Oprah’s Investment in Weight Watchers Was Smart Because the Program Doesn’t Work

By Traci Mann

On October 19, Oprah made news by buying a 10 percent stake in Weight Watchers. Analysts quickly speculated about what the move could mean for Weight Watchers, with the general consensus being that Oprah’s involvement, endorsement, and ability to promote it on her OWN network will be a boon to the company. Sure enough, stock prices more than doubled by the end of the day of the announcement and have stayed up since.

At first glance — and in stark contrast to some of the other wellness ideasshe touts — Winfrey seems to be investing in a scientifically sound weight-loss company. Studies have shown, after all, that Weight Watchers, along with three other popular diets (Zone, Atkins, and South Beach), leads to modest weight loss (an average of about ten pounds) in a year. In fact, those same studies found that only Weight Watchers participants reliably lost more weight than people in control groups who were not enrolled in a diet program at all. At first glance, Weight Watchers works.

But the truth is a bit more complicated: Winfrey’s venture is, in fact, a brilliant investment, although not necessarily for the reason she thinks. It’s brilliant not because Weight Watchers works but because it doesn’t. It’s the perfect business model. People give Weight Watchers the credit when they lose weight. Then they regain the weight and blame themselves. This sets them up to join Weight Watchers all over again, and they do.

The company brags about this to its shareholders. According to Weight Watchers’ business plan from 2001 (which I viewed in hard-copy form at a library), its members have “demonstrated a consistent pattern of repeat enrollment over a number of years,” signing up for an average of four separate program cycles. And in an interview for the documentary The Men Who Made Us Thin, former CFO Richard Samber explained that the reason the business was successful was because the majority of customers regained the weight they lost, or as he put it: “That’s where your business comes from.” 

RELATED STORIES

Nice Words Can Lead to Weight LossI Am Training for a Marathon. So Why Am I Getting Fat?

But what about those aforementioned studies showing Weight Watchers works? There’s an important catch: While most dieters do lose weight in the short term, they gain most of it back in the long term. In the one study that followed up with Weight Watchers dieters over a longer-term span, the average dieter had already regained six of the 12 pounds they had lost when researchers checked in two years later. This general pattern is true no matter the diet, and the weight regain only continues in the years that follow. My labreviewed 60 years of clinical trials of diets, and we found that people lose an average of 10 percent of their starting weight on most diets but within two to five years have gained back all but about two pounds.

So, in reality, despite the short-term effectiveness of certain diet regimes, the most common outcome of dieting itself, by a landslide, is either weight regain or trivial weight loss — which leads to a lot of repeat business for companies like Weight Watchers. But no diet, not even Weight Watchers, can claim that more than a small minority of its customers successfully keep the weight off in the long term. To be fair, Weight Watchers doesn’t explicitly promise long-term weight loss, but it neglects to mention that it’s extremely unlikely and instead makes vague claims on its website, such as, “Our proven program works.” Works for what? It would be easy for potential customers to misconstrue the website’s statement that they’ve “helped millions of people change their relationship with food for good.”

The problem is that dieting itself leads to a host of physiological changes that undermine long-term efforts to maintain the weight loss. Some of these changes probably evolved to keep us alive in times of famine. For example, if your body detects that not enough calories are coming in, your metabolism changes so that you can run your body on fewer calories than before, leading your body to store more as fat. So if you eat the same amount of calories that you were eating when you lost weight on your diet, after a while you will stop losing weight, and maybe even start gaining it. Dieters sometimes refer to this as “the plateau,” and it is a predictable result of calorie restriction. Few dieters make it past this plateau.

Dieting also leads to changes in the hormones of the gastrointestinal system, the so-called gut hormones. Some of those hormones (such as leptin and peptide YY) influence when you feel full, and others (including ghrelin) influence when you feel hungry. Levels of leptin and peptide YYdecrease after dieting, whereas levels of ghrelin increase. So food that made you feel full before you dieted will feel less satisfying as your diet goes on, and the extra hunger makes it that much harder to stick to your diet.

