Posted by VicPlough on May 11, 2012 in
Health Researchers in Europe have coined the term “social jet lag” to describe the all-too common practice of following a different sleep schedule on weekdays versus the weekend.
Our circadian rhythms are out of sync with our hectic work schedules, the theory goes, so each weekend we’re effectively flying back and forth between time zones without ever leaving the ground.
Social jet lag is “the discrepancy between what our body clock wants us to do and what our social clock wants us to do,” says Till Roenneberg, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Munich’s Institute of Medical Psychology, in Germany. “It almost looks as if people on a Friday evening fly from Paris to New York, and on Monday morning they fly back again.”
Health.com: 10 alarm clocks for heavy sleepers
This weekly disruption is more than just a nuisance. In a new study published today in the journal Current Biology, Roenneberg and his colleagues surveyed the sleep habits of more than 65,000 adults and found that people with different weekday and weekend sleep schedules had triple the odds of being overweight.
What’s more, the body mass index (BMI) of overweight people tended to rise as the gap between their weekday and weekend “time zones” widened.
The findings echo previous research linking higher BMI to sleep deprivation and irregular sleep schedules. In particular, numerous studies have found an increased risk of obesity — as well as chronic diseases such as diabetes — among shift workers.
Social jet lag may be harmful in the same way, says David J. Earnest, Ph.D., a neurobiologist and body-clock expert at the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine, in Bryan.
“The schedules we keep on the weekend are much different than those we keep during the week,” Earnest says. “This potentially has ramifications for disrupting circadian rhythms and translating into the same sorts of things associated with shift work, such as an increased risk for cancer and diabetes and so on.”
Health.com: Surprising health benefits of sleep
Some of the proposed explanations for the link between shift work and obesity, such as irregular meal times and metabolism disruptions at the cellular level, may help explain the social jet lag findings as well, Roenneberg says.
“With social jet lag, we’re forced to eat at times when the body doesn’t want to eat, or isn’t prepared for digesting food properly,” he says. “All these things coming together might influence the way you digest food and how you incorporate it into your body fat. The result is that you become overweight or obese.”
Most people experience at least some social jet lag. Two-thirds of the study participants reported at least one hour’s difference in their average weekday and weekend sleep schedules, and more than 10% reported three-plus hours.
Health.com: How much sleep do you really need?
Paying more attention to our body clocks may be good for the economy as well as our health, Roennenberg suggests. Rather than bending early birds and night owls to the same work schedule, why not encourage personalized schedules based on each individual’s circadian rhythms?
The result would be a better-rested, healthier, and doubtless more productive workforce, Roennenberg says.
“Living against our body clocks is detrimental for our health,” says Roenneberg, who spoke to Health.com from Munich at 11 p.m. local time, just before heading to bed. “On an epidemiological level, we pay an enormous price for not being within our natural clocks.”
Copyright Health Magazine 2011
Posted by VicPlough on May 9, 2012 in
Health Story By: by Melisa Goh
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Pictures of the “supermoon” from around the world.
Well before night fell stateside, the “supermoon” was already a star. Cameras from Tokyo to Athens gazed into its light, just a little bit brighter than usual.
It was enough to inspire some beautiful photos, so we thought we’d share what we’ve found.
For those who prefer science to art, NASA has a pleasant video to explain the phenomenon, uninspiringly called a “perigee moon.” Well, we still think it’s super.
Posted by VicPlough on May 9, 2012 in
Health Story By: by Scott Hensley
Moms and their kids protest a proposed ban on homemade food at bake sales in New York City schools at a rally near City Hall in 2010. One sign read, “I wanna get obese on my terms. No junk food.”
An American tradition is in jeopardy.
The bake sale, a staple of school fundraising for generations, is getting squeezed. The epidemic of childhood obesity is leading some districts to restrict the kinds of foods sold or to ban the sales altogether, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Stephanie Armour explained on Friday’s Morning Edition.
The obesity rate for children and adolescents has tripled since 1980, she told host David Greene. So in some districts, she said, “the thought is if they can get healthier food or no bake sales that perhaps they can lower that rate.”
She reported recently that schools in many states, including California, New York, and Texas, have regulations that limit bake sales to nutritious food.
Calories â and big money â are at stake. Armour told Greene about a school in Maryland that raised $25,000 with bake sales and a mom in New York City who said she’d helped raise $50,000 that way.
Parents, she said, are divided on the restrictions. Opponents say the money often goes to activities, such as athletics, that could help kids stay trim and fit.
One jurisdiction that has clamped down is Montgomery County in Maryland, according to Armour. And while that may be the case, I can tell you from my own investigation that junky foods haven’t been eliminated.
Early this year I attended a “Doughnuts with Dads” breakfast that featured giant, sugary doughnuts as big as my hand. And a few months later my wife got her fill at “Muffins with Moms.” Kids and their parents chowed down while bonding over art projects. Good times and empty calories were enjoyed by all.
At my house anyway, our weights were unaffected by the caloric benders.
