Posts filed under 'Nutrition News'
Children who are overweight face more than future health problems. They appear to have broken bones and joint problems more often during childhood than kids of normal weight, research suggests.
“A lot of people think that if you’re an overweight kid … that later on in life you’re going to run into having heart disease or Type 2 diabetes,” said Dr. Susan Yanovski, director of the obesity and eating disorders program at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
“But kids and adults who are overweight are already having problems with their mobility, fractures, and joint pain.”
A study led by her husband, obesity researcher Dr. Jack Yanovski, found that children and teens who were overweight were far more likely to have had a fracture than their ideal-weight peers. They also had more bone and hip joint abnormalities, which can lead to permanent deformities.
The research involved 227 overweight children and adolescents and 128 who weren’t overweight. The children had an average age of 12. All were enrolled in various federal health studies between 1996 and 2004 and were considered overweight if they were in the 95th percentile of weight and height for their age and sex.
A review of their medical history revealed that 13 percent of overweight kids had had at least one broken bone at some point in their lives, compared with less than 4 percent of ideal-weight children. Similar results were found for how many had muscle, bone or joint pain, especially knee pain, and restricted movement.
“The combination of musculoskeletal pain and poor mobility may possibly lead to less physical activity … and perpetuate the vicious cycle,” said Yanovski.
Source: bahraintribune.com
December 5th, 2005
05.12.05
By Martin Johnston
Sugar-laden Sprite will be scratched off the drinks menu at 21 McDonald’s outlets in a bid to help curb diabetes.
In what is thought to be a world first for the fast-food chain, all its Counties-Manukau restaurants will sell only Sprite Zero, which contains artificial sweeteners.
Consuming regular soft drinks, sweetened by about 10 teaspoons of sugar per can, causes 40 preventable deaths a year in New Zealand from heart attacks and strokes, according to Auckland Medical School estimates.
The open-ended diet Sprite trial, which starts on December 6, has been organised under the Let’s Beat Diabetes project of the Counties Manukau District Health Board.
“[It’s] one of our hopes that it will prevent weight gain,” said the project’s medical director, diabetes specialist Dr Brandon Orr Walker. “We don’t yet know that substitution of sugary drinks with diet drinks prevents weight gain; it flows from logic, but it’s not proven.”
Counties Manukau is an acknowledged leader in fighting type 2 diabetes, the obesity-linked epidemic that threatens to swamp the public health system.
Around 115,000 people have been diagnosed with the disease nationally and the number is expected to exceed 160,000 by 2021. Poorly managed diabetes leads to complications such as heart disease, blindness and lower-limb amputations.
One in six McDonald’s customers buys Sprite. The trial will use Sprite Zero because the taste difference between the regular and diet versions is less than for some other soft drinks, including Coke, and since Sprite Zero is not yet available on tap at McDonald’s.
Coca Cola Oceania regional corporate affairs manager Alison Sykora said the company had been “proactive” in participating in the trial, however it was “unlikely” that the trial would extend to Coke.
“We have already got Diet Coke, so there is a choice for people who want a diet option.”
McDonald’s spokeswoman Joanna Redfern-Hardisty said the chain joined the trial as part of its goal of improving the healthiness of its meals.
“If we get a really good [customer] response, it’s something we would look at, how we can put it in a significant number of other restaurants. It’s new territory.”
Dr Orr Walker said one of the aims was to change people’s habits. “This is an issue of making low and non-sugar drinks the easy option, making them the default option rather than being the namby-pamby option out there somewhere from left field.”
Auckland Medical School researcher Professor Rod Jackson, who has urged hospitals and schools to replace sugary soft drinks with diet versions, said the trial was a step in the right direction.
Diabetes specialist Professor Jim Mann, of Otago University, said: “We have to applaud anything that reduces calorie intake.”
But the human response could not be predicted: “People might feel self-righteous with diet Sprite and have a double ice-cream.”
There is controversy about artificial sweeteners. Sprite Zero contains aspartame, acesulphame potassium and saccharin.
Dr Orr Walker said Sprite Zero was safe to drink, except for people with the rare metabolic disorder phenylketonuria, for whom aspartame was not a safe sugar substitute.
Soft drinks and sugar
* A can of regular soft drink contains about 10 teaspoons of sugar.
* Researchers estimate the amount we drink leads to 40 preventable deaths from heart attacks and strokes each year.
Source: nzherald.co.nz
December 5th, 2005
Press Association
Monday December 5, 2005 3:08 AM
Drinking alcohol in small amounts regularly could mean you are less likely to become obese than if you do not drink at all, new research suggests.
The US study, published in the journal BMC Public Health, may appear to contradict the traditional image of the beer belly often found attached to those who like a drink or two.
But the researchers said the results did not mean teetotallers should turn to the bottle in the battle of the bulge.
