By MICHAEL MOSS On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.’s and company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were hardly friends. Their stature was defined by their skill in fighting one another for what they called “stomach share” — the amount of digestive space that any one company’s brand can grab from the competition. James Behnke, a 55-year-old executive at Pillsbury, greeted the men as they arrived. He was anxious but also hopeful about the plan that he and a few other food-company executives had devised to engage the C.E.O.’s on America’s growing weight problem. “We were very concerned, and rightfully so, that obesity was becoming a major issue,” Behnke recalled. “People were starting to talk about sugar taxes, and there was a lot of pressure on food companies.” Getting the company chiefs in the same room to talk about anything, much less a sensitive issue like this, was a tricky business, so Behnke and his fellow organizers had scripted the meeting carefully, honing the message to its barest essentials. “C.E.O.’s in the food industry are typically not technical guys, and they’re uncomfortable going to meetings where technical people talk in technical terms about technical things,” Behnke said. “They don’t want to be embarrassed. They don’t want to make commitments. They want to maintain their aloofness and autonomy.” A chemist by training with a doctoral degree in food science, Behnke became Pillsbury’s chief technical officer in 1979 and was instrumental in creating a long line of hit products, including microwaveable popcorn. He deeply admired Pillsbury but in recent years had grown troubled by pictures of obese children suffering from diabetes and the earliest signs of hypertension and heart disease. In the months leading up to the C.E.O. meeting, he was engaged in conversation with a group of food-science experts who were painting an increasingly grim picture of the public’s ability to cope with the industry’s formulations — from the body’s fragile controls on overeating to the hidden power of some processed foods to make people feel hungrier still. It was time, he and a handful of others felt, to warn the C.E.O.’s that their companies may have gone too far in creating and marketing products that posed the greatest health concerns. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Aggression
Link ID: 17843 - Posted: 02.25.2013

By Tina Hesman Saey Like the sun, insulin levels rise and fall in a daily rhythm. Disrupting that cycle may contribute to obesity and diabetes, a new study suggests. Many body systems follow a daily clock known as a circadian rhythm. Body temperature, blood pressure and the release of many hormones are on circadian timers. But until now, no one had shown that insulin — a hormone that helps control how the body uses sugars for energy — also has a daily cycle. Working with mice, researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville have found that rodents are more sensitive to insulin’s effects at certain times of day. Disrupting the animals’ circadian timers interferes with the hormone’s daily rise and fall and makes mice prone to obesity. If the findings hold up in humans, they could help explain why people who work night shifts tend to be overweight and suffer health problems. The discovery may also tie the obesity epidemic in part to staying up late and eating at the wrong time. Many people had thought that it was best for the body to maintain insulin at a relatively constant level, says Carl Johnson, a circadian biologist who led the new study. “But that’s not how organisms have adapted,” he says. Since the environment cycles through light and dark, body processes often coordinate with that rhythm. To uncover insulin’s natural rhythm, Johnson and his colleagues performed an “insulin clamp” procedure on mice. The clamp infuses glucose or insulin around the clock into mice that are moving freely in their cages. Measuring how much insulin or glucose the mice need to maintain constant blood sugar levels tells the researchers how responsive the animals are to the hormone at any given time of day. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Aggression
Link ID: 17831 - Posted: 02.23.2013

Diet pop and other artificially sweetened products may cause us to eat and drink even more calories and increase our risk for obesity and Type 2 diabetes, researchers are learning. Former McGill University researcher Dana Small specializes in the neuropsychology of flavour and feeding at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Small said there's mounting evidence that artificial sweeteners have a couple of problematic effects. Sugar substitutes such as sucralose and aspartame are more intensely sweet than sugar and may rewire taste receptors so less sweet, healthier foods aren't as enjoyable, shifting preferences to higher calorie, sweeter foods, she said. Small and some other researchers believe artificial sweeteners interfere with brain chemistry and hormones that regulate appetite and satiety. For millennia, sweet taste signalled the arrival of calories. But that's no longer the case with artificial sweeteners. "The sweet taste is no longer signalling energy and so the body adapts," Small said in an interview with CBC News. "It's no longer going to release insulin when it senses sweet because sweet now is not such a good predictor of the arrival of energy." Susan Swithers, a psychology professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., studies behavioural neuroscience. "Exposure to high-intensity sweeteners could change the way that sweet tastes are processed," she says. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Obesity; Aggression
Link ID: 17825 - Posted: 02.19.2013

