Let Your Nose Guide You to Less Fatty Foods

Study finds people could spot high- and low-fat milk through smell alone

WebMD News from HealthDay

By Robert Preidt

HealthDay Reporter

FRIDAY, Jan. 24, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- How fatty is that food in front of you? Your nose knows, a new study suggests.

The study, which found that people's sense of smell is adept at gauging foods' fat content, might have real-world uses. For example, it might be possible to manipulate food products' odor to make low-fat items more appealing, thereby cutting the amount of fat in people's diets, said researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

"The human sense of smell is far better at guiding us through our everyday lives than we give it credit for," study senior author and neuroscientist Johan Lundstrom said in a center news release. "That we have the ability to detect and discriminate minute differences in the fat content of our food suggests that this ability must have had considerable evolutionary importance."

Fat is "calorie dense" and has been an important source of energy for humans through much of evolution, the researchers said. This means it would have been to our advantage to be able to detect the nutrient in food.

To test people's ability to smell fat in food, the researchers had volunteers smell milk with three amounts of fat found in a typical milk product: 0.125 percent, 1.4 percent or 2.7 percent fat.

The test was conducted three times using different sets of participants: in Philadelphia with normal-weight people, in the Netherlands with normal-weight people; and again in Philadelphia with both normal-weight and overweight people.

In all three experiments, people were able to use their sense of smell to detect the different levels of fat in the milk, regardless of their culture or weight, according to the study, which was published Jan. 22 in the journal PLoS One.

Study lead author Sanne Boesveldt, a sensory neuroscientist, said the next step is identifying the odor molecules in the food that allow people to detect fat levels.

"Fat molecules typically are not airborne, meaning they are unlikely to be sensed by sniffing food samples," Boesveldt said in the news release. "We will need sophisticated chemical analyses to sniff out the signal."

source : Let Your Nose Guide You to Less Fatty Foods

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Carbohydrate And Healthy Diet Plan For Men

To maintain men’s health is a challenge for working men. A balanced diet plan retains all health problems away from you. Balance and healthy diet contain balance nutritious foods which are essential for the health of men. An unbalance diet plan helps in rapid increase of weight. So how can a working men or women find out which is better and the best diet plan for health?

Healthy diet comprises all the essential nutrients required for healthy body in a balanced quantity.  In this blog we focus on a healthy diet needed for healthy body. Do not remove carbohydrate completely from body because carbohydrate is essential composite that helps in right functioning of energetic responses in a healthy body. These carbohydrates produce energy which is required for our body for activities. These carbohydrates should be used up during breakfast as part of stable health diet plan.

source : Carbohydrate And Healthy Diet Plan For Men

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10 Cancer Symptoms Women Shouldn't Ignore

You don't need to panic, but you shouldn't assume these signs are 'nothing,' either. Plus three ways to lower your risk.

By Christina Boufis
WebMD Magazine - Feature

Reviewed by Nivin Todd, MD, FACOG

When Caryl Engstrom, 49, found a lump in her right breast, she knew something was wrong. Despite a normal mammogram 2 months earlier and recent breast exams by her internist and gynecologist, who found nothing amiss, Engstrom knew she needed to call her doctor right away. "I just had a gut feeling. It was a sizable lump and just didn't feel right to me." 

Engstrom's suspicions turned out to be correct when a biopsy revealed she had stage 2 breast cancer. 

Although almost 65% of women over 40 have had a mammogram in the last 2 years, according to the CDC, cancer isn't always caught by screening tests. 

And when women do suspect something, fear sometimes prevents them from seeing a doctor right away, says Beth Y. Karlan, MD. She's the director of the Women's Cancer Research Program at Cedars-Sinai's Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute in Los Angeles. Or women downplay or misinterpret symptoms that could point tocancer. 

"They say, 'Oh, this bloating is nothing. It can wait,'" Karlan says. "There's this idea that if you look into it, if you acknowledge the symptoms, then something is going to change in your life, and you don't want it to change. 

"But warning signs do not mean cancer," she adds. "Even if you have all of them. There are many other benign diagnoses or physiological changes that can also cause warning signs." For instance, you can have bloating, low back pain, and pelvic pressure and just have fibroids, Karlan says. 

But if your symptoms are "persistent and progressive," she says, "meaning you wake up every morning and feel something and it has you worried -- even for 2 weeks in a row -- it really is worth calling your physician and having it checked out." 

Regular checkups and screening tests such as Pap smears and mammograms, as well as knowing your own body, are all crucial for good health, Karlan says. 

Which changes are worth bringing to your doctor's attention? We've asked experts about the symptoms you need to keep on your radar screen.

1. Breast Changes

"If you feel a lump, you shouldn't ignore it, even if your mammogram is normal," says Carolyn Runowicz, MD. She's a breast cancer survivor and past president of the American Cancer Society. If your nipple gets scaly or starts flaking, that could indicate Paget’s disease of the nipple, which is linked to an underlying cancer in about 95% of cases. Any milky or bloody nipple discharge should also be checked out. 

Dimpling of the skin over the breast, particularly if it looks like the skin on an orange, "is something to be worried about," Karlan says. Such dimpling is most often linked to inflammatory breast cancer, a rare, usually aggressive cancer characterized also by swollen, hot, red breasts. 

Expect your doctor to do a breast exam and medical history, followed by a mammogram and most likely a sonogram. Depending on the results of both tests, your doctor might do a biopsy. 

source : 10 Cancer Symptoms Women Shouldn't Ignore

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