Parents have good reason to worry about the sugar content of children’s breakfast cereals, according to an Environmental Working Group review of 84 popular brands.

Kellogg’s Honey Smacks, at nearly 56 percent sugar by weight, leads the list of the 10 worst children’s cereals, according to EWG’s analysis. In fact, a one-cup serving of the brand packs more sugar than a Hostess Twinkie, and one cup of any of the 44 other children’s cereals has more sugar than three Chips Ahoy! cookies.

In response to the exploding childhood obesity epidemic and aggressive food company advertising pitches to kids, Congress formed the federal Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children to propose standards to Congress to curb marketing of kids’ foods with too much sugar, salt and fat.

But EWG has found that only one in four children’s cereals meets the government panel’s voluntary proposed guidelines, which recommend no more than 26 percent added sugar by weight. EWG has been calling for an even lower cap on the maximum amount of sugar in children’s cereals.

“When I went to medical school in the 1960s, the consensus view was sugar provided ‘empty calories’ devoid of vitamins, minerals or fiber,” said health expert Dr. Andrew Weil. “Aside from that, it was not deemed harmful. But 50 years of nutrition research has confirmed that sugar is actually the single most health-destructive component of the standard American diet. The fact that a children’s breakfast cereal is 56 percent sugar by weight – and many others are not far behind – should cause national outrage.”

“Cereal companies have spent fortunes on convincing parents that a kid’s breakfast means cereal, and that sugary cereals are fun, benign, and all kids will eat,” said noted NYU nutrition professor Marion Nestle. “The cereals on the EWG highest-sugar list are among the most profitable for their makers, who back up their investment with advertising budgets of $20 million a year or more. No public health agency has anywhere near the education budget equivalent to that spent on a single cereal. Kids should not be eating sugar for breakfast. They should be eating real food.”

“As a mom of two, I was stunned to discover just how much sugar comes in a box of children’s cereal,” said Jane Houlihan, EWG’s Senior Vice President of Research. “The bottom line: most parents would never serve dessert for breakfast, but many children’s cereals have just as much sugar, or more.”

Studies suggest that children who eat breakfasts that are high in sugar have more problems at school. They become more frustrated and have a harder time working independently than kids who eat lower-sugar breakfasts. By lunchtime they have less energy, are hungrier, show attention deficits and make more mistakes on their work.

About one in five American children is obese, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has reported that childhood obesity has tripled over the past 30 years.

“It has been said that exploding rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes in today’s children will lead them to be the first in American history to have shorter lifespans than their parents,” Weil said. “That tragedy strikes me as a real possibility unless parents make some dramatic changes in their children’s lives.”

“Nearly 20 percent of our children and one-third of adults in this country are obese. Our children face a future of declining health, and may be the first generation to have a shorter lifespan than their parents. We must provide consumers with the information they need to make healthier choices and prevent misleading claims about the nutritional contents of food,” said Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT). “Cereal is a prime example of this—we know that children do better in school if they have breakfast. But we also know that the type of breakfast matters. And yet, as the Environment Working Group’s report shows, many children’s cereals have sugar content levels that are above 40 percent by weight. Our children deserve better, and it is critical that we take action to combat America’s obesity epidemic.” Congresswoman DeLauro serves on the appropriations subcommittee responsible for the Food and Drug Administration and agriculture, where she oversees drug and food safety.

10 Worst Children’s Cereals
Based on percent sugar by weight

1.) Kellogg’s Honey Smacks 55.6%

2.) Post Golden Crisp 51.9%

3.)Kellogg’s Froot Loops Marshmallow 48.3%

4.) Quaker Oats Cap’n Crunch’s OOPS! All Berries 46.9%

5.)Quaker Oats Cap’n Crunch Original 44.4%

6.) Quaker Oats Oh!s 44.4%

7.) Kellogg’s Smorz 43.3%

8.)Kellogg’s Apple Jacks 42.9%

9.) Quaker Oats Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries 42.3%

10.) Kellogg’s Froot Loops Original 41.4%

Some cereals are better than others. Nutrition expert Marion Nestle recommends:

1. Cereals with a short ingredient list (added vitamins and minerals are okay).
2. Cereals high in fiber.
3. Cereals with little or no added sugars (added sugars are ingredients such as honey, molasses, fruit juice concentrate, brown sugar, corn sweetener, sucrose, lactose, glucose, high-fructose corn syrup and malt syrup).

