FATTIES: Boffins say their miracle sunshine skin cream 'prevents obesity' Swingbellies: Take heed! An international team of top boffins say they have found that sunlight can reduce weight gain - and that they can duplicate the effect with a skin cream. "Exposure to moderate amounts of sunshine may slow the development of obesity," a university statement announcing the research says. And it goes on …
With all the weasel words and add-ons like "exercise and a healthy diet", I smell a rat. Or more like someone got a grant by a company to find some great thing for their product. That last paragraph infers a lot but let's face it, going out into the sun is done by those that are not couch potatoes.
Top boffins? or Paid Shills?
Are you kidding ? Have you never noticed all the flab that is baking on the beaches every summer ?
I call bollocks on the whole thing. Skin cream won't do a thing for your weight, not unless it contains hydrochloric acid. I propose someone grant me a million dollars so I can totally prove that it is my miracle eyedrops, combined with a lot of exercise and a healthy diet, that can keep you slim and fit.
Pff. Amateurs.
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The chemicals used to replace the sugar have two well known side effects :-
1/ Liver cancer
2/ The production of fat cells, the nasty ones that give your skin that "spotty blancmange" look.
As for the study, like every other weight loss claim it comes back to healthy eating and exercise; hence my personal catch-phrase :-
CHOCOLATE CAN HELP WEIGHT LOSS
(But only as part of a calorie controlled diet).
Paris, because the best way to burn calories involves her.
4 "Thumbs Down"
4 people in denial????
The artificial sweeteners used in UK drinks are banned in several countries due to their association with liver cancer.
They are also very difficult for the body to break down, so the body creates fat cells to store them in.
I studied this at Uni.
"I studied this at Uni."
You were misled !
"They are also very difficult for the body to break down, so the body creates fat cells to store them in."
Ref. ?
AFAIK the 3 major artificial sweeteners used have been shown to be safe. Some past evidence to the contrary has been disproved or shown to be rodent specific.
Yes.
It's generally not down to chemicals. It was that diet coke had a lot of sugar in it, just less. But if people drank twice as much, then it was no help.
However I have been informed some diet cokes now have zero sugar. I'd not know, never touch the stuff. But if it does, it still gives a feedback to a person that they can drink/eat as much sweet stuff as they like. Then when they move onto the non-diet food, the feedback mechanisms or natural hunger, have been suppressed (mentally or physically?).
Turns out [a/the] reason diet drinks make you fat is that the sweeteners throw a spanner in your gut ecology. Eg nature article here:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v514/n7521/full/nature13793.html
Really very conclusive study imho, also scary in that the effects were quite long term.
Dr Stasha Gominak has some interesting videos on you-tube.
Her observation is that proper sleep helps the body fix itself. Fix that and many problems go away, including some obesity issues. Vitamin D deficiency is one common problem which affects sleep, hence the link to sunlight as a cure.
She also notes that studies were done on rats, which are nocturnal and have different requirements and different vitamin D (which appears to be a hormone as our bodies make it rather than it being present in food).
Or not, I mean it's not like this has been known for ages... Oh wait it has. Body builders have been ingesting supplements which increase nitric oxide for years now with benefits along the lines of improved endurance / recovery / weight loss.
As is pointed out in a bodybuilding article I once read, the ingestation of Nitric Oxide combined with exercise increases the rate at which the body uses up glucose, effectively converting it to a form available to the body faster, then absorbing it faster. Here's the main quote.
experiment was 2 sets of people, some ingesting a nitric oxide supplement, others not, they then cycled for 2 hours, followed by a 15 minute all out cycling period.
-------------
http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/6-reasons-use-nitric-oxide.htm
During this time glucose levels were measured in the body and it was noted that those who had taken the L-arginine had a significantly higher glucose rate of appearance, glucose rate of disappearance, and glucose clearance rate. This demonstrates that these athletes were taking up the glucose faster into the muscle cells as the exercise persisted.
