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Eating one serving of beans, peas, lentils or chickpeas every day may help dieters lose a little extra weight, according to a new analysis of existing research.

Researchers examined data from nearly two-dozen trials and found that participants who ate about three quarters of a cup of legumes every day lost about three quarters of a pound more than those who didn’t eat legumes, regardless of whether the diets were geared to weight loss. 

Lead author Dr Russell de Souza told Reuters Health that legumes — or pulses, as they are known in many parts of the world — are an important sustainable protein source, plus they’re high in fibre. 

“Legumes also have a low ‘glycaemic index,’ which means the carbohydrates in them do not raise blood sugars as rapidly as things like white bread or white flour,” said de Souza, a researcher with the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.

Previous studies have found that eating foods high in fibre and protein and low in the glycaemic index promote weight loss, but the specific role of legumes hasn’t been clear, de Souza and his coauthors write in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

“We did this study as one in [a] series of papers we are working on to assess the effects of pulses on blood pressure, blood cholesterol, body weight, and appetite control to help guidelines committees to better formulate dietary advice,” he said by e-mail.

The researchers culled 19 studies, based on 21 clinical trials that compared the effects of diets containing legumes with diets that didn’t include legumes, but had the same number of calories. 

Only four of the studies were designed as weight loss studies; the remainder were meant to study weight-maintenance. A total of 940 obese or overweight adults participated in the trials, which lasted from four to twelve weeks. 

After an average of six weeks, the study participants who ate legumes every day lost about 0.34 kilogrammes more than those who didn’t. 

“Though the amount of weight loss was small, it’s important to state that the pulse-containing diets we reviewed were not designed for weight loss,” de Souza said.

Six of the trials also suggested that eating legumes was linked to slightly lower body fat, though there was no evidence of a difference in waist circumference.

De Souza said swapping legumes for other sources of protein, such as meat, may be a painless way to eat healthier and lose a little weight. 

“In another study we did, we found they may help with appetite control — eating 100 calories worth of pulses at a meal will make you feel about one-third more full than 100 calories from another food,” he said.

De Souza said that losing weight is relatively easy — but keeping it off is much, much harder. 

“This is where eating more pulses in your daily diet can really help, we think,” he said.

There were some limitations to the study. Many of the trials were short-term and not of the highest quality. The authors also couldn’t tell what the long-term effects of eating legumes would be. 

Lauren Graf, a registered dietician with Montefiore Medical Centre in New York, said she wasn’t surprised by the findings and that there are multiple health benefits to eating legumes regularly.

“Beans are loaded with antioxidants and phytochemicals that help protect against cancer and cardiovascular disease,” Graf, who was not involved in the study, told Reuters Health by e-mail.

The fibre in legumes helps lower levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol in the blood, Graf said.

For people who are not accustomed to eating beans, adding about a half cup per day is a good place to start, she said, adding that they can be used in place of other starches like potatoes or rice.

Graf also suggests adding cooked lentils to salads and to homemade veggie burgers, or incorporating them into soups and stews.

Maria Sharapova is the most noteworthy athlete to have failed a drug test for meldonium, but in the month since the tennis star revealed her use of a drug that she contends is for medical reasons a slew of other top athletes have been implicated.

They include fellow Russians Yuliya Efimova, a four-time breaststroke world champion, and Nikolai Kuksenkov, the country’s best male gymnast. In all, 140 athletes have tested positive for meldonium in the three months after it was banned on January 1, according to a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) spokesman.

But as the tally of failed tests increases, critics are raising questions about its performance enhancing benefits and how WADA could ban the drug with what they say is relatively little scientific evidence.

“There’s really no evidence that there’s any performance enhancement from meldonium. Zero,” said Don Catlin, a long-time anti-doping expert and the scientific director of the Banned Substances Control Group.

Those supporting meldonium’s ban point to its potential to enhance performance and measures of its use by athletes, both before and since the ban.

