Fight Childhood Obesity in the Home, New Guidelines Say

Parents and pediatricians should fight childhood obesity by improving diet and activity levels in the home, new guidelines propose.

In a new paper, leading physicians' group the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is updating its guidelines, last issued more than a decade ago, about how to stem rising rates of childhood obesity. The updated recommendations encourage parents to help change kids' eating and levels of activity at home, and emphasize family-based strategies to promote healthier lifestyles.

More than one-third of American children and teens are overweight or obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although some progress has been made in fighting obesity, including recent declines in obesity rates among preschool-age children, weight problems in kids remain a serious health concern.

"Once obesity is established, it's very hard to treat," said Dr. Stephen Daniels, chairman of the AAP nutrition committee and chair of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver.

Because it takes a lot of time and effort to treat obesity, the paper's main message for parents and pediatricians is to focus on preventing childhood obesity in the first place, Daniels said. Many of the behavioral approaches used to treat kids who have already become obese might also apply to its prevention, he noted. 

"The home environment has a big influence on what kids eat and how active they are," Daniels told Live Science. [10 Ways to Promote Kids' Healthy Eating Habits]

That's why the report, published online today (June 29) in the journal Pediatrics, outlines key steps that parents can take to promote healthy eating at home and an active lifestyle for families, he said.

Changing behaviors

To prevent childhood obesity, the AAP guidelines recommend that parents do the following:

• Control the foods that are brought into the home, and be aware of age-appropriate portion sizes for children. If healthful foods are stocked at home, then kids can make good choices within a prescribed zone, Daniels said.
• Buy fewer sweetened beverages (including sodas, iced teas, juice drinks and sports drinks) and instead encourage children to drink water, milk and limited amounts of 100 percent fruit juice.
• Make healthier foods visible and easily available, and wrap higher-calorie foods in foil and put them in the back of the refrigerator or pantry.
• Serve as important role models for kids by setting a good example with their own eating and exercising habits, even parents who are struggling with weight issues themselves, Daniels said.
• Reduce opportunities for sedentary entertainment. Parents should keep TVs, computers, video games and electronic devices, out of children's bedrooms and ban these devices in areas where family meals are consumed to prevent distracted eating.
• Limit screen time to no more than two hours a day at most for children ages 2 and older. "Often, screen time is accompanied by eating, so a child is getting a double whammy of extra calories and inactivity," Daniels said. Kids should replace screen time with activity time, he advised.
• Encourage overweight children to keep track of their eating and activity levels (physical and sedentary) in a diary, log or other form of daily self-monitoring. Children and parents can work together to set goals and review their results, and set nonfood rewards for when small goals are achieved. Often the reward that most children are looking for is to spend more time with a parent involved in an activity, which can be a win-win if this is a physical activity, Daniels suggested.
• Make sure that children get enough sleep. Recent research has suggested a link between obesity in children and insufficient sleep. Studies have shown that when sleep is increased to age-appropriate levels, children are less likely to become overweight or obese.

Although parents may have heard this health advice before, putting these steps into practice and holding the line with kids can be difficult, Daniels said. Parents can start by picking one behavior change they can implement effectively, praising good behavior when a child demonstrates it and then building on this initial success over time, he suggested.

Daniels stressed that parents have a lot of influence over the behaviors that can lead to childhood obesity. And the time spent by parents and pediatricians addressing and reinforcing prevention issues early on can be beneficial to families, and have a big impact on long-term health, he said.

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Sugary Drinks Kill 184,000 People Every Year

Sugary drinks cause 184,000 deaths worldwide annually, including 25,000 deaths in the United States, according to a new study.

The finding — a revised estimate of numbers first presented at a scientific meeting in 2013 — represents a tally of deaths from diabetes, heart disease and cancer that scientists say can be directly attributed to the consumption of sweetened sodas, fruit drinks, sports/energy drinks and iced teas.

The numbers imply that sugary drinks can cause as many deaths annually as the flu.

