Kids shovel down more calories watching TVNEW YORK (Reuters Health) — Watching television disrupts children’s’ normal response to food — they will eat more while they’re sitting in front of the tube, whether or not they’re really hungry.“These data, combined with those from other studies, support recommendations to reduce television watching and restrict eating while watching television as part of a healthy lifestyle,” Dr. Jennifer L. Temple and colleagues from the University at Buffalo, New York, conclude.

Temple and her team looked at how television affected “habituation to food cues.” Habituation is the phenomenon that occurs when a person repeatedly provided with a food will eventually lose interest and stop eating it once they are full.

Providing a new, unfamiliar food can disrupt this process, and a person will start eating again even if they’re not hungry. Non-food stimuli may also disrupt habituation if a person’s attention is distracted.

In the first experiment, the researchers had 30 normal-weight kids ranging in age from nine to 12 perform a computer task to earn points to eat food. The task consisted of ten two-minute time blocks.

For the first seven blocks, kids worked for points to eat half a junior cheeseburger. For the final seven, some children continued to work for pieces of cheeseburger, others worked for French fries, and the third group worked for cheeseburgers while watching television.

While the kids who didn’t watch television and were continually offered cheeseburgers as rewards eventually lost interest in the food, the children offered French fries and those who finished the task while watching television started eating again, the researchers found.No need to diet and exercise to lose weightNEW YORK (Reuters Health) — A new study debunks the widely held belief that diet plus exercise is the most effective way to lose weight. Researchers report that dieting alone is just as effective as dieting plus exercise.“For weight loss to occur, an individual needs to maintain a difference between the number of calories they consume everyday and the number of calories they burn through metabolism and physical activity,” Dr. Leanne Redman of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, explains in a press release.

“What we found was that it did not matter whether a reduction in calories was achieved through diet or burned everyday through exercise.”

Thirty-five overweight but otherwise healthy adults — 16 men and 19 women — completed the six-month study. Twelve were assigned to a diet-only group; they reduced their calorie intake by 25 percent. Twelve were assigned to diet plus exercise; they reduced their calorie intake by 12.5 percent and increased their exercise by 12.5 percent. The remaining 11 subjects made no significant diet or exercise changes.

Redman and colleagues found that the diet-only group and the diet plus exercise group lost roughly the same amount of weight, albeit by different means. They lost about ten percent of their body weight, 24 percent of their fat mass and 27 percent of their abdominal “visceral” fat — the deep internal fat linked to heart disease risk.

Therefore, if the goal is purely shedding pounds, diet or exercise will work, according to this study. However, as the researchers point out, regular exercise can improve aerobic fitness and lower the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer.Fish haters can get strong bones tooNEW YORK (Reuters Health) — Diets high in alpha-linolenic acid may promote strong bones, the results of a small study suggest, and contrary to what many people believe, you don’t need to eat fish or take fish oil tablets to raise levels of this omega-3 fatty acid. Omega-3 fatty acids are a type of polyunsaturated fatty acid, or PUFA. Most guidelines recommend consuming diets high in PUFAs and low in saturated fats.“Our findings suggest that by eating plant sources of alpha-linolenic acid, such as walnuts and flaxseed oil, you can strengthen bones,” senior author Dr. Rebecca L. Corwin, from The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, told Reuters Health. “This is good news for people who don’t like fish.”

The new findings, which appear in the Nutrition Journal, are based on a study of 23 subjects who consumed one of three diets, provided by the researchers, over 6-week periods. The diets included an average American diet, which was low in PUFAs; a diet high in alpha-linolenic acid; and a diet high in linoleic acid, a PUFA of the omega-6 group.

Compared with the average American diet, the alpha-linolenic diet, and to a lesser extent the linoleic diet, produced changes suggesting a reduction in bone breakdown, which would be expected to promote stronger bones. However, these diets did not seem to increase the formation of new bone.

“The take-home message is that eating plant sources of omega-3 fatty acids” seems to improve bone health, Corwin noted. “Although linoleic acid also had a beneficial effect, I would be reluctant to recommend increasing the intake, since some research has linked the omega-6 fatty acids with inflammatory effects.”