As if the arrival of board shorts and bikini season wasn’t enough, there’s new evidence about the negative effects of carrying extra poundage on the male body. Fortunately, science is also giving us some cool new tools to deal with our increasingly portly profiles.
The Heart and Stroke Foundation confirms that “almost 60 per cent of all Canadian adults and 26 per cent of our children and adolescents are overweight or obese.” So it was no accident that the 9,300 experts who converged recently for the Endocrine Society’s Annual Meeting spent a lot of time talking about the obesity epidemic.
Anne Turner and her colleagues from Australia’s Deakin University may have found one of the biological roots of overeating. At the San Francisco conference she reported that, at least for obese and overweight men, the simple act of eating triggers secretion of the stress hormone cortisol.
Her numbers were impressive. “Overweight/obese men responded to food intake with a significant elevation (51 per cent) in salivary cortisol” compared to a five per cent increase in lean men. “If overweight/obese men have an elevated cortisol response every time they ingest food,” Turner writes, “they may be more susceptible to the development of stress-related disease.”
There’s a sort of vicious circle at work here, because many people deal with stress by, you guessed it, eating more. Dr. Valerie Taylor, psychiatrist-in-chief at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, talks about the “obesity-mental illness dyad,” even suggesting a chemical association between being fat and being depressed.
“The most common biological perturbation associated with depression is an increase in cortisol,” she writes in an article in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. She goes on to explain that high cortisol levels tend to make the body store up fat. Taylor suggests that “a type of MDD (major depressive disorder) characterized by an increase in the need for sleep and food, may actually characterize the most typical presentation of MDD.
Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/health...ies+research/8612546/story.html#ixzz2YB9urGBQ
The Heart and Stroke Foundation confirms that “almost 60 per cent of all Canadian adults and 26 per cent of our children and adolescents are overweight or obese.” So it was no accident that the 9,300 experts who converged recently for the Endocrine Society’s Annual Meeting spent a lot of time talking about the obesity epidemic.
Anne Turner and her colleagues from Australia’s Deakin University may have found one of the biological roots of overeating. At the San Francisco conference she reported that, at least for obese and overweight men, the simple act of eating triggers secretion of the stress hormone cortisol.
Her numbers were impressive. “Overweight/obese men responded to food intake with a significant elevation (51 per cent) in salivary cortisol” compared to a five per cent increase in lean men. “If overweight/obese men have an elevated cortisol response every time they ingest food,” Turner writes, “they may be more susceptible to the development of stress-related disease.”
There’s a sort of vicious circle at work here, because many people deal with stress by, you guessed it, eating more. Dr. Valerie Taylor, psychiatrist-in-chief at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, talks about the “obesity-mental illness dyad,” even suggesting a chemical association between being fat and being depressed.
“The most common biological perturbation associated with depression is an increase in cortisol,” she writes in an article in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. She goes on to explain that high cortisol levels tend to make the body store up fat. Taylor suggests that “a type of MDD (major depressive disorder) characterized by an increase in the need for sleep and food, may actually characterize the most typical presentation of MDD.
Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/health...ies+research/8612546/story.html#ixzz2YB9urGBQ