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Home » Diets that Work » New VTCRI center to explore if people can think their way to smaller waists (copy) – Roanoke Times

Can people be taught to think their way to smaller waists?

Scientists in Roanoke and Blacksburg plan to team up with Carilion Clinic doctors to explore the answer.

The work will be done at a new lifestyle center that the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute is building in Roanoke. Researchers will look at the connection between the mind and the body, and at whether people who are coached to think differently will eat better, exercise more and change the way their bodies burn calories.

Warren Bickel, who studies how people make decisions, and Matthew Hulver, who looks at how their bodies use energy, will head the Center for Transformative Research on Health Behaviors in Roanoke.

One of the impetuses for this is we are getting better at treating diseases that have a strong biological basis, Bickel said. Whats going to be a bigger piece of health care, and the costs, are the things we do to ourselves. We eat too much. We dont exercise enough. We consume too many substances. We dont follow physicians advice. So health behavior, in a very real sense, has a great potential to be the future of medicine.

The center will be in Carilions Riverside 1 building, a stones throw from the VTC Research Institute and School of Medicine, and is the first spinoff to be created within the Roanoke Innovation District.

Bickel and Hulver have been meeting with other Tech researchers and with Carilion physicians to pursue collaborations that will help them better understand the body-mind connections that affect health.

Bickels research at the VTC Research Center looks at which regions of the brain are involved in decision-making. People who use regions that are more prone to impulsive behavior tend to value the future less and think more short-term. They are also more likely to overeat, drink too much and become addicted to substances. Its a process he terms discounting the future.

Hulvers research at the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Department of Human Nutrition, Foods and Exercise looks at the physiology of metabolism and how it is affected by high-calorie, high-fat, Westernized diets that contribute to obesity and diabetes.

One of the first conversations Warren and I had was that certain parts of the brain are more impulsive and certain parts are more logical. It would be interesting to see how those affect obesity, Hulver said. If this part of your brain is lighting up, and youre impulsive, there have got to be some signals going out to the body.

They have started screening 200 people using Bickels method of assessing the way they value the future, and will then use Hulvers methods to measure whole-body metabolism and how people with extreme ways of thinking respond to a meal with the aim of exploring a link between brain decisions and metabolism.

Bickel and Hulver said the center goes beyond their collaborations and will function as a clearinghouse for others studying health behaviors.

Bickel said he and Michael Friedlander, Techs vice president for health sciences and technology and executive director of the research institute, were talking about moving into health behaviors at the same time Techs translational obesity center was looking for a new direction.

We said, what if we combined our interests, because they clearly overlap they are different parts of the same beast, sort of like the elephant, ones grabbing one part, the other is grabbing another part and actually put it together? Wed have more than the sum of the parts and could actually generate more interest and excitement and involvement, Bickel said.

The center plans to link researchers in Blacksburg and Roanoke with Carilion clinicians to work on projects that can affect the health of people living in the area.

Knowing how to change health behaviors, that lead to major expenses and utilize a lot of resources, and helping people change is where medicine is going to be heading in the next 20 to 30 years, Bickel said.

The center is expected to open in June.

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New VTCRI center to explore if people can think their way to smaller waists (copy) - Roanoke Times

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Home » Diets that Work » New VTCRI center to explore if people can think their way to smaller waists (copy) – Roanoke Times