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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...

So we've tried the Fit Bit to see how much we exercise (and how many calories we burn when we do it).  Weight Watchers offers devices that count the points you rack up, entitling you to eat more.     But what about a necklace that hears what you eat to help you track of it?  Sounds quite bizarre but a new study is proving that it may work. Carrots and apples not only taste different. They make distinct sounds when chewed. This may seem like unnecessary knowledge, but it’s not in the laboratory of University at Buffalo computer scientist Wenyao Xu, who is creating a library that catalogues the unique sounds that foods make as we bite, grind and swallow them, according to newswise.com. The library is part of a software package that supports AutoDietary, a high-tech, food-tracking necklace being developed by Xu and researchers at Northeastern University in China. “There is no shortage of wearable devices that tell us how many calories we burn, but c...

Ready for SuperBowl 50?  I'm not.  I hate the game.  I live in a tennis and soccer house.  Sorry. But how about those snacks?  If you want to keep enjoying them, stop reading. A new study says if you're gonna eat two slices of Domino's Ultimate Pepperoni Hand-Tossed, Large, you'd have to run 109 football fields to burn it off. A handful (ounce) of peanuts?   Coaching football for 35 minutes. One potato chip with French Onion Dip (and this you might find even less tasty than that)?  Thirty minutes of singing along to ColdPlay and Beyonce during the halftime show. And what about two KFC Original Recipe Chicken Drumsticks?  Try 1,561 waves. On the liquid side, two bottles of Budweiser beer equal 267 touchdown dances in the end zone. And five tortilla chips with 7-layer dip?  Sixty minutes performing in a marching band. So what's a guy (or girl) to do?  Think about healthier snacks, of course.  That doesn't mean you have...

Ah, if only! No more cutting out cakes and cookies.  No more skipping lunch.  No more Weight Watchers. Now all you have to do is find the gene that blocks fat.  Or, at least, scientists do. According to a new study , by blocking the expression (or working) of a certain gene in patients, University of Montreal researchers have been able to isolate and somewhat shut down the production of the triglycerides that cause hypertriglyceridemia, the ones most often associated with frequent health issues, such as obesity or diabetes. “Triglycerides, like cholesterol, are lipids. They come from fats carried by our food or produced by our bodies. Depending on the cause, the accumulation of triglycerides in blood is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular and pancreatic illnesses, and other complications,” explains Dr. Daniel Gaudet, first author of the study.   What all that gobbledygook simply means is that, if the gene that produces this can be ...

I remember hearing that you have to walk a football field to burn off one M&M. (Not true.) But not too far from it. Adolescents who saw printed signs explaining the number of miles they would need to walk to burn off the calories in a sugary drink were more likely to leave the store with a lower calorie beverage, a healthier beverage or a smaller size beverage, according to new Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health research. The study says this adds to the growing evidence suggesting that simply showing calorie counts on products and menus isn’t enough to break Americans from their bad eating habits. With calorie counts expected on menus in chain restaurants with more than 20 outlets by early next year the Affordable Care Act, the researchers say policymakers may need to rethink how that information is communicated.  “People don’t really understand what it means to say a typical soda has 250 calories,” says study leader Sara N. Bleich, Ph...

Family history of heart attacks?  Afraid you might be next?  Give blood. That's right.  Get yourself to a Red Cross blood center and give up some of that valuable red stuff. According to a new study , “Excessive iron is believed to contribute to heart disease and donating blood reduces the iron stores in the body,” newswise.com quotes Ivan Pacold, MD, chair, Cardiology Department, Loyola’s Gottlieb Memorial Hospital. “Plus you get a mini-assessment each time you give blood to reinforce wellness." Many years ago I edited an article for Good Housekeeping magazine about hemochromatosis, a disease just as ugly to have as to pronounce.  Simply put, the illness came from having too much iron in your blood.  The solution?  To bleed the patient once or twice a week. It's also the most common genetic disorder in the U.S. A type of anemia (thalassemia) and chronic liver disease can cause it, and it can lead to arthritis, liver and pancreatic disease, ev...

Great.  Now I have to worry about my cholesterol medicine making me fat. A new study has found that people who take statins tend to eat more calories and fat than those who do not. According to newswise.com, "p eople who take statin drugs to lower their cholesterol appear to have developed a false sense of security that could lead to heart disease and other obesity-related illnesses." That's because a  new UCLA-led study suggests that people who took statins in 2009–2010 were consuming more calories and fat than those who used statins 10 years earlier. There was no similar increase in caloric and fat intake among non–stain users during that decade, researchers said. In 1999–2000, statin users were consuming fewer calories and less fat than individuals who didn't take these medications, the Web site reports, but that is no longer the case. "Increases in body mass index — a measure of obesity that considers body weight and height — were greater for statin-u...

