NICE (Jan. 21) — Air France this week was embroiled in a public relations debacle that proved what a delicate issue obesity is becoming even for the once proudly svelte French. The airline was forced to deny reports that it would penalize overweight passengers by making them buy two seats after a barrage of stories accusing the airline of treating fat people unfairly.
Dozens of newspapers quoted an Air France spokeswoman saying that as of April 1, passengers who appear too heavy would be obliged to buy a second seat at a …

Sale of drugs that do NOT (I repeat do NOT) make you thinner is expected to grow 11.5% per year.
Kathlyn Stone, January 24, 2010
They were right about the growth in vaccine sales. Now industry analysts predict anti-obesity drugs will be the next big success story in the pharmaceutical industry.
GlobalData’s newest report  predicts the global market for anti-obesity drugs – now valued at $1.4 billion – will grow 11.7 percent each year over the next seven to reach $3.1 billion by 2016.
Fueling the industry’s interest is the alarming obesity epidemic …

Seems like the reasons to not eat at fast food restaurants just keep on piling up. Weve heard all about the unseemly practices that go into obtaining their meats and innumerable other horrors.
Brian Merchant, Treehugger
But now, lets look at the quality of the soda fountains–another staple of the fast food experience. A recent study has revealed that a full 48% of soda fountains at fast food restaurants contain coliform bacteria–a bacteria that grows in feces. Oh, and 11% contained E. Coli, too.
The study was done by a team of microbiologists …

Children at schools where older students are obese or otherwise overweight are significantly more likely to suffer weight problems themselves, researchers report.
Amelia Hill, January 3, 2010, the Observer
For each one per cent increase in the prevalence of obese students aged 16 to 18 years, the odds of a student at 14 to 16 years old attending that school also being overweight increased significantly.
“It was the one risk factor that held true across every school we looked at,” said Dr Scott Leatherdale, the chair of research at Cancer Care Ontario and …

December 3, Michelle Higgins, NY Times
Should overweight passengers pay extra to fly?
That’s the debate stemming from a photo of an extremely large passenger that was posted on the aviation Web site Flightglobal.com. The photograph shows an obese passenger spilling out of his seat and into the aisle. According to the blog, Unusual Attitude, which is hosted by the site, the photograph was taken by an American Airlines flight attendant to show her manager what was happening on the aircraft.
Although it was posted on the blog last month, ABCNews.com, the New …

In a naturalistic study, we investigated the influence of gender, group size and gender composition of groups of eaters on food selected for lunch and dinner converted to total calories per meal of 469 individuals 198 groups in three large university cafeterias. In dyads, women observed eating with a male companion chose foods of significantly lower caloric value than those observed eating with another woman. Overall, group size was not a significant predictor of calories, but womens calories were negatively predicted by numbers of men in the group, while the …

ON a recent Thursday evening at the Bon Vivant Diner in Lower Manhattan, three round-bodied women sat at a booth, gabbing happily about warrior poses and downward-facing dogs, when they were interrupted by a heavyset woman in the adjacent booth.
“Excuse me, are you talking about a yoga class?” she asked.
The three women, Cynthia Ayers, Beth Garner and Bridget Clark, told her about their class, Buddha Body Yoga, and gave her a slip of paper with the Web address.
Looking at the paper skeptically, she asked: “So they have all levels, all …

Obese workers with diabetes are less productive than their normal-weight co-workers, says a U.S. study.
Researchers surveyed 7,338 working adults about missed work time, reduced work effectiveness and impairment of daily activities. The results showed that people who were obese and had type 2 diabetes lost 11 percent to 15 percent of work time (about 5.9 hours a week) because of health problems, compared with 9 percent of work time (about 3.6 hours a week) lost by normal-weight people.
The survey also found that obese people with type 2 diabetes reported impairment …

If the obesity epidemic needed a stimulus package, it would look much like the 24-fl.-oz. Oh Fudge! shake from Cold Stone Creamery, which sends a 1,920-calorie deposit of chocolate ice cream, milk, and fudge syrup into the bellies of those willing to pay $5.50 or more. To withdraw that from your daily calorie bank, you’d have to spend more than four hours on the step machine or nearly seven hours doing water aerobics. In other words, it’s Food Porn. The gory details are published in the May issue of Nutrition Action Healthletter, …

Chains are resorting to giveaways or less-than-$1 menu items. And they’re getting smarter about engineering lower-priced but still-profitable items, though some say the cheaper food tastes that way.

Before the recession, Andrew Puzder, who heads the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s burger chains, liked to joke about how sharp-priced competitors were “giving food away.”
As the recession deepened and the number of 79-cent taco and 99-cent hamburger offers exploded, Puzder realized it was “no longer a joke; they are giving food away.”

Literally.

On Monday, KFC gave away a free piece of its new grilled chicken just …