To make matters worse, another counterproductive result of dieting is neurological changes that may make food seem even more tempting and even harder to resist than before. Brain-imaging studies by Eric Stice and his colleagues found that, when shown pictures of high-calorie foods, people who had fasted for as few as five hours that day or had lost even two pounds in the last two weeks had increased activation in brain regions associated with liking and craving those foods, paying attention to those foods, and being motivated to acquire and eat them. Stice and his colleagues also found that the longer you deprive yourself, the more appetizing and tougher to resist the foods get. Not surprisingly, these neurological changes have been linked to weight gain.

None of this is to suggest that no one successfully loses weight and keeps it off for several years. But based on surveys of those who do, conducted by Rena Wing at the Brown University’s Alpert Medical School, these folks are not casual dieters. Rather, they tend to make weight loss a singular focus of their life, weighing themselves and everything they eat every day. They tend to eat the same foods in the same amounts most days, and they exercise a ton: a minimum of an hour a day, seven days a week. As obesity expert Kelly Brownell, dean of Duke University’s School of Public Policy, told the New York Times, “They never don’t think about their weight.”

So, despite the inspirational stories of a few outliers, the bottom line is that your goal to keep weight off is at odds with your body’s goal to keep you alive. And your body has the upper hand, making this an unfair fight. When the weight invariably comes back, as it does for all but about 5 percent of dieters, they shouldn’t blame themselves. The problem isn’t the dieter. The problem is dieting itself, as well as the constant temptations in our current food environment. Until people understand this, Weight Watchers will continue to create repeat customers instead of successful dieters, and Oprah will get an impressive return on her investment.

Traci Mann, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota and the author of Secrets From the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again.

How Junk Food Can Damage Your Kidneys as Much as Type 2 Diabetes

BY ADAM BIBLE AND BRITTANY SMITH

Seems every month another bit of smart research craps on fast food’s head—and this month is no different. A study in Experimental Physiology has tied fast food to the type of kidney damage seen in folks with type 2 diabetes. Supersize that insurance plan!

In the study, rats were fed either high-fat rodent chow (60% of calories from fat) for 5 weeks or junk food consisting of cheese, chocolate bars, biscuits, and marshmallows for 8 weeks to see how insulin resistance and too much sugar or fat affect the kidneys.

The researchers tested the effect of these diets on blood sugar levels and glucose transporters. They then compared changes seen in their diet-induced obesity and insulin resistance to changes in rats with actual type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

How Much Junk Food Can You Really Get Away With Eating? >>>

Little background info: Type 2 diabetes is typically linked to obesity; in short, your body doesn’t react properly to insulin, or doesn’t produce enough of it, which causes a surplus to accumulate in the blood. This raises blood sugar levels, and certain types of glucose transporters and their regulatory proteins. This can have severe long-term consequences for organs, especially the kidneys. 

For type 2 diabetic rats, there was a higher number of glucose transporters (GLUT and SGLT) and regulatory proteins; this was also the case for rats fed a high-fat and junk food diet.

“The Western diet contains more and more processed junk food and fat, and there is a well-established link between excessive consumption of this type of food and recent increases in the prevalence of obesity and type 2 diabetes,” lead study author Havovi Chichger said in a press release.

Researchers document troubling rise in strokes in young adults, starting at age 25

By Jennifer Breheny Wallace May 11

From the WashingtonPost
Robin Dickinson and her family. (Adam Houseman)

There’s a troubling statistic in the United States when it comes to strokes. Although stroke hospitalizations have declined in recent years among the aged, the opposite appears to be be happening among younger Americans. In a study released Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association, researchers found that between 2000 and 2010, hospitalizations for ischemic stroke, the most common type, dropped nearly 20 percent overall — but among people ages 25 to 44, there was a sharp 44 percent increase in the rate.

Ischemic stroke accounts for about 80 percent of all strokes and occurs when a blood vessel in the neck or brain is blocked. Deprived of blood’s oxygen and vital nutrients, brain cells begin to die and the abilities controlled by that part of the brain, like muscular control or speech, are compromised.

Doctors attribute the apparent rise in strokes among younger adults to the same lifestyle risk factors traditionally found in older patients, such as obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure. For other young adults, stroke may be caused by rare conditions, like congenital heart defects, or injury to the arteries in the neck, which can be caused by even minor trauma.

