The cookie diet: What it is

Being hungry and craving sweets are two of the main reasons people fall off their diets. But what if eating cookies and not being hungry was part of your diet plan? The cookie diet uses cookies to entice dieters into easy weight loss. After all, what could be more appealing than losing weight while indulging in one of our favourite treats?

But these are not your grandmother's cookies. Instead they're designed to be meal replacements made with fiber, protein, and other ingredients intended to keep you full. They're not nearly as sweet as grandma's, though they're certainly palatable. They contain no drugs or secret ingredients, other than amino acids (the building blocks of protein) and fiber that act to suppress hunger.

How it works

On the cookie diet, there are no decisions about what to eat, but which flavour cookie to eat, and what to have for dinner. It's a relatively mindless diet strategy that has reportedly helped half a million of patients lose weight.

The cookies contain select amino acids thought to suppress hunger, fiber, and other ingredients that digest slowly to help keep you feeling full. Eating four to six of the cookies a day will give you somewhere around 500 calories.

Dinners are simple: Lean protein and veggies, or a light dinner and a salad. The dinners range from a low of 300 to a high of about 1,000 calories each, meaning the diet has a grand total of 800-1,500 calories per day.

Anyone following 800-calorie per day plan is sure to lose weight, but medical supervision is recommended for people following very low-calorie diets (less than 1,200 per day), as they are likely to be deficient in nutrients. Most of the very low-calorie cookie diet plans recommend a daily multi-vitamin to fill in the nutritional gaps.

"One of the greatest motivators to sticking to a diet is when you manage hunger, decrease cravings, and watch the weight come off, and virtually everyone will lose weight at 800 calories," Siegal says.

Evan Bass, a physician, has been following the cookie diet for more than a year and has lost upto 45 pounds.

"The first two weeks were the hardest," he says. "I was tired with no energy for exercise but once I got used to it, I felt great and could be more physically active while eating cookies daily for breakfast and lunch."

He says he loves the chocolate chip cookies, especially when they're warmed in the microwave, and has not grown tired of eating 6-8 cookies a day.

As a result of being on the diet and checking in regularly, Bass says he has seen his health improve, along with his food choices and his commitment to being physically active.

"To maintain my weight loss, I still eat cookies during the week and allow some indulgences on the weekend," he says. "But I keep a close watch on my weight and when it goes up 5 pounds that is my signal to be more vigilant about what I eat and my activity."

What you can eat

The cookies that replace breakfast, lunch, and snacks range from 90-150 calories each. They come in a variety of flavours, including chocolate, banana, blueberry, oatmeal, and coconut. The cookies are convenient, portable, and don't need refrigeration.

On Siegal's medically supervised cookie diet, you have one meal for dinner, consisting of four to six ounces of lean protein with steamed veggies or raw veggies. The meal contributes about 300 calories. Eight daily glasses of no-calorie coffee, tea, water, or other beverages are allowed, but no alcohol, sweets, fruits, dairy, or other foods are recommended.

Dieters using the online cookie diet plans without medical supervision are directed to eat about 500 calories worth of cookies each day, plus a dinner made up of sensible foods. This approach controls daytime calories, but dinner could be a calorie disaster unless it is chosen wisely.

What the experts say

Dee Sandquist, American Dietetic Association spokeswoman says, "the cookie diet is another version of the meal replacement plan, known to be an effective option for some people. For lots of people, decisions about meals are tough, whether at home or eating out, and when you can drink a shake or, eat a cookie or a bar instead of a meal, it simplifies it and helps some dieters stay in control."She emphasises the importance of making wise food choices when following the cookie diet, and recommends that dieters include lean protein, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, healthy fats, and low-fat dairy in the dinner meal, even it if ends up being more than 300 calories.

She also suggests checking the nutrition facts panel to see how many grams of fiber, carbohydrates, protein, and other nutrients are in each cookie, as these numbers vary from plan to plan.

