Tag: junk food

Categories : Diet and NutritionTags :

What Students Eat: I Conducted a Survey at a South African University’s Cafes – the Results Are Scary

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Photo by Jonathan Borba

Tinashe P. Kanosvamhira, University of Cape Town

University students have limited spending money and their schedules are packed. Many are adapting to new lifestyles on campus. Eating a healthy diet is crucial: a poor diet leads to reduced concentration, lower grades and increased stress.

Campus cafés, especially at universities that are some distance from supermarkets, often sell mainly fast food such as white bread sandwiches, hot chips and doughnuts. It’s easy to eat on the go, but places nutritious choices out of reach.

I’m an urban geographer who researches the relationship between food, health and place. My work examines how urban agriculture, informal food systems and everyday urban infrastructures shape well-being, sustainability and spatial justice in African cities.

Research has already found that through pricing, menu design and information provision, campus cafés play a decisive role in shaping dietary behaviours among young adults. I wanted to find out how students at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa choose what to eat when they’re on campus, what they see as healthy food and what stands in the way of them buying nutritious meals.

The university is one that was underfunded during apartheid. Until 1994 it primarily taught students who were Black and people of Colour. Today, it serves about 23 000 students, many of whom are drawn from low-income backgrounds, and has few supermarkets within walking distance. The campus cafés are a key food supply area for students.

My research found that at the University of the Western Cape, only 32% of the food offered at the student café was healthy. It also cost more than the fast food. The students I surveyed knew healthy food was important. But only a small minority consistently chose nutritious meals. Nearly 40% of the group reported that the healthy options were too expensive.

When students face the twin challenges of financial hardship and inadequate access to affordable, nutritious food, this deepens inequality. It also undermines their efforts to succeed. Even worse, it can cause students to develop long term, unhealthy eating habits that damage their health.

Unless affordability, availability and awareness of healthy food choices are addressed together, students will struggle to eat well and to perform at their best.

Universities must implement targeted food subsidies, introduce clearer nutritional labelling, and expand healthy menu options to make nutritious eating more accessible and appealing to students.

Students speak out about their food choices

I conducted a survey that sampled 112 students in five campus cafés at the university. These cafés are mainly used by students in the 18-24 age group.

My survey revealed that 75.9% of students considered healthy offerings at least “somewhat important” when choosing where to eat. Yet only 6.3% always selected nutritious options; 28.6% rarely or never did so. Meanwhile, 38.4% of students described nutritious meals as “expensive” and another 8% found the healthy options “very expensive”.

My research also found that University of the Western Cape students ate very little fruit and vegetables. Just 41% of the students I surveyed ate two or more servings a day and 9.8% admitted they ate none.

I also did a detailed menu audit at one café to see what was on the menu. I found that only 32.6% of 46 distinct items met basic “healthy” criteria (they were low in saturated fats and made up of whole-grains or vegetables).

The majority of students (55.4%) had not noticed any campus healthy-eating campaigns, but agreed (57.1%) that balanced meals boosted academic performance and overall well-being:

I feel much more focused and energetic when I eat well, which helps me do better in my studies and feel healthier overall.

Only a small handful of the students said they could afford healthy campus café meals:

I choose cafés based on food quality. If the food is fresh and tasty, I’ll pay more, but it needs to be worth it.

What needs to happen next

High prices for nutritious items, narrow menu selections and barely visible information about nutrition are preventing students from eating healthy foods on campus.

Campus café offerings tend to mirror the broader inequities of national and global food systems. Food environments of big institutions like universities can prop up food inequality, even if these universities are committed to social justice.

Universities should adopt these steps to make healthy food available to students:

  1. Subsidised meal plans and discounts: Introducing a tiered subsidy for students from low-income backgrounds would directly reduce costs. For example, meal vouchers could make salads, whole-grain sandwiches and fruit bowls as affordable as a pastry or soft drink.
  2. A wider range of food on the menu and smaller portions: Partnerships between university caterers and local cooperatives or farmers could expand the range of fresh produce. Smaller portions or “light” meal options could be sold at lower prices to suit tighter budgets. Regularly rotating healthy specials and clearly labelling ingredients and calories would help students become accustomed to choosing healthy meals.
  3. Visible nutrition campaigns: Digital and printed standout posters about healthy foods could be placed around campus. Universities could hold social-media challenges and pop-up tasting events. Integrating simple tips into lecture slides or student newsletters would also help by repeatedly exposing students to healthy food tips.
  4. Peer-led workshops and cooking classes: These should be arranged to empower students to take ownership of their diets and learn about budgeting, meal planning and quick, nutritious cooking skills. Peer facilitators can demystify healthy eating and create a supportive healthy eating community.
  5. Seeking feedback: To see if their healthy food campaigns are working, universities should survey students, and analyse sales data from the cafés to see what’s being eaten. They should get feedback from students through focus groups that identify emerging needs and ensure that campaigns and projects reflect the realities of students’ lives.

My research suggests that by tackling cost, choice and communication together, universities can transform their cafés from sites of compromise into engines of student well-being. Such interventions would unlock academic potential and set young people on healthier life paths. This is an outcome as enriching as any degree.

Tinashe P. Kanosvamhira, Postdoctoral fellow, University of Cape Town

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Categories : Diet and NutritionTags :

Why Does Obesity Takes Away the Pleasure of Eating?

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Photo by Jonathan Borba

The pleasure we get from eating junk food — the dopamine rush from crunching down on salty, greasy chips and a luscious burger — is often blamed as the cause of overeating and rising obesity rates in our society. But a new study suggests that pleasure in eating, even eating junk food, is key for maintaining a healthy weight in a society that abounds with cheap, high-fat food.

Paradoxically, anecdotal evidence suggests that people with obesity may take less pleasure in eating than those of normal weight. Brain scans of obese individuals show reduced activity in pleasure-related brain regions when presented with food, a pattern also observed in animal studies.

Now, University of California, Berkeley, researchers have identified a possible underlying cause of this phenomenon — a decline in neurotensin, a brain peptide that interacts with the dopamine network — and a potential strategy to restore pleasure in eating in a way that helps reduce overall consumption.

The study, published in Nature, reveals an unsuspected brain mechanism that explains why a chronic high-fat diet can reduce the desire for high-fat, sugary foods, even when these foods remain easily accessible. The researchers propose that this lack of desire in obese individuals is due to a loss of pleasure in eating caused by long-term consumption of high-calorie foods. Losing this pleasure may actually contribute to the progression of obesity.

“A natural inclination toward junk food is not inherently bad — but losing it could further exacerbate obesity,” said Stephan Lammel, a UC Berkeley professor in the Department of Neuroscience and a member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute.

The researchers found that this effect is driven by a reduction in neurotensin in a specific brain region that connects to the dopamine network. Importantly, they demonstrate that restoring neurotensin levels — either through dietary changes or genetic manipulations that enhance neurotensin production — can reinstate the pleasure in eating and promote weight loss.

“A high-fat diet changes the brain, leading to lower neurotensin levels, which in turn alters how we eat and respond to these foods,” Lammel said. “We found a way to restore the desire for high-calorie foods, which may actually help with weight management.”

While findings in mice don’t always translate directly to humans, this discovery could open new avenues for addressing obesity by restoring food-related pleasure and breaking unhealthy eating patterns.

“Imagine eating an amazing dessert at a great restaurant in Paris — you experience a burst of dopamine and happiness,” said Neta Gazit Shimoni, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow. “We found that this same feeling occurs in mice on a normal diet, but is missing in those on a high-fat diet. They may keep eating out of habit or boredom, rather than genuine enjoyment.”

Gazit Shimoni and former UC Berkeley graduate student Amanda Tose are co-first authors, and Lammel is senior author of the study, which will be published March 26 in the journal Nature.

Solving a long-standing puzzle in obesity research

For decades, doctors and researchers have struggled to understand and treat obesity, as countless fad diets and eating regimens have failed to produce long-term results. The recent success of GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic, which curb appetite by increasing feelings of fullness, stands out among many failed approaches.

Lammel studies brain circuits, particularly the dopamine network, which plays a crucial role in reward and motivation. Dopamine is often associated with pleasure, reinforcing our desire to seek rewarding experiences, such as consuming high-calorie foods.

