Varying brain energy expenditure in childhood associated with weight gain

It is well known that we tend to put on weight when we consume more calories than we spend. It is, however, less known that our brain uses half of the body's energy during early childhood.

Research says that variation in the energy needs of brain development across kids- in terms of the timing, intensity, and duration of energy use- can influence patterns of energy expenditure and weight gain.

We all know that how much energy out bodies burn is an important influence on weight gain. When kids are 5, their brains use almost half of their bodies' energy. And yet, we have no idea how much the brain's energy expenditure varies between kids. This is a huge hole in our understanding of energy expenditure, said the co-author of the study.

A major aim of our paper is to bring attention to this gap in understanding and to encourage researchers to measure the brain's energy use in future studies of child development especially those focused on understanding weight gain and obesity risk.

We believe it is plausible that increased energy expenditure by the brain could be an unanticipated benefit to early child development programme, which of course, have many other demonstrated benefits. That would be a great win-win, he said.

This new hypothesis was inspired by the team showing that the brain consumes a lifetime peak of two-thirds of the body's resting energy expenditure, and almost half of total expenditure when kids are 5 years old.

The study also shows that ages, when the brain's energy needs increase during early childhood, are also ages of declining weight gain. As the energy needed for brain development declines in older children and adolescents, the rate of weight gain increases in parallel.

This finding helped confirm a long-standing hypothesis in anthropology that human children evolved a much slower rate of childhood growth compared to other mammals and primates, he said.

 

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Taking the pill could affect how well women recognise complex emotions

New European research has found that taking the oral contraceptive pill could very slightly impair a woman’s social judgement, making it more difficult to identify more complex emotions. Carried out by researchers, the new small-scale study recruited 95 healthy women, including 42 who took the pill and 53 who did not, and asked them to complete a special emotion recognition task.

The findings, showed that both groups of women were equally good at recognizing easy expressions and emotions, such as happiness and fear. 

However, women who took the pill were nearly 10 per cent worse on average in recognizing the most complex emotional expressions, such as pride and contempt, than women who didn’t take the pill.

The effect held true for both positive and negative expressions, and regardless of the type of pill taken. The team also found that a woman’s menstrual cycle phase had no effect on the differences in emotion recognition.

The researchers note that the effect was a subtle one, with senior author commenting that, "If oral contraceptives caused dramatic impairments in women’s emotion recognition, we would have probably noticed this in our everyday interactions with our partners."

"We assumed that these impairments would be very subtle, indicating that we had to test women’s emotion recognition with a task that was sensitive enough to detect such impairments. We, thus, used a very challenging emotion recognition task that required the recognition of complex emotional expressions from the eye region of faces"

Although the pill has been linked with a variety of physical effects, both good and bad, little is known about the psychological effects. However, Dr. added that the findings are in line with previous research.

"Coincidental findings suggest that oral contraceptives impair the ability to recognize emotional expressions of others, which could affect the way users initiate and maintain intimate relationships."

"Cyclic variations of estrogen and progesterone levels are known to affect women’s emotion recognition, and influence activity and connections in associated brain regions. Since oral contraceptives work by suppressing estrogen and progesterone levels, it makes sense that oral contraceptives also affect women’s emotion recognition, However, the exact mechanism underlying oral contraceptive-induced changes in women’s emotion recognition remains to be elucidated."

Further research is now needed to understand this area better says the Dr., and to help give women more detailed information about the potential effects of oral contraceptive use.

THIS IS ONLY FOR INFORMATION, ALWAYS CONSULT YOU PHYSICIAN BEFORE HAVING ANY PARTICULAR FOOD/ MEDICATION/EXERCISE/OTHER REMEDIES.                                    PS- THOSE INTERESTED IN RECIPES ARE FREE TO  VIEW MY BLOG-                                                                                           https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com/       

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