.


This type of study is called a meta-analysis, the object of which is to pool data from a variety of sources to try to identify significant trends.


Combined, these studies included 3,912,809 people, more than 67,000 of whom had heart disease. In the 75 studies that included data on the differences between men and women and included 2.4 million people, the researchers found that women who smoked had a 25 percent higher risk of having a heart attack than men who smoked.


That risk increased by 2 percent for every year the women smoked, compared with men who smoked equally as long, Huxley and Woodward found.


The risk to women could actually be greater than what was uncovered in this study, Huxley added. On average, women smoke fewer cigarettes than men and while the number of women who smoke has peaked in the United States, in developing countries women are just beginning to take up the habit, she said.


Huxley noted that they also found a higher risk for lung cancer among women who smoked, compared with men. "Women who smoked had twice the risk of dying from lung cancer, compared to men," she said.


"So this is not just a one-off thing," Huxley said. "There is some physiological or behavioral reason why women who smoke have a much greater risk of contracting illness, compared to their male counterparts," she said.


The report was published in the Aug. 10 online edition of The Lancet.


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