Nutrition and Dietetics expert, Parvathy Radhakrishnan answers readers’ questions on nutrition. Get your doubts cleared and see them featured on our FAQ page every Wednesday.

This week’s answers:

1. Hello Mam, I am Harish Shahi, My age is 25 and my height is 5 feet 9 inch and my weight si 80 KG. Mam I got heart attack two years back and I am taking medicines also. My doctor is saying to reduce weight. I am gaining weight progressively however I have reduced my diet 3-4 months back. Presently I take 250 GM milk with an apple in the breakfast some time poha I take.Then in the lunch I take 2-3 chapati with green vegetable and in the night I take 2-3 chapati.
I don’t use gee and any other oily things.
Mam Please suggest how to reduce weight.
Harish Shahi
Harish, please follow the diet given here

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Low-dose aspirin is a cheap and effective way to prevent potentially deadly blood clots forming in patients’ legs or the lungs. Low-dose aspirin could thus save the lives of people with a history of blood clot.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Sydney, found that people who have suffered blood clots in the veins of the leg (deep vein thrombosis or DVT) or the lungs (pulmonary embolism or PE) are less likely to suffer a recurrence of the serious blood clots or a heart attack when on low-dose aspirin.

“The results suggest the simple, inexpensive treatment of low-dose aspirin could prevent thousands of patients from experiencing recurrent clots each year and may make substantial healthcare savings in Australia and worldwide,” said John Simes, professor at the University of Sydney, The New England Journal of Medicine reports.

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French fries, the scourge of nutritionists, are actually healthy for you, according to researchers.

Professor Vincenzo Fogliano, who oversaw the study with Italian chef Giuseppe Daddio said that fries are not bad for us.

“If it’s fried in the correct way, a potato chip…can be an excellent nutritional product,” the Sydney Morning Herald quoted him as saying.

The pair arrived at the conclusion by studying the way that cooking oil – which is usually loaded with fat – is absorbed during the frying stage.

Zucchini and eggplant, thought of as healthy, absorbed 30 percent of the oil. Potatoes and pizza absorbed just five percent.

Potatoes resisted the oil because they’re full of starch, Professor Fogliano said.

“A fundamental rule is that starch plays an important part in sealing the food being fried and reducing the oil absorption. The starch in potatoes….is particularly effective,” he said.

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A study led by King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) has provided the most detailed understanding yet of the brain processes involved in teenage alcohol abuse.

Alcohol and other addictive drugs activate the dopamine system in the brain, which is responsible for feelings of pleasure and reward. Recent studies from King’s IoP found that the RASGRF2 gene is a risk gene for alcohol abuse, however, the exact mechanism involved in this process has, until now, remained unknown.

“People seek out situations which fulfill their sense of reward and make them happy, so if your brain is wired to find alcohol rewarding, you will seek it out. We now understand the chain of action: how our genes shape this function in our brains and how that, in turn, leads to human behaviour,” said Professor Gunter Schumann, from King’s IoP and lead author of the study.

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Researchers from Sweden have identified a protein in blood that can indicate who is at risk of diabetes at an early stage, thereby reducing the chances of the disease to damage areas like blood vessels and eyes because of late diagnosis.

“We have shown that individuals who have above-average levels of a protein called SFRP4 in the blood are five times more likely to develop diabetes in the next few years than those with below-average levels,” Anders Rosengren, a researcher at the Lund University Diabetes Centre (LUDC), who led the work on the risk marker, said.

It is the first time a link has been established between the protein SFRP4, which plays a role in inflammatory processes in the body, and the risk of type 2 diabetes.

Studies at LUDC, in which donated insulin-producing beta cells from diabetic individuals and non-diabetic individuals have been compared, show that cells from diabetics have significantly higher levels of the protein.

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Social media may be an effective tool to help children overcome obesity, a new study has suggested.

According to a new American Heart Association scientific statement, published online in the association’s journal Circulation, social media can be proved to be a useful tool for ‘promoting healthy behavioural change’.

“Online communication and social media are an increasing part of our lives and our overall social network of family, friends and peers. Healthcare providers should embrace its potential as a tool for promoting healthy behavioural change,” Jennifer S. Li, M.D., M.H.S., chair of the writing group said.

“The studies we looked at suggest that more parental involvement and more interaction with counselors and peers was associated with greater success rates for overweight children and teens who participated in an online intervention,” she added.

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