Water weight. It’s the bane of dieters looking to lose pounds, causing bloating, puffiness and disappointment when stepping on a scale. While a full 60% of your body is water, sometimes too much water is retained. That can make losing weight frustrating because it may seem like you aren’t actually losing weight. Varying water levels can make a person’s weight fluctuate by 2 to 4 pounds in just one day. The amount of water your body contains is a function of your body’s composition, sex and age, but eating can cause you to retain a few extra pounds of water. This extra water is fluid the kidneys would normally purge from the body. “Most of our weight is water,” said Dr. Gabe Neal, a family medicine physician and clinical assistant professor at the Texas A&M College of Medicine. “It’s the heaviest thing in our body besides our bones, and it is one of the first to go when you start losing weight.” So the question is, how do you lose water weight? The MIDSS (Measurement Instrument Database for the Social Sciences) has some advice. Why do you retain water? There are lots of reasons, including too much salt or carbs, menstrual hormones and dehydration. “Water, when used efficiently, goes all over our bodies,” Neal said recently. “We want it to go to our arteries, veins,…  read on >  read on >

FRIDAY, Jan. 13, 2023 (HealthDay News) – Despite tobacco industry claims, a new study found that banning menthol-flavored cigarettes did not lead to more people purchasing illicit smokes. Researchers at the University of Waterloo surveyed smokers to study the impact of a menthol cigarette ban in Canada. Smokers of both menthol and non-menthol cigarettes were surveyed before and after Canada’s ban, and asked about their usual cigarette brand and the last one they bought. Smokers who were still smoking after the menthol ban were also asked where they last purchased cigarettes. After the ban, researchers found no change in purchasing cigarettes from First Nations reserves, the main source of illicit cigarettes in Canada. “The tobacco industry has a long history of claiming that policies to reduce smoking will lead to substantial increases in illicit trade,” said lead study author Janet Chung-Hall, a research scientist for the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Policy Evaluation Project at Waterloo. “We can add the Canadian menthol ban to the long list of effective policies, such as graphic warnings and plain packaging, whose evaluation disproved the scare tactics by industry — showing that illicit trade did not, in fact, increase,” Chung-Hall said in a university news release. A 2022 study that combined ITC Project data and a comparable evaluation study in Ontario found increased smoking cessation among menthol smokers compared to…  read on >  read on >

Infants too young to be vaccinated for COVID-19 get some protection from their mothers’ breast milk, researchers say. The new study follows up on findings published in 2021 that showed the breast milk of vaccinated people contained antibodies against the COVID-19 virus. For the study, researchers analyzed infants’ stool. “Our first study showed there were SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the breast milk, but we couldn’t say if those antibodies were getting through the babies’ gastrointestinal tract and possibly providing protection there,” said senior study author Joseph Larkin III. He is an associate professor in the University of Florida/Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, in Gainesville. Larkin and his team used a technique known as a neutralization assay to show that the antibodies found in the infants’ stool offered protection against the virus. “The antibodies run interference and don’t let the virus get to the cells,” Larkin said in a university news release. Even though people think of COVID-19 as a respiratory virus, it can invade the gut. Finding antibodies there is significant, the researchers said. “The antibodies ingested through breast milk may provide a protective coating in the infants’ mouths and gastrointestinal tract,” said first author Dr. Vivian Valcarce Luaces, a postdoctoral fellowship trainee in neonatology. Antibodies found in the blood plasma and milk of the mothers were better able to neutralize the virus, though they…  read on >  read on >

The updated COVID-19 vaccine boosters intended to defend people against emerging Omicron variants don’t appear to provide any better protection than the original shot does, two new studies find. The new mRNA bivalent boosters produced by Moderna and Pfizer only attack the COVID-19 virus about as well as the companies’ first-wave vaccines, according to a blood testing study led by renowned virologist Dr. David Ho, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, in New York City. The bivalent shots also failed to promote higher antibody levels or a better immune response than the original COVID-19 vaccines, according to another study led by Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston. Both studies were published online Jan. 11 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Together, the two studies “suggest that with this rapidly evolving virus, vaccines developed for different strains are not going to add a huge difference in terms of protection,” said Dr. Greg Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group. It appears that human immune systems “imprint” after exposure to the first mRNA COVID vaccines, experts say. They are primed to respond to aspects of the original COVID-19 strain that are shared by all the variants, rather than the novel mutations sported by newer variants. “It may…  read on >  read on >

Despite routine use of a childhood vaccine, the United States still sees outbreaks of mumps. Now, a new study reinforces the belief that it’s due to waning immunity post-vaccination. Mumps is a viral infection best known for causing puffy cheeks, a swollen jaw, fever and general misery. While it’s usually relatively mild, mumps occasionally causes serious complications like brain inflammation and hearing loss. Because of that, children in the United States are routinely immunized against mumps, using the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine. Yet mumps has seen a resurgence in the past two decades. Since 2006, there has been an uptick in annual cases — often among college-age adults who were vaccinated as children, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Similar patterns have been seen in other countries where vaccination rates are high, leading to two theories on why: waning immunity to mumps in the years after vaccination; or the emergence of new mumps strains that evade the vaccine-induced immune response. The new study — published Jan. 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — supports the waning-immunity view. Using mathematical modeling, researchers found that waning immunity could largely explain the resurgence of mumps in the United States in recent years. They also estimated that about one-third of vaccinated kids start to lose their mumps immunity by age 18. But…  read on >  read on >

Children with autism often have difficulty grasping the emotional cues in other people’s voices, and now researchers may have zeroed in on the reason why. In a study of 43 kids with and without autism, researchers were able to trace such difficulties to a particular brain area — one involved in social communication. Experts said the findings suggest that children with autism are processing the sound of vocal emotions without trouble. The stumbling block can arise in interpreting those sounds. Typically, children learn from an early age to link vocal sounds to particular emotions: They know when their parents are happy or sad, even if they do not understand all the words being said. But many children and adults with autism have difficulty “reading” the emotional cues in other people’s voices, which can make communication much trickier. “Having these skills is crucial in navigating our social world,” said Daniel Abrams, one of the lead researchers on the new study. Oftentimes, he noted, people refrain from plainly saying what they’re feeling, and instead signal it in their tone of voice. “The voice can actually tell you more about emotions than a person’s actual words,” said Abrams, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine. It’s well known that autism, a developmental brain disorder, impairs communication and social skills to varying degrees. But…  read on >  read on >

Giving up nicotine can be a brutal experience that can include everything from physical symptoms, such as headache and nausea, to mood issues, including irritability, anxiety and depression. Yet, it is still possible to get through nicotine withdrawal symptoms with a good plan and specific tools, according to a smoking cessation expert, who offered some suggestions for coping with nicotine withdrawal symptoms. “Nicotine is highly, highly addictive,” said Emma Brett, a staff scientist at University of Chicago Medicine and a group lead in the Courage to Quit program. “Nicotine affects the brain, blood vessels, metabolism. There are effects all throughout the body.” Quitting requires an adjustment period, she stressed. Most commonly, withdrawal symptoms happen in the first week after quitting, peaking at about day three or four, Brett said. Some may experience nicotine withdrawal symptoms for weeks. Some may have few symptoms at all. Using nicotine replacement aids Nicotine replacement products can be helpful to get someone through those initial days, weeks or months. “We know from the research that when people quit and use something like a patch or lozenge or gum, that can almost double the success rate of a quit attempt,” because you’re still getting some nicotine, just it’s delivered in a safe way versus the combustion of a cigarette, Brett said. She suggested staying on the products until having a high…  read on >  read on >