THURSDAY, Feb. 2 (HealthDay News) -- A warning to certain types as those Super Bowl parties approach: People with a need to please others are more likely to eat too much in social situations, a new study suggests.
"People pleasers feel more intense pressure to eat when they believe that their eating will help another person feel more comfortable," study lead author Julie Exline, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University, said in a university news release. "Almost everyone has been in a situation in which they've felt this pressure, but people pleasers seem especially sensitive to it."
But there's an emotional cost to this behavior, according to the report published in the current issue of the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.
"Those who overeat in order to please others tend to regret their choices later. It doesn't feel good to give in to social pressures," Exline said.
The study included 101 college students who completed a questionnaire that assessed their characteristics for having a people-pleasing personality, such as putting others' needs before their own, worrying about hurting others and being sensitive to criticism.
Each of the participants was then seated alone with a female actor who posed as another study volunteer. The actor was given a bowl of candy and took a small handful (about five pieces) before offering the bowl to the study participant.
Being a people pleaser was associated with taking more candy, both in the laboratory experiment and in a second study involving the participants' recollection of real-life eating situations.
People pleasers "don't want to rock the boat or upset the sense of social harmony," Exline explained.
-- Robert Preidt 
Copyright © 2012 HealthDay. All rights reserved. SOURCE: Case Western Reserve University, news release, Jan. 31, 2012
THURSDAY, March 15 (HealthDay News) -- An electronic diary program helped improve overweight and obese adults' adherence to a weight-loss regimen, according to a new study.
The study included 210 overweight or obese adults who were asked to keep track of aspects of weight-loss treatment such as attendance at group sessions and energy and exercise goals.
The participants kept track using either a paper diary, a personal digital assistant (PDA) without feedback, or a PDA with a program that provided personalized dietary and exercise feedback messages.
The participants who received the feedback messages (one per day on diet and one every other day on exercise) were more successful in attending group sessions, meeting daily calorie goals, meeting daily fat-intake goals, reaching weekly exercise goals and monitoring their eating and exercise.
After six months, people in the group that received feedback messages saw weight loss of more than 5 percent. After 24 months, however, weight loss was similar in all three groups, according to the study, which is scheduled to be presented Thursday at an American Heart Association (AHA) meeting in San Diego.
"The results suggest that using an electronic diary improves treatment adherence," study author Lora Burke, a professor of nursing and epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, said in an AHA news release.
"Over time, participants' adherence declined, particularly in the later phase as contact frequency declined and subsequently ended," she said. "Adherence in the paper-diary group declined more than in the device groups."
Because this study was presented at a medical meeting, the data and conclusions should be viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
-- Robert Preidt Copyright © 2012 HealthDay. All rights reserved. SOURCE: American Heart Association, news release, March 15, 2012
HealthDay Reporter
WEDNESDAY, March 21 (HealthDay News) -- The costs of the obesity epidemic to the United States and the economic value of curbing it are not captured fully by current methods, according to a new report.
The problem is that estimates used by Congress when it looks at these issues project out only 10 years, while it may take much longer than that for complications of obesity, such as diabetes and heart disease, to manifest, the report authors say.
For example, "a person with diabetes is not going to go on dialysis right away. They're going to go on dialysis 10 to 12 years after their diagnosis," said Michael O'Grady, co-author of the report, released Wednesday by the Campaign to End Obesity.
A 25-year window for making policy decisions would be more appropriate when drafting policies aimed at curbing disease, he said at a Wednesday morning press conference.
By the same token, measures to prevent obesity can take 20 or more years, perhaps even generations, to show their promise, the report said. A wider time window would enable policy makers to assess the cost-effectiveness of preventive programs, the report noted.
"Interventions aimed at children will not have their full payoff until those children are adults," said Dr. James Marks, senior vice president and director of the Health Group at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funded the study.
Nor will the success of interventions aimed at pregnant women be seen for many years, noted the study's authors, speaking at the briefing.
