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Tag: nutrition

07.03.2014

the science of drunk food

Martini

Over at Science of Us, Julia Reinstein at tries to explain why we crave junk food after imbibing:

Plenty of sober people crave junk food, of course, but booze ratchets up these cravings by messing with your blood-sugar levels. When your liver is all tied up processing excessive alcohol levels, it can interfere with normal blood-sugar production, resulting in a dip in your blood-sugar level (kind of ironic, considering how sugar-packed your cranberry-vodka is) that causes you to crave foods that will bring it back up. Doing so with an apple rather than buffalo wings is challenging under the best of circumstances, but when your inhibitions are lowered, you’re even more likely to choose whatever’s quick and satisfying in that moment.

Researchers at Northwestern University demonstrated this in one particularly deliciousexperiment. They left two groups of subjects, one drunk and one sober, with unlimited ice cream and told them they could eat as much as they wanted. The drunk group ate a lot more of the ice cream, and this held true even when the subjects ingested the alcohol unknowingly (quite an experiment …), suggesting it wasn’t simply about social or cultural norms pertaining to alcohol and food. Rather, the researchers argued, alcohol simply makes people more relaxed, and when people are relaxed, they’re more likely to indulge. The blood-sugar thing and the lowered-inhibitions thing, then, are a potent one-two punch straight to the face of healthy eating.

04.10.2013

vitamin d holds up under scrutiny

Vitamin D

Six studies confirm the health benefits of vitamin D

We often see headlines mentioning a chemical or vitamin has astonishing new health benefits, only to have those claims fall apart under more thorough investigation. Vitamin D is looking like it might be an exception. Science News highlights six studies on the vitamin’s health benefits:

  • An analysis of 24 clinical trials in children finds that kids getting vitamin D supplements had a 47 percent reduced risk of dental caries, researchers report in Nutrition Reviews.

  • A study of 242 healthy adults getting daily calcium supplements shows that those who also took modest vitamin D supplements of 800 IU per day saw their blood pressure decrease. Their top blood pressure number fell by 10 points on average after a year and their bottom BP number fell by four points. Writing in Nutritional Influences on Bone Health, the researchers also report that the vitamin D folks saw their heart rate decline from 74 to 70 beats per minute. The calcium-only group saw no improvement on average.

  • A 28-year study in which Danish scientists monitored the health of nearly 10,000 people finds that those who developed a tobacco-related cancer during that time had vitamin D levels at the study outset of 14.8 nanograms per milliliter of blood on average, compared with 16.4 ng/ml on average for everyone else. That report shows up in Clinical Chemistry.

  • BMJ reports in a review of 31 studies that pregnant women with vitamin D levels of less than 30 ng/ml had an increased risk of developing a complication such as preeclampsia or gestational diabetes.

  • Low vitamin D levels may hamper metabolism in blacks. A study in Nutrition Research finds that adult blacks averaged vitamin D of only 14.6 6 ng/ml compared with 25.6 ng/ml on average in whites. Blacks were also more likely to have insulin resistance, a condition in which cells fail to use the hormone insulin efficiently to process glucose. But when researchers compared groups with similar vitamin D levels, the differences in insulin resistance disappeared. That suggests that the higher burden of insulin resistance in blacks is at least in part the result of low vitamin D, they conclude.

  • Very low vitamin D might be linked to suicide risk. An analysis of military service members finds that people who committed suicide appear to have similar vitamin D levels on average compared with those who don’t. But a closer look finds that people with the very lowest levels, less than 15 ng/ml, were roughly twice as likely to commit suicide as people with vitamin D ranging from 17 to 41 ng/ml. That study appears in PLoS One.

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