DailyMail, Jenny Hope, August 28, 2010
Carrying out weight-loss surgery on the NHS is eating up millions of pounds each year, it is claimed.
Operations have increased ten-fold since 2000 – at the same time as the NHS is being forced to ration cancer drugs such as Avastin.
More than £32million a year is being spent on weight- loss surgery, with experts warning that many obese people are opting for a ‘quick fix’.
Some are even putting on weight so they can qualify for surgery rather than dieting, it is claimed.
Publicity surrounding …

CNN, Anne Harding, Health.com, September 1, 2010
Overweight people with a history of heart disease who take the prescription weight-loss drug Meridia may be at increased risk of heart attack or stroke, according to a study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The study confirms longstanding concerns about the safety of Meridia in people with heart disease and other heart problems, who are already warned against taking the drug.
A Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee is scheduled to meet later this month to discuss the possibility of …

Los Angeles Times, August 31, 2010, Jeannine Stein
People with a genetic predisposition to obesity can reduce their risk of being overweight by being physically active, researchers conclude.

Even people with a strong genetic predisposition to obesitycan offset their risk of being overweight by being physically active, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal PLoS Medicine.

British researchers examined the effects of 12 genetic variants associated with a higher risk of obesity among 20,430 people in Britain. Researchers calculated a genetic predisposition score for each volunteer that ranged from 0 to 24, representing the number of …

The New York Times, Natasha Singer, August 21, 2010
WHY are Americans getting fatter and fatter? The simple explanation is that we eat too much junk food and spend too much time in front of screens — be they television, phone or computer — to burn off all those empty calories.
One handy prescription for healthier lives is behavior modification. If people only ate more fresh produce. (Thank you, Michael Pollan.) If only children exercised more. (Ditto,Michelle Obama.)
Unfortunately, behavior changes won’t work on their own without seismic societal shifts, health experts …

BBC News, August 25, 2010
A moment on the lips can actually mean a lifetime on the hips, according to Swedish researchers, who found that binging on food seems to have a long term effect on body weight.
People who gorged on fast food for four weeks and did little exercise put on an average of 6.4kg of weight.
Two years later, signs of increased body fat were still apparent, says the Linkoping University study.

The Swedish researchers studied a group of 18 adults with an average age of 26.
During the study, the …

BBC News, Emma Wilkinson, August 13, 2010
Overweight people are more likely to make frequent trips to their GP than smokers or those who are generally unfit, say Dutch researchers.
The findings cannot be explained by overweight people having a higher risk of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, the analysis showed.
Rising rates of obesity means nurses may have to take some of the pressure off doctors, they said.
The research is published in Family Practice.
The team from Maastricht University looked at GP data from almost 4,500 adults.
Participants also filled in a questionnaire designed …

Harvard Gazette, Alvin Powell, August 2, 2010
Harvard researchers have uncovered a mechanism through which caloric restriction and exercise delay some of the debilitating effects of aging by rejuvenating the connections between nerves and the muscles that they control.
The research, conducted in the labs of Joshua Sanes and Jeff Lichtman, both members of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard and professors of molecular and cellular biology, begins to explain prior findings that exercise and restricted-calorie diets help to stave off the mental and physical degeneration of aging.
Sanes said their research, conducted through laboratory …

The New York Times, Natasha Singer, August 12, 2010
The farm stand is becoming the new apothecary, dispensing apples — not to mention artichokes, asparagus and arugula — to fill a novel kind of prescription.
Doctors at three health centers in Massachusetts have begun advising patients to eat “prescription produce” from local farmers’ markets, in an effort to fight obesity in children of low-income families. Now they will give coupons amounting to $1 a day for each member of a patient’s family to promote healthy meals.
“A lot of these kids have a very …

Bloomberg News, Pat Wechsler, August 3, 2010
The U.S. is losing the battle of the bulge, and Mississippi is the state reporting the largest percentage of fat people.
The number of states with an adult obesity rate of 30 percent or more has tripled, to nine, since 2007, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report today. Mississippi had the highest rate, 34 percent. About 75 million Americans are considered obese, the Atlanta-based CDC said.
Being fat is costing Americans as much as $150 billion a year from ills such …

MailOnline, Daniel Martin, July 29, 2010
Doctors should stop mincing their words and tell the overweight they are fat, the public health minister has said.
Anne Milton called on the NHS to ban terms such as ‘obese’, because they do not have the same emotional impact.
The former nurse said larger people were less likely to bother to try to lose weight if they were told they were obese or overweight than if the doctor was blunt and said they were ‘fat’. But health experts argued against such plain speaking because they fear …