"It should be a global priority to substantially reduce or eliminate sugar-sweetened beverages from the diet," said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, senior author of the study and dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. [7 Foods You Can Overdose On]

There is evidence that sugary drinks contribute to obesity and that obesity contributes to people's risk of these diseases, Mozaffarian said. Previous studies found that obesity-related diseases cause more than 17 million deaths per year.

For this latest study, led by Gitanjali Singh, an assistant professor at Tufts, researchers attempted to tease out the contribution that sugary drinks make to this global burden of obesity-related deaths. They calculated that there are 133,000 deaths yearly from type 2 diabetes; 45,000 deaths from cardiovascular disease; and 6,450 deaths from cancer.

The study is based on a complex statistical analysis of country-specific dietary habits and causes of death in more than 50 countries, coupled with information on the availability of sugar on the world market. The researchers' definition of sugary drinks included beverages sweetened with cane sugar, beet sugar and high-fructose corn syrup.

"Among the 20 countries with the highest estimated sugar-sweetened beverage-related deaths, at least eight were in Latin America and the Caribbean, reflecting the high intakes in that region of the world," Singh said.

In Mexico, where more than 10 percent of the population has diabetes, approximately 30 percent of the deaths among people under age 45 are due to sugary drinks, the researchers concluded. Mexico had the highest death rate attributable to sugar-sweetened beverages, the researchers said.

Conversely, in Japan, where unsweetened teas are among the most popular beverages, deaths from sugary drinks are negligible.

Americans consume 22.2 teaspoons of added sugar (equal to 355 calories) per day, on average, and sugar-sweetened beverages are the primary source of this sugar, according to the American Heart Association (AHA). The sugars are added to foods and drinks to improve their taste but provide no nutritional benefit, only calories, thus contributing to weight gain and heart disease, the AHA said.

A 12-ounce (355 milliliters) serving of regular soda has about 10 teaspoons of sugar, according to the American Diabetes Association, which recommends that people avoid drinking sugar-sweetened beverages to help prevent diabetes.

The researchers could not prove a direct cause and effect — for example, they cannot say that sugary beverages are the actual, primary cause of these 184,000 deaths on an individual level. Rather, they based their conclusions on national beverage consumption trends, death rates and sugar availability.

The beverage industry remains skeptical of the findings.

"This study does not show that consuming sugar-sweetened beverages causes chronic diseases and the authors themselves acknowledge that they are at best estimating effects of sugar-sweetened beverage consumption," the American Beverage Association, a trade association that represents the U.S. non-alcoholic beverage industry, said in a statement.

Mozaffarian said the connection between sugary drinks and obesity is well established. "They [the industry] have their heads in the sand," Mozaffarian told Live Science.

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Why a Teen's Reasons for Using Marijuana Matter

Marijuana may have a reputation as a "gateway" to other drugs, but new research shows that the reason a teenager uses marijuana in the first place is an important factor in whether that person also uses other drugs.

And it turns out that when a teen's reason for smoking pot is "to experiment," he or she is less likely to use other drugs.

Researchers analyzed survey results from more than 6,000 high school seniors in the United States who all said theyhad used marijuana in the past year. The surveys also asked students questions about whether they used alcohol, as well as drugs such as crack, heroin, powder cocaine and hallucinogens.

The researchers found that the teens who said they used marijuana to experiment were less likely to say theyhad used any other drugs, compared with teens who used marijuana for other reasons, such as out of boredom or to increase the effects of other drugs.

They also found that the students who said they used marijuana to experiment were less likely to say they had recently used "hallucinogens other than LSD and narcotics other than heroin," the researchers wrote in their study. [11 Odd Facts About Marijuana]

In contrast, the students who said they used marijuana because they were bored were more likely to say theyhad used powder cocaine, or hallucinogens other than LSD. And the teens who said they used marijuana "for insight or understanding" were also more likely to say they had used hallucinogens, excluding LSD, according to the study.

