Attention, college students cramming between midterms and finals: Binging on soda and sweets for as little as six weeks may make you stupid. A new UCLA rat study is the first to show how a diet steadily high in fructose slows the brain, hampering memory and learning -- and how omega-3 fatty acids can counteract the disruption. The peer-reviewed Journal of Physiol... (read more)
That overweight during pregnancy can lead to overweight children and adolescents has been known for some time, but new research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and in the US indicates that excess weight before and during pregnancy can have long-lasting health consequences for the offspring of such mothers even later in life. nvestigators at the Hebrew U... (read more)
Are you sick of your commute to work? Bad news: It might actually be making you sick. According to a new study in three car-centric Texan cities, the longer your daily commute, the more likely you are to have high blood pressure, an oversized waistline, and other health problems that increase your risk for chronic diseases. “Long commutes really get under the skin in terms of affecting people’s h... (read more)
The ranks of obese Americans are expected to swell even further in the coming years, rising from 36% of the adult population today to 42% by 2030, experts said Monday. Kicking off a government-led conference on the public health ramifications of all those expanding waistlines, the authors of a new report estimated that the cost of treating those additional obese people for diabetes, heart disease and... (read more)
Lack of sleep or erratic slumber from working late-night shifts or travel may lead to diabetes and obesity, according to a Harvard study that is the first to tie abnormal sleep patterns to disease. In a trial of 21 men and women observed in a sleep laboratory, those allowed only 5.6 hours of sleep in a 24-hour period over three weeks had a slowdown in their metabolism and a reduction in insulin production. Tho... (read more)
That America has a weight problem can’t be denied, but the social perception that obese people simply can’t lose weight is not true, a new study finds. According to researchers from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston, obese Americans are trying to lose weight — and many are successful. The researchers looked at data for 4,021 obese people ages 20 and older wh... (read more)
A large international consortium study has found at least two gene variants that increase the risk for common childhood obesity. Writing in Nature Genetics on 8 April, the researchers describe how they linked variants near the loci OLFM4 and HOXB5 to this condition, and showed they are also linked with increased body mass index (BMI) in adults. Lead investigator Dr Struan F.A. Grant, associate director of the ... (read more)
Pregnant women might now have one more good reason to watch their diet and exercise: A new study links autism and developmental delays in young children to metabolic conditions, like obesity and diabetes, in their mothers. The findings, published in Monday's edition of the journal Pediatrics, found that women who had diabetes or hypertension or were obese were 1.61 times as likely as healthy wo... (read more)
Active video games are often touted as ways to help kids be more physically active—but don’t toss the basketball and jump rope just yet. A study finds that having active video games in the home may not translate into more exercise. The study, released Monday in the journal Pediatrics, tested video games among 78 children ages 9 to 12 with a body mass index between the 50th and the 99th perce... (read more)
A little extra simple sugar in your diet probably won't make you pack on the pounds -- as long as you cut down on other carbs to make up for it, a new analysis of past studies suggests. Researchers found that people who consumed extra fructose baked into breads or sprinkled into drinks didn't gain any extra weight compared to those who had other types of carbohydrates instead -- when they ate the same numbe... (read more)
Clinicians should not recommend that all travelers use aspirin for prevention of deep vein thrombosis during long plane trips, according to a new recommendation. In an updated guideline, doctors are urged to consider the individual patient's risk for deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and venous thromboembolism (VTE), as well as their risk for bleeding before prescribing prophylaxis, Gordon Guyatt, MD, of M... (read more)
A preference for fatty foods has a genetic basis, according to researchers, who discovered that people with certain forms of the CD36 gene may like high-fat foods more than those who have other forms of this gene. The results help explain why some people struggle when placed on a low-fat diet and may one day assist people in selecting diets that are easier for them to follow. The results also may help foo... (read more)
Among weight-loss surgery options, gastric bypass comes with more complications shortly after surgery than gastric banding, but makes up for it with fewer long-term side effects and repeat operations, new research suggests. People who got bypass surgery also lost weight faster, and more kept it off, in the study of more than 400 obese Swiss patients. "What we would like with any of the (weight-loss... (read more)
A team led by the University of East Anglia has made an advance in understanding the causes of adult-acquired flat feet -- a painful condition particularly affecting middle-aged women. Published recently in the journal Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, the findings could eventually lead to new drug therapy for this and other common conditions affecting the tendons, such as Achilles tendonitis. Adult-acqui... (read more)
They said eating an extra 50g of processed meat, approximately one sausage, every day would increase a person's risk by 19%. But the chance of developing the rare cancer remains low. The World Cancer Research Fund suggested the link may be down to obesity. Eating red and processed meat has already been linked to bowel cancer. As a result the UK government recommended in 2011 that people eat no more than 70... (read more)
