• Researchers have found that many students diet, exercise or purge to offset calories from drinking
• This behaviour was observed among female Australian students and is called ‘drunkorexia’
• Drunkorexia appears to be motivated by two key social norms: consuming alcohol and thinness

College students are known to drink too much and eat a poor diet.

So it may not be surprising that new research has revealed that these two unhealthy behaviours often collide on campus.

When students diet, exercise or purge to purposely offset calories they consume from alcohol, experts sometimes call this “drunkorexia”.

The new study, published online recently in the journal Australian Psychologist, discovered that drunkorexia is incredibly common among female college students, and certain psychological thought patterns may be partially to blame.

Early ‘maladaptive schemas’

Based on a survey of nearly 500 female university students in Australia, researchers found that eight in 10 had engaged in drunkorexic behaviours – skipping meals, drinking low-calorie or sugar-free alcoholic beverages, and purging or exercising after drinking – over a three-month period.

Close to three in 10 reported engaging in these behaviours to offset the calories they took in from alcohol. They did not otherwise show signs of an eating disorder.

The study also found that those who engaged in drunkorexic behaviours were likely to share particular thought patterns – called early maladaptive schemas – or deeply held beliefs about oneself that often develop in childhood.

The researchers identified insufficient self-control, emotional deprivation and social isolation as the three particular schemas associated with drunkorexia.

“Drunkorexia behaviour appears to be motivated by two key social norms for young adults – consuming alcohol and thinness,” said study author Alycia Powell-Jones, a clinical psychologist at the University of South Australia.

More intense intoxication

“However, our research indicates that this behaviour can be a coping strategy potentially to manage social anxieties, through becoming accepted and fitting in,” she added.

Prior research has confirmed that excessive drinking and disordered eating often go hand-in-hand, but this study was the first to identify potential underlying causes.

The prevalence of drunkorexia should be cause for concern, according to two experts, as the combination of these two behaviours comes with consequences.

One concern is that restricting food while drinking alcohol increases the intensity of intoxication.

“Having food in your stomach prior to drinking helps to slow down how quickly alcohol enters your bloodstream,” explained Lisa Fucito, an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.

Relatively common behaviours

And alcohol is not a replacement for food – it is just empty calories, added Fucito.

“Individuals who engage in these patterns may actually put on weight and have nutritional deficits,” she noted.

Besides the well-established dangers inherent to eating disorders and excessive alcohol consumption, the combination heightens the risk that one will progress towards more severe forms of the two conditions.

According to Simon Sherry, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, “Individuals who engage in these relatively common behaviours will be at risk to develop the full-blown version of an eating disorder or the full-blown version of a substance use disorder.”

Sherry said, “One of the riskiest things here is that you could move further down a continuum of having a mental illness.”

But he emphasised that there are well-established interventions to treat eating disorders, and he believes that these techniques could manage drunkorexia.

Deeply ingrained psychological factors

“We have roughly three decades of research that suggests cognitive behavioural therapy is an effective intervention for disordered eating, and I think that intervention could easily and flexibly take into account this pattern of behaviour whereby alcohol gets woven into a pattern of disordered eating,” Sherry said.

“I’d be quite optimistic about helping someone who was suffering from this particular collision between food and alcohol problem,” he said.

As this study revealed, there may be deeply ingrained psychological factors that contribute to the development of drunkorexia, and Fucito said that effective intervention would need to address them.

“An effective intervention needs to address both risks – the pressures to be thin and to drink heavily,” Fucito explained.

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• According to a number of studies, napping is a double-edged sword
• Short naps appear to be good for cardiovascular health, whereas long naps don’t
• Napping too long during the day can disrupt overall sleep patterns, and it’s best to ‘maximise sleep at night’

You could read this story now. Or you could take a nap first, and perhaps tackle it feeling more alert and refreshed.

Health-wise, is that a good idea?

Under the right conditions, for the right reasons, probably – if you’re awake to the possible pitfalls.

“A power nap, between 15 and 45 minutes, can improve memory and reduce fatigue for the rest of the day,” said Dr Michael Grandner, director of the Sleep and Health Research Program at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “If you’re otherwise well-rested, that kind of nap can actually boost performance pretty well.”