In addition to this, the supplement also supported the increase of nonesterified fatty acid concentration as well as glycerol in the body, potentially pointing to the burning up of fat as fuel.
--------------
Burning fat as fuel is another important note to this for those looking to lose weight. During the first 10 minutes or so of exercise the body burns carbs as fuel, from 10-60 minutes the body turns to burning fat. Normally from 60 minutes + the body will switch to burning muscle as fuel since proteins burn slower and it's slow energy you need.
Although I did read another study that still pointed out that going over 50 minutes was bad for fat loss, the study measured cortisol rates (stress hormone, which can increase fat storage) cortisol levels gradually decreased as people exercised, up to about 45 minutes, after which cortisol levels began to skyrocket. Lots and lots of different things you need to take into account while exercising for weight loss.
Nice to know that we have studies like that.
As far as the limit of our knowledge is concerned, I have often heard that the sea is the final frontier of discovery, but my opinion is that it is our own metabolism that we need to get to know better.
We all know that exercise and a healthy diet is necessary for the body to grow and age in the best of conditions, but we don't know what exactly we need as an individual on a given day. Some people may need more or less food of a certain type than others. In a given dietary environment, it may actually be good to have a bar of chocolate at a given time of day.
What I'm driving at is the fact that we have no idea of what a particular food does to us, nor what is the best time to eat it. I'm not saying that eating fries at a given time of day will be better for us, I'm saying that we just don't know the impact, at a cellular level, of what we eat.
What we need to get to is something like Frank Herbert described in Heretics of Dune, when the character Miles Teg is visited by a local doctor. In this extract, the doctor simply uses a medical scanner on him, then defines a meal for him that will set him right. Of course, that is fiction, but it does describe a level of knowledge of the human metabolism that we are far from having today.
Studies like the one linked above will help us get there, the more the better.
"During the first 10 minutes or so of exercise the body burns carbs as fuel, from 10-60 minutes the body turns to burning fat. Normally from 60 minutes + the body will switch to burning muscle as fuel since proteins burn slower and it's slow energy you need."
I think you'll find that this is not correct.
A fit, well-fed individual will have ~~1300 cals of stored carbohydrate, mostly as glycogen, At the start of exercise this will be mobilized to the muscles. On it's own it will provide enough energy for ~~2hrs cycling, however fat mobilization/metabolism which is slower, starts to contribute from relatively early on and becomes significant well before carbohydrate is exhausted. As most people have plenty of fat (maybe 160000 cals) provided the exercise is of a lower order than 'flat-out' fat can provide energy for a long time. Catabolism of protein is a response to starvation in the main, although anyone seriously trying to lose weight by just dieting (i.e.starvation) should try to maintain whole-body muscle fitness by exercise.
It's only laboratory mice that have been cured of everything, and the chief cause of death for laboratory mice is homogenization.
The problem with so-called "diet" foods is that the people who eat them are at risk of considering that they can eat more because it's diet food. In addition, in an effect similar to the 5-second rule, if you add a diet element to your meal, then people tend to consider that it makes the whole meal "diet".
Which is why we can all laugh at the bloated mouth asking for a super-sized meal but with a Diet Coke.
Yeah, that'll make all the difference.
This is an excellent idea and a masterstroke engineering/biochemistry crossover. This stuff has been wringing the last drop of energy out of internal combustion engines for ages so it's obvious it's going to enhance fat burning...
Oh! NITRIC oxide. Still, never mind. In he world of tabloid journalism* it's all the same stuff.
* Not including "El Reg" here, of course.
Our findings are important as they suggest that casual skin exposure to sunlight, together with plenty of exercise and a healthy diet, may help prevent the development of obesity,
A-Huh...
And if they had a control group who just did the "plenty of exercise and a healthy diet" bit, without the sunlight?
I wonder if they would have lost weight?
There are no Doctor Who little beings of fatness.