Eat an egg.  Chew a cheese stick.  Swallow a hunk of steak.  Then, go exercise. Experts are now promising that some women who do this will lose more weight, or lose it faster.   According to newswise.com, "A  high-protein meal followed by 30 minutes of moderate exercise is an effective way of burning calories, especially when compared to exercising on an empty stomach." I was actually told this several years ago when I had a trainer for three months.  He suggested I eat something, anything, before I went for my jog.  I usually picked fruit and I can't say it helped me lose much weight (maybe I chose the wrong thing).  The idea? You will exercise longer and tire less, if you have food in your stomach.  But this new study found something else. “We looked at the effects of protein consumption alone on total energy expenditure, and protein consumption combined with exercise,” newswise quotes  Ashley Binns, a doctoral student in kine...

So you thought you were eating healthy.  Whole-grain toast for breakfast.   Salad for lunch.  Fat free cookies for dessert at dinner. Hold the phone. Did you know many breads and cereals are made with refined whole grains?  Here's how to know if the bread you're buying is nutrious.  If the  label reads “bleached” or “unbleached enriched wheat flour," it's refined grain.  So what? This processing strips the grain of its full nutritional benefit, according to Sheryl Kraft at yahoo.com.  She suggests that, instead,you look for a label that offers “100%   whole-grain.”   This gives you the germ, endosperm and bran — a nutritional powerhouse, she writes. Now, to salads.  Salads are great of course -- full of green things for great fiber.  But don't forget all the stuff you put in them (did you know Burger King's dressings have more fat and calories than a Whopper Jr.?).   Cheese (like me), tuna or chicken salad loaded wit...

Imagine this. You can lose weight by using your nose. Researchers have found that humans can use smell to detect dietary levels of fat, according to newswise.com.  As food smell almost always is detected before taste, the findings identify one of the first sensory qualities that signals whether a food contains fat. Innovative methods using odor to make low-fat foods more palatable could someday aid public health efforts to reduce dietary fat intake. “The human sense of smell is far better at guiding us through our everyday lives than we give it credit for,” said senior author Johan Lundström, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist at Monell at newswise.com. “That we have the ability to detect and discriminate minute differences in the fat content of our food suggests that this ability must have had considerable evolutionary importance.”   The reason?  " As the most calorically dense nutrient, fat has been a desired energy source across much of human evolution," the Web ...

Can you believe it?  The food industry -- that's companies like Kellog, General Mills, Pepsico and  Hershey -- claim to have slashed trillions of calories from their foods, according to USA Today. That's 78 calories per person -- an average cookie or a small apple (you can't be serious!). The companies say they have cut 64 trillion calories from their products -- four times what they were supposed to. The 2010 pledge taken by 16 companies — including General Mills, Campbell Soup, ConAgra Foods, Kraft Foods, Kellogg, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Hershey — was to cut 1 trillion calories by 2012 and 1.5 trillion calories by 2015, writes Mary Clare Jalonik. But what does this mean for the average person? Well, e ven though the companies that made the commitment represent most of the nation's most well-known food companies, they sold only around a third of all packaged foods and beverages at the beginning of the study, Jalonik reports. "Missing are many off-label bra...

We've been encouraged to put our forks down between bites.  To chew more slowly.  To intersperse our eating with sips of water, all to make the food seem like more so we eat less. Now a disappointing new study  has found that, while eating slowly does reduce hunger, it has does nothing to reduce the amount of calories we take in.   According to medicalnewstoday, eating slowly just makes us less hungry when we're done.  It looks like we eat the same. The Web site reports that a study done at Texas Christian University found that those who ate like someone was going to take the food away consumed just as many calories as those who took their time.  But the second group stayed full longer. Both groups also demonstrated a higher water consumption throughout the slow-eating condition, with 12 ounces of water consumed, compared with 9 ounces throughout the fast-eating condition. Interestingly, the slow eaters' high consumption of water  "may have cause...

So you thought the only reason to get your kids to bed early was some peace and quiet?  Guess again.  A new study has found that sleep -- or lack thereof -- is tied to obesity. Children who do not sleep enough may be increasing their risk for obesity, a story reported today in The New York Times. In the study children who slept more ate 134 calories fewer each day during the week they were tested than the week when they did not. Their weight averaged a half-pound less the week they slept the most. The bottom line?  Children who sleep more may see their appetites decrease, while, conversely, children who only get five or six hours of sleep a night may just want to eat more. It's also true of adults.  Studies have shown that it happens in adults, too. " Obesity develops when energy intake is greater than expenditure. Diet and physical activity play an important part in this, but an additional factor may be inadequate sleep," Dr Kristen Knutson, from the...

What now?  We've been told and told to stay away from fat .  But now scientists are finding that a certain kind of fat can help raise metabolisms, to burn more calories. In mice. According to newswise.com, scientists looked into why "skeletal muscles of obese people contained a certain type of enzyme that breaks down saturated fats." So researchers used a transgenic mouse model (one that's had DNA from a different animal injected into it), and we took the gene that makes the enzyme that’s not normally expressed and took away it’s regulation to make it active all the time,” newswise.com quotes Chad Paton, an assistant professor of nutritional biochemistry in the Department of Nutrition, Hospitality and Retailing. “What we found in those animals is they had a hypermetabolic rate compared to the wild mice, increased energy consumption and greatly increased these animals’ exercise capacity.” The enzyme apparently "converts saturated fat into monounsaturated f...

