Obesity: Why are we getting fat? :epizza:

[Michaelangelica]

Tthere is an International Conference on Obesity (near me) in Sydney.

I put a google alert out for it and have had dozens of hits in overseas newspapers but not one locally. Facinating. . .

They are very concerned about Obesity comparing it to Tobacco as a major health problem

EG

http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3431392

Too little,too late for fatties

WHO official urges action on obesitybefore we lose the battle of the bulge

 

September 09, 2006 Edition 1

 

Malcolm Burgess

 

Governments must wake up to the scourge of obesity or it will soon be too late to win the battle against the global epidemic, a senior World Health Organisation official warned yesterday.

 

Professor Robert Beaglehole's warning concluded a week-long summit at which 2 000 delegates exchanged research on a health problem the WHO says now affects more than a billion people globally - nearly one in six people.

 

Beaglehole, the WHO's director of chronic disease, said public health bodies must learn to "harangue" and educate health ministers who doubted the urgency of acting on obesity.

 

"The critical lesson from tobacco is waiting too long - 50 years - from the first evidence," he said.

 

"There would not be one minister of health who doesn't now appreciate the importance of tobacco control."

 

Obesity was out of control and there was sufficient evidence to convince governments to take urgent action, said Beaglehole. Unless individual nations moved now to rein in expanding waistlines, "we will have missed the boat".

 

"The evidence is secure enough for the appropriate public health action," he said, dismissing those who doubt data on the extent of the problem.

Click here!

 

At the 10th International Congress on Obesity in Sydney, a gloomy snapshot emerged of a global menace that disproportionately affects women and the poor, threatens a generation of children, and risks bankrupting nations that fail to act early enough.

[Michaelangelica]

Here is one for the kids

Homework causes obesity!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/07/AR2006090701159.html

Busy Work

Two books accuse educators of burying children -- and their childhoods -- in homework.

 

Reviewed by Ben Wildavsky

Sunday, September 10, 2006; Page BW10

 

THE HOMEWORK MYTH

 

Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing

 

 

* Busy Work: Two books accuse educators of burying children -- and their childhoods -- in homework.

 

By Alfie Kohn

 

Da Capo. 250 pp. $24

 

THE CASE AGAINST HOMEWORK

 

How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and

 

What We Can Do About It

 

By Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish

 

Crown. 290 pp. $24.95

If Kohn is the would-be intellectual theoretician of a new war on homework, Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish have written a battlefield manual for parents. While their central claims are of a piece with Kohn's (they write that "homework overload is compromising our parenting choices, jeopardizing our children's health, and robbing us of precious family time"), this duo's approach is more practical. Employing the chatty, anecdote-driven style of women's magazines, they lay out their case (even claiming that the growing homework burden fuels childhood obesity), then spell out how to lobby schools to have it reduced or eliminated.

[ronthepon]

I knew it!

[Michaelangelica]

This is an interesting article-a spin off from the Sydney confrence.

Still nothing about it in the local press

 

Some thought provoking extracts

Published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a comprehensive study designed to associate BMI and death risk sent shock waves through the international medical community.

A research group led by Katherine Flegal, a senior epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, analyzed data from several large U.S. health studies conducted between 1976 and 2000, controlling for factors such as smoking, age, race and alcohol consumption.

They found that while obesity caused about 112,000 deaths a year, being overweight prevented about 86,000 deaths annually. Based on those figures, the net U.S. death toll attributable to excess weight is 26,000 a year (about one-twelfth the figure that many obesity experts had been fond of quoting). But this was more than canceled out by the 34,000 deaths that researchers linked to being underweight—having a BMI lower than 18.5.

What to make of pudginess appearing to prolong lives? Study coauthor David Williamson speculated that since most people are over 70 when they die, some extra fat might have a protective effect in old age.

 

While some analysts condemned the study as flawed, its findings delighted University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos, whose provocative book The Obesity Myth was published in 2004.

The Flegal study, he says, confirmed at least two of his firmly held views: that the BMI's overweight category is meaningless and that you see a significant increase in the risk of premature death only at the two extremes of weight distribution.

"The vast majority of people who are being judged as weighing too much by public health authorities throughout the Western world are at a weight where there isn't even a correlation with increased health risk, let alone a causal relationship," says Campos.

