A large new study has provided added evidence that larger waist size alone, even in people of normal weight, significantly raises the risk for heart disease.
Researchers used data on 80,360 Swedish men and women ages 45 to 83 who were enrolled in two long-term health studies over a seven-year period ending in 2004. During those years, 1,100 of them were either hospitalized for heart disease or died from it.
The researchers measured waist size, waist-to-hip ratio, waist-to-height ratio, and B.M.I., or body mass index, a weight-to-height ratio. All four measures were …

Getting back to the relatively slim, trim days of the 1970s would help to tackle climate change, researchers say.
The rising numbers of people who are overweight and obese in the UK means the nation uses 19% more food than 40 years ago, a study suggests.
That could equate to an extra 60 mega tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year, the team calculated.
Transport costs of a fatter population were also included in the International Journal of Epidemiology study.
Dr Phil Edwards, study leader and researcher at the London School of Hygiene and …

Kelly D. Brownell and Kenneth E. Warner
Context: In 1954 the tobacco industry paid to publish the “Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” in hundreds of U.S. newspapers. It stated that the public’s health was the industry’s concern above all others and promised a variety of good-faith changes. What followed were decades of deceit and actions that cost millions of lives. In the hope that the food history will be written differently, this article both highlights important lessons that can be learned from the tobacco experience and recommends actions for the food …

Imposing a penny-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages could substantially reduce consumption, help prevent obesity and diabetes, and raise money to fund public health programs, Yale Professor Kelly Brownell and New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden argue in an upcoming opinion article in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Brownell and Frieden wrote that sugar-sweetened beverages “may be the single-largest driver of the obesity epidemic,” and suggested that taxing sugared beverages could work in the same way that taxing tobacco has played a role in reducing consumption and becoming “a key …

Desk jobs are increasing obesity, with many employees and employers ignorant of the risks of sitting down all day, researchers said on Wednesday.
The researchers found that 19 percent of Dutch citizens and 31 percent of Irish citizens perform no exercise at work. Fifty-five percent of Greeks and Croatians and 61 percent of French people do no exercise at all, Linos said.
 
A lack of designated areas for employees to store and eat their food, and a lack of onsite gyms were among the factors increasing obesity, the researchers said.
Desk jobs making …

For more than 30 years, scientists have been intrigued by brown fat, a cell that acts like a furnace, consuming calories and generating heat.  But it was generally believed that humans lose brown fat after infancy, no longer needing it once the shivering response kicks in. Thinner people appeared to have more brown fat than heavier people; younger people more than older people; people with lower glucose levels, presumably reflecting higher metabolic rates, had more than those whose metabolisms were more sluggish; and women had more than men.
Brown Fat Identified as Heat-Yielding Cells …

Researchers for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments surveyed nine area school districts and found that although all met federal nutrition guidelines for meals, none met the recommended 150 minutes of physical education a week. The average elementary school recess was 15 minutes a day and jurisdictions offered 40 to 90 minutes a week of physical education, the survey found.
Schools also need to collect weight data on students by tracking their body mass index BMI to provide a better picture of obesity trends, according to the report.
via D.C. Area Schools …

Children are impulsive. Any parent knows that from experience – they want everything they see, and they want it right now. Thats not necessarily a bad thing; grabby curiosity is what spurs kids to explore their world and learn new things.
But that same self-indulgence may also be helping to drive children to obesity. Thats the conclusion of a group of researchers who studied the relationship between self-control and weight gain in youngsters enrolled in a government study. In two papers published this week in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent …

A striking new study says almost 1 in 5 American 4-year-olds is obese, and the rate is alarmingly higher among American Indian children, with nearly a third of them obese. Researchers were surprised to see differences by race at so early an age.
Overall, more than half a million 4-year-olds are obese, the study suggests. Obesity is more common in Hispanic and black youngsters, too, but the disparity is most startling in American Indians, whose rate is almost double that of whites.
The lead author said that rate is worrisome among children so …

For people who are trying to lose weight, it does not matter if they are counting carbohydrates, protein or fat. All that matters is that they are counting something. That is the finding of the largest-ever controlled study of weight-loss methods published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. More than 800 overweight adults in Boston and Baton Rouge, La., were assigned to one of four diets that reduced calories through different combinations of fat, carbohydrates and protein. Each plan cut about 750 calories from a participant’s normaldiet, but no one ate fewer than 1,200 …