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With obesity at 18.8% of the population and health care costs, Hungary has just implemented a ten forint (about $.50 tax) on fatty and sugary foods to cover health costs. So what exactly are Hungarians hungry for?
The dobostorta cake, a five-layer vanilla and chocolate buttercream dessert with a caramel-glazed top layer, is probably Hungary’s best-known treat — at least after goulash. The cake can be seen in the vitrines of coffee houses and bakery shops lining the streets of Budapest.
“Hungarians are really into desserts,” said Carolyn Banfalvi, co-founder of Taste Hungary. The tour company operator describes Hungarian food in general as “very fatty,” with traditional cooking ingredients that include pork and goose fat. “What they call bacon here is often pieces of pure lard,” she said.
The Hungarian government argues that this kind of diet is also leading to obesity and increased health problems, and that those who partake in indulgences like sweets should also pay a premium to help offset those costs. Enter the “fat tax.”
Other European nations are considering the same, despite the suggestion that education and/or subsidies for healthy fruits and veggies would be more effective. With about two-thirds of Americans being overweight or obese, should the United States follow suit?
It seems like a silly question, some say that heavy people who exercise can actually be healthier and live longer lives than their skinny but sedentary friends.
Well, maybe. Adam Bean of Runner’s World asked two experts what "fit" really means:
RW: Do the benefits of exercise matter more than losing weight?
YES: Physical activity can lower your risk of cardiovascular disease, regardless of your weight. Whether you’re talking about boosting good HDL cholesterol, lowering bad LDL cholesterol, reducing blood pressure, and so forth—all these can be improved with exercise, even if you don’t lose weight. And this results in a lower cardiovascular-disease risk. Physical activity seems to have a profound effect on overall mortality risk as well—again, regardless of your weight.NO: Exercise can improve your health, but you can list more than 50 medical conditions—from diabetes to arthritis to acid reflux to sleep apnea to certain cancers—that result from complications from carrying excess weight. Even losing five or 10 pounds will lower your risk of developing these issues and improve your health.
Link (Photo: Shutterstock)
A fat cat in Japan complies with doctor’s orders by starting an exercise routine. I don’t know if it’s the cat’s facial expression, his considerable size, or the appropriate music, but I could not stop watching this video. Link -via Metafilter
Workers from the Thames Water company in east London plead with customers not to pour grease down the drain, because it clogs the sewers. That message is sing the tune of “Good King Wenceslas”. From the YouTube link:
Thames Water will donate 1p to WaterAid for every hit the film gets on YouTube (up to a maximum of 200,000 views, ending on 31 January 2011) to support the charity’s life-saving work to improve access to safe water and sanitation to the world’s poorest people.
A lot of people probably think "McDonald’s made me fat," but there’s one guy in Brazil who got the court of law to agree with him. Here’s the bizarre story of a man who sued McD for making him fat … and won!
A former manager of a McDonald’s franchise in Porto Allegre, Brazil, sued the hamburger chain for making him gain 65 pounds while he worked with them for over a dozen years. McDonald’s must pay him $17,500 as recompense for his weight gain, a Brazilian court ruled on Tuesday.
The 32-year-old man, whose identity wasn’t disclosed, complained that the company’s policy of mandatory food sampling caused him to balloon from about 155 lbs. to 231 lbs. while working at their restaurant in southern Brazil. [...]
The man said that he felt forced to taste everything on the menu to ensure the quality of the food because McDonald’s hired undercover customers to randomly visit restaurants and report back on quality.
Also, he blamed the free lunches consisting of burgers, fries and ice cream, which contributed to his excessive weight gain during the course of employment.
Judge Joao Filho agreed with the man, and issued a ruling against the company, ordering them to pay $17500 to the ex-employee.
If you thought KFC’s Double Down was bad, just wait until you get your hands on the new Fried Cheese Melt from Denny’s. The heart-stopping monstrosity combines 4 fried mozzarella sticks and a grilled cheese sandwich. At only $4 with a an included side of fries, it’s a lot more filling for the price tag than the Double Down. I have to admit, while I found the Double Down to be seriously nasty looking, I am a sucker for cheese, so this actually looks pretty good to me.