As for the very low-calorie monitored cookie diet plans, critics say 800 calories is below the recommended level for safe and effective weight loss. They say the 800-calorie cookie diet is lacking in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, dairy, and fiber, all of which should be a part of any healthy weight loss plan. Siegal says that his clinical experience over the last 30 years has shown that fast weight loss is safe under a doctor's care, and that any nutrients lacking in the plan are made up for by the daily multi-vitamin.

The weakness in the cookie diet, experts say, is the lack of an exercise plan. Experts recommend that physical activity should be a regular part of everyone's life.

Food for thought

For people who have trouble controlling what they eat, meal replacement cookies can be an excellent way to control calories and lose weight.

Although the idea of a cookie for a meal sounds like a childhood dream, the truth is that it could get monotonous eating cookies every day. And without regular physical activity and guidance to help you make long-term lifestyle changes, lost weight may creep back.

While you'll most likely to lose quick weight on an 800 calorie a day plan, the cookie diets lack a transitional plan to help dieters get back to eating more normally and to maintain the lost weight.

Dietitians recommend that, once you reach your goal weight, you should increase your intake of healthy foods; especially fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts, and low fat-dairy for at least two meals a day, and rely on meal replacements for one meal a day.

Washington University School of Medicine researchers are taking the first direct look at one of the human brain's most fundamental "foundations": a brain signal that never switches off and may support many cognitive functions. Their findings, appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are an important step forward in understanding the functional architecture of the brain.

Functional architecture refers to the metaphorical structures formed by brain processes and interactions among different brain regions. The "foundation" highlighted in the new study is a low-frequency signal created by neuronal activity throughout the brain. This signal doesn't switch off even in dreamless sleep, possibly to help maintain basic structure and facilitate offline housekeeping activities.

"A different, more labile and higher-frequency signal known as the gamma frequency activity has been the focus of much brain research in recent years," says study author Biyu He. "But we found that signal loses its large-scale structure in deep sleep, while the low-frequency signal does not, suggesting that the low-frequency signal may be more fundamental."

"What we've been finding is reorienting the way we think about how the brain works," adds co-researcher Marcus Raichle. "We're starting to see the brain as being in the prediction business, with ongoing, organised carrier frequencies within the systems of the brain that keep them prepared for the work they need to do to perform mental tasks."

Neurologists have spent many years exploring the upper levels of the brain's functional architecture. In these studies, researchers typically ask volunteers to perform specific mental tasks as their brains are scanned using fMRI. Such "goal-oriented" tasks might include looking for or studying a visual stimulus, moving an arm or leg, reading a word or listening for a sound. As the subjects perform these tasks, the scans reveal increases in blood flow to different parts of the brain, which researchers take as indications that the brain areas are contributing to the mental task.

In the past decade, however, scientists have realised that deeper structures underlie goal-oriented mental processes. These underlying brain processes continue to occur even when subjects aren't consciously using their brain to do anything, and the energies that the brain puts into them seem to be much greater than those used for goal-oriented tasks.

"The brain consumes a tremendous amount of the body's energy resources -- it's only two percent of body weight, but it uses about 20 percent of the energy we take in," says Raichle. "When we started to ask where all those resources were being spent, we found that the goal-oriented tasks we had studied previously only accounted for a tiny portion of that energy budget. The rest appears to go into activities and processes that maintain a state of readiness in the brain."

To explore this deeper level of the brain's functional architecture, Raichle and others have been using fMRI to conduct detailed analyses of brain activity in subjects asked to do nothing. However, a nagging question has dogged those and other fMRI studies: Scientists assumed that increased blood flow to a part of the brain indicates that part has contributed to a mental task, but they wanted more direct evidence linking increased blood flow to stepped-up activity in brain cells.

In the new study, the researchers took fMRI scans of five patients with intractable epilepsy. The scans, during which the subjects did nothing, were taken prior to the temporary installation of grids of electrodes on the surfaces of the patients' brains. The level of detail provided by the grids is essential clinically for pinpointing the source of the seizures for possible surgical removal, a last resort employed only when other treatments failed.