Dr Armed Arif, of Texas Tech University, and Professor James Rohrer, from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, analysed the results of a health and nutrition survey, focusing on 8,236 non-smokers who took part.
The respondents were asked to fill in a questionnaire about their drinking habits, while their body mass index was also measured.
The survey found that 46% of the group were “current drinkers” who drank at least one drink a month on average, while those who drank four or more drinks a day were classified as heavy drinkers.
The researchers found current drinkers had a 0.73 lower chance of being obese compared to non-drinkers. They said that those who drank one or two drinks regularly, but less than five drinks a week, were significantly less likely to be obese compared to non-drinkers and heavy drinkers.
But heavy drinkers were 46% more likely to be obese compared to those who drank nothing at all.
Dr Arif and Prof Rohrer said: “The odds of overweight and obesity were significantly higher among those who indulged in binge drinking and/or heavy drinking - consuming four or more drinks per day.
“In contrast, light to moderate drinking - consuming one or two drinks per day - was associated with lower odds of overweight and obesity.”
© Copyright Press Association Ltd 2005, All Rights Reserved.
Source: guardian.co.uk
December 5th, 2005
By Brock Vergakis
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 5, 2005
“It astonished me, actually,” said his friend, Steven Peck. “We were both very heavy. It was hard not to be struck.”
After watching Mr. Hawks lose and keep the weight off for a year and a half, Mr. Peck tried intuitive eating in January. “I was pretty skeptical of the idea you could eat anything you wanted until you didn’t feel like it. It struck me as odd.” Mr. Peck is an assistant professor at BYU.
Eleven months later, Mr. Peck sometimes eats mint-chocolate-chip ice cream for dinner, is 35 pounds lighter and a believer in intuitive eating.
“There are times when I overeat. I did at Thanksgiving,” Mr. Peck said. “That’s one thing about Steve’s ideas, they’re sort of forgiving. On other diets, if you slip up, you feel you’ve blown it, and it takes a couple weeks get back into it. — This sort of has this built-in forgiveness factor.”
The one thing all diets have in common is that they restrict food, said Michael Goran, an obesity specialist at the University of Southern California. Ultimately, that’s why they usually fail. At some point, you want what you can’t have.” Still, he thinks intuitive eating makes sense as a concept “if you know what you’re doing.”
Intuitive eating alone won’t give anyone six-pack abs, Mr. Hawks said, and what he eats is “actually quite healthy.”
“I’m as likely to eat broccoli as eat a steak,” he said.
In a small study published in the American Journal of Health Education, Mr. Hawks and a team of researchers examined a group of BYU students and found those who were intuitive eaters typically weighed less and had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than other students. He said the study indicates intuitive eating is a viable approach to long-term weight management and he plans to do a larger study.
Source: washtimes.com
December 5th, 2005
By Brock Vergakis
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 5, 2005
SALT LAKE CITY — Who says you have to eat lettuce when you want chocolate?
Not Steven Hawks. When he’s tempted by ice cream bars, M&Ms and toffee-covered almonds at the grocery store, he doesn’t pass them by. He fills up his shopping cart.
It’s the no-diet diet, an approach the Brigham Young University health science professor used to lose 50 pounds and to keep it off for more than five years.
Mr. Hawks calls his plan “intuitive eating” and thinks the rest of the country would be better off if people stopped counting calories, started paying attention to hunger pangs and ate whatever they wanted.
As part of intuitive eating, Mr. Hawks surrounds himself with unhealthy foods he especially craves. He says having an overabundance of what’s taboo helps him lose his desire to gorge.
There is a catch to this no-diet diet, however: Intuitive eaters only eat when they’re hungry and stop when they’re full. That means not eating a box of chocolates when you’re feeling blue or digging into a big plate of nachos just because everyone else at the table is.
The trade-off is the opportunity to eat whatever your heart — well, stomach — desires when you’re actually hungry.
“One of the advantages of intuitive eating is you’re always eating things that are most appealing to you, not out of emotional reasons, not because it’s there and tastes good,” he said. “Whenever you feel the physical urge to eat something, accept it and eat it. The cravings tend to subside.”
Mr. Hawks should know. In 1989, the Utah native had a job at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and wanted to return to his home state. But at 210 pounds, he didn’t think a fat person could get a job teaching students how to be healthy, so his calorie-counting began.
He lost weight and got the job at Utah State University. The pounds soon came back.
Several years later and still overweight, Mr. Hawks decided it was time for a lifestyle change. He stopped feeling guilty about eating salt-and-vinegar potato chips. He also stopped eating when he wasn’t hungry.
His weight gradually began to drop. Exercise helped. His friends and co-workers soon took notice of the slimmer Mr. Hawks.
Continue No-foods-barred diet feeds cravings to loseII
Source: washtimes.com
December 5th, 2005
NEW YORK (BBC Health News) — Scientists have discovered why it is often harder to keep weight off than to lose it in the first place.
