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Obesity Map Of The United States
With such a large percentage of the population weighing more than is healthy, the public-health implications of being overweight have taken on greater importance. The burgeoning percentage of heavy Americans has economic consequences, too. Researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and RTI International estimated that 2003 health-care costs attributable to obesity reached $75 billion, with taxpayers picking up about half of the bill through programs like Medicare and Medicaid.........
Posted by: Audrey Permalink Source
Pork Rivals Chicken In Terms Of Leanness
The new study findings, presented at the Institute of Food Technologists annual meeting, revealed a surprising fact: pork tenderloin is just as lean as the leanest type of chicken - a skinless chicken breast. USDA analysis has shown that pork tenderloin contains only 2.98 grams of fat per 3-ounce serving1, in comparison to 3.03 grams of fat in a 3-ounce serving of skinless chicken breast.2 Pork tenderloin meets government guidelines for "extra lean" status.
"These new data illustrate how pork is changing to meet consumers' concerns about fat content," said Ceci Snyder, MS, RD, Assistant Vice President of Consumer Marketing for the National Pork Board. "Some of the more common cuts of pork you can find in today's meat case are now lower in fat and saturated fat because America's pork producers have improved feeding and breeding practices to deliver the leaner products that consumers demand."
In other words, pigs have gone on a diet. On average, six common cuts of pork are 16 percent leaner than 15 years ago, and saturated fat has dropped 27 percent.........
Posted by: Audrey Permalink Source
Laberge Study Shows Benefits Of Exercise
Laberge had modest expectations when she embarked on her research. "The Comite de gestion de la taxe scolaire de l'île de Montreal wanted to know if exercise would boost academic results," she reports. "But since there are thousands of factors affecting success, most importantly socio-economic status, family life, age and life experience, we didn't think that forty-five minutes of daily exercise would outweigh these overwhelming influences".
Laberge and Paula Bush, whose work on the project constituted her master's research, set up an eighteen-week program of activities, including aerobic dance, martial arts, weight training, team sports and Playstation, for volunteer Secondary Two students at ecole Saint-Germain in Saint-Laurent.
The study found a pronounced positive correlation between involvement in the program and the students' ability to pay attention and concentrate. But closer analysis of the findings revealed that the difference was observable only in male students because, Laberge believes, growing teenaged boys need an outlet for their high levels of energy.........
Posted by: Audrey Permalink Source
Strategies For Preventing And Treating Obesity
The conference takes on particular significance in light of the recent IRS ruling making physician-prescribed plans to treat obesity tax deductible.
"This will have a profound effect in legitimizing obesity as a public health issue," said Conference Director Duane Eichler, PhD, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and pediatric endocrinology at USF.
Dr. Eichler said he expects insurance companies and Medicare to eventually follow suit by offering coverage for obesity, which has become an epidemic in the United States. "The new ruling will give new meaning to preventive medicine, which, by history, insurance companies have refused to pay for.
"It may take some time, but the pedulum is now swinging in the direction of giving the consumer added clout in forcing coverage for the therapy of obesity. The bottom line is that paying for preventive therapies will likely be less expensive than long-term coverage of the chronic diseases secondary to obesity, such as diabetes and heart disease".
The conference, to be held at the Sheraton Sand Key Resort in Clearwater Beach, brings together nationally-recognized experts on obesity and weight management.........
Posted by: Audrey Permalink Source
Sleep More To Keep Weight
The study was interesting because it showed that women who sleep 5 hours or less per day had 32% higher chance of having significant weight gain compared to women who sleep for 7 hours per day. The criteria for significant weight gain mentioned above was a gain in weight of 33 pounds or more. The results of this study also indicated that women who sleep 5 hours or less have fifteen percent increased risk of becoming obese during the 16 year study period, compared to women who sleep more. The group in between, who had only 6 hours of sleep per day, had twelve percent higher chance of developing major weight gain and 6% higher risk of developing obesity when compared to women who regularly get 7 hours of sleep.
These conclusions are from a large study, which had 68,183 middle-aged women, who were part of the Nurses health study. Women who participated in the study were required to state their sleeping habits and were asked to report their weights every couple of years of the span 16 years covered by the study. Even at the beginning of the study women who slept 5 hours or less per day weighed on an average 5.4 pounds more on the scale in comparison to women who had 7 hours of sleep. The principle investigator of this study, Sanjay Patel MD, who an Associate Professor of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University located in Cleveland, Ohio, claims that this is the biggest study of its kind. Dr. Patel says that, this is the first study to show that lack of sleep is associated with increased risk of weight gain over time.........
Posted by: Evelyn Permalink
Super-sizing Your Food Takes Toll
But there's a hidden cost to those larger portions, even beyond the health consequences of gaining weight. A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison nutritional scientists has calculated how much money a single bout of overeating can cost over the following year, according to a study to be published in June 2006 in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.
