Behavior: Distracted Eating Adds More to Waistlines

 

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Published: January 3, 2011

Catching up with e-mail while you eat lunch? Watching television? You may end the day eating more than you think.

Researchers had 22 volunteers eat a meal while playing computer solitaire and 22 others eat the same meal in the same amount of time while undistracted. They told the subjects it was a test of the effect of food on memory, but actually they were testing how full people felt after a meal, how much they ate at a “taste test” 30 minutes later, and how successfully they could recall exactly what they ate. Their results appear online in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Not only were distracted eaters worse at remembering what they had eaten, but they felt significantly less full just after lunch, even after the researchers controlled for height and weight. And at the taste-test session a half-hour later, they ate about twice as many cookies as those who had lunch without playing games.

“If you can avoid eating in front of a computer screen or any other activity that distracts you, that might temper the tendency to snack later in the day,” said Jeffrey M. Brunstrom, the senior author.

Dr. Brunstrom, a researcher in behavioral nutrition at the University of Bristol in England, said the problem lay in recalling what one has eaten. “Memory plays an important role in the regulation of food intake,” he said, “and distractions during eating disrupt that.”

A version of this article appeared in print on January 4, 2011, on page D6 of the New York edition

Let the Sun Shine

 Skiing on fresh snow, skating on reflective ice or hiking at high altitudes can be harder on your eyes than a day at the beach. Snow, as many East Coast readers may have noticed this week, reflects nearly 80 percent of the sun’s rays. Dry beach sand? Just 15 percent.
Most of us already know that ultraviolet (UV) rays can cause skin cancer and other problems. But that’s not all there is to worry about. “Most people don’t appreciate the damage that UV rays can do to their eyes,” said Dr. Rachel J. Bishop, a clinical ophthalmologist at the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Md.
Winter or summer, hours of bright sunlight can burn the surface of the eye, causing a temporary and painful condition known as photokeratitis. Over time, unprotected exposure can contribute to cataracts, as well as cancer of the eyelids and the skin around the eyes.
UV exposure also may increase the risk of macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in people over age 65. While cataracts can be removed surgically, there is no way to reverse damage to the macula, the area in the center of the retina.
Worried? Consider this article license to buy yourself a new pair of UV-protective shades. But don’t let price and style be your only guides.
“Some cheap sunglasses are great, some expensive ones are not,” said Dr. Lee R. Duffner, an ophthalmologist in Hollywood, Fla., and a clinical correspondent for the American Academy of Ophthalmology. In fact, some knockoff designer frames may do your eyes more harm than if you’d worn no glasses at all.
Below, some advice on how to find sunglasses that will protect your eyes without plundering your wallet.
READ THE FINE PRINT Prolonged exposure to UV radiation damages the surface tissues of the eye as well as the retina and the lens. Yet while the Food and Drug Administration regulates sunglasses as medical devices, the agency does not stipulate that they must provide any particular level of UV protection. The wares at the average sunglasses store therefore can range from protective to wholly ineffective.
Look for labels and tags indicating that a pair of sunglasses provides at least “98 percent UV protection” or that it “blocks 98 percent of UVA and UVB rays.” If you find sunglasses without labels, or they say something vague like “UV absorbing” or “blocks most UV light,” don’t buy them — the sunglasses may not offer much protection.
For the best defense, look for sunglasses that “block all UV radiation up to 400 nanometers,” which is equivalent to blocking 100 percent of UV rays, advised Dr. Duffner.
CHOOSE THE RIGHT STYLE Ideally, your sunglasses should cover the sides of your eyes to prevent stray light from entering. Wraparound lenses are best, but if that’s not an appealing style, look for close-fitting glasses with wide lenses. Avoid models with small lenses, such as John Lennon-style sunglasses.
Don’t be seduced by dark tints. UV protection is not related to how dark the lens is. Sunglasses tinted green, amber, red and gray may offer the same protection as dark lenses. For the least color distortion, pick gray lenses, said Dr. Duffner.
If you are frequently distracted by glare while driving, boating or skiing, look for polarized lenses, which block the horizontal light waves that create glare. But remember, polarization in itself will not block UV light. Make sure the lenses also offer 98 percent or 100 percent UV protection.
Though the F.D.A. does not require that sunglasses have UV protection, the agency does insist that they meet impact-resistance standards — which basically means they won’t shatter when struck. Even so, if you wear sunglasses while cycling, sailing or gardening, for instance, consider purchasing a pair with polycarbonate lenses, which are 10 times more durable than regular plastic or glass lenses.
AVOID SIDEWALK VENDORS Buy a pair of chic Chanel knockoffs that offer no UV protection, and you might look swell — but your eyes will suffer. The tinted lenses will relax your pupils, letting more damaging radiation hit your retina than if you were wearing no glasses at all.
To play it safe, buy glasses from well-established drug, chain or department stores, rather than from vendors on the street. Shop around: you should be able to find a pair of drugstore sunglasses for $10 to $20 that provide all the protection you need.
Among the recent offerings at Sunglasswarehouse.com, for instance, were wraparound and aviator-style sunglasses that came with full UV protection for just $13.
DON’T FORGET THE CHILDREN Upgrade your children from their Dora and Spider-man toy sunglasses to legitimate shades that offer 98 percent to 100 percent UV protection. Children with light-colored eyes are especially vulnerable to sun damage, said Dr. Duffner. The injury is cumulative, so the earlier children get in the habit of wearing shades, the better off their eyes will be.
If your child plays sports regularly, consider also purchasing sport-specific goggles. Eye injuries are the leading cause of blindness in children, and most of those injuries occur when they are playing basketball, baseball, ice hockey or racket sports.
The National Eye Institute says it believes that protective eyewear could prevent 90 percent of sports-related eye injuries in children.
TEST THOSE OLD GLASSES Reluctant to pop for a new pair of sunglasses? If you already have a favorite pair but don’t know what kind of protection they offer, ask your local eyewear store if they have a UV meter. This device can measure the UV protection of your glasses and help you determine whether you should buy a new pair. “Most opticians have such a meter and can do this very easily,” said Dr. Duffner.
Even if you wear contact lenses that offer UV protection, you’re not in the clear. Contact lenses sit on the cornea in the center of your eyes and so can’t protect the surrounding white area (the conjunctiva) and skin.
“I see many older patients who have growths on the whites of their eyes that were caused by sun damage,” Dr. Bishop said. These yellow bumps, called pinguecula, often lead to eye irritation and dryness and may eventually disrupt vision. To prevent them, adults with contact lenses still must wear sunglasses outdoors.
Lastly, if you wear prescription glasses, you can avoid buying sunglasses by either purchasing clip-ons that attach to your frames or having a UV coating applied to your lenses. Presto, you’ll have two pairs in one.

