The Sunday Morning Herald, Amy Corderoy, October 20, 2010
New immigrants to Australia often say they came for a better life for their children. But new research shows that those children will pick up Australia’s growing problems with being overweight and obesity.
For the first time it has been shown that immigrants will catch up with our rates of obesity within one generation.
The problem is particularly evident among people from Asian countries, who tend to weigh much less than Australians when they arrive, said the study co-author, Bruce Hollingsworth.
“Even the heaviest first …

The New York Times, Jane E. Brody, October 18, 2010
Esther Tuttle is nearing the end of the 10th decade of a remarkably productive and adventurous life. If all continues to go as well as it has to date, next July 1 she will join the rapidly growing clan of centenarians, whose numbers in the United States have increased to 96,548 in 2009 from 38,300 in 1990, according to the Census Bureau.
At age 92, Mrs. Tuttle (best known as Faity, her childhood nickname) wrote a memoir with the prescient title “No …

AFP, Yannick Pasquet, October 13, 2010
Chronic illnesses like obesity and diabetes, generally seen as “Western”, are making worryingly rapid inroads in the developing world, health experts warned at a meeting in Berlin this week.

Around 80 percent of new cases of cancers, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases are now being recorded not in the rich West, but in poorer parts of the globe, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) figures.
[Image by Sophie van Schouwen]
The explosion is a “consequence of importing lifestyles from Western countries,” Francis Collins, head of the US-based National Institutes …

Reuters, Kate Kelland, October 10, 2010
Scientists have found more than 30 new gene variations linked to obesity and fat in research they say could help explain why some people get so overweight, and why some are apple shaped and some shaped like pears.

An international team of more than 400 scientists from 280 research institutions said their results give more insight into the biological processes that can lead to obesity and may in future help in developing new ways to treat or prevent it.
But they said that while genes do …

The New York Times, Anemona Hartocollis, October 6, 2010
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg sought federal permission on Wednesday to bar New York City’s 1.7 million recipients of food stamps from using them to buy soda or other sugared drinks.
The request, made to the United States Department of Agriculture, which finances and sets the rules for the food-stamp program, is part of an aggressive anti-obesity push by the mayor that has also included advertisements, stricter rules on food sold in schools and an unsuccessful attempt to have the state impose a tax …

USA Today, Liz Szabo, October 6, 2010
Although the link between alcohol and breast cancer has become increasingly clear in recent years, that research hasn’t simplified women’s choices, says cancer surgeon Susan Love, author of Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book.
Even very light drinking increases the risk of breast cancer, but it also appears to help the heart, says Walter Willett, author of Eat, Drink and Be Healthy and a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.
For Brenda Coffee’s friends, choosing a drink at a Mexican restaurant on a recent night …

Chicago Tribune., Monica Eng, September 24, 2010

Critics of factory farms say we pay a high price for low-cost food
If you adjust for inflation and income, Americans have never spent less on food than they have in recent years. And yet many feel we’ve also never paid such a high price.
U.S. Department of Agriculture figures show the average American spent just 9.5 percent of his or her disposable income on food last year, a lower percentage than in any country in the world.
And although meat consumption has risen slightly …

It’s been a busy week for vegetables.
The baby-carrot industry tried to reposition its product as junk food, starting a $25 million advertising campaign whose defining characteristics include heavy metal music, a phone app and a young man in a grocery cart dodging baby-carrot bullets fired by a woman in tight jeans.
On the East Side of Manhattan, crates of heirloom vegetables with names like Lady Godiva squash were auctioned for $1,000 each at Sotheby’s, where the wealthy are more accustomed to bidding on Warhols and Picassos than turnips and tomatoes.
Both efforts, …

IS your social network making you fat? Are your friends and family influencing you to smoke and drink more, or to sleep less?
And if our relationships contribute to behaviors that erode our health, can social networks be harnessed to improve it?
These are seminal questions in “network science” — an emerging field that examines how behavioral changes spread through social networks. By social networks, I don’t mean virtual, will-you-“friend”-me? simulations, but old-fashioned, flesh-and-blood relationships. You know, people you actually see in person regularly — friends, relatives, co-workers, neighbors.
“It’s a very old …

The Washington Post,David Brown, September 17, 2010
You know the cartoon where Bugs Bunny is driving an old car that suddenly falls apart, every bolt sprung, with the last hubcap rattling in a circle until it comes to rest?
Is there a single problem that gets the final chain of events going? Or should “old age” under some circumstances be considered an actual cause of death – equal to lung cancer, leukemia and diabetes?
Those questions are becoming increasingly important as more and more people die at very advanced ages without an …