College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

The secret life of Virginia Tech electronic pubs, and no we don’t mean a virtual space to grab a pint

By in Feature 1 Comment Tags:

Former Virginia Tech President Charles Steger’s dissertation is 339 pages long. But it doesn’t take up an inch of shelf space at Virginia Tech’s Newman Library. That’s because it is available online at VTechWork’s Electronic Theses and Dissertations collection.

Virginia Tech was the first university on Earth to mandate that graduate students use an ETD system. Currently, the system is a package designed to obtain electronic approvals from committee members and the graduate school and deposit the thesis or dissertation at the library for electronic access and storage. Since its launch, the ETD publishing procedures at Virginia Tech have been flexible and allow students to designate varying levels of access to their thesis or dissertation. People all over the world can query the database at VTechWorks and download the thesis or dissertation for viewing on their personal computer.

Professor Gail McMillan at Virginia Tech’s Libraries, Professor of Computer Science Ed Fox, and former Associate Provost for Graduate Studies John Eaton collaborated to launch this innovation. The ETD initiative began in the 90s with discussions across the library, departments and graduate school and with external collaborators at other universities. After two years of testing, on April 5, 1996, Jinxia Sun became the first student to deposit a dissertation in the system titled Characterization of Organosilicone Surfactants and Their Effects on Sulfonylurea Herbicide Activity. Sun is now a Virginia Tech alumna and a research manager at Croda in Delaware where she heads up teams to develop agricultural applications of surfactants . Since becoming mandatory on January 1, 1997, over 27,160 ETDs have been added to the collection. This number includes some bound theses and dissertations that the library pulled off the shelf, scanned and uploaded to VTechWorks’ ETD collection.

The ETD initiative was the “most important and effective” change that made research more open said Fox. Virginia Tech’s motivation to move from bound theses and dissertations to online versions was rooted in our mission as a land-grant university to share the knowledge created by our scholars with the public.
The ETD initiative has had four notable benefits:

1. worldwide accessibility.

2. space savings at the library.

3. faster access.

4. enhanced content.

Unlike a printed document sitting on a shelf, the ETD database archives diverse file types. Since Virginia Tech formally launched the ETD initiative in 1997, hundreds of universities all over the world have followed suit.

The ETD initiative is about more than just storage, though. It teaches graduate students about the responsible conduct of research.

“The vision for the ETD initiative is eternal. There will always be a need for a future professoriate that has the right skills for the job,” said Fox. “When graduate students deposit their thesis or dissertation in the ETD collection, they are learning the technical skills required to create and manage files for sharing and long term storage. At the same time, they are participating in and contributing to the open culture scientists must practice in research.”

The ETD initiative has certainly proven to improve accessibility to research. The data files for Glen R. Gibson’s dissertation titled “War and Agriculture: Three Decades of Agricultural Land Use and Land Cover Change in Iraq” have been accessed more than 3,500 times. The ETD initiative has also improved the richness of graduate students’ thesis or dissertation. From the beginning, students have taken advantage of the ability to deposit any kind of file that showcases the scope of their research. Unlike the dissertations of President Steger’s era, today, ETDs can contain color photographs, videos, websites, non­standard page sizes, raw data files or code.

Fox’s Ph.D. student, Uma Murthy, created a tool that helps a user identify fish. She deposited her code and fish database along with her electronic dissertation so that future users can access the fish ID tool.

On January 1, 2017, Virgnia Tech’s ETD initiative will celebrate its 20th anniversary. As a virtual resource, it is awkward to throw a party for something that doesn’t have a physical form. There won’t be a party with cake and balloons. But we can still celebrate. The best way to honor the achievement is to use it. Pull out your laptop, tablet or phone and browse the scholarly work of Virginia Tech’s community.

Highlights of the ETD collection include contributions from an astronaut, a high-ranking USDA official, and video files of historic Turkish coffee houses among others:
Former VT President Charles Steger’s dissertation:
“An integrated modular watershed planning model applied to the Upper South River watershed, Waynesboro, Virginia.”

http://hdl.handle.net/10919/27427

Astronaut Charles Camarda’s dissertation:
“Development of advanced modal methods for calculating transient thermal and structural response”

http://hdl.handle.net/10919/39810

USDA Undersecretary Catherine Woteki’s dissertation:
“Some nutritional considerations of lactose malabsorption in Mexican American children.”

