Category: Eating Disorders

Moving away from home and adapting to a new social environment are just two of the many challenges that new students face as they enter university. An innovative new study conducted at the University of Alberta has found that these challenges can actually have a negative effect on a student’s health.

Adolescents have grown taller and put on weight over the last thirty years, but the problem of underweight teens may be worse, a study in the online open access journal BMC Public Health suggests. An analysis of the height, weight, and body-mass index of teenagers during 1966-1969 and 1995-1997 in Norway demonstrates a shift towards taller and heavier teenagers, but also hints that there are more underweight adolescents.

The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) released its Position Stand on “The Female Athlete Triad,” recognizing the relationships among energy availability, menstrual function and bone mineral density, which may manifest into eating disorders, amenorrhea (absence of menstrual period), and osteoporosis in at-risk female athletes.

A new study of teenagers has found that the same risk factors are associated with both being overweight and with disordered eating behaviors like binge eating and using diet pills. Moreover, food related problems are extraordinarily common among urban teens affecting 44 percent of adolescent girls and 29 percent of boys. The study also suggests that teasing teens about weight is no joke, especially when the teasing comes from family.

Although anorexia nervosa is categorized as an eating disorder, it is not known whether there are alterations of the portions of the brain that regulates appetite.

Nearly 10 million women and one million men suffer from diagnosed eating disorders; many more have symptoms that have yet to be clinically identified and treated.

Researchers report that fasting or eating half as much as usual every other day may shrink your fat cells and boost mechanisms that break down fats. Consuming less calories and increasing physical activity is usually what people do to lose weight and stay healthy. But some people prefer to adopt a diet which consists of eating as much as they want one day while fasting the next.

BAPEN is delighted to announce the support of the Welsh Assembly Government, the Scottish Government, the Chief Nursing Officer in Northern Ireland and the Department of Health in England for the UK’s first Nutrition Screening Week (NSW) to establish the extent of malnutrition on admission to hospital and care homes across all four nations.

Pregnancy may open a window of vulnerability for developing binge eating disorder, especially for women from lower socio economic situations, according to a study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers and colleagues in Norway. In a long-term study of 100,000 pregnant Norwegian women, the researchers saw an unexpected increase in new incidences of binge eating disorder that began during pregnancy.

A University of Iowa professor is making a case for a new eating disorder she calls purging disorder. The disorder is similar to bulimia nervosa in that both syndromes involve eating, then trying to compensate for the calories. What sets the disorders apart is the amount of food consumed and the way people compensate for what they eat. Women with purging disorder eat normal or even small amounts of food and then purge, often by vomiting.