Family History of Alcoholism linked with Decreased Neuronal Activity

New research exploring the neural processes of adolescents with alcohol abuse in their family history has indicated that a positive family history may confer a significant risk for future alcoholism in the teenager!

Researchers examined teenagers that had not begun to drink, but had a family history of alcoholism, to rule out any brain differences caused by alcohol as a direct result.

In the experiment, the participants were required to prevent themselves from reading a color word out loud, and focus instead on the color of the ink the word was written in.

The researchers discovered that the teens with a familt history of Alcoholism showed higher levels of frontal lobe activation during the Stroop Interference test, suggesting they had decreased neuronal efficiency, meaning - to get the same score as the control group their brain had to work harder.

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2 Articles into Obesity

Two interesting articles caught my eye this week on the Subject of Obesity.

1. Researchers confirmed that Obesity and Overeating are directly linked to excessive activity in a specific gene found in the human body.

You can't argue with a headline like that! It immediately grabbed my attention.
In this study the researchers bred mice with a particular gene that was identified in 2007 amongst heavier human subjects, which they believed could be the 'fat' gene. In the recent study they found that the mice with overactivity in this gene, "although healthy, ate more and became fatter than normal mice."

I argue that I wouldn't say these mice (nor people with this gene) are 'genetically' obese, they just eat more. Although their body may be telling them that they are hungry, when perhaps they are not, they don't have to eat and therefore put on weight.

Still, regardless of what people can conclude, it was an interesting study.

2. Lose weight by eating junk food?

A researcher recently proved that this IS possible. How? Just don't overeat!

Mark Haub, nutrition professor, believed that "It's all about how much you eat, not what you eat."

He tested the theory on himself, only eating a maximum of 1800 calories today (down from the usual 2600) and he ate only food that you would typically found in vending machines.

After 2 months of his experiment, his weight dropped to 174 pounds, and his BMI dropped to a healthy 24.9. The experiment even improved his other health statistics!

I wouldn't recommend this diet, and nor did he, but it is interesting how this actually seems, in a roundabout way, to back up the first article.

Although some may have this overactive gene, in the end it really does seem to be the quantity of what you eat that determines your weight. As Mark Haub showed, quantity makes a large difference, and quality seems to take a step back. The mice study shows that an veractive gene is merely causing people to eat more, increasing their weight.

To me, this evidence shows very clearly that it is nurture that alters our weight and nature is sitting the fight of Obesity out.


Article 1: Mice
Article 2: Mark Haub

Seeing Meat Makes People Less Aggressive

According to new research seeing meat appears to make human beings significantly less aggressive.

Odd!


Researcher Frank Kachanoff says:
"I was inspired by research on priming and aggression, that has shown that just looking at an object which is learned to be associated with aggression, such as a gun, can make someone more likely to behave aggressively. I wanted to know if we might respond aggressively to certain stimuli in our environment not because of learned associations, but because of an innate predisposition. I wanted to know if just looking at the meat would suffice to provoke an aggressive behavior."

Kachanoff believed that humans may have evolved a predisposition to respond aggressively towards seeing meat. In the experiment, participats had to punish a script reader every time he made an error while sorting photos. Some photos were of meat whilst others were neutral.

Kachanoff believed that the use of 'ready to eat' meat images may have been the problem as when our ancestors were eating they would have been with friends/family and thus calm. He is interested in trying again using 'hunting' images instead, and expects to find different results.

Kachanoff's research is important because it looks at ways society may influence environmental factors to decrease the likelihood of aggressive behavior. Perhaps more pictures of food around would lead us all to be calmer!

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