The findings are important because they show that boredom is a risk factor for using marijuana and also for using other drugs, said Joseph Palamar, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor of population health at NYU Langone Medical Center. "Programs and education efforts, for example, can benefit from knowing that marijuana users who use because they are bored are more likely to use certain other drugs," Palamar said in a statement. "It may be feasible for prevention programs to address ways of coping with factors such as boredom in order to decrease risk."

Perhaps not surprisingly, the teens who said they used marijuana "to increase the effects of other drugs," were also more likely to use other drugs, the researchers wrote in the study, which was published online June 26 in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse.

The most common reason that teens gave for using marijuana was "to feel good or get high," according to the study.

The study also reported that surveys conducted in 2013 showed that nearly 1 in 2 high school seniors said they'd used pot at one point in their lives. Previous research has suggested that marijuana is less dangerous for health than narcotics like heroin,and is less likely than alcohol to lead to an overdose.

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Flu Vaccine and Narcolepsy: New Findings May Explain Link

An unusual increase in narcolepsy cases in Europe was linked to a new flu vaccine used there, and now researchers may have figured out why: A protein in the vaccine appears to mimic one in the brain that plays a role in the sleep disorder.

People with narcolepsy experience severe daytime sleepiness and "sleep attacks," in which they suddenly fall asleep for a short time. The vaccine that was linked to the disorder was used in 2009 and 2010 to protect against the H1N1 strain of flu, which is sometimes called the swine flu.

The new findings also suggest that the may play a role in the disorder, and that in rare cases vaccines or infections can trigger narcolepsy in people with a certain genetic mutation.

Still, the researchers emphasized that the risk of getting narcolepsyfrom the vaccine is extremely small, and that "the benefits of influenza vaccination currently far outweigh the risks of complications," they said.

What's more, for people who are genetically predisposed to narcolepsy, the risk of developing the disorder may be higher if they become naturally infected with the flu rather than getting the vaccine to protect against it, the researchers said.

Previous studies linked this version of the swine flu vaccine, called Pandemrix (made by GlaxoSmithKline), and cases of narcolepsy. For example, a study in England found that children who had narcolepsy were 14 times more likely to have been vaccinated with Pandemrix than other children in England of the same age.

In another study, researchers estimated that the chances of developing narcolepsy following vaccination in Finland and the United Kingdom were between 1 in 16,000 and 1 in 50,000. After the 2009 to 2010 swine flu outbreak, Pandemrix was withdrawn from the market.

Other versions of the swine flu vaccine havenot been linked with an increased risk of narcolepsy. [6 Flu Vaccine Myths]

In the new study, the researchers compared components of the Pandemrix vaccine with those of another H1N1 vaccine, called Focetria, which was manufactured by Novartis.

They found that part of a viral protein in the Pandemrix vaccine mimicked the structure of a brain receptor that binds to a hormone called hypocretin. This hormone is involved in keeping people awake, and people with narcolepsy have lower levels of hypocretin, which led the researchers to hypothesize that problems with hypocretin or its receptor could play a role in the sleep disorder.

In contrast to the Pandemrix vaccine, the Focetria vaccine contained much lower levels of the viral protein that mimicked the hypocretin receptor.

Next, the researchers analyzed blood samples from 20 people in Finland who developed narcolepsy after Pandemrix vaccination, and found that these people had antibodies in their blood that bound to the H1N1 virus and also to the hypocretin receptor. But people who received the Focetria vaccines did not have these antibodies.

The researchers speculate that, in people who are already predisposed to narcolepsy because of a genetic mutation, receiving the Pandemrix vaccination triggered an autoimmune response — these patients developed antibodies that not only attacked the virus, but also attacked the hypocretin receptor in the brain.

This could interfere with the brain signaling of hypocretin, leading to narcolepsy, said study researcher Dr. Lawrence Steinman, a professor of pediatrics and of neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine.

However, the researchers still need to prove that these antibodies against the hypocretin receptor do indeed get into the brain. This will be the next step in the research, Steinman said.

