Posts filed under 'Weight Guides'
By Jessica Heslam
Tuesday, December 6, 2005
Mothers who frown upon those extra pounds take note:
Youngsters whose moms worry about their kids’ weight are more likely to diet and obsess about being thin, a new Hub study found.
But don’t just blame mother. Thin celebrities and peers had a bigger influence on the youngsters’ diet and desire to be skinny.
“It’s important for parents to realize that their own weight concerns may be transmitted to their children,” said lead author Alison Field, a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Children’s Hospital.
“It’s important to get children away from the dieting mentality when they are young,” Field said.
The researchers studied data from more than 5,300 adolescent girls and nearly 4,000 boys who took part in the Growing Up Today Study.
About half of the mothers said it was important that their daughters and sons not be fat. About 4 to 5 percent of the youngsters “accurately perceived” that their weight was important to their mother.
The boys and girls who knew weight was important to their mother were more likely to diet and think a lot about wanting to be thinner, the researchers said.
Dieting is among the top New Year’s resolutions. But instead of making a resolution to diet, mothers should adopt healthy eating habits and exercise for a “healthier lifestyle,” Field said.
Children who diet gain more weight than those who don’t, previous research has found.
“It will send a much better message,” Field said. “We need to get away from talking about losing weight all the time.”
The findings appear in this month’s Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine.
jheslam@bostonherald.com
Source: theedge.bostonherald.com
December 7th, 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
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
Injecting drugs into the buttocks may not be a reliable way of administering medicine, research suggests.
Doctors from a hospital in Dublin found many patients had so much fleshy tissue on their buttocks that jabs could not properly penetrate to the muscle.
They found women, and in particular obese women, were most likely not to get the full intended dose.
Details were presented to a conference of the Radiological Society of North America.
Lead researcher Dr Victoria Chan, based the Adelaide and Meath Hospital, said: “Our study has demonstrated that a majority of people, especially women, are not getting the proper dosage from injections to the buttocks.
“There is no question that obesity is the underlying cause. We have identified a new problem related, in part, to the increasing amount of fat in patients’ buttocks.”
Many medications are administered through injections into the muscles of the buttocks, including painkillers, vaccines, contraceptives and anti-nausea drugs.
Good site
The buttock is the preferred site because it contains relatively few major blood vessels, nerves or bones that could be damaged by the needle, but the underlying muscle has a rich supply of microscopic blood vessels which can absorb medicines effectively.
Intramuscular injections are a common alternative when patients cannot take pills.
The use of injections has increased over the past 10 years and new medications have been developed for delivery in this way.
However, Dr Chan’s research found 68% of the injections do not reach the muscles of the buttock.
She said: “The amount of fat tissue overlying the muscles exceeds the length of the needles commonly used for these injections.”
Pharmaceutical companies design medications based on the assumption that they are injected straight into the muscle.
Injections which only reach into the fat tissue will not deliver as much medication, as the tissue contains significantly fewer blood vessels.
Dr Chan said her work suggested that patients were either not receiving the maximum benefit of a drug or receiving no benefit at all.
Furthermore, if the medication is not absorbed into the blood stream, it remains in the fatty tissue where it can cause local infection and irritation.
The research focused on 50 patients due to undergo abdomen or pelvis scans.
Each was given an intramuscular jab which contained a small air bubble so the researchers could track the path of the medication when they carried out the scans.
Only 56% of injections successfully reached muscle tissue in men - while in women the success rate was just 8%.
Compared to men, women typically have a higher amount of fat in their buttocks.
Dr Chan said longer needles would be need to increase the success rate of the jabs.
Vaccine problem
Professor Richard Guy, an expert in pharmaceutical sciences at Bath University, told the BBC News website the effectiveness of vaccines could be particularly compromised.
They tend to be made up of large molecules that would only slowly diffuse out of fat tissue.
He said: “Whether using longer needles is a practical solution, I’m not sure, as these are unlikely to be terribly popular.
“A better approach might be to give the intramuscular injection where there is less fat around.”
Professor Guy said alternative technologies, such as micro needles, were under development which can deliver drugs into the blood vessels underlying the skin.
Dr Jim Kennedy, prescribing spokesman for the Royal College of General Practitioners, said intramuscular injections were not in as common use in the UK as other parts of Europe.
He said obesity was doubtless a factor but it was also important to use the right length of needle and to ensure that those who administered jabs had proper technique.
Source: news.bbc.co.uk
November 29th, 2005
IAN JOHNSTON
PEOPLE who are officially classed as overweight are not necessarily putting their health at risk and going on a diet could be dangerous, according to new research.
A row has been raging after a controversial US study earlier this year found that those deemed to be overweight - because of their high weight to height ratio - actually had a lower chance of dying prematurely than people whose weight was “normal”.
Now scientists are increasingly supporting the findings and casting doubt on the value of the body mass index (BMI) system of measuring whether someone is too heavy, according to New Scientist magazine.
This is because it does not take fat levels into account. The BMI method would suggest actor Brad Pitt and George Bush, the US president, are overweight, mostly because they exercise regularly and have built up the amount of lean tissue in their bodies. And experts warned that anyone deciding to lose weight after being told they were too heavy because of their BMI could actually damage their health.
Reducing the amount of food consumed lowers weight, but also lowers the amount of lean tissue, which has been linked to an increased chance of premature death.
Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who led the team behind the controversial study, said: “Although people think there’s all this evidence out there showing a high mortality risk associated with being overweight, in fact the literature doesn’t show it.”
A previous CDC study said overweight and obesity caused 325,000 premature deaths a year in the US, but Ms Flegal’s study found that while obesity was the cause of 112,000 early deaths, there were 86,000 fewer deaths a year among those who were overweight compared with those who were “normal” weight.
In Britain, nearly two-thirds of the population are considered to be overweight and about a quarter are obese The NHS Direct website includes a page where people can enter their height and weight and then be given a BMI rating and told whether they are overweight or obese.
But Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at California University whose BMI makes him nearly obese, said: “If correct, all these worries about a huge fraction of the population being overweight just go out the window. It’s not a trivial problem, but the focus should now be on the severely overweight. The current definition of overweight is not like the speed of light or pi. What was considered as the normal, desirable weight is too low.
“I just got back from a 350-mile bike trip all over the south-west of the US. I lost no weight whatsoever. I was eating like a pig I was so hungry all the time.”
Researchers in Denmark and Finland found people who lose weight by eating less food were more likely to die.
The theory is that dieting results in a decrease in the amount of lean body tissue as well as fat and that this is damaging to health, although the reasons why this appears to happen remains unclear. Losing weight through exercise avoids this problem as it preserves or increases the amount of lean mass.
Dr David Haslam, the chairman of the National Obesity Forum, told The Scotsman that while BMI was useful for population studies, it was “flawed to say the least” when assessing individuals.
“The best way is to get a tape measure and measure your waist halfway between the crest of the hip and the lower rib at the side,” he said.
Men with waists of more than 112cm or 40 inches and women with waists of 88cm or 35 inches are considered to be too fat for their health. These figures can be lower for some ethnic minorities, particularly people from south-east Asia.
Dr Haslam said: “If you’ve got a low waist size but a high BMI you’re probably not at increased risk, so it would be foolish to diet. But there are many confounding factors. What people should not take from this is that having extra fat on the abdomen is a good thing. It’s not.”
How to work it out
TO FIND out your BMI, multiply your height in metres by itself and then divide your weight in kilograms by the resulting figure.
According to the NHS 24/NHS Direct website, if you have a BMI of less than 18.4 you are underweight and between 18.5 and 24.9 you are an ideal weight.
Between 25 and 29.9 you are overweight, between 30 and 39.9 you are obese and over 40 you are very obese.
Source: news.scotsman.com
November 24th, 2005
Tue Nov 22, 6:52 PM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Who you calling fat?
Some 1 million adult New Yorkers are obese, but nearly two-thirds of them don’t think they are, according to a study released on Tuesday by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Among the obese, who account for about one in five New Yorkers, only 39 percent described themselves as “very overweight,” according to the report.
Two percent said they were very underweight, 1 percent said they were slightly underweight, 16 percent said they were just right and 42 percent said they were slightly overweight.
About 2 million more New Yorkers are overweight, the report said, and one in five children in kindergarten is obese.
Only 44 percent of the city’s adults are at a healthy weight, and nearly 75 percent say they do not participate in any regular physical activity.
New York City’s adult obesity rate was 20 percent in 2003 compared with 23 percent nationwide in 2004. The national average has nearly doubled from 12 percent in 1993, the report said.
Overweight and obese are defined by body mass index, or BMI, which is based on a person’s weight, adjusted for height, the department said.
Being obese means having a BMI of 30 or greater, while being overweight means a BMI of more than 25 but less than 30.
A 5-foot, 10-inch (1.78-meter) man weighing 175 pounds (79 kg) would have a BMI of 25.1 and be considered overweight, according to the department. If he weighed 210 pounds (95 kg), he would have a BMI of 30.1 and be obese.
The report was compiled from results of the department’s 2002 and 2003 annual telephone surveys of some 10,000 adults.
Source: news.yahoo.com
November 23rd, 2005
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
By Marilynn Marchione / Associated Press
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.
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 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, head of the growth and obesity program at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. He presented results of the study at a recent meeting of the Obesity Society in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Source: detnews.com
November 22nd, 2005
From egg nog to creamed corn, what’s worst for your waistline?
By Susan Yara
Updated: 5:01 p.m. ET Nov. 20, 2005
Around the world, holidays are inextricably tied with food. Often the bigger the holiday, the bigger the feast. Not only that, but the food is nearly always especially tasty — and extremely fattening.
Partly this is due to the fact that most traditional recipes predate our era of calorie counting and cholesterol consciousness. These are foods that are often rooted deep within a culture, made from the most special or delicious ingredients — heavy creams, butter, meat, nuts, sugars, candied fruits, preserves, oils, i.e., the stuff that tastes good — that a family could afford. In some cultures, such celebrations often originated around the lifting of a fast or the approach of winter, when the extra fat from such a feast served to strengthen the body against past or future times of hunger.
Of course, these days in societies where food is abundant year-round, such feasts just make our pants harder to button. Despite the pleasure that many of us take from that extra helping of turkey with stuffing and gravy, or another of Grandma’s special sugar cookies, we inevitably regret the food hangover that follows.
“I think the holidays are difficult times for people because there are so many special foods available that people don’t have very often, such as eggnog or potato latkes,” says Marlene Schwartz, Ph.D. and associate director at the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. “It makes sense to enjoy these special foods in moderation, but not use the holidays as a reason to pay no attention to what you are eating.”
While just one holiday meal can result in thousands of calories — roast goose alone has a whopping 784 calories per serving — it’s the desserts that really pack on the pounds. According to Information Resources in Chicago, U.S. retail bakery sales were at about $895 million in October 2004 and rose 2.8 percent to more than $920 million by December 2004. These treats are packed with sugar and refined carbohydrates, which are unhealthy because both can result in unstable insulin levels and weight gain. That apple pie may taste great, but each slice contains around 500 calories; and a bowl of Christmas pudding will cost a person almost 400 calories per slice — and that’s not even a la mode.
Schwartz says the best way for one to watch their weight is to plan ahead, especially if there is a holiday party or celebration. “Figure out the calories for some of your favorite treats and then plan your day around that. While you don’t want to arrive at the party starving, it makes sense to plan particularly healthful meals and snacks surrounding the party, so in the end your day is balanced.”
If it is too hard to keep count, Ashley Borden, a personal trainer in Los Angeles, says there are a couple of foods to stay away from. “Say no to eggnog and high dairy desserts like ice cream and remember that alcohol and high sodium foods like dips, chips and pastries can make for one bloated holiday.”
Just remember, most holiday foods contain fat; that’s why they taste so good. On the same note, it won’t benefit anyone to get worked up over a cupcake. The real catastrophe to the waistline is overeating. Think twice before having that second helping. Do you really need to sample both kinds of pie? Too many people just can’t say no, and by Jan. 1, weight loss centers like Weight Watchers are slammed with new clients.
So while it’s not fun to think about the harm that holiday foods have on the body, it’s always smart to be aware of what you’re about to eat. A good place to start is with our list of fattening holiday foods. The slides that follow contain nutritional information taken from Recipezaar.com — a site where anyone can post their favorite recipes and get a full detailed nutritional analysis. It takes one to two days for recipes to be posted, but is immediate for premium members. To get more information go to www.recipezaar.com.
© 2005 Forbes.com
Source: msnbc.msn.com
November 21st, 2005
By Debra Samuels, Globe Correspondent | November 21, 2005
On the heels of the wildly popular ‘’French Women Don’t Get Fat,” we can now read why Japanese women don’t get fat — or old.
If only everyone would just eat and act like the Japanese, says Japanese-born Naomi Moriyama, we’d all be a lot better off. In ‘’Japanese Women Don’t Get Fat or Old: Secrets from My Mother’s Tokyo Kitchen,” a memoir cum self-help manual cum recipe book coauthored with her American-born husband, William Doyle, Moriyama suggests that changing American eating habits could help create slimmer and more healthful lives. Dieting is not required.
Moriyama, a marketing consultant in New York, offers attractive recipes, advice on creating a Japanese kitchen, and some wisdom. She has evocative food memories of growing up in Japan, too. She compares American ice cream trucks in neighborhoods here to the Japanese vendors at home who bring their trucks to neighborhoods and roast sweet potatoes over hot stones.
Of the secrets in her mother’s Japanese kitchen, one is that it is not enough to eat like a Japanese person: You must also behave like one. For instance, in Japan, people do not hop into their cars to run multiple unrelated errands. They benefit from the incidental exercise of walking and climbing hundreds of steps when taking trains and using one-speed bicycles to shop and to pick up their children at school.
There are plenty of food-related secrets, too. The most important may be the concept of ‘’hara hachi bunme” — eating until you are 80 percent full. Portions are small and partially determined by plate size. Foods are eaten separately and enjoyed for their flavors as well as their eye appeal. Indeed, in Japan, everyone is a food stylist. Japanese women are exhorted by school principals to make sure the lunch they prepare for their children is well balanced and beautiful to behold.
Moriyama introduces the ‘’seven pillars of Japanese food” — fish, vegetables, rice, soy, noodles, tea, and fruit. Deconstructing the Japanese diet, she explains each element in separate chapters, studded with mostly accessible recipes. These include history lessons, chatty anecdotes, references to ‘’samurai shopping lists,” and details of husband Billy’s Japanese food experiences and culinary skills. Actually, they are more distracting than appealing. The book needs to be slimmed down. By the time Moriyama gets to her final how-to chapter, with menus and a guide to the recipes, you are apt to have forgotten the food. Her penchant for detail, including measurements of plate size, is overwrought. When is the last time you shopped with a tape measure?
Still, her descriptions of Japanese ingredients are excellent. She reminds us that the Japanese diet is based on fish, rather than beef, with all the nutritional benefits (including less fat). We also get a good sense of the form and flavors of the food.
She admits to being inspired by ‘’French Women Don’t Get Fat.” Although both titles are catchy, Moriyama’s is overstated. Alas, many Japanese women do get old and chubby. Japanese television is filled with infomercials for liquid diets, exercise machines, and undergarments that squeeze the life out of you. Japanese women are the longest-living in the world, but their daughters and granddaughters are getting bigger and heavier. The Japanese blame it on fast food and the Western diet. Eating disorders are on the rise.
Moriyama calls Japan a ‘’food Utopia” — and that is an understatement. You can’t walk 15 paces in Tokyo without passing a food establishment that looks and smells so enticing it is bound to separate you from any resolve. This evokes the concept of ‘’enryo” (restraint). As Moriyama points out, Japanese women eat sweets but do so in much smaller amounts than their Western counterparts. There is no premium on gluttony in Japan — or elsewhere in Asia. Koreans speak of eating like a crane, which, due to the shape of its beak, can only pick at food. That way, you will grow old as gracefully as that elegant bird.
When I asked a Japanese friend who recently lost about 15 pounds how she did it, she held her hands close together to indicate small portion sizes. To start the day, she said, ‘’I went back to eating a Japanese breakfast of miso soup, rice, and fish or egg.” Moriyama calls it a ‘’Japanese power breakfast.” Maybe we should start there.
Debra Samuels lives and writes in Tokyo.
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.
Source: boston.com
November 21st, 2005
November 21, 2005
By Sally Squires, Special to The Times
If you’re feeling hungry as you read this, blame your parents — at least in part.
A growing number of studies find that real and perceived hunger appear to be passed down from generation to generation, just like hair color or height.
“Genes can really influence hunger,” says Simone Lemieux, an associate professor of nutrition and science at Laval University in Quebec City. “Some people are telling us that they are always hungry. They are right, because they have genes that are misleading them in the amount of food that they really need.”
At the University of Maryland, scientists studying Old Order Amish families have pinpointed two chromosomal regions that are linked to restrained eating and overeating in adults. At Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, researchers have studied twins and found a significant genetic link for overeating.
But before you use such findings as an excuse to let your appetite go wild, keep in mind that the latest findings suggest that genetic influences on eating behavior are bite-sized compared with environmental effects.
Scientists say there’s plenty of blame to go around, such as the easy availability of food and the growing tendency to engineer physical activity out of life.
“Even people who may not be genetically susceptible to overeating might overeat because of what Kelly Brownell [Yale University psychologist] calls the ‘toxic environment,’ ” says Suzanne Mazzeo, assistant professor of psychology and pediatrics at Virginia Commonwealth.
At the top of the list of environmental influences on eating behavior is something you may never have considered: your family, particularly your parents.
New research suggests that how they taught you to eat and whether they trained you to use food as a reward or comfort are among the strongest shapers of lifelong eating habits.
Published in a recent issue of Obesity Research, the findings are drawn from a 30-year ongoing study of more than 200 Quebec families, whose children had already reached young adulthood when the most recent data were collected. The study used extensive questionnaires to examine three familiar eating behaviors: dietary restraint, overconsumption of food and susceptibility to feeling hungry.
The study found that family played a significant role in shaping eating habits, especially feeling hungry and the tendency to overeat in response to good and bad emotions.
The researchers conclude that the “development of eating behaviors during growth remains a critical determinant of eating behavioral traits during adult life.”
Based on the latest findings, here’s how you can overcome what nature and your family served you in childhood:
• Move beyond your genes. Even if you come from an overweight family that used any occasion to indulge in food, “you can change your environment,” says Mazzeo. Ask yourself, she says, “What are your coping mechanisms with food? What is your behavior like now?”
• Avoid food battles with your kids. The evidence is very clear that parents who overly restrict favorite foods “are more likely to have kids who overeat when you’re not around,” Mazzeo says. Provide a wide variety of food, then let your kids choose.
• Skip criticizing what your daughter eats. Research suggests that girls seem particularly susceptible to such parental criticism, especially from mothers. Studies suggest that telling girls not to eat because they’ll get fat or to restrict food are particularly damaging.
Sons don’t appear to be quite as vulnerable to food criticism. And there’s virtually no research that teases out a dad’s role in shaping his kids’ eating habits.
• Is your hunger real? “Knowing when you are really hungry can be difficult these days,” says Mazzeo. “We eat in front of the television. We eat in the car. We eat at our desks. We all do it. So it’s really important to take the time to ask, ‘Am I hungry right now? Am I really enjoying or even tasting what I am eating?’ ”
Source: latimes.com
November 21st, 2005
November 21, 2005
# Those who weigh themselves regularly have a better chance of losing extra pounds, a recent study finds. But not all experts agree.
By Rosie Mestel, Times Staff Writer
Losing weight is hard — and you might say hardly studied. Only recently have scientists clinically shown that the widely used Atkins diet actually works, and they’ve yet to definitively weigh in on another diet-related question: Does regularly stepping on the scales help a dieter lose weight?
Sure it does, say many weight loss experts. Weighing yourself is a clear way to monitor progress or catch (and nip in the bud) a slow, steady uptick in lardage. Not so fast, say others. The glacially slow nature of weight loss, plus those spiky daily fluctuations in body weight, might actually make dieters more apt to throw in the towel.
Now, just in time for the waist-expanding holiday season, a new study has come down on the side of daily weigh-ins. Published in the December issue of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, it reports that dieters who weighed themselves regularly shed more pounds over a 24-month period than people who didn’t regularly weigh themselves. Those who weighed themselves daily lost the most.
To the authors, the implications are clear: Dieters should be encouraged to weigh themselves — and often.
“We talk to people about monitoring calories daily, about monitoring their exercise daily…. if we’re asking them to do those … on a daily basis, then why not add this other recommendation?” says Jennifer A. Linde, lead author of that study and an assistant professor at the school of public health at the University of Minnesota.
Yet there’s a chicken-egg caveat here that some critics point to and that even those who believe in the findings acknowledge. Sure, successful dieters may weigh themselves more. But the studies don’t tell you what caused what — just that the two things correlate. It’s fun to step on the scales when you’re succeeding. When the numbers are nudging upward or stubbornly refusing to change … less so.
“They’re assuming that weighing yourself frequently leads you to lose weight. I think losing weight makes you weigh yourself more frequently, because — ‘I’m losing weight, yes, yes, I’m down another pound,’ ” says Janet Polivy, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Toronto, who is not a fan of the bathroom scales.
That confusion is why, to this day, you’ll sometimes get roomfuls of PhDs and MDs sitting around discussing an issue you’d think 21st century science might have put to bed by now.
A curious study from the 1960s points to the potential effect of frequent weighing. Eight overweight women in a small private college were enrolled in a weight loss plan, part of which consisted of coming in to be weighed four times a day. By study’s end the women had lost an average of 40 pounds each.
The study was small; it lacked important controls. But it was intriguing. “People in that group lost more weight than any study since then in nearly 40 years,” says Dr. Joseph A. Risser, director of clinical research for Lindora Medical Group, which runs the Lean for Life weight loss program.