Big surprise.  Women who are frequently encouraged by their significant others to lose weight are more likely to resort to unhealthy measures, such as fasting and diet pills, according to a new study  by the Health Behavior News Service, part of the Center for Advancing Health, reported at newswise.com. Almost half of the participants said their significant other encouraged them to diet. Unhealthy weight control behaviors -- fasting, using diet pills, and self-induced vomiting -- and some of the more extreme ways young adults try to control their weight, are often the beginning of more severe eating disorders, depression and other health problems, the study found. I'm a big fan of the shows on addiction and intervention, and I can't count on one hand the number of episodes that show young women -- even pregnant women -- hovering over the toilet as all the food they've eaten -- or binged on -- pours out.   I'm fortunate.  My husband could care less w...

OK.  You can now blame your genes . Many of us fighting weight battles have used the old "It's genetic" excuse to explain our inability to lose weight.  But a story today by Gina Kolata in The New York Times may prove there's some truth to that, after all. She offers tantalizing evidence, as demonstrated in mice, why some people can eat a lot, and never gain weight, while others (I'm giving no names) look at a piece of cheesecake and pile on the pounds. Kolata reports that this new information may offer clues to, "Why do . . .people gain different amounts of weight while overeating by the same amount?" Scientists have long known that our genes have a lot to do with our ability to stay thin, or fat. Or, as Kolata puts it, "They knew body weight was strongly inherited."  They've now found evidence that many — if not hundreds — of genes may be involved to make people hungry, and so, overeat. These genes determine how quickly calorie...

And now we have depressed mothers to blame! According to a story at nytimes.com, "Mothers who report symptoms of depression are more likely to display obesity-promoting practices and have children who are overweight or obese than mothers who say they are not depressed, according to a new study ." As if we don't blame ourselves for enough.  But mothers who rated themselves as being moderately or severely depressed were 2.5 times more likely to have 5-year-olds who were overweight, or even obese, Hope Reeves, reports. These children were far more likely than other children to not eat breakfast and drink sweetened beverages.  I've learned from Weight Watchers (and a few commercials) that eating breakfast can help you lose weight, because if you don't -- or maybe I should say if I don't -- I eat all day to make up for it. Another reason for their children to be overweight?  The depressed mothers were less likely to supervise what and how much food the...

It worked with cigarettes.  Now some are thinking it may work for food -- tax those who eat too much. Well, you're not taxing the people, per se, but the calories they eat. A story today at The Washington Post notes that "an increase in the price of a calorie regardless of its source would improve obesity outcomes,” according to a working paper that three researchers prepared for a private, nonprofit bureau, according to Peter Whoriskey. The main culprit for one out of three Americans being fat or obese?  Low food prices, Whoriskey reports.  If we raised the taxes on sugary drinks, fast food and junk food, would people stop buying it, as they did cigarettes? No one quite knows, but could you really tax something people need to live?  I suppose you could say we don't need Big Macs or giant Slurpees but the fear is that raising the prices on some foods probably would raise them on all, like fruits and vegetables, too, making them too expensive for many to buy, ...

Now we've seen it all? Nutrition labels on alcohol?  It's coming. We already have warnings on pregnancy but now the Treasury Department, which regulates alcohol, "said this past week that beer, wine and spirits companies can use labels that include serving size, servings per container, calories, carbohydrates, protein and fat per serving. Such package labels have never before been approved," according to Mary Clare Jalonik of the AP. The labels, however, are voluntary so you probably won't be seeing too many of them. I don't know about you but when I'm drinking my Cosmopolitan , I don't really want to know it has the same number of calories as a brownie, or two (212). That's what was behind the famous Skinny Girl cocktail brand, putting fewer calories in liquor. But I'm not in the mood to count calories when I'm out drinking.  It's just not the most important thing on my mind. Some weight loss experts say to treat it as a piece...

OK.  So do you really know how many calories are in that pomegranate soda?  Mary Clare Jalonick writes that up until now, it's been hard for the government to keep up with all the new foods -- and their nutritional content -- that are constantly streaming into the marketplace. But the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill is hoping to put a stop to that by creating a ginormous map of what Americans are buying and eating, according to Jalonick. Chocolate milk has long interested researchers because, though the government lists chocolate milk with 2% milk as one unit, the UNC group, using scanners from grocery stores and other commercial data "founds thousands of different brands and variations of 2% chocolate milk and averaged them out, Jalonick reports. What they found was that this wasn't just happening with chocolate milk, it was pretty much occurring with every food product.  Can you imagine making sense of all that, enough to truly have accurate cal...