A team at New York’s Columbia University has shown the key is falling levels of the hormone leptin, which controls appetite.
They found that giving people who had recently lost weight injections of the hormone helped them to avoid putting the pounds straight back on.
The study features in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
It is estimated that more than 85% of obese people who have lost weight eventually put at least some of it back on.
Research suggests this is due to a number of changes in the functioning of the body’s metabolic, hormonal and nervous systems.
The Columbia team believes these changes are governed by low levels of leptin.
The hormone is made in the fat tissue, and so when a person loses weight their leptin production falls off.
Conversely, putting weight back on should raise leptin levels, and start to reverse the changes that made weight gain more likely.
To test their theory, the researchers gave doses of leptin to lean and obese volunteers who had recently lost weight.
They found that most of the metabolic and hormonal changes which mean people cannot keep the weight from creeping back on were reversed once leptin levels were restored to pre-weight loss levels.
Leptin is known to play a role in controlling appetite, but as yet the exact way that it works is unclear.
Injections of leptin have been used to help morbidly obese people with a deficiency of the hormone to lose weight, but a similar approach has no effect on obese people with normal leptin levels. ——————-New drug hope
The researchers said it might eventually be possible to develop new drugs to keep weight off that work by targeting the way the body monitors leptin levels.
Lead researcher Dr. Michael Rosenbaum told the BBC News website that historically it made sense our ancestors to defend their fat reserves, as they were often subjected to periods when food was scarce.
“We would predict that the human genome is heavily enriched with genes that defend body fatness and relatively lacking in genes that would oppose weight gain.
“We essentially have lived through hundreds of thousands of years of an environment that would encourage us to eat more and move less to preserve energy stores. “We are now in an environment where those traits are maladaptive.”
Dr. Ian Campbell, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, said it was possible that medication could eventually be developed to target the leptin system.
However, he said: “The common denominator among people who do manage to maintain weight loss is a continuation of physical activity. “There may be room for medication at some point, but you need to look at lifestyle factors first, and the most important way to manage your weight is to keep a check on your diet, and to take regular physical activity.”
Source: tehrantimes.com
December 5th, 2005
05.12.05
A New Zealand doctor who specialises in obesity says it comes as no surprise that the country now ranks at number seven in an OECD league of the world’s most obese nations.
Wellington hospital director of clinical services Robyn Toomath said it had to be expected, considering a third of New Zealand primary school children were overweight.
She said that across the board, New Zealanders were more obese than ever, yet there was a particular problem among Maori, and the figures were higher again for Pacific Islanders.
New Zealand, with 20.9 per cent of the population classified as obese, ranks seventh on the latest Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) list of the world’s fattest countries.
Australia has a 21.7 per cent obesity rate, and the United States has ballooned into first place with 30.6 per cent.
Dr Toomath, who is also a spokeswoman for Fight the Obesity Epidemic, blames the rise on the marketing of junk food.
“We are terribly prone to marketing techniques which are unbelievably diverse, and subtle and powerful.”
She said products previously consumed only occasionally, such as chips and soft drinks, - ” ” - were now “locked into culture, as something you eat several times a day”.
Dr Toomath, who says there has been a tremendous increase in obesity locally over a very short period of time, said the growth was leading to eating-related illnesses filtering down to children.
“There’s been a rise in diabetes, and surgeons are now having to do gall bladder operations on children, which is something we used to say only occurred if you were ‘fat and forty’.”
Whereas in the past, a lack of education has been pinpointed as a major fat factor, Dr Toomath said times had changed.
“A vast majority of people who are overweight are fully aware potato chips, soft drinks, pies and chocolate biscuits are things that make you fat, so educating people about fatty foods is a waste of time.”
She said the only way of stopping the bulge in numbers was to re-engineer society.
“We have to put a different frame around it and say ‘look, what do we have to do to protect our children from becoming obese’?”
Huge progress could be made once that framework was in place, she said.
“Like taking advertising of junk food off TV and taking junk food out of schools … That is the beginning.”
Obesity, worst 10
Country and percentage of population:
United States 30.6
Mexico 24.2
Britain 23
Slovak Republic 22.4
Greece 21.9
Australia 21.7
New Zealand 20.9
Hungary 18.8
Luxembourg 18.4
Czech Republic 14.8
(Source: OECD)
-NZPA
Source: nzherald.co.nz
December 5th, 2005
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Coffee and tea may reduce the risk of serious liver damage in people who drink alcohol too much, are overweight, or have too much iron in the blood, researchers reported on Sunday.
The study of nearly 10,000 people showed that those who drank more than two cups of coffee or tea per day developed chronic liver disease at half the rate of those who drank less than one cup each day.
The study, conducted by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and Social & Scientific Systems, Inc., found that coffee provided no protection to people at risk of liver disease from other causes, such as viral infections.
