To me, these foods have one thing in common: Theyre the stuff we ate as kids.

Why might grown adults be reaching back into the pantry of their pasts? What is it about a pandemic that makes us feel like were teenagers at a sleepover?

The reasons are deeply rooted.

At its core, the purpose of food is to nourish. Of course food provides us with the necessary energy and balance of vitamins and minerals to power and fuel the body. But anyone whos reached for a pint of Ben and Jerrys after a particularly stressful day will know that nourishment is about more than nutrition.

During periods of stress, people tend to eat more and show a greater preference for higher calorie foods. The sweeter and saltier the better. Regardless of hunger, a tasty snack can feel comforting. Theres evidence to suggest that highly palatable foods, especially those high in fat and sugar, may elicit a response in the brain that is similar to the response from opioids.

Yes, a delicious slice of rich chocolate cake can be just as good as drugs.

We tend to call many of these foods comfort foods, but the definition of comfort food is a bit slippery. Food is deeply personal. The foods that comfort people depend on their cultural background, taste preference, and personal experience. We know, however, that food can induce feelings of nostalgia that transport us back to simpler times.

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Coronavirus diets: What's behind the urge to eat like little kids? - Sioux City Journal

With the recent announcement of an extended lockdown period, it is becoming more and more important to eat well and exercise if you want to manage your weight at home. Losing weight fast at home is not all that difficult, especially if you follow the below weight loss tips from a performance nutritionist. Good news is that you don't even need to go full keto for weight loss either, although it might help (just saying).

Is it impossible to lose weight at home? According to Simon Jurwik, performance nutritionist and commercial director at Bulk Powders, it isn't, not by a long shot. In fact, some simple changes in lifestyle and diet can lead to big results and you don't even have to do bodyweight workouts at home or run for hours on end to shed pounds.

We asked a few questions to Simon about how to maximise lockdown weight loss effectively.

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Drinking more water can certainly help

(Image credit: Getty Images)

As Simon explains, "to avoid weight gain or to lose weight, you need to maintain calories compared to your energy expenditure to avoid weight gain or in a deficit for weight loss."

If this sounds a bit too complicated, here is what it means: you need to eat less than your maintenance calories in order to lose weight. Maintenance calories are what your body needs to function: on average, it is around 2000 kcal for women and 2500 kcal for men.

"A good way to do this is tracking your calories so you have a better understanding of how much youre eating." Simon adds "If you dont like specifically calorie tracking, then start monitoring your portion sizes. If you need to lose weight, simply reduce the portion sizes."

Calorie tracking can be made easy with apps like MyFitnessPal which can scan barcodes and do the addition for you, no need to calculate carbs/fat/protein manually.

Avoid takeaways if you don't want to get obese

(Image credit: Getty)

Simon doesn't believe in bad foods although even he wouldn't recommend chowing down on takeaway every morning. His motto is "everything in moderation". "Nonetheless, I would say to limit your consumption of the below whilst in lockdown as they are more calorie dense" he adds.

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Eat all your five-a-day in one go if you wish

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When it comes to weight loss, Simon vouches for calorie deficit: "You should try and eat a well balanced diet so you get the right amount of nutrients and minerals." Ideally, you would like to eat your five a day, a mix of fruits and vegetables, to make sure your vitamin levels are topped up.

It's easier than you think to add more greens to your meals: have some tomatoes with your breakfast bacon and eggs, have an apple mid-morning, some asparagus and kale with your lunch, a banana in the afternoon and half an avocado with your tea.

Simon recommends the following food groups to be included in your diet for effective weight loss:

Is keto diet the key to weight loss?

(Image credit: Fresh n Lean)

"Ultimately, it comes down to adherence. If you find going lower carb keto diet is easier for you to stick with, then thats a good option. If you prefer intermittent fasting and you find you can stick to it, then thats one to explore" Simon adds.

