(Press-News.org) Researchers from the University of Birmingham have shown that drinking 500ml of water at half an hour before eating main meals may help obese adults to lose weight. They believe that the simple intervention could be hugely beneficial, and be easily promoted by healthcare professionals and through public health campaigns.
Obese adult participants were recruited from general practices and monitored over a 12 week period.
Each of the participants, all adults with obesity, were given a weight management consultation, where they were advised on how to adapt their lifestyle and improve their diet and levels of physical activity. 41 of those recruited were asked to preload with water, and 43 were advised to imagine that they had a full stomach before eating.
Those in the group who were instructed to 'preload' with water lost, on average, 1.3kg (2.87lbs) more than those in the control group.
Those who reported preloading before all three main meals in the day reported a loss of 4.3kg (9.48lbs) over the 12 weeks, whereas those who only preloaded once, or not at all, only lost an average of 0.8kg (1.76lbs).
Dr Helen Parretti, NIHR Clinical Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, explained, "The beauty of these findings is in the simplicity. Just drinking a pint of water, three times a day, before your main meals may help reduce your weight."
"When combined with brief instructions on how to increase your amount of physical activity and on a healthy diet, this seems to help people to achieve some extra weight loss - at a moderate and healthy rate. It's something that doesn't take much work to integrate into our busy everyday lives."
Participants were encouraged to drink tap water. Sparkling water, sodas or sweetened drinks were not allowed as part of the study.
The study, published in the journal Obesity, showed encouraging initial results for the trial, and the team hope that the findings will inform further research into the benefits of water preloading before meals. They hope to receive backing for a trial with a larger number of participants and over a longer period of time in order to confirm the findings.
Dr Parretti added, "Losing a few extra pounds over the course of a year can be significant to an individual, and this could be an easy way to help with that weight loss. It's a simple message that has the potential to make a real contribution to public health."
INFORMATION:
PITTSBURGH, Aug. 26, 2015 - Obese women are nearly twice as likely as their lean counterparts to have stillborn babies for several specific, potentially preventable medical reasons, a new University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health analysis reveals.
Placental diseases and hypertension were the most common causes of stillbirth among obese women, according to the study, published online and scheduled for the October issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
"We've known for ...
A group of intrepid Israeli researchers recently went back to the dawn of the Stone Age to make lunch.
Using 12,500-year-old conical mortars carved into bedrock, they reconstructed how their ancient ancestors processed wild barley to produce groat meals, as well as a delicacy that might be termed "proto-pita" - small loaves of coal-baked, unleavened bread. In so doing, they re-enacted a critical moment in the rise of civilization: the emergence of wild-grain-based nutrition, some 2,000 to 3,000 years before our hunter-gatherer forebears would establish the sedentary ...
Some dying stars suffer from 'irregular heartbeats', research led by astronomers at the University of Warwick has discovered.
The research confirms rapid brightening events in otherwise normal pulsating white dwarfs, which are stars in the final stage of their life cycles.
In addition to the regular rhythm from pulsations they expected on the white dwarf PG1149+057, which cause the star to get a few percent brighter and fainter every few minutes, the researchers also observed something completely unexpected every few days: arrhythmic, massive outbursts, which broke ...
Computing --the creation of supercomputers, above all-- enables scientists and engineers to analyse highly complex physical processes using simulation techniques. In this case, researchers in the UPV/EHU's Department of Computer Architecture and Technology and the Department of Materials Physics are collaborating with researchers from various universities (including the Universidade de Coimbra, Universitat de Barcelona, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, University of Liege) to analyse the photosynthesis process basing ...
(PHILADELPHIA) -- Alternative medicines are widely thought to be at least harmless and very often helpful for a wide range of discomforts and illnesses. However, although they're marketed as "natural," they often contain active ingredients that can react chemically and biologically with other therapies. Researchers performed a comprehensive review of all of the medications taken by senior oncology patients and found that as 26 percent were using complementary or alternative medicines (CAM), in a report published August 12th, in the Journal of Geriatric Oncology.
"Currently, ...
(Boston)--Educating clinicians on how to safely prescribe opioids can help decrease opioid misuse among chronic pain sufferers.
These findings, which appear online in the journal Pain Medicine, confirm that education can empower clinicians to make more informed clinical decisions about initiating, continuing, changing or discontinuing opioids for patients suffering from chronic pain based on a careful benefit versus risk/harm assessment.
Chronic pain affects approximately 100 million people in the U.S. making it one of the most common reasons patients seek medical ...
The great escape: why awareness of our own mortality can be bad for our health
People with low self-esteem use a variety of escape mechanisms to avoid thinking about their own mortality, new research reveals.
Researchers led by Dr Arnaud Wisman, of the University of Kent's School of Psychology, found evidence in five studies that people with low self-esteem respond to reminders of their own mortality by directing their focus away from the 'self'.
The research found an empirical and causal link between people with low self-esteem having unconscious concerns about ...
This news release is available in German. An LMU team has shown that the axons of auditory neurons in the brainstem which respond to low and high-frequency sounds differ in their morphology, and that these variations correlate with differences in the speed of signal conduction.
As a rule, the axons (i.e. signal-transmitting fibers) of the neurons in the central nervous systems of vertebrates are ensheathed in layers of myelin, which serves as a form of insulation that improves their electrical conduction properties. In fact, the fat-rich myelin coating largely consists ...
Rehabilitation is recommended for many patients following a hospital stay for acute heart disease. In a recent original article in Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl int 112: 527-34) Axel Schlitt et al. show that this improves prognosis for heart disease and can thus reduce patient mortality.
More than 1900 patients in Saxony-Anhalt were contacted and asked to fill out a questionnaire. They had spent time in the hospital for serious cardiovascular disease an average of 11 years earlier. The authors used the data to analyze how many of the patients who ...
Cholecystectomy and treatment for inguinal, femoral, umbilical, or abdominal hernia are common surgeries and are considered routine in Germany. In an original article in the current edition of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 112: 535-43), Ulrike Nimptsch and Thomas Mansky show that fewer than 0.5% of patients die as a result of such surgeries. However, in those who do die risks are frequently apparent even before surgery.
Between 2009 and 2013, 731 000 cholecystectomies and 1 023 000 herniotomies took place in Germany. Over 2400 of the patients ...