"When confronted with the overwhelming costs of obesity to society as a whole, people don't always take the statistics personally," says Rachel Close, who completed the study with professor of nutritional science Dale Schoeller as part of her master's thesis. "This is another way to present the costs associated with weight gain, and might help convince people that upsizing a meal is no bargain after all. With obesity projected to rise from the current 30 percent to 40 percent of the American population by 2010, this is an important message".
Schoeller and Close were interested in how additional weight affected the amount of money spent on medical care and a vehicle's gasoline mileage, as well as the cost of the additional caloric energy required to support increased body weight. The pair anchored their study on two key assumptions: that the additional calories from upsizing a fast-food meal would be stored as excess energy -- in other words, that they would lead to weight gain -- and that diners would not compensate for the excess calories during subsequent meals. Close notes that the results of this study apply to overeating regardless of the type of food consumed -- fast-food or a home-cooked meal -- as long as the diner does not compensate for the calories at a later meal.........
Posted by: Audrey Permalink Source
Major Weight-Loss Marketers Pay $3 Million
As per the FTC's Complaint, the ads for three skin gels - Tummy Flattening Gel, Cutting Gel, and Dermalin APg - claimed they melted away fat wherever applied, including a user's thighs, tummy, even a double chin. Ads for Leptoprin and Anorex, two ephedrine pills, claimed they caused weight loss of more than 20 pounds. The advertising for PediaLean fiber pills for overweight children claimed the pills caused substantial weight loss. The FTC alleged the marketers lacked a reasonable basis to back up these claims. In addition, the FTC alleged the ads falsely claimed that clinical testing proved those claims for four of the challenged products and misrepresented their spokesperson as a medical doctor.
Ads for the products ran on television, in magazines, and in tabloids. The products were also marketed on the Internet. Leptoprin was heavily advertised through short-form television infomercials. Ads for the skin gels ran in Cosmopolitan, Muscle and Fitness, and other magazines. PediaLean was advertised in tabloids and magazines such as The Enquirer and Redbook.........
Posted by: Audrey Permalink Source
Fear of Fat
As the media try, on the surface, to sort through the weight debate, what's being communicated underneath, in a number of cases, is our society's deeply held moral and aesthetic prejudice against being heavier than a thin ideal. Magazines may write about the fact that you don't have to be runway thin to be healthy, but they stop short of picturing anyone with a little extra flab. They know what sells.
As a journalist who has written about obesity for a number of magazines, and as an author whose book on the diet industry, Losing It, made me the Weight Expert of the Week recently, I've seen up-close how strong the bias against fat people runs in the media, and how that prejudice confuses the real news about weight.........
Posted by: Audrey Permalink Source
Cultural Approach Is Key To Tackling Obesity
Maryanne Davidson, Yale University School of Nursing, and Kathleen Knafl, Oregon Health and Sciences University, reviewed 20 papers published over 10 years on descriptions of the concept of obesity by health professionals, Black Americans, Latino Americans and Caucasian Americans. Davidson and Knafl found women in general base their ideal weight on cultural criteria.
"Black American study participants defined obesity in positive terms, relating it to attractiveness, sexual desirability, body image, strength or goodness, self esteem and social acceptability," said Davidson. "They didn't view obesity as cause for concern when it came to their health."
White women, conversely, defined obesity in negative terms, describing it as unattractive and socially undesirable and associated obesity with negative body image and decreased self-esteem. Davidson said some of these women saw weight as a health issue, while others did not.
"Key health issues correlation to obesity include diabetes, hypertension and cholesterol, asthma and some cancers," Davidson said. "That's why it's imperative that scientists and healthcare providers understand how people from different cultures view obesity. This will help them to promote key messages about the health risks associated with excess weight in a culturally sensitive way."........
Posted by: Audrey Permalink Source
Is obesity caused by a virus?
The theory that viruses could play a part in obesity began a few decades ago when Nikhil Dhurandhar, now at Pennington Biomedical Research Center at LSU, noticed that chickens in India infected with the avian adenovirus SMAM-1 had significantly more fat than non-infected chickens. The discovery was intriguing because the explosion of human obesity, even in poor countries, has led to suspicions that overeating and lack of exercise weren't the only culprits in the rapidly widening human girth. Since then, Ad-36 has been found to be more prevalent in obese humans.
In the current study, Whigham et al. attempted to determine which adenoviruses (in addition to Ad-36 and Ad-5) might be associated with obesity in chickens. The animals were separated into four groups and exposed to either Ad-2, Ad-31, or Ad-37. There was also a control group that was not exposed to any of the viruses. The scientists measured food intake and tracked weight over three weeks before ending the experiment and measuring the chickens' visceral fat, total body fat, serum lipids, and viral antibodies.........
Posted by: Audrey Permalink Source
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