A nutritious diet is not seen as being as important as physical activity when it comes to college students’ health and wellness efforts, according to Indiana University researchers, even when the students live in an environment that provides classes, cues and motivation to eat healthily. “Personal preferences triumph over discipline,” the researchers note. The researchers examined the eating habits of college students as they transitioned from high school to university life and to living in residence halls or apartments. Habits that college students establish as they leave home may have long-reaching effects on their health and that of their future families, the researchers note. The students, they say, bring to college the eating habits established at home, where most skipped breakfast and almost 40 percent ate out for dinner or were on their own. This “grab and go” view of food and a preference for restaurant-style foods was apparent in the study. Researchers found that regardless of the variety available in the residence hall or the need to prepare meals in apartment living, foods that can require more preparation or are more perishable are eaten less often. The researchers studied three groups of students — students in apartments, students living in a residence hall and students living in a Fitness and Wellness Living-Learning Center, a themed residential community that provides students with an onsite fitness facility and educational material — including a required course on healthy living. Students in all three groups achieved similar levels of physical activity, with around 56 percent meeting the recommended three bouts of exercise weekly. Compared to how they ate at home, the students reported eating the same amount or less of the healthy foods examined. Students in the Living and Learning Center reported eating even less of these healthy foods. The findings suggest that school and college health educators should consider providing students with tools to “internalize that fitness = exercise = healthy food,” and to find ways for them to eat healthy in our grab-and-go world.

A Brazilian palm berry sweeping the globe as a popular health food though little research has been done on it – now may have its purported benefits better understood.

In the first research involving people, the acai (ah-sigh-EE) berry has proven its ability to be absorbed in the human body when consumed both as juice and pulp.  That finding, by a team of Texas AgriLife Research scientists, was published in a recent issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Showing the berry’s absorption in humans is important because it is known to contain numerous antioxidants.  The berry is heavily marketed in the U.S. as a health food.

The study involved 12 healthy volunteers who consumed a single serving of acai juice or pulp.  Researchers believe the results point to the need for continued research on the berry which is commonly used in juices, beverages, smoothies, frozen treats and dietary supplements.

“Acai is naturally low in sugar, and the flavor is described as a mixture of red wine and chocolate,” said lead investigator Dr. Susanne Talcott, “so what more would you want from a fruit?”

Talcott, who also is assistant professor with the Texas A&M University’s nutrition and food science department, said that previous studies have shown the ability of the human body to absorb target antioxidants (from other produce), but “no one had really tested to see if acai antioxidants are absorbed in humans.”

Sales of acai products have increased dramatically in the U.S. where it has been touted as a metabolism booster, weight reducer and athletic enhancer.  Advertisements use buzzwords such as health, wellness, energy, taste and organic.

About the only buzzword not used with acai is “local.”  The berries are harvested in the Brazilian rainforest from acai palms that may reach heights in excess of 60 feet one of the same palms used to harvest edible hearts of palm.

The fruit is about the size of a large blueberry yet only the outermost layers of the fruit, the pulp surrounding a large internal seed, are edible, Talcott noted.

Talcott and her co-researcher and husband Dr. Steve Talcott began studying the palmberry in 2001.  His first scientific report on acai, apparently the first such study in English, was published in 2004.

Initially, their studies on the berry examined antioxidant and nutritional components in pulp and juice.  Later studies showed the berry’s activity against cancer cells, Talcott noted.

With that background, the researchers then decided to find out whether those elements were actually being absorbed into the human body or being eliminated unused as waste.

“Like vitamin C, the body can only absorb so much at a time,” Steve Talcott explained.

He said the researchers now “need to determine potential disease-fighting health benefits, so we can make intelligent recommendations on how much acai should be consumed.

For the clinical trial, people were given acai pulp and acai juice containing half the concentration of anthocyanins as the pulp and each compared to the control foods: applesauce and a non-antioxidant beverage.

Blood and urine samples at 12 and 24 hours after consumption showed significant increases in antioxidant activity in the blood after both the acai pulp and applesauce consumption, she said.  Both acai pulp and acai juice showed significant absorption of antioxidant anthocyanins into the blood and antioxidant effects.  The research couple said future studies hopefully will help determine whether the consumption of acai will result in any disease-preventing health benefit and the proper serving sizes for a beneficial dose for people.

“Our concern has been that it is sold as a super food – and it definitely has some good attributes – but it is not a solution to all diseases,” she said.  “There are a great number of foods on the market, and this could just be part of a well-balanced diet.”

America does a mediocre job caring for its sickest people.  The nation, says a new report, gets a C.

Palliative care programs make patients facing serious and chronic illness more comfortable by alleviating their pain and symptoms and counseling patients and their families.

Only Vermont, Montana and New Hampshire earned an A, according to America’s Care of Serious Illness: A State-by-State Report Card on Access to Palliative Care in Our Nation’s Hospitals, a report based on a study in the October 2008 issue of the Journal of Palliative Medicine.  Three states – Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi – got an F.

“The good news is that hospitals nationwide have implemented palliative care programs quickly over the last six years,” said R. Sean Morrison, MD, director of the non-profit National Palliative Care Research Center and senior author of the study.  “The bad news is that if you live in the South or you have to rely on public or small community hospitals, you’re in trouble.”

Ninety million Americans are living with serious illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson’s, stroke and Alzheimer’s.  As the baby boomers age, this number will more than double over the next 25 years.