Among the best simple-to-prepare breakfasts for children are fresh fruit and high-fiber, lower-sugar cereals. Better yet, pair fruit with homemade oatmeal.

Top 10 Cereals that will Rot Your Kids Teeth Out.

This is the annual DietDetective.com airline survey. Each year I contact the media relations departments of the various airlines to request nutrition information for the foods they serve economy-class passengers on domestic flights. This year, finally, all but two airlines were helpful. Wow, maybe they’re finally getting how important it is to provide this information to the public.

Check out the survey at: Annual Airline Snacking and Onboard Food Survey with Health Ratings for 2011.

August 29, 2011, Jessical Pauline Oglivie, Los Angeles Times

Is severe childhood obesity a life-threatening form of abuse that justifies removing a child from his or her parents?

Doctors, lawyers and child welfare experts have grappled with this question in recent years, and the debate was renewed this summer by a high-profile commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital Boston, and Lindsey Murtagh, a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health, argued that when children are near death due to morbid obesity, state intervention should be considered. The practice is uncommon, but it has been done in rare instances in the U.S. and abroad.

Severe childhood obesity has been shown to trigger diseases that haunt people throughout their lives, including liver dysfunction, respiratory problems and diabetes. In the most extreme cases, these diseases can prove fatal before the age of 18.

Those in favor of temporarily removing morbidly obese kids from their parents say that if social workers don’t step in, children may die. Those against it say it’s an overreach of government power and that the unproven benefits don’t justify the trauma of removal.

For a small number of morbidly obese children, state intervention could be lifesaving.

Dr. Norman Fost is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and chairman of the University of Wisconsin Hospital Ethics Committee.

The standards for state action on child obesity cases are clear: There must be a high probability of serious, imminent harm; a high probability that intervention will help; and it ought to be the last resort after all other alternatives have been tried and exhausted.

But there is a small percent of severely obese children who are going to die soon if there’s no state intervention. The goal of state action is not to fix obesity — it’s to prevent death in cases that are the worst of the worst, children who as best we can tell aren’t going to make it to adulthood.

In 2009, I co-wrote an article on this topic in the journal Pediatrics that was triggered in part by the case of a teenage girl who was so obese that she couldn’t breathe anymore. She was near death, requiring admission to an intensive care unit for mechanical ventilation. She was saved, but it was a wake-up call to her parents, and in this case they voluntarily embarked on a program that kept her out of the danger zone. The case showed how dangerous morbid obesity can become.

As a doctor, if you believe that state action is a last resort, you try everything else first: education, home health services, a nutritionist going to the home, even money to buy more healthful food. If all that fails, the child may be removed. The child may be able to stay with a relative, and he or she would have regular visits and contact with the parents. Over the course of probably three to six months, you would work on diet, and you would hope to get the child on an exercise regime.

Removing children for nutritional neglect is fairly common, but the form of nutritional neglect is usually undernutrition — children who are starving — not overnutrition. Morbid obesity is just another form of malnutrition. It doesn’t require new legislation or a change in the criteria for state intervention.

A misconception is that the reason for state action is to punish parents. We do not think punitive action toward the parents is warranted or helpful. These are caring parents, and the removal is a therapeutic action to help them keep their child alive.

It is emotionally traumatic to remove a child from a home, of course, but that’s true in all cases of child abuse. Even children who are severely physically abused don’t want to be taken out of their homes. But it doesn’t make sense to allow a child to die to avoid emotional trauma.

State intervention doesn’t have proven results, and families of obese kids can learn how to help their children while they remain in their homes.