While raising mice on a high-fat diet, Gazit Shimoni noticed a striking paradox: While in their home cages, these mice strongly preferred high-fat chow, which contained 60% fat, over normal chow with only 4% fat, leading them to gain excessive weight. However, when they were taken out of their home cages and given free access to high-calorie treats such as butter, peanut butter, jelly or chocolate, they showed much less desire to indulge than normal-diet mice, which immediately ate everything they were offered.

“If you give a normal, regular-diet mouse the chance, they will immediately eat these foods,” Gazit Shimoni said. “We only see this paradoxical attenuation of feeding motivation happening in mice on a high-fat diet.”

She discovered that this effect had been reported in past studies, but no one had followed up to find out why, and how the effect connects to the obesity phenotype observed in these mice.

Restoring neurotensin reverses obesity-related brain changes

To investigate this phenomenon, Lammel and his team used optogenetics, a technique that allows scientists to control brain circuits with light. They found that in normal-diet mice, stimulating a brain circuit that connects to the dopamine network increased their desire to eat high-calorie foods, but in obese mice, the same stimulation had no effect, suggesting that something must have changed.

The reason, they discovered, was that neurotensin was reduced so much in obese mice that it prevented dopamine from triggering the usual pleasure response to high-calorie foods.

“Neurotensin is this missing link,” Lammel said. “Normally, it enhances dopamine activity to drive reward and motivation. But in high-fat diet mice, neurotensin is downregulated, and they lose the strong desire to consume high-calorie foods — even when easily available.”

The researchers then tested ways to restore neurotensin levels. When obese mice were switched back to a normal diet for two weeks, their neurotensin levels returned to normal, dopamine function was restored, and they regained interest in high-calorie foods.

When neurotensin levels were artificially restored using a genetic approach, the mice not only lost weight, but also showed reduced anxiety and improved mobility. Their feeding behaviour also normalised, with increased motivation for high-calorie foods and a simultaneous reduction of their total food consumption in their home cages.

“Bringing back neurotensin seems to be very, very critical for preventing the loss of desire to consume high-calorie foods,” Lammel said. “It doesn’t make you immune to getting obese again, but it would help to control eating behaviour, to bring it back to normal.”

Toward more precise treatments for obesity

Although directly administering neurotensin could theoretically restore feeding motivation in obese individuals, neurotensin acts on many brain areas, raising the risk of unwanted side effects. To overcome this, the researchers used gene sequencing, a technique that allowed them to identify specific genes and molecular pathways that regulate neurotensin function in obese mice.

This discovery provides crucial molecular targets for future obesity treatments, paving the way for more precise therapies that could selectively enhance neurotensin function without broad systemic effects.

“We now have the full genetic profile of these neurons and how they change with high-fat diets,” Lammel said. “The next step is to explore pathways upstream and downstream of neurotensin to find precise therapeutic targets.”

Lammel and Gazit Shimoni plan to expand their research to explore neurotensin’s role beyond obesity, investigating its involvement in diabetes and eating disorders.

“The bigger question is whether these systems interact across different conditions,” Gazit Shimoni said. “How does starvation affect dopamine circuits? What happens in eating disorders? These are the questions we’re looking at next.”

Source: University of California – Berkeley

Categories : Diet and Nutrition General InterestTags :

Slow Traffic Pushes Commuters to Choose Fast Food

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Photo by Why Kei on Unsplash

Ever notice how much more tempting it is to pick up fast food for dinner after being stuck in traffic? It’s not just you. New research shows that traffic delays significantly increase visits to fast food restaurants, leading to unhealthier eating.

“In our analysis focusing on Los Angeles County, unexpected traffic delays beyond the usual congestion led to a 1% increase in fast food visits. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s equivalent to 1.2 million more fast food visits per year in LA County alone. We describe our results as being modest but meaningful in terms of potential for changing unhealthy food choices,” said study author Becca Taylor, assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Taylor and her co-authors had access to more than two years’ of daily highway traffic patterns in Los Angeles, along with data showing how many cell phone users entered fast-food restaurants in the same time period.

With these data, the team created a computational model showing a causal link between unexpected traffic slow-downs and fast food visits. This pattern held at various time scales, including 24-hour cycles and by the hour throughout a given day. When analysed by the day, traffic delays of just 30 seconds per mile were enough to spike fast-food visits by 1%.

“It might not be intuitive to imagine what a 30-second delay per mile feels like,” Taylor said. “I think of it as the difference between 10a.m. traffic and 5p.m. traffic.”

