BEST DIET : LOSE WEIGHT WITH BEST TRICK

Eating certain foods can help people lower their cholesterol levels, even without the aid of medication, a new study finds.

In the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, patients who started out with high or borderline high LDL, or bad cholesterol, levels (anything above 158 mg/dL) were able to lower their LDL by 14% over six months by sticking with a diet rich in cholesterol-lowering foods.

That diet cut participants’ LDL three times more than a standard low-fat diet.

So what foods were effective against artery-clogging fat? According to study leader Dr. David Jenkins, chair of nutrition, metabolism and vascular biology at the University of Toronto, there are four pillars of a cholesterol-lowering diet: plant oils or sterols such as margarine; viscous fibers including oats, barley and psyllium; nuts; and soy.

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For most people, Jenkins says, it wouldn’t require that much effort to boost consumption of these foods enough to achieve a cholesterol-reducing effect. In fact, he says, it would be sufficient to substitute oat bran or psyllium cereal in the morning in place of your regular breakfast, and to try soy milk products instead of dairy.

The six-month study was the first to look at the potential impact of a real-world diet on cholesterol levels. Rather than providing their 345 participants with foods to eat, researchers counseled them on how to shop for and incorporate more cholesterol-lowering products into their diet on their own. (The only food given to the study participants was plant sterol-based margarine, which was not permitted to be sold in Canada, the site of the study, at the time.) One group of participants received two nutritional counseling sessions of 40-60 mins. each, while another group received a more intensive schedule of seven sessions over six months. The control group got advice on how to eat a low saturated fat diet.

At the end of the six months, the two intervention groups showed an average 25 mg/dL drop in their LDL levels, compared with an 8 mg/dL decline in the low-fat-diet group. Both groups that received counseling on cholesterol-lowering diets showed similar reductions, suggesting that people were able to change their diets after just two sessions of instruction.

“The results show that we do have something worthwhile to add to the dietary formula,” says Jenkins.

He notes that the majority of people in the study were recruited through advertisements, which may have targeted people with a pre-existing interest in lowering their cholesterol levels, so they might have been particularly keen on adopting the necessary dietary changes to keep their lipid levels in check.

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Jenkins suggests that the results could be even more impressive among people who aren’t paying much attention to their diet at all and may therefore have more to gain. “The implication from our point of view is that if we take the couch potato, and they were to bite the bullet and adopt these changes, they could do much better in terms of reducing their cholesterol,” he says.

How much more tofu and oat bran would it take to make a difference? Based on an average 2,000-calorie daily diet, Jenkins said the study participants were instructed to aim for 2 g of plant sterol, nearly 20 g of fiber, and 40 g each of soy and nut products daily.

Only about 40% of the volunteers reached this target, but Jenkins says anyone can easily start adding some of these foods into their diet gradually. “To eat more oats, for example, change your breakfast cereal and try some desserts made of oat bran with fruits and nuts,” he says. He acknowledges that boosting soy intake could be a little more difficult, particularly among westerners who still aren’t accustomed to the protein that’s such a staple of Asian diets.

But the effort may be worth it, especially for those who aren’t eager to start popping pills to lower their cholesterol, Jenkins says. In the first study his team did on these foods, in 2003, they showed that in a lab setting, when participants were provided with the adequate amounts of fiber, nuts, soy and plant sterols, they were able to lower their LDL levels by nearly 30% — with the reductions associated with early cholesterol-lowering statin drugs.

Jenkins says his next step is to follow-up with his diet-study patients to see whether the change in their eating habits translates to cleaner arteries and therefore to fewer heart events. He plans to conduct imaging studies of the major arteries to document any changes the diet may have on blood vessels.

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In the meantime, he says, “I don’t think it’s that difficult” to switch to a more powerful cholesterol-lowering diet. “You don’t have to hold your nose, but just change as much as you can and look for substitutes for high-fat foods that often fill the gap very, very well.”

Alice Park is a writer at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @aliceparkny. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.

If you’ve ever sat at your desk scarfing a vending-machine lunch, then you’d probably agree with the authors of a recent editorial in the journal PLoS Medicine, who wrote: “[U]nhealthy eating could legitimately be considered a new form of occupational hazard.”