Long-term effects inconclusive

Some studies even compare the benefits of a midday nap to a cup of coffee, while some companies – including Google and NASA – let workers pencil naptime into their daily schedule.

But the long-term effects of naps are less conclusive.

For example, a 2019 study in the British medical journal Heart tracked the napping habits of nearly 3 500 people over five years and found those who napped once or twice a week were 48% less likely to have a cardiovascular event than those who didn’t. Conversely, a meta-analysis of 11 studies published in the journal Sleep in 2015 showed people who nap for an hour or more a day had 1.82 times the rate of cardiovascular disease than people who didn’t nap.

“We do not know enough about the association of naps with either optimal health or disease risk, especially cardiovascular disease,” said Dr Clete Kushida, a neurologist and professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the Stanford University Medical Center in California. “More research needs to be conducted.”

The more urgent health question, both experts say, is why you’re taking that nap.

Sleep evaluation urged

“If you’re napping because it helps you get through the day, that’s probably a good thing,” Grandner said. “But if you’re napping because you just can’t stay awake, that’s a sign that there’s some underlying health issue. You’re either not getting enough sleep at night or your sleep quality could be very poor.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates one-third of US adults don’t get enough sleep – at least seven hours per night is the standard recommendation – and warns that the risks include heart disease, diabetes, obesity and depression. Even the weary who appear to have slept long enough may have sleep apnoea, a common sleep disorder where breathing is frequently interrupted.

“If an individual has significant daytime sleepiness leading to inadvertent or spontaneous naps, it usually indicates sleep quantity or sleep quality issues,” Kushida said. If the sleep time seems adequate, he urges an evaluation “for sleep disorders and/or medical diseases”.

The ideal nap, Kushida and Grandner agree, shouldn’t last too long.

“You don’t want to get into a deep stage of sleep,” Grandner said. “If you’ve ever woken up from a nap that was too long, you know it because you feel miserable and groggy.”

Napping too long during the day, Kushida added, can disrupt overall sleep patterns. “It’s generally recommended to maximise sleep at night,” he said.

A foundational part of our biology

Grandner said the exception might be if someone occasionally doesn’t sleep enough at night and needs to recoup during the day.

“I call that the sleep replacement nap,” he said. “College students do it a lot. They stay up at night, but then they nap a few hours during the day. That’s not an ideal solution, but it’s not terrible, either.”

Lying down for a nap or laying your head on the desk might be a good time to reflect on the importance of sleep.

“We live in a culture that doesn’t necessarily value sleep,” Grandner said. “We need to stop talking about it as unproductive time, and to stop admiring people who brag about how little sleep they think they need.

“The scientific evidence is there,” he said. “Sleep is a foundational part of our biology, like diet and physical activity. We need to take care of it.”

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• Plant protein has been proven to have a positive effect on longevity
• Diets high in animal protein, on the other hand, are linked to numerous health problems
• Benefits of plant proteins include lower blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels

If you want to live longer, you should choose beans over beef for your protein, a new analysis suggests.

“These findings have important public health implications as intake of plant protein can be increased relatively easily by replacing animal protein and could have a large effect on longevity,” the researchers reported.

Diets high in protein from plants– such as legumes (peas, beans and lentils), whole grains and nuts – have been linked to a lower risk of diabetes, heart disease and stroke, while diets high in animal protein have been linked with a number of health problems.

However, there have been conflicting findings on the association between different types of proteins and the risk of early death, so a group of researchers analysed 32 studies that examined the risk of death from heart disease, cancer and any cause in adults aged 19 and older.

Lower risk of lifestyle diseases

During a follow-up of up to 32 years, just over 113 000 deaths occurred among more than 715 000 participants in the studies. A high intake of total protein was associated with a lower risk of all-cause death.

Consumption of plant protein was associated with an 8% lower risk of death from any cause and a 12% lower risk of death from heart disease. Consumption of animal protein was not significantly associated with risk of death from heart disease or cancer.

Data from 31 of the studies also showed that an additional 3% of energy from plant proteins a day was associated with a 5% lower risk of death from any cause, according to the findings published n 22 July in the BMJ.