Why do we like fatty foods so much? We can blame our taste buds. Our tongues apparently recognize and have an affinity for fat, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. They have found that variations in a gene can make people more or less sensitive to the taste of fat. The study is the first to identify a human receptor that can t... (read more)
A hormone naturally found in muscle cells that triggers the calorie-burning benefits of exercise, may have potential as an obesity drug, according to Harvard University scientists. The researchers found that the hormone, called irisin, rises during exercise, converting white fat into brown fat, a substance whose primary function is to generate body heat, according to a study published today in ... (read more)
Obese people who had weight-loss surgery were less likely to later suffer a heart attack or stroke, or to die from one, compared to people who did not have the surgery, according to a Swedish study. The findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, come from a study of more than 4,000 obese people treated at 500 surgery departments and health care centers in Sweden. Between ... (read more)
Cancer death rates are continuing to fall, dropping by 1.8 percent per year in men and 1.6 percent per year in women between 2004 and 2008, according to the American Cancer Society's annual report on cancer statistics released on Wednesday. Advances in cancer screening and treatment have prevented more than a million total deaths from cancer since the early 1990s, according to the report. But t... (read more)
The biggest obstacle to the successful treatment of obesity is the tendency to regain weight lost through diet and exercise, and evidence is increasing that this could be due to physiological causes. Recently, an Australian study reported that after large weight loss, appetite-regulating hormones appear to reset to levels that increase appetite. Now a new study reported online on 27 De... (read more)
Teens are more likely to be obese if they had a poor emotional relationship with their mother when they were toddlers, according to a new study. The findings echo previous research showing that toddlers who didn't have close emotional ties with their parents were more likely to be obese by the time they were 4.5 years old. In the latest study, researchers examined U.S. National Institute of Child Health a... (read more)
Talk about stirring up controversy. A new study shows that the urine of people who consume canned soup can contain surprisingly high levels of bisphenol A (BPA), a hormone-disrupting compound linked to health problems including heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. People who consumed one serving of canned soup a day for five days had a more than 1,000 percent increase in urinary BPA over people who consumed... (read more)
In a study that provides provocative support for a new approach to treating obesity, a drug that kills a particular type of fat cell by choking off its blood supply was shown to cause significant weight loss in obese monkeys. After four weeks of treatment at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, obese monkeys given daily injections of the drug, called adipotide, lost an average of 11% of their body wei... (read more)
Researchers say there's a new way to tell if infants are likely to become obese later on: Check to see if they've passed two key milestones on doctors' growth charts by age 2. Babies who grew that quickly face double the risk of being obese at age 5, compared with peers who grew more slowly, their study found. Rapid growers were also more likely to be obese at age 10, and infants whose chart number... (read more)
Older adults who are heavy, especially around the middle, seem to have a higher risk of developing colon cancer than their thinner peers -- and exercise may lower the incidence of the disease, especially for women, a European study said. More than 120,000 adults in the Netherlands aged 55 to 69 were followed for 16 years by the study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology. During that time, ... (read more)
Obesity is a medical condition in which excess body fat has accumulated to the extent that it may have an adverse effect on health, leading to reduced life expectancy and/or increased health problems. Body mass index (BMI), a measurement which compares weight and height, defines people as overweight (pre-obese) if their BMI is between 25 and 30 kg/m2, and obese when it is greater than 30 kg/m2.
Obesity increases the likelihood of various diseases, particularly heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea, certain types of cancer, and osteoarthritis. Obesity is most commonly caused by a combination of excessive food energy intake, lack of physical activity, and genetic susceptibility, although a few cases are caused primarily by genes, endocrine disorders, medications or psychiatric illness. Evidence to support the view that some obese people eat little yet gain weight due to a slow metabolism is limited; on average obese people have a greater energy expenditure than their thin counterparts due to the energy required to maintain an increased body mass.
Dieting and physical exercise are the mainstays of treatment for obesity. Moreover, it is important to improve diet quality by reducing the consumption of energy-dense foods such as those high in fat and sugars, and by increasing the intake of dietary fiber. To supplement this, or in case of failure, anti-obesity drugs may be taken to reduce appetite or inhibit fat absorption. In severe cases, surgery is performed or an intragastric balloon is placed to reduce stomach volume and/or bowel length, leading to earlier satiation and reduced ability to absorb nutrients from food.
Obesity is a leading preventable cause of death worldwide, with increasing prevalence in adults and children, and authorities view it as one of the most serious public health problems of the 21st century. Obesity is stigmatized in much of the modern world (particularly in the Western world), though it was widely perceived as a symbol of wealth and fertility at other times in history, and still is in some parts of the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity
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