The notion that overweight and obesity turn people into medical time bombs "is being exaggerated by roughly a factor of 10," he says. "An argument that may be relevant to the heaviest 6% of the population is being applied to 65% of the population."

. . .

Skeptics argue that far from being a fact, the obesity epidemic is a potpourri of scientific, moral and ideological assumptions.

One of these—that fat is bad and will eventually make you sick—ignores evidence that high BMI is associated with lower incidence of numerous diseases and syndromes, including some cancers, emphysema, anemia, bronchitis, osteoarthritis and hip fracture. It also skirts the evidence for fat, in many cases, being little more than a benign marker of an individual's genetic predisposition to carry it. According to GPs, there are many people who eat sensibly, exercise regularly and have excellent health readings—but have a BMI well over 25. "You can be thin," says The George Institute's Huxley, "and have a much worse cardiovascular profile than if you were fat but fit."

Much more (and above should be read in context)

HERE:-http://www.time.com/time/pacific/magazine/article/0,13673,503060918-1533489,00.html

[Michaelangelica]

http://www.nutraingredients-usa.com/news/ng.asp?n=70505-seaweed-obesity-japan

Brown seaweed extract could fight obesity

 

By Stephen Daniells

 

All news for September 2006

All news for August 2006

 

9/12/2006 - Supplementing the diet of obese rodents with a compound found in brown seaweed reduced weight by 10 per cent, and could be developed as a natural extract to help fight the growing human obesity epidemic, Japanese researchers told attendees at the 232nd national meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco.

 

The research, funded by the Japanese government, is yet more innovation from the Asian country that has consistently been at the forefront of nutrition research.

 

Professor Kazuo Miyashita and his team from Hokkaido University, focussed their studies on the compound fucoxanthin, a brownish pigment not found in significant quantities in green or red seaweed.

 

Since fucoxanthin is tightly bound to proteins in the seaweed and not easily absorbed in the form of whole seaweed, said Miyashita, this means that extracts for weight-loss supplements, or even pharmaceuticals, will be the most efficient way of delivering the active form of the fucoxanthin.

 

Miyashita and his team extracted fucoxanthin from Undaria pinnatifida, a type of kelp also known as wakame, to 200 rats and mice.

They found that the obese animals fed the seaweed extract had weight losses of between five and ten per cent.

 

The compound was reported to stimulate a protein found in the fat that surrounds internal organs (white adipose tissue), called UCP1, which causes fat oxidation and conversion of energy to heat. Since the abdominal area contains abundant adipose tissue, the compound might be particularly effective at shrinking oversized guts, Miyashita said.

 

This is the first time that a natural food component has been shown to reduce fat by targeting the UCP1 protein, he said.

 

The pigment is also reported to have stimulated the liver to produce the omega-3 fatty acid, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) at levels comparable to fish oil supplementation.

Research has shown that DHA can reduce the levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol, which is said to contribute to obesity and heart disease. No adverse side effects from fucoxanthin were reported in the mice and rats used in the study.

[Michaelangelica]

A very intersesting 'fat' site

http://www.fatnews.com/

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn."

--

[Michaelangelica]

Geting fat can make you go blind!!??

Obese People Twice as Likely to Lose Sight

 

SightThose who are obese have a greatly increased risk of losing their sight due to degenerative eye conditions, according to a report from Britain's Royal National Institute of the Blind.

 

Obese people have an increased risk of three major causes of sight loss:

 

The obese have twice the risk of suffering from AMD and cataracts, and up to10 times the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

 

ScientificAmerican.com September 6, 2006

http://www.mercola.com/2006/sep/19/obese_people_twice_as_likely_to_lose_sight.htm

[InfiniteNow]

SightThose who are obese have a greatly increased risk of losing their sight due to degenerative eye conditions, according to a report from Britain's Royal National Institute of the Blind.

See also: Diabetic retinopathy

 

http://www.nei.nih.gov/health/diabetic/retinopathy.asp

[ThisIsMyName]

A virus?? Maybe just all the fat people are eating the same foods that are making them sick? I knew plenty of fat people hat have pinker internet tissus than I probably do!

Blow up McDonalds, Buger King, and all those other gross fast food places and all the fat people will look like Europeans!

