James Fishman | Sunstone Online

Emotional Eating Starts Young, Study Finds

Belgian researchers recently explored the roots of emotional eating and found surprising results. Children as young as five will turn to food when they are anxious or stressed. The Belgian team asked more than 300 children who were between the ages of five and ten about their lives. The parents also answered questions in a questionnaire about how often their children ate certain foods.

The results certainly showed a correlation between the stress in a child’s life and the sweets they ate. Researcher Nathalie Michels of Ghent University also showed that levels of the hormone cortisol rose as the stress did.

As a result of the study, Dr. Michels is encouraging schools and parents to teach children how to cope with stress. As she said, “Parents and children should be made aware that stress can influence emotional eating behavior, so they can pay attention to potential triggers and anticipate this behavior. Furthermore, children should be equipped with stress-coping skills, such as problem-solving or asking for help, instead of seeking solace in food.”

Adding to the discussion, Tam Fry of the National Obesity Forum said, “From the moment that an infant is born it learns that sweetness brings comfort. It should therefore be of no surprise that it is sophisticated enough, even by age five, to know that it’ll feel better about some unhappy event having eaten a chocolate biscuit or something sugary.”

Get Your Lick Here: The Edible Mist Machine

It looks like something straight out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but it’s not a story.

Charlie Harry Francis loves inventing things with food. But he doesn’t invent them in the way that you or I would, perhaps. Having grown up on an ice cream farm in South Wales with his dad, an ice cream maker, and his mom, a baker and confectionary maker, Charlie loves finding new ways to deliver food to people.

So far, as his website explains, he’s invented: “the Popcorn Hairdryer, Nitro Ice Cream Buggy, Soup Washing Machine, Gramophone Ice Cream Pottery Wheel, Edible Mist Machine, Instant Lollipop Maker, Whirligig Candyfloss Whirlwind, Levitron Cocktail levitating Device, Glow in the Dark Ice Cream and the Olfactic Dog Nose.”

His latest creation, featured in the video below, is a machine that uses ultrasonic vaporization to create a microscopic mist. You suck this mist through a straw and get an instant flavor hit. And you can enjoy over two hundred flavors this way! This includes everything you could imagine from fois gras and tiramisu to butter, popcorn and beyond. And it’s all calorie free.

It’s called the Edible Mist Machine and it’s created by Charlie and his company Lick Me I’m Delicious. As Charlie explains,”It messes with your mind because your brain expects something to be in your mouth. It’s a pretty fun machine, the range of flavours is massive and we can also produce you a personalised mist from pretty much anything in the World like your favourite book or even your hair. And it’s zero calories.”

Check it out below. And get ready to salivate.

Dog Died? No Problem. PetMatch Has a Replacement for You

If Muffy, your beloved dog, as just died and you’re mourning her loss, there might be another solution. PetMatch, a new app, will help you to find a near replica and to adopt a new dog. Using images of either an old pet or an animal that belongs to a friend, they can help you to find a similar dog nearby.

The app searches for animals that are up for adoption in your local area.

Launched by Californian start-up Superfish, which has a specialty in image search algorithm, they will help you find a local match. Using their patented image recognition technology, they perform geometric analysis.

Users can then browse a list of potential matches and then click through to a profile that they want to see. They can get the contact information for the adoption center where the specific animal is.

The service is only in the US and is only for cats and dogs.

As the developers explained, “PetMatch is a faster, more intuitive way to bring you closer to finding exactly what you’re looking for. Behind the scenes, PetMatch uses Superfish’s patented image recognition technology to find similar adoptable pets in your area [and] gives you all the information you need to connect with the adoption agency.”

The company also has an app called Window Shopping that can help shoppers to find clothing that is similar to something they already have, or that they’ve seen in a shop.

Get to Work Early, Says Recent Study

In a fascinating and potentially important bit of research, the University of Washington found that flextime isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be. Bosses in the study, led by Christopher Barnes of the University of Washington, showed an “early bias” that favored employees who arrived early.

