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Less snacking, more satisfaction: Some foods boost levels of an Ozempic-like hormone

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Less snacking, more satisfaction: Some foods boost levels of an Ozempic-like hormone

A fiber found in barley, called beta-glucan, may improve insulin sensitivity, lower blood pressure and increase satiation between meals, research shows.

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A fiber found in barley, called beta-glucan, may improve insulin sensitivity, lower blood pressure and increase satiation between meals, research shows.

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For several months now, I’ve been studying how the new medications, Ozempic and Wegovy, cause dramatic weight loss.

Both medications contain a compound, semaglutide, that squelches hunger like a fly swatter smashes a mosquito. People who take the medication say they no longer have constant cravings for food, so they eat less frequently. The drug seems to quiet what some people call “food noise,” the constant internal chatter telling them to eat.

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While reading study after study about Wevgovy and Ozempic, I learned that the drug mimics a hormone that our bodies naturally make when we’re eating food. It’s called GLP-1. This made me wonder: Could we increase levels of this hormone by changing our diet?

Turns out, the answer is yes – you can increase your body’s production of GLP-1 with your diet, says Frank Duca, who studies metabolic diseases at the University of Arizona. One of the key foods that triggers its release is a food most Americans struggle to eat enough of, even though it comes with a cornucopia of health benefits. Yup, I’m talking about fiber.

Whenever my family finds out that I’m studying obesity or diabetes, they say, ‘Oh, what’s the wonder drug? What do I need to take? What do I need to do?’” Duca explains. “And I say, ‘Eat more fiber.’ “

But here’s the hitch. Not all fiber works the same way. Duca and other researchers are beginning to show that particular types of fibers are more potent at triggering GLP-1 release and at regulating hunger than others. “We’re seeing now that companies are adding fiber to foods, but a lot of the time, they don’t add the kind of fiber that’s super beneficial for you,” Duca says.

How GLP-1 helps flip hunger into satisfaction

To understand why fiber is so important for producing GLP-1, let’s look at what happens when you don’t eat much fiber. Let’s say you wake up in the morning feeling hungry and you eat two slices of white bread and a fried egg. As the digested food moves into the small intestine, many of the nutrients, such as the carbohydrates, fats and amino acids, trigger an avalanche of activity in your blood and brain.

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“The food activates cells in your intestine, which then release a ton of hormones,” says Sinju Sundaresan, who’s a gut physiologist at Midwestern University. About 20 of these hormones, including GLP-1, are known as satiation hormones.

“They tell your body to start absorption, and to suppress your hunger signals,” Sundaresan says. So you slow down eating and eventually stop because you feel satisfied.

At this point, GLP-1 kicks into action. It stimulates the release of insulin and slows down how quickly the bread and egg moves from your stomach into the intestine. So you don’t use up the fuel all at once, says Gary Schwartz, who studies the neuroscience of eating and appetite at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

GLP-1 also likely activates neural circuitry inside the brain by turning on nerves inside the lining of your gut. “These neurons collect information from the gut, and then signal all the way to the brain stem, where you find another signaling pathway for GLP-1,” Schwartz explains.

But GLP-1’s actions are extremely fast. “Once the hormone hits the blood, it begins to be degraded,” says integrated physiologist Darleen Sandoval, at the University of Colorado, who has studied GLP-1 for more than a decade. “By the time GLP-1 gets to the heart and the rest of the circulation, there’s very little of it left,” she says.

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And so an hour or two after eating this no-fiber breakfast, GLP-1 levels in your blood plummet. And when lunch rolls around, you’re hungry again.

This is where GLP-1 differs substantially from semaglutide, the active ingredient in weight-loss drugs. GLP-1 sticks around in the blood for only a few minutes, but semaglutide persists for days. And this stability allows the drug to go into the brain, where it squelches appetite and cravings directly, says Sandoval. That’s why people on these drugs lose so much weight. “In mice or rats, we can give naturally occurring GLP-1 directly into the animals’ brains, and it stops them from eating,” Sandoval says.

But, back to our breakfast scenarios: What if, instead of eating white bread, you had two slices of high-fiber rye bread, with about 8 to 10 grams of fiber in them? Turns out, adding that hefty portion of fiber adds another opportunity for your intestine to release GLP-1, many hours after the meal.

