HEALTH

Full-fat milk decreases risk of obesity

NEW Canadian research has found that children who drink whole milk appear to have a 40 per cent lower risk of being overweight or obese than children who drink reduced-fat milk.
Led by St. Michael’s Hospital of Unity Health Toronto, the new review and meta-analysis looked at 28 studies from seven countries that included 20,897 children aged one to 18 years of age.
All of the studies had investigated the relationship between children drinking cow’s milk and the risk of being overweight or obese.
The findings of the analysis, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, showed that 18 of the 28 studies suggested that children who drank whole milk were less likely to be overweight or obese than kids who drank reduced-fat milk.
The researchers added that among the children who drank whole milk, the risk of being overweight or obese was 40 per cent lower than among the reduced-fat milk drinkers.
Although the researchers point out that ten out of the 28 studies did not find an association between drinking full-fat milk and a lower risk of being overweight or obese, they said that none of the studies included in the analysis showed that kids who drank reduced-fat milk had a lower risk of being overweight or obese.
The researchers say the findings go against Canadian and international guidelines, which currently recommend that children consume reduced-fat cow milk, instead of whole milk, starting at age two to reduce the risk of obesity.
“The majority of children in Canada and the United States consume cow’s milk on a daily basis and it is a major contributor of dietary fat for many children,” said lead author Dr Jonathon Maguire.
“In our review, children following the current recommendation of switching to reduced-fat milk at age two were not leaner than those consuming whole milk.”
He says that the next step in the research would be to carry out a randomised controlled trial to establish the cause and effect of whole milk and lower risk of obesity.
“All of the studies we examined were observational studies, meaning that we cannot be sure if whole milk caused the lower risk of overweight or obesity.
“Whole milk may have been related to other factors that lowered the risk of overweight or obesity,” he said.
“A randomised controlled trial would help to establish cause and effect, but none were found in the literature.” – AFP Relaxnews

Baby and adult brains ‘sync up’

HAVE you ever played with a baby and felt a sense of connection, even though they couldn’t yet talk to you?
New research suggests that you might quite literally be “on the same wavelength,” experiencing similar brain activity in the same brain regions.
A team of Princeton researchers has conducted the first study of how baby and adult brains interact during natural play, and they found measurable similarities in their neural activity. In other words, baby and adult brain activity rose and fell together as they shared toys and eye contact.
The research was conducted at the Princeton Baby Lab, where University researchers study how babies learn to see, talk and understand the world.
“Previous research has shown that adults’ brains sync up when they watch movies and listen to stories, but little is known about how this ‘neural synchrony’ develops in the first years of life,” said Elise Piazza, an associate research scholar in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) and the first author on a paper published on Dec 17, 2019, in Psychological Science.
Piazza and her co-authors – Liat Hasenfratz, an associate research scholar in PNI; Uri Hasson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience; and Casey Lew-Williams, an associate professor of psychology – posited that neural synchrony has important implications for social development and language learning.
Studying real-life, face-to-face communication between babies and adults is quite difficult. Most past studies of neural coupling, many of which were conducted in Hasson’s lab, involved scanning adults’ brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in separate sessions, while the adults lay down and watched movies or listened to stories.
But to study real-time communication, the researchers needed to create a child-friendly method of recording brain activity simultaneously from baby and adult brains. With funding from the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Grant, the researchers developed a new dual-brain neuroimaging system that uses functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which is highly safe and records oxygenation in the blood as a proxy for neural activity. The setup allowed the researchers to record the neural coordination between babies and an adult while they played with toys, sang songs and read a book.
The same adult interacted with all 42 infants and toddlers who participated in the study. Of those, 21 had to be excluded because they “squirmed excessively,” and three others flat-out refused to wear the cap, leaving 18 children, ranging in age from 9 months to 15 months.
The experiment had two portions. In one, the adult experimenter spent five minutes interacting directly with a child – playing with toys, singing nursery rhymes or reading Goodnight Moon – while the child sat on their parent’s lap. In the other, the experimenter turned to the side and told a story to another adult while the child played quietly with their parent.
The caps collected data from 57 channels of the brain known to be involved in prediction, language processing and understanding other people’s perspectives.
When they looked at the data, the researchers found that during the face-to-face sessions, the babies’ brains were synchronized with the adult’s brain in several areas known to be involved in high-level understanding of the world — perhaps helping the children decode the overall meaning of a story or analyze the motives of the adult reading to them.
When the adult and infant were turned away from each other and engaging with other people, the coupling between them disappeared.
That fit with researchers’ expectations, but the data also had surprises in store.
For example, the strongest coupling occurred in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in learning, planning and executive functioning and was previously thought to be quite underdeveloped during infancy. -Science Daily