People with a preference for sweets are at a higher risk of developing depression, diabetes, and suffering a stroke, according to new research from the University of Surrey.
The study, which was published in the Journal of Translational Medicine, utilized anonymized data on the food preferences of 180,000 volunteers from the UK Biobank. Artificial intelligence was employed to categorize them into three general profiles:
Health-conscious: prefer fruits and vegetables over animal-based and sweet foods.
Omnivore: Likes most foods, including meats, fish, and some vegetables, as well as sweets and desserts.
Sweet tooth: Prefer sweet foods and sugary drinks and is less interested in healthier options like fruit and vegetables.
The Surrey team analyzed UK Biobank data on blood samples, measuring 2,923 proteins and 168 metabolites to observe how these levels varied in each group.
Proteins are essential for various functions in the body, such as fighting infections, muscle contractions, and cognitive processes. Metabolites, on the other hand, are small molecules produced during digestion and other chemical processes in the body, providing valuable insights into our body’s functioning. By comparing these blood-based proteins and metabolites, researchers can gain a better understanding of the biological variances between different groups.
Professor Nophar Geifman, said:
“The foods that you like or dislike appear to be directly linked to your health. If your favorite foods are cakes, sweets, and sugary drinks, our study’s results suggest that this may have negative effects on your health. We found that the group with a sweet tooth is 31% more likely to have depression. Additionally, this group had higher rates of diabetes and vascular heart conditions compared to the other two groups.”
“Importantly, by utilizing data-driven artificial intelligence methods, we managed to categorize individuals based on their food preferences. These categories have significant associations with health outcomes and biological markers.”
“Processed sugar is a significant part of many people’s diets. These results provide further evidence that, as a society, we should be mindful of what we eat. It’s important to stress that we’re not trying to tell people what to do; our job is simply to inform.”
The researchers also looked at differences between the three groups in standard blood biochemistry tests.
Professor Geifman continues:
“In the sweet tooth group, they had higher levels of C reactive protein, which is a marker for inflammation. Their blood results also show higher levels of glucose and poor lipid profiles, which is a strong warning sign for diabetes and heart disease.”
Conversely, the health-conscious group, which also had higher dietary fibre intake, had lower risks for heart failure, chronic kidney diseases and stroke, while the omnivore group had moderate health risks.
According to the British Nutrition Foundation, on average, in the UK, between 9% to 12.5% of an individual’s calories come from free sugar – this is defined as sugar that is added to food or drink. Biscuits, buns, cakes, pastries and fruit pies are the biggest single contributors for adults, but together, sugary soft drinks and alcoholic drinks contribute the most to free sugar intake.
The harmful consequences of this epidemic are already evident: childhood hypertension and type 2 diabetes, among others. Researchers sound the alarm and discuss both challenges and potential solutions. Credit Alex Dolce, Florida Atlantic University
Since 1990, the rise in childhood overweight and obesity has surged across every continent, almost doubling in prevalence. While the United States has the highest prevalence, other nations are not far behind.
In Southern Europe, including Greece, Italy, and Spain, 10 to 15% of children are obese. At the same time, Eastern European countries have somewhat lower rates but are experiencing a rapid increase that may soon match Southern Europe. Globally, Asia has nearly half of all overweight children under the age of 5, and Africa has one-quarter of such children. In Latin America, about 20% of children under 20 are overweight. Many developing countries face the dual challenge of both overweight/obesity and malnutrition in their children.
“Pediatric overweight and obesity have reached epidemic levels in the U.S. and are becoming a pandemic globally. These conditions lead to high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and lipid disorders, which contribute to metabolic syndrome. In adults, these issues significantly increase the risks of heart attacks, stroke, liver disease, obstructive sleep apnea, arthritis and certain cancers – many of which are now occurring at younger ages,” said Charles H. Hennekens, M.D., first author and the first Sir Richard Doll Professor of Medicine and Preventive Medicine, FAU Schmidt College of Medicine. “Through coordinated clinical and public health efforts, we can address these troubling trends and work toward a healthier future for children and families globally.”