From the New York Times, January 14, 2011

On Road to Recovery, Past Adversity Provides a Map (New York Times)

Whatever else it holds, this new year is sure to produce a healthy serving of redemption stories, against-the-odds tales of people who bounced back from the layoffs, foreclosures and other wreckage of 2010. They landed better jobs. They started successful companies. They found time to write a book, to study animal husbandry, to learn a new trade: to generate just the sort of commentary about perseverance, self-respect and character that can tempt anyone who’s still struggling to throw things at the TV.

Character is a fine thing to admire, all right — once the storm has passed and the rigging is repaired.

But when people are truly sinking, because of job loss, illness, debt or some combination of ills, they have no idea what mix of character, connections and dumb luck will be enough to pull through. To use the psychologists’ term, they don’t know how “resilient” they are, or how much resilience even matters.

Do I have the right stuff? Or is this sinkhole simply too deep?

“As with so many of life’s experiences, humans are simply not very good at predicting how they’ll behave when hit by a real adversity,” said Laura King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri.

Researchers aren’t so good at it, either. It is clear that with time, most people can and do psychologically recover from even devastating losses, like the death of a spouse; but reactions to the same blow vary widely, and no one can reliably predict who will move on quickly and who will lapse into longer-term despair.

The role of genes is likewise uncertain. In a paper published online Monday in The Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers at the University of Michigan who analyzed more than 50 studies concluded that variations in a single gene determine people’s susceptibility to depression following stressful events. But an earlier analysis, of fewer but similar studies, concluded that the evidence was not convincing.

New research suggests that resilience may have at least as much to do with how often people have faced adversity in past as it does with who they are — their personality, their genes, for example — or what they’re facing now. That is, the number of life blows a person has taken may affect his or her mental toughness more than any other factor.

