I recently listened to an interesting podcast about the placebo affect and the power of belief in healing. Chris Kresser always has excellent podcasts and blog articles, and this is no exception. Toward the end there are some good points about how we can harness this research to affect our own health and happiness.

They said: “Positive beliefs about future outcomes, especially when connected with an intervention recommended by a clinician, may trigger those outcomes.  Moreover, much of medical practice consists of repeated rituals that may create conditioned responses that can be reactivated in the future by placing the patient in a similar environment.  In conscious persons, conditioning overlaps with learning, thus creating positive expectancies.”  So, in other words, just the ritual of going to the doctor and getting a prescription or a diagnosis or the doctor telling you that you’re going to get better can have a real, measurable, biological effect on healing.

 For example, in Italy blue placebos make really good sleeping pills for women, but they had the opposite effect on men.  Like, they actually gave men worse insomnia.  And they were really trying to figure out why this would be until somebody pointed out that the Italian soccer team’s color is blue and, you know, Italian men are crazy for soccer, it gets them really excited, so the theory was that the association of Italian men with blue was as a really stimulating color, and that actually affected the outcome or the effect of these placebo treatments.

Key points:

Studies have looked at the type and quantity of food intake, but nobody has undertaken the question of whether the timing of what you eat and when you eat it influences body weight, even though we know sleep and altered circadian rhythms influence body weight,” said the study’s lead author Molly Bray, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology in the UAB School of Public Health.

Bray said the research team found that fat intake at the time of waking seems to turn on fat metabolism very efficiently and also turns on the animal’s ability to respond to different types of food later in the day. When the animals were fed carbohydrates upon waking, carbohydrate metabolism was turned on and seemed to stay on even when the animal was eating different kinds of food later in the day.

“The first meal you have appears to program your metabolism for the rest of the day,” said study senior author Martin Young, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine in the UAB Division of Cardiovascular Disease. “This study suggests that if you ate a carbohydrate-rich breakfast it would promote carbohydrate utilization throughout the rest of the day, whereas, if you have a fat-rich breakfast, you have metabolic plasticity to transfer your energy utilization between carbohydrate and fat.”

The New York Times reports that in Japan, “under a national law that came into effect two months ago, companies and local governments must now measure the waistlines of Japanese people between the ages of 40 and 74 as part of their annual checkups.

“Those exceeding government limits – 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women, and having a weight related ailment will be given dieting guidance if after three months they do not lose weight. If necessary, they will be steered toward further re-education after six more months.”

The government will impose financial penalties on companies and local governments that fail to achieve targets for reducing the overweight population.

Yet the Japanese are nowhere near as overweight as Americans. The average waste size for American men is 39 inches, 36.5 for women. It is 32.8 for Japanese men and 28 inches for women.

Read More here. While I am not sure that the government should be monitoring the people’s waste lines I do see insurance companies should start doing something similar. Of course there is more to being health than having a slim waist, but it is a good starting point.