[Pop a daily aspirin to help prevent heart attacks, stroke and colon cancer]

“When people think of stroke, they think of Grandpa who smokes and has high blood pressure,” says neurologist Lee Schwamm, director of Massachusetts General Hospital, Acute Stroke Services. “And while he’s more likely to have one, it doesn’t mean that if you’re young and healthy you can’t have a stroke too.”

Roughly 90 percent of the 800,000 strokes each year in the United States happen to adults age 50 and older, but the new study underscores just how significant the risk is for those who are younger.

The data analyzed includes information on 8 million hospital stays and came from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample, the largest publicly available database in the United States on these patients. The researcher found that stroke hospitalizations decreased in the two oldest age groups: For those 85 and older, stroke hospitalizations went from 2,077 per 100,000 to 1,618; those ages 65 to 84, the ratio dropped from 846 per 100,000 to 605. But for those ages 45 to 64, the rate rose from 149 per 100,000 to 156; and for those ages 25 to 44, from 16 to 23 per 100,000.

[They said my dad was having a stroke. I wish I had been able to handle it better.]

The researchers said their results should be interpreted with caution because some people fail to recognize that they are having a stroke and don’t seek medical attention, so the number of hospitalizations may be lower than the actual number of people experiencing the condition. Also, among the younger individuals, “we cannot rule out that changes were due to chance since the number of events were small.” However, the researchers added that their findings are consistent with smaller regional studies — such as one in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky — that also showed a similar trend of increasing strokes among younger Americans.

Robin Dickinson’s case serves as a cautionary tale about why even the young should be vigilant about recognizing symptoms of stroke. At age 31, she was married with two young children and working as a family physician near Denver when she unknowingly suffered two strokes within days of each other. The second sent her to the hospital.

“With both strokes, I instantly started spinning and would fall over if I closed my eyes,” she said, “but I dismissed them as migraines.”

While the extreme dizziness gradually got better, she says, it never went away. “Like so many other young adults who have suffered a stroke, I was in denial, even though as a doctor I knew what the symptoms were telling me,” says Dickinson.

[Another reason not to binge-drink: It can give you a heart attack or stroke]

Doctors found the cause of her strokes was due to a tiny tear in a large vessel in her neck that allowed a blood clot to form, break off and limit blood flow to the part of the brain that’s responsible for balance and coordination.

After the strokes, which occurred three years ago, Dickinson said her family’s life was turned upside down. Extreme dizziness, triggered by fatigue, forced her to severely limit her work schedule. “Our finances got so bad that we could only afford to eat potatoes, oatmeal and rice, so we went on food stamps,” she says.

“Three years later,” says Dickinson, “I’m doing better and better, but I still struggle to bring a sense of normalcy back to our family’s lives.”

With a stroke, time-loss is brain-loss — nearly two million brain cells die every minute a stroke goes untreated, increasing the risk of disability or death. Unsuspecting young adults like Dickinson often delay seeking medical attention. But, this delay can cause them to miss the small, critical window when the clot-busting drug tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) may be administered to rescue dying brain cells and stop further damage. Research shows the sooner the drug is given, the better the results — and after four-and-a-half hours, the window for receiving it closes.

“Unfortunately, not all patients qualify for this drug and not every hospital has the staff to administer it 24 hours a day,” says neurologist Salina Waddy, a stroke expert with the National Institutes of Health. “So, the best thing a patient can do is to prevent a stroke in the first place.” Up to 80 percent of strokes are preventable by managing key risk factors, like eating well, exercising, not smoking and limiting alcohol consumption.

Each year significantly more women die from stroke than from breast cancer — and yet many women think of stroke as a man’s disease. According to a 2015 national survey, only 11 percent of the 1000 women surveyed could identify female-specific stroke risk factors, like migraine headaches with aura, hormone-replacement therapy, oral contraception and pregnancy, particularly in the final month and postpartum.

Catherine Zalewski (Zalewski family)

In the summer of 2010, new mom Catherine Zalewski, now 34, was getting ready to feed her 6-month old daughter when she felt a sudden wave of exhaustion accompanied by a tingling of pins-and-needles throughout her body. “I didn’t know what was going on, just that I felt off and my vision was doubled,” says Zalewski. “I remember that I kept missing my daughter’s mouth with the bottle.”