If you want to lose weight you need to have less calories coming in than are going out.
The end. That's it.
Diets do NOT work. Lifestyle changes do. Eat more healthily and exercise a bit more.
In fact, it doesn't even need to be exercise. DON'T drive half a mile to buy a pint of milk, get off your FAT ARSE and walk. Don't take the lift up, take the stairs. These little things all add up.
I'm a 44 year old office worker yet I manage not to have a huge belly. I am nothing special and I don't live on lettuce.
One of the things I've picked up from watching a number of programmes on Auntie Beeb hosted by Michael Mosley (a doctor who has subjected himself to a few dietary regimes to see what happens) is that the answer to obesity is not in miracle solutions like pills, superfoods, or any other crap. It's in having a healthy balanced diet and getting a reasonable amount of exercise. So I agree that walking to the shop, using the stairs, and in fact making the choice not to be lazy whenever possible is pretty much the answer.
The trouble is, it seems to be part of human nature to take the lazy option.
I'm a 44 year old office worker yet I manage not to have a huge belly. I am nothing special and I don't live on lettuce.
I get fat once a decade or so. Invariably it comes down to eating too much crap and doing too little exercise. Time available for exercise varies - some of us are just too busy to spend time in a gym or jog mile after mile.
This time though, I've dropped about 10kgs in just under 3 months due to some very simple and small scale changes that add up to meaningful change - after the first latte of the day all else is tea, sushi for lunch, take the lift not the stairs (both up and down), and try to avoid snacking where possible (apples being better than crisps/chocolate/ice cream when I do snack). I'm still fatter than I'd like, but then my weight is still falling.
Given the size of the deficit, I'd happily vote to tax the arse out of takeaways, junk food, and high calorie meals & snacks.
Oh dear. Someone has a metabolism which means they don't put weight on easily and has combined this with a GCSE in physics... what's that saying about a little knowledge being dangerous?
"If you want to lose weight you need to have less calories coming in than are going out" is at a similar level as "you are less likely to be in a car accident if you don't drive".
The human body is incredibly complicated. The basic calories in/used argument is obviously true but if you take two people they won't gain the same calories from eating exactly the same food and they won't use the same calories from doing the exact same activities.
For all those who think they can apply conservation of energy blindly, go work out the mass-energy equivalence of the calories contained in a big-mac.
And OF COURSE diets work. "Eating sensibly" IS a diet, you muppet.
" Bioavailability
What you swallow is not what you absorb. Quite a few of the unhealthy foods have high bioavaliability while the healthy ones have lower bioavailability."
I suspect you don't know what bioavailability means. Hint: it's not just the proportion of material absorbed.
Actually I have a physics A-level. (;->
As to my metabolism. HAVE YOU MET ME????? No, you haven't. So you know NOTHING about me.
I am not naturally slim. I keep the weight off by:
A: Running twice a week in my lunch hour, come rain, hail, snow, sun, whatever.
B: 3 times a week, after I have put my little girl to bed, at around 9pm when most of you are slumped on the sofa, I go to my garage and lift weights. I do this all year round, even when it's so cold it hurts to hold the bar - real lifters spurn gloves, and use only chalk. (;->
Having more muscle burns more energy so helps keep the weight off. See, I do know we are all different.
If you think any of the above is easy, especially at this time of year and into winter, then I'm afraid you're the muppet.
Your equating energy in vs energy out to car driving is ludicrous. I use the word "diet" in the colloquial sense to describe such fads as "red and green days" which should have been stunningly obvious to you.
Yes, we all have differing metabolisms, so we expend energy different, yet the FACT remains that if we take in more energy than we expend, then we will put on weight.
The human body is incredibly complicated. The basic calories in/used argument is obviously true
It may be "obviously true", but it's not actually true in any useful sense. First, not all calories (actual thermodynamic calories of chemical energy1) in food are used - some are excreted.2
Second, it's well-established that, as JDX says, the body is very complicated, and is generally much better at making use of calories arriving in some forms than in others. See this article for a decent introduction.