The key here is sticking to the diet and not jumping from one fad to the other. Once you found the diet you can keep to it doesn't have to be an extreme one either just let your body adjust and eventually, you'll see the results.

The most important thing to remember is that once you get healthy, weight loss will come naturally. It's not about chasing after pounds lost; what's more important is to ease yourself into a healthy lifestyle and a sustainable diet. That will make you lose weight and keep it off, too.

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Exercising regularly is not necessary for weight loss but it can certainly help

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In Simon's opinion, it's important to make a distinction between people who already have a certain muscle mass and people who 'just' want to lose weight: "It depends, if youre aiming to maintain a certain amount of muscle mass, you would need to continue exercising and in particular, resistance training, to hold onto the muscle mass you have."

Cardio has long been used for weight loss, let it be running on treadmills, indoor cycling or indoor rowing. But resistance training is also a great way to burn calories as well as doing HIIT workouts. The best resistance training for weight loss are the ones that use compound exercises, like this full body workout or this two-day push-pull workout.

"Similarly, if youve just completed a diet, which incorporated exercising and calorie restriction, youll need to continue completing the same level of exercise to maintain your weight. If you were to just stop, your calorie expenditure would go down and you will likely gain weight" Simon concludes.

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Supplement-wise, Bulk Powders has you covered

(Image credit: Bulk Powders)

Understandably, Simon knows a lot about supplements: "supplements can contribute to maintaining/losing weight when incorporated into a balanced diet. For example, if you follow a ketogenic diet, Bulk Powders has several products that are low in carbohydrates such as our Complete Keto Protein Shake, Complete Greens and Electrolyte tablets."

Supplements can come in many shapes and sizes and supplementing your diet doesn't necessarily mean chugging down gallons of protein shakes or weight gainers. Especially if you are following a strict diet, like the vegan diet or the aforementioned keto diet, taking some supplements will be inevitable to support your metabolism.

When using supplements to lose weight, our product Cutting Edge, contains Glucomannan which contributes to weight loss in the context of a calorie restricted diet.

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Avoid lockdown weight gain: this nutritionist has blacklisted five foods, and you're not gonna like it - T3

While fruits and vegetables rich in Vitamin C, including orange, kiwi, lemon, guava are considered good for the growth, development and repair of all body tissues -- a team of scientists has discovered added benefits of the nutrient. They say that a fasting-mimicking diet could be more effective at treating some types of cancer when combined with Vitamin C. The novel study was conducted by scientists from USC and the IFOM Cancer Institute in Milan.

In studies on mice, researchers found that the combination delayed tumour progression in multiple mouse models of colorectal cancer; in some mice, it caused disease regression. The results were published in the journal Nature Communications. "For the first time, we have demonstrated how a completely non-toxic intervention can effectively treat aggressive cancer," said Valter Longo, the study senior author and the director of the USC Longevity Institute at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and professor of biological sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. "We have taken two treatments that are studied extensively as interventions to delay ageing -- a fasting-mimicking diet and Vitamin C -- and combined them as a powerful treatment for cancer," added Longo.

The researchers said that while fasting remains a challenging option for cancer patients, a safer, more feasible option is a low-calorie, plant-based diet that causes cells to respond as if the body were fasting.Their findings suggest that a low-toxicity treatment of fasting-mimicking diet plus Vitamin C has the potential to replace more toxic treatments. Results of prior research on the cancer-fighting potential of Vitamin C have been mixed. Recent studies, though, are beginning to show some efficacy, especially in combination with chemotherapy.

In this new study, the research team wanted to find out whether a fasting-mimicking diet could enhance the high-dose Vitamin C tumour-fighting action by creating an environment that would be unsustainable for cancer cells but still safe for normal cells. "Our first in vitro experiment showed remarkable effects. When used alone, fasting-mimicking diet or vitamin C alone reduced cancer cell growth and caused a minor increase in cancer cell death. But when used together, they had a dramatic effect, killing almost all cancerous cells," said Longo.