The authors are referring mainly to night-shift workers — doctors and nurses, for instance — who work in 24/7 industries. Off-kilter shift schedules are notorious for encouraging bad eating habits, and they also disrupt circadian rhythms and prevent adequate sleep — all of which conspires to make workers fat and increase their risk of Type 2 diabetes, among other ills.

The editorial writers cite the results of a recent study, also published in PLoS Medicine, and which we reported on Healthland earlier this month, that involved nearly 177,000 participants of the Nurses’ Health Studies. That study found that women who had rotating night shifts were more likely to develop diabetes over a 20-year follow-up, compared with women who worked during the day.

The longer women worked nights, the higher their risk: those who had rotating night shifts for 1 to 2 years had a 5% increased risk of diabetes; working nights on and off for 10 to 19 years upped the risk to 40%; and women who pulled graveyard shifts for more than 20 years were 60% more likely to develop diabetes than those who never worked at night.

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The study authors, led by Dr. Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health, had multiple theories for why night work might lead to bad health. For one thing, shift workers are more likely to grab junky foods on the go — out of the aforementioned vending machines or from fast-food restaurants — which leads to weight gain, a risk factor for diabetes. They’re also less likely to get regular exercise, because of their screwy sleep schedules.

Previous research has shown that even going to bed mere hours later than normal — at 3:45 a.m., instead of 12:30 a.m. — can lead to unhealthy eating and weight gain. We reported on a study by Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine researchers in May:

Being a night owl appeared to do more harm than good: for starters, people who stayed up late got less sleep overall (5 hrs. 33 mins. versus 6 hrs. 38 mins. for normal sleepers). Worse, compared with early-to-bed-early-to-risers, late sleepers had a much less healthful diet: they ate more fast food (five meals per week, compared with the normal sleepers’ three), drank more full-calorie soda (4.5 servings per week versus 1.3) and got significantly fewer fruits and vegetables (1.9 servings per day versus 3.4).

Notably, the late sleepers ate roughly the same number of calories per day as normal sleepers. … However, they ate a larger proportion of their food later in the day — at dinner or after 8 p.m. On average, late sleepers’ dinners contained 825 calories, while the normal sleepers’ suppers totaled 630 calories. Those who stayed up late consumed 754 calories per day after 8 p.m., while the normal sleepers ate only 376 calories.

The findings fall in line with animal research on the same phenomenon. A 2010 study found that when light-dark cycles were tampered with, so that mice were exposed to continuously dim light when they should have been sleeping, mice gained 50% more weight than animals living in a natural light-dark environment, even though all the mice ate and exercised the same amount.

Turns out, the animals exposed to late-night light — equivalent to the glow of a TV or computer screen for humans — ate most of their food during their normal sleeping hours, suggesting that it’s not only what you eat, but when that matters.

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Further, disrupted sleep itself — either not getting enough sleep or sleeping at the wrong time — interferes with your circadian rhythm, which may in turn wreak havoc with your appetite and metabolism, and increase blood sugar levels and insulin resistance, according to Hu. These factors also increase risks for obesity and diabetes.

The problem of shift work is no small matter: some 15% to 20% of the working population in the U.S. and Europe is engaged in night work. “As the world of work becomes increasingly 24 hour, shift work will become more common,” the editorial authors write, suggesting that it “has the potential to accelerate the progression of the global epidemic of obesity and diabetes.”

There may not be much to mitigate the effects of shift work — especially if it’s inconsistent — on the body’s internal clock, but workers’ eating habits are “obvious targets for intervention,” the authors note. Perhaps workplaces, particularly those that employ shift workers, can lead the way in improving workers’ diets and making sure it’s easier and cheaper for them to eat healthily than not, the authors said.

Many heroic efforts to change people’s eating behaviors have been launched and failed over the years, but the authors suggest that the field of occupational health now has reason to enter the fray.

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There’s never a shortage of news about the merits of exercise. In the latest, researchers found that you reap benefits even when you’re not the one working out: for example, your cranky boss — the one who habitually lies, humiliates and generally makes her employees’ lives hell — behaves a lot more kindly when she’s working out.

Interestingly, only a moderate amount of exercise — just one to two days per week — was needed for Evil Boss to chill. But you don’t have to be in management to benefit from the magic powers of raising your heart rate.