As a former Mrs. New Jersey and a certified personal trainer, Zalewski has always been healthy and in shape, so it never occurred to her that she could be having a stroke. After she managed to put her daughter down in her crib, Zalewski climbed into bed herself for a nap, assuming parental exhaustion was to blame for her symptoms.

Seven hours later, her husband returned home, found her in bed and brought her to the hospital. The stroke left her partially paralyzed. For six weeks, Zalewski underwent in-patient rehabilitation, relearning how to walk, talk and dress herself. “It took me weeks to be able to hold my daughter all by myself,” she says.

In looking for the cause of the stroke, doctors discovered that Zalewski had a patent foramen ovale (PFO), a hole in her heart that required surgery to close. She had the surgery later that year.

With a successful recovery behind her, Zalewski gave birth to a baby boy last year. “Three months later, I was back at the gym training with a client when I suddenly began to feel a numbing sensation,” she says. “My words began to slur, and I quickly realized I was having another stroke — but I couldn’t get the words out.”

Luckily, the manager of her gym noticed the warning signs and called 911. Within an hour she was given the clot-busting drug tPA. Because of the early intervention, her recovery this time was quick. She was back at home and resuming her normal routine within a week.

While doctors still don’t know the cause of her two strokes, Zalewski says she believes it has to do with her pregnancies. “My advice to young mothers is to pay close attention to your own health, too,” says Zalewski. “As women we often take care of everyone else first — let my story be the lesson of the devastating consequences that can come from putting yourself last.”

May is National Stroke Awareness Month. As Catherine Zalewski’s story shows, strokes are highly treatable if you act fast. The American Stroke Association teaches the acronym FAST to help you quickly spot a stroke and take quick action:

• Face drooping. Does one side of the face droop or is it numb? Ask the person to smile. Is the person’s smile uneven?
• Arm weakness. Is one arm weak or numb? Ask the person to raise both arms. Does one arm drift downward?
• Speech difficulty. Is speech slurred? Is the person unable to speak or hard to understand? Ask the person to repeat a simple sentence, like “The sky is blue.” Is the sentence repeated correctly?
• Time to call 911. If someone shows any of these symptoms, even if the symptoms go away, call 911 and get the person to the hospital immediately. Check the time so you’ll know when the first symptoms appeared.

How Gut Bacteria Impacts Obesity, Allergies, Happiness and More

From- https://shangshuiw.wordpress.com

A growing body of research has shown that the teeming populations of gut bacteria within us have evolved complex connections that can affect our body’s basic functions — from metabolism to sleep to mood.

Changes in the makeup of the gut bacteria in the human digestive system have been associated with a growing number of diseases.

It’s important to remember, though, that the science is still young and evolving.

Here we highlight the most intriguing of the cutting-edge studies.

Healthy Heart

Some of the many beneficial compounds that certain gut bacteria produce for us are carotenoids—antioxidants that are believed to protect against stroke and angina.

In a 2012 study in Nature Communications, researchers in Sweden compared the gut microbiome of stroke patients to that of healthy subjects and found that there were more carotenoid-­producing gut bacteria in healthy participants.

Stanley Hazen, M.D., Ph.D., and his team at the Cleveland Clinic have been looking at a variety of ways microbes play a role in heart disease.

For example, when certain gut bacteria metabolize lecithin (abundant in egg yolks) and ­carnitine (a compound in red meat), it boosts compounds in the blood that are linked to an increased risk of heart attack and stroke. Remove the bacteria and the risk-causing compounds vanish even ­after eating those foods.

Allergies Denied

Researchers in Copenhagen reviewed the medical records and stool samples of 411 children for 6 years and found that those who had the least diverse colonies of gut bacteria as infants were more likely to develop some types of allergies.

Trim Weight

A growing body of studies indicates that obese people tend to have a much lower diversity of gut bacteria — up to 40 percent less — than people with a healthy weight. And gut microbes may be responsible for those lean or plump traits: several studies with mice have found that transferring gut microbes from obese mice (or from obese humans) into non-­obese mice, leads the non-obese mice to gain weight.