 

Here's a link for ten foods you should never eat:

 

http://www.cspinet.org/nah/10foods_bad.html

[HydrogenBond]

One aspect of obesity that is often overlooked is perception of wealth. If anyone has parents or grandparents that went through the Great Depression, they are often very conservative when it comes to food. They often teach one to finish their plate, (it may be the last meal for awhile).

 

If one considers why poor people tend to be overweight more than wealthy people, such thinking could be part of the affect. A wealthy person may order an entree and decide their don't like it. They would have no problem leaving it unfinished. The poor person just invested their weeks go-out allowance, and will polish it off even if it is not that good.

 

The wealthy parent may cut off the crust for their little darling and throw it in the barrel. The poor parent will tell the child to eat it, since there is not enough food to give everyone 30% more food to suppliment the waste.

Wealthy people like fresh food and don't always eat leftovers, except maybe pizza. A poor person, if they cook too much, would feel bad about wasting food and will eat the leftovers.

[Michaelangelica]

One aspect of obesity that is often overlooked is perception of wealth. If anyone has parents or grandparents that went through the Great Depression, they are often very conservative when it comes to food. They often teach one to finish their plate, (it may be the last meal for awhile).

The opposite can be the case! Scarcity can cause obesity!

(see my posts on the "hungerwinter" and how this produced obese males.)

Throughout this thread I have tried to show that there are very many factors influencing obesity, genetic, social, viral, environmental.

 

We seem to be stuck in a logic loop criticising Mc Donald's who have already moved on to salads.

[InfiniteNow]

The opposite can be the case! Scarcity can cause obesity!

This is a good point. In times of limited food resources, the body will convert a higher percentage of ingested food into fat for longer term storage.

 

If anyone has parents or grandparents that went through the Great Depression, they are often very conservative when it comes to food. They often teach one to finish their plate, (it may be the last meal for awhile).

HB's point is good too, in that much about the way we eat has a lot to do with what we've been taught. He further indicates that what we are taught has a lot to do with the SES in which we find ourselves.

 

 

Me, I clean my plate. Every time. Sometimes the plates of others too. I workout and have a fast metabolism though, so am still in excellent shape. Just yesterday, I had 9 pieces of pizza for lunch (yes, seriously) and then went rock climbing and was hungry again in a few hours.

 

It's the way our genes, our environment, and our choices all come together which really dictates the outcomes.

 

 

As an aside, a tremendous amount of calories can be burned through cognitive function. You'll burn more calories working on a math problem than you will watching the grass grow. B)

[ThisIsMyName]

One aspect of obesity that is often overlooked is perception of wealth.

The wealthy parent may cut off the crust for their little darling and throw it in the barrel. The poor parent will tell the child to eat it, since there is not enough food to give everyone 30% more food to suppliment the waste.

 

I actually have to disagree with that... Though it may be true is some cases, it's just the opposite in most. If what you're saying is true, wouldn't that mean that all the poor citizens would be perfectly lean because they eat a normal amount or less food a day than a rich person. Plus, my family is pretty, what you would call "well off" and I'm not exactly thin... In my opinion, it all depends on what you eat in what portions and all that. Sometimes it's gentic, sometimes it is how your family feeds you. it's a different case every time.

[pgrmdave]

I have a tendency to eat okay at home (a little too much, but not overeating), but if I am eating out, I tend to eat everything. I know it's faulty logic, but I can't help looking at food on the plate and seeing wasted money.

[ThisIsMyName]

Yeah, I'm the same. I always think of the people who can barely afford food and feel ashamed of myself if I leave food on my plate... Has anyone ever been to a Food Show? Hundreds of cooks are there cooking meals and feeding Food Service customers for free. When the show is over, even if there was only one slice cut off a large roast, it all goes in the trash. Some people take that for granted I guess... But let's not let this topic get distracted from Why people are obese to Why why people have food issues concerning money. :cocktail:

[InfiniteNow]

But let's not let this topic get distracted from Why people are obese to Why why people have food issues concerning money.

You're absolutely right. New thread...

 

 

Food conservation and issues with safety

[Southtown]

Obesity and disease are mostly nutrition-related, as well as exercise of course.

 

http://www.newstarget.com/020177.html