David Orentlicher is a professor at the Indiana University School of Law in Indianapolis and co-director of its Hall Center for Law and Health.

There are a few problems with the idea of state intervention in child obesity cases. One is that, in effect, we are blaming parenting for the child’s obesity when we really don’t understand why people become obese. There are important genetic factors, there are environmental factors, poverty plays a role — so we are singling out parents for responsibility when we don’t know how much of the responsibility belongs to them.

The second thing is, if we do think that poor parenting is part of the problem, the way to address that is by working with the family and providing in-home assistance so they can correct their practices, whether it’s an unhealthful diet, not enough exercise or too much TV.

What strikes me as odd about this proposal is that the proponents want to take the child out temporarily and return the child once they feel it’s safe. Well, the only way they are going to make it safe is to work with the family and teach good practices, and since they are going to have to do that anyway, why take the child out? We are not taking about an abuse situation where the child could be killed at any moment. Obesity is a long-term problem, so there’s no real urgency to take the kid out.

The proponents also want to reserve this for only extreme cases, but when we try to implement these kinds of policies and limit them to only the appropriate cases, it just doesn’t work out. We know that decisions are sometimes made in arbitrary ways, and there are often racial and socioeconomic undertones. So removal from the home may not be done in a fair way.

In some cases, the state may be too quick to intervene. An intensive process of working with the family can take time and resources, and child protective workers often are overworked, with caseloads that are frequently too high. If putting the child in foster care is a choice that requires less time and supervisory involvement, it may be very tempting to take that path.

When a child is taken away from his or her family, it’s very traumatic. So before you do that, you want to make sure you absolutely have to do it. It’s a matter of what’s best for the child. We know that removing a child from parents is harmful and psychologically damaging for the kid, and we don’t yet know that state intervention will help with obesity, so you are weighing an almost certain harm against a speculative benefit.

Should morbidly obese children be taken from parents? – latimes.com.

USA Today, August 23, 2011

Where’s the beef? Not in Bill Clinton’s diet.

The former president, known for his love of burgers, barbecue and junk food, has gone from a meat lover to a vegan, the strictest form of a vegetarian diet. He says he eats fruits, vegetables and beans, but no red meat, chicken or dairy.

Clinton, 65, who had quadruple bypass surgery in 2004 and then stent surgery in 2010, is following this eating plan to improve his heart health.

He talked about his plant-based diet last year, saying he lost 24 pounds on it for his daughter Chelsea’s wedding, and he chatted about it again recently on TV, drawing national attention to the potential health benefits of this type of diet.

“Veganism is the most extreme type of vegetarianism,” says Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University.
Types of vegetarians:

About 3% of U.S. adults are considered full-fledged vegetarians because they never eat meat, poultry, fish or seafood, and about 1% of people are vegans because they also never eat dairy, eggs or honey, says the Vegetarian Resource Group. “The percentage of vegetarians has doubled since 1994,” says John Cunningham, consumer research manager for the organization.

Elizabeth Turner, editor in chief of Vegetarian Times, says, “A much larger number of people — 22 million based on a poll the magazine did in 2008 — are what I’d describe as vegetarian-inclined. These are the people who might have the occasional chicken or fish. They’re interested in vegetarianism and moving in a veg direction, but they aren’t all the way there yet.

“What the science shows is that people who are vegetarians have a lower risk of heart disease and cancer, especially colon cancer, and they tend to live longer,” Turner says. “They’re also less likely to be overweight.”

But, “a vegetarian diet is not by definition a healthy one. You can’t just replace meat with French fries,” she says. “What makes a great vegetarian diet is eating whole foods that come from the earth like whole grains, fruits, vegetables, beans and nuts. Beans are the ultimate source of protein, and they are loaded with fiber.”

Clinton says he was inspired to follow a low-fat, plant-based diet by several doctors, including Dean Ornish, author of Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease. Ornish has been working with Clinton as one of his consulting physicians since 1993.