“While it is too soon to encourage patients to increase their coffee and tea intake, the findings of our study potentially offer people at high-risk for developing chronic liver disease a practical way to decrease that risk,” said Dr. Constance Ruhl, who helped lead the study.
“In addition, we hope the findings will offer guidance to researchers who are studying liver disease progression.”
Writing in the American Gastroenterological Association journal Gastroenterology, Ruhl and colleagues said caffeine seemed to hold the key.
They analyzed the records of 9,849 participants in a government survey whose coffee and tea intake was evaluated and who were followed for about 19 years.
Source: news.yahoo.com
December 4th, 2005
By Carolyn Poirot
Knight Ridder Newspapers
FORT WORTH, Texas — High-fructose corn syrup isn’t completely
responsible for the nation’s 6 million overweight children — but Dr. George Bray says it’s a big part of the problem.
Nurture trumps nature in the current childhood-obesity epidemic, says Bray. It’s the environment we’re creating for our kids that’s the problem, and that environment includes increasing numbers of products high in high-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS.
Bray, who served as founding president of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity and organized the first international congress on obesity in 1973, points out that between 1970 (when HFCS was introduced) and 2000 (when average yearly consumption of the ultra-sweet liquid sugar hit 73.5 pounds per person in this country), the prevalence of obesity more than doubled, from 15 percent to almost one-third of the adult population.
And worse, much worse, obesity among children 12 to 19 — who consume a disproportionate amount of the soft drinks, fruit juice, sports drinks and packaged cookies and other baked goods that are sweetened with HFCS — increased from 4.2 percent in 1970 to 15.3 percent in 2000.
Dangers of obesity
The implications for our children’s future are clear: “We know that if it’s not caught early, one in three of these overweight children will grow into overweight adults at increased risk for type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke and early death,” Bray said at an October presentation in Fort Worth.
But there is hope. Obesity is largely preventable through changes in lifestyle, especially diet, says Bray, who called for removing soda machines from schools and reducing portion sizes of commercially available sodas in his now-famous commentary in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in April 2004.
Larger portions, more high-fat fast foods, less exercise of any kind, irregular sleep patterns, lower consumption of milk and other high-calcium foods, and increased consumption of HFCS in beverages go a long way toward explaining the obesity epidemic, Bray says.
“Genetic factors play an important role in the development of obesity, but given the rapidity with which the current epidemic of obesity has descended on the U.S. and many other countries, environmental factors are a more likely explanation,” he says. “Whatever its genetic and biochemical determinants, obesity in man is susceptible to an extraordinary degree of control of social factors. Environment is very important.”
You stop feeling full
Bray says the problem with HFCS is not only that it is sweeter than other forms of sugar, but also that it does not affect appetite. Fructose adds to overeating because it does not trigger chemical messengers that tell the brain the stomach is full and no longer hungry, like food and drinks that contain regular refined sugar do.
An internist whose pioneering research helped establish the connections between weight gain and the development of type 2 diabetes, Bray is a research professor and former director of the Pennington Center at Louisiana State University, the largest nutritional research center in the world.
He says consumers would be a lot better off without added sugar in any form, but that artificial sweeteners are much preferred over calorically sweetened drinks, even for children.
“Children less than 5 probably shouldn’t have any sweetened drinks, and for older children, diet drinks are better than regular soft drinks and fruit drinks,” Bray said. “A lot of parents are concerned about the ‘chemicals’ added to sweeten diet soft drinks, but all forms of extra added sugar and artificial sweeteners are bad. We don’t need added sugar in our diet.”
Bray is calling for improved packaging and labeling for food meant to be consumed as a single serving. Too many ready-to-eat foods and drinks are labeled as single servings but packaged as two or even three servings.
“It’s hard to find a single-serving soft drink,” he said. “Portion size is something government (the Food and Drug Administration) can and should do something about.”
Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company
Source: seattletimes.nwsource.com
Image: ncga.com
December 4th, 2005
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Published: 02 December 2005
Every dieter knows that shedding excess pounds is far simpler than maintaining a new slimline self. Now Obesity specialists at Columbia University claim to have remedied the problem. They say that by restoring the hormone leptin to its level before weight loss, patients maintained their slim figures.
Leptin is thought to play a key evolutionary role in survival by signalling how much fat the body stores. As fat is lost, the level of leptin declines reducing energy expenditure to conserve calories.
The effect is the reverse of what dieters want. The reduction in energy expenditure means fewer calories are burnt. Dieters on the same calories gain weight.
In preliminary trials in 10 patients on a diet, three of whom were of normal weight and seven obese, researchers found that twice daily injections of leptin helped maintain low weight. The experiment was run for seven weeks. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the authors, led by Michael Rosenbaum, say that the body interprets the weight-reduced state as one of “relative leptin insufficiency”.