Satiation hormones last longer after eating fiber

Our bodies don’t have the capacity to break down fiber. So it moves through our small intestines largely unchanged, and eventually – approximately 4 to 10 hours after a meal – reaches our colons.

Here, inside the large intestine, the fiber meets a whole crew of microbes that can digest the fiber. Bacteria in your large intestine can break down certain dietary fibers into smaller molecules. And these smaller molecules can trigger the release of not only GLP-1, but also another key hormone that decreases your appetite, called PYY (peptide YY). These smaller molecules also can suppress appetite on their own, and have been linked to lower body weight and better glucose regulation.

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Since this extra boost of GLP-1 and PYY occurs hours after you eat, it can tamp down cravings between meals and even the overall desire to eat the next meal. “PPY regulates satiety – that is how long you wait between meals,” says the University of Arizona’s Frank Duca. “The release of PYY, in addition to the GLP-1, can increase the length of time between meals,” he says.

These hormones may even influence how much you eat at the next meal. “This is what’s called a second meal effect,” says Edward Deehan, a nutritional microbiologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “If you eat a lot of fiber at one meal, by the time it’s in your colon, it’s around the time of your next meal. So you may have improved insulin responses and improved satiety or a feeling of fullness,” Deehan says.

But, not all fiber is equal: To get this extra boost of satiation hormones, you need to eat fiber that bacteria can digest. These fibers are called fermentable because bacteria literally ferment them, in a similar way that yeast ferments barley into beer.

Scientists, such as Duca, have just started trying to figure out which fermentable fibers may be best at suppressing appetite and inducing weight-loss. “So the agricultural community in the U.S. could prioritize the growing of grains with these fibers,” he explains.

In one preliminary study with mice, Duca and his colleagues found that a fiber in barley, called beta-glucan, induced the most weight loss in obese animals. “At face value and, at least in our settings, it was only beta-glucan that was effective,he says.

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How To Add Barley To Your Diet

Cooking barley is super easy. Some recipes call for soaking the grain before boiling. But it’s not necessary. Simply add one cup of barley and three cups of water to a pot.

For pearled barley, continue boiling for about 30 minutes. For hulled barley, boil for about 40 minutes. Strain the water and you’re ready!

You can throw barley into soups or on salads and boiled barley is a great fiber-rich substitute for white rice. You can also buy barley flour and use it for baking breads, muffins and pancakes.

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Beta-glucan is also found in oats and rye. And indeed, studies with people have found that beta-glucan fiber may improve insulin sensitivity, lower blood pressure and increase satiation between meals.

Other fermentable fibers include dextrin in wheat, oligosaccharides in beans, peas and lentils, and pectin in apples, pears and green bananas.

If your diet currently doesn’t include much fiber, Duca says, don’t worry too much about which fiber you start adding. “Just being aware of how much fiber you’re eating and increasing it, that’s a huge step to improving your health,” he says. “Then once you get into the habit of eating more fiber, you can be more specific about adding more beta glucan and barley.”

But beware of processed foods that claim to have fiber added to them, Duca says. “Companies are hearing that they need to increase the fiber in their foods, but then a lot of times, they’re adding fiber that isn’t super beneficial for you,” he says. “It’s the type of fiber that just passes right through you, without triggering the release of any hormones.”

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This story was edited by Jane Greenhalgh

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Rubio Visits NATO Amid European Alarm Over Trump’s Agenda

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Rubio Visits NATO Amid European Alarm Over Trump’s Agenda

Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Brussels on Thursday for a gathering of NATO foreign ministers amid high anxiety over the Trump administration’s approach to Europe, including the war in Ukraine, relations with Russia and President Trump’s growing trade war with the continent.

Mr. Rubio’s visit to the alliance’s headquarters, the first by a senior Trump administration official this year, comes as relations between the United States and Europe have abruptly shifted from the close cooperation of the Biden era to mistrust and acrimony under Mr. Trump.

At the same time, NATO officials may welcome a chance to confer with Mr. Rubio, whom many consider the most pro-alliance member of Mr. Trump’s national security team.

As a senator in 2023, representing Florida, Mr. Rubio cosponsored legislation requiring any president to seek the Senate’s advice and consent before withdrawing from the organization. Former aides say Mr. Trump has privately mused about taking that step, which would shatter the 32-nation military alliance formed to counter Russia.