When the researchers broke the day into hour-long segments, they found a significantly greater number of fast food visits when traffic delays hit during the evening rush hour. At the same time, grocery store visits declined slightly.

“If there’s traffic between 5 and 7p.m., which happens to be right around the evening meal time, we see an increase in fast food visits,” Taylor said.

“Drivers have to make a decision about whether to go home and cook something, stop at the grocery store first, or just get fast food.”

Considering every major city has both traffic and fast food restaurants lining highway feeder roads, it’s not a stretch to extrapolate the pattern beyond Los Angeles.

Taylor and her co-authors say the link between traffic and unhealthy food choices is just one more reason policymakers around the country and the globe should prioritize infrastructure reforms to ease congestion.

“Our results contribute to the literature suggesting time constraints are really important to the food choices people make. Any policies aimed at loosening time constraints – and traffic is essentially lost time – could help battle unhealthy eating,” Taylor said. “That could mean improvements in infrastructure to mitigate traffic congestion, expanding public transport availability, and potentially increasing work from home opportunities.”

Source: University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences

Categories : Diet and Nutrition Mental HealthTags :

How Chronic Stress Drives Cravings for ‘Comfort Foods’

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Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

Reaching for a high-calorie snack is a common reaction when stressed – but this could be driving a vicious circle. Australian scientists report that stress combined with calorie-dense ‘comfort’ food creates brain changes that drive more eating, boost cravings for sweet, highly palatable food and lead to excess weight gain.

A team from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research reported in the journal Neuron that stress overrode the brain’s natural response to satiety, leading to non-stop reward signals that promote eating more highly palatable food. This occurred in a part of the brain called the lateral habenula, which when activated usually dampens these reward signals.

“Our findings reveal stress can override a natural brain response that diminishes the pleasure gained from eating — meaning the brain is continuously rewarded to eat,” says Professor Herzog, senior author of the study and Visiting Scientist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research.

“We showed that chronic stress, combined with a high-calorie diet, can drive more and more food intake as well as a preference for sweet, highly palatable food, thereby promoting weight gain and obesity. This research highlights how crucial a healthy diet is during times of stress.”

From stressed brain to weight gain

Most people will eat more than usual during times of stress and choose calorie-rich options high in sugar and fat. To understand what drives these eating habits, the team investigated in mouse models how different areas in the brain responded to chronic stress under various diets.

“We discovered that an area known as the lateral habenula, which is normally involved in switching off the brain’s reward response, was active in mice on a short-term, high-fat diet to protect the animal from overeating. However, when mice were chronically stressed, this part of the brain remained silent – allowing the reward signals to stay active and encourage feeding for pleasure, no longer responding to satiety regulatory signals,” explains first author Dr Kenny Chi Kin Ip.

“We found that stressed mice on a high-fat diet gained twice as much weight as mice on the same diet that were not stressed.”

The researchers discovered that at the centre of the weight gain was the molecule NPY, which the brain produces naturally in response to stress. When the researchers blocked NPY from activating brain cells in the lateral habenula in stressed mice on a high-fat diet, the mice consumed less comfort food, resulting in less weight gain.

Driving comfort eating

The researchers next performed a ‘sucralose preference test’ – allowing mice to choose to drink either water or water that had been artificially sweetened.

“Stressed mice on a high-fat diet consumed three times more sucralose than mice that were on a high-fat diet alone, suggesting that stress not only activates more reward when eating but specifically drives a craving for sweet, palatable food,” says Professor Herzog.

“Crucially, we did not see this preference for sweetened water in stressed mice that were on a regular diet.”

Stress overrides healthy energy balance

“In stressful situations it’s easy to use a lot of energy and the feeling of reward can calm you down — this is when a boost of energy through food is useful. But when experienced over long periods of time, stress appears to change the equation, driving eating that is bad for the body long term,” says Professor Herzog.

The researchers say their findings identify stress as a critical regulator of eating habits that can override the brain’s natural ability to balance energy needs.

“This research emphasises just how much stress can compromise a healthy energy metabolism,” says Professor Herzog. “It’s a reminder to avoid a stressful lifestyle, and crucially – if you are dealing with long-term stress – try to eat a healthy diet and lock away the junk food.”

Source: Garvan Institute of Medical Research