Health Newsletter

DOES WHITE BREAD MAKE YOU SOFT & ROUND?

Study: Refined grains contribute to belly fat

Many Americans are like a loaf of bread – soft, with one side round. And some researchers believe their choice of bread may be part of the reason.

The scientists say white bread and other refined grains seem to go to the gut and hang out as belly fat. 

“Waist circumference was very much associated with this high-refined grains pattern,” said Katherine Tucker, an associate professor of nutritional epidemiology at Tufts University in Boston. She and her colleagues are studying what happens to the bodies of people who eat lots of refined bread.

Refined vs. whole grains

The researchers have been following the eating habits of a group of healthy, largely middle-aged people in Baltimore. They focused on 459 people with a variety of eating habits, including some who preferred refined grains and others who preferred fiber such as whole grains, fruits and vegetables.

For those who are not food scientists, refining removes the fibrous bran and oil-rich germ, leaving the sweeter endosperm, the whitish-colored meat of the kernel.

The Tufts researchers say that, for some reason, calories from refined grains preferred to settle at the waistline. The belt size of the white bread group expanded about one-half inch a year, which probably put some of the research subjects into a larger size of pants over the three years they were followed, Tucker said. At the end, the white bread group had three times the fiber group’s gain at the gut.

It’s not surprising that the waists of refined-grain eaters expanded, said Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital in Boston. Ludwig was not connected to the Tufts study, but his research had found something similar in a look at younger adults around the nation. One of the factors he checked was the waist-to-hip ratio – whether people’s torsos were more tapered or more round. People who ate less fiber were more round.

Heart disease risk

The size of the waistline is important for health as well as looks. A person with a bigger gut has a higher risk of heart disease than a person who weighs the same but who does not carry extra weight around the belly.

Why that is, as well as why refined grains would send more calories to the gut, is still something of a mystery. The Tufts researchers, who published the waistline data in June of 2003, are now trying to solve that mystery.

Their theory is that it’s linked to the ease in which the body breaks down carbohydrates in the endosperm into simple sugars. When sugars flood the body, insulin levels rise to help pull the sugars out of the bloodstream and store them in cells, often as fat.

“I think abdominal fat cells may be more sensitive to insulin’s effects than other fat cells in the body,” said P. Kristen Newby, lead author of the Tufts study.

Curbing carbohydrates as a way to rein in the insulin response is a key rationale for popular carb-curtailing diets such as the Atkins and South Beach plans, and dieters have been giving up refined grains as a result.

Study: Cleaning Products, Solvents May Cause Asthma

Exposure to fumes emitted by cleaning products in the home could cause asthma in children, a study published in late August shows.

The study, in the British Medical Association’s journal Thorax, found that children exposed to higher levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) were four times more likely to suffer from asthma than children who were not.

VOCs are found in solvents, paints, floor adhesives, cleaning products, polishes, room fresheners and fitted carpets, the study said.

The authors, led by Krassi Rumchev of the School of Public Health at Curtin University of Technology in Australia, studied 88 children who were treated for asthma at the emergency department of the Princess Margaret Hospital in Perth.

“Our study supports the hypothesis that exposure to indoor pollutants might be important in the genesis of asthma,” the authors wrote.

They found VOC concentrations were higher in homes where people smoked indoors, as well as homes that had been recently painted or had new carpets.

But they said they did not have enough data to conclude for certain whether use of household products such as cleaning products, paints and hobby supplies were to blame.

“Given that VOCs are carcinogenic (cancer causing) and some may be significantly related to asthma, it is important that an increased understanding of the factors that affect their indoor concentration is achieved,” the study said.

Fruit Helps Eyes Stay Healthy

Bananas, oranges, and other fruits may reduce the risk of developing age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness among older people.

Scientists have found that people who ate at least three daily servings of fruit had a 36 percent lower risk of developing age-related macular degeneration (AMD) than people who ate fewer than 1.5 servings a day.

“This is the first good study that has some statistical value that documents what we’ve been thinking all along,” said Dr. Robert Cykiert, a professor of ophthalmology at New York University School of Medicine in New York City. “It’s always nice to have some statistical support for what’s been observed but not proven.”

More surprisingly, vegetables, vitamins and carotenoids, the compounds responsible for red, yellow and orange pigment in some fruits and vegetables, did not appear to affect the risk.

Although the findings need to be replicated, the study can still serve as a green light to eat fruit. “Fruit intake has been related to reduced cardiovascular disease and certain forms of cancer,” said the study’s lead author, Eunyoung Cho, an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, both in Boston. “I think it’s still OK to say this is one more reason to eat fruit.”

The findings appear in the June issue of The Archives of Ophthalmology.

Because there’s little to be done about AMD once it sets in, researchers have been strongly focused on prevention. While some studies have found that antioxidant vitamin and mineral supplementation protects against AMD, there’s been little research looking at fruit and vegetable intake in relation to the condition.

This study is the first large-scale prospective examination of diet and risk for AMD. “We looked at all antioxidant vitamins, carotenoids as well as fruits and vegetables, because they are good food sources of those nutrients,” Cho explained.