Longo and his colleagues detected this strong effect only in cancer cells that had a mutation that is regarded as one of the most challenging targets in cancer research. These mutations in the KRAS gene signal the body is resisting most cancer-fighting treatments, and they reduce a patient's survival rate. KRAS mutations occur in approximately a quarter of all human cancers and are estimated to occur in up to half of all colorectal cancers. The study also provided clues about why previous studies of vitamin C as a potential anticancer therapy showed limited efficacy. By itself, a Vitamin C treatment appears to trigger the KRAS-mutated cells to protect cancer cells by increasing levels of ferritin, a protein that binds iron.

But by reducing levels of ferritin, the scientists managed to increase Vitamin C's toxicity for the cancer cells. Amid this finding, the scientists also discovered that colorectal cancer patients with high levels of the iron-binding protein have a lower chance of survival. "In this study, we observed how fasting-mimicking diet cycles are able to increase the effect of pharmacological doses of Vitamin C against KRAS-mutated cancers," said Maira Di Tano, a study co-author at the IFOM, FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology in Milan, Italy.

"This occurs through the regulation of the levels of iron and of the molecular mechanisms involved in oxidative stress. The results particularly pointed to a gene that regulates iron levels: heme-oxygenase-1," added Tano. The research team's prior studies showed that fasting and a fasting-mimicking diet slow cancer's progression and make chemotherapy more effective in tumour cells while protecting normal cells from chemotherapy-associated side effects. The combination enhances the immune system's anti-tumour response in breast cancer and melanoma mouse models.

The scientists believe cancer will eventually be treated with low-toxicity drugs in a manner similar to how antibiotics are used to treat infections that kill particular bacteria, but which can be substituted by other drugs if the first is not effective. To move toward that goal, they say they needed to first test two hypotheses: that their non-toxic combination interventions would work in mice, and that it would look promising for human clinical trials.

In this new study, they said that they've demonstrated both. At least five clinical trials, including one at USC on breast cancer and prostate cancer patients, are now investigating the effects of the fasting-mimicking diets in combination with different cancer-fighting drugs.

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Study reveals combination of fasting, Vitamin C effective on hard-to-treat cancers - EdexLive

Jean Nidetch was in the supermarket one day in September 1961 when she ran into an old friend. Oh, Jean, you look so wonderful! the friend said, before asking, When are you due? Nidetch was not pregnant. Horrified by her friends remark, she walked home asking herself over and over, What do I do now?.

What she did was go on to found Weight Watchers International in her living room.

Nidetchs 2015 New York Times obituary opens with the above anecdote, describing Nidetch at that time as a a 214-pound [97kg] Queens housewife with a 44-inch [112cm] waist and an addiction to cookies by the box.

Few women would want this incident, or any particular set of measurements, to define them, but Nidetch had told this story of her rock-bottom moment a thousand times. Most fat people need to be hurt in some way in order to be jolted into taking action, she would later write.

Weight Watchers is ubiquitous in modern culture, with everyone from Mad Mens Betty Draper to Oprah to our own Aisling (the young Irish everywoman created by Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen) dutifully following the plan. Who hasnt sat through an office lunch without being told how many points was in their sandwich? But, increasingly, the idea of women in a room together (it is still mainly women) at a Weight Watchers meeting talking about a physical ideal seems anti-feminist. We are conscious now of body shaming and fat acceptance; all bodies are beach bodies.

But while diet may be a four-letter word, many of us still want to lose weight.

I have been to Weight Watchers meetings the length and breadth of Dublin so many pastel-painted community halls with so many fold-out chairs; often a security man at reception who points the way to the meeting without having to be asked. Inside is a leader with the air of a kindly teacher and walls plastered with charts of good and bad foods alongside encouraging slogans.

Then there is the shedding of coats, boots and even jewellery for the weekly weigh-in; the handing out of gold and silver stickers to the success stories others left annoyed, they dont understand, they did everything right. So many people reduced to the loss or gain of 200g. Then afterwards, the group discussion: Where did it all go wrong this week, Mary?

