Skipping meals increases children's obesity and cardiometabolic risk
2014-12-15
(Press-News.org) Children who skip main meals are more likely to have excess body fat and an increased cardiometabolic risk already at the age of 6 to 8 years, according to a Finnish study. A higher consumption of sugary drinks, red meat and low-fat margarine and a lower consumption of vegetable oil are also related to a higher cardiometabolic risk. "The more of these factors are present, the higher the risk," says Ms Aino-Maija Eloranta, MHSc, who presented the results in her doctoral thesis at the University of Eastern Finland.
The dietary habits, eating behaviour and dietary determinants of excess body adiposity and cardiometabolic risk were investigated in a population sample of 512 Finnish girls and boys 6 to 8 years of age participating in the Physical Activity and Nutrition in Children (PANIC) Study. Cardiometabolic risk was assessed by a continuous metabolic risk score computed using Z-scores of waist circumference, fasting serum insulin, fasting plasma glucose, triglycerides and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and the mean of systolic and diastolic blood pressure.
Children who skipped meals and ate more protein were more likely to have excess body fat. Uncontrolled eating behaviour, such as eating fast, emotional overeating and a lower satiety responsiveness were also associated with higher body adiposity.
The study also showed that most children's diet was far from ideal. Less than half of the children ate all three main meals - breakfast, lunch and dinner - every day. Instead, snacks were a major source of energy and sucrose. A minority of the children consumed vegetables, fruit and berries as recommended. As many as a quarter of the children consumed sugary drinks daily. The intakes of saturated fat, sucrose and salt were higher and the intakes of dietary fibre, vitamin D and iron were lower than recommended among the children.
"Based on the findings, sticking to regular meals seems to be crucial for preventing overweight and cardiometabolic diseases already in childhood," Ms Eloranta says. In addition, parents need to provide their children with better dietary choices: regular-fat vegetable-oil margarines and vegetable oils instead of low-fat margarines, fat-free milk and water instead of sugary drinks, and more fish instead of red meat at meals.
The results were originally published in European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, International Journal of Obesity and European Journal of Nutrition.
INFORMATION:
For further information, please contact:
Aino-Maija Eloranta, MHSc, University of Eastern Finland, Institute of Biomedicine, +358 50 5344255, aino-maija.eloranta(at)uef.fi
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2014-12-15
ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Most parents agree their children should be ready to move out of the pediatrician's office into adult-focused care by age 18 - but just 30 percent actually make that transition by that age, according to the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health.
As health care becomes more complex, it's difficult for teens to shift from relying on their parents to taking on their own health care needs.
The C.S. Mott National Poll on Children's Health asked a national sample of parents of adolescents and young adults ...
2014-12-15
Cities like Miami are all too familiar with hurricane-related power outages. But a Johns Hopkins University analysis finds climate change will give other major metro areas a lot to worry about in future storms.
Johns Hopkins engineers created a computer model to predict the increasing vulnerability to hurricanes of power grids in major cities on or relatively near the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. They factored historic hurricane information in with plausible scenarios for future storm behavior, given a global rise in average temperatures. With that data, the team could pinpoint ...
2014-12-15
Monstrous moonshine, a quirky pattern of the monster group in theoretical math, has a shadow - umbral moonshine. Mathematicians have now proved this insight, known as the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture, offering a formula with potential applications for everything from number theory to geometry to quantum physics.
"We've transformed the statement of the conjecture into something you could test, a finite calculation, and the conjecture proved to be true," says Ken Ono, a mathematician at Emory University. "Umbral moonshine has created a lot of excitement in the world of math ...
2014-12-15
By blocking a widespread enzyme, Centenary researchers have shown they can slow down the movement of cells and potentially stop tumours from spreading and growing.
Using a new super-resolution microscope they've been able to see single molecules of the enzyme at work in a liver cancer cell line. Then they've used confocal microscopes to see how disrupting the enzyme slows down living cancer cells.
The enzyme is DPP9 (dipeptidyl peptidase 9) which the researchers at the Centenary Institute and the Sydney Medical School were first to discover and clone, in 1999. Ever ...
2014-12-15
Tropical Cyclone Bakung is moving in a westerly direction over the open waters of the Southern Indian Ocean and NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of the sea storm.
Aqua passed over Bakung on Dec. 12 at 07:35 UTC (2:35 a.m. EST) and the MODIS instrument aboard took a visible image of the storm. The image showed that deeper convection (stronger currents of rising air that form the thunderstorms that make up the tropical cyclone) was occurring around the low-level center of circulation, so the center was not apparent in the MODIS imagery. The bulk of the clouds associated ...
2014-12-15
Natural gas from hydraulic fracturing generates income and, done well, can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and water use compared to coal and even nuclear energy. However, widespread use of natural gas from fracking could slow the adoption of wind, solar and other renewables and, done poorly, release toxic chemicals into the environment.
Robert Jackson, the Kevin and Michelle Douglas Professor of Environment and Energy at the Stanford School of Earth Sciences, will discuss how to minimize the water and air impacts of fracking and other unconventional energy-extraction ...
2014-12-15
Recent international climate talks have focused on the potential of reforestation and afforestation - planting trees in an area where there was no forest previously - to slow global warming. Increasingly, though, science is showing that planting more trees and increasing forest conservation can provide benefits beyond carbon storage, and that carbon-centric accounting is, in many cases, insufficient for climate mitigation policies.
Robert Jackson, the Kevin and Michelle Douglas Professor of Environment and Energy at the Stanford School of Earth Sciences, will discuss ...
2014-12-15
Runoff from rainstorms in big cities can represent both threats and opportunities. Too much runoff in the wrong places causes flooding. Too little rainwater in the right places leads to dried-up creeks and rivers. Water that washes up pollution from city streets can dirty downstream watersheds. Figuring out the best solutions to these problems requires lots of data - data that are easy to get in highly developed countries, but much scarcer in others.
On Dec. 15 at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco, Perrine Hamel, a postdoctoral scholar with ...
2014-12-15
Stanford scientists have found evidence that sections of the fault responsible for the 9.0 magnitude Tohoku earthquake that devastated northern Japan in 2011 were relieving seismic stress at a gradually accelerating rate for years before the quake.
This "decoupling" process, in which the edges of two tectonic plates that are frictionally locked together slowly became unstuck, transferred stress to adjacent sections that were still locked. As a result, the quake, which was the most powerful ever recorded to hit Japan, may have occurred earlier than it might have otherwise, ...
2014-12-15
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15, 2014--Credit card fraud and identify theft are serious problems for consumers and industries. Though corporations and individuals work to improve safeguards, it has become increasingly difficult to protect financial data and personal information from criminal activity. Fortunately, new insights into quantum physics may soon offer a solution.
As reported in The Optical Society's (OSA) new high-impact journal Optica, a team of researchers from the Netherlands has harnessed the power of quantum mechanics to create a fraud-proof method for authenticating ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Skipping meals increases children's obesity and cardiometabolic risk