Posted by VicPlough on May 5, 2012 in
Health Story By: by Richard Harris
Massive sections of ice (center front) have broken away from the Jakobshavn glacier into the sea. There’s enough water stored in Greenland’s glaciers to raise the sea level by 20 feet.
“It turns out that glacial pace isn’t very slow,” she says.
It also turns out that glacial pace isn’t consistent. The glaciers like Jakobshavn that started surging haven’t kept on picking up speed. In fact, some have slowed down. And glacier speeds vary dramatically.
Picture streams of ice that start out as one giant river and then split into two on their way toward the ocean.
“We saw cases where one of those might be consistently speeding up, while the one right next to it might speed up one year, slow down the next, speed up again,” Moon says.
When they added up what all those glaciers were doing during the past decade, they saw a 30 percent increase in speed overall.
“We’re still seeing velocities increase so we can expect to see continued sea level rise from the Greenland ice sheet,” she says. But their report in Science magazine says they aren’t seeing the runaway meltdown of Greenland that some had feared. That makes sense to Joughin, given the lay of the land.
“All of the ice flows towards the coast and squeezes through these narrow outlet glaciers, much like toothpaste squeezing out the nozzle of a toothpaste tube,” he explains.
James Balog is more than a photographer. He’s an explorer and researcher with fascinating finds.
Some studies now suggest the Arctic Ocean could be free of ice in the summertime by the year 2030.
That imposes a natural limit on how much ice can flow off the bedrock. But those bottlenecks don’t exist in Antarctica, where other glaciers are also surging toward the sea. So that’s still an important wildcard.
But given what’s happening in Greenland, the worst-case scenario, for 6 feet of sea level rise this century, is looking very unlikely to Joughin.
“My guess, and it is a guess, is probably a meter or less â 3 feet or less.”
He isn’t breathing a sigh of relief, though. Three feet of sea level rise would still threaten millions of people around the world who live near sea level.
And Josh Willis, who studies sea level from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., says oceans won’t magically stop rising at the end of the century under any scenario, “so we’re going to see a lot more sea level rise. The question is: How fast is it going to come, and are we going to be able to adapt in time?”
But it’s hard to plan if you don’t know whether sea level will rise 1 foot in this century â which is the low-end estimate â or 6 feet.
“The difference between 1 foot and 6 feet is really enormous in terms of cost and adaptation and mitigation measures,” Willis says.
Narrowing that uncertainty requires gathering more observations from satellites. But that’s a problem: Those eyes in the sky are going blind. The National Research Council notes with alarm that Earth-observing satellites are wearing out much faster than they’re being replaced. With budget troubles, the U.S. could lose most of its Earth-observing capacity in just eight years.
Posted by VicPlough on Apr 30, 2012 in
Health Story By: Talk of the Nation
Mechanical engineer Maurizio Porfiri, of the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, designs robot fish. A few years ago, he found that real fish would mill about his aquatic robot, and now he’s trying to understand why. His research suggests that it has less to do with how the robot looks, than how it makes fish feel.
Posted by VicPlough on Apr 30, 2012 in
Health Story By: by Nancy Shute
How to test reading ability in children who can’t read has been a problem for researchers.
For people with dyslexia, problems recognizing words can make life difficult. Children usually aren’t diagnosed until elementary school, when it becomes clear they’re struggling with reading. But scientists say it could be possible to diagnose and help kids much earlier by identifying problems with visual attention â long before they learn to read.
Scientists have argued for decades about why 10 percent of the world’s population has dyslexia. Theories include difficulties recognizing chunks of words or problems processing visual signals or issues ignoring extraneous sounds. People with dyslexia are often bright and verbal, but have trouble with the written word.
Many programs have been devised to help children and adults with reading difficulties, but none solves the problem. Since learning to read is such a big part of early childhood, it makes sense to think that identifying children with dyslexia as preschoolers, before they learn their ABCs, could lead to new and better ways to help.
But how to test reading ability in children who can’t read has remained a barrier. Researchers at the University of Padua in Italy say kids who have problems with visual attention in preschool are most likely to have difficulty reading later on.
The scientists tested 96 kindergartners who hadn’t yet learned to read, asking them to identify specific symbols amid distractions. The youngsters also were asked to identify syllables, name colors quickly and remember things they were told. Researchers continued to test the children over the next two years as they learned to read.
The kindergartners who struggled with the visual attention test were the ones who later had trouble with reading. The results were published in the journal Current Biology.
If preschoolers are screened with a simple visual attention test, the researchers conclude, children with dyslexia could get help much earlier and potentially avoid years of struggle in school and adulthood.
Indeed, many adults with dyslexia were never diagnosed as children. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Schultz says he figured it out only after his 7-year-old son was diagnosed with the learning disorder.
Schultz told NPR’s Audie Cornish that he didn’t learn to read until he was 11. He still has to be very selective in what he reads, he says, because it’s so painful.
“The actual neurological â if I may use that word â act of reading, I don’t enjoy,” Schultz said. “I have to often read the same sentence over and over before I understand it. And I have to convince myself that what I’m reading is so enjoyable and so exciting and so good for me that it’s worth the effort.”
