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4A Daily News – Tuesday, July 9, 2013 Vitality health & fitness Want to lose weight? Drink more water By Kerry Grens Reuters Health NEW YORK - Dieters who drink more water have greater weight loss, according to a new review of several prior studies. In one study that asked dieters to drink water before a meal, for instance, "the water enhanced the weight loss," said Brenda Davy, a professor at Virginia Tech who led some of the work included in the review. Researchers said there is not yet enough evidence, however, to say for sure that drinking more water will help people shed the pounds. Rebecca Muckelbauer, a researcher at the Berlin School of Public Health, Charité University Medical Center Berlin in Germany, led the new review of the water studies. She said that, as a nutrition researcher, people had often asked her about whether they should drink water to lose weight, and she didn't know the answer. She and her colleagues decided to examine all of the studies on weight and water consumption. Eleven studies fit their criteria. Three of them showed that increased water intake among dieters was tied to greater weight loss. A study by Davy's group found that middle aged and older adults who drank two cups before a meal lost about four pounds more than a group that didn't drink the extra water. Yet another study found that women who increased their water consumption while they dieted lost more weight than those Relaxnews who kept it below one liter a day. It's not clear how water might help people shed pounds. One possibility, said Davy, is that water could squelch feelings of hunger. "This may have helped them reduce their calorie intake," she told Reuters Health. Muckelbauer agreed that increased fullness is the most likely explanation, but another possibility is something called "water-induced thermogenesis." The idea is that "drinking water itself increases energy expenditure of your body. It has an energy consuming effect. This is not very well studied," Muckelbauer told Reuters Health. The Institute of Medicine recommends that adults consume between 91 ounces of water for women and 125 ounces for men (2.7 - 3.7 liters) each day, but this total can come through food, plain water or other beverages. While the experimental studies suggest that drinking water may aid in weight loss, the surveys Muckelbauer examined don't always show that people who drink more water are slimmer. In fact, some found that obese or overweight adults drank more water than people of normal size, while others did not find such a link, Muckelbauer's team reports in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. "We don't have conclusive evidence that increasing water intake reduces weight, but there are certainly other benefits to increasing our intake," said Davy. She said people in the U.S. typically drink about 400 to 500 calories a day from other beverages, and replacing them with water is not a bad idea. One study found that women who drink water, rather than sweet drinks, had a slightly lower chance of developing diabetes. And women who don't drink plenty of water have greater odds of getting kidney stones. "There's not a lot of risk for recommending (increased water intake) for individuals," Davy said. Muckelbauer said it will be helpful to have larger experiments looking at the potential weight loss benefits of adding more water to the diet. Fatty acids in formula linked to quick-thinking kids By Kathryn Doyle Reuters In a study of six-yearolds, researchers found no IQ differences between kids who were fed formula supplemented with longchain polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) as infants and those who got regular formula, but the PUFA kids were notably faster at picture-matching games. "Babies need LCPUFAs for brain growth and development, but studies such as ours show that the benefits persist after infancy and can affect later development," lead author Dr. Peter Willatts of the University of Dundee in the UK told Reuters Health. Fatty acids are important components of nerve cell membranes and are found naturally in breastmilk. Heavy mobile phone usage tied to poor fitness: study They are thought to play an important role in brain development, but are not included in many infant formulas.a In previous studies, babies on PUFA formula tended to learn faster and be more attentive, and the evidence for benefits in older kids is growing, Willatts said by email. For his team's new study, infants in several European countries were randomly divided into three groups of 70 for four months: one group was given formula containing the fatty acids docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and arachidonic acid (ARA), one was given regular formula and a third was breastfed. The researchers later measured the children's intelligence, attention control and mental processing speed. Tehama Family Fitness Center Kid's Summer Fit Camps! Fun Workouts, Exercise Skills, Nutrition Education, Active Games, Water Fun, Sports, Goal Setting, And Other Health And Fitness Session 1: June 17th-20th • Session 2: June 24th-27th Session 3: July 8th-11th • Session 4: July 15th-18th *All Sessions Run Daily from 1pm-4pm* The two formula groups had the same average IQ scores, but the PUFA group processed information faster in a picture-matching game. Kids in the PUFA group were quickest to match pictures when they got it right, followed by the breastfed group and then the regular formula group, according to the results published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. "The PUFA children were 20 percent faster at solving the problems," than the other formula group, Willatts said. "You probably wouldn't notice this when watching them complete the tests, but the fact that there is an improvement which can be measured is a very important finding." Researchers can't say for certain that faster processing would affect all areas of learning in later life, but the measure is related to better performance on reading and math, he said. "Long term cognitive benefits of including DHA and ARA (two important PUFAs) in infant formula have now been