Sugary soda doesn’t increase risk of heart attack or stroke

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Colby Vorland

Can you imagine that title being reported throughout the media without a fiery backlash of skepticism (except for smug soda drinkers)? Yet the reporting on a new study that indeed found this in their results instead focused on its finding of a positive association between diet soda consumption and vascular events. Many popular websites trumpeted the findings as solid, or at least didn’t provide an appropriate context for interpretation. Here are some reasons why both of the above conclusions would be premature. (This is, by the way, the second time this study has gone through the media rounds, the first time prior to publication.)

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Nutrition Research Trends

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Colby Vorland

Just a quick note, I’ve been playing around with some ways to track publication counts over a number of different research areas within nutritional science to attempt to quantify trends. What I have so far is posted here: http://nutsci.org/nutrition-research-trends/

It uses NCBI E-Utilities, javascript, and Google Spreadsheets to automate tracking of paper count in the pubmed database for a number of search terms. Right now I have embedded on the page 4 spreadsheets, which show the following:

Number of papers so far in 2012 for 50 random terms compared to 2011 on the same day (uses the current date). With this we can see the change in % difference between the two years each day (it refreshes daily).
This one is a publicly editable spreadsheet that is the same setup as (1) but anyone can enter their own search terms.
The same idea as (2) but searchable by author.
The last uses the same 50 random terms as (1) and calculates the slope and R^2 values of the linear regression of the paper counts over 6 years (2005-2011).

This is very much in the early stages, but hopefully it will become more useful in the future. Let me know if you have any requests/ideas in the comments here or on that page.

My favorites of 2011

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Colby Vorland

Like 2010 and 2009, here is my annual list of favorite personal posts, blogs, and twitter people. I hope it can help others discover new sources of information.

This year I changed the blog domain to nutsci.org and hope to continue highlighting interesting research as I have time.

Favorite Post Topics

I didn’t write as many posts this year, choosing to transition to more in depth posts instead of on single studies. Here are my favorites:

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Strawberry polyphenols mitigate very high dietary fructose-induced metabolic dysfunction in rats

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Colby Vorland

This was an interesting paper that has been sitting in my drafts for awhile, so here is a quick post on it.

By Jaroslawska et al., it directly examines the ability of strawberry pomace (leftover from industrial processing of strawberries) to mitigate the adverse metabolic effects of a high fructose intake in rats in the blood and in the gut (unabsorbed fructose seems to alter gut physiology).

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Varying dietary protein with overfeeding in a metabolic ward

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Colby Vorland

A new paper by George Bray and colleagues in JAMA examines the effect of altering dietary protein content on weight gain, energy expenditure, and body composition in response to overeating in metabolic units. The rationale being to test the hypothesis of metabolic inefficiency on a low or high protein diet that existing research has suggested. Scroll down for a video summary from Bray.

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A reader survey

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Colby Vorland

Last year around this time I put up a survey to learn more about reader demographics to this blog and posted some of the results here. It proved interesting so I’ve decided to do it again this year using the same questions to see if there are any differences.

Here is the link to the survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NWCBW8Y

If you have a few minutes of time I would greatly appreciate any feedback you can give- none of the questions have required answers so you can answer 1 or all of them. There are 10 questions. I’ll leave it run for 1 month and put up some of the (anonymous) results.

Thank you!

Dairy/calcium may reduce oxidative stress and inflammation in metabolic syndrome

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Colby Vorland

Metabolic syndrome is characterized by increased oxidative stress and inflammation (Van Guilder, Hoetzer, Greiner, Stauffer, and Desouza, 2006) that may underlie the increased risk for cardiovascular disease (Mottillo et al., 2010). Dietary calcium reduced reactive oxygen species, as well as biomarkers of oxidative stress and inflammation in mouse models (Sun and Zemel, 2006; Zemel and Sun, 2008). A reduction in biomarkers of oxidative stress and inflammation in overweight and obese humans following a high-dairy diet is observed in some (Zemel and Sun, 2008; Zemel, Sun, Sobhani, and Wilson, 2010) but not all (Wennersberg et al., 2009; van Meijl and Mensink, 2010) research. Stancliffe, Thorpe, and Zemel (2011) evaluated whether dairy had an effect in subjects with metabolic syndrome.

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Holidays & weight gain

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Colby Vorland

Yesterday and today I re-posted articles I wrote last year on Thanksgiving and overall holiday period weight gain, but for some reason they didn’t propagate through the RSS feed. Here is a link to both:

Thanksgiving and weight gain: trivial or not, and riskier for the overweight?

Holidays & weight gain: what the science suggests

Thanks for reading, and happy Thanksgiving!

Holidays & weight gain: what the science suggests

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Colby Vorland

Originally published on 12.22.2010.

Many people have the perception that they are likely to gain 5 or 10 pounds during the holiday season (Thanksgiving to after New Year’s Day). This myth has been propagated by media (4), partially explaining why it exists. But since it is untrue, it does not mean it isn’t important; holiday weight gain still may be an important factor in the obesity epidemic. After all, the average weight gain per year is only ~0.2 to 0.8 kg per year (4). Holiday weight gain could contribute a large part of this gain.

Several weeks ago, I described 2 studies that looked at the Thanksgiving holiday itself on weight, 1 of the studies finding an average increase in weight over about 2 weeks of 0.5 kg. Perhaps the most interesting finding is that when classified by weight at the start of the study (BMI), the overweight/obese group had gained on average 1.0 kg, whereas the “normal” weight group only gained 0.2 kg, suggesting that those already overweight may be at a higher risk for holiday weight gain, so, this is a good time to suggest precautions that can be taken.

First, let’s look at the other holiday research to see if it corroborates that on Thanksgiving, and if there are hints of differing effects in subgroups like in that study. If you want to skip the details, i’ve provided a summary and crude spreadsheet with results from each study at the end. Continue reading →

Thanksgiving and weight gain: trivial or not, and riskier for the overweight?

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Colby Vorland

Originally published on 11.23.2010. No additional research has been done since. Tomorrow I will post the subsequent article that examined research on the entire holiday period.

Is the Thanksgiving holiday a prime time for weight gain? Is it riskier for people already overweight or currently dieting? Unfortunately, I am only able to find 2 studies that specifically examine the effect Thanksgiving has on weight gain, and both have limitations that make definite conclusions difficult. I summarize those 2 studies below. For the quick and dirty summary, scroll to the bottom. There are several other studies that have looked at the entire holiday season, as well as Christmas by itself on weight. I will describe these studies in upcoming separate posts.

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