In the commentary, the authors report on the leading causes of this epidemic including high body mass index (BMI), which increases the risks of many serious health issues. In the U.S., a preschooler is considered overweight if their BMI exceeds the 85th percentile. Research shows that these children are at a significantly higher risk of being overweight during adolescence compared to those with a BMI at the 50th percentile. This underscores the misconception that children simply “outgrow” overweight issues.
In addition, the authors note that health care providers and public health practitioners face major challenges in boosting daily physical activity among children, which is crucial for increasing metabolic rates, lowering BMI, and reducing future risks of coronary heart disease.
“With declining physical education in schools and excessive time spent on electronic devices, many children fail to meet recommended activity guidelines. This sedentary behaviour contributes to overweight and obesity through poor diet, reduced sleep, and decreased physical activity,” said Panagiota “Yiota” Kitsantas, Ph.D.,
The authors also caution that while increasing levels of daily physical activity is necessary, it isn’t sufficient to make a major impact on the rates of childhood overweight and obesity. The rise of high sugar containing foods, along with consumption of ultra-processed foods also are major contributors.
“Nearly 70% of the average U.S.-based child’s diet is made up of ultra-processed foods,” said Hennekens. “Moreover, consumption of ultra-processed foods among children under 24 months is rising worldwide, triggering not only the potential of developing obesity but also decreased immunological protection.”
The authors say that more research is needed to pinpoint which components of ultra-processed foods contribute to weight gain in children. However, they warn that a diet high in ultra-processed foods is linked to rising rates of overweight and obesity, with schools being a major source of these foods.
“Evidence suggests that enhancing school lunch nutritional standards could help reduce obesity, particularly among low-income children,” said Kitsantas. “We recommend adopting school food policies that remove ultra-processed foods from menus and promote healthier alternatives, alongside educational programs on healthy eating, despite the challenges posed by external influences on children.”
Among the challenges highlighted in the commentary is the use of social media and advertising, which significantly affect children’s food choices and behaviors that include sharing unhealthy food posts and recognizing many unhealthy food brands upon exposure.
“Despite recommendations from the World Health Organization and public health authorities to restrict food marketing aimed at children, few countries have implemented such measures,” said Hennekens. “The effectiveness of existing regulations in today’s media landscape is uncertain, creating an opportunity for health providers and public health practitioners to educate families about the impact of this advertising.”
The authors explain that addressing the rising pediatric obesity epidemic requires a multifaceted approach. In 2023, the American Academy of Pediatrics endorsed WHO guidelines and released their own recommendations for managing pediatric overweight and obesity. These guidelines advise health care providers and public health practitioners to tackle social determinants of health, use motivational interviewing to modify nutrition and activity behaviors, and consider pharmacotherapy or surgery to meet personalized patient goals.
However, the authors say that while there are approved drug therapies available, before prescribing pharmacologic options, maternal and child health care providers should employ therapeutic lifestyle changes.
“While the ultimate goal is prevention of pediatric overweight and obesity as well as metabolic syndrome, to paraphrase Voltaire, we should not ‘let the perfect be the enemy of the good,’” said Hennekens.
In conclusion, the authors urge leveraging all available resources to at least stabilize the rising rates of childhood obesity and its associated health issues. Ignoring these challenges could lead to an unprecedented global epidemic of childhood and adolescent obesity, with severe future health consequences, as seen in the U.S.
“Health care and public health professionals must collaborate across disciplines to address these issues with patients, families, communities and policymakers. United efforts can help reverse these troubling trends and ensure a healthier future for children worldwide,” said Kitsantas.
Anti-inflammatory foods can combat disease, researcher says
Almost 60% of Americans have pro-inflammatory diets, increasing the risk of health issues such as heart disease and cancer, according to a recent Omega 3 for chronic pain, by Dr Andrea Furlanstudy utilizing a tool designed to assess inflammation in the diet.
The study also found that specific populations, including Black Americans, men, and people with lower incomes, were more likely to consume a diet high in pro-inflammatory foods.
“Overall, 57% of U.S. adults have a pro-inflammatory diet and that number was higher for Black Americans, men, younger adults and people with lower education and income,” said lead author Rachel Meadows, visiting faculty in The Ohio State University’s College of Public Health.
