Eat chocolate to loose weight? Not so fast...

A very pleasant-to-read study (at least pleasant for this chocolate lover, but only the real stuff – that is, dark, dark chocolate - not that fancy-pants milk chocolate stuff that’s more candy than chocolate) in the Archives of Internal Medicine has determined that adults who eat chocolate regularly are actually thinner than adults who shun that terrific treat.

Surprisingly, the researchers also claim that chocolate eaters did not seem to cut back on the intake of other calories to compensate for the chocolate eating (why in the world would you want to do that, anyway? It would spoil the benefits of eating the chocolate as an added treat, after all, and just make chocolate into another food that you had to monitor) nor did chocolate-eaters exercise more.

But before you jump on the no-doubt soon-to-be-hyped Hollywood Chocolate diet, here’s a couple of things to consider about these results.

Could it be, for example, that people who eat lots of chocolate somehow know – perhaps from past eating experiences - that they are not as geared as other people to gaining weight so they also know that they can they can get away with eating more chocolate than someone who gains weight very easily?

Or perhaps chocolate eaters are health- and weight-conscious in other ways that these researchers did not account for?

That said, I’ve always been a strong believer that you need your treats – well, I do, anyway - and so long as you practice a bit of discipline (one or two or three bites, not one or two or three bars), there are only benefits to be had from eating some chocolate regularly.

Sitting too much every day is not good for you

A 3-year-long study that followed over 200,000 Australian adults concluded that the longer you sit every day, the higher your risk of premature death.

So people who sat the most and who did no exercise were 3 times more likely to die over these 3 years than their more active, less sedentary peers.

But here’s the rub: the data also revealed that anyone sitting between 8-11 hours a day had a 15 % higher risk of dying than people who sat less than 8 hours a day, and this held true even if the longer sitters were doing regular exercise outside their sedentary time.

Even worse, people who sat more than 11 hours a day had a 40 % higher risk of overall death.

Seems to me that a study like this has several major cautions especially the fact that people who sit longer hours are very likely more sick to begin with than people who don’t sit as much and it’s their poorer health that is actually the reason for their higher risk of premature death, and I know that the researchers try to account for a factor like this but in short-term studies like this, it seems to me impossible to account for this potential mitigating determinant.

That said, sitting too much can’t possibly be good for anyone so if you have a sedentary job, you should probably try especially hard to maximize the time you spend doing more active stuff away from work.

Like me, for example, who spends most of his day on the computer but most of his time away from the computer up and about as a (rather poor) house-husband.

But hey, it sure beats having a real job, and besides, I love the limited company, which consists entirely of a flatulent, somnolent rottweiler.

He’s a great listener, though. I think.

Popcorn is tops

According to a paper presented yesterday at the 243^rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), popcorn is the king of snacks.

It’s not only got terrific whole grain fiber, but it’s also loaded with anti-oxidants, in fact popcorn is more concentrated with anti-oxidants, if you believe these guys, than fruits and veggies, which are mostly water, after all, while popcorn is not.

The downside?

Well, besides, those kernels getting stuck in your teeth (the report didn’t mention those but I think it matters), there’s the way we generally prepare popcorn, that is, with a maximum of oil and salt, especially the kind you get in movie theatres, which is about as far removed from being a healthy snack as I am from being (mis)taken for George Clooney.

If, however, you use a minimum of salt and oil, and especially if you use healthy oils, then you’ve got what these people called the perfect snack.

Is it too soon to offer them a Nobel Prize?

We live in a clean, clean, world – and that's not always so good

The hygiene hypothesis proclaims that we live in a world that’s too clean and that may account for the large rise in the numbers of cases of conditions like allergies, asthma, autoimmune disorders, and anything to do with how we handle “inflammation”.

This theory proposes that early (and frequent?) exposure to germs and all the other nasties that used to be way more prevalent in our lives until we started cleaning, and wiping and generally avoiding all those things work as a sort of priming mechanism for normal immune system development, so if you delay or postpone the introduction of “schmutz” (there’s really no good way to reproduce the real emphasis in the voice of a Jewish mother for when she uses that word what is generally translated as “dirt”), the non-primed immune system jumps into over-drive to protect us from what lingers in the schmutz, leading to a much larger risk of developing those conditions referred to above.

It’s been a topic of hot debate among the experts but the “pro” side in this argument has just received a terrific boost from a (soon-to-be) publication in the authoritative journal, Science, which has found that mice raised in an environment lacking germs (intriguingly referred to as "germ-free mice"; science is so tricky sometimes) not only had “exaggerated inflammation of the lungs and colon resembling asthma and colitis” but equally important, if the germ-free mice were exposed to ordinary shmutz (bacteria, etc) early in life, their immune systems developed normally, although if that exposure was delayed, their immune systems seemed to be permanently negatively affected.

Does this mean you should throw your kids into the dirt early in life (and not let them in until they’d rolled around in it for hours?)

No, but it also means, if you ask me, that we should drop our obsessive attachment to using anti-this and anti-that wipes for our counters and work surfaces and floors (not to mention our own body parts) and that allowing kids to play with dogs, cats, in parks, etc is not only good for their social lives, it also benefits them physically.

Lots of hype about a potential baldness cure

Lots of hype around a study yesterday that found a prostaglandin (a kind of hormone) that seems to help control hair loss (probably, I’ll bet, along with other as-yet-undiscovered hormones or proteins that work with or against this one), which is an interesting finding in itself because previously-discovered prostaglandins seem to be more implicated in hair growth than hair loss.

Anyway, in rodents in which you block this prostaglandin, apparently they will grow hair normally back in places where they had lost it, normal hair growing in normal hair follicles.

If this holds up in humans, it would be a step (not really sure how large) forward in finding one of the Holy Grails of pharmaceutical research, a better treatment for hair loss (and perhaps even prevention of hair loss) for which millions and millions of men (and likely millions of women, too, as hair loss in aging women is a considerable cosmetic problem) would pay whatever they could afford to pay.

That said, dozens and dozens of companies are doing research in this area so I’m willing to bet that withing 5 years, we’ll have a vast marketable improvement in this area.