A new study reveals some news about low carb dieting which is both encouraging and not surprising.

A diet low in carbohydrates but high in animal fat and protein doesn’t seem to increase the risk of type 2 diabetes in women, a new study claims.

“One study is never enough to change a recommendation, but this study is interesting in that it shows that a low-fat diet is no better than a low-carbohydrate diet in preventing type 2 diabetes,” said Thomas Halton, lead author of a study in the current issue of theAmerican Journal of Clinical Nutrition. “The one diet that did seem to show a protective effect was a vegetable-based, low-carb diet which consisted of higher amounts of vegetable fat and vegetable protein, and lower amounts of carbohydrate.”

The findings, Halton added, were a bit surprising in that most doctors and nutritionists recommend a low-fat diet to prevent type 2 diabetes. “This study showed that a low-fat diet didn’t really prevent type 2 diabetes in our cohort when compared to a low-carb diet. I was also surprised that total carbohydrate consumption was associated with type 2 diabetes, and that the relative risk for the glycemic load was so high.”

The article continues and points out that the low carb diet was just that, “low carb.” It was not the Atkins diet which has been controversial due to its stringent exclusion of vital carbohydrates — fruits and vegetables — and excessive amounts of animal fats and protein content that goes far beyond what the body requires.

While low-fat, high-carb diets are often recommended, the long-term effects of such a regimen are not known.

People who reduce their carb intake generally take in more total and saturated fat and less whole grains, cereal fiber, fruit and vegetables, which can heighten the risk of type 2 diabetes.

For this study, Halton and his colleagues examined the association between low-carb diets and the risk of diabetes among 85,059 women participating in the Nurse’s Health Study. The data included 20 years of follow-up.

Women were ranked according to what they ate. “We calculated a low-carbohydrate diet score based on the women’s percent consumption of fat, protein and carbohydrate,” Halton explained. “A higher score reflected a higher intake of fat and protein and a lower intake of carbohydrate. Therefore, the higher a woman’s score, the more closely she followed a low carb-diet, and the lower her score, the more closely she followed a low-fat diet.”

Women with a higher score did not have a heightened risk of diabetes. In fact, they seemed to have a small decreased risk when they derived their fat and protein from vegetable rather than animal sources.

Research results are in. Read the full story below after the jump.

You probably don’t need a scientific study to tell you there’s no such thing as a magic weight-loss pill. But a paper published today on BMJ.com shows exactly that: Taking federally approved anti-obesity medications, such as Xenical and Acomplia, leads only to modest weight loss — an extra 6 lbs. to 10 lbs. (2.7 kg to 4.7 kg) a year — and it’s not likely to radically trim down bulging waistlines. “People have to understand it’s very difficult to lose weight,” says lead author Raj Padwal, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta.

But that’s not to say the drugs aren’t successful. “There’s a disconnect between what medical practitioners seek and what patients seek,” says Padwal. Obese patients might go to their doctor looking to lose 100 pounds or more — they want to look the way they looked in high school. But doctors usually have more modest goals, tempered by their patients’ experience — and by concerns about health over vanity. By a doctor’s standard, even a 5% to 10% reduction in body weight can make a big difference to a patient’s health. On that level, at least, there’s little doubt anti-obesity medications can help.

The article continues.

Beyond mere weight loss and wellness, life extension is a powerful motivation to do what is difficult; restrict one’s daily calorie intake.

Calorie restriction research goes back more than 70 years to pioneering experiments on mice at Cornell University. Restricting your food intake does appear to extend life, although no one’s totally sure how.

“If we base ideas on calorie restriction, in animals, and even in monkeys, which are relatively close to us, we see that calorie restriction slows down virtually all diseases of aging,” researcher on aging at Harvard David Sinclair said.

Eat less, live longer? Easier said than done.

Brian Delaney is the president of the Calorie Restriction Society. He says it’s easy to live on a calorie restricted diet, simply figure out what your normal intake of calories would be and then reduce it by 20 to 30 percent – or maybe even a bit more.

“But then you don’t want to take it too far because then it’s frankly starvation,” he said.

Members of Delaney’s group generally consume fewer than 2,000 calories a day and some go as low as 1,000 calories. Will they live longer? Is what’s good for dessert-deprived monkeys also good for people?

“The CR diet could allow a human being to live to be maybe 135 or 140 years, but we don’t know yet because we have not done that long a study in humans,” Delaney said.

The article continues.

Something to keep in mind about emotional eating.

Just in time for the start of the holiday eating season – a new study finds that dieters who have the tendency to eat in response to external factors, such as at festive celebrations, have fewer problems with their weight loss than those who eat in response to emotions (internal factors). Led by researchers at The Miriam Hospital’s Weight Control & Diabetes Research Center, the study also found that emotional eating was associated with weight regain in successful losers.

“We found that the more people report eating in response to thoughts and feelings, such as, ‘when I feel lonely, I console myself by eating,’ the less weight they lost in a behavioral weight loss program. In addition, amongst successful weight losers, those who report emotional eating are more likely to regain,” says lead author Heather Niemeier, Ph.D., of The Miriam Hospital’s Weight Control & Diabetes Research Center and The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

This is important, the authors note, because one of greatest challenges facing the field of obesity treatment remains the problem of weight regain following weight loss.

The article continues.

A new study has been released.