The research team used the dietary inflammatory index, a tool developed a decade ago that includes 45 dietary components to examine the diets of more than 34,500 adults included in the 2005–2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
Based on self-reported diets, they used the tool to assign inflammation values ranging from −9 to 8, where 0 represents a neutral diet. About 34% of those in the study had anti-inflammatory diets, and the remaining 9% had neutral dietary inflammatory levels
Older dietary measures look at the intake of certain food groups (such as fruits, vegetables and dairy) or macronutrients (such as carbohydrates, proteins and fats) that align with national diet recommendations or certain diets like keto or paleo.
“But inflammation is an important element to consider and the overall balance of diet is most important,” Meadows said.
“Even if you’re eating enough fruits or vegetables, if you’re having too much alcohol or red meat, then your overall diet can still be pro-inflammatory.”
Meadows said she’s less interested in labeling foods as “bad” and more interested in thinking about anti-inflammatory foods as tools people can employ to boost health.
“There’s a potential here to think about positive interventions, such as adding more garlic, ginger, turmeric and green and black tea — which are all anti-inflammatory — to your diet,” she said. “Moving toward a diet with less inflammation could have a positive impact on a number of chronic conditions, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease and even depression and other mental health conditions.”
Other examples of anti-inflammatory foods are mostly unprocessed including whole grains, green leafy vegetables (such as spinach), legumes (such as beans and lentils), fatty fish (such as salmon) and berries. Challenges to eating a less inflammatory diet include poor access to fruits, vegetables and other foods that can contribute to better health — and even when those foods are available, they can sometimes be more costly, creating a barrier for those with low incomes, Meadows said.
Many people also have elevated chronic inflammation due to non-dietary factors including stress and adverse childhood experiences, she said. “There are a lot of factors that contribute to chronic inflammation, and they all interact – even sleep is a key component. Diet can be used as a tool to combat that,” Meadows said.
Emily Manoogian and Satchin Panda Credit Salk Institute
Approximately one-third of adults in the United States have metabolic syndrome, a group of conditions that greatly increase a person’s risk of heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. These conditions consist of high blood pressure, elevated blood sugar, excess abdominal fat, and abnormal cholesterol levels.
In a recent clinical trial, researchers at the Salk Institute and the University of California San Diego School of Medicine discovered that time-restricted eating, also known as intermittent fasting, could provide significant health benefits to adults with metabolic syndrome. Patients who adhered to a consistent eight-to-ten-hour eating window each day for three months experienced improvements in various markers of blood sugar regulation and metabolic function compared to those who received standard treatments.
“Our bodies process sugars and fats very differently depending on the time of day,” says Salk Professor Satchidananda Panda, co-corresponding study author and holder of the Rita and Richard Atkinson Chair. “In time-restricted eating, we are re-engaging the body’s natural wisdom and harnessing its daily rhythms to restore metabolism and improve health.”
“For many patients, metabolic syndrome is the tipping point that leads to serious and chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease,” says co-corresponding author Pam Taub, who is a professor of medicine at the UC San Diego School of Medicine and a cardiologist at UC San Diego Health. “There is an urgent need for more effective lifestyle interventions that are accessible, affordable, and sustainable for the average American.”
Western diets high in sugar, salt, and fat, combined with increasingly sedentary lifestyles, are believed to have led to increasing rates of metabolic dysfunction. While the initial recommendation may be to “eat less and move more,” these lifestyle changes are challenging for most people to maintain long-term. Researchers suggest that time-restricted eating provides a more practical approach that is accessible to a wider range of patients, including those already on medication.
“Unlike expensive pharmaceuticals like Ozempic, which require lifetime use, time-restricted eating is a simple lifestyle change that doesn’t cause side effects and can be maintained indefinitely,” says first author Emily Manoogian, a staff scientist in Panda’s lab at Salk. “Patients appreciate that they don’t have to change what they eat, just when they eat.”
