Your Dog's Behaviour Might Tell You If You Need To Lose Weight, Says Study

Did you know? Your dog's behaviour can help in determining if you are a person with a normal weight or if you need to reduce weight. Your food habits can be explained by the kind of food you like or dislike. However, many times you do not want to consider the fact that a particular food can or cannot contribute to a gain in weight. While dogs have been a part of the human society for years now, they can now help humans in many ways - thanks to technological development. As part of a research, scientists in Budapest, Hungary asked a few volunteers to bring their dogs and divide them in 2 groups on the basis of their weight. One group consisted of dogs of average weight, while the other group consisted of overweight pets. For conducting the study, the researchers got two bowls filled with low-value, less interesting food items, and high-value, tasty and exciting food items respectively. The owners of pets were then asked to command their dogs to choose any one of the bowls. The decision was to be made after inspecting both bowls. It was found that both dogs behaved differently in terms of dealing with foods. This behaviour was found to be quite similar to human behaviour.
 

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Normal and overweight dogs were found to behave in a similar way to humans. The study - published in journal Royal Society Open Science - stated that the dogs decided to not wait for exciting food and starting having casual food as soon as they saw it. It was found that in case a situation is uncertain, obese dogs are unwilling to invest energy and search for food. The main thing for these obese dogs is to find the right food with minimum efforts.

Similarly, overweight humans also prefer food immediately, instead of waiting for better food to come. Researchers say that this study can be used for research into psychological impacts and causes of human obesity.

However, a lot of research is required to get to the ultimate conclusion as obesity issues in humans and animals are very complicated. Researchers cannot be entirely sure about similar behavioural presence in dogs and humans.

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In the meantime, it is quite known that dogs can help in detecting various cancers, including colorectal, prostrate and melanoma. In fact, there are some dogs who are trained to detect diabetic patients as well. Reportedly, some trained dogs can sniff the scent of low blood sugar when provided with saliva samples of patients. In some specific laboratories, dogs are used to detect ovarian cancer as well.