Big in Japan? You're Breaking the Law!
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.
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Should Chocolate Milk Be Banned?
A food fight is brewing in the school cafeteria, and this time, it’s promises to be much nastier than the one that got those kids jailed:
The milk industry clearly doesn’t want chocolate milk to go the way of the soda can in schools. Sure, a serving of chocolate milk has 60 more calories, but kids love it, so they’ll drink more milk if it’s an option instead of other sugary drinks, the campaign contends. The National Dairy Council and the Milk Processor Education Program are spending between $500,000 to $1 million to get the message across.
But no amount of money will convince people like Marlene Schwartz, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, that chocolate milk needs to be in schools. She told the AP that kids get needed calcium elsewhere and do not need yet another source of sugar additives that contribute to obesity. Ann Cooper, director of nutrition services at the Boulder Valley School District in Colorado, notes in the same story that kids "happily drink white milk" when it’s the only milk available at school. The "renegade lunch lady," as she calls herself, also said that the extra 40 to 60 calories on top of the 110 calories in a typical 8-ounce serving of white milk "could add up to 5 pounds of weight gain over the 180-day school year." Her district does not offer chocolate milk.
So, should schools ban chocolate milk? Will kids revolt if they did? Link
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How Medical Data Revealed Secret to Health and Happiness
The Framingham Heart Study began in 1948 and followed over 5,000 participants for decades. The volunteers made up 40% of the population of Framingham, Massachusetts.
In 2003, Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist and internist at Harvard, and James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego, began searching through the Framingham data. But they didn’t care about LDL cholesterol or enlarged left ventricles. Rather, they were drawn to a clerical quirk: The original Framingham researchers noted each participant’s close friends, colleagues, and family members.
“They asked for follow-up purposes,” Christakis says. “If someone moved away, the researchers would call their friends and try to track them down.”
Christakis and Fowler used the social data to study changes in the population over time. They constructed networks of the volunteers social connections to see how these connections affected any changes. The findings? Some behaviors are contagious. Social connections with up to three degrees of separation influence whether we quit smoking or become fat. And even happiness is contagious, both online and offline. The social connections of the Framingham volunteers are graphically illustrated at Wired. Link
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As Waistlines Widen, Brains Shrink
A new study shows that elderly people who are overweight or obese have significantly less brain tissue than those of normal weight. The difference was 4% for overweight people and 8% for the obese in a study of 94 people in their 70s. The volunteers were followed for five years, and anyone who showed cognitive impairment was excluded from the final sample.
“The brains of obese people looked 16 years older than their healthy counterparts while [those of] overweight people looked 8 years older,” said UCLA neuroscientist Paul Thompson, senior author of a study published online in Human Brain Mapping.
Much of the lost tissue was in the frontal and temporal lobe regions of the brain, the seat of decision-making and memory, among other things.
It is not clear whether weight gain caused a reduction in brain tissue, or if a smaller brain contributes to weight gain, or there are other factors contributing to both. Link -via Lifehacker
(image credit: Flickr user erat)
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Fat Inmate Hid Gun in Fat Rolls
We’ve posted some creative prison smuggling schemes before on Neatorama, but never one this … beefy:
An obese inmate in Texas has been charged after officials learned he had a gun hidden under flabs of his own flesh. [...] The 500-pound man was searched during his arrest and again at a city jail and the county jail, but officers never found the weapon in his rolls of skin. Vera admitted having the gun during a shower break at the county jail.
Link (Image: Houston Police Department)
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Children Cheat on Exercise Study
A study by Mile End Centre for Sports and Exercise Medicine in the Whitechapel area of London, England asked 11- and 12-year-olds to wear pedometers to measure their activity. Researchers were surprised to find that the more obese children registered the highest activity levels. Then they found out why. The participants were attaching the pedometers to their dogs!
Once adjusted to take into account the help from pets, the study indicated that boys in the borough walk or run 12,620 steps a day, below the recommended level of 15,000 steps.
It also found that girls take 10,150 steps, falling short of the recommended 12,000 steps.
It indicated that more than a third of 11 and 12-year-olds in the borough of Tower Hamlets are overweight or obese – 11% higher than the national average.
(image credit: Flickr user size8jeans)
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Personal Trainer's New Year's Resolution: Get Fat!
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
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"Fat Enzyme" Explains Why Some People Never Get Fat
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.
