Walking may help overweight people curb sugar cravings

Walking for 15 minutes may help overweight people at least temporarily reduce cravings for high-calorie, sugary snacks, a small study suggests.

"This study showed that brisk walking can be used as a strategy to reduce momentary food craving," said Adrian Meule, a psychologist at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany who wasn't involved in the research.

Exercise may provide some cognitive stimulation that interferes with thoughts about the craved food, and the discipline to regularly take walks to circumvent cravings might also improve the ability to follow through with healthy food choices, Meule said in an email.

Globally, almost 2 billion adults are overweight or obese, according to the World Health Organization. This increases their risk of premature death, breathing difficulties, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, fractures and mental health issues.

The study, by Larissa Ledochowski at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and colleagues, examined the impact of a 15-minute treadmill walk on sugar cravings in a group of 47 overweight people who were on average about 28 years old.

To elevate sugary snack cravings, participants were asked to abstain from eating any sweets for three days at the start of the study. They were also asked to fast, drink nothing but water, and avoid any exercise for two hours prior to each assessment of cravings.

Then, in an exercise session, some participants warmed up for two minutes slowly on a treadmill then walked for 15 minutes at a pace fast enough to catch a bus, but not to the point of breathlessness.

For comparison, other participants, instead of exercise, were told to sit passively for 15 minutes without doing anything.

After exercising or sitting still, all of the participants sat quietly for five minutes. Then, they did a computerized test designed to boost physiological arousal and stress. Next, they were asked to unwrap a piece of candy and hold it without eating it.

Throughout the process, participants were questioned seven different times about their food cravings and their feelings of arousal or stress.

Those who exercised reported significantly lower cravings for sweets mid-way through the experiment and at the end than the participants who didn't get on the treadmill.

Even when people unwrapped candy and held it in their hands, people who exercised first had fewer cravings than those who didn't.

The study is small, and its limitations include relying on people to tell the truth about abstaining from sweets before the start of the experiment and a lack of measurements to track how much exertion was required by each participant to walk on the treadmill.

They were also exercising at a fairly low intensity, said Margaret Schneider, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine.

"The study only looks at the short-term impact, so we really shouldn't draw any conclusions about how one 15-minute exercise bout would impact eating behavior throughout the day," Schneider, who wasn't involved in the study, said in an email.

Even so, exercise does have the ability to improve mood, and it's possible that this could result in reduced cravings among individuals who eat for emotional reasons, she said. At the same time, mild exercise can also trigger metabolic processes that make more blood sugar available to the brain, reducing the craving for sugary foods.

And the study offers a reason to consider working at a treadmill desk, also known as walking work stations, Schneider said. "Presumably, remaining active at a low intensity throughout the day will result in less snacking and enhanced mood among the overweight."

Keeping healthy snacks on hand will also help exercise have the intended effect on food choices, Meule said. "Otherwise, temporarily reducing food craving by brisk walking will be ineffective. Even if people successfully manage to control their food cravings, they still have to eat something." — Reuters

Walking may ease Parkinson’s symptoms, study suggests

NEW YORK – Going for regular brisk walks may improve symptoms among people with Parkinson’s disease and boost their quality of life, according to a preliminary study.

“Exercise is medicine for Parkinson’s,” Jay Alberts, from the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute in Ohio, told Reuters Health.

“This shows it doesn’t necessarily have to be super high-intensity exercise,” Alberts said. He studies motor function in Parkinson’s disease but wasn’t involved in the new research.

The study included 60 people with mild to moderate Parkinson’s disease who could walk independently without a cane or walker and had no other serious medical problems.

Researchers had the participants walk briskly, at an average pace of 2.9 miles per hour, three times a week for six months. Each walking session lasted 45 minutes. Participants kept diaries of each session and had trainers to help choose walking routes and collect the diaries.

When researchers compared results from a battery of tests conducted before and after the six months of regular walks, they found participants’ motor function, fitness, mood, tiredness, memory and thinking abilities all improved during the study, on average.

At first some participants also tried interval training—alternating every three minutes between slower and faster speeds—but researchers started assigning all new participants to continuous speed walking when knee pain became a problem in the interval group. There were no such side effects in the continuous speed group, according to results published in Neurology.

“We observed seven to 15 percent improvement in various symptoms that appeared to be clinically meaningful,” Dr. Ergun Uc told Reuters Health in an email. He led the study at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

This was only a preliminary study, called a phase I/II trial, but Uc said he has applied for phase III trial funding to continue the research.

One limitation of the current study is that it didn’t include a group of patients who did not walk regularly for comparison.

It’s hard to compare the effectiveness of medications to that of exercise since they probably work in different ways, Uc said. He prefers to think of exercise as supplemental to medical treatment, which patients can explore with guidance from their doctors.

With a doctor’s permission, certain patients may be able to follow the aerobic component of physical activity guidelines from the US Department of Health and Human Services, which recommend 150 minutes of aerobic exercise, which should feel “somewhat hard,” per week, he said.

Uc added that people with Parkinson’s disease may be discouraged from exercising due to poor general health, lack of knowledge and appreciation of the benefits of exercise, time constraints, lack of an appropriate exercise environment, depression or fear of injury and falls.

“This is probably one of the hottest topics in Parkinson’s research right now,” said Beth Fisher, who studies exercise and Parkinson’s disease at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She was not part of the new research.

Researchers tend to focus on the physical symptoms of Parkinson’s, like tremor, but non-motor effects are important too, Alberts said.

“This should 100 percent be a part of the treatment program,” he said. “As long as they can do these things in a safe manner and don’t have any other orthopedic reasons (not to exercise), I’m not sure there’s any reason not to recommend exercise.”

“Even if there aren’t motor benefits, there are improvements in mood, fatigue, aerobic fitness - all of these things,” he said.

There will always be debate about the optimal type, amount and intensity of exercise, he said, and researchers will probably never have a precise answer because every person is different. But the aerobic component seems to be the important part, he said.

“I always say, what do you love doing and what can you scale up in difficulty?” Fisher told Reuters Health. “If you love walking and you’re doing it from point A to point B every day outside for x amount of time, how about doing it in less time?” — Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com