Sometimes at the meetings sadder stories emerge: the woman so ashamed of her body that she shopped at a 24-hour supermarket in the middle of the night to avoid judgment, or the woman who went to her weekly weigh-in even though her mother had just died because she promised her she would keep going.

Stick with it girls, show up and stick with it!

And, always, the strange embarrassment at being corralled into a room and told what is good and bad for you, even though youve known for 30 years. Admittedly, youre a bit confused too, because along the way youve also done Atkins, keto, paleo, 5:2, and intermittent fasting. You had a fling with Slimming World because you heard you can eat more pasta there. An avocado is an angel or a demon depending on the diet.

Ultimately, however, the same fact unravels you each works every single diet works but only if you stick with it forever until the end of time, amen.

I have been dieting since I was about eight. Growing up, my house was full of Vogues and slimming magazines, all the women in one set of glossy pages wanting to look like all the women in the other. I went on Slimfast for a month before I went to the Gaeltacht when I was 13. Being a fat teenager was no joke. I still cant walk past a gang of teenage boys without steeling myself for commentary.

Last year, I had to be weighed before emergency surgery. In the midst of all the trauma, shame was still there in the room. I stood on the scales and said to the nurse, I cant look, is it okay if you dont tell me? She jotted the number down quietly, said youre lovely, and left. It felt like absolution.

The times when I was thinnest, I was grieving or depressed, but I still loved the compliment. When I was not dieting, and the compliment did not come, the absence of it was stark.

Late last year, in a packed Olympia theatre in Dublin, I cried when the singer Lizzo came out on stage like a goddess. It is all very hard to reconcile, those women striving and hopeful in a community hall trying to sort this bloody thing out once and for all, and then seeing Lizzo, big, resplendent and celebrated in a gold corset. You leave thinking; maybe Im okay as I am?

In her new book, This is Big, lifelong yo-yo dieter Marisa Meltzer explores her own weight-loss history alongside Nidetchs rise to the top of the diet industry. Meltzer was first signed up to Weight Watchers at the age of nine. At 38, reading Nidetchs obituary, she was surprised to find similarities in their weight loss struggle, with one difference: Nidetch had lost 32kg, kept it off and became a mogul in the process.

Meltzer is a New York journalist who writes about celebrities and wellness for high-end glossy magazines. Her appearance, she believes, helps her interview subjects open up to her. I think that you can take one look at me and theres no risk that Im gonna steal your husband. She writes about Busy Phillips cutting up a slice of banana bread into tiny cubes for them to share, and a Vogue photo shoot with Emily Blunt where Meltzer gorged on brownies from catering before sneaking a look at the size tag of Blunts jeans.

Meltzer had deliberately assembled an enviable life that existed in contrast to how she felt about her emotional eating, which consisted of the kind of delivery order where the restaurant packs four sets of plastic utensils.

She is on lockdown when we speak on Skype. She explains her motivation for writing this book: I was about to turn 40 and had a sense with a lot of things in my life of, Im turning 40, Im too old for this shit. Mostly, I kept thinking about my relationship to my body and food. And I was just like, I cant believe its still this hard for me.

Meltzer has spent most of her life either striving to change her body, or striving to accept it. No matter how unattainable perfection may be, working toward it as opposed to working toward self-acceptance is satisfying in its own way. At least youre aiming for something tangible, she writes. But at the same time, am I a fool for still, after all these yo-yo years, wanting to lose and keep off weight?

Nidetch would tell Meltzer that its worth the battle. She looms large in the book, all blonde bouffant and brutal quips. Fat is anything but beautiful, she wrote in her 1960s magazine column.

Meltzer wanted to know more about Nidetch, who she felt had become a footnote in the history of the company she started, which now has 4.6 million members worldwide. Having regularly written about Goop-style health camps, Meltzer was going back to basics. She committed to one year of Weight Watchers sampling her way around New York meetings until she found one that was just right.