“Americans are living longer – but with serious illnesses,” said Dr. Diane E. Meier, director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care and co-author of the study.  “Without palliative care, people with serious illnesses like cancer often suffer unnecessarily from severe fatigue, pain, shortness of breath, nausea and other symptoms from their disease and treatments.”

The study suggests that in states with more palliative care programs, patients are less likely to die in the hospital; don’t have to go to the intensive care unit as much in the last six months of life; and spend fewer days in intensive care or the coronary unit in the last six months.

That also saves hospitals money, which could help lower health care costs.

A carefully framed combination of moderate exercise and nutritional supplements could help older people maintain an active lifestyle for longer.

A Manchester Metropolitan University study has found that taking carbohydrate and protein supplements just before and just after low-resistance exercise could boost muscle performance and slow muscle wastage in people over retirement age.

Moreover, this combination appears to deliver greater fitness benefits than undertaking heavy-resistance training with or without changing one’s nutritional habits.

This was the first-ever study of the combination of structured exercise and nutritional supplements to focus wholly on older people.  Undertaken as part of the SPARC (Strategic Promotion of Ageing Research Capacity) initiative, the findings will be discussed at this year’s BA Festival of Science in Liverpool on Thursday 11th September.  SPARC is supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

This groundbreaking study involved a carefully selected sample of around 60 healthy, independent-living adults aged 65 and over.

The volunteers were randomly divided into groups who underwent different 12 week programmes of physical exercise and nutritional supplementation.  Everyone was then re-assessed at the end of the programme.

Some groups undertook low-resistance exercise once a week; others undertook high-resistance exercise twice a week.  Within each group, some of the volunteers took protein and carbohydrate supplements while others did not.

When all the participants were re-assessed at the end of the 12 week programme, it was observed that muscle size and strength had increased in all groups.

However, the results suggested that older people would derive the most benefits if they took appropriate supplements coupled with low-intensity exercise.

“Maintaining muscle performance and arresting muscle wastage can offer older people real improvements in their quality of life,” says Dr Gladys Pearson, who led the research.  “Though we still need to assess precisely what level of exercise gives the best results, we believe we’ve shown that regular low-resistance exercise complemented by the right nutritional supplements could boost the well-being of the UK’s ageing population.”

Dr Pearson and her team now aim to look at the effectiveness of novel combinations of strength training and nutritional supplementation as a way of speeding recovery and improving mobility for old and young orthopaedic surgery patients.

With more new mothers in the workplace than ever before, there has been a corresponding increase in the number of child-care facilities in the United States.

The current research was supported in part by the Berkowitz Fellowship of the department of nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health; an Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort training grant from the National Center for Education Statistics; and training grants on statistical analysis for education policy from the American Educational Research Association.

However much the likes of Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay might want to shake up our diets, culinary evolution dictates that our cultural cuisines remain little changed as generations move on, shows new research, published today, Thursday, 10 July, 2008, in the Institute of Physics (IOP)’s New Journal of Physics (NJP).

The research, ‘The non-equilibrium nature of culinary evolution’, shows that three national cuisines British, French and Brazilian – are affected by the founder effect which keeps idiosyncratic and nutritionally ambivalent, expensive and sometimes hard to transport ingredients in our diets.

Using the medieval cookery book, Pleyn Delit, and three authoritative cook books from Britain, France and Brazil, the New Penguin Cookery Book, Larousse Gastronomique and Dona Benta respectively, the researchers from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, compiled statistics which could be compared to see how time and distance effect the three different national cuisines.

Time, the number of ingredients used, the number of recipes published in each cook book and the ratio between the number of ingredients and the number of recipes in the books were used as variables to assess how our diets have evolved.

Three editions of Dona Benta, from 1946, 1969 and 2004, were evaluated to see how the Brazilian diet has changed over the past half century, amidst the change from a regional to a more globalised food consumer profile, and found that the rank and importance of certain idiosyncratic ingredients, such as chayote, an edible plant that is a frequent ingredient in Central and South American diets, remained much the same.

Ranking the importance of certain food types by their frequency of use in each national cuisine and comparing them to ingredients which have an equivalent rank in one of the other two foreign cuisines led to patterns emerging which suggest that all our menus evolve in similar ways.

So, whether it’s the Irish with potatoes, the French with frogs’ legs, the Germans with sauerkraut, the Ghanaians with plantains or the Japanese with fish stock, it seems a global food culture has not shifted some die-hard culture-based eating habits.

As the authors, from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Sao Paulo University, write, “Some low fitness ingredients present in the initial recipes have a strong difficulty of being replaced and can even propagate during culinary growth.  They are like frozen “cultural” accidents.”

“Consumers who understand their emotional ability can make higher quality consumption decisions such as health decisions and product choices,” explain the authors, Blair Kidwell, David M. Hardesty, and Terry L. Childers (University of Kentucky). “A person can know a lot about nutrition and know what foods are not healthy, but can still make poor decisions when unable to recognize, reason, and solve problems based on emotional patterns,” they add. For example, compulsive eaters may understand nutrition, but they may not realize their emotions affect their food choices.This research establishes a new method for assessing consumers’ emotional intelligence. The authors developed a scale by testing undergraduates with more than 110 questions about emotions and consumption. As a result of this research, the authors were able to determine which emotion-related questions best predicted overeating.

The researchers then narrowed the questions to 18. They measured four different dimensions of consumer emotional ability: perceiving, facilitating, understanding, and managing emotions.  This 18-item scale—called the CEIS, or Consumer Emotional Intelligence Scale—is a highly reliable indicator of consumer behavior.

It seems consumers who care about healthy eating need to consider their feelings instead of studying nutrition labels.