Those questions highlight a difficult position for WADA. With scant existing research, how does it know meldonium enhances performance? Does it need to ban a drug like meldonium before it understands its benefits and potential harms because it sees athletes using the drug? And if it’s not enhancing performance, why are a large number of seemingly healthy athletes taking a drug used to treat patients with heart problems?

Criteria for banning drugs

Meldonium’s journey to WADA’s prohibited substances list began in March 2014 when the US Anti-Doping Agency received a confidential tip that Eastern European athletes were using the drug to enhance performance.

By October of that year, meldonium — which also goes by the brand-name Mildronate — was on WADA’s monitoring list. In February 2015, scientists completed a study of global athlete usage of the drug.

In reviewing 8,320 urine samples, the study — which was funded by the Partnership for Clean Competition — found that 182 samples contained meldonium. At 2.2 per cent of the sample, it was more than double the rate for any other drug on the list. While stating that the findings of meldonium in samples was not limited to a particular sport, the paper notes use of the drug was found to a greater extent in strength sports (67 per cent) and endurance sports (25 per cent).

Results from the European Games in Baku, Azerbaijan, in June seemed to support concealed use of the drug. That research, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, showed positive tests for meldonium in 66 of 762 urine samples but that only 23 athletes of the 662 athletes tested had declared their use of the drug.

Of the 662 doping-control forms the study reviewed, 525 declared the use of a medication or nutritional supplement. Use of meldonium was found in 15 of 21 sports, and the total count included 13 medallists.

While acknowledging evidence of meldonium’s performance enhancing effects is “limited”, the study concluded that since the drug was not being used primarily for therapeutic reasons it was “evidently being used with the intention to either improve recovery or enhance performance”.

To be considered for WADA’s prohibited list, a substance must meet two of three criteria: that it enhances or has the potential to enhance performance, that it presents an actual or potential health risk or that it violates the spirit of sport.

Once it was up for consideration, WADA’s expert group could consider public discussion on the drug, information from medical literature, monitoring, the availability of a test for the drug, among other factors.

In September, WADA decided to ban the drug and that went into effect on January 1. In its explanatory note, WADA wrote that it was banned because of evidence of use with the intention of enhancing performance.

Dr Andrew Pipe, medical and scientific adviser to Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, acknowledged there is little English-language literature available on meldonium, which was created in Latvia in the 1970s and is not approved for use in the United States and many other Western countries.

But Pipe defended its addition to the list, saying that while he was not speaking for WADA that the committee did follow WADA’s process. In a statement, a WADA spokesman similarly noted that the agency followed its process in banning meldonium.

“If you have a substance that has a purported mechanism that is capable of enhancing performance, you have evidence it is being used by large numbers of athletes and you have evidence that it is used by a large number of athletes concealed, then I think you come to the conclusion that this is a substance that should be placed on the prohibited list,” said Pipe, who was chair of the expert group at the time.

Little scientific evidence

Catlin and others question whether meldonium meets the basic criteria to be considered for the list. It’s not that it doesn’t enhance performance, Catlin said, it’s that there’s not research to show that.

“They have to try to show that it enhances performance, but by banning it they’ve already said it enhances performance and that will make people turn to it,” Catlin said.

“You can find that it has effects, but it’s difficult to link those to performance enhancement,” said Catlin. “I’ve tried and tried to figure out why so many athletes seem to be taking it.”

The drug, which is used to primarily to treat heart and cardiovascular diseases, works by shifting cells’ metabolism from fatty acids to carbohydrates for energy, a process that requires less oxygen.

A 2002 paper from researchers at Tbilisi State Medical University in Georgia found the drug has a positive effect on the physical working capacity of judokas, concluding it did not have side effects. Research presented in 2012 at the Baltic Sport Science Conference found much the same, noting it was not on the doping list.

For its part, Grindeks, the company that manufactures Mildronate, says it is not a performance-enhancing drug because it prevents the death of ischemic cells and does not increase performance of normal cells.