“This decrease in energy expenditure is of sufficient magnitude to account - in part - for the very high recidivism to obesity in otherwise successfully weight-reduced subjects.”
Every dieter knows that shedding excess pounds is far simpler than maintaining a new slimline self. Now Obesity specialists at Columbia University claim to have remedied the problem. They say that by restoring the hormone leptin to its level before weight loss, patients maintained their slim figures.
Leptin is thought to play a key evolutionary role in survival by signalling how much fat the body stores. As fat is lost, the level of leptin declines reducing energy expenditure to conserve calories.
The effect is the reverse of what dieters want. The reduction in energy expenditure means fewer calories are burnt. Dieters on the same calories gain weight.
In preliminary trials in 10 patients on a diet, three of whom were of normal weight and seven obese, researchers found that twice daily injections of leptin helped maintain low weight. The experiment was run for seven weeks. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the authors, led by Michael Rosenbaum, say that the body interprets the weight-reduced state as one of “relative leptin insufficiency”.
“This decrease in energy expenditure is of sufficient magnitude to account - in part - for the very high recidivism to obesity in otherwise successfully weight-reduced subjects.”
Source: news.independent.co.uk
December 4th, 2005
Cleveland Clinic may be advertising its bariatric surgery in UPMC’s back yard, but there are still plenty of candidates to go around
Sunday, December 04, 2005
By Christopher Snowbeck, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A battle of the bulge is brewing between hospitals in Pittsburgh and Cleveland over patients who need bariatric surgery, an increasingly popular treatment for severe obesity that has become a lucrative revenue source for hospitals.
The Cleveland Clinic began running newspaper ads in Pittsburgh last month courting patients who are more than 100 pounds overweight and considering the gastric bypass.
While the marketing director for the Cleveland hospital said it was unintentional, a line from the new ad campaign closely echoes a former slogan for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center by stating: “Choose a bariatric program as if your life depends on it.”
Officials at UPMC and other hospitals in the Pittsburgh area say they aren’t scared by the competition. They say hospitals and surgeons that perform bariatric surgeries here are plenty good, so patients don’t need to travel.
And they say they aren’t noticing any drop-off in demand for the procedure. Considering the number of number of obesie people in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and across the country, there’s plenty of business to go around, the local hospitals contend.
“Four percent of American adults are morbidly obese,” said Dr. Anita P. Courcoulas, director of bariatric surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, referring to patients who are potential candidates because they have body mass indexes above 40, which often correlates to being 100 pounds overweight. People with slightly lower indexes might be candidates if they also have certain health problems related to weight.
That means that even while the number of gastric bypass operations performed each year is increasing dramatically, it’s still reaching “only a fraction” of the number of people who could benefit from surgery, Dr. Courcoulas said.
The Cleveland Clinic is reaching out to bariatric surgery patients not just in Pittsburgh but also in Akron, Canton and Erie this year, and will extend the effort to other parts of Ohio and Michigan next year, said James Blazar, chief marketing officer. Pittsburgh doesn’t represent a uniquely large market of obese patients compared to Cleveland, he added.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not rank cities in terms of the proportion of obese residents, but it does collect the results of phone surveys about health risks in all 50 states. During 2002, those surveys found that the statewide populations in Ohio and Pennsylvania, respectively, were 23 percent and 23.9 percent obese — greater than the national average of 22.2 percent.
While it’s unclear whether Pittsburgh is the fatter city, it likely has a larger number of patients who know Dr. Philip Schauer, the staff director of the bariatric surgery program at the Cleveland Clinic. That’s because Dr. Schauer left UPMC last year after practicing here for several years, and building a large practice.
Bariatric surgery patients often undergo tests and counseling for months prior to undergoing surgery, so it wouldn’t be surprising if some patients who met Dr. Schauer at UPMC followed him to Cleveland for care, said Dr. Neil Hutcher, a bariatric surgeon in Richmond, Va., and president of the American Society of Bariatric Surgeons.
He said patients often are willing to travel long distances for surgeons they’ve never met personally but have learned about on the Internet.
“My understanding is that it’s only 100 miles from Cleveland to Pittsburgh,” said Dr. Hutcher. “Even though it’s different states, 100 miles is not an inordinate distance for a bariatric patient to travel.”
The Cleveland Clinic says more than 100 patients have traveled from Western Pennsylvania already. But Dr. Courcoulas, the UPMC surgeon, insists the Pittsburgh program isn’t suffering a lack of demand. On the contrary, UPMC has a waiting list of patients seeking the surgery.
Nor have patients been bypassing the North Side in favor of the drive to Cleveland, according to officials at Allegheny General Hospital, which is one of least seven medical centers in the region that perform bariatric surgeries.
“There’s certainly no shortage [of hospitals] here,” said Dr. Joe Colella, director of bariatric surgery at Allegheny General. “Patients who would want access to surgical medical care for weight problems would really be hard-pressed to do better elsewhere.”
The Cleveland Clinic’s marketing push comes at a time when more health insurers are trying to restrict access to bariatric surgery. At a cost of about $25,000 each in simple cases — and much more in more complicated ones — the growing popularity of the celebrity-promoted procedures has been troubling to health plans.
A 2004 report from the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council found that 6,791 gastric bypass surgeries were performed in the state in 2003, up tenfold from 1999 when only 674 were performed. Between 1999 and 2003, the number of surgeons performing gastric bypass surgery increased from 31 to 84, the council reported, and the number of facilities increased from 26 to 49.
At a time of runaway health care costs, some employers and insurers are drawing the line at the surgery.
HealthAmerica decided that, effective June 1, groups renewing their health benefits with the insurer no longer will receive obesity surgery coverage in their basic medical plan. Firms with more than 250 employees can obtain coverage if they purchase a rider for obesity surgery. HealthAmerica’s move follows similar steps taken by national insurers Aetna and Cigna.
Gastric bypass surgery is still part of basic health insurance coverage at Highmark, but the number of surgeries covered by the region’s largest health insurer dropped during 2004 after the insurer tightened the criteria for patients seeking operations.
While insurers say they are restricting access due to safety concerns — and doctors fire back that such claims are vastly overstated — proponents of the surgery noted that Medicare appears poised to cover more of the procedures for patients under age 65.
“I think it’s a major positive,” said Dr. Schauer, the Cleveland Clinic surgeon, in reference to Medicare’s decision late last month to seek public comment on a proposal to expand coverage. A final decision from Medicare is expected next year.
“That may influence the national market in this area in terms of whether other payors will cover the procedure,” Dr. Schauer said.
Source: post-gazette.com
December 4th, 2005
Sales in schools targeted by group
By Caroline E. Mayer, Washington Post | December 2, 2005
WASHINGTON — The fight against sugary soft drinks is beginning to foam over.
A coalition of lawyers who have actively and successfully sued tobacco companies says it is close to filing a class-action lawsuit against soft-drink makers for selling sugared sodas in schools. The lawyers, who have been trying to develop a case against the soft-drink makers for more than two years, say a lawsuit could be filed within the next few weeks, probably in Massachusetts, which has one of the nation’s most plaintiff-friendly consumer-protection laws.
As reports of the pending lawsuit proliferate, the beverage industry is shoring up its defenses. The American Beverage Association released a study yesterday that showed a 24 percent drop in purchases of full-calorie carbonated soft drinks at schools from 2002 to 2004. In 2004, the study showed, high-school students drank the equivalent of one 12-ounce can of such soda a week, while younger students drank less.
The reduction in soft-drink consumption in schools ‘’started long before there were trial lawyers looking for an industry to sue,” said Susan Neely, president of the beverage association. ‘’Litigation isn’t the answer to a complex social problem like childhood obesity,” she added.
The beverage association’s study showing the decline ‘’reflects the overall trend of the industry,” said John Sicher, editor and publisher of Beverage Digest. ‘’Carbonated soft drinks are down across the board.”
Leading the litigation effort is Richard Daynard, an associate dean at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, who is also president of the Tobacco Control Resource Center and chairman of the Tobacco Products Liability Project, both of which have provided legal support to lawyers suing tobacco companies. Daynard was involved in many of the state cases against the tobacco firms that led to the landmark $246 billion settlement in 1998.
Joining Daynard is Stephen Sheller, a Philadelphia lawyer who came up with the legal theory that tobacco firms deceived consumers into thinking their low-tar and low-nicotine cigarettes were safer to smoke than regular cigarettes. That theory helped lead to a $10 billion consumer-fraud verdict against Philip Morris USA in an Illinois state court two years ago. That verdict is under appeal.
Also involved in the prospective lawsuit is the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group that has aggressively pressed for more detailed food labels and less fat and sodium in all kinds of food. Earlier this year, the group called for federally mandated health warnings similar to those on cigarettes.
‘’The idea is to get soda machines out of schools because they are clearly making a substantial contribution to the obesity epidemic,” Daynard said yesterday in an interview. ‘’This is an unfair practice under state consumer-protection laws,” he said.
The suit’s legal basis will be tied to the concept of ‘’attractive nuisance: If somebody has something on his land like a swimming pool that he knows is attractive to kids and dangerous, then he has some obligation to keep the kids away from it,” Daynard said. ‘’You want to keep kids away from dangerous objects, and a soda machine is demonstrated to be a dangerous object for kids.”
Daynard said the challenge is finding the right set of parents to sign on as plaintiffs for the class-action case.
