HHS AND WEIGHT GAIN AND WEIGHT LOSS

FROM:  U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES  
From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Nicholas Garlow with HHS HealthBeat.

Losing weight is hard. Keeping yourself from gaining weight may not be easy, but at least it’s not as hard as losing it. With that in mind, researchers at Duke University have been looking at what they call the “maintain, don’t gain” approach.

Researcher Gary Bennett checked data on 97 black women in an intervention group in which each woman was in a program that included personalized goals for diet and physical activity. He compared them with another 97 who got basically weight loss counseling.

“Sixty-two percent of women in our intervention group completed the intervention with weights at or below their starting weight, compared to only 45 percent of women in our usual care group.”

The study in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Learn more at healthfinder.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Nicholas Garlow.

FOOD AND YOU COMPARISON FROM HHHS

FROM:   HHS HealthBeat (May 7, 2012) 
You are what you eat
Think about what you eat. Think about how much of it you eat, and how often. Twenty-thousand participants did just that, and researchers were able to make food patterns of it, based on demographics.

Suzanne Judd is at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
“The first pattern, we called it traditional in the abstract. It’s made of people that have mixed meals – Chinese food, Mexican food, pizza, pasta. And if you look at the mean age, it tends to be younger.”

Some diet patterns can give us bad habits; for instance, a sweet tooth, or a craving for take-out, or the more than occasional happy hour drink.
“Consuming that much processed and sweet food is a little bit alarming. One would think that’s probably not going to be a good thing.”

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health.