In turn, adding gut bacteria from lean mice into heavy ones causes the chubby mice to lose weight on a high-fiber, low-fat diet. Researchers believe different bacteria metabolize food differently, which could affect how much your body absorbs.

A 2013 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests certain gut microbes may help lower blood pressure.

Researchers found that by-products produced by certain gut bacteria activated a specific kind of cell receptor in blood vessels that lowers blood pressure. More bacteria equals more by-products, which equals healthier blood pressure.

Fight Cancer

A robust and diverse gut microbiome may help certain chemotherapies work better. French researcher Laurence Zitvogel, M.D., Ph.D., and his colleagues observed that gut bacteria in mice encouraged immature immune cells in the lymph nodes to develop into tumor-targeting T-cells.

In contrast, when mice were treated with antibiotics (which wipes out bacteria) before begin­ning chemotherapy, the chemotherapy was less effec­tive. The researchers ­believe the gut bacteria help prime the immune system to respond to chemotherapy.

Some microbes may be associated with colon cancer. University of Michigan researchers exposed two groups of germ-free mice — essentially mice with sterile colons — to a known carcinogen.

One group then received gut bacteria from mice with colon cancer and went on to develop twice the number of tumors than the other group who got gut bacteria from cancer-free mice. The researchers narrowed down the microbial families associated with colon cancer and one included Prevotella.

People with inflammatory bowel disease are at higher risk of developing ­colon cancer than the general population. Researchers have thought that the main culprit is overactive immune cells, which release DNA-damaging molecules. 

Now new findings in Science suggest that overactive immune cells also may be causing an imbalance in your gut bacteria — encouraging E. coli strains that produce cancer-causing toxins.

Relaxed & Happy

There’s something to be said for “gut feelings.”

Gut bacteria produce hundreds of different neurotransmitters, including up to 95 percent of the body’s supply of serotonin, a mood and sleep regulator. Serotonin also controls movement within the intestines.

Our gut is said to be our “second brain” in part because the vagus nerve is a major communications highway that stretches from the brain to various points along the intestinal lining; communication travels in both directions.

One Lactobacillus species, for example, sends messages from the small intestine to the brain along this nerve: in a study led by John Cryan, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland, anxious mice were dosed with a proprietary strain of Lactobacillus rhamnosus.

Those rodents then had lower stress hormone levels and an increase in brain receptors for a neurotransmitter that’s vital in curbing worry, anxiety and fear. The effects were similar to those of Valium.

According to another study, when mice had this bacteria in their gut, they showed less depressive behavior. Whatever bacteria may be responsible for “feeling good,” it appears they can be acquired: a recent experiment moved gut bacteria from fearless mice into anxious mice. The new bacteria sparked a personality change, making timid mice more gregarious

Dan Littman, M.D., Ph.D., a microbiologist at the NYU School of Medicine, led a study that found an association between the gut bacteria Prevotella copri and the onset of rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease of the joints. While the connection was significant, it’s not clear which comes first: the bacteria or RA.

However, other animal studies, Littman says, have clearly shown that gut microbes play a role in causing autoimmune diseases. One of these, published in 2013 in the journal Science, showed 75 percent of female mice at risk of autoimmune type 1 diabetes were protected against the disease when they were given gut bacteria from healthy mice.

Manage Crohn’s

A large study out of Massachusetts General Hospital involving more than 1,500 patients recently reported a connection between gut microbes and Crohn’s disease (an inflammatory bowel disease that can affect any part of the GI tract, but typically the intestines).

In addition to having less diversity, Crohn’s patients had fewer bacteria known to quell inflammation and more bacteria that cause inflammation.

Interestingly, those who received the standard antibiotic treatment for Crohn’s had a microbe mix that was even more out of balance. Another study found that when Crohn’s patients were given a prebiotic fiber supplement each day, disease symptoms decreased significantly.

Vitamin D Heals Damaged Hearts

Vitamin D supplements may help people with diseased hearts, a study suggests.

A trial on 163 heart failure patients found supplements of the vitamin, which is made in the skin when exposed to sunlight, improved their hearts’ ability to pump blood around the body.