After Clinton’s angioplasty and stents in 2010, Ornish says he contacted the former president “and I indicated that the moderate diet and lifestyle changes he’d made didn’t go far enough to prevent his heart disease from progressing, but our research proved that more intensive changes could actually reverse it,” he says.

“Heart disease is a food-borne illness,” says Caldwell Esselstyn, Jr., author of Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. He advocates going “cold turkey from the typical fatty, meat-laden, dairy-rich Western diet” to this kind of plan.
Gina Lundberg, a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association, says a vegan diet is wonderful if people can follow it. “But it’s so limited in variety and taste that people get sick of it, and they don’t stick to it.”

Nestle says that the vegan diet “is probably good for President Clinton, but whether it is good for everybody is a subject of much debate.”

“Whatever they (vegans) do personally is fine, but I don’t want them telling me that if I eat a little meat, there is something wrong with my diet. I think animal foods can have a place in a healthful diet.”

Eating a vegan diet can be unhealthy if….
A vegetarian diet can be a healthy one if people avoid certain pitfalls, says registered dietitian Dawn Jackson Blatner, author of The Flexitarian Diet and a blogger at food.usatoday.com. Here are some common mistakes vegetarians make:

•Eating usual meals minus meat. Just opting out of meat will lead to a diet low in protein, iron and zinc, Blatner says. So instead, you need to swap in plant proteins, such as beans and legumes, that can provide the essential nutrients and help keep hunger at bay, she says.

•No-veggie vegetarian. “This mistake is also known as the ‘beige diet,’ with a focus on dull-colored carbohydrate foods such as bread, pasta, rice.” Each meal and snack should have colorful, disease-fighting produce to get optimal health benefits and to keep calories in check, she says.

•Faux-meat fixation. “You know you are guilty of this if you look in your fridge and see too many veggie burgers, ‘chicken’ nuggets and veggie lunchmeats,” she says. These are fine in a pinch, but indulging regularly in these veggie conveniences results in too much processed food that is too high in sodium.

•Vegan health halo. The word “vegan” or “vegetarian” on a package is not a synonym for healthy, Blatner says. Even if a cookie, cake or fries are veggie-friendly, these are still junk foods that should be enjoyed in moderation, she says.

•Cheeseaholic. Some vegetarians rely only on cheese to get protein, eating foods such as cheese sandwiches, cheese on pasta and cheese and crackers for a snack, Blatner says. Overdoing it on cheese ends up being too high in calories and saturated fat, she says.

Lacto-Ovo Vegetarian: Does not eat meat, fish or fowl. Eats dairy and egg products.

Ovo Vegetarian: Does not eat meat, fish, fowl or dairy products. Eats egg products.

Lacto Vegetarian: Does not eat meat, fish, fowl or eggs. Eats dairy products.

Vegan: Does not eat any animal products including meat, fish, fowl, eggs, dairy, honey, etc.

Bill Clinton declares vegan victory – USATODAY.com.

August 13, 2011, AAP

SCIENTISTS have come up with a novel way of helping overweight people drop some kilos – retraining their taste buds.
Australian researchers have found that overweight and obese people who regularly tuck into fatty foods are less able to taste fat.

As fat promotes fullness, if a person is insensitive to fat their body will not send out signals telling them they are full and need to stop eating.

However the researchers found that switching to a low fat diet made people more sensitive to tasting fat, increasing their ability to feel full faster and stop overeating.

The findings by scientists at Deakin University’s Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition Research builds on their discovery in 2010 of a taste bud that detects fat.

For the latest study, 19 people of a healthy weight and another 12 who were overweight or obese were put on a low-fat diet for four weeks and a high-fat diet for another month.

The participants were all given samples of custard after following the low-fat diet and each could taste which ones had lower amounts of fat.

However when they switched to a high-fat diet it was only the people of a healthy weight who showed any change in their ability to recognise different fat levels.

While the healthy weight people were less able to taste different fat levels in custard, those who were overweight or obese showed no change in their sensitivity to fat.
The centre’s Associate Professor Russell Keast said the study showed being on a low-fat diet makes overweight and obese people more sensitive to fatty tastes.

“It was interesting that we could improve fat sensitivity of overweight/obese people with low fat diets – in a sense train their tastebuds to be more sensitive to fat,” he said.
“This provides hope that their body may be able to adapt over a period of time, thereby responding to dietary fat in a similar way as a healthy weight person.”

But Assoc Prof Keast said simply switching to a low fat diet was not necessarily the only way to help obese people lose weight.

Scientists still did not have a complete understanding of the role genetics played in obesity and more studies were needed to determine if different types of fat could affect how sensitive people become to detecting fatty foods, he said.

Another possible key to weight loss could be linked to whether specific foods or different types of fat can make people less or more sensitive to tasting fat.
Assoc Prof Keast said the centre’s study had revealed that the participants who were less sensitive to fatty tastes tended to eat more meat and high-fat dairy foods.
He said if scientists could work out whether eating certain fats helped people feel fuller, the concentrations of those specific fats could be increased in foods which could possibly then be marketed as weight-loss products.
“Everything comes down to the response to what you are eating,” he said.

“It’s certainly not as easy as saying this is the only solution.

“Overweight and obesity is a result of multiple factors and excess consumption of fat is only one of them.”
The study was published in the International Journal of Obesity and Clinical Nutrition.

via Taste bud training is the new weight loss tool | Information, Gadgets, Mobile Phones News & Reviews | News.com.au.

Los Angeles Times, August 8, 2011, Jeanine Stein

Obese men who want to improve their sexual health might have another solution besides their erectile dysfunction drugs. A study finds that overweight men who lost just 5% of their weight over eight weeks saw improvements in erectile dysfunction, sexual desire and urinary tract symptoms.

The small study focused on 31 obese men with a body mass index of 30 or greater and who had Type 2 diabetes. Some were put on a low-calorie diet that included liquid meal replacements and others were assigned to a high-protein, low-fat diet that decreased their calorie intake by 600 calories a day. For 42 weeks afterward the participants stayed on the high-protein diet, or were switched to it.

Those on the low-calorie diet lost 10% of their body weight and 10% off their waist circumference, and those on the high-protein diet lost 5% of their weight and waist circumference. But participants in both groups improved their plasma glucose, LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, erectile function, urinary symptoms, sexual desire and endothelial function. Endothelial cells form a thin layer and line the inside surface of blood vessels. Dysfunctional cells can be a marker for vascular disease and may signal early development of athersclerosis.

Weight loss and improvement of insulin sensitivity, the authors wrote, could increase the production of testicular testosterone, and in turn, enhance sexual function.

“Our findings are consistent with the evidence that not only erectile function, but also lower urinary tract symptoms are a marker of cardio-metabolic risk,” said Dr. Gary Wittert of the University of Adelaide in Australia, in a news release. “The evidence that improvement can be achieved by modest weight loss, in particular when a diet is of high nutritional quality, is of public health significance in framing public health messages that resonate with men.”

The study was released Monday in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
Weight loss may help obese men improve their sexual health – latimes.com.

July 19, 2011, TIME, Jeffrey Kluger

Want to lose weight? How about trying to bore yourself thin? According to a study that will  be published in the August issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, monotony at mealtime might be a clever — if  unexciting — way to reduce calorie consumption.

Human beings come pre-loaded with a sort of habituation threshold and it shows itself in a lot of ways. Hear the same pop song too often and you eventually want to fling the CD out the window. See the same sitcom re-run enough times and the jokes just aren’t funny anymore. The same holds true for food — even your favorites get boring if you eat the same thing over and over without shaking up the menu a little. It’s not even necessary that the repetitive food be boring: you’ll habituate to pizza almost as easily as you do to boiled chicken.

Straightforward as that simple idea seems, there’s been surprisingly little hard research to measure it in any kind of empirical way. In the new study, University of Buffalo nutritionist Leonard Epstein and his colleagues recruited 32 women — half of them obese, half nonobese – and divided them into two groups, also with equal numbers of overweight and normal weight subjects. The women were instructed to perform an assigned task for 28 minutes, after which they were given 125-cal. portions of macaroni and cheese and allowed as many additional helpings as they wanted.