In guidance issued after the drug was banned, the Finnish Anti-Doping Agency noted there is “little scientific evidence of meldonium being able to enhance athletic performance”.

WADA does not have to prove a substance’s performance enhancing effects, and athletes are not able to challenge a drug’s inclusion on the prohibited list.

Catlin contends WADA incorrectly used evidence of use as a criterion. While few question whether use of the drug violates the spirit of sport, the broadest of the three criteria, some question how much it meets the first two.

“If you take those criteria seriously, then you would think that substances need to be innocent before proven guilty,” said Roger Pielke Jr., a University of Colorado professor whose book, The Edge: The War against Cheating and Corruption in the Cutthroat World of Elite Sports, is due out this year. “You can just say here’s a substance, athletes are taking it therefore we have suspicion that it has performance enhancing effects. Your anti-doping list would expand very rapidly if any substance that out there and you just add it to the list.

“If evidence is to matter, then the meldonium ban was put into place before that evidence became readily available,” he added.

Getting that evidence is part of the problem WADA faces. First, there is the cost. Conducting a study of the drug’s effect on elite athletes that would include a big enough group to draw conclusions can be expensive.

Then there are ethical considerations. At what doses could a study give a drug, even to consenting participants? Athletes often ascribe to the theory that if some is good, more is better and might be doubling, tripling or even quadrupling the dosage, said Victor Conte, founder of BALCO.

Athletes would need an exemption to compete with the drug or be held out of competition for the duration of the study.

All of that can make it hard for WADA to respond to evidence of misuse of a drug by athletes.

“[It’s] extremely difficult given that WADA is not only underfunded, but it has to deal with several substances, many of which have effects that WADA is unable to determine due to lack of research and literature,” said Dr Gregory Ioannidis, a sports lawyer and anti-doping expert in the United Kingdom.

While not impossible, conducting that research for each drug WADA considers banning presents a significant barrier. Without it, WADA faces the difficult position of banning a substance without knowing its effects.

“It does have the real potential to enhance performance,” said Dr Tom Bassindale, anti-doping scientist and forensic toxicologist at Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom. “It’s just there hasn’t been enough background research to prove that it does it yet.”

‘Rampant use’

So what can be concluded from the high number of athletes using meldonium?

Catlin found little reason behind Sharapova’s explanations, which included a magnesium deficiency and a family history of diabetes, and suggested there was little to infer from the number of failed tests other than that many athletes used meldonium.

But others accept the conclusion from some researchers and from WADA — that its use is at least with the intent to enhance performance.

“They must believe it does to all be on it,” said Bassindale. “It’s very hard to believe they all have angina or diabetes.”

For his part, Conte, who has worked to help anti-doping efforts after serving a prison sentence related to the BALCO case, said athletes’ use of meldonium is an endorsement of its performance enhancing effects.

“They know when it works. When you take drugs, you know when you’re stronger, faster, have more endurance,” he said.

“Of course it works. Now is there a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover clinical trial with a sufficient total of subjects involved to be published in a credible scientific journal? No. But is there rampant use of it in Olympic sports? Yes.”

WASHINGTON — In an online world where viral trends can shift in an instant, the “exploding watermelon” video may have set a high-water mark.

The digital news site BuzzFeed on Friday showed just how quickly a mindless act can gain notoriety, using Facebook’s new live video service for an event in which its team placed elastic bands around the melon until it exploded.

The spectacle quickly gathered steam on social media, and at one point more than 800,000 people were viewing live, waiting for the watermelon to explode.

Moments later, the cached video had more than 4.4 million views and generated over 314,000 comments on Facebook.

“I want to stop watching so bad but I’m already committed,” one Facebook user wrote.

“When my husband comes home and asks me what I did today, I’m not certain he will understand how I couldn’t stop once I started,” another said.

The live event featured BuzzFeed’s Chelsea Marshall and James Harness in hazmat suits placing rubber bands one by one around the watermelon’s middle, counting out each time.

On Twitter, #watermelon become a top trend.

“More people are watching this than CNN right now,” one person tweeted.