Many international companies allow for flextime. Google lets its employees set their own hours; Microsoft allows many employees to do so as well as long as they come in between 9 and 11 am. At KPMG, 70% of the employees work flexible hours.

As Mr. Barnes found, “People seem to have a tendency to celebrate early-risers. Witness the enduring popularity of aphorisms like Ben Franklin’s ‘early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise’ or, in China, ‘a day’s planning should be done in the morning.”

He explained, “The field study we conducted tested the hypothesis that supervisor ratings of conscientiousness and performance would be associated with the timing of an employee’s work day.” The hypothesis was supported.

The researchers found that supervisors rated employees who came to work early as more conscientious. They received higher ratings than did those employees who came to work later.

They then created a lab experiment to test their theory that supported this early bird theory.

As the researchers concluded, “One way or another, team leaders must come to accept that the people who use flextime to start their day late are not necessarily lazier than their early-bird colleagues.

Otherwise, flextime policies that could serve both employees and employers well will become known, and avoided, as routes to dead-end careers.”

Tapping to Weight Loss

Certainly, there are oodles of fad diets on the market today, and it’s up to readers to decide if this is yet another one. The Tapping for Weight Loss book by author Jessica Ortner says that your diet success starts with your fingertips.

The key here is to tap acupressure points on the face and body to make your cravings disappear. This is also called the Emotional Freedom Technique and is a scientifically backed method that was developed in the Seventies by psychologists who found that it can reduce stress and anxiety.

Medical Research

According to a Harvard Medical School study, when you stimulate these points it decreases the activity in the amygdala which is the area of the brain that controls production of the stress hormone cortisol. This is linked to increased appetite, sugar cravings and levels of abdominal fat.

A recent clinical study with 89 women actually showed that the women who tapped for 15 minutes a day lost approximately 16 pounds in eight weeks without even following a strict diet plan or exercise regime. And they had still kept the weight off six months later.

Get Tapping

So how should you tap? First, you need to identify what is bothering you. Are you upset that you looked fat in a recent picture? Are you frustrated with something at work? Then, you should give a score to the thing that is bothering you from 0 to 10. The ten would mean you are incredibly distressed and the 0 would mean you feel nothing. Tap with two fingers on the “karate chop point” which is the soft part of the hand under the little finger and say a positive statement to yourself three times.

The idea with the tapping is to run through the eight points of the tapping sequence while repeating a phrase to yourself that reminds you about your anger and how to overcome it. The eight points are: the eyebrow, the side of the eye, under the eye, under the nose, the chin, the collarbone, under the arm and the crown of the head. Here is a video that can help you to see the tapping process more. Tap each seven times and spend enough time at each point so that the reminder phrase has time to sink in. Try to tap for at least 15 minutes a day in a quiet location.

When you finish tapping, you should ask yourself if your issues have shifted, if certain thoughts came up while tapping and how you feel now on the scale of 0 to 10.

Watch Out for Your Child’s Nightmares, Says New Study

Recently presented at a Pediatric Academics Societies meeting in Vancouver, Canada was a study that found that nightmares might be tied to bullying. The British-led study from researchers at the University of Warwick followed 6,438 children from birth to age 12. When they were 8-10, they were interviewed about bullying and were then interviewed about nightmares at age 12.

As co-author Dieter Wolke explained, “Our findings indicate that being bullied is a significant stress/trauma that leads to increased risk of sleep arousal problems, such as nightmares or night terrors.”

“It is an easily identifiable indicator that something scary is being processed during the night. Parents should be aware that this may be related to experiences of being bullied by peers, and it provides them with an opportunity to talk with their child about it.”

Researchers found that by the age of 12, 24% of the kids had nightmares and 9% had night terrors.

When adjusting for many factors, the researchers concluded that children who were victims of abuse and bullying were more likely to manifest their distress, anxiety and depression in sleep-related issues.