This week, I began month three of my early-morning boot camp. Four days a week, I rise before my kids, lace up my running shoes, scrape the ice off my windshield and zoom to a neighborhood gym, where I run, jump, twist and squat with a gaggle of other fitness nuts. Not that I would have considered myself in that league before December.

I kind of hate gyms, the monotony of the elliptical trainer, the stink, the smartly spandexed bodies that show off at every corner. But boot camp has held my interest — it’s fast-paced, it’s different every day and I can actually feel my stomach getting firmer.

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This morning, we push-upped, lunged, jumping-jacked and pounded out sit-ups on a Bosu ball in 30-second increments; earlier in the week, we’d jumped rope, wall-sat and remained in plank position for a minute and a half.

So why, oh why, have I not dropped at least two sizes by now? The answer eludes me. Ian, the boot camp guru, initially suggested that participants keep a food diet. I did that for about a day (has anyone actually succeeded in doing this for a week or longer?). Was it too time-consuming, as I told myself, or did I simply not feel like jotting down that I’d just tossed back a handful of white chocolate chips?

I know, I know — it’s dark chocolate that’s supposed to be good for you. Well, I’m no slouch when it comes to that either. Think it’s time to give that food diary another go-around.

When it comes to chocolate, you might just be able to have your sweet and eat it, too.

That’s what researchers report in the first study to balance all of the known health benefits and harms of chocolate. Publishing in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Dr. Beatrice Golomb and her colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, say that the sweet’s extra calories may be more than offset by its positive effect on other conditions, such as heart disease, blood pressure and glucose control.

Most notably, the team found that people who reported eating chocolate more frequently were thinner than those who ate less, as measured by their body mass index (BMI). Golomb says that based on previous studies documenting the health benefits of chocolate, she expected that these metabolic benefits might, at best, compensate for the extra calories. “I wasn’t expecting that BMI would be favorable,” says Golomb. “That was a nice surprise.”

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Golomb’s team asked 1,000 men and women how much chocolate they consumed in a week, and recorded how much exercise they did over the same time period. Eating chocolate five times a week was linked to a 1-point drop in BMI, though the amount of chocolate the participants ate did not seem to have a significant effect on weight. The chocolate-lovers’ lower BMI also could not be accounted for by exercise or eating less overall. It “clearly wasn’t explained by the fact that people who ate chocolate ate less food, because they ate more. And they didn’t exercise more than those who didn’t eat as much chocolate,” says Golomb. “So there is no evidence that this effect can be explained by any confounder we looked at.”

The results certainly don’t prove that eating chocolate every day will make you lose weight, but they do raise interesting questions about how better to interpret the benefits of chocolate. Previous studies have focused specifically on its individual benefits, such as the ability of its antioxidants to lower LDL, or bad cholesterol, levels, or the role that chocolate’s flavenols can play in lowering blood pressure and improving blood flow by inhibiting clotting processes. Even the primary fat in chocolate, cocoa butter, isn’t such a health problem because it is made up of stearic acid, which does not raise cholesterol levels, says Golomb. She says it’s important to consider all of these metabolic effects together to get a sense of the net effect that chocolate has on the body. Overall, that effect seems to be a positive one.

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Golomb is hoping to conduct further research on whether different types of chocolate, such as dark or milk chocolate, may have stronger or weaker effects on BMI, but in the meantime, she says the results “should reduce the guilt associated with regular modest chocolate consumption. We should feel a little better about eating chocolate until there is additional data.” Sometimes, it seems, (chocolate) dreams do come true.

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Alice Park is a writer at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @aliceparkny. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.

Eating a diet high in omega-3 fatty acids — from fish, soy or nuts, for example — may help stave off Alzheimer’s disease, the authors of a new study suggest.

The researchers, from Columbia University Medical Center in New York, looked at 1,219 people over age 65 who were free of dementia. The participants filled out questionnaires about their eating habits for the previous 1.2 years. The researchers focused on the participants’ dietary intake of 10 different nutrients, including saturated fatty acids, omega-3 and omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids, monounsaturated fatty acid, vitamin E, vitamin C, beta-carotene, vitamin B12, folate and vitamin D.

The researchers also took blood samples from the participants to test for levels of beta amyloid, a protein found in the amyloid plaques in the brain that are a telltale sign of Alzheimer’s disease. Because beta amyloid is difficult to measure in the brain, however, the researchers looked at blood levels instead, which is thought to be a marker for Alzheimer’s risk.