http://hdl.handle.net/10919/37854
An example of video files in a dissertation:
“A Contemporary Turkish Coffeehouse design Based on Historic Traditions” by Oral, Timur

http://hdl.handle.net/10919/36551
An example of a website as a dissertation:
“bipolar[i].discuss();” by Walker, Megan Anna Hein

http://hdl.handle.net/10919/23805
Graduate student Uma Murtha’s fish identification tool:
“Digital Libraries with Superimposed Information: Supporting Scholarly Tasks that Involve Fine Grain Information” by Murthy, Uma


http://hdl.handle.net/10919/26866

An example of color used in a dissertation:
“An Urban Park Pavilion as a Sense of Place: A Community Theater and Water Taxi Terminal at the Foot of King Street” by Seong, Rok

http://hdl.handle.net/10919/71283

Written by Nancy Dudek, grants coordinator, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

Researchers discover a royal flush in wastewater

By in Feature No Comments Tags: , , , , ,

VT115710_201600140143

As far as sources of renewable energy are concerned, poop would seem a likely candidate as a never-ending supply of fuel.

But it turns out wastewater energy plants stink at maximizing their energy output in a sustainable way.

Nationally, treatment plants consume 5 percent of the country’s total output, but that could be significantly reduced if the plants could harvest the energy from the waste that people flush down their drain pipes every minute of every day.

Two Virginia Tech researchers have discovered a way to harness the energy from wastewater using two distinct methodologies: using a novel tracing technology to determine which bacteria work well together to chew through waste, and also which ones are good conductors of energy.

Xueyang Feng and Jason He traced bacteria, which led them to discover that the working relationship between two specific substrates produced more energy than either did separately. This work will help take the mystery out of how electrochemically active bacteria create energy. It could help in the development of new treatment system called a microbial fuel cell.

“Tracing the bacteria gave us a major piece of the puzzle to start generating electricity in a sustainable way,” said Feng, an assistant professor of biological systems engineering. “This is a step toward the growing trend to make wastewater treatment centers self-sustaining in the energy they use.”

Feng is in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Engineering; He, an associate professor of environmental engineering, is in the College of Engineering.

The discovery is important because not all organics perform the same job in the same way. Some work because they are food for the electricity-generating bacteria while others are good at conducting energy.

While one substrate known as lactate was mainly metabolized by its host bacteria to support cell growth, another substrate known as formate was oxidized to release electrons for higher electricity generation.

The team found that when these two substrates are combined, the output of energy is far greater than when they are working separately. The organics work in tandem with receptors in fuel cells, and while research using microbial fuel cells is not new, the kind of organics that Feng and He used was novel in generating electricity because they were able to measure the symbiotic nature of two particular organics.

The unique methodology that allowed them to trace the metabolic pathways of the different strains of bacteria, called carbon 13 pathway analysis, was the first time this type of isotope labeling process was used in measuring metabolism in microbes, the researchers said. The analysis works by creating a non-radioactive isotope on a carbon group that is visible through a mass spectrometry.

Harnessing energy from wastewater is a sustainability measure that even urban plants such as the wastewater treatment facilities in Washington, D.C.

The results of this work encouraged the further development of microbial fuel cells, especially system scaling up. The He lab is currently operating a 200-L microbial fuel cell system in a local wastewater treatment plant for evaluating its long term performance with actual wastes.

For now, however, Feng and He are not only giving wastewater it’s moment in the sun, they are making sure that, whether it’s ammonia or organic waste, that producing energy from wastewater is part of a movement.

Watch a video here about He and Feng’s discovery.

Researchers respond to threat of Zika virus

By in Feature 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , ,

1454960788236 1

While the Zika virus has been busy grabbing headlines as a public health menace that seemingly came out of nowhere, it is in fact just the latest iteration of viruses — from a family called flaviviruses — to rear its head as a public health menace. Flaviviruses stealthily adapt quickly to changing environments to infect the human population.

“Today, it’s Zika virus. Yesterday it was West Nile virus and chikungunya virus,” said Kevin Myles, an associate professor of entomology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Fralin Life Science Institute affiliate. “It’s always going to be something and you can’t predict what it’s going to be next. So what you have to do is develop a sound research infrastructure that’s in place and ready to go so you can rapidly respond to the next threat.”

That’s exactly what Myles and colleague Zach Adelman, also an associate professor of entomology and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Fralin Life Science Institute affiliate, are doing in their labs.

The flavivirus family also includes other important pathogens, such as yellow fever virus and four different dengue viruses.

Myles and Adelman will now begin work on Zika virus.

“Viruses evolve very rapidly, especially these types of viruses because they are RNA viruses,” said Myles. “In fact, the traditional definition of a species doesn’t even apply to a RNA virus. They actually exist as what’s called a quasi-species, which can be thought of as a swarm of RNA sequences. This allows these viruses to adapt to a changing environment very rapidly.”

Zika virus has infected a growing number of Americans over the past few months, and the disease may cause a birth defect called microcephaly, in which infected pregnant women give birth to brain-damaged babies with abnormally tiny heads.

While Zika had only previously been associated with mild symptoms in humans, it may produce more severe symptoms in areas where the virus has been recently introduced because populations have no pre-existing immunity.

Myles pointed out that the development of a vaccine is paramount to resolving the current public health crisis. However, other tools, such as new strategies for vector control, for example gene drives, should also be explored to prevent future viral outbreaks.

One application of gene drive might involve genetically engineering a mosquito to either increase or decrease its immunity to a virus; the mosquito would either never become infected or would die quickly before it could transmit the virus to another host. Of course there are also more conventional approaches to vector control, which would involve regional, state, or national organization participation in coordinated spraying.

Read about more actions you can take to protect yourself from Zika virus here.

Photo Credit: CDC/James Gathawy

 

 

Traveling at the Speed of Evolution

By in Feature No Comments Tags: , , , , ,

VT8088_2101172 011

Chickens are unlikely harbingers of the invention of time travel, but a recent study using a line of White Plymouth Rock foul developed in Virginia Tech’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences caused evolutionary history to speed up a bit.

Specifically, the experiment proved that evolution happens 15 times faster than previously thought.

The research was published recently in Biology Letters, a journal of Royal Society Publishing. The discovery involved researchers from several universities, including the University of York, Oxford University, the University of Sydney, Uppsala University, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and Virginia Tech.

“This experiment and many others involving everything from animal appetites to genetics could never have been done without the pedigree lines here at Virginia Tech,” said Siegel, distinguished professor emeritus of animal and poultry sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “This experiment was also an excellent example of international collaboration between six countries that was necessary for the success of the study.”

Siegel’s other primary research area using genetic lines of chickens focuses on why some animals pack on pounds and others don’t, and will be a key component of finding out how to breed chickens to feed the projected 9 billion people set to besiege the planet in 2050.

Siegel, along with Ben Dorshorst and Christa Honaker, also in the Virginia Tech Department of Animal and Poultry Sciences, were co-authors on the current paper.

The pedigree lines of White Plymouth Rock chickens were developed by Siegel, who began breeding them in 1957. From the common founder population, he produced two distinct lines of chickens selected for high- and low-body weight. Today, the high-weight line dwarfs its low-growth counterpart by an average of 12 times more by the time they reach the eight-week selection age.

In the latest experiment, researchers analyzed blood samples of chickens of the same generation using the most distantly related maternal lines to reconstruct how the mitochondrial DNA passed from mothers to daughters.

Mitochondria are specialized structures in the cells of animals, plants, and fungi that generate energy, synthesize proteins, and package proteins for transport to different parts of the cell and beyond.

Previously, estimates put the rate of change in a mitochondrial genome about 2 percent per million years,” Greger Larson, professor of archaeology at Oxford University, said in a news release. “At this pace we should not have been able to spot a single mutation in just 50 years, but in fact we spotted two.”

The sampling scheme yielded 385 mitochondrial transmissions that were analyzed for linkages within the mitochondrial DNA.

The rate of evolution was calculated by analyzing the number of observed mutations in the approximately 16,000 samples of mitochondrial DNA in the genome over 47 generations.

The scientists then reconstructed the maternal pedigree based on the mitogenome sequences.

“Our observations reveal that evolution is always moving quickly, but we tend not to see it because we typically measure it over longer time periods,” Larson said in the news release. “Our study shows that evolution can move much faster in the short term than we had believed from fossil-based estimates.”

The experiment also determined that mitochondria are not solely passed down from maternal lines. Strictly maternal inheritance has long been thought of as the characteristic of mitochondrial genomes.

“The thing everyone knew about mitochondria is that it is almost exclusively passed down the maternal line, but we identified chicks who inherited their mitochondria from their father,” said Michelle Alexander, lead author. This finding supports the theory that “paternal leakage” is not such a rare phenomenon.

Invasive Eats

By in Feature No Comments Tags: , , , ,

VT115113_201543040039

Fancy a sweet treat? Well, look no further than your local creeping vine — kudzu, to be exact. Or at least that’s what students in Jacob Barney’s biological invasives class learned this past semester. Kudzu was just one of several species the students learned about and concocted into entrées for an end of the semester project.

The class was an introduction as to why and how invasives become a dominant species in a given region, and send the original tenants of an area packing their bags not unlike the speed at which disgruntled hipsters take off after their “cool” neighborhood gets discovered by the unworthy masses.

And while it’s tempting to think of kudzu as a nasty, rude space invader, the truth is that like the majority of invasives, the plant that ate the South was in fact purposefully introduced in 1876. It later became part of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal and an integral component of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Soil Erosion Service’s plan to stabilize the nation’s soil quality in 1935.

“I wanted students to get a sense of why and how people move species around from this class,” said Barney, assistant professor of plant pathology, physiology, and weed science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “The species we have now were introduced a long time ago, and it’s not always cut-and-dry as to whether or not these species are bad. It really depends on the eye of the beholder.”

So how do you eat kudzu (besides, of course, with a fork)? We aren’t talking about a kudzu salad in this instance. More like kuzu powder, as it’s known in Japan.

Student Elizabeth Gray used the invasive-derived ingredient in a delicious traditional Japanese dessert known as kuzomochi. Kuzu powder is used as a thickener in a gelatinous confection of roasted soy flour and brown sugar.

Other dishes made by the class included fried catfish, crawfish cornbread, rosehip jelly, caribou sausage, kangaroo chili (yes, they are invasive in Australia), and coffee cupcakes made from Arabica beans.

According to the Institute of Applied Ecology, invasive species cost the U.S. over $120 billion annually, and more than $1.4 trillion worldwide, with the annual cost of impact and control efforts equaling five percent of the world’s economy. Their website appliedecology.org, touts the motto, “eradication by mastication,” and features a cookbook called, “They’re Cooked: Recipes to Combat Invasive Species.”

Some herald eating invasives as a way to nosh ourselves out of an infestation of the out-of-control flora and fauna. But that is about as unrealistic as eating one bowl of Cheerios and expecting to get the same amount of fiber in that bowl as an all bran cereal. You would have to eat so many bowls it would be impractical, and also impossible, to ingest equal amounts of colon-cleansing matter, and also to eradicate invasives through regular food production and consumption.

So, what’s the point of eating invasives? As Barney’s class found out invasives are here to stay, but to steal a phrase from Celebrity Chef Alton Brown, they’re also good eats.

Pathways, pigs, and vaccines

By in Feature No Comments Tags: , , ,

VT102485_201427810362

Kiho Lee works with pathways.

Whether these pathways are responsible for food intake, or pathways that viruses use as entryways to the host, Lee and his collaborators want to use these conduits to develop vaccines for humans and find ways for pigs to utilize feed more efficiently.

“Studying pathways means that we effectively have a platform to develop vaccines for a large number of infectious diseases,” said Lee, an assistant professor of animal and poultry sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

He collaborates with Lijuan Yuan, an associate professor of virology and immunology in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology in the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, to study norovirus and rotavirus, both of which cause gastroenteritis.

Their goal is to develop effective vaccines against norovirus gastroenteritis — a condition that is especially prevalent among elderly people and young children and is responsible for 56,000 to 71,000 hospitalizations and approximately 800 deaths per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Their work is conducted in a gnotobiotic pig facility at Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, where pigs are studied.

Lee said pigs display disease symptoms similar to humans and they also correlate to human health better than rodent vaccine testing models.

While Lee conducts research on pigs together with Yuan to develop vaccines, he is also making inroads in hog production.

“Basically I am a pig farmer,” said Lee. “I’m still interested in production. The question I am asking is how can I produce these animals at a high rate and with high efficiency.”

He is developing a way to design models that both agricultural and biomedical industries can utilize to increase profit margins.

Typically it takes two-and-a-half years to select for traits in pigs through conventional genetic engineering approaches, but Lee’s techniques shave two years from the process, which is helpful for agriculture specialists and pharmaceutical companies alike.

“That’s a huge difference,” said Lee. “In six months you have your model. The cost is lowered, and the low cost makes this kind of research practical for agriculture when it was not practical before.”

Lee believes the research will increase livestock production. By revealing pathways in charge of food intake, the animals can better metabolize feed to increase muscle mass.

Lee works in conjunction with Dr. Sherrie Clark, an associate professor of theriogenology — the study of the physiology and pathology of reproductive systems — in the Department of Large Animal Clinical Sciences. Her work in embryo transplantation has helped move the research forward.

Whether it’s biomedicine or hog production, Lee said the research in treating enteric viruses will itself be a pathway for research on more deadly viral diseases.

 

They promised us jetpacks

By in agriculture, Agriculture and LIfe Sciences, Feature 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , ,

zhang

Meet Percival Zhang and Joe Rollin. They may have just ushered in the era of Jetson’s-style transportation, making clean, nonfossil-fuel travel a reality in coming decades.

But it’s not because they’ve invented the hydrogen-oxidized flying cars or personalized jetpacks that pop futurists have been promising us since the pages of science-pulp fiction magazines blew up with images of air-defying heroes in the 1920s.

It’s because the team has discovered a way to create hydrogen fuel using a biological method that greatly reduces the time and money it takes to produce the zero-emissions fuel– using abundantly available common corn stover – the stalks, cobs, and husks – to produce the hydrogen.

Their new discovery is unique in two ways.

Unlike other hydrogen fuel production methods that rely on highly processed sugars, the Virginia Tech team used dirty biomass — the husks and stalks of corn plants — to create their fuel. This reduces the initial expense of creating the fuel and enables the use of a fuel source readily available near the processing plants, making the creation of the fuel a local enterprise.

The team also increased enzymatic generation rates. This reaction rate is fast enough for hydrogen production in distributed hydrogen-fueling stations. The achieved reaction rate is at least 10 times that of the fastest photo-hydrogen production system.

Hydrogen-fueled cars and machinery would displace dependency on fossil fuels that are associated with climate change.

“We believe this exciting technology has the potential to enable the widespread use of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles around the world and displace fossil fuels,” Rollin said.

Commuting by flying car? Not likely anytime soon, but Zhang and Rollin are already making the clean fuel to combat climate change – and maybe even power a jetpack.

Positively Glowing

By in Feature No Comments Tags: , , , ,

Millipede

It’s not a millipede party until someone starts glowing. At least that is how the millipedes known as M. bistipita let their hair down.

And right now they have a lot to celebrate.

Paul Marek, assistant professor of entomology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences who studies the arthropods, recently re-categorized them as belonging to the genus Motyxia, the only genus that is known to glow in the Western Hemisphere.

M. bistipita is also not as showy as its brighter relatives. Diminutive in size compared to other millipedes, the species lives at a lower elevation with few predators and was not thought to belong to the genus of millipedes that glow.

Marek rediscovered a significant piece of the luminosity puzzle while revisiting a Californian millipede that had been literally sitting on a shelf for half a century — Xystocheir bistipita. It had been collected in 1967 and was not seen again until Marek rediscovered it during fieldwork in the foothills of San Luis Obispo, California.

After sequencing their DNA, Marek found that the millipede was in fact related to its luminous cousins, and changed its name to Motyxia bistipita.

Unlike fireflies that glow because of an enzymatic reaction between a luciferase and a luciferin, M. bistipita owes its soft green-blue glow to the reaction of a photoprotein that requires magnesium and is thought to have initially evolved for its antioxidant properties to cope with the oxidative stress of living in a low-lying, dry environment. Bioluminescence was then repackaged as a nocturnal warning signal in millipedes that live at a higher elevation and contend with many more predators.

“Living things glow in many different colors and for many different reasons, but now we know that the early evolutionary role of bioluminescence may be completely different than its modern day function,” he said. “This discovery clarifies the evolutionary origins of many complex traits, not just bioluminescence.”

As their own built-in luminous party favors, Marek has crowned M. bistipita the belle of the creepy crawly ball.

Now they just have to master performing a celebratory conga line in unison with their collective feet.

 

Image: Courtesy of National Geographic Society Expeditions Council

 

Looking for a healthy lifestyle? There’s really no choice in the matter

By in Research No Comments Tags: , , , , ,

childreneating

Ever eaten a salad at lunch to offset the fatty dessert at dinner?

A new study in mice says that exercising our food choice by eating a little bad of this, and a little nutritious of that, is probably not a good strategy for losing weight, or being healthy.

In a first of its kind study researchers at Virginia Tech took a look at the issue in terms of mimicking a real world environment in which people more often than not alternate between eating fattening foods or healthy low-fat ones, such as strolling the grocery store aisles and throwing a bag of cookies in your cart along with a bunch of kale.