Foreign officials who have dealt with Mr. Rubio since he became Mr. Trump’s top diplomat have described him as downplaying some of Mr. Trump’s wilder ideas and translating them into more realistic policy approaches, although they also question whether he truly speaks for a president with whom he does not have a close personal relationship.

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And there is only so much Mr. Rubio can do to sugarcoat Mr. Trump’s agenda, which is driven by a view that Europe economically exploits the United States, is culturally out of sync with the values of Mr. Trump’s political movement and must do business with Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.

Mr. Rubio also arrives just a day after Mr. Trump announced 20 percent tariffs on imports from the European Union. At the White House on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said of the E.U.: “They rip us off. It’s so sad to see. It’s so pathetic.”

In meetings with NATO ministers, Mr. Rubio is expected to press Mr. Trump’s call for a swift end to the war in Ukraine, an approach that alarms many European leaders who overwhelmingly support Kyiv and fear that Mr. Trump will wind up appeasing Mr. Putin.

Mr. Rubio’s fellow ministers will do their best to shape the Trump administration’s efforts to broker a deal between Kyiv and Moscow, which have stalled over wide gaps between the warring parties, and to urge the United States not to abandon Ukraine.

Mr. Rubio is also likely to reiterate Mr. Trump’s demand that NATO countries increase their military spending to 5 percent of their gross domestic product, even as many of them struggle to meet spending goals of 2 percent that the alliance set years ago. Mr. Trump and other top American officials believe that the alliance relies too heavily on the United States for protection.

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That was made painfully clear to European officials by a discussion among top Trump administration officials last month on the Signal app that unwittingly included a journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine. During the text chain, about a U.S. plan to bomb Houthi militants in Yemen, Vice President JD Vance complained that America would “again” be “bailing out” Europe by taking unilateral action to protect international shipping lanes that the Houthis have attacked.

“I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded. “It’s PATHETIC.”

Mr. Trump himself has warned that he may not come to the defense of NATO countries that he feels are not spending enough on their militaries, despite the alliance’s commitment to mutual self-defense. “If they don’t pay, I’m not going to defend them,” the president told reporters last month.

An additional point of tension is Mr. Trump’s determination to acquire the island of Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark, a NATO member. Mr. Trump has shocked officials from Denmark and other NATO countries by declining to rule out taking Greenland by force, although Mr. Vance said on a recent visit to the island that military action was not under consideration.

Denmark’s foreign minister will attend the gathering in Brussels, although it is unclear whether he and Mr. Rubio will discuss Greenland. Danish officials say they cannot negotiate Greenland’s fate on their own because the island has the right of self-determination.

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Mr. Rubio will be joined in Brussels by the new U.S. ambassador to NATO, Matthew G. Whitaker, whom the Senate narrowly confirmed on Tuesday.

NATO officials are unsure what to make of Mr. Whitaker, who briefly served as acting attorney general during Mr. Trump’s first term but has no foreign policy experience. During his confirmation hearing, Mr. Whitaker assured senators that the United States’ commitment to NATO was “ironclad.”

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Apple and other US tech groups hit as Donald Trump targets suppliers

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Apple and other US tech groups hit as Donald Trump targets suppliers

Shares in top US companies including Apple, Amazon and Tesla tumbled in after-hours trading on Wednesday as Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff regime threatened widespread upheaval to global supply chains.

Technology companies were among the hardest hit in initial market reaction, with contracts tracking the Nasdaq down 4 per cent. Apple, which is heavily exposed to additional tariffs on China, saw its shares plummet 7 per cent, with Amazon down about 6 per cent.

The escalation of Trump’s global trade war poses a significant risk to tech supply chains, after top executives spent months courting the president in an effort to soften or gain exemptions from policies that could hit their bottom line.

Tech companies were not the only ones suffering late on Wednesday. Shares in big retailers and consumer brands also sank after Trump’s tariffs announcement, with Walmart dropping 7 per cent. Target fell more than 5 per cent and sports apparel group Nike was off by 7 per cent in after-hours trading.

A 10 per cent universal tariff on all countries will apply from midnight eastern time on April 5, while higher “reciprocal” tariffs, which apply to multiple geographies including the EU, China, the UK, Japan and South Korea, are set to take effect from midnight eastern time on April 9.

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Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives wrote the spree of new tariffs was “worse than the worst case” scenario that markets feared. “Tech stocks will clearly be under major pressure on this announcement [over] worries about demand destruction, supply chains and especially the China and Taiwan piece of the tariffs.”

