A new study has revealed that the brain can control eating behavior, and considering the long-term consequences of your food choices may help control food cravings.

Two research studies have showed that the way one thinks about food can have an impact on appetite, and many others on the relationship between the brain and eating behavior.

Kathryn Demos, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Miriam Hospital at Brown University and her colleagues used functional MRI scans to watch participants brains as they reviewed pictures of enticing foods, like pizza, French fries and ice cream.

Through the scans, the researchers were able to evaluate different strategies to reduce the desire to eat and found that thinking about the long-term negative impact of eating these foods may be an effective way to reduce appetite.

Through the MRI scans, the researchers identified that thinking about the long-term negative impact of eating unhealthy foods increased activity in a region of the brain involved in inhibitory control and self-regulation.

The results also showed the promising possibility that focusing on the long-term consequences of consuming unhealthy foods could help diminish cravings and, as a result, potentially enhance weight-loss efforts.

By transforming human scar cells into blood vessel cells, scientists have discovered a new way to repair damaged tissue.

The method appeared to improve blood flow, oxygenation and nutrition in injured areas.

Fibroblasts - cells that cause scarring and are plentiful throughout the human body - can be coaxed into becoming endothelium, an entirely different type of adult cell that forms the lining of blood vessels, the scientists learnt.

"To our knowledge, this is the first time that trans-differentiation to a therapeutic cell type has been accomplished," said the study's principal investigator Chair John Cooke from the Houston Methodist Research Institute in the US.

"In this particular case, we have found a way to turn fibroblasts into 'shapeshifters' nearly on command," Cooke added.

The new method described by the scientists involves tricking fibroblasts cells into reacting as if attacked by a virus.

Fibroblasts' response to a viral attack - or, in this case, a fake viral attack - appears to be a vital step in diverting fibroblasts toward a new cell fate, the researchers found.

The regenerative medicine approach provides proof-of-concept that a small molecule therapy that could one day be used to improve the healing of cardio-vascular damage or other injuries.

"It is likely that modifications of this small molecule approach may be used to generate other body cells of therapeutic interest," Cooke concluded.

The study appeared will appear in the upcoming issue of Circulation.

Instead of hurting egos, super-thin models featured in beauty magazines boost "thinspiration", the belief of normal-sized women that they can make themselves look just as attractive as the models they see in these magazines, finds a research.

The researchers found that the women buying beauty magazines to look thin are less likely to engage in weigh-loss activities.

"Women get the message that they can look just like the models they see in the magazines," said Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, author of the study and professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

"It makes them feel better at first, but in the long run women are buying into these thinness fantasies that just won't come true," Knobloch-Westerwick said.

The study involved 51 female college students.

The study found that women who felt greater "thinspiration" by viewing images of thin models were actually less likely to engage in weight-loss behaviours.

"They felt better about their body instantly when viewing the images and related content. They were not thinking about what they had to do to look like these models," Knobloch-Westerwick pointed out.

The study appeared online in the journal Health Communication.

A new study has revealed that a diet rich in omega-3 could help tackle children's reading difficulties.

According to the study by researchers at University of Oxford, the key to dyslexia is hearing and in order to do phonics correctly, you've got to hear the order of sounds in the word very clearly, the Guardian reported.

Professor John Stein said that many dyslexics hear the sounds, but they can't get them in the right sequence because their auditory nerve cells are not working fast enough, and we think this is because of a lack of certain omega-3 fatty acids.

One of the alleles believed to be associated with dyslexia is involved in metabolising these crucial omega-3 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids. One of these, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), makes up 50 percent of the membranes of nerve cells in the auditory system, known as magnocells. DHA and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) are also involved in creating the myelination around nerve cells, which allows signals to pass more quickly.

When they work properly, auditory magnocells track rapid fluctuations in sound frequency and amplitude; the subtle cues that enable you to distinguish the sequence in which sounds occur. To do this, they require their membranes to be highly flexible and able to react quickly. However, Stein believes the development of these magnocells is impaired in many dyslexic people, and that this may be the result of a lack of DHA and EPA, both of which are found in fish oil.

Current recommendations suggest we should consume around 220mg of DHA a day. Our ancestors would easily have exceeded this, with fish forming one of the main components of their diets. However, since the advent of processed ready-meals, the amount we consume has fallen drastically. Last year, the British Nutrition Foundation found that around 80% of five- to 16-year-olds in the UK eat fewer than two portions of fish a week.

The study found that it was possible to improve the reading abilities of children by giving them supplements of DHA. A larger replication study is currently underway to try to confirm this finding.

The heart holds its own pool of immune cells capable of helping it to heal after injury, finds research, adding that the harmful immune cells from the bone marrow disrupts this process in adults.

These immune cells are called macrophages - whether they reside in the heart or arrive from the bone marrow.

Blocking the bone marrow's macrophages from entering the heart protects the organ's beneficial pool of macrophages, allowing them to remain in the heart where they promote regeneration and recovery, research on mouse model showed.

"This may explain why the young heart can recover while the adult heart cannot," said Kory Lavine from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

"The same macrophages that promote healing after injury in the neo-natal heart also are present in the adult heart but they seem to go away with injury," Lavine explained.

The investigators found that the helpful macrophages originate in the embryonic heart and harmful macrophages originate in the bone marrow and could be distinguished by whether they express a protein on their surface called CCR2.

Macrophages without CCR2 originate in the heart; those with CCR2 come from the bone marrow, the research showed.

The researchers found that a compound that inhibits the CCR2 protein could block the bone marrow's macrophages from entering the heart.

"When we did that, we found that the macrophages from the bone marrow did not come in," Lavine said.

"And the macrophages native to the heart remained. We saw reduced inflammation in these injured adult hearts, less oxidative damage and improved repair. We also saw new blood vessel growth," Lavine added.

The study appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.