The new study customised time-restricted eating protocols to each participant’s eating habits, sleep/wake schedules, and personal commitments. The resulting regimen had them reduce their eating window to a consistent eight to ten hours per day, beginning at least one hour after waking up and ending at least three hours before going to sleep. Manoogian says this personalized approach made the intervention easier for patients to complete, compared to other intermittent fasting studies, which typically assign the same strict time window to all participants.
The TIMET study also accepted participants who were on medication for metabolic syndrome—a group usually excluded from such trials. This makes it the first study to measure the benefits of time-restricted eating in addition to existing standard-of-care pharmacological treatments.
The study randomly sorted 108 adults with metabolic syndrome into either the time-restricted eating group or the control group. Both groups continued to receive standard-of-care treatments and underwent nutritional counselling on the Mediterranean diet. Participants also logged their meals using the myCircadianClock mobile app, developed at Salk.
After three months, patients who had completed the time-restricted eating regimen showed improvements in key markers of cardiometabolic health, including blood sugar and cholesterol. They also saw lower levels of haemoglobin A1c, a marker of long-term blood sugar control. This reduction was similar in scale to what is typically achieved through more intensive interventions by the National Diabetes Prevention Program.
The time-restricted eating group also showed 3-4% greater decreases in body weight, body mass index (BMI), and abdominal trunk fat, which is closely linked to metabolic disease. Importantly, these participants did not experience significant loss of lean muscle mass, which is often a concern with weight loss.
Autoantibodies attacking the heart in lupus patients Credit Hand-drawn image by Xiaokan Zhang/Vunkak-Novakovic Lab
Cardiovascular disease is the primary cause of death in individuals with lupus, an autoimmune disease that occurs when the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues and organs, including the heart, blood, lungs, joints, brain, and skin. Lupus myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle, can be extremely serious as it can disrupt the normal rhythm and strength of the heartbeat. However, understanding the mechanisms of this complex disease is challenging and studying it is difficult.
A long-standing question about lupus is why some patients develop myocarditis while others remain unaffected, and why the clinical manifestations of affected patients range so dramatically, from no symptoms at all to severe heart failure. Lupus is characterized by a large number of autoantibodies, which are immune proteins that mistakenly target a person’s own tissues or organs, with different specificities for various molecules. These autoantibodies, similar to our genes, may explain why different individuals experience different symptoms.
Researchers have long suspected that certain autoantibody signatures may be the key to understanding the varied clinical presentations seen in lupus patients. Identifying the specific autoantibodies responsible for heart damage has been very difficult due to the lack of experimental models that accurately mimic the cardiac disease in lupus patients. The animal models currently used have limitations due to differences in cardiac physiology, and human cell cultures are unable to fully replicate the complexity and function of the human heart.
New study shows that autoantibodies can directly affect heart disease in lupus patient
The researchers created small cardiac tissues from healthy adult human stem cells, and then they matured the tissues using metabolic and electromechanical signals. Afterward, they exposed the tissues to the autoantibodies present in the blood of lupus patients who had myocarditis and those who did not. The team found that the way the patients’ autoantibodies attached to the heart tissue depended on the type and severity of their myocardial damage. Some patients with severe myocarditis had unique autoantibodies that mainly targeted dying cardiac cells, while those with weakened heart pump function had autoantibodies that mostly focused on the surface of live cells. Interestingly, the team also found that the autoantibodies binding to live cardiac cells could have powerful biological effects on the tissues without the presence of immune cells, potentially revealing new mechanisms that could lead to heart failure in lupus patients.
The study also identified four autoantibodies that may directly affect the heart muscle. These findings could assist in identifying lupus patients with the highest risk of developing heart disease, informing the development of new therapeutic strategies, and potentially extending to other autoimmune diseases.
“This study is the first to show that autoantibodies can directly cause injury to the heart in this complicated autoimmune disease,” said Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, the leader of the team. She is the University Professor and the Mikati Foundation Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Medical Sciences, and Dental Medicine at Columbia. “It’s astonishing that the miniature heart tissues we’ve created using human stem cells and ‘organs-on-chip’ technology can replicate organ-level functions in a way that is specific to each patient, particularly for such a complex disease. We are now in an era where we can examine the progression and treatment of diseases using seemingly simple yet highly controllable and predictive models of human organs. It feels like we are living in the future.”
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