The results confirmed that the fMRI data she had gathered earlier reflected changes in brain cell activity exhibited in the gamma frequency signal. But she also noticed the persistent low-frequency signal, which also corresponded to the fMRI data. "When we looked back in the literature, we found that a similar signal had been the subject of a great deal of animal research using implanted electrodes in the 1960s through the 1980s," she says. "There were suggestions, for example, that when this low-frequency signal, which fluctuates persistently, is in a low trough, the brain may handle mental tasks more effectively."

"What we've shown provides a bridge between the fMRI work many scientists are doing now and the earlier work involving electrical recordings from the brain that emphasised slow activity," says he. "Bringing those two fields together may give us some very interesting insights into the brain's organisation and function."

Like red-light warnings on the dashboard, the human body sends out a flare when something's awry. Chest pain, shortness of breath, dizziness - those are some familiar medical symptoms. But other problems can creep up on you, too - aches and pains, lumps and bumps. It's necessary to know when they are important and when they are not.

Neil Shulman, MD and a professor of internal medicine at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, calls it a serious and likens to "terrorists inside our bodies." The symptoms are "killing way too many people. There's tremendous suffering and horrible death which could be avoided, but people don't know that something's wrong."

In fact, it happens all the time, a symptom is missed and it leads to a tragic ending. Or it's caught just in time, and a life is saved. Quite literally, it's that dramatic, Shulman tells.

Here are "five flags" - five medical symptoms - you should keep in mind:

1. If you have unexplained weight loss and/or loss of appetite , you may have a serious underlying medical illness.

"If you're on a diet, you're expecting this to happen. But if you're eating the same way - and now have to adjust your belt a few notches tighter - you could have a serious problem, so you should see a doctor." Shulman says.

2. Slurred speech, paralysis, weakness, tingling, burning pains, numbness, and confusion are signs of a stroke, and you should get to an appropriate emergency centre immediately. Early treatment may prevent permanent damage to the brain or even save your life.

3. Black, tarry stools may indicate a haemorrhage from an ulcer of the stomach or the small intestine. It is important to stop the bleeding and to rule out cancer as a cause.What you eat changes the colour of stools. But black, tarry stools mean there may be bleeding higher in the digestive tract, says Shulman. It could be a sign of a bleeding ulcer or cancer.

4. A headache accompanied by a stiff neck and fever is an indicator of a serious infection called meningitis. In fact, if you can't put your chin on your chest, that's a sign you may have bacterial meningitis, says Shulman. With bacterial meningitis, you need antibiotics immediately to kill the bacteria before it infects and scars the brain.

5. A sudden, agonizing headache, more severe than any you have felt before, could mean you are bleeding in the brain. Go to an emergency room immediately. A brain aneurysm is rare, but it can happen - even in people under 40. If you have a severe, crushing headache, you may have an aneurysm, which is a blood-filled pouch bulging out from a weak spot in the wall of a brain artery. If treated before it bursts, it could save your life.

Root canals and dental implants are equally successful, but implants may need more follow-up maintenance, a new study shows. Dental implants replace tooth roots. A root canal is a procedure designed to save an infected or decayed tooth. The study comes from researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. James Porter Hannahan, DMD, and Paul Duncan Eleazer, DDS, followed 129 dental implants and 143 root canals for three years, on average. Dental implants and root canals had similar success rates, meaning that the teeth in question were still in the mouth and hadn't rotated or needed further correction. Those success rates were 98 percent to 99 percent. "There appears to be little difference in the success of the two treatments," except that "implants required additional procedures more frequently" than teeth that got root canals, Hannahan and Eleazer told.

Smokers and former smokers who eat lots of broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables may be less likely than other smokers to develop lung cancer. Researchers at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y. reported that news recently in Washington, D.C. at an American Association of Cancer Research meeting on cancer prevention. "The first thing to do is to quit smoking," because that is "still the best thing to do to reduce the risk" of developing lung cancer, researcher Li Tang, PhD, says. Besides quitting smoking, Tang recommends smokers and former smokers eat more cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, turnip greens, mustard greens, and collard greens - especially in their raw form. Tang cautions that "nothing is the magic bullet" guaranteed to prevent lung cancer. But there's no downside to eating more vegetables.Exercise: The brain's fountain of youth