Would you eat it?
Link Via Consumerist
Think your job stinks? Just be thankful you’re not a sewer worker in London. Here’s what they had to do recently:
"We’re used to getting our hands dirty, but nothing on this scale," said Danny Brackley, a sewer flusher with Thames Water. "We couldn’t even access the sewer as it was blocked by a 4-foot wall of solid fat."
The fat is the product of Londoners’ "sewer abuse" — using the water system as general garbage disposal. Particularly troublesome is Londoners’ habit of pouring used cooking oil down the sink. Once in the sewer, the oil cools, congeals and then traps other garbage.
Getting at the goo was not easy. Teams of workers, replete with breathing apparatus to protect them from the rancid smell, had to attack the fat with shovels. They then used water cannons to break down the "fatbergs" inside the sewer.
Link (Photo: Stewart Turkington)
For the fifth year running, Mississippi clinched yet another unwanted distinction of being the fattest state of 2010. A whopping 70% of Mississippians are overweight, with more than 33% of them being downright obese.
The skinniest state is Colorado, but if you read the statistics closely, the news isn’t so great: more than 55% of Coloradans are overweight, and nearly one in five are obese.
Link | Why are Americans so fat? The reason is obvious.
Pictured is Chauncy Morlan, who once made a living as a side show fat man. People paid money to look at him, because he was so unusually obese. A hundred years later, you can walk into any buffet restaurant and see a dozen people bigger than Morlan. Adam Ozimek at Modeled Behavior wonders what size people we will consider normal or freakish 100 years from now. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
Why do we gain weight as we age? Don’t just blame all the bad stuff we eat … let’s blame nature, too. Darn those aging muscles:
In large part, that’s because we lose muscle cells as we age. When younger muscle cells get damaged, they’re quickly repaired. That’s not the case with older muscles, according to UCLA researcher and geriatrician Jonathan Wanagat. He says we don’t know why muscles literally shrink as we age. But there are a number of theories.
"I think one of the ones that have become increasingly interesting and popular is the idea that the stem cells in the muscle are not able to respond to damage or to aging the way they did when we were younger," says Wanagat. And if damaged muscle cells aren’t repaired, they sort of whittle away and die, he says. Decreases in growth hormone, testosterone and estrogen levels may also account for the loss of muscle fiber and the inability of tissue to replenish itself.
In addition, the muscle cells we’re left with are sort of worn out, according to Phillips. "If you think of muscles as being the energy powerhouse of our body, that’s where most of our calories are burned. And when we talk about metabolism, what we’re really talking about is how efficiently those powerhouse cells — the muscle cells of our body — burn the energy we bring in."
Energy is delivered to the body in the form of calories. And if you keep your caloric intake exactly the same as you get older, says Phillips, those unburned calories end up as fat.
Its sort of a one-two punch, says Wanagat. The energy powerhouse cells in muscles get damaged with age. That damage accumulates over time and, on top of that, the body’s ability to repair that damage also dwindles with aging.
Patti Neighmond of NPR has more: Link
Researcher Wolfgang Goymann and colleagues were studying the migrations of the garden warblers (Sylvia borin) when they discovered an interesting nugget of information:
While pockets of flab accumulated over the winter months may be a source of frustration for some, it can be a cause of joy for others …
The researchers fitted ten fat birds and ten lean birds on the Italian island of Ventotene with temporary adhesive radio transmitters. [...]
Monitoring their test subjects using the stick-on surveillance bugs, the German boffins found that the more rotund ones had sex sooner and generally slept only one night in any given location. Plumpness led to sexual success for the wobblebottomed group, while their spindly counterparts took longer to get any action – and tended to make longer stays of more than one night, too.
