Smartphone can help you be healthy
People bored of following sedentary lifestyle should start consulting their smartphones as it can help them get active and reduce chances of weight gain, a new study has claimed. According to a pilot study, using smartphone reminders to prompt people to get moving may help reduce sedentary behaviour, increase activity and reduce chances of weight gain, higher body mass index (BMI) and obesity. Researchers Darla E. Kendzor, PhD of the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Centre and Kerem Shuval, PhD of the American Cancer Society explored whether smartphone interventions have the potential to influence sedentary behaviour. Participants wore accelerometers to measure movement and carried smartphones for seven consecutive days. Participants who reported more than two hours of sitting during the day received a message emphasising that long uninterrupted sitting is bad for health. It encouraged them to stand up and move around more and to sit less.
key protein may cause cancer
A protein that usually fights viral infections may also cause cancer by taking advantage of a weakness in DNA replication process to induce mutations in our genome, a new study has found. Cancer is caused by the growth of an abnormal cell which harbours DNA mutations, ‘copy errors’ occurring during the DNA replication process. If these errors do take place quite regularly without having any damaging effect on the organism, some of them affect a specific part of the genome and cause the proliferation of the mutant cell, which then invades the organism, according to researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and Russian Academy of Sciences.
Diet, exercise not enough for right weight
Researchers at a US university have found the brains of obese children function differently from those children of healthy weight, and suggest that diet and exercise may not be enough to restore their normal weight. The study conducted at the Vanderbilt University Medical Centre in Tennessee said mindfulness — a practice used as a therapeutic technique to focus awareness — should be studied as a way to encourage healthy eating and weight loss in children. “Adults, and especially children, are primed towards eating more,” said senior author Kevin Niswender. “In today’s world, full of readily available, highly advertised, energy dense foods, it is putting children at risk of obesity. “We think mindfulness could recalibrate the imbalance in the brain connections associated with childhood obesity,” added co-author Ronald Cowan.
