(Press-News.org) ANN ARBOR—Trying to find a produce store or a large grocer in an economically depressed neighborhood is about as easy as finding an apple in a candy store.
Lack of access to good nutrition impacts racial and ethnic minorities and recent immigrants disproportionately. Poor nutrition combined with higher stress can contribute to other health problems, including type 2 diabetes.
But a new University of Michigan study may help explain how to cope with this stress and perhaps curb some of these health problems.
Rebecca Hasson, assistant professor at the U-M schools of Kinesiology and Public Health, found that overweight and obese African-American children and teens who successfully adapt to mainstream American culture—while maintaining strong ties with their own—could reduce stress and stress eating. In turn, this could reduce the risk for type 2 diabetes.
Immigration literature shows that successfully adapting to different cultures in a society, while maintaining one's own cultural identity, reduces stress. Since cultural and social environments influence stress-eating behavior, Hasson's findings could provide a valuable tool to change unhealthy eating behaviors linked to obesity and diabetes in ethnic minority youth.
The study also found that Latino adolescents of higher socioeconomic status showed increased diabetes risk, which means they didn't appear to benefit from the protection against diabetes that higher social and economic status affords.
Researchers cannot fully explain this finding, but again, it may be stress-related. Hasson said Latinos could suffer increased psychological stress associated with racial discrimination and social isolation if they live in predominantly white areas. Another possibility is that longer time in the U.S. is associated with poorer health outcomes for recent immigrants.
Pediatric obesity in the U.S. has more than tripled in the last 30 years, particularly among Latinos and African-Americans, said Hasson, who also heads U-M's Childhood Disparities Research Laboratory. This disparity is partially due to greater exposure to psychological stress, which leads to cortisol production and potential stress eating.
Hasson's current project investigates the link between chronic stress, stress eating and obesity in Latino, African-American and non-Latino white adolescents.
The study, "Sociocultural and socioeconomic influences on type 2 diabetes risk in overweight/obese African-American and Latino-American children and adolescents," appears in the Journal of Obesity.
INFORMATION:
Rebecca Hasson: http://kines.umich.edu/profile/rebecca-hasson-phd
Childhood Disparities Research Laboratory: http://kines.umich.edu/lab/cdrl
School of Kinesiology: http://kines.umich.edu
School of Public Health: http://www.sph.umich.edu
END
MADISON, Wis. — It is natural to imagine that the sense of sight takes in the world as it is — simply passing on what the eyes collect from light reflected by the objects around us.
But the eyes do not work alone. What we see is a function not only of incoming visual information, but also how that information is interpreted in light of other visual experiences, and may even be influenced by language.
Words can play a powerful role in what we see, according to a study published this month by University of Wisconsin–Madison cognitive scientist and psychology professor ...
Tree growth is measured to understand tree health, fluxes in carbon sequestration, and other forest ecosystem functions. It is one of the most essential and widely collected woody plant traits. Yet, the traditional method to measure tree growth is awkward and time consuming. Scientists have developed a new, resourceful way to take repeated tree growth measurements safely and accurately.
Dendrometer bands are metal straps that wrap around a tree trunk to measure its growth. Bands are fashioned by bending banding material into a "collar" and passing the metal strap through ...
Dartmouth researchers have developed a molecular switch that changes a liquid crystal's readout color based on a chemical input. This new development may open the way for using liquid crystals in detecting harmful gases, pathogens, explosives and other chemical substances.
The findings appear in the journal Angewandte Chemie. A PDF of the study is available on request.
One of the challenges in the field of molecular switches and machines is the translation of molecular level motion into macroscopic level events by harnessing light or chemical energy -- think of a molecular-sized ...
Human activities are changing the water chemistry of many streams and rivers in the Eastern U.S., with consequences for water supplies and aquatic life, so reports a new study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
In the first survey of its kind, researchers looked at long-term alkalinity trends in 97 streams and rivers from Florida to New Hampshire. Sites ranged from small headwater streams to some of the nation's largest rivers. Over the past 25 to 60 years, two-thirds have become significantly more alkaline.
Alkalinity is a measure of water's ability ...
New York, NY – Researchers at Columbia University, in collaboration with biologists in Baylor College of Medicine, have made a significant step in understanding and imaging protein synthesis, pinpointing exactly where and when cells produce new proteins. Assistant Professor Wei Min's team developed a new technique to produce high-resolution imaging of newly synthesized proteins inside living cells. The findings were published in the July 9th issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Volume 110; Issue 28).
Proteins carry out almost every crucial biological ...
LA JOLLA, CA—August 26, 2013—Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found a way to apply a powerful new DNA-editing technology more broadly than ever before.
"This is one of the hottest tools in biology, and we've now found a way to target it to any DNA sequence," said Carlos F. Barbas III, the Janet and Keith Kellogg II Chair in Molecular Biology and Professor in the Department of Chemistry at TSRI.
The breakthrough concerns a set of designer DNA-binding proteins called TALEs, which biologists increasingly use to turn on, turn off, delete, insert ...
SASKATOON -- When Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the double helical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in 1953, it began a genetic revolution to map, study, and sequence the building blocks of living organisms.
DNA encodes the genetic material passed on from generation to generation. For the information encoded in the DNA to be made into the proteins and enzymes necessary for life, ribonucleic acid (RNA), single-stranded genetic material found in the ribosomes of cells, serve as intermediary. Although usually single-stranded, some RNA sequences were ...
Each year, millions of people in the United States get a tuberculosis skin test to see if they have the infection that still affects one third of the world's population. But the standard diagnostic test is difficult to give, because a hypodermic needle must be inserted at a precise angle and depth in the arm to successfully check for tuberculosis.
Now, a team led by University of Washington engineers has created a patch with tiny, biodegradable needles that can penetrate the skin and precisely deliver a tuberculosis test. The researchers published their results online ...
This news release is available in French. The nature of the teenage brain makes users of cannabis amongst this population particularly at risk of developing addictive behaviors and suffering other long-term negative effects, according to researchers at the University of Montreal and New York's Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
"Of the illicit drugs, cannabis is most used by teenagers since it is perceived by many to be of little harm. This perception has led to a growing number of states approving its legalization and increased accessibility. Most of the debates ...
HIV-infected people who carry a gene for a specific protein face a 20-fold greater risk of contracting cryptococcal disease, according to a study published in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.
Cryptococcus neoformans is the most common cause of fungal meningitis among HIV-infected individuals. While the disease is a risk for everyone with HIV who has a very low level of CD4+ T cells, researchers have discovered that those with the gene for the protein FCGR3A 158V have an immune cell receptor that binds tightly to antibody-bound ...
