Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center director talks about burden of dementia

UW epidemiologist William Kukull has devoted his public health career to the study of Alzheimer’s disease. In a personal profile, he mentions what led him to this field, and the ramifications of the disorder as more Americans live longer.

Blood sugar drives brain’s response to sight of food

Our brain’s response to the sight of food appears driven more by our blood sugar level at the moment than our upbringing or genetics, according to a UW study of identical twins.

“The finding suggests our brains have a way to override genetic inheritance, upbringing and habits to respond to our immediate nutritional needs,” said Dr. , UW assistant professor of medicine, who led the research.

Harborview trauma director discusses brain-injury study, consent law exemptions

Harborview is one of 10 U.S. and Canadian trauma centers planning a study of a therapeutic drug for patients suspected of having sustained a traumatic brain injury. Harborview’s trauma director explains how the public is being notified about the study before it starts, due to consent law exemptions for trauma patients who are unconscious.

Workshop is first mind-meld of UW, Allen Brain Institute

For the first time, two Seattle brain research powerhouses are collaborating to teach the next generation of neuroscientists. The UW’s Computational Neuroscience program and the Allen Institute for Brain Science will jointly offer a “Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain” Aug. 24 through Sept. 7 at Friday Harbor Laboratories.

Physician offers advice to peers on avoiding burnout

Health professionals devoted to caring for others sometimes neglect their own needs for restorative rest and relaxation. A UW physician offers tips for keeping mental and emotional exhaustion at bay in a demanding career.

AIDS-free generation is aim of new guidelines for clinician

Many tools to prevent HIV are available but are not being used like they should. An interdisciplinary panel of experts created a simple framework of best clinical practices to try to achieve an AIDS-free generation. The guidelines, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, integrate biomedical advances and evidence-based behavioral interventions for people with HIV or at high risk for HIV infection.

Brian Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing at Cornell University, has spent much of his life thinking about food and wondering about Americans’ relationship to it.

“I grew up in Sioux City, Iowa. Like a lot of people in the Midwest, I spent a lot of my early years around food. I spent my summers walking the bean fields, selling vegetables, and later delivering pizza,” Wansink said in a phone interview. “I always found it puzzling that so much of the world has a very different view towards food than we Americans do. In most of our environment, food is incredibly affordable, incredibly attractive—incredibly available.”

A keen observer of human behavior, Wansink’s early curiosity led him to study behavior that affects food choices.

Wansink will give the 21^st John R. Hogness Symposium on HealthCare, entitled Slim by Design: Scientific Approaches to Eating, from 3 to 4:30 p.m., in Hogness Auditorium, Health Sciences Center, Monday, Oct. 14.  Wansink is director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and co-director of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition Programs, and a pioneer of the Small Plate Movement. He holds a doctoral degree in consumer behavior from Stanford University, founded the Food and Brand Lab at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1997 and moved the lab to the Department of Applied Economics at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.,  in 2005. From 2007 to 2009, he was executive director of U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, the federal agency that developed the 2010 Dietary Guidelines and promoted the Food Guide Pyramid.

Best known for his work on consumer behavior and food, and for popularizing such terms as “mindless eating,” Wansink studies how microenvironments influence what and how much people eat and how much they enjoy it.

“We study the ways the cues in our environment lead us to eat too much and too much of the wrong food. There are powerful, very small changes that can help us to mindlessly eat less than mindlessly overeat.”

Wansink thinks the solution to changing eating behaviors is not through traditional education, but by changing our food environments.

“We all know that eating an apple is better for you than eating a cookie. But, what do most of us want 70 percent of the time? It is certainly not the apple.  What can we do to nudge ourselves to eat better?

“There are five places in our food environment where we virtually purchase and eat all of our food. Those places are our homes, workplaces, schools, grocery stores and restaurants.  If each of us made a couple of personal changes in those areas and encouraged those places to make one or two changes to help us, our lives and those of most of our neighbors would be better.”

To illustrate how small environmental changes can make a difference in food consumption, Wansink cited some research findings from his lab.

“For example, portion size. The better determinant of how much we are going to eat today than yesterday, is what size of a plate we’re going to serve our dinner on. If we serve off of a 10-inch plate rather than a 12-inch plate, we will serve ourselves 22 percent less food,” Wansink said. “Our research finds that if a person eats off of a 10-inch plate instead of a 12-inch and is then asked if they’re still hungry, they will say, ‘No, I ate a full plate of food.’

“The biggest determinant of whether you are going to go for seconds is whether the serving bowl is on the table or six or more feet away from you. The average person eats 19 percent less food when the food is six or more feet away. “

Wansink said changing the way Americans eat will take a collective effort of individuals, the food industry and governments working together to change the environments in which Americans purchase and consume their food.

Wanskink is the best-selling author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (Bantam Dell, 2006). He writes Chew on This, a column on food behavior, for MSNBC, and Food Think with Wansink, a column on nutrition for Prevention.com. His latest book, Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life, will be published by William Morrow in March 2014.

Eating peppers — which are in the same botanical family as tobacco — may reduce the risk of Parkinson’s disease. The findings are reported in the May 9 edition of the Annals of Neurology, a journal of the American Neurological Association and Child Neurology Society.

Nearly one million people in the United States are living with Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that results from the loss of dopamine-producing brain cells. In early stages, Parkinson’s is characterized by difficulties in controlling movement. Initial symptoms include hand tremors, limb rigidity, and problems walking. As the disease progresses, cognitive problems may develop and advance into dementia.

Dietary sources of nicotine may prove protective.

“Eating peppers twice or more per week was consistently associated with at least 30 percent reduced risk of developing Parkinson’s disease,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Susan Searles Nielsen, a research scientist in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the UW School of Public Health.

The investigation of dietary sources of nicotine stems from the puzzling epidemiologic findings that repeatedly show that people who have regularly used tobacco have about half the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, explained Searles Nielsen. In 2012, she published a study that suggested that second-hand smoke also might reduce risk of the disease.

“It’s possible that people predisposed to Parkinson’s disease simply don’t respond well to tobacco smoke and therefore avoid it.  However, if tobacco is actually protective, and if the reason is nicotine as some experimental studies suggest,” said Searles Nielsen, “then our hypothesis was that other plants in the Solanaceae family that contain nicotine might also be protective.”

The subjects interviewed for the study included 490 Parkinson’s patients newly diagnosed at the UW Neurology Clinic or Group Health Cooperative between 1992-2008.  The control study subjects were 644 unrelated, neurologically normal people.

While she and the study co-authors investigated the association between Parkinson’s and the subjects’ dietary consumption of a variety of vegetables, including nicotine-containing peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes in the Solanaceae family, peppers showed the greatest protection.  The decreased risk of disease grew stronger with increasing pepper consumption and occurred mainly in people with little or no prior use of tobacco, which contains much more nicotine than the foods studied.

Searles Nielsen cautions that further studies are needed to confirm these findings and explore whether a similar but less toxic chemical shared by peppers and tobacco might be equally or more protective than nicotine.

Study co-authors included Dr. Harvey Checkoway and Dr. Gary Franklin from the UW Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and Dr. W.T. Longstreth and Dr. Phillip Swanson from the Department of Neurology in the UW School of Medicine.

Funding for the study was provided by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, in part through the UW Superfund Research Program.