Love: When it comes to love, go with your gut – literally. A new study says our choice of mate may be influenced by our intestinal bacteria driving our pheromones to tell us who to be attracted to. The research compared two groups of flies, one that had been fed a diet of starches and one that had been fed a diet of malt sugar, and found that each subgroup preferred partners with similar nutritional background. But when antibiotics were administered, killing gut bacteria, the preferential mating pattern disappeared. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicate that intestinal flora plays a direct role in pheromone levels, driving mate selection. Yet another reason to take your probiotics.
Mind: Go ahead, indulge in that food fantasy. In a landmark discovery, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have shown that imagining eating a certain food reduces your actual consumption of that food. This changes the decades-old assumption that thinking about something desirable increases cravings for it and its consumption. “These findings suggest that trying to suppress one’s thoughts of desired foods in order to curb cravings for those foods is a fundamentally flawed strategy,” said Carey Morewedge, lead author of the study published in Science.
Weight: There’s even more value in breathing clean air – for your figure and your health, says a new study that found a link between the environment and weight-gain. According to the research, animals exposed to air pollution had larger and more fat cells in their abdominal area and higher blood sugar levels than did animals eating the same diet but breathing clean air, connecting contamination to obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. “Fine particulates directly cause inflammation and changes in fat cells, both of which increase the risk for Type 2 diabetes,” said Qinghua Sun, lead author of the study. The findings appear in the journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology.
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