What you drink ma

What you drink may contribute more to weight gain than what you merely eat, according to a study.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, examined the link between beverage consumption among adults and weight change.

They conducted a prospective study of 810 adults, aged between 25-79 years old participating in the PREMIER trial, an 18-month randomised and controlled study.

They found that weight loss was positively associated with a reduction in liquid calorie consumption. Conversely, this kind of intake had a stronger impact on weight than solid calorie intake.

“Both liquid and solid calories were associated with weight change, however, only a reduction in liquid calorie intake was shown to significantly affect weight loss during the six-month follow up,” said Benjamin Caballero senior study author and a professor at Bloomberg School.

“A reduction in liquid calorie intake was associated with a weight loss of 0.25 kg at six months and 0.24 kg at 18 months.

Among sugar-sweetened beverages, a reduction of one serving was associated with a weight loss of 0.5 kg at six months and 0.7 kg at 18 months,” he said, according to a Johns Hopkins release.

Of the seven types of beverages examined, sugar-sweetened beverages were the only beverages significantly associated with weight change,” he added.

These findings were published in the Wednesday issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Getting rid of fearful memories a matter of timing: Getting rid of memories that trigger fear boils down to the right timing, according to a new study.

Marie Monfils, assistant psychology professor at Texas University, Austin, has identifed key time when memories are ripe for change, especially converting fearful memories into pleasant ones.

Monfils conducted the study with colleagues at New York University where she was a post-doctoral researcher.

The experiment began by inducing fear in rats by sounding a tone and then shocking them under the feet.

Eventually, the rat would exhibit fear from just hearing the tone.

The standard treatment for getting rid of the fear response is to sound the tone repeatedly, without a shock. Eventually, the rat does not exhibit fear at the sound. The method is called extinction, said a Texas release.

She said the findings might find their way into treating humans with anxiety disorders. “But we have a lot more work to do before we actually get there,” she said.

Current treatments are short lived in effects and some of them include drugs, many of which would be hard to administer locally in humans and have harmful side-effects.