Weight Watchers felt like the lowest common denominator. It felt like something for gossipy housewives. And it didnt seem applicable to someone like me, or the way that I think about myself. A lot of it was just getting over my own ego and being like, youre fat, these people are fat, youve a lot in common. She laughs. I had to humble myself a bit and there were things that I learned, but there are also moments where Im just like, Oh my God, if I have to hear you talking about the amount of cereal that youre letting yourself eat. . .

The idea of a weekly meeting as the basis for her Weight Watchers business came to Nidetch when, after a tragic stillbirth, she found comfort in talking with other bereaved mothers.

I think her genius was in this idea of community, Meltzer says. Dieting had been just yet another thing that women were supposed to slog through on their own; another private hardship of being a woman. They were all supposed to be good 60s housewives and get their shit together. I think Jean saw that there was strength in sharing the reality of your experience.

Meltzer recalls dieting from the age of four. Her parents split up when she was young, but together they focused on her weight loss. In the 1980s, Meltzer was sent to that American wonder: a fat camp. Her parents paid for meal delivery schemes and health coaches into her 30s, all three of them holding firm to the idea that Meltzer might lose the weight and be done with it.

Theyre not monsters. I think its hard for them to understand how their good intentions were so painful for me.

Writing about dieting these days can feel as current as penning an article on 101 ways to please your man. Self-acceptance is the more modern goal, which means there is often now a double shame at play shame about the body itself, and shame about wanting to change it.

Its hard to criticise something thats trying to do good, says Meltzer of the body acceptance movement. But I think that if youve ever had a complicated relationship with your body, you should understand that what its suggesting is just as unreasonable in some ways as someone coming up to me and being like, oh what you need to do is to eat less calories than you burn and then youll lose weight.

Its not a lack of knowledge that keeps me from being where I want to be. And I think the same thing is true of body positivity. In some ways its easier to change your body, or at least try to, than to change your feelings. I think that theres this false idea that you can be woken up one day to this liberating notion, and then youre forever changed.

What Meltzer really wants is to have more control over how she is viewed by the world.

A lot of this book was figuring out like, what do I actually want to happen? And in some ways, my fantasy is to be thin enough that no one could ever think that Im fat. Part of it is this idea of wanting to hide in plain sight. Weight is so complicated because theres no hiding from it. I wish that I could lie about the ending of this book, but it would be impossible because its written all over my body. Theres no hiding about weight, which makes it really embarrassing and touchy and vulnerable.

Meltzer jokes how she wouldnt have minded an Eat Pray Love-style conclusion, and now Im engaged to someone I met at Weight Watchers, and he also lost 50 pounds! I had to settle into that idea that this book was going to be more complicated than some easy triumph at the end.

Reading the book, many of Meltzers friends were surprised to learn how she felt.

Secrecy is really behind so much of fat and food. Theres a secrecy to eating, a furtiveness, and theres a secrecy in not talking about it. Some of that is a sort of corrective that we try to impose because the weight is speaking for us. Theres this sense of, I dont get to have my weight be a private thing, or to be something that only I struggle with. The world can see that I struggle.

An unenthusiastic and inconsistent dater, Meltzer is particularly vulnerable when writing about her relationships. A New York psychologist, who she met online, texted her the morning after their date to say that he was attracted to the girl in the photos and not the one who had shown up at his door. His honesty was for her own good. She thought this might be her Nidetch rock bottom moment, but she just took a bath, ordered Indian food and cried.

One part of the body positivity movement that Meltzer resents is its adherents repeated assurances of how hot their spouses find them.

I hate it. I get it, it is supposed to give us all hope but its justanother way for us to feel were failing.

After attending Weight Watchers meetings faithfully for a year, Meltzer formed friendships but realised she was never going to reach a point where Im really happy with my body or with my relationship to food, and I also dont have to.