The scales couldn’t possibly have registered real loss from one weigh-in to the next — but maybe, Risser muses, something else was going on, such as a reminder of the mission the dieter was on. His own studies of more than 600 clients show that those who were weighed five times weekly lost more weight (24 pounds) than those weighed twice weekly (19 pounds).
The new study by Linde and colleagues tapped statistics from two populations. One was a group of 1,800 obese or overweight adults enrolled in a weight loss trial. Participants were asked at the study’s start and at intervals thereafter how often they weighed themselves.
After one year, monthly, weekly and daily weighers all lost weight on average, but those who weighed themselves daily lost the most — about 8 pounds. (Those who never weighed themselves gained weight.)
The other data came from 1,226 adults in a weight gain prevention trial. At 12 months, those who weighed themselves daily had lost about 2 to 3 pounds. Those who weighed themselves less often, or not at all, actually gained weight. In both studies, significant differences were also seen at two years.
People who weighed themselves also did other healthy things such as exercise more, but the self-weighing effect was statistically significant on its own, Linde says.
James O. Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado, says the findings fit with a registry of adults who have lost at least 30 pounds and (even more impressive) maintained that weight loss for a year or longer.
A key thing those succeeders report, Hill says, is regular self-weighing — at least weekly, and often daily. (They also have an emergency plan of action for when the reading creeps above a crucial number of pounds.)
Focusing on the long term
Psychologist Patrick M. O’Neil, director of the weight management center at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, says he’s a strong proponent of daily weigh-ins, based on Hill’s data and his own clinical experience — but that the practice should be paired with a weight chart that focuses on trends, not short-term, zigzag fluctuations.
“It’s sort of like tracking stock prices,” he says. “You know they’re going to vary day to day.”
Regular weighing is one thing. But every single day? After all, hormonal changes, fluid intake, sweating, medications and salt intake cause day-to-day, hour-to-hour differences in body weight of up to several pounds.
At Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers, dieters weigh in each week with their personal consultants or at meetings. “We encourage them to take a break from daily weigh-ins because weight fluctuates,” says Jenny Craig spokeswoman Gail Manginelli. “It can be demoralizing.”
Meanwhile, there are some specialists who think either daily or weekly scale-hopping may have downsides. Psychologists and psychiatrists who treat patients with eating disorders note that encouraging people to weigh themselves might exacerbate such pathologies.
Other scale-doubters, such as psychologist Michelle Dionne of Ryerson University in Toronto, believe self-weighing can also be counterproductive in psychologically healthy folks who just want to shed some poundage.
Among the studies she points to: ones in which students were brought into an experimental clinic and weighed — but on fixed scales that actually recorded their weights as heavier or lighter than they truly were.
Students led to think they were 5 pounds heavier than they had thought scored significantly lower on psychological scales measuring mood, selfesteem and body satisfaction.
In one of the studies, students were also provided with a tasty snack right after the weigh-in — and the ones who’d been bamboozled into thinking they were heavier than they were ate significantly more of that snack.
“I would suggest there are some people who are going to receive really helpful feedback and reinforcement from self-weighing,” Dionne says. “But there’s another group of people, whom we call for lack of a better word ‘vulnerable,’ who … may feel worse about themselves, dislike their body to a greater degree and start engaging in behaviors that may lead to weight gain.”
Experts debate how students given false information in a lab relate to real-life dieters using scales to monitor their progress. But even proponents of weighing advocate restraint. “I don’t think anyone in a responsible professional position has argued for weighing oneself more than once a day,” says O’Neil. “We do not want to encourage people to turn this into a fetish.”
If you do weigh in
With that caveat in mind, here are some tips from various specialists about the best way to weigh yourself if you choose to.
• To minimize variation, always weigh at the same time of day, such as in the morning just after having used the bathroom.
• If you are weighing yourself daily, understand that your weight will vary day to day. It’s the trend that’s important. You may find it useful to make a graph of your weight.
• Put the scale on a flat, uncarpeted surface so the readings don’t wobble.
• Use a scale that is consistent, giving the same weight when you step on, then off, then on again. That’s more important than the type of scale you buy. Use the same scale each time.
• Don’t get fixated on the scale. Monitor your body change in other ways, such as the fit of your clothes, a tape measure or how you physically feel.
• To the best of your ability, try to gauge how the weighing makes you feel, and if it is reinforcing — or undermining — your efforts.
Source: latimes.com
November 21st, 2005
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