BuzzFeed unabashedly promoted the event, tweeting: “The @BuzzFeedNews team is currently monitoring the imminent explosion of a watermelon. Stay tuned for the latest.”

The video showed a crowd around the watermelon cheering when the count passed 400 rubber bands.

“Can someone share this to my personal Facebook in case I die?” Harness said during the event.

With tension rising at BuzzFeed, the watermelon began spewing juice at 660 rubber bands until its top blew off at 690 to a round of cheers, followed by a partaking of the fruit inside.

But the buzz continued even after the live event.

“The year is 2030,” journalist Bobby Blanchard tweeted, “and my son asks ‘Daddy where were you when @BuzzFeed exploded a watermelon with rubber bands as 700,000 people watched on?’” 

Analysts, meanwhile, looked for lessons for struggling news media organisations.

“Livestreams are stories, just like any other content generated by a news organisation,” said Benjamin Mullin of the Poynter Institute in a blog post.

Mullin said it’s not clear if this feat can be duplicated, but that “newsroom managers might be wise to figure out how they can apply today’s lessons to their own coverage.”

WASHINGTON — Climate change can be expected to boost the number of annual premature US deaths from heatwaves in coming decades and to increase mental health problems from extreme weather like hurricanes and floods, a US study said on Monday. 

“I don’t know that we’ve seen something like this before, where we have a force that has such a multitude of effects,” Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told reporters at the White House about the study. “There’s not one single source that we can target with climate change, there are multiple paths that we have to address.”

Heatwaves were estimated to cause 670 to 1,300 US deaths annually in recent years. Premature US deaths from heatwaves can be expected to rise more than 27,000 per year by 2100, from a 1990 baseline, one scenario in the study said. The rise outpaced projected decreases in deaths from extreme cold.

Extreme heat can cause more forest fires and increase pollen counts and the resulting poor air quality threatens people with asthma and other lung conditions. The report said poor air quality will likely lead to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths, hospital visits, and acute respiratory illness each year by 2030. 

Climate change also threatens mental health, the study found. Post traumatic stress disorder, depression and general anxiety can all result in places that suffer extreme weather linked to climate change, such as hurricanes and floods. More study needs to be done on assessing the risks to mental health, it said.

The peer-reviewed study by eight federal agencies can be found at: [health2016.globalchange.gov/] 

Cases of mosquito and tick-borne diseases can also be expected to increase, though the study, completed over three years, did not look at whether locally-transmitted Zika virus cases would be more likely to hit the United States. 

President Barack Obama’s administration has taken steps to cut carbon emissions by speeding a switch from coal and oil to cleaner energy sources. In February, the supreme court dealt a blow to the White House’s climate ambitions by putting a hold Obama’s plan to cut emissions from power plants. Administration officials say the plan is on safe legal footing. 

John Holdren, Obama’s senior science adviser, said steps the world agreed to in Paris last year to curb emissions through 2030 can help fight the risks to health. 

“We will need a big encore after 2030... in order to avoid the bulk of the worst impacts described in this report,” he said. 

After years of using and abusing the car-computers analogy that has been fashion since the 1980s I found a much better one: medicine-IT. With time and the incredible development of IT, it has become more relevant to compare these two sciences than to put a car and computer in the same comparison.

It starts with diversification and specialisation. We used to speak of computers, in a rather simplistic manner. Today with the cloud, smartphones, wireless technology everywhere, virtual servers, networks security, the IoT (the Internet of Things), social networking and countless other IT-related fields, the technology has become as diversified and specialised as medicine. This is true, notwithstanding any eventual objections from physicians who may consider their trade to be “above” IT.

We now refer to programmers, network specialists, IT administrators, web developers and other IT professions, the same way we think of ophthalmologists, dermatologists, ENT specialists, paediatricians, etc. Everything has become much specialised and the trend continues unabated.