I no longer feel so tortured by it or in the dichotomy of, do I hate myself, do I love myself, am I a good feminist who accepts herself, am I someone who hates themselves and is trying to change? I am all of those things all of the time. And that has given me a lot of peace.

Perhaps Meltzer writing so openly about her body is the natural progression of Nidetchs idea of story-sharing, stripped of any element of shame.

I have the same body that I did before, but [with this book] Im outing myself as fat. And that feels liberating because Im acknowledging to the world that this is a complicated relationship and that it will continue to be complicated.

She believes that for the most part, the conversation around dieting has changed only superficially. Theres a lot of intense orthorexia that seems to be going on where people are obsessed with the health of every little thing they put in their mouth now. A lot of that is a contemporary spin on diet culture.

Even Weight Watchers is uncomfortable with the word weight in its name, rebranding as WW, with Oprah at the helm. Its very touchy-feely, speaking in the patois of wellness that we all speak in these days, Meltzer says, a far cry from Nidetchs more proscriptive approach.

There is nothing truly new in dieting; the variable is us.

Were psychologically complex beings and were not dieting in a vacuum; we have all kinds of commitments and cravings and hormones and emotions to be dealt with.We all want some area where we can have some comfort and slip up and slide into some sort of oblivion now and then, and fortunately for me, its not drugs, its not alcohol. And I wouldnt even say food is the only place, but we all have our areas we go to for comfort.

Meltzer has reached a sort of truce with her body, but shes also very tired of being lectured by every doctor I see for reasons that are totally unrelated to weight, you know? And yet I also understand that there are things going on in my body that would be better if I lost weight. Its still hard. No doctor is going to tell me that I should try losing some weight for my heart and give me a low calorie diet sheet and its all gonna click into place.

She says the fact that dieting memes and baking pictures overtook the internet at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic really shows how much food is a comfort for all of us. And some people are fortunate in that they can eat a lot and other people like me cannot without gaining weight.

We are being told to practise self-compassion, to eat the cake. But despite the scale of this crisis, in the aftermath many will turn again to the redemptive narrative of dieting as if a fat body is merely a chrysalis from which the real you will eventually emerge.

Lets see what happens when we are out and about buying bathing suits, dating, seeing our friends, gyms are open, you know? Meltzer says. I think theres gonna be also a big push to get your post-pandemic body sorted out.

This Is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World (and Me), by Marisa Meltzer, is published by Chatto & Windus

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Chewing the fat: a year of Weight Watchers, a lifetime of dieting - The Irish Times

Saturated fat is delicious but not ideal if youve got to crack on with work afterwards (Credits: Getty Images)

If youre struggling to focus on your work, reading or Netflix series during lockdown, youre not alone. Lockdown brain fog really does seem to be a thing.

Its hardly surprising; staying in the same location week after week, with little opportunity to take fresh air or be exposed to different stimuli might see your capacity to concentrate diminish. But it may not be down to your isolation station alone.

New research has found that our focus may start to suffer after eating just one meal high in saturated fat.

Fatty food is exactly the sort of comfort blanket many of us are enjoying during this pandemic but a recent study from Ohio State University has found that performance is significantly hindered by less healthy fats.

51 women took a test to assess their attention, having first either eaten the same meal with one crucial difference. One meal was high in saturated fat and the other was made with sunflower oil. Their performance was worse after eating the high-saturated fat meal than the healthier fat, leading researchers to suggest a link between fatty food and the brain.

The scientists were also looking at whether a condition called leaky gut (which allows intestinal bacteria to enter the bloodstream) affects concentration and they found that it did. Those who had leaky guts performed worst on the test, regardless of which meal they ate.

Lead author of the study, Annelise Madison, said that while most previous studies looked at the effect of diet over a prolonged period of time, this finding was interesting because it showed a pretty remarkable difference after just one meal.

Both meals were high in dietary fat, its just that they contained different types of it.

Fat isnt bad for you. In fact, its essential that we all eat enough fat as certain vitamins are only absorbed by the body if were also consuming fat.

