A Healthy You: weight gain

Thursday, 22 December 2016

Red cabbage microgreens lower 'bad' cholesterol in animal study

Microgreens are sprouting up everywhere from upscale restaurants to home gardens. They help spruce up old recipes with intense flavors and colors, and are packed with nutrients. Now testing has shown that for mice on a high-fat diet, red cabbage microgreens helped lower their risk factors for developing cardiovascular disease and reduce their weight gain. The report appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Microgreens are tender, immature plants and herbs that take only a week or two to grow before they're ready for harvesting. A growing body of research suggests that microgreens could offer more health benefits than their mature counterparts. And since previous studies have shown that full-grown red cabbage can help guard against excessive cholesterol, Thomas T.Y. Wang and colleagues wanted to see if red cabbage microgreens might have a similar or even greater effect than their larger counterparts.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers used mice that were a model for obesity. These animals also tend to develop high cholesterol and other risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The team divided 60 of these mice into different diet groups. They received food low in fat or high in fat, and with or without either red cabbage microgreens or mature red cabbage. Both the microgreens and mature cabbage diets reduced weight gain and levels of liver cholesterol in the mice on high-fat diets. But the study also showed that microgreens contained more potentially cholesterol-lowering polyphenols and glucosinolates than mature cabbage. The baby plants also helped lower LDL, or "bad," cholesterol and liver triglyceride levels in the animals.

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Materials provided by American Chemical Society. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

Haiqiu Huang, Xiaojing Jiang, Zhenlei Xiao, Lu Yu, Quynhchi Pham, Jianghao Sun, Pei Chen, Wallace Yokoyama, Liangli Lucy Yu, Yaguang Sunny Luo, Thomas T. Y. Wang. Red Cabbage Microgreens Lower Circulating Low-Density Lipoprotein (LDL), Liver Cholesterol, and Inflammatory Cytokines in Mice Fed a High-Fat Diet. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2016; 64 (48): 9161 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jafc.6b03805

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Tuesday, 20 December 2016

Direct link between REM sleep loss, desire for sugary and fatty foods discovered

It is not well understood what role sleep loss plays in affecting areas of the brain that control the desire to consume unhealthy foods. A new paper published on December 6 in the journal eLife finds that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep loss leads to increased consumption of unhealthy foods, specifically sucrose and fat. The researchers at the University of Tsukuba's International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine (IIIS) used a new method to produce REM sleep loss in mice along with a chemical-genetic technique to block prefrontal cortex neurons and the behaviors they mediate. As a result, the IIIS researchers discovered that inhibiting these neurons reversed the effect of REM sleep loss on sucrose consumption while having no effect on fat consumption.

REM sleep is a unique phase of sleep in mammals that is closely associated with dreaming and characterized by random eye movement and almost complete paralysis of the body. The prefrontal cortex plays a role in judging the palatability of foods through taste, smell and texture. Moreover, persons who are obese tend to have increased activity in the prefrontal cortex when exposed to high calorie foods. "Our results suggest that the medial prefrontal cortex may play a direct role in controlling our desire to consume weight promoting foods, high in sucrose content, when we are lacking sleep," says Kristopher McEown, the lead author on this project.

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Materials provided by University of Tsukuba. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.