All of the women went through five such 28-min. sessions — the only difference was, half of them did so on five consecutive days and half came back once a week for five weeks. By the end of all of the sessions, the once-a-day group had decreased its calorie intake of macaroni by about 30 cal. per session, while the once-a-weekers had increased theirs by 100 cal. The conclusion: the first group had simply gotten sick of the stuff.

By itself, the research is not the kind of thing that gets the Nobel folks printing up the award announcements, but it does suggest a starting point for further research. “Repeated presentations once a day compared with once a week provide a reference point for the interval between food presentations that could lead to long-term habituation,” wrote Epstein and his colleagues. In other words, adjust the sliding scale of lag time between repetitive meals until you find the point at which the food is not so overfamilar that you go running to some high-calorie alternative, but not so novel that you gorge on it when you see it.

Further research, the investigators believe, could also shed light on the link between overeating and addiction. Some nutritionists theorize that the obese may suffer from a too-high habituation threshold, taking much longer to get tired of a food than other people. A similar miscalibration could also be at work in the case of alcoholism and addictive drug use. In all of those cases, it’s impossible to say you’ve had enough until you truly feel you’ve had enough.

via How Repetitive Foods Can Mean Weight Loss – TIME Healthland.

People tend to lose a little more weight with online help than with traditional weight loss programs, according to a new study from Japan.

Reuters Health, June 28, 2011, Eric Schultz

With obesity on the rise, there have been many attempts to take advantage of the Internet to help people lose weight, mainly because it’s thought to be easier and less expensive.

But the effect of including online help in obesity treatment programs was pretty small in the new study.

Overall, patients in programs with a web component lost an average of a pound and a half more than participants in non-Web programs, the researchers reported in the International Journal of Obesity.

The findings are from a review of 23 studies that compared weight control programs with an Internet component to programs that did not involve any online support.

The Internet was used for a variety of purposes in the different weight control programs. These included individualized instruction, communication with lifestyle instructors, counseling, and keeping a record of food intake. In addition, the programs varied in how much participants used the Internet.

The research team, headed by Dr. H. Sone of the University of Tsukuba Institute of Clinical Medicine in Ibaraki, Japan, did identify certain features that made web-based programs more — or less — effective.

For instance, they found that when the Internet replaced face-to-face counseling, people ended up weighing about three pounds more, on average, than their peers who weren’t getting “help” from the Internet.

But weight-loss programs that used the Internet in addition to in-person counseling helped participants end up about two pounds lighter compared to people who didn’t use the Web.

“An in-person contact approach is superior to a technology-based approach,” the authors write. “An internet program needs to include the component of a face-to-face program for participants to achieve weight loss.”

They also found that internet-based programs were more effective when the goal was to lose weight in the first place, and less effective when the goal was weight loss maintenance.

Clearly, Web-based programs are not always better. The programs studied in the review differ in many more ways than just whether or not they used the internet or in how much time people spent online, said Dr. Robert Jeffery, a researcher at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

“It’s premature to make generalizations,” he told Reuters Health.

Still, the results are promising for patients who have not had success with other programs, said James Christian, a researcher at Colorado State University who also works for PHCC, Inc., a Pueblo, Colorado-based company that designs online programs to help people make health changes in their lifestyle.

“People respond differently to different kinds of support,” Christian said.

Dr. Jean Harvey-Berino, chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Vermont in Burlington, disagrees that face-to-face meetings are necessary for a weight program to be effective. They are not always “better enough to warrant the extra cost and aggravation,” she said.

According to Harvey-Berino, a good Internet program enables participants to communicate in groups, monitor their eating and exercise habits, and get regular feedback from peers and supervisors, while focusing on behavior change.

Harvey-Berino sees the Internet as an important tool to promote weight loss now and in the future. She said, “This is the next wave of public health intervention, and we can’t stop now.”