Late last week, film director Kevin Smith pulled an anti-Silent Bob by unleashing a barrage of HateTweets (Is that a word? No? It should be!) against Southwest Airlines for kicking him off a plane because he was too fat. Although they later apologized, Southwest stuck to its gun by labeling him as a "safety concern."
I don’t know about you, but looking at the photo above, Southwest may have a point here.
Just kidding – actually that’s just Kevin Smith "avatized" by Robert Paulson, who has now avatized a bunch of other celebs:
Hey all, I’m the Avatizer. Yeah, that one. I started doing these photoshops the weekend Avatar came out cause I liked the movie and thought it’d be fun to do a few of these. Well people seemed to like them and requested more and soon a few became a dozen and and then a bunch until I ended up with over a hundred of these things seemingly overnight.
As you can probably tell, my early ones are very rough, mainly because I didn’t have much experience with photoshop when I started so I’ve had to essentially learn how to do this as I go along. Each manipulation can take as little as 20-30 minutes to as much as 4 or 5 hours (especially when I wasn’t quite sure how to do it). Now each one takes roughly an hour and a half to do, depending on how detailed the resolution is and whether their are arms/hands/legs to do too. If you want a general idea of how I do it, check out this timelapse video I did for my Ellen Page edit.
Links: Avatized Pics Flickr Set | Kevin Smith on Twitter
Are you fat? It may not be your fault, blame the bacteria in your intestines instead:
Ninety percent of the bacteria fall into two major divisions, or phyla: the Firmicutes and the Bacteroidetes. Previous research had shown that obese mice had higher levels of Firmicutes, and lean ones had more Bacteroidetes.
Analyzing the genomes of the bacteria, Gordon and graduate student Peter Turnbaugh concluded that the Firmicutes were more efficient at digesting food that the body can’t.
Animals that have a higher proportion of Firmicutes convert a higher proportion of food into calories that can be absorbed by the body, making it easier to gain weight.
When the researchers transferred bacteria from obese mice into so-called gnotobiotic mice, which were raised in a sterile environment and had no bacteria in their guts, the mice gained more weight than did those receiving a similar amount of bacteria from lean mice, even though they were fed the same diet.
Are you fat? Be thankful that you’re in the United States. If you were in Japan, you’d be breaking the law:
In Japan, being thin isn’t just the price you pay for fashion or social acceptance. It’s the law. [...]
In Japan, already the slimmest industrialized nation, people are fighting fat to ward off dreaded metabolic syndrome and comply with a government-imposed waistline standard. Metabolic syndrome, known here simply as “metabo,” is a combination of health risks, including stomach flab, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, that can lead to cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Concerned about rising rates of both in a graying nation, Japanese lawmakers last year set a maximum waistline size for anyone age 40 and older: 85 centimeters (33.5 inches) for men and 90 centimeters (35.4 inches) for women.
A skunk named Mr. Bumble was turned over to the RSPCA when his owners could no longer handle him. The skunk, who loves bacon sandwiches, weighed in at 14 pounds! Mr. Bumble is now at Tropiquaria Animal Park in Watchet, England and is on a weight-loss regimen.
Park owner Chris Noisier told the BBC: “We’re now working on dieting him down to what he should be and clearly bacon butties are not a normal part of a skunk’s diet in the wild.
“We’re putting him on the vegetarian option at the moment. It’s very much like a human weight watching issue.
“He is getting to meet lots of new people so there’s lots going on in his life and I suspect it’s making up for the lack of his old favourite food.”
Hmmm, this t-shirt outlet might not be the place to buy gifts for loved ones, but if you are a fat guy and proud of it, you’ll find a shirt to love. There are also shirts for big women and for women who love fat guys. Link -via Buzzfeed
Every sport has its bad boy (I’m looking at you, Ron Artest), but sumo bad boy Asashoryu Akinori is special.
After a string of bad behaviors including a brawl in a communal bath, being drunk in public and so on, the sumo champ is being accused of … being "podgy"!
Sumo bad boy Asashoryu, no stranger to public criticism, has been labelled "podgy" in a bizarre attack on the volatile Mongolian.