"This paper is really elegant, and establishes a mechanism for how this one specific pandemic flu vaccine may have caused narcolepsy in some patients," said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease specialist and a senior associate at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Center for Health Security, who was not involved in the study.

Although more work is needed to confirm the findings, "it seems to me, that this really is a likely explanation, based upon all these steps the researchers took to prove this hypothesis," Adalja said. He noted that the researchers had genetic evidence, as well as evidence from patients' blood, which both pointed to the same mechanism.

Steinman noted that people who are infected with the flu appear to generate higher levels of antibodies to this viral protein, compared with people who are vaccinated with Pandemrix. "Therefore, there is potentially far greater risk of getting narcolepsy with influenza infection compared to influenza vaccination in those genetically susceptible to narcolepsy," Steinman said.

The flu has been linked with other sleeping disorders. For example, after the epidemic of Spanish flu in 1918, there was an increase in people suffering a "sleeping sickness" known as encephalitis lethargica. (Patients with this condition were the subject of the 1973 book "Awakenings.")

In the new paper, the researchers speculate that, because the 1918 flu strain also contained this "mimic" viral protein, an autoimmune reaction might also explain the rise in encephalitis lethargica after the Spanish flu.

The study is published today (July 1) in the journal Science Translational Medicine.                                 

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Most popular health news articles for 2015

Dr. Sergio Canavero, of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group (TANG) in Italy, to carry out the first human head transplantation in July 2013 - a project named HEAVEN-GEMINI.

At the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopedic Surgeons' 39th Annual Conference in Annapolis, MD, in June, Dr. Canavero will present, addressing some of the previously identified challenges that come with it.

Though researchers have seriously questioned the feasibility of Dr. Canavero's plans, it seems the first human head transplantation is a step closer to becoming a reality; Valery Spiridonov, a 30-year-old computer scientist from Vladimir, Russia, is the first person to volunteer for the procedure.

Spiridonov has Werdnig-Hoffman disease - a rare genetic muscle wasting condition, also referred to as type 1 spinal musclur atropy (SMA). The condition is caused by the loss of motor neurons in the spinal cord and the brain region connected to the spinal cord. Individuals with the disease are unable to walk and are often unable to sit unaided.

Spiridonov was diagnosed with Werdnig-Hoffman disease at the age of 1 and told MailOnline that he volunteered for HEAVEN-GEMINI because he wants the chance of a new body before he dies.

'"I can hardly control my body now," he said. "I need help every day, every minute. I am now 30 years old, although people rarely live to more than 20 with this disease."

Donor body will be attached to recipient's head through spinal cord fusion

Dr. Canavero told CNN he has received an array of emails and letters from people asking to be considered for the procedure, many of which have been from transgender individuals seeking a new body. However, the surgeon says the first people to undergo the procedure will be those with muscle wasting conditions like Spiridonov.

The procedure - which is estimated to take 100 surgeons around 36 hours to complete - will involve spinal cord fusion (SCF). The head from a donor body will be removed using an "ultra-sharp blade" in order to limit the amount of damage the spinal cord sustains.

"The key to SCF is a sharp severance of the cords themselves," Dr. Canavero explains in a paper published earlier this year, "with its attendant minimal damage to both the axons in the white matter and the neurons in the gray laminae. This is a key point."

The spinal cord of the donor body will then be fused with the spinal cord of the recipient's head. Chemicals called polyethylene glycol or chitosan can be used to encourage SCF, according to Dr. Canavero. The muscles and blood supply will then be sutured.

The recipient will be kept in a coma for around 3-4 weeks, says Dr. Canavero, during which time the spinal cord will be subject to electrical stimulation via implanted electrodes in order to boost the new nerve connections.

The surgeon estimates that - with the help of physical  threpy - the patient would be able to walk within 1 year.

Spiridonov admits he is worried about undergoing the procedure. "Am I afraid? Yes, of course I am," he told MailOnline. "But it is not just very scary, but also very interesting."

"You have to understand that I don't really have many choices," he added. "If I don't try this chance my fate will be very sad. With every year my state is getting worse."

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