Having a choice of either a high-fat or low-fat diet can lead to overeating, researchers found.

Scientist who wrote the paper include George Davis, a professor in both the Department of Human Nutrition, Foods, and Exercise and the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at Virginia Tech; and Deborah Good, an associate professor of human nutrition, foods, and exercise.

Davis and Good are in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and are affiliated faculty of the Fralin Translational Obesity Research Center.

In this study, the team used two sets of mice mothers – those given a high-fat diet, and those given a low-fat diet. The offspring were then given a diet that was high fat, low fat, or one in which they had a choice of foods.

The offspring that had a choice of high- or low-fat foods gained body weight and body fat, and had increased glucose levels. Those on a low-fat diet showed no such negative impacts. They did, however, have a higher energy expenditure compared to those on low- or high-fat diets. Essentially, the mice burned more energy as they wandered around and evaluated which food they were going to eat.

“This study helps to show that if you make good choices, you can overcome some of your natural tendencies and be healthier in the long-run,” said Renee Prater, the associate dean for curriculum, assessment, and medical education at the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine, who was also a study author.

On a larger scale, policymakers could also potentially use this information as leverage to price healthy foods more competitively or make them more available to consumers.

Resolution Revolution: Don’t Drop the Ball Before the Ball Drops

By in Feature 11 Comments Tags: , , , ,

Various foods spread out on a festive table.

It’s that time of year again: candy canes, sugar cookies, and large turkey dinners, followed by eggnog around the fire. For many of us, the holiday season is a joyous time to gather with friends, family, and colleagues to celebrate the year’s cheer.

As I enter the holiday hoorah, I tend to start my New Year’s resolution list. “I’ll watch what I eat after New Year’s,” I’ll say, while eating another serving of pumpkin pie.

“And I’ll start exercising again, too,” I’ll add, propping my feet up on the couch, just in time to continue television’s winter movie marathon.

The problem here is that once the New Year begins, I will have gained weight and likely won’t lose it.

More weight is gained during the holiday season than during any other time of year, explained Brenda Davy, registered dietitian, associate professor of human nutrition, foods and exercise in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and affiliated researcher with the Fralin Life Science Institute and the Translational Obesity Research Center.

Not only is weight gained during the holidays, she added, but it’s often not lost during the course of the rest of the year.

Contrary to resolution frenzy, the healthy solution may not be about getting on the right track after the New Year, but instead about making conscientious choices throughout the holiday season.

Davy also explained that additional weight gain tends to happen this time of year because regular routines change. Instead of heading home after work, we engage in parties, gatherings, late night nostalgia—all surrounded by a plethora of food and drink, right there in front of us, to be tried, discussed, nibbled, gobbled, and juxtaposed with feelings.

So how can we keep from adding on extra pounds? One way is to pay close attention to our behavior during the holiday season rather than wait until the start of the New Year.

In a 2011 study published in SCAN’s Pulse newsletter, Davy, along with Virginia Tech colleagues Jyoti “Tina” Savla, associate professor of human development in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, and Jamie Zoellner, associate professor of human nutrition, food and exercise in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, investigated the effectiveness of daily self-monitoring for weight maintenance over the holidays.

Participants who had already lost weight were able to more successfully maintain their body weight by completing weekly self-tracking logs. In these logs, participants recorded their daily body weight, number of steps per day, and consumption of fruits and vegetables.

Ultimately, the researchers found that self-monitoring body weight, food intake, and physical activity may help prevent weight gain over the holidays.

This is a particularly helpful strategy for overweight, obese individuals because they are potentially at higher risk of gaining weight during the holidays, gaining up to five times more weight than normal weight individuals.

The study also discusses common reasons for general weight gain, including lack of portion control, stress, sugary beverages, eating away from home, consuming too many calories, and lack of physical activity—all behaviors that tend to emerge from holiday festivities and the doldrums of winter months.

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, formerly the American Dietetics Association, supports ways we can eat healthier by offering helpful tips for holiday eating and party planning. For suggestions, visit eatright.org and enter search terms like party time or holiday celebrations to get started. This information is free and open to the public.

For additional information on nutrition and how it affects health and obesity, follow Davy on Twitter @DavyBrenda.

Holidays happen. So this year, let’s cheers to our health and start healthy resolutions before we ring in 2016.

Updated Dec. 22, 2015

1 2
Social Media Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com