Feast or famine: The diet that won't just help you lose weight, you'll live longer and be brainier!

By Jerome Burne
 

As all dieters will know, there is nothing more tedious than counting calories or weighing foods for a meal plan. Especially if you then don't lose weight.

But there's now an effective weight-loss regimen that is not only simple, it promises significant health benefits - from easing asthma symptoms and reducing blood sugar levels, to fending off heart disease and breast cancer and protecting brain cells. Apparently, you'll also live longer.

The diet goes under various names - The Alternate-Day Diet, Intermittent Fasting or The Longevity Diet - but the principle is the same: eat very little one day (50 per cent of your normal intake) and as much as you like the next.

This appears to trigger a 'skinny' gene that encourages the body to burn fat.

Researchers first discovered the benefits of low-calorie eating in the Thirties. They found that putting a rat - or a worm, or a fruit fly or just about any animal, as it turned out - on a permanent very low calorie diet helped the animal live about 30 per cent longer than normal.

The animal had clearer arteries, lower levels of inflammation, better blood sugar control and its brain cells were less likely to get damaged. Meanwhile, rates of diseases linked to ageing all dropped.

But while scientists have known for years that animals on a low-calorie diet were healthier, no human - except a few iron-willed fanatics - could permanently stick to this regime.

The big breakthrough came in 2003 when Dr Mark Mattson, an American neuroscientist, discovered rats still enjoyed all those health benefits even when their calories were cut only on alternate days.

In other words, you don't have to starve yourself all the time.

This was a crucial discovery, because the diet suddenly became a realistic option. In particular, it is far more palatable for the obese. The standard diet for them involves a daily intake of between 20 per cent and 40 per cent of what they would normally have.

'These are very hard diets to follow,' says Krista Varady, assistant professor of kinesiology and nutrition at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

You are constantly hungry. The eat-every-other-day-diet seems to offer an easier and more effective option.'

She's just published the results of a ten-week trial of 16 patients, all weighing more than 14st.

They ate 20 per cent of their normal intake one day and a regular, healthy diet the next. Each lost between 10lb and 30lb; much more than the 5lb or 6lb expected.

'It takes about two weeks to adjust to the diet and, after that, people don't feel hungry on the fast days,' says Varady.
 

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Alcohol 'protects men's hearts' from the BBC

Drinking alcohol every day cuts the risk of heart disease in men by more than a third, a major study suggests.

The Spanish research involving more than 15,500 men and 26,000 women found large quantities of alcohol could be even more beneficial for men.

Female drinkers did not benefit to the same extent, the study in Heart found.

Experts are critical, warning heavy drinking can increase the risk of other diseases, with alcohol responsible for 1.8 million deaths globally per year.

The study was conducted in Spain, a country with relatively high rates of alcohol consumption and low rates of coronary heart disease.

The research involved men and women aged between 29 and 69, who were asked to document their lifetime drinking habits and followed for 10 years.

Crucially the research team claim to have eliminated the "sick abstainers" risk by differentiating between those who had never drunk and those whom ill-health had forced to quit. This has been used in the past to explain fewer heart-related deaths among drinkers on the basis that those who are unhealthy to start with are less likely to drink.

Good cholesterol

The researchers, led by the Basque Public Health Department, placed the participants into six categories - from never having drunk to drinking more than 90g of alcohol each day. This would be the equivalent of consuming about eight bottles of wine a week, or 28 pints of lager.

For those drinking little - less than a shot of vodka a day for instance - the risk was reduced by 35%. And for those who drank anything from three shots to more than 11 shots each day, the risk worked out an average of 50% less.

The same benefits were not seen in women, who suffer fewer heart problems than men to start with. Researchers speculated this difference could be down to the fact that women process alcohol differently, and that female hormones protect against the disease in younger age groups.

The type of alcohol drunk did not seem to make a difference, but protection was greater for those drinking moderate to high amounts of varied drinks.

The exact mechanisms are as yet unclear, but it is known that alcohol helps to raise high-density lipoproteins, sometimes known as good cholesterol, which helps stop so-called bad cholesterol from building up in the arteries.

Read the full article at the BBC News site

OK, so it may not be kosher for me to report on a chocolate study that was conducted by an employee of a chocolate maker at the chocolate maker’s own research lab. Get over it. The results of this new study are intriguing and shed more light on the biochemical basis behind dark chocolate’s health benefits.

The team of researchers was led by Sunil Kochhar, PhD, who heads the BioAnalytical Science Department at the Nestlé Research Center in Switzerland. He and his colleagues designed the study to see whether eating dark chocolate every day for two weeks could affect the way the body metabolizes stress hormones.

They recruited 30 healthy young people—11 men and 19 women. They tested their anxiety levels and determined that 13 of them tested as “high anxiety” and 17 tested as “low anxiety” on standardized anxiety tests. They gave the volunteers 40 grams of dark chocolate (about an ounce and a half), containing 74% cocoa, every day for two weeks and tested their blood and urine at the beginning and end of the trial.

In the high anxiety group, eating chocolate reduced levels of their stress hormones, and the changes were “biologically significant,” Dr. Kochhar tells me. What’s more, people felt less anxious after munching on chocolate. The findings did not apply to the low anxiety group. “We observed improvement in the anxiety states of subjects immediately after their consumption of chocolate,” he says.

Read the full article here