O'Grady, citing current CDC figures, said more than one-third of U.S. adults are overweight, another one-third are obese and 6 percent are extremely obese.
"That's right around three-quarters of the population," said O'Grady, a senior fellow for health care research at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and a principal with O'Grady Health Policy, LLC.
One estimate puts the annual cost of obesity at $147 billion, representing almost 10 percent of all medical expenses, the report said. But the Society of Actuaries -- which adds in lost productivity, employees on full disability and absenteeism -- puts the costs closer to $300 billion a year.
And at a minimum, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that per-person, obesity-related spending will increase an average of 3.6 percent a year, the report said.
The authors are asking those who make up budgets, including the Congressional Budget Office, to take into account a growing body of scientific literature on the toll of diabetes as well as hopeful interventions when they tally the price of obesity.
A window of 25 years will help policy makers arrive at more accurate long-term estimates, they said.
"Ten years is adequate for food stamps and aircraft carriers, but there are certain policy areas where we know the disease has a 20- to 25-year progression. You need the flexibility to go beyond 10 years," O'Grady said. "We probably want to modify the status quo of how we measure these things in order to capture the full value of that."
Marks said two of the greatest challenges the nation faces are restoring global economic competitiveness and the skyrocketing costs of medical care, which has become perhaps the biggest obstacle to long-term economic strength.
"Obesity lies right at the center of those challenges," he said. "The way Congress acts to score legislation, using only a 10-year horizon, misses a huge part of the value of preventive efforts."
The authors served in the George W. Bush administration. O'Grady was assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, and co-author James Capretta served as an associate director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Copyright © 2012 HealthDay. All rights reserved. SOURCES: March 21, 2012, teleconference with: Michael O'Grady, Ph.D., senior fellow for health care research, National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago, and principal, O'Grady Health Policy, LLC, and James Marks, M.D., senior vice president and director, Health Group, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; March 21, 2012, Campaign to End Obesity report, Assessing the Economics of Obesity and Obesity InterventionsHealthDay Reporter
TUESDAY, Feb. 21 (HealthDay News) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration plans to take a second look at the weight loss pill Qnexa on Wednesday, after initially rejecting it because of concerns about heart problems and possible birth defects.
While effective at reducing weight, the drug, manufactured by Vivus Inc., was denied approval in 2010 because of its potential side effects. An FDA advisory panel will now review two years of data; when advisers last voted on Qnexa, only one year's worth of follow-up data was available.
The drug combines the appetite suppressant phentermine and the anti-seizure/migraine drug topiramate. Phentermine was once widely prescribed as the "phen" part of the fen-phen weight loss drug. This combo was withdrawn from the market after its use was linked to high blood pressure in the lungs and heart valve disease. The problems were related to the "fen" or fenfluramine part of the combination, not the phentermine.
No new weight-loss drug has been approved in the United States in the past 13 years, according to published reports. As it stands, Xenical is the only FDA-approved drug specifically for long-term use -- up to a year -- for weight loss. Xenical is sold over-the-counter as Alli. However, other drugs may be used off label to promote weight loss.
Last April, a study funded by Vivus found that obese patients taking Qnexa lost an average 22 pounds over a year, while also lowering their blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
Dr. Louis Aronne, founder and director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Program at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City, is cautiously optimistic that Vivus did a good job responding to FDA safety concerns, and that the FDA will give the drug its nod of approval, with some caveats. Aronne was not involved in the trials but has been an adviser to Vivus and other companies developing weight loss medications.
"I am not as pessimistic as most people," he said.
Vivus has reported that Qnexa may increase the risk of cleft lip in babies of women who use the drug while pregnant. Aronne said the birth defect concern could be addressed through education on who should and should not use the new drug.
"We have learned our lessons with weight loss drugs," he said. "They need to be used in the right people under the right circumstances." The heart risks need to be weighed against reductions in heart disease risk factors that come with weight loss, he said.