Victor Schwartz, a Washington lawyer who has advised companies on product-liability policies, said the case ‘’would require a radical modification of traditional liability laws with an expansion of statutory consumer-protection claims.” However, he noted, Massachusetts is one of the few states in the country where plaintiffs do not have to demonstrate actual damage in a consumer-protection case — just that a violation occurred.
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.
Source: boston.com
December 4th, 2005
By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent
Published: 01 December 2005
Healthy options offered by burger and pizza chains are still stuffed with salt and fat despite menu changes.
An investigation of the food sold by the “big four” - McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC and Pizza Hut - found that 17 of 20 products were high in salt or saturated fat or both. Of those, five out of eight of the salads used as “evidence” of their embrace of healthy eating had “high” salt or fat content.
On average, the fast-food meals sampled by Which? had 274 calories per 100g of food, more than double that of a home-cooked roast dinner. And there were inaccuracies in the nutritional information provided by three of the companies.
McDonald’s website claimed that a Big Mac and medium fries had 786 calories but analysis showed it had 900. Burger King’s Whopper and regular fries had 19 grams of saturated fat, rather than the 13 grams claimed. Levels of saturated fat in KFC’s Zinger crunchy salad were almost treble the company estimate.
Obesity has tripled in England since 1980. A third of children aged two to 15 are overweight or obese. Which? said that although fast food was not solely to blame, the rise in weight had been accompanied by the rise in fast-food sales.
Researchers said the chains frequently targeted children in promotions by giving away toys or goodie bags. Many used children’s characters such as Mr Men, Postman Pat, Winnie the Pooh and My Little Pony.
Which?found the popularity of fast-food outlets was related to their advertising budgets. Researchers also analysed nutritional content. Burger King fries were only 86 per cent potato; the 11 other ingredients included partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil, rice flour, dextrose, corn syrup solids and salt. McDonald’s chicken grills contained 19 other ingredients. McDonald’s and Burger King’s cheddar slices included “cheese flavouring”, trisodium citrate, diphosphates, polyphosphates and sorbic acid.
Some of the fast-food meals scored astronomical calorific counts. A Big Mac, medium fries and small vanilla milkshake contained 1,169 calories. A diner would need to walk 16 miles to work that off. Which? said: “Nearly all the fast food we tested contained a lot of salt. And salt can lurk where you least expect it. The KFC original chicken salad contains more salt than the KFC chicken fillet burger.”
A Pizza Hut margherita pan pizza and garlic bread had 5.4 grams of salt, almost the entire recommended daily allowance of 6 grams.
The companies said their menus now had more variety. Pizza Hut said it gave customers “the choice of healthy or more indulgent food”. McDonald’s said its customers visited on average just two or three times a month.
Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, said: “The food industry knows there is evidence of a health problem which it is part of, but it likes to claim it has nothing to do with it.”
Which? wants to ban television advertisements for fast-food aimed at children, saying such “aggressive but sophisticated” marketing was irresponsible.
Healthy options offered by burger and pizza chains are still stuffed with salt and fat despite menu changes.
An investigation of the food sold by the “big four” - McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC and Pizza Hut - found that 17 of 20 products were high in salt or saturated fat or both. Of those, five out of eight of the salads used as “evidence” of their embrace of healthy eating had “high” salt or fat content.
On average, the fast-food meals sampled by Which? had 274 calories per 100g of food, more than double that of a home-cooked roast dinner. And there were inaccuracies in the nutritional information provided by three of the companies.
McDonald’s website claimed that a Big Mac and medium fries had 786 calories but analysis showed it had 900. Burger King’s Whopper and regular fries had 19 grams of saturated fat, rather than the 13 grams claimed. Levels of saturated fat in KFC’s Zinger crunchy salad were almost treble the company estimate.
Obesity has tripled in England since 1980. A third of children aged two to 15 are overweight or obese. Which? said that although fast food was not solely to blame, the rise in weight had been accompanied by the rise in fast-food sales.
Researchers said the chains frequently targeted children in promotions by giving away toys or goodie bags. Many used children’s characters such as Mr Men, Postman Pat, Winnie the Pooh and My Little Pony.
Which?found the popularity of fast-food outlets was related to their advertising budgets. Researchers also analysed nutritional content. Burger King fries were only 86 per cent potato; the 11 other ingredients included partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil, rice flour, dextrose, corn syrup solids and salt. McDonald’s chicken grills contained 19 other ingredients. McDonald’s and Burger King’s cheddar slices included “cheese flavouring”, trisodium citrate, diphosphates, polyphosphates and sorbic acid.
Some of the fast-food meals scored astronomical calorific counts. A Big Mac, medium fries and small vanilla milkshake contained 1,169 calories. A diner would need to walk 16 miles to work that off. Which? said: “Nearly all the fast food we tested contained a lot of salt. And salt can lurk where you least expect it. The KFC original chicken salad contains more salt than the KFC chicken fillet burger.”
A Pizza Hut margherita pan pizza and garlic bread had 5.4 grams of salt, almost the entire recommended daily allowance of 6 grams.
The companies said their menus now had more variety. Pizza Hut said it gave customers “the choice of healthy or more indulgent food”. McDonald’s said its customers visited on average just two or three times a month.
Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, said: “The food industry knows there is evidence of a health problem which it is part of, but it likes to claim it has nothing to do with it.”
Which? wants to ban television advertisements for fast-food aimed at children, saying such “aggressive but sophisticated” marketing was irresponsible.
Source: news.independent.co.uk
December 1st, 2005
BEIJING, Dec. 1 (Xinhuanet) — Caffeine has a positive effect on short-term memory and reaction times, according to an Austrian study.
Researchers at the Innsbruck Medical University discovered that the caffeine found in coffee, tea, soft drinks and chocolate stimulates areas of the brain governing short-term memory and attention.
In a study of 15 healthy men ages 26 to 47, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)showed increased activity in the frontal lobe where the working memory is located and in the anterior cingulum that controls attention 20 minutes after the men consumed 100 mg of caffeine.
After consuming caffeine, all the men showed a tendency toward improved reaction times on the test, compared to when they had no caffeine, said study author Dr.Florian Koppelstatter, a radiology fellow at the university.
“This effect takes part in the distinct part of the working memory network that controls attention and concentration.” Dr.Koppelstatter said.
The research was presented Wednesday in Chicago during the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.
Caffeine is the world’s most widely used stimulant, with a global, per-person average of 76 milligrams a day.
Source: xinhuanet.com
December 1st, 2005
By David Rose
PREGNANT women have long been expected to “eat for two” and satisfy their craving for unhealthy foods, but expectant mothers who overindulge may be condemning their children to a lifetime of obesity, researchers have said.
Although obstetricians agree that women should gain weight as part of a healthy pregnancy, two separate studies have suggested that children born to women who put on excess weight during pregnancy are likely to become overweight themselves.
Guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) suggest that, taking into account women of different builds, a total gain of almost 18kg (40lb) during pregnancy — including the weight of the foetus — is an upper limit for a healthy pregnancy. Yet two American studies involving thousands of mothers have suggested that weight gain in excess of 16kg during pregnancy will lead to babies being overweight by the age of 3, next week’s New Scientist magazine will report.
The studies were carried out by two teams, one from Harvard Medical School, Boston, led by Matthew Gillman, and a second led by Andrea Sharma, of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, Georgia.
The teams presented their findings last week at the 3rd International Congress on Developmental Origins of Health and Disease, in Toronto.
Guidelines issued by the US Institute of Medicine in 1990 suggest that, on average, women should experience a total weight gain of between 11.5kg and 16kg. The Harvard researchers studied a group of 770 pregnant women from Massachusetts, divided into those who gained “inadequate”, “adequate” and “excessive” amounts of weight, according to the guidelines.
Professor Gillman said: “Only the ‘inadequate’ group — a weight gain of less than 11.5 kg — gives a result that is where you want to be.”
Dr Sharma, meanwhile, scoured national health records and found a correlation between pregnancy weight gain and obesity among children aged between 2 and 4. The study of 190,000 families found that mothers who had gained more than the US institute’s recommended 16kg were more likely to have obese children.
The last two to three months of pregnancy and the first months of life are understood to be a critical period for the development of obesity, when a baby’s metabolism is learning how to adapt to what it perceives as a normal environment. The Harvard team found that the relationship between pregnancy weight gain and childhood obesity remained strong after allowing for factors such as race, smoking, income and foetal growth.
Researchers suggested that their findings could explain the marked increase in obesity in the United States, where 16 per cent of children — a threefold increase since 1980 — and 30 per cent of adults are obese.
But in Britain expectant mothers have been shown to gain even more weight than the disputed American recommendations. NICE’s latest antenatal care guidelines state: “The normal range of weight gain during pregnancy varies for each individual. Based on observational data, total weight gain ranges for healthy pregnant women giving birth to babies of between 3kg and 4kg are between 7 and 18kg.”
The World Health Organisation suggests that a weight gain of between 10kg and 12.5kg is healthy. Peter Bowen-Simpkins, at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said: “It is more preferable to think in terms of the maximum advisable weight gain as being 25 per cent of the mother’s original weight.”
AVERAGE GAIN
# At birth, an average baby weighs 3.3kg (7.3lb)
# During pregnancy the muscle around the womb grows to weigh an extra 900g
# The placenta weighs 600g, breasts put on 400g, blood mass increases by 1.2kg and extra body fluid can weigh up to 2.6kg
# About 2.5kg of fat is stored during pregnancy to provide extra energy for breastfeeding
# Total weight gain: about 11kg (24.2lb)
Source: timesonline.co.uk
December 1st, 2005
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