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How Diet Soda Actually Makes You Fat
Think that because diet sodas have low calories they help prevent weight gain? Think again! David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding of Men’s Health wrote an article on the ugly truth about diet soda:
When confronted with the growing tide of calories from sweetened beverages, the first response is, “Why not just drink diet soda?” Well, for a few reasons:
Just because diet soda is low in calories doesn’t mean it can’t lead to weight gain.
It may have only 5 or fewer calories per serving, but emerging research suggests that consuming sugary-tasting beverages–even if they’re artificially sweetened–may lead to a high preference for sweetness overall. That means sweeter (and more caloric) cereal, bread, dessert–everything.
Link | More on "The Dangers of Diet Soda" at Get Fit Slowly blog
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Depressed, Sick, and Fat? Blame Your Friends!
Image: J Fowler and N Christakis/New England Journal of Medicine/BMJ
Research by medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis and colleague at the Harvard Medical School in Boston revealed how oher people’s happiness, depression, and obesity can affect you:
Recent research shows that our moods are far more strongly influenced by those around us than we tend to think. Not only that, we are also beholden to the moods of friends of friends, and of friends of friends of friends – people three degrees of separation away from us who we have never met, but whose disposition can pass through our social network like a virus.
Indeed, it is becoming clear that a whole range of phenomena are transmitted through networks of friends in ways that are not entirely understood: happiness and depression, obesity, drinking and smoking habits, ill-health, the inclination to turn out and vote in elections, a taste for certain music or food, a preference for online privacy, even the tendency to attempt or think about suicide. They ripple through networks "like pebbles thrown into a pond", says Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has pioneered much of the new work.
At first sight, the idea that we can catch the moods, habits and state of health not only of those around us, but also those we do not even know seems alarming. It implies that rather than being in charge of where we are going in life, we are little more than back-seat drivers, since most social influence operates at a subconscious level.
Previously on Neatorama: 14 Habits That Make You Fat (which also noted the study above)
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14 Habits That Make You Fat
It may be the wrong time of year to think about how fat you are -or maybe it’s the best time of year to change your habits before you put the pounds on! HealthAssist lists 14 habits you want to examine to turn your health around and either lose weight or avoid becoming fat. Some you are familiar with, but others may be news. Who knew the way you dress makes a difference in how active you are? Link -Thanks, Karen!
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Cut Out the Stuffing!
Simon Tofield, the creator of the Simon’s Cat series (previously at Neatorama) has turned his attention to his sister’s dog. This video was created for the RSPCA’s campaign to fight pet obesity.
There is of course a serious message to this animation. According to leading vets, pet obesity is one of the biggest issues affecting pets’ health and one in three of the UK’s dogs and cats are now overweight. Fat pets can develop serious health problems – including diabetes, arthritis and even organ failure.
The RSPCA has more information, and has even created an online community to help people keep their pets slim and healthy. Link -Thanks, Jayne Carverhill!
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"Weight-ism" More Widespread Than Sexism
In America, most of us believe that we shouldn’t discriminate based on characteristics that people can’t control (e.g. race, gender, etc.). However, we also believe that weight is something that people can control, and while that is correct to a certain extent, there are other factors that prevent people from achieving their ideal weight.
A new study from Yale University claims that weight discrimination is more widespread than previously imagined. Some of its findings:
– Men are not at serious risk of discrimination until their BMI reaches 35, while women begin experiencing an increase in discrimination at BMI 27.
- Moderately obese women with a BMI of 30 to 35 are three times more likely than men in the same weight group to experience weight discrimination.
- Compared to other forms of discrimination in the United States, weight discrimination is the third most prevalent cause of perceived discrimination among women (after gender and age) and the fourth most prevalent form of discrimination among all adults (after gender, age and race.)
As for how much control people can exert over their own weight, according to Rebecca Puhl (the study’s author):
We place a lot of emphasis on personal responsibility for body weight. Our billion-dollar diet industry is founded on that premise. Your weight is modifiable. But that does not reflect the current state of science. We know from hundreds of randomized clinically controlled trials that it’s very difficult to sustain weight loss over time with our existing treatment methods. That has compelled a number of expert panels, like the National Institutes of Health, to conclude that we really can’t expect you to lose more than 10 percent of your body weight and be able to keep that off.
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