Herbal Health Spot

Lessening the time spent in front on television can help burn calories, according to a new study. As per the background information of the study, an average adult watches almost five hours of television everyday. The study used an electronic lock-out system to reduce the television time by half without changing the calorie intake. However, it was found more energy was spent over a three-week period.

Jennifer J. Otten, Ph.D., R.D., then of the University of Vermont, Burlington, and now of Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, Calif., and colleagues conducted a randomized controlled trial of 36 adults who had a body mass index between 25 and 50 and reported watching at least three hours of TV per day. Between January and July 2008, all participants underwent a three-week observation period during which their daily TV time was assessed.

A group of 20 individuals was then randomly assigned to receive an electronic device that shut off the TV after they had reached a weekly limit of 50 percent of their previously measured TV viewing time. An additional 16 participants served as a control group.

It was found that those with the lock-out systems burned 119 more calories per day during the three-week period, while the control group burned 95 fewer calories per day during the intervention than during the observation period.

Also, Energy balance-the comparison of calories consumed to calories burned-was negative in the intervention group (who consumed 244 calories less than they burned each day) but positive in the control group (who consumed 57 more calories than they burned each day); however, this difference did not reach statistical significance.

The authors wrote: “A recent task force report supports small behavior changes as a more sustainable, long-term approach to help address the obesity epidemic. “It has been estimated that combined increases in energy expenditure and decreases in energy intake equaling only 100 calories per day could prevent the gradual weight gain observed in most of the population.”

In the past it has been found in children that screen time reductions reduce calories consumed but do not increase calories burned. The authors concluded: “This suggests that adults may differ from children in how they respond to reductions in sedentary behaviors.

“To our knowledge, this is the first study to measure the effects of a TV reduction intervention in adults. Reducing TV viewing should be further explored as a method to reduce and prevent obesity in adults.” The study has been published in December 14/28 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

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Hope , this will be a informative one. Thank you….

A new study has found that individuals suffering from asthma fare much better when they have a stronger educational background. According to researchers, having less than 12 years of formal schooling is associated with worse asthma symptoms.

Drs. Kim Lavoie and Simon Bacon from the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal, Canada, worked with a team of researchers to study asthma severity in a group of 871 adult patients. “Lower educational achievement was associated with worse asthma control, greater emergency health service use, and worse asthma self-efficacy,” they said.

“Patients with less than 12 years of education were 55 percent more likely to report an asthma-related emergency health service visit in the last year,” they stated. The researchers suggest that lower education is often a marker of lower socio-economic status generally, and that this may explain their results.

At the individual level, poorer people may have higher exposures to indoor allergens, such as cockroaches, tobacco smoke and mould, and outdoor urban pollution. “Although this link between socio-economic status and asthma is well established in children, this is the first study to investigate it in an adult population in Canada,” Lavoie said.

“It is noteworthy that patients with less education were more likely to exhibit poor health behaviours that may exacerbate asthma, including smoking and being overweight,” she added. Lavoie and her colleagues hope that once all the mechanisms of the poverty-asthma relationship have been identified, interventions can be developed to improve asthma outcomes in these patients. The research has been published in BioMed Central’’s open access journal Respiratory Research.