Jim Liebelt's Youth Culture Watch

Reducing Sugar Drinks at Home Curbs Teen Weight Gain

A new study has found that teens who drink lots of sugary drinks can lose weight if they swap the sodas for non-caloric beverages such as water or diet drinks.

The research was led by Dr. David Ludwig, director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at the Harvard-affiliated Boston Children's Hospital. It's published in the Sept. 21 online issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

His new study involved 224 overweight and obese ninth and tenth-graders (124 boys, 100 girls) who were habitual sugar-sweetened beverage drinkers, meaning they had either a 12-ounce sugary drink or 100 percent fruit juice every day.

They split students into two groups, one of which received a delivery every two weeks of non-caloric beverages such as water, flavored-water and diet drinks for one full year. The other group that served as controls received no non-caloric drinks but were mailed a $50 gift card to a supermarket at four and eight months (with no instructions on what to use it on) to ensure they wouldn't drop out of the study.

Ludwig said the researchers wanted to see if solely changing the teen's household environment to carry fewer sugary drinks would have an effect on his or her weight without a behavioral intervention explicitly promoting weight loss.

It turns out that simply swapping the drinks out of the home helped. After statistically ruling out other demographics so the only difference between groups would be sugary drink intake, teens who had the non-caloric deliveries gained an average of four fewer pounds over the course of a year than soda drinkers in the control group.

"No other single food product has been shown to change body weight by this amount over a year simply through its reduction," Ludwig said.

Source: CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-57518076-10391704/swapping-sugary-drinks-out-of-teens-homes-curbs-weight-gain-study-finds/

Obesity Can Impact Teen Brains, Hinder Performance

A "constellation" of health problems linked to obesity can impair the brains of adolescents, lowering test scores and hindering efforts to learn, according to research just published in the journal Pediatrics.

That cluster of health issues related to obesity, called metabolic syndrome or MetS, includes symptoms related to development of heart disease and diabetes, such as high blood pressure, low levels of "good" cholesterol, high triglycerides, a large waistline and insulin resistance. The teens who have the syndrome do worse in school than other peers who are of normal weight, the study found. Metabolic syndrome incidence, they noted, has become more prevalent in tandem with an increase in obesity. And the researchers said the findings may indicate heavy teens could face lower academic and professional success.

The study examined 49 adolescents with the syndrome compared to 62 without it, matching them on age, socioeconomic status, school grades, gender and ethnicity. Among other things, they looked at blood tests, magnetic resonance imaging of the brain and neuropsychological evaluations. A release explaining the study said the researchers wanted to "ensure things like cultural differences in diet and access to quality health care did not cloud the data."

Reasearchers found that those with metabolic syndrome "showed significantly lower arithmetic, spelling, attention and mental flexibility and a trend for lower overall intelligence."

The findings suggest, the authors wrote, that "even relatively short-term impairments in metabolism, in the absence of clinically manifest vascular disease, may give rise to brain complications. In view of these alarming results, it is plausible that obesity-associated metabolic disease, short of type 2 diabetes mellitus, may be mechanically linked to lower the academic and professional potential of adolescents."

Source: Deseret News
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865561734/Study-Obesity-can-impact-teen-brains-hinder-performance.html

Poll: Kids' Lack of Activity is Top Health Concern

A recent national poll finds that the top health concern of adults across the United States for children is they are "not getting enough exercise."

The annual University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health comes up with a top 10 list of adults' biggest health concerns for kids in their communities.

For the first time, not enough exercise was rated by most adults, 39%, at the top of the list, according to a release from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Thirty-eight percent of those polled listed childhood obesity as the top concern. Smoking and tobacco use was cited by 34% as the biggest concern.

The remaining top concerns are:
 4. Drug abuse (33%)
 5. Bullying (29%)
 6. Stress (27%)
 7. Alcohol abuse (23%)
 8. Teen pregnancy (23%)
 9. Internet safety (22%)
10. Child abuse and neglect (20%)

Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/story/2012-08-22/child-health/57219420/1

Obese Teens Have Fewer Friends, Especially Whites

Obese adolescents tend to have fewer friends at school than their peers, finds a new study in Ethnicity & Disease. However, the impact of obesity on friendships varies by ethnic group, with White students faring worse than Black or Hispanic students.

The research team used data drawn from the school-based National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The team’s sample comprised 15,355 adolescents in grades 7 through 12. Each student was asked to list up to five same-sex friends from within school or outside of school. By linking students’ responses, the researchers could determine when students who listed a certain peer as a friend were in turn listed by that peer as a friend. This information was used to assess “social integration.”

“We found that obese adolescents were picked as friends by only 3 schoolmates, compared to the average adolescent who was not obese, who was identified as a friend by 5 schoolmates,” said lead author Solveig Argeseanu Cunningham, Ph.D., of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.

Obese teens did not report having fewer friends than their normal weight peers. Differences only emerged in whether the friendship was reciprocated. Being obese had the greatest effects on the reciprocity of white teens’ friendships. For non-white teens, especially Black girls, being obese did not reduce their number of school friends. One explanation could be the different ideals of beauty among different ethnic groups, with African-American and some Hispanic cultures being more accepting of larger bodies, offered Cunningham.

Source: Health Behavior News Service, part of the Center for Advancing Health
http://www.cfah.org/hbns/archives/getDocument.cfm?documentID=22536