AMY D’ONOFRIO AND CAROLYN LOCHHEAD, Hearst Newspapers August 17, 2009Obesity is the elephant in the room of health care reform, a public health catastrophe that kills well more than 100,000 Americans a year, costs New York more than $6.1 billion a year in medical services and promises to shorten U.S. life expectancy for the first time since the Civil War.
Whatever Washington does this year to try to lower medical spending almost certainly will be swamped by the nation’s rising weight. Obesity lurks as a cause behind the top chronic illnesses — …

The New York Times, ABBY ELLIN
October 21, 2009
COOKIES? On a diet? Apparently so.
Just ask Christina Kane, who has tried everything from the grapefruit diet to Atkins, with no success. Then she heard about Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet, which involves eating six prepackaged cookies a day, plus one ‘real’ meal — say, skinless chicken and steamed vegetables.
“I thought, ‘That diet looks so incredibly easy,’ ” said Ms. Kane, 43, a legal secretary in Washington, who started paying $56 a week for the prepackaged cookies in June, when she weighed 255 pounds. Three …

Swooping in to save the kids from the evils of the junk food junkies, the all new comic book superhero, Super Nutricia, created by Inland Empire Health Plan IEHP will help fight childhood obesity and unhealthy eating among children.
This is the first ever female superhero from IEHPs squad of masked avengers that already includes Rad R

ider and Eradicator.Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090811/DC60167Super Nutricia is scheduled to launch her first mission at the annual Route 66 Rendezvous event on September 19 in downtown San Bernardino, complete with a live showdown including an array of …

Fooducate.com discusses a study that links food stamps to obesity.
A recent study published Ohio State University’s Center for Human Resource Research says YES. The findings: the average user of food stamps had a Body Mass Index (BMI) 1.15 points higher than non-users. The link between food stamps and higher weight was almost entirely based on women users, who averaged 1.24 points higher BMI than those not in the program, the study found. For an average American woman, this would mean an increase in weight of 5.8 pounds.
The study also found that people’s …

The New York Times, August 10, 2009
A nationwide survey of obesity rates offers very little good news. More than two-thirds of Americans are now overweight or obese, and the percentage is still rising. The report is based on data for 2005 through 2009 gathered by state health departments with the help of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The study defines overweight as a body mass index of 25 to 30, and obesity as a B.M.I. over 30.
The authors acknowledge some debate over the use of B.M.I. For example, …

4 AUGUST 2009, Cancer Research UK Press Release
Ninety-seven per cent of people dont list being overweight as a cancer risk, according to a Cancer Research UK survey out today Tuesday.
After smoking, being overweight or obese is one of the biggest cancer risks.
But in a survey of nearly 4,000 people, only three per cent mentioned keeping a healthy bodyweight as something people could do to reduce their risk of cancer.
And seven per cent of those surveyed failed to name a single positive change people could make to help to prevent the disease.
Sara …

(The Denver Post, August 2, 2009)
The extra medical costs that severely overweight people add to health care spending are ballooning, a new study shows.
While Congress works with President Obama to reform health care, the question of what to do about the obesity epidemic in our country should be front and center in the debate. As the study by RTI International documents, as much as $147 billion every year is spent on obesity-related ailments and conditions.
Just over 10 years ago, medical spending related to obesity was $78.5 billion. Now that’s super-sizing.
“There …

Ed Blazina
(The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 2, 2009)
Obesity and its impact on health care costs have taken center stage in the debate about national health care reform.
And it seems there may be as many ideas about how to address the problem as there are people who are obese.
The issues converged last week when a national study estimated the cost of obesity at $147 billion annually, nearly double what it was 10 years ago; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held its first Weight of the Nation conference in Washington, …

BBC News, July 31, 2009
Teenagers who have overweight friends tend to develop a weight problem themselves, mounting evidence suggests.
Latest research from the US found a strong link between teenagers own weight and that of their closest peers.
A UK obesity expert said the link is likely to be causal and down to catching bad habits.
The journal Economics and Human Biology work adds weight to the notion of imitative obesity – mimicking of friends who pile on the pounds.
It looked at data on nearly 5,000 teenagers, many of whom were later followed …

Kristina Sherry
(Los Angeles Times, July 30, 2009)
Reporting from Washington — There’s good and bad news when it comes to American obesity, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Tuesday at an event addressing the nation’s increasingly costly and deadly weight problem.

The inaugural conference on obesity control and prevention — attended by health educators, policy analysts, epidemiologists and dietitians, among others, and sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — comes at a time when the average American carries an extra 23 pounds and the nation, collectively, is …