“Frequency makes a difference: that is the message,” said Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine. “Each negative event a person faces leads to an attempt to cope, which forces people to learn about their own capabilities, about their support networks — to learn who their real friends are. That kind of learning, we think, is extremely valuable for subsequent coping,” up to a point.

In a study appearing in the current issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Dr. Cohen Silver, E. Alison Holman, also of the University of California, Irvine, and Mark D. Seery, of the State University at Buffalo, followed nearly 2,000 adults for several years, monitoring their mental well-being with online surveys. The participants, a diverse cross section of Americans between the ages of 18 and 101, listed all of the upsetting life events they had experienced before entering the study and any new ones that hit along the way. These included divorce, the death of a friend or parent, a serious illness, and being in a natural disaster.

Or, none of the above: A subset of the participants, 194, reported that they had experienced not one of the fairly comprehensive list of 37 events on the survey. “We wondered: Who are these people who have managed to go through life with nothing bad happening to them?” Dr. Cohen Silver said. “Are they hyper-conscientious? Socially isolated? Just young? Or otherwise unique?”

They weren’t, the researchers found. Stranger still, they were not the most satisfied with their lives. Their sense of well-being was about the same, on average, as people who had suffered up to a dozen memorable blows.

It was those in the middle, those reporting two to six stressful events, who scored highest on several measures of well-being, and who showed the most resilience in response to recent hits.

In short, the findings suggest that mental toughness is something like the physical strength: It cannot develop without exercise, and it breaks down when overworked. Some people in the study reported having had more than a dozen stressful events, and it showed.

“These people were truly suffering,” Dr. Cohen Silver said, “and we do not minimize in any way the pain of such events when you’re going through them. But it does appear that if you’ve had several such experiences but not too many, you learn something.”

Other researchers who looked at the study were more cautious. George Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia University, said that the results may partly reflect a trick of memory. In particular, “people who are more distressed will tend to recall more stressful life events,” Dr. Bonanno, the author of the book “The Other Side of Sadness,” said by e-mail. That by itself could explain the correlation between high numbers of lifetime crises and low current mood, he said.

It does not as easily explain the correlations at the lower end, Dr. Seery said. “The people in the study who recalled zero or one negative events were worse off than those with some adverse events,” he said. “So they were willing to admit to not doing so well, yet did not recall stressful life events.”

Experience may provide more than a sense of what to expect and who one’s real friends are. In a recent study in the journal Emotion, researchers at the University of Denver and the University of Basel in Switzerland tested the ability of 78 women to reduce the amount of sadness they felt after watching an upsetting film clip, using a technique called reappraisal. Reappraisal comes naturally to many people and is a way of taking the sting out of a situation by reframing how it’s understood: “I wasn’t afraid to act, I was uncertain; I didn’t have all the information.” The study found that the women who were adept at this sort of self-therapy were less susceptible to depressive symptoms after significant crises in their own lives.

It may be that experience with a few threatening or upsetting events refines these types of psychological skills, in a person’s own thinking through of the problem or in discussion with friends.

Either way, the lifetime resilience study suggests that the pain, the self-doubt, the disorientation and the anger that swarm the consciousness in the wake of a job loss, a foreclosure or a divorce can have some upside, even though it’s not remotely visible at the time.

“Perhaps the one most fundamental thing you learn in living through an experience like this is that you can come out the other end of almost anything,” Dr. King said. “You say, ‘Well, it may have crushed me, but I survived.’ ”

A version of this article appeared in print on January 4, 2011, on page D5 of the New York edition.

Bali School Makes Sustainability a Way of Life

SIBANG KAJA, BALI — Half a world away from Cancún, Mexico, and the international climate change talks that took place there last month, a school here in Indonesia is staging its own attempt to save the planet.

It is small-scale and literally grassroots — and possibly in some respects more effective than the tortuous efforts of politicians to agree on how to stop global warming.

In the midst of the lush, steaming jungle of Bali, along a pitted road, past scattered chickens and singing cicadas, Green School has two dozen buildings made of giant bamboo poles. There are no walls, and there is no air-conditioning. Just gracefully arched roofs, concrete floors and bamboo furniture. There is a big, grassy playground, complete with goalposts made — yes — of bamboo; a bamboo bridge across a rock-strewn river; vegetable patches; and a mud-wrestling pit.