Specialisation in high-tech is evolving at such speed that new fields are emerging faster than colleges and universities are able to catch up with the market demands to create corresponding curricula. This is leading giant companies like Microsoft and Cisco (networking) to have their own curriculum and to deliver their own certifications that often are more sought-after in the real world IT market than traditional college degrees. Naturally, Microsoft and Cisco certifications are focused on their own products, but this doesn’t reduce their importance an iota. Enterprises now look to hire specialists with direct industry certifications.

On the lighter side, IT technicians, in particular those who provide technical support for servers and networks are often called to the rescue with the same sense of emergency as doctors are. A colleague in the IT business in Amman recently told me a story that says it all.

One of his clients had called asking for a computer engineer to be dispatched to him to fix a network failure that was preventing their staff from accessing the shared data on the server. Though the engineer was immediately sent the client called a second time, a mere 10 minutes after the first, asking where on earth the engineer was, and why he hasn’t arrived yet. My colleague told him to be patient, adding that even an ambulance sometimes cannot make it in less than 10 minutes, given the morning traffic in the city. The client’s reply was most eloquent: “Do you think that transporting a patient in an ambulance is more vital than fixing our network?”

Alas, if clients ask for an IT technical support engineer as anxiously as if they were calling a doctor, overall and typically the first is still less rewarded financially than the second. Perhaps it is just a matter of time till things change and become more balanced. After all medicine goes back to circa 3000BC as most agree, or to the days of Hippocrates circa 400BC like some purists prefer to think of it. IT on the other hand is a mere 60-year-old, counting from when the science started using modern electronics.

Besides, the two worlds have been dramatically converging since the 1900s. From MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) to telemedicine and robotic surgery that is possible only thanks to high-tech and the Internet, the separation line is often blurred by the sophistication of the medical equipment that is heavily dependent on IT and all its various specialities. Hewlett-Packard, among others, has become a recognised global leader in both fields; the success story of the company is sign of how well they merge and blend.

Let us not forget the vocabulary that the two worlds share. It starts with the term virus and its derivatives: to disinfect, to place in quarantine, and it goes on with expressions such as “memory loss” when you lose data accidentally and “it alleviates the pain” when you find a solution to an IT problem after having “diagnosed” it. And when you say “scan” today you have to specify if you are scanning a printed document in your office or a patient’s brain in a hospital.

Perhaps IT technicians will soon start wearing the famous white coat when going to work on a computer problem.

Scientists are sending four strains of fungi to the International Space Station (ISS) to see what happens when the tiny organisms contend with the stress of microgravity and space radiation.

It’s not just for kicks. Researchers say that putting these fungi in an extraterrestrial environment could cause them to produce new medicines for use on Earth and perhaps even on long-term space missions.

The work is one of the first to look at the intersection of pharmaceutical science and space exploration, said principal investigator Clay Wang, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Southern California (USC).

Most of us think of fungus as something we don’t want around — not on our feet, not on our food and not on our plants. But some members of the vast fungi kingdom have been hugely beneficial to humans.

Decades ago, scientists discovered that certain species of fungi create molecules called secondary metabolites to help combat stressful situations. By harvesting these molecules, researchers have been able to make new and important drugs that have changed the trajectory of medicine.

The most famous of these is penicillin, an antibiotic produced by members of the Penicillium genus when they are exposed to bacteria. Penicillin’s bacteria-fighting properties were discovered by the Scottish pharmacologist Alexander Fleming in 1928, and the drug is now used throughout the world to fight infectious diseases.

Other fungi-produced medicines include the cholesterol-lowering drug lovastatin and the anti-fungal griseofluvin. Researchers are also looking into whether other secondary metabolites might also be used to fight cancer, osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s disease.

Wang has used genome sequencing to show that Aspergillus nidulans, one of the most studied fungi, has 40 different drugmaking pathways. However, most of them are never “turned on”.

“In nature, fungi only make what they need to respond to their environment,” Wang said. “These pathways are like a set of tools or weapons in their arsenal, and most of the time they are not in use.”

At his lab at USC, Wang and his students grow fungi in 60 different “stressful” environments, in an effort to coax the organisms to create new medicines that have never been seen before. But the only way to expose fungi to the stressors of a space environment is to send them off the planet.

To do that, Wang partnered with Kasthuri Venkateswaran, a microbiologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, California, who studies microbes in space. Venkateswaran said NASA has previously sent bacteria and yeast to the ISS, but this is the first time the space agency would be deliberately growing fungi inside the space laboratory.

On April 8, four different strains of the fungi Aspergillius nidulans will launch aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. They are scheduled to return to Earth on May 10.

The actual experiment will last just three to seven days. One of the benefits of working with this particular fungi is that its growth can be controlled by temperature. For most of its time in space, the fungi will be stored at 4°C. When the experiment begins, the fungi will be placed in an ideal growth condition of 37°C.

At the same time, the same four strains of the fungi will be grown on Earth to serve as a control.

The research team, which includes USC School of Pharmacy doctoral students Jillian Romsdahl and Adriana Blachowicz, hope to get the fungi that journeyed to space back to the lab for testing by the middle of May.

One of the team’s hypotheses is that the extraterrestrial fungi will produce molecules to protect them from space radiation that they do not need to produce when they are living on Earth.

“We know if there is high radiation, they will adapt, but we are not sure what that adaptation will be,” Wang said.

When the space fungi samples return, the researchers will analyse what secondary metabolites they produced, as well as what genetic regulators or “switches” the fungi used to activate the genes that produce those metabolites. Once the scientists know that, they can genetically manipulate the organism into producing those same metabolites back home.

“The lessons we will learn in space will be brought to Earth,” Wang said.

Although it is still unclear exactly what those lessons will be, the researchers are confident they will learn something.

“Even if it doesn’t make something new, I know it will make more or less of something in space, and that will allow us to figure out how to amplify a drug or make less of something we don’t want,” he said. “This is one of those great experiments with no bad answer.”

Head oil massage is a specialty of my home country India. In fact, I would go as far as to call it a super specialty because no other nation dabbles in it. Not with as much enthusiasm and participation anyway. Every Indian, between the ages of zero and hundred, has had a head massage done at some point or another in their lives. For some it is a daily routine while for many others it is a weekend indulgence but nothing relaxes my fellow country people more than a vigorous hot oil head massage. 

The benefits of this are manifold and they are instilled in our upbringing from a very early age by our grandmothers or nannies. They are the ones who introduce the infants to this procedure in the first place. A small bowl of lukewarm almond, coconut or mustard oil is kept handy which is regularly applied to the scalp of a newborn with gentle strokes. Along with soothing the baby, it is supposed to give it sound sleep as well. The soft fluff on the head also miraculously becomes a thick mop of hair in the process. Nobody questions the veracity of this diktat because most of us are inured into believing it. 

In fact there is a Bollywood film that was released in the late 1950s that has an entire song dedicated to head massage. Believe me, it’s true. The movie is called “Pyasa” which means “The thirsty one” and has a serious storyline about a struggling poet who becomes famous posthumously when everyone thinks that he has died but actually it is a case of mistaken identity and someone else is dead. In the midst of all this melodrama, our film industry’s favourite comedienne Johnny Walker starts singing, extolling the virtues of a head massage. For sheer comic relief, they have yet to create a song to beat this all time classic.

When I was growing up, my granny would catch hold of me every other day and subject me to a brisk head rub. I hated the greasy oil that she poured all over my pate but she was adamant and for a fragile lady, she had surprisingly strong hands. The shampoos we had back then were not mild like the ones we have now and when she gave me a bath afterwards it would get into my eyes and make them sting. My hair would be shining and lustrous but my vision would be blurred for the rest of the evening. The result was that I must be probably the only Indian who did not like her head to be massaged and given a choice I would happily run in the opposite direction. 

I stayed away from it all for as long as I could. And then I moved to Jordan. For some reason Jordanians think that Indians have lustrous hair because of regular head massages. Every time I meet someone in Amman, after a few minutes, the conversation veers towards this topic.

“Your hair is lovely habibti,” a young woman greets me in the gym. 

“Thank you, shukran,” I reply. 

“You massage it?” she asks. 

“No, but I dye it,” I answer truthfully. 

“Oil massage before dying?” she persists. 

“No,” I shake my head. 

“Aha! After dying then?” she probes. 

“Actually no,” I admit. 

“You don’t want to tell me?” she snaps. 

“No, I mean yes,” I falter. 

“So then?” she prompts. 

“Before, I mean after,” I improvise instantly.

Watching videos of kids eating vegetables may encourage small children to follow suit, a new study suggests.

Preschoolers who watched a short video of kids eating bell peppers later ate more of the vegetables themselves, the researchers reported in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behaviour. 

They also presented their findings this month at the annual meeting of the Society of Behavioural Medicine in Washington, DC.

The difference in consumption was not immediate, however. Instead, a week after seeing the video, the children ate about 16 grammes of bell pepper. Kids who hadn’t seen the video only ate about 6 grammes. 

“The DVD segment we assembled was 7.5 minutes in length, and after just one exposure the preschoolers increased vegetable consumption one week later. So a brief DVD exposure... between children’s TV programming, or during a transition time at daycare before snack or meal time, [may] influence children to make healthier food choices,” Amanda Staiano, at Biomedical Research Centre in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who led the study, told Reuters Health by e-mail.

Staiano’s team randomly assigned 42 youngsters, ages three to five, to watch either the video of other children eating bell pepper, or a video on brushing teeth or no video at all. 

The next day, those who watched the veggie video actually ate less bell pepper than the others. But one week later, after accounting for the amount of bell pepper that each child ate on day one, the veggie video group’s consumption was higher and the difference was statistically significant, the researchers found. 

“This indicates that the children retained the positive experience of watching peers eating the vegetable and were able to reproduce that action one week later,” Staiano says. 

Childhood obesity has more than doubled in the past 30 years according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. And one of the CDC’s recommendations to combat the rise is to eat more servings of vegetables. 

The children in the video may serve as ambassadors for healthier eating. 

“The kids were positively influenced by their peers through role modelling of healthy behaviours,” says Amy Yaroch, executive director of the Gretchen Swanson Centre for Nutrition in Omaha, Nebraska, who was not involved in the research.

“We know from behavioural theory that role modelling is an effective strategy to get people [including young kids] to adopt healthy behaviours. Parents typically serve as role models, but peers can be a very strong influence as well, especially if they are viewed as ‘cool’ by their peers,” Yaroch says.

Staiano and her team still have several questions they’d like to investigate, including how to increase the effect and whether repeated video exposure could convince a kid to choose a vegetable over candy.

“Figuring out ways to make screen time into healthy time is critical for our young children, who are expected to have shorter lifespans than their parents due to obesity-related diseases,” Staiano says.

Held concurrently at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre and seemingly melding one huge festival, the Dhabi International Motor Show and Custom Show Emirates events reflected a variety of motoring niches, subcultures and businesses. Expected to attract considerably more than last year’s 12,000 visitors and 100 local and 57 international exhibitors, the events also include large outdoor activities. 

Billed as both International and Emirati events, large mainstream auto manufacturers were largely represented at a dealership and regional level, and showcased their latest and current vehicle line-ups. However, the event took on a more international flavour in regards to its custom car component, with many aftermarket tuning and customisation firms taking part, given the UAE’s and GCC’s rich market for such wares in particular, and the region in general.

Connecting aftermarket companies showcasing products with consumers, the event featured local, regional and international companies coming from afar as the US, Japan, Australia, Russia, China, New Zealand, India and elsewhere. Most notable among international exhibitors was a pavilion of some 50 companies representing the highly Specialty Equipment Market Association, well renowned for their own annual US event.