By Jason Bittel Bears hibernate. They spend all year eating salmon, blueberries, and picnic baskets and then, sometime around baseball playoffs, they all wander off to a cave full of treasure and explorers’ skulls where they curl up in a big furry ball and snore away the winter. Everybody knows this! Even small children too young to attend to their own biological functions know how these wild animals make it through a period of harsh weather and food shortage. But beyond the fact that bears den up in winter, what do we really know of these lumbering slumber beasts and the secrets they keep beneath the ice and snow? Let’s start with this bit of housekeeping—cursory Googling of bears and hibernation will lead you to all sorts of trash talk saying bears aren’t “true hibernators.” True hibernators, such as Arctic ground squirrels, are capable of dropping their body temperatures below the freezing point of water, conditions so cold that neurons in the brain’s cortex are physically incapable of firing. Not to mention you can do all sorts of awful things to true hibernators while they slumber—like, oh, I don’t know, locking marmots in airtight jars filled with carbonic acid and hydrogen. (Easy, PETA. We’re talking 1832.) I know what you’re thinking: First Lance Armstrong, then Manti Te’o, and now this. But before you sit the kids down and blow their fragile little minds with the message that bears may not be true hibernators, consider that science is something of a moving target. The more we learn, the more questions we raise. © 2013 The Slate Group, LLC

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 17812 - Posted: 02.18.2013

By SARAH LYALL IPSWICH, England — Who knows what the worst moment was for Paul Mason — there were so many awful milestones, as he grew fatter and fatter — but a good bet might be when he became too vast to leave his room. To get him to the hospital for a hernia operation, the local fire department had to knock down a wall and extricate him with a forklift. That was nearly a decade ago, when Mr. Mason weighed about 980 pounds, and the spectacle made him the object of fascinated horror, a freak-show exhibit. The British news media, which likes a superlative, appointed him “the world’s fattest man.” Now the narrative has shifted to one of redemption and second chances. Since a gastric bypass operation in 2010, Mr. Mason, 52 years old and 6-foot-4, has lost nearly two-thirds of his body weight, putting him at about 336 pounds — still obese, but within the realm of plausibility. He is talking about starting a jewelry business. “My meals are a lot different now than they used to be,” Mr. Mason said during a recent interview in his one-story apartment in a cheerful public housing complex here. For one thing, he no longer eats around the clock. “Food is a necessity, but now I don’t let it control my life anymore,” he said. But the road to a new life is uphill and paved with sharp objects. When he answered the door, Mr. Mason did not walk; he glided in an electric wheelchair. And though Mr. Mason looks perfectly normal from the chest up, horrible vestiges of his past stick to him, literally, in the form of a huge mass of loose skin choking him like a straitjacket. Folds and folds of it encircle his torso and sit on his lap, like an unwanted package someone has set there; more folds encase his legs. All told, he reckons, the excess weighs more than 100 pounds. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17772 - Posted: 02.06.2013

By Nathan Seppa The link between obesity and vitamin D deficiency appears to be a one-way street. A large study of the genetics underpinning both conditions finds that obesity may drive down vitamin D levels, but a predisposition to the vitamin deficiency doesn’t lead to obesity. The findings also suggest that boosting vitamin D levels won’t reverse obesity. An association between the two has been observed for years, but determining cause and effect has been difficult. “I find this very plausible and a correct interpretation of the data,” says Robert Heaney, an endocrinologist at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb. “I think it’s worth reporting.” In the new study, researchers tapped into a huge international database, accessing the genetic profiles of more than 42,000 people. The scientists noted whether a person harbored any of 12 genetic variants associated with being overweight. Not surprisingly, people with these variants were more likely to be obese than those without them. People with these obesity-associated gene variants were also apt to have low vitamin D levels, Elina Hyppönen, an epidemiologist and nutritionist at University College London, and colleagues report online February 5 in PLOS Medicine. When the researchers tested for four genetic variants linked to low vitamin D levels, they found that people with the variants were not necessarily prone to obesity. The researchers checked both findings against a separate database of people and got similar results. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17767 - Posted: 02.06.2013