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An executive at a Big Tech company said that operating under the current administration was like “trying to hit a moving target”. “I’m more worried he’s going to break the US economy” than any one set of tariffs, the person said.

Apple declined to comment on whether there was any prospect of it securing a carve-out from the new tariffs, as it managed to do during Trump’s first term. A White House spokesperson confirmed there were no exemptions for Apple in the president’s executive order.

Tim Cook, Apple chief executive, is walking a geopolitical tightrope, with the company’s supply chains tightly bound to China, where the likes of Foxconn pump out millions of iPhones each year. A $500bn spending plan announced in February was seen as an attempt to placate Trump.

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Apple ships roughly 50mn iPhones to the US each year, with the vast majority made in China. The iPhone remains the company’s flagship product and accounts for more than half of its total revenue, with its Mac, iPad, wearables and fast-growing services business making up the rest.

Trump announced he would be imposing a “reciprocal” 34 per cent tariff on Chinese imports — on top of a 20 per cent tariff he has already imposed — as well as 26 per cent on India and 46 per cent on Vietnam, where Apple also manufactures.

The unilateral move affecting multiple crucial manufacturing countries would not only affect Apple’s close supply chain relationship with China, but also blunt any benefits from its attempts to diversify its manufacturing base elsewhere.

Amazon has similarly engaged in a recent campaign to woo Trump, having faced the president’s ire during his first term. Company founder Jeff Bezos attended Trump’s swearing-in ceremony and has dined with him several times in recent months.

The Seattle-based conglomerate is dependent on Chinese imports to stock its warehouses, and about a quarter of its retail arm’s costs are tied to China, according to Morgan Stanley analysts.

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Nvidia shares, meanwhile, shed more than 5 per cent after-hours, despite the White House clarifying that semiconductors would be exempt from the reciprocal regime for now.

The chip giant relies on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co to manufacture its cutting-edge artificial intelligence chips, whose sales have propelled the company to lofty valuations in the last two years. 

Nvidia, whose chief executive Jensen Huang similarly promised hundreds of billions of dollars in spending in the US over the next four years in an interview with the Financial Times last month, declined to comment.

TSMC shares were down about 6 per cent in after-hours trading. The company recently committed to investing an additional $100bn in US chip manufacturing.

Meta shares were meanwhile down around 5 per cent. It has previously warned that its China advertising revenues could be hit in the event of an escalating trade dispute with the US.

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Trump also confirmed that 25 per cent tariffs will be imposed on all foreign-made cars and parts at midnight, hitting the stocks of all US carmakers.

Shares in Tesla fell 8 per cent in after-hours trading as investors worried about the impact on its global supply chain, as well as the prospect of retaliatory tariffs on the world’s largest electric vehicle maker. 

Last month Tesla warned that the cost of making cars would increase because “certain parts and components are difficult or impossible to source within the US” and American vehicles would become less competitive overseas.

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A White House factsheet said that cars and car parts “already subject to tariffs”, copper and “certain minerals that are not available in the US” would be exempt, without providing more details.

Daniel Newman, chief executive of The Futurum Group, described Trump’s move as a “rip the Band-Aid-off moment” for tech investors who have been jittery for weeks.

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“You’re watching the market react and you’re going: the whole world has basically become completely dependent on us having this very accessible economy,” he said.

For retailers, the share moves came despite years of effort to diversify their supply chains after Trump placed heavy tariffs on imports from China in his first term. Suppliers to the Home Depot, the largest home improvement chain, moved some production to south-east Asia, Mexico and the US, chief executive Ted Decker said last month.

Target has shifted production of apparel out of China and increasingly to Central American countries such as Guatemala and Honduras, chief commercial officer Rick Gomez said last month. Trump hit Guatemala and Honduras with 10 per cent tariff rates on Wednesday.

Target declined to comment.

“These newly announced tariffs — and the expected retaliatory tariffs on American businesses — risk destabilising the US economy, undermining the goals of bolstering domestic manufacturing and growth,” said Michael Hanson, senior executive vice-president at the Retail Industry Leaders Association, which counts Target as a member. 

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The new tariffs sparked an immediate push for special relief. The Consumer Brands Association, whose members include food manufacturers PepsiCo, Mondelez and Kraft Heinz, petitioned to exempt certain “critical ingredients” from the levies.