Another particular attraction representing both tuning and customisation worlds and well capturing the zeitgeist of the event was Japanese firm Kuhl Racing’s “golden Godzilla”. A Nissan GT-R with intricately engraved gold chrome body, the flamboyant GT-R is also tuned to produce some 800BHP, in place of a standard model’s 542BHP.

Offering much for enthusiasts of different tastes and persuasions, the event included contrasts such as stand for quintessentially British classic Minis right next to one showcasing the US urban subculture of lowriders. Comprised almost exclusively of modified and immense classic American, saloons, coupes and convertibles, lowriders alternatively ride on stilts or sit near tarmac scraping clearance, owing to extreme hydraulic suspension kits 

In addition to the many modified, tuned, customised, hot rods and otherwise fettled cars and motorcycles, the event also featured numerous classic cars, both modified and in stock condition. Consisting of mainly luxury, sports and SUV models of various vintage and including a rare 1980 Lamborghini LM002 SUV, the classic cars on display even included less expected compact peoples cars like the Fiat 500 and Citroen 2CV.

Held over the weekend, the event featured numerous activities including crowd-pleasing outdoor skid pan with saloon car, SUV, taxi and bike drifting exhibits and car and bike parade. Contests were also held, with awards going for best bike builds, custom cars and bikes, photos, in addition to an engine competition. Meanwhile, the annual and regional Middle East Car of the Year awards ceremony was also held at the exhibition events, on the opening night.

AMMAN — In his latest works of acrylic and pastel on canvas, Jordanian artist Muhammad Afefa explores instinct in its most raw and refined forms.

His artworks on display at Societá Dante Alighieri Amman in the exhibition “Memories and Fish” delve into the psyche of human and animal instinct with a sense of rawness reflective of its subject matter.

Building his paintings on the recurring motifs of a female, a shark-like fish and a chair, Afefa, also a political cartoonist, creates new meanings by juxtaposing these three shapes — and at times even combining them — in a strange twist on the traditional trinity of the id, ego and superego. 

“I see the female as representative of humans, the fish as a manifestation of raw instinct, and the chair as the ‘humanised’ form of instinct — the hunger for power,” Afefa told The Jordan Times in an interview.

In his paintings, the three shapes are seen existing each in their own vacuums, closely interacting with each other in harmony, or struggling to gain the upper hand in a savage conflict.

The female is at times seen flirting with the fish, reaching out in an attempt to gain an understanding, and at other times standing separately with a bag in hand as if parting ways.

Other images are more violent, showing the three shapes caught in a struggle of dominion, each perhaps vying for absolute control over the psyche — lusting for that elusive chair of power.

Afefa’s background as a cartoonist gives him a sure hand in sketching out his ideas, but he makes sure not to take away from the mystery of the work by leaving it open to a kaleidoscope of interpretations.

He employs rich, textured colours to give a bold background to his paintings, capitalising on the harmonious mixture of hues, and on their staggering conflict as well to add dimensions to the struggle between the figures in his work.

Seemingly random doodles sometimes pervade his pieces, revealing another level of meaning at a closer inspection.

“I don’t plan how a painting is going to end up looking. I simply absorb whatever experiences I encounter and let my subconscious express them through my work,” Afefa said.

Acknowledging that there is a sense of symbolism in the paintings akin to his work as a cartoonist, the artist stressed, however, that the pieces give him and the viewer more freedom to explore different meanings and impressions.

“Cartoons may have a wider audience, but you have to think, rethink and redo them a hundred times as you take in so many variables,” Afefa, who has been a cartoonist for over 10 years, explained.

“As a cartoonist, you want your audience to understand the idea you are imparting, but you also try to make sure that your editors also understand and approve the work,” he added.

“With paintings, you don’t have to worry about this. I’m done with the work when I want to be. No one can change it.” 

Exploring his latest exhibition, one can surmise that Afefa the artist and the cartoonist are one and the same.

Being a cartoonist has become part of his identity as an artist, enriching his paintings and informing his style in a unique advantage that adds more layers to his work.

The paintings are on display until April 10.