Add Soya, Drop Pounds?

A plant compound found in soya may help decrease fat tissue and body weight, despite causing an increase in appetite and food intake, a recent study suggests. Brigham Young University researchers found that rats fed a diet rich in isoflavones – a type of oestrogen in some plants known as phytoestrogen–lost body weight and fat tissue compared with rats that ate a low-isoflavone diet. After three months, they weighed 10 to 15 per cent less and carried 50 per cent less body fat. (In terms of humans, the study represented the span of life between birth and age 20, say the researchers.) Rats of both sexes lost weight, even though the males ate more. According to the researchers phytoestrogens, which may decrease fat storage and increase its breakdown, appear to alter metabolic hormones and spur weight loss, whether or not they also increase food intake. In general, individuals with relatively high soya intake have less adipose (fat) deposition than individuals whose soya intake is very low.

Minimum Sleep

Sleeping fewer than eight hours per night on a regular basis may elevate certain proteins to unhealthy levels in the blood, which can lead to heart and other chronic diseases. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University, presented the results of their 12-night study at the US Endocrine Society’s recent annual meeting. For the first four nights in the sleep laboratory, 25 healthy subjects, ages 19 to 31, were allowed to sleep for up to eight hours. For the remaining nights, they were awakened after six hours – and experienced a 40 to 60 per cent increase in levels of the inflammatory protein interleukin-6. Lack of sleep also slowed the subjects’ performance on a vigilance test, in which they responded by pressing a button as soon as a number flashed on a screen. Not everyone needs a full eight hours sleep each night, the researchers say, but restricting sleep appears to be a major risk for both public safety and long-term health. They aslo observed that women seem to handle sleep deprivation better than men by shifting rapidly into deep slow-wave sleep, which they speculate may be an evolutionary compensation for the sleep women lose in child rearing.

Vitamin Excess

People who supplement their diet with vitamins and minerals may consume levels high enough to pose rare but significant health risks, according to a new study. Researchers from the School of Dietetics and Human Nutrition at McGill University in Quebec, surveyed 1,530 adults. In the previous 24 hours, about 42 per cent of women and 28 per cent of men had taken at least one supplement. The 35 milligram upper limit for niacin, which can cause flushing and heart palpitations, was exceeded by 47 per cent of supplement takers. Eight women reported taking three milligrams or more of vitamin A, an amount that could lead to birth defects and liver damage. And 17 people overdosed on vitamin B6 by taking 100 milligrams, an amount linked to neurological damage. According to the researchers only people who take individual vitamins and minerals risk going over the upper limits. A daily multivitamin alone keeps levels within a safe range.

64.4%of women who are of childbearing age report taking some form of vitamin supplement.

Weight Check-ups

Physicians often fail to recognise weight problems in their patients–even more frequently than the patients themselves do. A team from the department of medicine at Baltimore’s Good Samaritan Hospital, surveyed 37 doctors and found that over the course of three months, they missed about one fourth of the weight problems in 526 patients, nearly a quarter of whom were obese. In comparison, 21 per cent of the overweight patients believed their weight to be healthy. Male doctors were significantly more likely than female ones to miss patients’ weight problems. (Among the patients, men were more than twice as likely as women to fail to identify their own weight problems.) The disparity, they concluded, is “possibly because of stricter cultural weight standards for women.” They believe that doctors could reduce the misdiagnoses by calculating body mass index, a more accurate measure of being overweight than just the number on a scale.