A popular former wrestler now working as a TV commentator accused Asashoryu of being flabby, even though his 150-kilogram frame is relatively small for the sport.
"He looks podgy," Shuhei Mainoumi told Japanese media. "He doesn’t look as buff. When I got flabby I hated being naked and showing off my body — he looks a bit like that."
Um, maybe this is my naiveté but I thought being podgy is the whole point of sumo wrestling? Link
Most people’s New Year’s resolutions usually involve losing weight, but Australian underwear model and personal trainer Paul "PJ" James’s was the exact opposite: he wanted to become fat to better understand his obese gym clients!
Matt Johnston of the Herald Sun has the story:
PJ, 32, has already gone from 80kg to 100kg since making his New Year resolution to boost his flab.
"I have always found it easy to tell clients what to do to lose weight, but it’s hard to tell where a client is coming from and how they are feeling," he said.
"There are health risks, I won’t shy away from that. But I’m trying to do it as responsibly as possible, with regular blood pressure and health checks."
He said his body had tried to reject the fat at first, but he had worked hard to make sure he stacked on the kilos, and was now starting to notice people looking at him differently.
"Especially when I’m trying to train clients and they are doing sit-ups and I’m standing there with a massive gut," he said.
"My gut is pretty big. That’s where most of the weight seems to be going."
Link (Photo: Rebecca Michael) | More pics at Australia-Bodybuilding Blog
And they want more! The Chawners, who haven’t worked in 11 years, explains why they want, nay, deserve more money! (Photo: Bernard Ashton/Closer)
“What we get barely covers the bills and puts food on the table. It’s not our fault we can’t work. We deserve more.”
The family claim to spend £50 a week on food and consume 3,000 calories each a day. The recommended maximum intake is 2,000 for women and 2,500 for men.
“We have cereal for breakfast, bacon butties for lunch and microwave pies with mashed potato or chips for dinner,” Mrs Chawner told Closer magazine.
“All that healthy food, like fruit and veg, is too expensive. We’re fat because it’s in our genes. Our whole family is overweight,” she added.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by philosophile.
Ever wonder why some people can eat anything they want and never gain weight? UCSF (my alma mater!) researcher Robert Farese and colleagues have found that it may just be the absence of a "fat enzyme":
The enzyme, MGAT2, determines whether dietary fat is used to generate energy or stored under the skin around the waist. The discovery of its role could be the key to preventing obesity, diabetes and heart disease
Scientists found that mice missing the gene for MGAT2 were able to feast on a high fat diet without becoming flabby or overweight.
Mice lacking MGAT2 were also protected against glucose intolerance – a precursor to diabetes – high cholesterol and a build up of fat in liver cells.
How you know your kitty needs to go on a diet.
Link Via GiggleSugar
Update 2/28/09: Let’s not forget our article on this very subject: Top 15 Amazingly Fat Cats
Austrian artist Erwin Wurm is a chubby chaser. Well, not so much a chubby chaser as a chubby maker.
And when we say "chubby," we mean "fleshy, volumnous sculptures."
Link - via geekologie
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
To paraphrase Animal Farm, “some fats are more equal than others”.
While putting on weight in general can have negative effects on your health, abdominal weight gain (visceral fat) is particularly unhealthy. Since visceral fat is buried deep in your abdomen, it may seem like a difficult target for spot reduction. But this fat is actually quite sensitive to exercise and calorie reduction.
In addition to diet and exercise for reducing overall fat, eMedExpert Blog has five tips for reducing belly fat in particular. Link -Thanks, Karen!
This is a story too gross to make up. A plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills is in trouble for modifying his engine to run on liposuctioned fat. Several ex-patients are suing Dr. Craig Bittner because they did not agree to having their excess used for his benefit. Apparently this isn’t the first time something like this has happened or else California wouldn’t already have a law on the books banning people from using human medical waste to power vehicles.
Whatever happened to appreciating the search for alternate fuel sources?
Link Via Consumerist, Photo by dotbenjamin [Flickr]