by Michael Balter CAMBRIDGE, UNITED KINGDOM—Siberia may not be everyone's idea of a tourist destination, but it has been home to humans for tens of thousands of years. Now a new study of indigenous Siberian peoples presented here earlier this month at a meeting on human evolution reveals how natural selection helped people adapt to the frigid north. The findings also show that different living populations adapted in somewhat different ways. Siberia occupies nearly 10% of Earth's land mass, but today it's home to only about 0.5% of the world's population. This is perhaps not surprising, since January temperatures average as low as -25°C. Geneticists have sampled only a few of the region's nearly one dozen indigenous groups; some, such as the 2000-member Teleuts, descendants of a once powerful group of horse and cattle breeders also known for their skill in making leather goods, are in danger of disappearing. Previous research on cold adaptation included two Siberian populations and implicated a couple of related genes. For example, genes called UCP1 and UCP3 tend to be found in more active forms in populations that live in colder climes, according to work published in 2010 by University of Chicago geneticist Anna Di Rienzo and her colleagues. These genes help the body's fat stores directly produce heat rather than producing chemical energy for muscle movements or brain functions, a process called "nonshivering thermogenesis." The new study sampled Siberians much more intensely, including 10 groups that represent nearly all of the region's native populations. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 17730 - Posted: 01.29.2013

When you eat could play an important role in weight loss, a new study suggests. Researchers looked at the role of meal timing in 420 men and women in southeast Spain participating in a 20-week weight-loss treatment following several studies in animals showing a relationship between the timing of feeding and weight regulation. Lunch was the main meal among the Mediterranean population studied.Lunch was the main meal among the Mediterranean population studied. (Eric Gaillard/Reuters) "Our results indicate that late eaters displayed a slower weight-loss rate and lost significantly less weight than early eaters, suggesting that the timing of large meals could be an important factor in a weight loss program," Frank Scheer, director of the medical chronobiology program at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said in a release. Of the participants, 51 per cent were early eaters who ate their main meal, lunch, before 3 p.m. The other 49 per cent had lunch after three. The researchers found energy and nutrient intake, estimates of calories burned, appetite hormones and hours of sleep were similar between both groups. "Nevertheless, late eaters were more evening types, had less energetic breakfasts and skipped breakfast more frequently than early eaters," Scheer and his co-authors wrote in Tuesday's issue of the International Journal of Obesity. They suggested that new weight loss strategies should incorporate the timing of food as well as the classic look at calorie intake and distribution of carbohydrates, fats and protein. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Obesity; Aggression
Link ID: 17728 - Posted: 01.29.2013

by Sara Reardon In the Arctic winter, it is not even worth getting up in the morning. It's freezing cold and the sun never rises, making it impossible to tell night from day. So each autumn, when the Arctic ground squirrel (Spermophilus parryii) heads underground to hibernate for eight months, it doesn't even bother setting its circadian clock. During hibernation, the squirrel goes into a state akin to suspended animation. It cuts itself off from the world and allows its body temperature to drop to -3 °C while it sleeps – the lowest ever body temperature recorded in a mammal. Once it wakes up for the summer, however, the squirrel can switch its daily clock back on. The squirrels' sub-zero tolerance was first discovered almost 25 years ago. Curious how the animals manage to survive the frigid Arctic winter where temperatures regularly drop to -30 °C, Brian Barnes of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks implanted radio transmitters into the stomachs of captive squirrels, which transmitted information on their body temperature, before letting them build burrows for the winter. Once the squirrels went into their deep sleep, Barnes found that their core body temperature dropped from about 36 °C to -3 °C. To prevent their blood from freezing, the squirrels cleanse it of any particles that water molecules could form ice crystals around. This allows the blood to remain liquid below zero, a phenomenon known as supercooling. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 17715 - Posted: 01.26.2013

