obesity
neurophilosophy | June 16, 2010THE dangers of obesity are very well known. Being overweight is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease and stroke, the two leading causes of death in the Western world. Gout is more common in overweight people, with the risk of developing the condition increasing in parallel with body weight. Obese people are twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes as those who are not overweight, and being overweight is also associated with several types of cancer. The list goes on...
Less well known is the effect of obesity on the brain. In the past few years, however, it has…
lborkowski | May 16, 2010Earlier this month, the DC City Council passed the Healthy Schools Act, which will raise nutritional standards for school meals, increase the amount of physical and health education students receive, create school gardens, and do all kinds of other commendable things. The difficult part is that it'll cost $6.5 million annually, and we're in the middle of a budget crunch.
Councilmember Mary Cheh has proposed a funding mechanism that has the potential to not only raise money but to fight obesity at the same time: a one-cent-per-ounce excise tax on sugar-sweetened beverages. (The beverages are…
sa smith | April 12, 2010You all might remember this story from a few years ago:
Contagious Obesity? Identifying The Human Adenoviruses That May Make Us Fat
This is one of the papers that article was based on:
Human adenovirus-36 is associated with increased body weight and paradoxical reduction of serum lipids
Long story short, an adenovirus (virus Ive written about previously) was associated with obesity. That is, people with high BMIs were more likely to have antibodies to Adenovirus-36 than people with normal BMIs, 30%:11%.
Since 2005/2006, scientists have tried to flush out the how/whys behind Ad36-->Obesity…
tsaunders | April 7, 2010
Image by Jespahjoy.
Just before moving to our new home here on Scienceblogs, I asked our readers for ideas on what types of content they would like to see here on Obesity Panacea. One topic that came up several times was the issue of injuries. I'm not sure why we haven't discussed injuries in the past (aside from the fact that it's not the focus of our research), but it was a great idea, and I've come across a study on the topic that I think will be of real interest.
The study is titled "The influence of exercise and BMI on injuries and illnesses in overweight and obese individuals: a…
pjaniszewski | March 19, 2010
That's right - contrary to what many religiously believe, it is the inability to grow more fat during times of energy surpluss, rather than the excess of fat which appears to directly contribute to the metabolic consequence often associated with obesity.
A recent article in the New Scientist shines some light on this issue;
Obesity kills, everyone knows that. But is it possible that we've been looking at the problem in the wrong way? It seems getting fatter may be part of your body's defense against the worst effects of unhealthy eating, rather than their direct cause.
While the article…
tsaunders | March 8, 2010
Image by atomicjeep
I came across a very interesting article in the Ottawa Citizen this weekend, unpleasantly titled "For Canada's obese, exercise alone isn't going to cut it". The crux of the article is this - exercise will not help you lose weight. Every few months it seems that this issue pops up, including a cover article in TIME magazine last year, which Peter has previously dissected. This is a complicated issue, and given the sensational title, I wasn't expecting much from the Citizen article. But the article is actually very well written, and includes interviews with a number…
edyong | March 5, 2010The Not Exactly Pocket Science experiment continues after the vast majority of people who commented liked the pilot post. I'm really enjoying this, for quite unexpected reasons. It's forcing me to flex writing muscles that usually don't get much of a workout. Writing short pieces means being far more economical with language and detail than usual. It means packing in as much information as possible while still keeping things readable. And it means blitz-reading papers and writing quickly without losing any accuracy.
One quick note before the good stuff: last time, a few people suggested that…
tsmith | February 23, 2010Student guest post by Liz Stepniak
In the United States, the obesity epidemic is rapidly spreading. Since 1980 the prevalence of obesity has increased over 75%. Currently, over half the population is overweight, and nearly 1 in every 3 adults is clinically obese. Research has also been proliferating, exploring a plethora of possibilities to better understand and treat this growing epidemic. One of the recent trends in obesity research has been investigating the role of the microbiota in the gut and differences in the composition of these bacteria between obese and non-obese individuals.…
grrlscientist | February 14, 2010tags: food, health, healthy eating, healthy food, cooking, portion size, obesity, overweight, Jamie Oliver, TEDTalks, streaming video
In this affecting video, TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver shares powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., and makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.