In recent years, high fat diets have been touted as the holy grail of weight loss. They work by forcing the body into a state of ketosis (where it runs off its own energy supply) and starving it of sugar (in the form of carbs). Keto enthusiasts would argue that they mainly fill up on unsaturated fat from things like avocados, lean meats, nuts, seeds and oily fish whereas the Atkins Diet was all about eating as much saturated fat (red meat, cheese, cream) as possible.

The Food Standards Agency, which is reponsible for all of the Governments nutritonal guidance, issued a statement back in 2003 describing low-carb diets like the Atkins as deadly. It claimed that they were linked to heart disease, cancer and ironically obesity.

We do all need a little bit of saturated fat in our diets and saturated isnt as bad as trans fats. Saturated fats include those which naturally occur in whole-fat milk, red meat, cheese and coconut oil. Trans fats are artificial and come from highly processed foods. You want to keep those to an absolute minimum (however delicious) and then consume saturated fats in moderation.

Monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats are the ones to really fill up on. They can lower the risk of heart disease and stroke, as well as helping to improve skin, teeth, hair, bone density and more.

Think of fats as a traffic light system:

Unsaturated = green

Saturated = amber

Trans = red

You can enjoy all three as part of a balanced diet but it is a fact that in an ideal world, youd be eating way more unsaturated than trans fats.

Because both meals were high-fat and potentially problematic, the high-saturated-fat meals cognitive effect could be even greater if it were compared to a lower-fat meal, she said.

A second study (published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition) was then carried on a group of cancer survivors.

Again, women were fed a high fat meal to test for fatigue and inflammation. At the beginning, they were asked to complete a baseline assessment of their attention before eating a high-fat meal containing eggs, biscuits, turkey sausage and gravy either cooked in oil high in saturated fat or sunflower oil. Both meals came to 930 calories and were designed to mimic fast food meals like Burger Kings double whopper with cheese or a Big Mac and medium fries.

Five hours later, the women took the same computer-based test again and in the following few weeks, did the same process with the opposite meal.

They also had fasted blood samples taken and analysed for an inflammatory molecule that signals the presence of endotoxemia a toxin responsible for leaky gut.

After eating the high saturated fat meal, women performed on average 11 per cent worse on the test, and again, those with signs of leaky gut came bottom. They performed poorly regardless of what type of fat they ate.

So perhaps that proves the power of gut-related dysregulation, Madison said pointing to previous research that suggested saturated fat increased inflammation throught the body, including possibly the brain.

And, Professor Janice Keicold-Glaser from Ohio State said, this might suggest why concentration is decreasing during lockdown in stressed out people turning to fatty foods.

What we know is that when people are more anxious, a good subset of us will find high-saturated-fat food more enticing than broccoli, she said.

We know from other research that depression and anxiety can interfere with concentration and attention as well. When we add that on top of the high-fat meal, we could expect the real-world effects to be even larger.

TL;DR, we all need a little comfort food now and again particularly in times of stress. But if you are craving pizza or a takeaway, save it for when you dont have anything important to concentrate on afterwards and try to limit the frequency. If having a Dominoes is your Friday night treat at the moment, enjoy it just make sure youre enjoying lots of other lower-saturated fat meals during the week too.

MORE: How to get protein when on a vegetarian or vegan diet

MORE: Mum who drank five litres of cola a day loses more than a third of her body weight after being told diet or die

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Struggling to focus? Blame it on the pizza - Metro.co.uk

Hypertension or high blood pressure is a severe health issue that directly impacts your heart and causes cardiovascular diseases. If you are suffering from hypertension, chances are that you would be on a strict medicine schedule. However, if you have just started observing the symptoms or fear that you might get diagnosed with hypertension soon, here are a few important health tips and lifestyle changes that can help get rid of high blood pressure. Also Read - What is World Telecommunication Day And Why is it Celebrated? Theme of World Communication And Information Society Day 2020

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If you are obese or overweight as per your height and age, you need to seriously work towards losing some of that fat because not just hypertension, obesity may lead to many other serious illnesses. Dont fret out! What you need first is a strong determination. The right diet plan-exercise routine will help serve the purpose. It is believed that your high blood pressure goes down by 1 millimeter of mercury (mm Hg) with every kg you lose. Also Read - Specific Gut Bacteria That Could be Linked to High Blood Pressure Identified

While losing weight, keeping an eye on the size of your waist is paramount. Whatever weight loss plan you are following, it should be focusing more on reducing the fat from your waistline area first.