shown in two studies that differ in many aspects of design and were conducted in different parts of the world," said Susan Carlson, a nutritionist at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, who recently authored a similar study in the same journal. Carlson's study in Kansas and Missouri did find a difference in IQ between formula groups at six years of age, but, she said, that may be because Carlson gave infants higher percentages of important PUFAs and continued the supplementation for the first 12 months of life, versus four months in European study. In most studies, breastfed kids score on average three to five points higher on IQ tests than formula babies, regardless of PUFAs they consume, which Willatts said can't easily be explained. The difference may result from other factors, such as the fact that mothers who breastfeed are more often highly educated with higher incomes than mothers who do not. Both Willatts and Carlson strongly recommend that parents who choose not to breastfeed choose PUFA formulas, which isn't difficult to do in the U.S. and Europe, they said. Perhaps not too surprisingly, spending copious amounts of time hovering over your mobile phone -texting, emailing, gaming, or watching videos -- doesn't do much for your fitness. Reported in Runners World on Thursday, Kent State University found that university students who spent large amounts of time on their phone -- as much as a truly obsessed 14 hours per day -- were less fit than those who spent around 90 minutes a day. While the concept of mobile devices allows "on the go" communication, the more students used their devices, the more sedentary they were, the report said. Plus those who spent more time on their mobile devices were more likely to engage in other sedentary forms of entertainment, such as playing video games or watching films. Low-frequency users, on the other hand, "were more likely to report being connected to active peer groups through their cell phones and to cite this as a motivation for physical activity." "The possibility that cell phone use may encourage physical activity among some low-frequency users while disrupting physical activity and encouraging sedentary activity among high-frequency users helps explain the significant negative relationship between cell phone use and cardiorespiratory fitness identified in this study," the authors write. The study appeared online in the journal International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity. Access: http://www.ijbnpa.org/content/10/1/79#abs Teen turmoil starts earlier By Dennis Normile ScienceNOW Puberty has always been a time of stress and emotional turmoil for adolescents and their parents. And scientists have long recognized that kids who start puberty before their peers are particularly likely to have trouble getting along with other children and with adults. New research suggests, though, that those difficulties can be traced back to even earlier ages, indicating that early puberty may not be the root cause. Australian researchers drew on data for 3,491 children, roughly half boys and half girls, who were recruited at age 4 or 5 and then followed until they reached 10 or 11. Every two years, a researcher visited each participant's home, evaluated the child and interviewed the primary caregiver, who later returned a questionnaire about the child's behavior. The primary caregiver — in most cases, a parent — was also asked to judge the child's pubertal status, based on indicators for an early phase of puberty such as breast growth in girls, adult-type body odor and body hair; and growth spurts, deepening voices in boys and menstruation in girls for a later stage. Girls typically enter puberty at age 10 or 11 and boys at 11 or 12. The researchers found that 16 percent of the girls and 6 percent of the boys in the study had entered puberty early, at age 8 or 9. Previously, researchers thought that negative behavior associated with early puberty — such as difficulty playing with other kids and participating in normal school activities — showed up only after puberty's onset. But the new study showed that children who later had early-onset puberty showed evidence of such problems when they were 4 or 5 years old. Boys in this group had also shown other behavior problems, such as being overactive, losing their temper and preferring to play alone from a young age. "The association between early-onset puberty and poor mental health appears to result from processes under way well before the onset of puberty," the researchers conclude in a paper published online in the Journal of Adolescent Health. Unusually early puberty "is opening up a broader window of vulnerability" for mental health problems among youths, says George Patton, the senior author of the paper and a psychiatric epidemiologist at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia. He explains that mental capacities for self-control of impulsive behavior do not normally accompany early puberty. This means that early puberty may increase the risk of children's harming themselves or falling into depression. The paper challenges previous assumptions that puberty triggers behavior changes, says Jay Giedd, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health, who was not involved in the study. But he adds that the study raises new questions about what factors are influencing this behavior and whether early psychosocial and behavioral difficulties might somehow trigger early puberty. The next stage of the research will try to provide some answers, says the study's lead author, Fiona Mensah, a social scientist at the Murdoch institute. "We will be looking to see whether we can identify the early life factors that may be influencing children's development and leading to early puberty," she says. They also want to understand how premature delivery, the home and community environment might influence mental health. The ultimate goal is to identify supportive measures to help children develop social and emotional resources before they reach puberty so that they can better navigate the storms of adolescence. 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