Experts are questioning whether diet drinks could raise depression risk, after a large study has found a link. The US research in more than 250,000 people found depression was more common among frequent consumers of artificially sweetened beverages. The work, which will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's annual meeting, did not look at the cause for this link. Drinking coffee was linked with a lower risk of depression. People who drank four cups a day were 10% less likely to be diagnosed with depression during the 10-year study period than those who drank no coffee. But those who drank four cans or glasses of diet fizzy drinks or artificially sweetened juice a day increased their risk of depression by about a third. Lead researcher Dr Honglei Chen, of the National Institutes of Health in North Carolina, said: "Our research suggests that cutting out or down on sweetened diet drinks or replacing them with unsweetened coffee may naturally help lower your depression risk." But he said more studies were needed to explore this. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Depression; Aggression
Link ID: 17676 - Posted: 01.12.2013

By Christie Wilcox There’s a lot to be said for smarts—at least we humans, with some of the biggest brains in relation to our bodies in the animal kingdom, certainly seem to think so. The size of animal brains is extravagantly well-studied, as scientists have long sought to understand why our ancestors developed such complex and energetically costly neural circuitry. One of the most interesting evolutionary hypotheses about brain size is The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis. Back in the early 1990s, scientists were looking to explain how brain size evolves. Brains are exceedingly useful organs; more brain cells allows for more behavioral flexibility, better control of larger bodies, and, of course, intelligence. But if bigger brains were always better, every animal would have them. Thus, scientists reasoned, there must be a downside. The hypothesis suggests that while brains are great and all, their extreme energetic cost limits their size and tempers their growth. When it comes to humans, for example, though our brains are only 2% of our bodies, they take up a whopping 20% of our energy requirements. And you have to wonder: with all that energy being used by our brains, what body parts have paid the price? The hypothesis suggested our guts took the hit, but that intelligence made for more efficient foraging and hunting, thus overcoming the obstacle. This makes sense, but despite over a century of research on the evolution of brain size, there is still controversy, largely stemming from the fact that evidence for the expensive tissue hypothesis is based entirely on between species comparisons and correlations, with no empirical tests. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Evolution; Aggression
Link ID: 17649 - Posted: 01.05.2013

Analysis by Sheila Eldred This spring, it's likely there will be a new diet pill on the market. Belviq (lorcaserin) won approval from the FDA last spring, making it the first weight-loss drug approved in 13 years, and the DEA proposed this week that the drug be classified as a Schedule IV controlled substance. Belviq is an appetite suppressant. The new chemical entity works by activating the brain's response to serotonin. Serotonin is a neuro-transmitter known for evoking happy moods; some anti-depressants work by keeping serotonin levels elevated. Belviq works specifically with the serotonin receptors involved with appetite, according to Time. In trial, patients who took Belviq lost 3 to 3.7 percent more weight than those taking a placebo; after taking it for one or two years, 47 percent lost at least 5 percent of their body weight (compared to 23 percent of those who took a placebo), WebMD reports. Another new weight loss drug, Qsymia, is already on the market, although sales have been slow. Belviq is approved for obese people and overweight people who have another weight-related disease or risk factor. Side effects include headache, dizziness, fatigue, nausea, dry mouth and constipation; in patients with diabetes, additional side effects include low blood sugar, back pain, and coughing. © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17630 - Posted: 12.22.2012

By Kate Clancy I tend to go to bed freezing, especially so in the winter, so I pile our flannel sheet, blanket, and down comforter over me when I settle in to sleep. A few times each menstrual cycle, clustered together in the luteal phase between ovulation and menses, I wake up from sleep completely soaked in my own sweat – not a delightful sight or experience. Usually I get up, change pajamas, and try to find a dry spot on the bed to go back to sleep (I promise the sheets eventually get washed, but I’m not about to wake my husband – and sometimes daughter – to change the bed at 3am). These night sweats started when I was still intensively breastfeeding my daughter and was marathon training, when she was under a year old. At first, I thought it was because we were co-sleeping and we slept next to each other. But I never experienced them next to my husband before that point, and he is a six foot four heat generating machine. When the marathon was over and I returned to less strenuous activity, breastfeeding frequency was also starting to decline. I didn’t get any night sweats again for quite some time. Then there was roller derby. At first, roller derby was a pastime, a recreational activity where I got to learn something totally new and hang out with women I respected. But of course, being the competitive person I am, it became an obsession, and in addition to roller derby practices I was working out quite a lot on my own time. Over the last year I’ve made additional nutritional adjustments to further improve my performance, and I’ve increased the intensity of my off-skates workouts. I work out a minimum of five hours a week, but in the middle of the season it is usually a minimum of nine hours per week. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 17609 - Posted: 12.17.2012