Qnexa is not any riskier than bariatric surgery, according to Aronne. "The problem is that it can be distributed more widely," he said. He hopes for a compromise that allows the new compound to be prescribed, but not misused. "Once new medications are approved, local medical boards will need to enforce rules and make sure these medications are prescribed appropriately to the right candidates," he said. "We don't want to open up pill mills."
One thing is clear, he said: More options to treat obesity are needed. "For hypertension, there are 120 medications in nine categories," Aronne said. "We need new options and we need to get physicians thinking about obesity and obesity treatments."
Dr. Scott Kahan, an obesity expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and director of the National Center for Weight and Wellness in Washington, D.C., agreed. He is optimistic about the FDA's upcoming decision on Qnexa. "The weight loss effects are striking and approaching the amount of weight loss over two years that we get with bariatric surgery," he said. "This is really impressive."
More information
Learn more about weight loss medications at the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Copyright © 2012 HealthDay. All rights reserved. SOURCES: Louis Aronne, M.D., founder and director, Comprehensive Weight Control Program at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, New York City; Scott Kahn, M.D., associate director, Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center, Baltimore, and director, National Center for Weight and Wellness, Washington, D.C. By Randy DotingaHealthDay Reporter
SUNDAY, Feb. 19 (HealthDay News) -- A new animal study suggests that a genetic mutation could put certain people at higher risk for becoming obese if they eat high-fat diets.
At the moment, the practical uses of the research seem to be limited, but physicians could conceivably test people for the mutation and recommend that they avoid certain kinds of diets, said study co-author Dr. Gozoh Tsujimoto, a professor at Kyoto University's department of genomic drug discovery science in Japan. It may also be possible, Tsujimoto said, to eventually give people drugs to combat the effects of the mutation.
If that happens, there would be "a new avenue for personalized health care," Tsujimoto said.
Scientists have been busy studying genetic links to obesity that could make some people more prone to gain extra weight. Two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. Excess pounds contribute to a variety of diseases, including heart disease and cancer.
In the new study, researchers looked at the component of the body's internal communication system that plays a role in the regulation of appetite and the production of fat cells.
The investigators found that mice that didn't have the component were 10 percent fatter than other mice when all were fed a high-fat diet. Mice without the component also developed higher intolerance to glucose.
Research conducted in animals does not always translate into humans, and much more research is needed. However, the researchers found that Europeans with the genetic mutation, known as GPR120, were more likely to be obese.
"Our study for the first time demonstrated the gene responsible for diet-induced obesity," Tsujimoto said.
According to Tsujimoto, more than 3 percent of Europeans have the trait. The next step for researchers is to study its prevalence in Japanese, Korean and Chinese people.
What can be done with the knowledge from the study?
Tsujimoto said physicians could advise people with the trait to avoid high-fat diets. A test is available to detect the trait and it costs about $200 in Japan, Tsujimoto said.
While medications could potentially be developed that would reverse the effects of the genetic trait, there are no such drugs now, Tsujimoto added.
Ruth Loos, director of Genetics of Obesity and Related Metabolic Traits at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, said "these findings provide another piece of what turns out to be the very large puzzle that describes the causes of obesity."
Consistent findings in mice and humans have put the trait "more firmly on the obesity map and provides a new starting point for more research into the function of this gene," said Loos.
"This is only the beginning of likely many years of research to disentangle the physiological mechanisms that lie behind the link between this gene and obesity risk," she said. "It is only when we understand the physiology and biology better that one can start thinking of developing a drug."
The study appears online Feb. 19 in the journal Nature.
