Hot MedFax

They're all the rage.  Open floor plans .  But did you know they could make you eat more? According to a new study, dining environments can have serious consequences for eating behaviors, newswise.com reports.  Although the research was conducted on a college campus, it may still have relevance for the rest of us. The study, which was conducted with 57 college students in the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell, made use of folding screens to manipulate the arrangement of kitchen and dining areas during the service of buffet-style meals, and two-way mirrors for the unobtrusive observation of variously sized groups of student diners. “Although more research is needed,” researchers say, “the results of our study suggest that the openness of a floor plan, among many other factors, can affect how much we eat. Eating in an ‘open concept kitchen,’ with greater visibility and convenience of food access, can set off a chain reaction. We’re more likely to get up and head t...

Admit it.  The sound of your husband crunching his breakfast cereal sometimes makes you consider divorce. But did you know the sounds you make when eating food affect how you eat?  According to researchers at Brigham Young University and Colorado State University, the noise your food makes while you're eating can have a significant effect on how much food you eat. The "Crunch Effect," as they call it, suggests you're likely to eat less if you're more conscious of the sound your food makes while you're eating. Therefore, watching loud TV or listening to loud music while eating can mask eating sounds that keep you in check.   "For the most part, consumers and researchers have overlooked food sound as an important sensory cue in the eating experience," says study coauthor Gina Mohr, an assistant professor of marketing at CSU, at newswise.com. "Sound is typically labeled as the forgotten food sense," adds Ryan Elder, assistan...

My husband is going to love this.  He'd live on seafood if he could.  Every week when we go out he orders a shrimp cocktail, then has a salad with salmon. He does it because he loves it but now there's an even better reason. Eating seafood just might protect you from Alzheimer's. A new study has found that older adults with a major risk gene for Alzheimer’s disease who ate at least one seafood serving per week showed fewer signs of Alzheimer’s-related brain changes. In contrast, this association was not found in the brains of volunteers who ate fish weekly but did not carry the risk gene. The researchers also examined the brains for levels of mercury, which can be found in seafood and is known to be harmful to the brain and nervous system. They found that seafood consumption was associated with increased mercury levels in the brains but not the amount of beta amyloid protein plaques and tau protein tangles, the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. The study's purp...

According to the experts, we're changing how we eat .   Our priorities have shifted, they say. Some of us have jumped on the gluten-free wagon while others now snack over 50% of the time they eat, newswise.com notes.  Here are the facts as the Web site reports them:    1. In a single day, American’s typically eat and drink 14 different kinds of food and beverages from sandwiches, fruit, vegetables, carbonated soft drinks, milk, coffee, potatoes, salty snacks, juices, and ready-to-eat cereal (NPD, 2013). 2. The largest restaurant chains in America from highest grossing are McDonalds, Subway, Starbucks, Wendy’s,  Burger King, Taco Bell, Dunkin’ Donuts, Pizza Hut, KFC, and Chik-fil-A (Technomic, 2013).  3. Forty-five percent of Millennials and 24 percent of Boomers have adopted a special diet (e.g., gluten-free or vegan). One-third of all Millennials’ eating involve global cuisine; 56 percent of Millennials want something healthy for their next snack (H...

Restaurant visits are slipping and guess who they're blaming?  Millenials. It's turning out that 18-to-30-year-olds just aren't going to restaurants much.  Fifty to 60 million of these young people are going out to restaurants far less than baby boomers did at that age, according to Stephanie Strom. And restaurants are hurting. Strom reports that research has shown that "restaurant visits among millennials have fallen 16 percent over the last four years, failing to pick up even as the economy has improved. The outlook for the restaurant industry over the next 10 years is dismal,” Bonnie Riggs, a restaurant industry analyst at a consumer marketing firm, told Strom.       Sales are expected to grow less than 4% in the next 10 years for places like McDonald's and even fast-casual outlets like Chipotle, a very bad thing for restaurants. In fact, McDonald's sales in stores open a year fell 1.2%, after rising every quarter for almost the last decade...

O.K.  So now they're making heavy people pay more for airline seats.  But now your boss may also make you pay.  OMG, can't we just be fat in peace? According to a story in today's Wall Street Journal, any man with a waist over 40 inches may wind up eating more of his employer's health care costs, shelling out more for health insurance.  The idea is to penalize people for thick waists and high blood pressure, two of the largest health concerns that cost companies the most, and that you can do something about. Theoretically. It makes sense to try to get people to live healthier lives, not just to save money but to help them live longer, too.  But along with NYC's Mayor Michael Bloomberg outlawing Big Gulps (at least, until the courts got their hands on him), and maybe salt, too, the world seems to be deciding more and more the price for being, shall we say, overweight? It's not just having to bear models with their hip bones sticking out and a constant par...