Laughter helps you lose weight

Laugh loudly and often from the heart" - everyone who is on a diet should heed this advice. It turns out that laughter produces energy, which can help you lose weight. Is it funny? Great: 10-15 minutes of daily laughter will burn from 10 to 50 calories. In fact, there is practically nothing funny in this advice. The message about the benefits of laughter was listened to in all seriousness by 2 thousand delegates from 80 countries who participated in the 4-day European Congress on Obesity, which ended in Athens 4 June 2005.

The author of the report is Maciej S. Buchowski, an American associate professor of Polish origin working at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He believes he and his colleagues were the first to figure out how much energy it takes to laugh. "We discovered that laughter produces energy," the scientist said. Nutrition, diet, disease, energy and metabolism are Professor Bachowski's main interests.

So, according to Bachowski, 10-15 minutes of genuine laughter can burn the equivalent of a medium-sized chocolate bar. In order to find out, we had to conduct an experiment with the participation, as usual, of student volunteers.

The researchers invited about 100 volunteers - 45 pairs of friends. The young people were locked in a room that looked like a room in a cheap hotel. In fact, it was a so-called metabolic chamber. It determines how much oxygen a person inhales and how much carbon dioxide he exhales - thus, scientists measure energy expenditure. In addition, the room was equipped with heart rate monitoring equipment and all sounds were recorded.

The volunteers were seated in chairs in front of televisions, and were forbidden to move or talk so that they would not waste energy. At the same time, they were misled - they were told that the purpose of the study was to study emotional reactions to various video materials.

"It's not easy to capture genuine laughter," Bachowski explained. "Because if you tell people you're going to measure laughter, they'll laugh. And induced laughter is regulated by a completely different part of the brain. We wanted it to be genuine laughter."

The first step was to find out metabolic rates - the metabolic rate of students in a relaxed state. The scientists showed them the English countryside: “We needed half an hour of something boring to start with, so we chose an English landscape,” said the doctor.

The next phase for each group of volunteers lasted more than an hour. On the screens they saw a 10-minute piece of comedy, then 5 minutes of sadly wandering sheep, then another 10 minutes of comedy, and so on.

American scientists believe that many animals have their own forms of laughter that resemble human laughter.

The researchers separately tested 7 pairs of male friends, 17 pairs of female friends, and 21 mixed couples (wanting to identify differences).

Eventually, the heart rate data, recorded laughter and breathing information were put together in the laboratory and carefully analyzed.

It turned out that the young men laughed more than the girls. The longest laugh lasted 40 seconds. And scientists saw that when people laugh, there is about a 20 percent increase in metabolic rate.

“The students burned 20 percent more calories by laughing,” Bachowski said. “Then we tried to figure out what would happen if someone laughed for 10 or 15 minutes a day, and found that up to 50 calories would be burned per day.” "depending on body size and intensity of laughter. According to our calculations, laughter can help you lose up to 2 kilograms over the course of a year if you have fun every day."

Laugh, mind you, you definitely need to laugh loudly. Otherwise