Possible reasons for the beneficial effects of plant proteins include lower blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels, which might help reduce the risk of conditions such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes, said Ahmad Esmaillzadeh, a professor of nutrition at Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran, and colleagues.

Further research is required, but the study results “strongly support the existing dietary recommendations to increase consumption of plant proteins in the general population”, the researchers said in a journal news release.

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The question has been central to cryptography for thousands of years, and lies at the heart of efforts to secure private information on the internet. In a new paper, Cornell Tech researchers identified a problem that holds the key to whether all encryption can be broken — as well as a surprising connection to a mathematical concept that aims to define and measure randomness.

“Our result not only shows that cryptography has a natural ‘mother’ problem, it also shows a deep connection between two quite separate areas of mathematics and computer science — cryptography and algorithmic information theory,” said Rafael Pass, professor of computer science at Cornell Tech.

Pass is co-author of “On One-Way Functions and Kolmogorov Complexity,” which will be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, to be held Nov. 16-19 in Durham, North Carolina.

“The result,” he said, “is that a natural computational problem introduced in the 1960s in the Soviet Union characterizes the feasibility of basic cryptography — private-key encryption, digital signatures and authentication, for example.”

For millennia, cryptography was considered a cycle: Someone invented a code, the code was effective until someone eventually broke it, and the code became ineffective. In the 1970s, researchers seeking a better theory of cryptography introduced the concept of the one-way function — an easy task or problem in one direction that is impossible in the other.

For example, it’s easy to light a match, but impossible to return a burning match to its unlit state without rearranging its atoms — an immensely difficult task.

“The idea was, if we have such a one-way function, maybe that’s a very good starting point for understanding cryptography,” Pass said. “Encrypting the message is very easy. And if you have the key, you can also decrypt it. But someone who doesn’t know the key should have to do the same thing as restoring a lit match.”

But researchers have not been able to prove the existence of a one-way function. The most well-known candidate — which is also the basis of the most commonly used encryption schemes on the internet — relies on integer factorization. It’s easy to multiply two random prime numbers — for instance, 23 and 47 — but significantly harder to find those two factors if only given their product, 1,081.

It is believed that no efficient factoring algorithm exists for large numbers, Pass said, though researchers may not have found the right algorithms yet.

“The central question we’re addressing is: Does it exist? Is there some natural problem that characterizes the existence of one-way functions?” he said. “If it does, that’s the mother of all problems, and if you have a way to solve that problem, you can break all purported one-way functions. And if you don’t know how to solve that problem, you can actually get secure cryptography.”

Meanwhile, mathematicians in the 1960s identified what’s known as Kolmogorov Complexity, which refers to quantifying the amount of randomness or pattern of a string of numbers. The Kolmogorov Complexity of a string of numbers is defined as the length of the shortest computer program that can generate the string; for some strings, such as 121212121212121212121212121212, there is a short program that generates it — alternate 1s and 2s. But for more complicated and apparently random strings of numbers, such as 37539017332840393452954329, there may not exist a program that is shorter than the length of the string itself.

The problem has long interested mathematicians and computer scientists, including Juris Hartmanis, professor emeritus of computer science and engineering. Because the computer program attempting to generate the number could take millions or even billions of years, researchers in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, as well as Hartmanis and others in the 1980s, developed the time-bounded Kolmogorov Complexity — the length of the shortest program that can output a string of numbers in a certain amount of time.

In the paper, Pass and doctoral student Yanyi Liu showed that if computing time-bounded Kolmogorov Complexity is hard, then one-way functions exist.

Although their finding is theoretical, it has potential implications across cryptography, including internet security.

“If you can come up with an algorithm to solve the time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity problem, then you can break all crypto, all encryption schemes, all digital signatures,” Pass said. “However, if no efficient algorithm exists to solve this problem, you can get a one-way function, and therefore you can get secure encryption and digital signatures and so forth.”

The research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and was based on research funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Researchers at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA have identified the process by which stem cells in the airways of the lungs switch between two distinct phases — creating more of themselves and producing mature airway cells — to regenerate lung tissue after an injury.

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have demonstrated a direct relationship between climate warming and carbon loss in a peatland ecosystem. Their study published in AGU Advances provides a glimpse of potential futures where significant stores of carbon in peat bogs could be released into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases.

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