“We encourage President Trump and his trade advisers to fine-tune their approach and exempt key ingredients and inputs in order to protect manufacturing jobs and prevent unnecessary inflation at the grocery store,” the association said.

Additional reporting by Rafe Uddin, Hannah Murphy and Alex Rogers

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Grilled by Senate, Boeing CEO admits to “serious missteps” on safety

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Grilled by Senate, Boeing CEO admits to “serious missteps” on safety

Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg testifies before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Wednesday about current and planned changes the company is making, including safety.

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Under sharp questioning from U.S. Senators Wednesday, the CEO of Boeing acknowledged a lax safety culture existed at the aircraft manufacturer but denied workers on Boeing’s factory floors were being pressured to speed up lagging production.

Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who was appointed to his post just last August, appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee on Capitol Hill. The hearing, titled “Safety First: Restoring Boeing’s Status as a Great American Manufacturer,”” focused on the steps the company has taken to address production deficiencies and safety issues that led to the door plug blow out incident on an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX-9 jet in January last year.

National Transportation Safety Board investigators found that four critical bolts needed to secure the door plug in place were not reinstalled at the Boeing factory in Renton, Wash., leading the door plug to blow out of the fuselage of the plane in mid-air, causing a rapid depressurization in the cabin of the passenger jet. None of the 177 passengers and crew members on board were seriously hurt.

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But Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who chairs the Commerce Committee, says “the incident produced fresh doubt about Boeing’s ability to safely build planes.”

“Efforts to cut corners in production or to move to the next production phase before necessary parts arrived have led to unacceptable failures,” Cruz said at the start of the committee hearing. He then went on to criticize Boeing’s “insufficient oversight” of its suppliers and of its own manufacturing process, which Cruz says led to “an unsustainable lack of safety culture at Boeing.”

In response, Ortberg acknowledged the company “has made serious missteps in recent years, and it is unacceptable.” But he insists the aerospace giant has “made sweeping changes to the people, processes, and overall structure of our company” to improve safety.

In regards to the specific failures that led to the door plug blowing out in flight, Ortberg took responsibility and vowed to fix the problems on the factory floor.

“It’s unacceptable that an aircraft left our factory without that door plug properly installed,” Ortberg told the Senate panel, adding, “and let me just make that perfectly clear, that can never, never happen again.”

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Since the incident, the Federal Aviation Administration has capped Boeing’s production of 737 MAX jetliners, its best selling plane in company history, at 38 planes per month. But Ortberg acknowledged in Wednesday’s hearing that the airplane manufacturer isn’t even producing planes at that rate yet, and is about two years behind in delivering ordered 737 MAX airplanes to its airline customers.

Under questioning, Ortberg acknowledged that he’d like to eventually increase the rate of production to 38 by the end of the year, but he insisted the company is not in a rush to do so, nor is he pressuring factory employees to speed up their work.

“Look, I want to be clear, I’ve not provided financial guidance to Wall Street for the performance of the company, I’ve not provided guidance on how many aircraft we’re going to deliver, I’ve gone and gotten financial coverage so that we can allow our production system to heal,” Ortberg said. “I’m not pressuring the team to go fast. I’m pressuring the team to do it right.”

Boeing’s safety protocols and lax safety culture were already under intense scrutiny following the crashes of two 737 Max passenger jets just five months apart in 2018 and 2019 that killed a total of 346 people.

Several family members of those killed in the crashes attended the hearing. They held up photos of their brothers, sisters, husbands, wives and children who died.

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Many say they want Boeing and the company’s top officials, especially those involved in the design and certification process of the 737 Max, held criminally accountable for the aircraft’s design and production flaws and for deceiving safety regulators.

Ortberg told senators Wednesday that the company is in talks with the Justice Department in hopes of reaching a revised plea agreement to resolve a criminal fraud charge. Boeing is accused of misleading the FAA about a flawed flight control system that investigators blame in part for causing the MAX crashes.

“I want this resolved as fast as anybody,” Ortberg told the committee. “Hopefully, we’ll have a new agreement here soon.”

Last July, the company agreed to plead guilty to one count of criminal fraud conspiracy and to pay a $243 million fine and an additional $455 million on compliance and safety programs. But in December, the Texas federal judge overseeing the base rejected the deal, and last week, he set a June 23 trial date for the company.

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