SOURCE: bit.ly/jPsnZA International Journal of Obesity, online June 21, 2011.

via Can the Internet help you lose weight? | Reuters.

June 17, 2011, Leeann Maton, Sun Times

He blanketed the Chicago airwaves with ads for his weight loss clinics.

Now Dr. Gautam Gupta is the subject of a nationwide manhunt after being charged with defrauding state and private insurance companies out of $25 million, according to the FBI.

Gupta, 57, who owns and operates several area Nutrition Clinic locations, was charged with felony counts of mail fraud, health care fraud and conspiracy in a criminal complaint announced on Friday.

Gupta or his staff allegedly submitted claims to both the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Insurance Company and Illinois Medicaid for unnecessary procedures or procedures that were never performed, according to the feds.

His company — which has locations in Arlington Heights, Chicago, Naperville, Rockford and South Beloit — was paid nearly $25 million for the claims between June 2001 and January 2010, the FBI said.

In January, 2010, federal agents, accompanied by State Police investigators and representatives from the Illinois Healthcare and Human Services Department, executed search warrants on Gupta’s clinics. The FBI at the time would only say it was part of an ongoing investigation.

The FBI has been unable to find Gupta, whose last known address was 1660 N. Mulford Rd. in Rockford.

Gupta is of Indian descent, stands 5-foot-5, weighs 160 pounds and has graying black hair that is sometimes worn in a ponytail.

Anyone with information on his whereabouts is asked to call the Chicago FBI at (312) 421-6700.

via FBI manhunt is on for weight loss doctor Gautam Gupta – Chicago Sun-Times.

The Times of India, November 23, 2010

Nearly 25 per cent of overweight and 16 percent of normal weight women of reproductive-age misperceive their body weight, says a new study.

The research from University of Texas Medical Branch suggests that this misperception affects women’s weight-related behaviours making many vulnerable to cardiovascular and other obesity-related diseases.

The researchers also found that overweight women who perceive themselves as normal weight were significantly less likely to report weight-related behaviours, such as dieting.

“As obesity numbers climb, many women identify overweight as normal, not based on the scale but on how they view themselves,” said corresponding author Mahbubur Rahman, assistant professor Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Women’s Health.

Self-perception of body weight is the degree of concordance between perceived and measured weight.

The study analyzed more than 2,200 women 18-25 years old based on survey questions pertaining to sociodemographic variables, height, weight, weight perceptions and weight-related behaviors.

Women with Body Mass Index (BMI) below 25 were considered normal weight and those with BMIs of 25 or more were considered overweight. Overall, 52 per cent of the study participants were considered overweight or obese.

Weight-related behaviours assessed included using diet pills, powder or liquids, laxatives or diuretics; induced vomiting; skipping meals; dieting/eating less or differently; smoking more cigarettes; and not eating carbohydrates.

Respondents were also asked about the number of days over the last week that they exercised for at least 30 minutes continuously.

Overweight misperceivers had significantly lower odds of participating in healthy or unhealthy weight-related behaviours. Normal weight misperceivers were more than twice as likely to diet, skip meals and smoke more cigarettes; the respective odds were nearly four and five times higher with regard to using diet pills, powder, liquids and diuretics.

“Weight misperception is a threat to the success of obesity prevention programs. Overweight individuals who do not recognize that they are overweight are far less likely to eat healthfully and exercise. These patients are at risk for cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and other serious problems,” said lead author Abbey Berenson, of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Women’s Health.

The researchers recommend that clinicians calculate patients” BMI at each visit as part of their vital signs, routinely screen for misperceptions of body weight and inquire about unhealthy weight-related behaviours so that they can counsel patients appropriately.

“This is especially important for reproductive-age women because they are more likely to be obese than similarly aged men, often because they’ve had at least one child and have not lost pregnancy weight and find that their schedules make it difficult to exercise and eat healthfully,” added Berenson.

The study is published in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology .

via Most overweight women think they’re slim – The Times of India.