Copyright © 2012 HealthDay. All rights reserved. SOURCES: Gozoh Tsujimoto, M.D., Ph.D., professor, department of genomic drug discovery science, Kyoto University, Japan; Ruth Loos, Ph.D., professor and director, Genetics of Obesity and Related Metabolic Traits, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York City; Feb. 19, 2012, Nature, online People Who Postpone a Snack Craving Have Less Desire for It; Eat Less Over Time, Study Finds
By Kathleen Doheny
WebMD Health News
Reviewed by Laura J. Martin, MD
Jan. 30, 2012 -- Got a craving for chocolate ice cream, greasy chips, or something else that you're trying not to eat?
Postpone it.
People who postpone a snack they crave actually desire it less and are able to delay eating it, says researcher Nicole Mead, PhD, an assistant professor at Catolica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics in Portugal.
What's more, they then eat less of that food over the next week, she has found.
One key? Postponing has to be to some vague time in the future.
"When you postpone to some indefinite time in the future, the desire for the food actually decreases," Mead says. She presented her findings at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in San Diego.
When a craving hits, people often think they have two choices, Mead says: giving in or resisting.
"If you give up, you are usually feeling guilty," she says. If you resist, you often feel deprived and ''you might overindulge later on."
"We propose a third option: To say to yourself, 'I can have it later.'"
It takes you out of that ''yes-no,'' ''should I or shouldn't I?'' conflict, she says.
Mead tested the strategy using different snack foods.
In one study, she invited 99 men and women to watch film clips. She put a bowl of candies in front of each participant. The participants weren't told what the researchers were actually studying. She assigned them to one of three groups:
One group was told they could eat the candies freely.Another group was asked not to eat them.A third group was told they could have them later.After the film clip viewing, Mead asked the participants unrelated questions, such as whether the temperature in the room was OK, again to throw them off.
Then she told all of them it was OK to eat the candies. The participants weren't told that the researchers were going to measure how much candy they ate.
The group told not to eat the candies while watching the film ate the most, about a third of an ounce. Those told to eat freely and those asked to postpone each ate about half that amount. The postponing group ate a little less than the eat-freely group.
"We also measured chocolate consumption over one week," Mead says. The postponing group ate chocolate candy only once during the week after the experiment. The group told to eat freely ate it three times. The group told not to eat it at the film viewing ate it about four-and-a-half times.
Mead wanted to see if she would get the same results if she allowed people to choose their strategy. She gave 105 high school students in the Netherlands, average age 15, each a bag of chips. They were randomly assigned to an eating strategy or told to choose their own.
The three strategies:
Eat the chips now if you wish.Do not eat the chips.Don't eat them now, but you can eat them later.The postponing group ate the least amount of chips, whether they were assigned to that group or chose it, Mead found.
They ate the least amount of chips over the week that followed, too, she says. Those in the postpone group had chips about 2.4 times in the next week. Those in the group told to eat freely had them nearly four times. Those in the group told not to eat chips had them 4.5 times.
"This one-minute manipulation lasted seven days," Mead says.
The postponing gives the mind a cooling-off period, Mead says. It may also take you out of conflict mode, torn between feeling guilty and feeling deprived.
However, she believes the postponement must be nonspecific. Not "I'll have that candy at 3 p.m.," but "I'll have the candy later if I want it."
The key may be postponing without telling yourself when, says Brian Wansink, PhD, John S. Dyson professor of marketing at Cornell University. He is a long-time researcher on eating behavior.
He wasn't involved in the Mead study, but he tested the postpone strategy some years ago.
He told people to postpone to a specific time, and he gave up on that research, he tells WebMD. "It worked OK for people who weren't that eager to have a food," he says. But it didn't seem to combat strong cravings.
Some participants, he remembers, were then watching the clock and thinking of nothing else but the food they craved.
Mead's strategy of postponing to some undefined time in the future, he says, might work well for those who want to watch their weight and avoid certain foods. During postponement, he says, they may actually substitute a healthier food.
Wansink reports receiving research funding from Bel Group (Babybel cheeses), Corn Refiners Association, and Birds Eye Foods.
This study was presented at a medical conference. The findings should be considered preliminary as they have not yet undergone the "peer review" process, in which outside experts scrutinize the data prior to publication in a medical journal.