Gary Taubes. “It is better to know nothing,” wrote French physiologist Claude Bernard in An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), “than to keep in mind fixed ideas based on theories whose confirmation we constantly seek.” Embracing a fixed idea is one of the main dangers in the evolution of any scientific discipline. Ideally, errors will be uncovered in the trial-by-fire of rigorous testing and the science will right itself. In rare cases, however, an entire discipline can be based on a fundamental flaw. As a science journalist turned science historian, I have written at length about how and why this may have happened in obesity research. I have suggested that the discipline may be a house of cards — as, by extension, may much research into the chronic diseases associated with obesity, such as diabetes. Before the Second World War, European investigators believed that obesity was a hormonal or regulatory disorder. Gustav von Bergmann, a German authority on internal medicine, proposed this hypothesis in the early 1900s. The theory evaporated with the war. After the lingua franca of science switched from German to English, the German-language literature on obesity was rarely cited. (Imagine the world today if physicists had chosen to ignore the thinking that emerged from Germany and Austria before the war.) Instead, physicians embraced the ideas of the University of Michigan physician Louis Newburgh, who argued that obese individuals had a “perverted appetite” that failed to match the calories that they consumed with their bodies' metabolic needs. “All obese persons are alike in one fundamental respect,” Newburgh insisted, “they literally overeat.” This paradigm of energy balance/overeating/gluttony/sloth became the conventional, unquestioned explanation for why we get fat. It is, as Bernard would say, the fixed idea. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17603 - Posted: 12.13.2012

Analysis by Emily Sohn Older people who remembered going hungry as children were slower to lose their mental sharpness as they reached old age. The new finding was only true for African-Americans, suggesting that the study hit on a particularly resilient group of people who thrived despite extreme childhood adversity. Even so, the study offers insight into how the experiences we have at very young ages can affect our health much later in life. "We know that the social experiences of African-Americans and Caucasians in this country have been very different, at least for people over age 65," said Lisa Barnes, a cognitive neuropsychologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. "We wanted to measure that and see if it had any effect at all." In an effort to add to a growing interest in the long-term health influence of childhood adversity, Barnes and colleagues started by interviewing about 6,100 people who lived in Chicago and were enrolled in a study of Alzheimer's. All participants were at least 65 years old when the study began. The average starting age was 75. In the first interview, seniors answered questions about their childhoods, including details about health, the financial situations of their families and how often someone read books to them. They also took a cognitive exam that included tests of memory. © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Aggression
Link ID: 17596 - Posted: 12.11.2012

By SABRINA TAVERNISE PHILADELPHIA — After decades of rising childhood obesity rates, several American cities are reporting their first declines. The trend has emerged in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, as well as smaller places like Anchorage, Alaska, and Kearney, Neb. The state of Mississippi has also registered a drop, but only among white students. “It’s been nothing but bad news for 30 years, so the fact that we have any good news is a big story,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the health commissioner in New York City, which reported a 5.5 percent decline in the number of obese schoolchildren from 2007 to 2011. The drops are small, just 5 percent here in Philadelphia and 3 percent in Los Angeles. But experts say they are significant because they offer the first indication that the obesity epidemic, one of the nation’s most intractable health problems, may actually be reversing course. The first dips — noted in a September report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — were so surprising that some researchers did not believe them. Deanna M. Hoelscher, a researcher at the University of Texas, who in 2010 recorded one of the earliest declines — among mostly poor Hispanic fourth graders in the El Paso area — did a double-take. “We reran the numbers a couple of times,” she said. “I kept saying, ‘Will you please check that again for me?’ ” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17595 - Posted: 12.11.2012