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They found that the more omega-3s a person consumed, the lower their blood levels of beta amyloid. Most of the omega-3s consumed by study participants came from fish, chicken, margarine, nuts and salad dressing. The study looked at nutrients that came only from food, not supplements.

Consuming 1 gram of omega-3s per day — the equivalent of eating about half a fillet of salmon a week — was associated with 20% to 30% lower blood beta amyloid levels. On average, people in the study weren’t getting this much omega-3s.

Out of all the nutrients studied, only omega-3 consumption was associated with lower beta amyloid levels. The result held even after researchers accounted for the participants’ age, gender, ethnicity and educational background.

“There is no threshold here,” says study author Dr. Nikolaos Scarmeas. “The more omega-3s one eats, the less the beta amyloid levels are. Previous studies have found this association in animals, but not in humans. It’s a good thing we see it in humans.”

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Although the study did not determine why omega-3s are associated with lower beta amyloid levels, the researchers are hopeful their findings will lead to further understanding of how diet can influence Alzheimer’s. “In this study, we were able to relate something that we eat with a very specific mechanism in the body that is very strongly related to Alzheimer’s,” says Scarmeas. “Our next step is to get even closer to the true biology of Alzheimer’s.”

Scarmeas says further research is needed to look at how nutrients directly influence beta amyloid in the brain, possibly using brain imaging to do so.

The study was published online in the journal Neurology.

The first new prescription diet drug in 13 years won Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval on Wednesday, offering a new alternative to aid weight loss for the nearly one in three Americans who are considered obese. The new drug, called Belviq (lorcaserin), is made by Arena Pharmaceuticals. Here’s what you need to know:

How does Belviq work?
The drug works by controlling appetite — specifically by activating brain receptors for serotonin, a neurotransmitter that triggers feelings of satiety and satisfaction. Serotonin is also involved in mood; many antidepressant drugs work by preventing the reuptake of serotonin and keeping brain receptors bathed in the chemical. Researchers at Arena say their drug is designed to seek out only the serotonin receptors that affect appetite.

How effective is it?
According to clinical trial data submitted by Arena to the FDA, nearly half of dieters without Type 2 diabetes who used the medication lost at least 5% of their starting weight — or an average of 12 lbs. — over a year, compared with 23% of those taking a placebo. For best results, dieters are advised to use the medication together with a healthy diet and exercise program. The approved labeling for Belviq also recommends that people discontinue the drug if they fail to lose 5% of their body weight after 12 weeks; longer treatment is unlikely to lead to meaningful weight loss.

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Who can take Belviq?
The FDA approved the medication for people who are obese (with a body mass index, or BMI, of 30 or higher) or who are overweight (with a BMI of 27 or above) and also have at least one weight-related health condition such as Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol.

Are there any side effects?
The most common side effects of Belviq in non-diabetic patients are headache, dizziness, fatigue, nausea, dry mouth and constipation; in patients with diabetes, side effects include low blood sugar, headache, back pain, cough and fatigue.

There was also some concern that Belviq caused tumors in animals and heart-valve defects in people. A similar serotonin-based drug that had been approved for weight loss — fenfluramine — was removed from the market in 1997 because of the same heart concerns.

In 2010, the FDA rejected Arena’s first request for approval, asking for more evidence of its safety. New data provided by the company showed that heart problems would not occur at the low doses at which Belviq would be prescribed. The FDA won’t require patients taking Belviq to be monitored for heart-valve damage, but the company is required to conduct six studies once the drug reaches the market to determine whether it causes heart attacks or stroke in people  who take it.

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Why did it take so long to get a new weight-loss drug approved?
The history of diet pills has been plagued by safety problems. Since 1999, when the last prescription weight-loss medication, Xenical (orlistat), was given the green light, one weight loss drug, Meridia (sibutramine) was taken off the market when users began showing increased risk of heart problems, and two others, Belviq and Qnexa, were rejected by the FDA over safety concerns. Manipulating the body’s weight-controlling pathways can have long-term consequences on the heart and other metabolic systems, so drug developers have a high bar to clear to prove their compounds are safe.

Read the FDA’s announcement on Belviq here.

Alice Park is a writer at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @aliceparkny. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.