Other research has shown that entrepreneurs are far more likely to have dyslexia. One theory is that they develop formidable skills at working with people to compensate for their problems communicating using the written word.
Posted by VicPlough on Apr 22, 2012 in
Health No matter how hard salad companies try to keep dangerous microbes out of your bag of greens, they can’t seem to guarantee that they’ve caught every one. Why? Bacteria from animal feces can enter the food supply in myriad ways.
Posted by VicPlough on Apr 19, 2012 in
Health Story By: Talk of the Nation
Valerie Winestock, received bariatric surgery for type 2 diabetes
Rob Stein, science correspondent, NPR
Dr. Phillip Schauer, director of the Bariatric and Metabolic Institute
Two studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine show that bariatric surgery may treat, or even reverse, the effects of type 2 diabetes in overweight and obese patients with high blood sugar levels. Some fear that the risks of the operation overshadow the rewards.
Posted by VicPlough on Apr 18, 2012 in
Health Story By: by Shankar Vedantam
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Shridhar Venkat is the director of the Akshaya Patra Foundation, which runs one of the largest school lunch programs in the world in India.
On days she comes to school hungry, K. Suchitra (center) knows she can eat at school.
The program is so cost-effective it’s become a Harvard Business School case study. Today it costs only about 11 cents to place a meal before each child. By 2020, the program hopes to feed 5 million children every day.
The combination of efficiency and high purpose makes for a strange marriage: ruthlessly efficient corporate management techniques married to a goal that is deeply emotional.
“We want to do things with heart,” Venkat says. “It’s not just, ‘build large kitchens.’ All these large kitchens have a big heart.”
Venkat is constantly looking for ways to increase efficiency so the program can feed more children. He studies the data to see if the lunch program is having a discernible effect. He’s recently noticed more children are coming to school on one particular day each week: the day the lunch program includes dessert.
Venkat said he was going to try to use the inducement of dessert to get kids to come to school. Typically, the children know on which day dessert is going to be included in lunch.
“We are trying to make it a secret, so they keep guessing and they come to school,” he says with a laugh.
Independent audits of the program have found it’s having a profound effect.
“The school attendance goes up, malnutrition level comes down, dropout rates comes down,” Venkat says.
But besides the statistics, Venkat says he regularly sees the human face of the results.
A young man recently visited Venkat. He was in one of the earliest cohorts of children who’ve been helped by the lunch program.
The man told Venkat he was the son of a security guard. When the son was in the eighth grade, his father was earning less than a dollar a day. He was so hungry, he used to faint at school. Academically, he was scraping by. Then, the free lunch program started.
“He told me, ‘My attention span went up. My concentration went up,’” Venkat says. So did the boy’s grades. He went on to college and became an engineer. When the young man visited Venkat, he handed him an envelope.
“And the envelope … had an offer letter from India’s leading multinational software company as a software programmer,” Venkat says.
Posted by VicPlough on Apr 9, 2012 in
Health Story By: by Nancy Shute
How to test reading ability in children who can’t read has been a problem for researchers.
For people with dyslexia, problems recognizing words can make life difficult. Children usually aren’t diagnosed until elementary school, when it becomes clear they’re struggling with reading. But scientists say it could be possible to diagnose and help kids much earlier by identifying problems with visual attention â long before they learn to read.
Scientists have argued for decades about why 10 percent of the world’s population has dyslexia. Theories include difficulties recognizing chunks of words or problems processing visual signals or issues ignoring extraneous sounds. People with dyslexia are often bright and verbal, but have trouble with the written word.
Many programs have been devised to help children and adults with reading difficulties, but none solves the problem. Since learning to read is such a big part of early childhood, it makes sense to think that identifying children with dyslexia as preschoolers, before they learn their ABCs, could lead to new and better ways to help.
But how to test reading ability in children who can’t read has remained a barrier. Researchers at the University of Padua in Italy say kids who have problems with visual attention in preschool are most likely to have difficulty reading later on.
The scientists tested 96 kindergartners who hadn’t yet learned to read, asking them to identify specific symbols amid distractions. The youngsters also were asked to identify syllables, name colors quickly and remember things they were told. Researchers continued to test the children over the next two years as they learned to read.
The kindergartners who struggled with the visual attention test were the ones who later had trouble with reading. The results were published in the journal Current Biology.
If preschoolers are screened with a simple visual attention test, the researchers conclude, children with dyslexia could get help much earlier and potentially avoid years of struggle in school and adulthood.
Indeed, many adults with dyslexia were never diagnosed as children. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Schultz says he figured it out only after his 7-year-old son was diagnosed with the learning disorder.
Schultz told NPR’s Audie Cornish that he didn’t learn to read until he was 11. He still has to be very selective in what he reads, he says, because it’s so painful.
“The actual neurological â if I may use that word â act of reading, I don’t enjoy,” Schultz said. “I have to often read the same sentence over and over before I understand it. And I have to convince myself that what I’m reading is so enjoyable and so exciting and so good for me that it’s worth the effort.”
Other research has shown that entrepreneurs are far more likely to have dyslexia. One theory is that they develop formidable skills at working with people to compensate for their problems communicating using the written word.