SOURCES: Nicole Mead, assistant professor, Catolica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics, Portugal.Brian Wansink, PhD, John S. Dyson professor of marketing, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 13th Annual Meeting, Jan. 26-28, 2012, San Diego, Calif.©2012 WebMD, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Study: Obese People Are in Pain More Often, Even if They Are Healthy
By Brenda Goodman, MA
WebMD Health News
Reviewed by Laura J. Martin, MD
Jan. 30, 2012 -- A large new study shows that obesity and pain often go hand in hand. That appears to be true even if an obese person is otherwise healthy.
Researchers say that begs some questions: Can extra pounds cause pain? If so, how does fat make us hurt?
A slew of chronic conditions that cause pain are also more common in people who are overweight and obese. Those conditions include arthritis, depression, fibromyalgia, type 2 diabetes, and back pain.
So the assumption has been that being obese makes a person more likely to have multiple medical problems, and many of these conditions may cause pain.
The new survey, however, which included responses from more than 1 million Americans, found that the relationship between obesity and pain persisted even after researchers tried to account for the influences of other pain-causing health problems.
"Being sick can cause pain, but that doesn't necessarily take care of the relationship between obesity and pain," says researcher Arthur A. Stone, PhD, distinguished professor and vice chairman of the department of psychiatry at the Stony Brook University Medical Center in Stony Brook, N.Y.
The study is published in the journal Obesity.
For the study, researchers relied on data collected by telephone surveys conducted by the Gallup organization from 2008 to 2010.
The majority of survey participants were white (85.1%) and had at least a high school education (94.2%).
Every survey participant was asked to report their height and weight. Based on that information, 36.8% of people in the study fell into the low or normal body mass index (BMI) category, 38.3% were considered overweight, and 24.9% were considered obese.
People were asked if they had experienced physical pain the previous day. They were also asked if they had neck, back, leg, or knee conditions that had caused pain during the last 12 months, or if they'd experienced any other condition that caused recurring pain.
They were also asked about the presence of a variety of other medical conditions, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, asthma, diabetes, heart attack, and depression. Researchers found that as weight increased, so did the likelihood that a person would be experiencing pain.
Compared to normal-weight people in the survey, people in the overweight group -- those with BMIs between 25 and 29 -- had about 20% more pain. People with BMIs between 30 and 34 had about 68% more pain. Those with BMIs between 35 and 39 had 136% more pain, and those with BMIs over 40 reported having 254% more pain.
As expected, chronic pain conditions accounted for a good portion of those results.
And researchers recognize that the relationships between chronic health problems and pain and obesity are complex. In some cases, it could be that having arthritis makes a person less likely to move around, which makes them more likely to gain weight. In others, it may be that being overweight puts strain on the joints, which leads to joint problems that cause pain.
When researchers accounted for the influences of other health problems and pain causing conditions, being overweight was no longer associated with being in pain.
But people who were obese still reported more pain than those with normal BMIs. Researchers caution that their findings are just an association. They don't prove that fat alone causes pain.
But they mirror a handful of other, smaller studies that have also found links between pain and obesity, even when there were no other chronic conditions to explain the findings.
So they say it makes sense that there might be another mechanism connected to having a lot of fatty tissue or to problems with the body's metabolism that might explain the pain.
The study wasn't able to explain how fat might cause pain.
But Stone says that fat cells are known to make chemicals that increase inflammation. "And we know that inflammation is very closely linked to pain perception, so there's the possibility that there's some connection through that kind of process."
He says those questions will ultimately need to be addressed by other researchers.
SOURCES: Stone, A. Obesity, published online Jan. 30, 2012.News release, Stony Brook University.Arthur A. Stone, PhD, distinguished professor and vice chairman, department of psychiatry, Stony Brook University Medical Center, Stony Brook, N.Y.©2012 WebMD, LLC. All Rights Reserved.