But there is also a computer lab, a well-stocked library and an array of courses drawn from an internationally recognized curriculum and taught in English.

More than 200 children from 40 countries, including Indonesia, are learning math here, as well as grammar, science, business studies, drama and Bahasa Indonesia, the official language spoken in this country of 240 million.

The students, whose levels range from kindergarten to 10th grade and who represent 40 nationalities, are also learning to grow and thresh rice and how to make ceramics and paper from materials found on the school site.

They get dirt under their fingernails and mud between their toes. Visitors are advised to wear comfortable shoes. High heels are not recommended.

If all this sounds a little bit hippie and idealistic, that is because it is. A little.

But then, Green School, the brainchild of John Hardy and his wife, Cynthia, is also realistic and practical, designed to give children not just a sense of how to live sustainably, but also to leave them ultimately with the skills to enter academic institutions anywhere in the world.

“We want to create future green leaders — we need green leaders,” said a sarong-clad Mr. Hardy, picking his way along a dirt path last month. “We want to teach kids that the world is not indestructible.”

Mr. Hardy himself — sarong notwithstanding — is no mere dropout, tree-hugging beach bum.

True, he says, he “ran away” from his home in Canada in 1975, to go to Bali. But he is also an entrepreneur, and the upmarket jewelry business he and his wife built over the years was worth enough, by the time they sold it in 2007, to allow the Hardys to set up the Green School.

The original idea had been to retire quietly. But then Mr. Hardy saw “An Inconvenient Truth,” the 2006 documentary about the campaign by Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president, to educate people about climate change.

“Al Gore ruined my life,” Mr. Hardy, who is now 61, likes to say.

The movie prompted him to scrap plans for a quiet life and to try to do his part to change the way young people — and ultimately society as a whole — behave toward their environment.

Environment-studies courses and nature excursions have, of course, long been popular in U.S. and European schools. But Green School, Mr. Hardy and its teachers believe, is unique in that it completely immerses children in a world of sustainable practices throughout the school day — with the nonflush compost toilets, the (easily bearable) lack of air-conditioning and the fact that virtually everything in the school is created from bamboo, rather than steel, glass and concrete.

“There are lots of schools that have elements of ‘green’ teaching, but I don’t think that anyone has been ambitious or foolhardy enough to try anything on this scale before,” said Ben Macrory, a New Yorker who moved to Bali in 2008 to take on the job of Green School’s head of admissions and whose 4-year-old daughter, Maggie, attends the school. “Every experience the children have here is about how to live with only a minimal impact on the environment.”

Yes, there are trade-offs. Schooling is only available from nursery school through 10th grade, with plans to extend teaching for the remaining two years by 2012. Also, students have a more limited choice of languages or other standard courses than might be available at Western schools or other international schools on the island of Bali.

But that has not prevented the appeal of Green School, which is in its third year, from growing.

Many of the students have come from other schools in Bali, and an increasing number come from families who have moved to Bali recently — often in large part because they want to send their children here.

“The atmosphere is magical,” said Barbara Friedrichsen-Mehta, who visited the school with her husband, Rajesh, and their daughters Lena and Vinya last month. The family is considering moving to Bali, once their institute for innovative music has been established in Singapore.

“We’ve always missed the educational vision in most of the international schools in the many places we’ve lived, and done a lot of home schooling for that reason,” Ms. Friedrichsen-Mehta said. “But this place is creative, innovative and multicultural. And the girls really, really liked it.”

The mystique of Bali — its arts, ubiquitous temples and gentle climate — helps to draw families to this place. And the slightly offbeat profile of expatriates on the island means parents are open to novel concepts like a school without walls that grows its own vegetables.

“No boring people move to Bali,” Mr. Macrory said. The island attracts entrepreneurs, artists, healers and some staff members from nongovernmental organizations, rather than the financial and corporate communities that have grown in Hong Kong and Singapore, Frankfurt and New York.

Still, Mr. Hardy says he is convinced that the Green School concept can work elsewhere, too, and he hopes the school will be the blueprint — or “greenprint” — for more. “Not just one,” he said — “50!”

Will Green School be a game-changer in the global fight to combat climate change? Who knows?

But for now, 200 children are visibly enjoying the school. And perhaps the school and its future spinoffs will someday yield another Al Gore to shake up someone’s retirement plans.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 3, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune.