Eating Disorders diagnosed from hair strands

Chris in his blog a couple of days back has talked about the research on how your body image can influence your decision about checking your weight and getting back to shape.

The latest research from Brigham Young University in Utah may help you pinpoint what is wrong with your diet even if you cannot assess yourself or would not like to disclose to your dietician.

According to the research, your hair strands provide an insight to an eating disorder if you have one. The researchers identified differences in the contents of nitrogen and carbon in the hair strands taken from female volunteers who had an eating-disorder and those who did not have one.

They could identify the source of the disorder 80% of the time.

Hair can show the patterns of diet of an individual, according to Kent Hatch, a professor in BYU’s department of integrative biology and the principle author of the research published in a journal, Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry.
Your hair grows continuously every day. Their chemistry changes on a day-to-day basis, which has been found to be linked with your daily intake of nutrition or lack of it. Just five strands of your hair can indicate if you have anorexia or bulimia, the two most common eating disorders.

The research, which needs to be perfected for wider usage, can help a clinician diagnose an eating disorder at a much earlier stage.

Doctors and therapists in their diagnosis of an eating disorder normally have to depend upon what their patients say about what and how much they eat. “Their self-evaluation is very impaired; they are poor historians too”, says Jennifer Tolman, clinical director of a treatment facility in Utah.

According to Ayurveda, the ancient Indian system of well being and healing, it is very important for you to know when you must eat, when you must not and when you must stop while eating. For instance, it takes 45 minutes to an hour after a meal for you to know whether you have eaten just enough, or have overeaten. Your correct biorhythms about such body processes are set very early in life. The parents who force their kids to eat when they are not hungry help set wrong biorhythms for them to grow into sick individuals. Yoga has been found to help correct such imbalances.

Add comment October 19th, 2006 Written By: lalitgambhir