Having a stomach or belly fat is never healthy whether you’re a man or a woman because the amount of fat that you carry around your stomach is a clear indicator of the amount of fat that surrounds your heart as well and when you consider whatever your heart does you don’t really want its function impeded by an excess of fat.
Here’s an article that might help you uncover the secrets to belly fat and how to get rid of it.
There’s a lot of research that shows that when we serve ourselves on smaller plates we tend to serve smaller portions which obviously means that we eat less in the long run. Most of this research is being carried out with adults however a team of researchers recently set out to find out if the same holds true when dealing with children.
Worldwide studies over the last few years have consistently shown that in the west up to a third of children and adolescents were overweight and many of them were significantly overweight to be counted as obese wherein they have had a huge accumulation of excess body fats.
A recent study that has been featured in the American Academy of Pediatric Journal reports on a research study that monitored 42 first graders during their lunch meal time for two sets of 4 days. One of those set of days the children used child size tableware and on the other 4-day period they had adult sized tableware.
The results of the study were actually very interesting and surprisingly enough confirmed the expectations leaned from the adult studies. In those children who used larger plates and bowls were apt to serve themselves more food in one sitting when compared with those children who used the child sized plates and bowls.
Dr. Thomas Robinson said that the results from the study are very interesting and confirmed our expectations that the impact of plate size on adults in the laboratory also applies to children. He goes on to say that “this study provides very important preliminary evidence that using smaller dishware may help reduce children’s energy intakes.”
It should be noted however that the authors of this study were keen to point out that these findings were at the best preliminary and more research was needed which I personally find a bit strange because to my mind it stands to reason that if children have followed a similar pattern to the adults, taking part in similar studies then it’s quite likely that the conclusions from those studies – that smaller plate sizes results in people eating less, will also prove true for children as well. And as much for the adults serving children on smaller plates would be one way of reducing the problem of obesity that we are seeing more and more in our youngsters.
One of the things that sorted itself out when I lost weight was the back pain that I used to suffer from time to time and it’s not surprising really because when you’re carrying a lot of weight at the front as many men do you tend to lean back and of course that does bring a lot more strain on the lower part of your back. Not only that, the top part of your body is heavier as well and all that extra weight goes through the one point at the base of your spine.
Once again here’s a study that’s interesting whilst you could say it points out the obvious. It’s nice having common sense proven by a bit of science once in a while.
According to this study by Dr. Dorothea Nitsch of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, we are more likely to suffer chronic kidney disease when we’re older if we are fat when we’re younger. In fact according to the latest research from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, you’re more than twice as likely to have CKD in your 60s if you’re overweight in your 20s than you would be if you stayed at a normal weight right up until your 60s.
What I found strange about the whole report interesting though it is, is that they don’t seem to be able to nail down the causes of this statistical correlation.
Yet when you consider what the kidneys do for our body, clearing out a lot of the garbage that it doesn’t need, someone who is overweight when they’re younger is producing a lot more garbage for their kidneys to clear out.
It shouldn’t be any wonder that after a lifetime of having to work harder than the kidneys of somebody consuming normal amounts of food that the kidneys of an overweight person would start to fail quite drastically as they get older.
If anyone doubts the correlation between the increased consumption in fast food and the steadily growing waistlines in both men and women would do well to have a quick peek at this rather informative article from Bloomberg. It shows a direct correlation between the influx of fast food chains into many countries around the world in the late 80s and the average weight gain and waist size increase that has been measured in these countries today.
Now while it may be unfair to lay the dietary ills of all these reason converts to fast food at the doors of the likes of McDonald’s and Pizza Hut and Dominoes and fill in the blank, it is certain that the changes in diet encouraged by the successful advertising of these companies has had an adverse effect on the eating habits of the countries that they have steadily been achieving a significant market share within.
Quite a few recent studies have suggested that obesity is associated with chronic inflammation in fat tissue. Over the last few months researchers at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute have found out that an imbalance between an enzyme and its inhibitor are causing a umber of factors including inflammation, insulin resistance, obesity and fatty liver disease.
The researchers discovered that obese humans have an increased level of activity in an enzyme called neutrophil elastase which was further complicated by decreased level in a protein that inhibits the activity of the elastase.
Taking this forward the team used mice in order to find out what would happen when they reverse this imbalance and at the same time fed the mice a high fat diet. It turned out that the mice became resistant to body weight gain, their insulin resistance was reversed and the occurrence of fatty liver disease was significantly reduced.
You can find out more about this and the work of Zhen Jiang, Ph.D. by following the link below.