Here’s another reason to get the kids to bed early: More sleep may lower their risk of becoming obese. Researchers have found that every additional hour per night a third-grader spends sleeping reduces the child’s chances of being obese in sixth grade by 40 percent.

The less sleep they got, the more likely the children were to be obese in sixth grade, no matter what the child’s weight was in third grade, said Dr. Julie Lumeng of the University of Michigan, who led the research.

If there was a magic number for the third-graders, it was nine hours, 45 minutes of sleep. Sleeping more than that lowered the risk significantly.

The study gives parents one more reason to enforce bedtimes, restrict caffeine and yank the TV from the bedroom. The study appears in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics.

Lack of sleep plays havoc with two hormones that are the “yin and yang of appetite regulation,” said endocrinologist Eve Van Cauter of the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the new study.

In experiments by Van Cauter and others, sleep-deprived adults produced more ghrelin, a hormone that promotes hunger, and less leptin, a hormone that signals fullness.

Another explanation: Tired kids are less likely to exercise and more likely to sit on the couch and eat cookies, Lumeng said.

You have probably heard the diet tip about slowing down when you eat; rest between bites, put your fork down, and thus allow your stomach to signal to your brain that you are full. Now researchers are using computers to help overweight children slow down when they eat:

CBS News correspondent Sheila MacVicar reports that a still on-going clinical trial by British researchers that combines exercise, healthy eating, psychology and technology may provide a breakthrough in the treatment of obesity.

“Do people with eating problems eat too fast?” Dr. Julian Hamilton Shield a child obesity expert at Bristol asks. “Do they eat so fast that the message from the stomach telling them that they’re full doesn’t get there in time because they’ve already eaten all the food on their plate?”

They’re experimenting with a Swedish computing device called a “Mandometer.” It was developed to treat people with anorexia and bulimia, but now experts are looking to see if it can also be used to re-educate the overweight – to teach them to slow down.

Fourteen year old Bella Lattuca is one of 120 patients enrolled in the trial. She said she’s tried to lose weight before and it didn’t really work.

But in one year, Bella has lost 35 pounds and is still dropping.

It’s quite intriguing:

Clinton Rubin knows full well that his recent results are surprising – that no one has been more taken aback than he. And he cautions that it is far too soon to leap to conclusions about humans. But still, he says, what if?

And no wonder, other scientists say. Rubin, director of the Center for Biotechnology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is reporting that in mice, a simple treatment that does not involve drugs appears to be directing cells to turn into bone instead of fat.

All he does is put mice on a platform that buzzes at such a low frequency that some people cannot even feel it. The mice stand there for 15 minutes a day, five days a week. Afterward, they have 27 percent less fat than mice that did not stand on the platform – and correspondingly more bone.

“I was the biggest skeptic in the world,” Rubin said. “And I sit here and say, ‘This can’t possibly be happening.’ I feel like the credibility of my scientific career is sitting on a razor’s edge between ‘Wow, this is really cool,’ and ‘These people are nuts.’ “

The article continues and discusses upcoming plans to use human subjects in subsequent research.

According to a new study:

The World Cancer Research Fund carried out the largest ever inquiry into lifestyle and cancer, and issued several stark recommendations.

They include not gaining weight as an adult, avoiding sugary drinks and alcohol, and not eating bacon or ham.

Everyone must also aim to be as thin as possible without becoming underweight.

People with a Body Mass Index (BMI), a calculation which takes into account height and weight, of between 18.5 and 25, are deemed to be within a “healthy” weight range.

But the study says their risk increases as they head towards the 25 mark, and that everyone should try to be as close to the lower end as possible.

There is no new research involved in this document: the panel examined 7,000 existing studies over five years.

The result, they say, is the most comprehensive investigation ever into the risks of certain lifestyle choices.

They see body fat as a key factor in the development of cancer, estimating its significance to be much higher than previously thought.

Another reason to keep your children from developing the TV habit:

Children who watch more than two hours of TV a day are twice as likely to be obese and suffer high blood pressure, say researchers.

A U.S. study found those glued to the screen for between two and four hours a day were 2.5 times more likely to have hypertension, which can lead to heart disease and stroke in later life.

That increased to 3.3 times the risk for children watching TV for four hours or more each day, says a report today in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The study also found that children tended to be more seriously overweight the more time they spent watching TV.

There are fears that ‘couch potato’ children are not only physically inactive but also exposed to TV commercials selling high-fat and other junk foods.

Researchers at the University of Florida confirm that obesity reduces an individual’s lifespan:

Super-size meals and a sedentary lifestyle shorten the lifespan of the obese and cost the U.S. taxpayer billions in Medicare expenditures, a study found.

Lead study author Zhou Yang of the University of Florida said he found an elderly person who is overweight at 65 may spend $16,000 more — and the obese person may spend $26,000 more — than those who are a normal weight at age 65.

The study, published in the online issue of the journal Health Services Research, said 35 percent of U.S. adults are overweight and another 30 percent are obese — and the total extra cost of treating them could jump to hundreds of billions of dollars as they age.

Life expectancy for a man of normal weight is 76.1 years; for an overweight man it’s 75.9 and for an obese man, it’s 74.2. For a woman of normal weight, life expectancy is 74 years; for an overweight woman it’s 72.7 and for an obese woman it’s 71.6, the study said.