In short, the thermodynamic dieting slogan ("don't eat more calories than you use") might make a nice bumper sticker, but it says nothing insightful about human weight gain.
JFTR, I'm one of those people who has no trouble maintaining a healthy weight, with little effort. I eat what I want, and rarely exercise for the sake of exercise, but my weight hasn't changed significantly in the past 25 years. I know plenty of people who make a concerted effort to eat a healthy variety, avoid junk food, control portions, and exercise regularly, but nonetheless struggle all the time to achieve and keep what the medical profession considers a healthy weight. Weight gain may ultimately come down to behavior, but some people have to behave a lot harder.
1Plus a small amount of heat energy when eating foods hotter than the body core temperature, minus a small amount of heat energy when eating foods colder. These effects can probably be ignored.
2Various writers claim that excrement contains "almost no" calories, but what they mean, if they know what they're talking about in the first place, is that there are few calories metabolizable by humans in the excrement of (healthy) humans; our digestive systems are about as efficient with one pass as they would be with two (unlike, say, those of rabbits). There are still thermodynamic calories in excrement - we're far from capable of extracting all the chemical energy bound in feces, and even urea has some chemical energy (obviously). Plus there's some heat loss, as there is with respiration.
To El Reg, did someone actually read the article or just a press release?
I tried to find a version of this article I could read using the Bodleian finder and it steadfastly insisted i needed a subscription (i.e. it is self-published). The ADA (American Diabetes Association) is a lobby group (they have "position statements" on their website. Therefore as well meaning as I am *sure* they are, I assume publications from these organisations may be interpreted as "we like this article and we think our funders will".
In America, diabetes treatment (as with all healthcare) is a BIG business.
Diet+Exercise works everytime.
Diet+Exercise in the sun, is harder than without it, but much nicer....
P.
Trust Me I'm a Doctor talked about nitric oxide last week - it helps open blood vessels to prevent high blood pressure. Nowt about making you thin.
I think the rubbing cream on your obese body will be all the exercise most fatties will do though.
Or picture this - two fat naked bodies and a tube of cream squirted on them then they just have to rub against each other to put the cream on places that will never see the sunlight. Picture that when you're about to sit down to dinner tonight :-)
"nitric oxide last week - it helps open blood vessels to prevent high blood pressure"
It's used for a number of control mechanisms in the body. AFAIK (it's mostly not my fields of expertise), there are 3 main mechanisms. One form of the enzyme eNOS (Nitric oxide synthetase ) is activated in blood vessels, I assume under some control, and converts the amino-acid arginine into nitric oxide (+citrulline) . This relaxes the blood vessels. Another NOS, iNOS generates NO by the same mechanism to generate an inflammatory reaction as part of the response to infection etc.
I think, also, that nitrates/nitrites in the diet can generate a background level of NO which may help blood vessel control.
Synthetic nitrites are used to produce a rapid rise in NO levels to alleviate angina symptoms.
But its nature - it modifies the activity of lots of proteins and has a number of recorded effects ( on insulin & airways for example) may mean there are plenty of unknown functions (good & bad)
having lost a stone+ in the past year the easiest way is through diet - exercise helps but you need to do a lot to burn off say 500 kcals (Circa an hour).There is I believe evidence that gut flora has an impact. But as an earler poster said there is no miracle cure (though eating less pocessed food made the biggest difference for me). The hard part is sticking to a healthy diet when there is so much rubbish out there - if you have the time (and to be honest if your organised it doesn't take much time) make your own food because then you can control what goes into it.
I also discovered that hitting your thumb with a hammer in the sunshine makes your thumb hurt. Also drinking water in the sunshine makes you less thirsty. So you can add those to the amazing discovery that you can lose weight by eating healthy and exercising outside when it's sunny.
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