Exercise is a universal solution:

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If you have checked your weight or suffers from hypertension without suffering from obesity, its time to reflect back on your regular day-to-day schedule and ask yourself if you practice yoga or do regular exercises? If not, then thats where your body wants you to work.

More physical activity means blood pressure coming down to safer levels. If not rigorous exercise, you can also add cycling, swimming, dancing, playing any sport of your choice and activities that make your body active and makes you sweat out some in your lifestyle.

Dont forget the diet:

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Its confirmed, observed and known worldwide that if you are not giving your body the kind of food it needs, you are going to face repercussions.

If you have high blood pressure, include whole-grain food items and rich items like vegetables and low-fat dairy products in your diet. You have to stay away from saturated fat and cholesterol. A single day of one good rich meal as per your diet plan can show your blood pressure going down by 11 mm Hg.

The best way to maintain a healthy diet program is to develop a habit of putting self-made rules. Start checking the labels that are put on your food products to analyse the ingredients and per centage of nutrients fat, cholesterol it carries. Monitor your eating habits and ask your loved ones for help. Make them realise how desperately you want to lose some weight and ask them to take care that you are not eating anything that you should not, and motivate you whenever its necessary.

Salt is your enemy:

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A patient with high blood pressure should eat food that has the least amount of salt possible. This is to reduce the level of sodium in your diet. If you are doing away with sodium in your diet, your blood pressure can even go down by 5-6 mm Hg. Dont worry about restricting salt in your diet because your body will derive the necessary amount of salt it needs from vegetables and fruits that occur naturally in them.

Smoking, alcohol, and caffeine are a no-no:

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Cutting down on smoking, alcohol intake and caffeine in your diet is always the best and the foremost step you should take if you are worried about your health due to any reason. For a patient of hypertension, drinking in moderation is important. This includes not having more than 12 ounces of beer, five ounces of wine and 1.5 ounces of 80-proof liquor in a day. In fact, drinking more than this limit can actually increase your blood pressure even more.

If you quit smoking, it will help you improve your overall health apart from lowering blood pressure. Reducing the risk of heart disease is the biggest result of quitting smoke. You are also saving others around you, especially your family members and colleagues, from getting health problems by passive smoking if you quit puffing on the cigarette now.

Caffeine is believed to raise your blood pressure up to 10 mm Hg if you are the one who is not a habitual drinker.

Stress management is your key

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If you are suffering from both hypertension and anxiety-stress problems, its time to realise that these two are interrelated. If youll work on decreasing your stress levels, your blood pressure will start lowering down on its own. Have 15-20 minutes of yoga include in your daily schedule. Meditating for even 10 minutes brings unexpected positive changes in your body and ease your senses that in turn helps in lowering down your stress levels and eventually helps in lowering the blood pressure.

Also, start working on identifying the situations, conversations, and people that trigger anxiety or stress in you. Stay away from confrontation if that causes your stress levels to shoot up. Do lighter things in life, you dont need to be overly ambitious about everything in life its not a race, its meant to be lived.

Before you freak out by knowing about your illness, you have to realise that hypertension is a lifestyle problem and depends a lot on your working schedule, sleep pattern, and food choices. If you are able to manage and find a balance in your life, you will be free of tension, in this case hypertension!

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World Hypertension Day 2020: How to Lower Blood Pressure Without Medicines? Follow These Steps - India.com