by Julia Brown Forget dieting; just cut down a little on the fat in what you eat and you'll lose weight. The confirmation that you can lose weight without eating less comes from a review of studies involving nearly 75,000 people – none of whom were trying to lose weight. The pounds fell off when they changed to a diet containing less fat. The work was commissioned by the World Health Organization to find out what our optimal intake of fat should be. Lee Hooper at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, and her colleagues reviewed 43 studies carried out in developed countries in which volunteers reduced the overall fat content of their diet, compared with controls who ate either their usual diet or a more healthy one. In all studies, volunteers had to maintain their eating plan for at least six months, with the median time about six years. The studies varied in how volunteers reduced their fat intake and by how much. For example, in one, volunteers simply replaced normal food with low-fat equivalents. In others, participants could change their diet in various ways to reduce their daily fat intake by about 7 per cent on average. In all but one study, the low-fat groups saw a greater weight reduction than the controls, with people losing on average about 1.6 kilograms. "I've never seen quite such a consistent set of results," Hooper says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17580 - Posted: 12.08.2012

Children who are obese may be more vulnerable to food advertising, a brain scanning study suggests. Food and beverage companies market to children to establish brand recognition, brand preference and loyalty. Previous studies found preschoolers said foods tasted better wrapped in branded packaging than plain packaging and kids were more likely to try to influence their parents' purchases when exposed to ads. Researchers in the U.S. suspected that children who are obese would show greater activation to food logos in the "drive" regions of the brain compared with healthy weight children. Amanda Bruce of the psychology department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and her colleagues looked at 10 healthy children and 10 obese children aged 10 to 14 using questionnaires measuring self-control and functional magnetic resonance imaging of brain activity. Other corporate logos and blurred images were also tested. Obese children showed more activation in some reward regions of the brain than the healthy weight children when shown food logos. But that wasn't the case for the control regions of the brain. "When shown food logos, obese children showed significantly less brain activation than the healthy weight children in regions association with cognitive control," the study's authors concluded in Friday's issue of The Journal of Pediatrics. "This provides initial neuroimaging evidence that obese children may be more vulnerable to the effects of food advertising." © CBC 2012

Keyword: Obesity; Aggression
Link ID: 17559 - Posted: 12.01.2012

By Melissa Hogenboom BBC News Researchers say a baby's chance of being obese in childhood can be predicted at birth using a simple formula. The formula combines several known factors to estimate the risk of obesity. The authors of the study, published in PLos One, hope it will be used to identify babies at risk. Childhood obesity can lead to many health problems, including Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Researchers from Imperial College London looked at 4,032 Finnish children born in 1986 and at data from two further studies of 1,503 Italian children and 1,032 US children. They found that looking at a few simple measurements, such as a child's birthweight and whether the mother smoked, was enough to predict obesity. Previously it had been thought that genetic factors would give bigger clues to later weight problems, but only about one in 10 cases of obesity is the result of a rare gene mutation that affects appetite. Obesity in children is rising, with the NHS estimating that 17% of boys and 15% of girls in England are now obese. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Obesity; Aggression
Link ID: 17553 - Posted: 11.29.2012

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Weight loss surgery, which in recent years has been seen as an increasingly attractive option for treating Type 2 diabetes, may not be as effective against the disease as it was initially thought to be, according to a new report. The study found that many obese Type 2 diabetics who undergo gastric bypass surgery do not experience a remission of their disease, and of those that do, about a third redevelop diabetes within five years of their operation. The findings contrast with the growing perception that surgery is essentially a cure for Type II diabetes. Earlier this year, two widely publicized studies reported that surgery worked better than drugs, diet and exercise in causing a remission of Type 2 diabetes in overweight people whose blood sugar was out of control, leading some experts to call for greater use of surgery in treating the disease. But the studies were small and relatively short, lasting under two years. The latest study, published in the journal Obesity Surgery, tracked thousands of diabetics who had gastric bypass surgery for more than a decade. It found that many people whose diabetes at first went away were likely to have it return. While weight regain is a common problem among those who undergo bariatric surgery, regaining lost weight did not appear to be the cause of diabetes relapse. Instead, the study found that people whose diabetes was most severe or in its later stages when they had surgery were more likely to have a relapse, regardless of whether they regained weight. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17552 - Posted: 11.29.2012