ADHD & Obesity - Demon Fructose? - Dystonia - Saccades

[Marc Breedlove]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=childhood-adhd-linked-to-obesity

Childhood ADHD Linked to Obesity in Adulthood

By Tara Haelle

Identification and treatment issues surrounding
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
are challenging enough. Now research is shedding
light on long-term outcomes for people with ADHD.
A recent study in Pediatrics reports that men who
had ADHD in childhood are twice as likely to be
obese in middle age, even if they no longer exhibit symptoms of ADHD.

ADHD is a mental disorder characterized by
hyperactivity, impulsivity, inattention and
inability to focus. It affects approximately 6.8
percent of U.S. children ages 3 to 17 in any
given year, according to a recent report by the
CDC. Medications used to treat ADHD, such as
Ritalin (methylphenidate) or Adderall
(dextroamphetamine and amphetamine), are
stimulants that can suppress appetite, however, a
couple recent retrospective studies have pointed
to a possible increased risk for obesity among
adults diagnosed with ADHD as children.

The new 33-year prospective study started with
207 healthy middle-class white boys from New York
City between 6 and 12 years old, who had been
diagnosed with ADHD. When the cohort reached an
average age of 18, another 178 healthy boys
without ADHD were recruited for comparison. At
the most recent follow-up when the participants
were an average age of 41, a total of 222 men remained in the study.

A troubling pattern emerged: A comparison of the
men’s self-reported height and weight revealed
that twice as many men with childhood ADHD were
obese than those without childhood ADHD. The
average body mass index (BMI) of the men with
childhood ADHD was 30.1 and 41.4 percent were
obese, whereas those without the condition as
kids reported an average BMI of 27.6 and an
obesity rate of 21.6 percent. The association
held even after the researchers controlled for
socioeconomic status, depression, anxiety and substance abuse disorders.

© 2013 Scientific American
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http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/many-fronts-in-fighting-obesity/?ref=health

Many Fronts in Fighting Obesity

By JANE E. BRODY

Sugar, and especially the high-fructose corn
syrup that sweetens many processed foods and
nearly all soft drinks, has been justly demonized
for adding nutritionally empty calories to our
diet and causing metabolic disruptions linked to
a variety of diseases. But a closer look at what
and how Americans eat suggests that simply
focusing on sugar will do little to quell the
rising epidemic of obesity. This is a
multifaceted problem with deep historical roots,
and we are doing too little about many of its causes.

More than a third of American adults and nearly
one child in five are now obese, according to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Our
failure to curtail this epidemic is certain to
exact unprecedented tolls on health and increase
the cost of medical care. Effective measures to
achieve a turnaround require a clearer
understanding of the forces that created the
problem and continue to perpetuate it.

The increase in obesity began nearly half a
century ago with a rise in calories consumed
daily and a decline in meals prepared and eaten at home.

According to the Department of Agriculture, in
1970 the food supply provided 2,086 calories per
person per day, on average. By 2010, this amount
had risen to 2,534 calories, an increase of more
than 20 percent. Consuming an extra 448 calories
each day could add nearly 50 pounds to the average adult in a year.

Sugar, it turns out, is a minor player in the
rise. More than half of the added calories ­ 242
a day ­ have come from fats and oils, and another
167 calories from flour and cereal. Sugar
accounts for only 35 of the added daily calories.

Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company
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http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/350460/description/Sweet_Confusion

Sweet Confusion: Does high fructose corn syrup deserve such a bad rap?

By Laura Beil

When chemists Richard Marshall and Earl Kooi
started fiddling with cornstarch, the powder made
from the dense insides of corn kernels, their
intention was to turn glucose, which is easily
produced from the starch, into fructose, which is
sweeter. The idea wasn’t that far-fetched. The
two sugar molecules are cousins, both made from
the same atomic parts slightly rearranged.

The duo’s experiment, which took place at the
Corn Projects Refining Company in Argo, Ill., was
a success. Marshall and Kooi discovered that the
bacterium Aeromonas hydrophila produced an enzyme
that could reconfigure the components of glucose
from corn like so many Lego blocks. It was the
first leap forward for a food industry dream: a
mass-produced glucose-fructose-blend sweetener
that would free commercial food manufacturers
from the historical volatility of cane sugar crops.

The scientists announced their triumph in a short
report in Science in 1957. There the discovery
sat in quiet obscurity for almost two decades,
until a worldwide spike in sugar prices sent
manufacturers scrambling. By the end of the
1980s, high fructose corn syrup had replaced cane
sugar in soft drinks, and it soon became popular
among makers of baked goods, dairy products, sauces and other foods.

Few consumers seemed to care until 2004, when
Barry Popkin, a nutrition scientist at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
along with George Bray, at the Pennington
Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La.,
published a commentary in the American Journal of
Clinical Nutrition pointing out that the
country’s obesity crisis appeared to rise in
tandem with the embrace of high fructose corn
syrup by food producers. That shift began in the
early 1970s ­ just about the time Japanese
researchers, who had noted Marshall and Kooi’s
experiment with keen interest, overcame the
technical hurdles of industrial production.

© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/opinion/sunday/disease-and-the-public-eye.html?ref=opinion

Disease and the Public Eye

By ALLISON HERSH LONDON

I’M in line at the supermarket holding three
items close to my chest. But I might as well be
juggling my Kleenex box, toothpaste tube and an
orange. Because ­ as you’d surely notice if you
were behind me in line ­ I‘m bent forward at a
sharp angle, which makes holding things
difficult. I know you don’t want to stare, but
you do. Maybe you think you’re being considerate
when you say, apropos of nothing, “You look like
you’re in pain.” Well, thanks, I am ­ but I’ll
resist replying the way I want (“You look like
you’re having a bad hair day”). I’m sorry. I know
you mean well. Anyway it’s my turn at the
register which means I’m closer to being at home
where I can lie down and wait for the spasms to subside.

Besides, if I told you what my issue was, you
would probably shrug and reply that you’d never
heard of it. There aren’t any public service
announcements about it or telethons. No Angelina
Jolies to bravely inform the world. Just people
like me, in supermarket checkout lines.

And this, I realize, is at the core of a problem
that extends beyond me and my condition and that
affects the way all of us respond to illnesses,
some of which are the subject of public attention
­ and resources ­ and some of which are not.

I have dystonia, a neurological disorder. Some
years ago, for reasons no one knows, the muscles
in my back and neck began to spasm involuntarily;
the spasms multiply quickly, fatigue the muscles
and force the body into repetitive movements and
awkward postures like mine. There is no cure,
only treatment options like deep brain
stimulation, which requires a surgery I underwent last year as a last resort.

© 2013 The New York Times Company
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http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/350464/description/Closed_Thinking

Closed Thinking

By Bruce Bower

In its idealized form, science resembles a
championship boxing match. Theories square off,
each vying for the gold belt engraved with
“Truth.” Under the stern eyes of a host of
referees, one theory triumphs by best explaining
available evidence ­ at least until the next bout.

But in the real world, science sometimes works
more like a fashion show. Researchers clothe
plausible explanations of experimental findings
in glittery statistical suits and gowns. These
gussied-up hypotheses charm journal editors and
attract media coverage with carefully
orchestrated runway struts, never having to battle competitors.

Then there’s psychology. Even more than other
social scientists ­ and certainly more than
physical scientists ­ psychologists tend to
overlook or dismiss hypotheses that might topple
their own, says Klaus Fiedler of the University
of Heidelberg in Germany. They explain
experimental findings with ambiguous terms that
make no testable predictions at all; they build
careers on theories that have never bested a
competitor in a fair scientific fight. In many
cases, no one knows or bothers to check how much
common ground one theory shares with others that
address the same topic. Problems like these,
Fiedler and his colleagues contended last
November in Perspectives in Psychological
Science, afflict sets of related theories about
such psychological phenomena as memory and
decision making. In the end, that affects how
well these phenomena are understood.

© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/opinion/sunday/vision-is-all-about-change.html?ref=opinion

Vision Is All About Change

By SUSANA MARTINEZ-CONDE

YOUR eyes are the sharks of the human body: they never stop moving.

In the past minute alone, your eyes made as many
as 240 quick movements called “saccades” (French
for “jolts”). In your waking hours today, you
will very likely make some 200,000 of them, give
or take a few thousand. When you sleep, your eyes
keep moving ­ though in different ways and at
varying speeds, depending on the stage of sleep.

A portion of our eye movements we do consciously
and are at least aware of on some level: when we
follow a moving bird or plane across the sky with
our gaze, for instance. But most of these tiny
back-and-forths and ups-and-downs ­ split-second
moves that would make the Flying Karamazov
Brothers weep with jealousy ­ are unconscious and
nearly imperceptible to us. Our brain suppresses
the feeling of our eye jumps, to avoid the
sensation that the world is constantly quaking.

Even when we think our gazes are petrified, in
fact, we are still making eye motions, including
tiny saccades called “microsaccades” ­ between 60
and 120 of them per minute. Just as we don’t
notice most of our breathing, we are almost
wholly unaware of this frenetic, nonstop ocular activity.

Without it, though, we couldn’t see a thing.

Humans are hardly unique in this way. Every known
visual system depends on movement: we see things
either because they move or because our eyes do.

Some of the earliest clues to this came more than
two centuries ago. Erasmus Darwin, a grandfather
of Charles Darwin, observed in 1794 that staring
at a small piece of scarlet silk on white paper
for a long time ­ thereby minimizing (though not
stopping) his eye movements ­ made it grow
fainter in color, until it seemed to vanish.

© 2013 The New York Times Company
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