Keeping a food diary can double your weight loss
Writing down everything you eat can help you eat less and lose twice as much weight, a new study by the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research has found. Funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health, the study is one of the few to recruit a large percentage of African Americans as participants (44 percent). African Americans have a higher risk of conditions that are aggravated by being overweight, including diabetes and heart disease. In this study, the majority of African-American participants lost at least nine pounds, which is higher than in previous studies. “The more food records people kept, the more weight they lost,” said lead author Jack Hollis Ph.D., a researcher at Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore. “Those who kept daily food records lost twice as much weight as those who kept no records. It seems that the simple act of writing down what you eat encourages people to consume fewer calories.” Besides keeping food diaries, participants were asked to follow a heart-healthy DASH (a Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet rich in fruits and vegetables and low-fat or non-fat dairy, attend weekly group sessions and exercise at moderate intensity levels for at least 30 minutes a day. After six months, the average weight loss among the nearly 1,700 participants was about 13 pounds. More than two-thirds of the participants (69 percent) lost at least nine pounds, enough to reduce their health risks and qualify for the second phase of the study, which lasted 30 months and tested strategies for maintaining the weight loss. “More than two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. If we all lost just nine pounds, like the majority of people in this study did, our nation would see vast decreases in hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease and stroke,” said study co-author Victor Stevens, Ph.D., a Kaiser Permanente researcher. For example, in an earlier study, Stevens found that losing as little as five pounds can reduce the risk of developing high blood pressure by 20 percent. The findings, from one of the largest and longest running weight-loss maintenance trials ever will be published in the August issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Higher education equals fewer cancer deaths
A drop in the death rates from the four leading types of cancer in the United States since the early 1990s were largely driven by the efforts of college-educated men and women, researchers said on Tuesday. The study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, was the latest to illustrate how a person’s health can be closely tied to socioeconomic factors, such as education and income level. Deaths from the four most common cancers – lung, colorectal, prostate, and breast – dropped substantially in the United States from 1993 to 2001 in working-age individuals. However, not all Americans are equally likely to benefit from those gains. Deaths due to lung cancer among college-degreed Black women remained unchanged. Further, the study found that while more other highly educated individuals experienced the greatest reductions in cancer death rates in nearly all of these cancers, less-educated individuals had fewer deaths in only one of the cancer types. However, the researchers did find an anomaly: Breast cancer deaths among White women who did not complete high school declined. For the study, researchers at the American Cancer Society and Emory University in Atlanta calculated death rates for lung, breast, prostate and colorectal cancer by level of education among U.S. Blacks and Whites, ages 25 to 64, for 1993 through 2001. “The recent reductions in death rates from major cancers in the United States have bypassed less-educated working-age people, suggesting that persons in lower socioeconomic groups have not yet benefited equivalently from recent advances in prevention, early detection and treatment of the major fatal cancers,” the researchers wrote. The authors also said that possible reasons for the differences in death rates that they uncovered had to do with the behavioral risks associated with people with less education and living in poverty, such as smoking, the lack of cancer screenings and access to better treatment, which is consistent with other recent studies.

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