Jamie Oliver is transforming the way we feed ourselves, and our children. Jamie Oliver has been drawn to the kitchen since he was a child working in his father's pub-restaurant. He showed not only a precocious culinary talent but also a passion for creating (and…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2010tags: man drinking fat, NYC Health Anti-Soda Ad, Are You Pouring on the Pounds?, diet, nutrition, sports drinks, soda, sweetened drinks, television, disgusting, streaming video
Most people don't realize how easy it is to gain weight from drinking sugary sodas, juice drinks, sport drinks and sweetened tea and coffee drinks. Just one 20-ounce bottle of soda can pack 250 calories and more than 16 teaspoons of sugar. Is the lemon-flavored iced tea any better? Not by much with 210 calories and 14½ teaspoons of sugar. Sugar-sweetened beverages add hundreds of calories to your diet each day. Don't…
razib | December 31, 2009Yeah, you read that right. Overweight and obesity in urban Africa: A problem of the rich or the poor?:
Descriptive results showed that the prevalence of urban overweight/obesity increased by nearly 35% during the period covered. The increase was higher among the poorest (+50%) than among the richest (+7%). Importantly, there was an increase of 45-50% among the non-educated and primary-educated women, compared to a drop of 10% among women with secondary education or higher. In the multivariate analysis, the odds ratio of the variable time lapse was 1.05 (p<0.01), indicating that the…
rskloot | October 28, 2009
Because of the flood of responses I got to yesterday's post on The Insanity of the FDA Approved Obesity Drug for Dogs, I thought I'd start a series of follow up posts answering the many questions I got by email and in the comments here. The most common question was, Okay, so the drug is a bad idea, but what else can we do to make sure our pets don't get or stay fat? Below is a column I once wrote for Prevention Magazine, followed by tips, which should answer the most common questions:
When I was a teenager, I came home from school one day to find L.C., my
family's beagle, lying on the…
razib | September 22, 2009Seems to be the upshot of this finding, I'll Have What She's Having: Effects of Social Influence and Body Type on the Food Choices of Others:
This research examines how the body type of consumers affects the food consumption of other consumers around them. We find that consumers anchor on the quantities others around them select but that these portions are adjusted according to the body type of the other consumer. We find that people choose a larger portion following another consumer who first selects a large quantity but that this portion is significantly smaller if the other is obese than…
terrasig | September 16, 2009If you are in the area, this looks really good:
Award-winning author Gary Taubes will speak at next week's Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) Research Conference:
"Why We Get Fat: Adiposity 101 and the Alternative Hypothesis of Obesity"
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
12:00 noon to 1:00 pm
North Pavilion
Lower Level Lecture Hall
Gary Taubes is the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease (Knopf, 2007). He studied applied physics as an undergraduate at Harvard and has an MS degree in engineering from Stanford University…
razib | September 7, 2009Another study on obesity & Africans, with a slight twist, Admixture Mapping of Obesity-related Traits in African Americans: The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study:
Obesity is an important cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. In the United States, the prevalence of obesity is higher in African Americans than whites, even after adjustment for socioeconomic status (SES). This leads to the hypothesis that differences in genetic background may contribute to racial/ethnic differences in obesity-related traits. We tested this hypothesis by conducting a genome-wide admixture…
razib | August 20, 2009
Common body mass index-associated variants confer risk of extreme obesity:
To investigate the genetic architecture of severe obesity, we performed a genome-wide association study of 775 cases and 3197 unascertained controls at 550 000 markers across the autosomal genome. We found convincing association to the previously described locus including the FTO gene. We also found evidence of association at a further six of 12 other loci previously reported to influence body mass index (BMI) in the general population and one of three associations to severe childhood and adult obesity and that cases…
razib | August 17, 2009Fat Tax:
Which is why it is so striking to talk to Delos M. Cosgrove, the heart surgeon who is the clinic's chief executive, about the initiative. Cosgrove says that if it were up to him, if there weren't legal issues, he would not only stop hiring smokers. He would also stop hiring obese people. When he mentioned this to me during a recent phone conversation, I told him that I thought many people might consider it unfair. He was unapologetic.
"Why is it unfair?" he asked. "Has anyone ever shown the law of conservation of matter doesn't apply?" People's weight is a reflection of how much…
razib | August 16, 2009A very thorough paper in PLoS Genetics on the "obesity gene," FTO, A Mouse Model for the Metabolic Effects of the Human Fat Mass and Obesity Associated FTO Gene:
Geneticists have identified many gene regions that cause human disease by using multiple genetic markers in large populations to find gene regions associated with disease. However, it is often not clear precisely which gene in any given region causes the disease or how the gene exerts its functional effect. For example, a gene variant in the non-coding region of FTO enhances obesity risk, but it is not clear if this is an effect of…
mikethemadbiologist | August 4, 2009Heritability: I do not think it means what you think it means.
There's been a spate of posts about obesity, started by a post by Megan McArdle. In these posts, a high heritability for obesity is bandied about (0.9!!! ZOMG!! TEH GENEZ R MAKIN U FAT!). But this demonstrates a lack of understanding of what heritability estimates mean--and, more importantly, what they do not mean.
A couple of years ago, the Three-Toed Sloth wrote a wonderful post about heritability, and I'll quote liberally from it here (instead of rephrasing it inelegantly) and add some additional commentary. I should…
razib | July 30, 2009Megan McArdle has a post, Thining Thin, a follow up to America's Moral Panic Over Obesity. She says:
1. Obesity is increasing in the population, so it can't be genetic.
Well, average height is also increasing in the population. Does that mean that you could be as tall as me, if you weren't too lazy to grow?
Twin studies and adoptive studies show that the overwhelming determinant of your weight is not your willpower; it's your genes. The heritability of weight is between .75 and .85. The heritability of height is between .9 and .95. And the older you are, the more heritable weight is.…