The Leeds Teaching Hospitals team, who presented at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology, described the results as “stunning”.

The British Heart Foundation called for longer trials to assess the pills.

Vitamin D is vital for healthy bones and teeth and may have important health benefits throughout the body but many people are deficient.

No safe way to suntan – warning

The average age of people in the study was 70 and, like many people that age, they had low levels of vitamin D even in summer.

“They do spend less time outside, but the skin’s ability to manufacture vitamin D also gets less effective [with age] and we don’t really understand why that is,” said consultant cardiologist Dr Klaus Witte.

Patients were given either a 100 microgram vitamin D tablet or a sugar pill placebo each day for a year.

And researchers measured the impact on heart failure – a condition in which the heart becomes too weak to pump blood properly.

The key measure was the ejection fraction, the amount of blood pumped out of the chambers of the heart with each beat.

In a healthy adult, the figure is between 60% and 70%, but only a quarter of the blood in the heart was being successfully pumped out in the heart failure patients.

But in those taking the vitamin pills, the ejection fraction increased from 26% to 34%.

Dr Witte told the BBC News website: “It’s quite a big deal, that’s as big as you’d expect from other more expensive treatments that we use, it’s a stunning effect.

“It’s as cheap as chips, has no side effects and a stunning improvement on people already on optimal medical therapy, it is the first time anyone has shown something like this in the last 15 years.”

The study also showed the patients’ hearts became smaller – a suggestion they are becoming more powerful and efficient.

In the UK, people over 65 are advised to take 10 microgram supplements of the vitamin.

However, Dr Witte does not think high-dose vitamin D should be routine prescribed just yet.

He told the BBC: “We’re a little bit off that yet, not because I don’t believe it, but data have shown improvements in heart function, they may show improvements in symptoms and we now need a large study.”

It is also not clear exactly how vitamin D is improving heart function, but it is thought every cell in the body responds to the vitamin.

Most vitamin D comes from sunlight, although it is also found in oily fish, eggs and is added to some foods such as breakfast cereals.

Prof Peter Weissberg, from the British Heart Foundation, cautioned that the patients seemed no better at exercise.

And added: “A much bigger study over a longer period of time is now needed to determine whether these changes in cardiac function can translate into fewer symptoms and longer lives for heart failure patients.”

Don’t Feed Babies a Ton of Rice Cereal, Says FDA

Millie-  say don’t feed them ANY grains at all, especially the first year!

Rice cereal is a popular first food for babies. It’s also kind of high in arsenic, says the Food and Drug Administration, so if your kid gets a steady rice cereal diet, it’s time to diversify.

Plants pick up minerals from the soil they’re grown in. Rice is especially good at picking up arsenic. It doesn’t matter if the rice was grown organically or not; this is a blanket warning for rice in general. Baby rice cereal is getting the most attention because some babies eat a lot of it. It’s typically fortified with iron and other nutrients, so pediatricians love to recommend it. The FDA says it’s still fine in small quantities, but don’t go crazy:

Rice cereal fortified with iron is a good source of nutrients for your baby, but it shouldn’t be the only source, and does not need to be the first source. Other fortified infant cereals include oat, barley and multigrain.

Pregnant women, likewise, should avoid relying heavily on rice in their diet. At very high levels, arsenic can interfere with a baby’s brain development. Brown rice carries more arsenic than white rice, and some rice-growing parts of the world have more arsenic than others, Deborah Blum writes at Undark. Arsenic has also been found at high levels in organic brown rice syrup, which is used as a sweetener.

Currently, the FDA does not set a limit on the amount of arsenic that can be in rice products. In a recent analysis, they sampled infant rice cereals and other foods. About half (53%) had levels above the European Union’s cutoff of 100 parts per billion. Non-rice foods were all below that level. The report doesn’t name brands, but baby food maker Gerber quickly wrote a letter to families pointing out that their rice cereals were all below 100 ppb.

The FDA has more information on arsenic in rice here.You can read their recent warning to parents at the link below.

For Consumers: Seven Things Pregnant Women and Parents Need to Know About Arsenic in Rice and Rice Cereal | FDA via Undark