obesity
razib | July 25, 2009Tyler Cowen linked to a Time article on the phenomenon of Southern Americans being relatively overweight vis-a-vis Americans from other regions of the country. Several reasons are offered, from the lower per capita income of Southern states, to the fact that Southern food tends to be fried and less healthful. But the article doesn't mention one very salient fact: black Americans are heavier than white Americans, and are disproportionately concentrated in Southern states. What is a regional disparity could be accounted for by underlying differences in the distribution of races.
State Health…
razib | July 20, 2009Derek Thompson at The Atlantic passes on this awesome chart:
OK, OK, obesity is more complex than that. But check out The Big Max:
Using New York's calorie-disclosure regulation to get the most for your money.
gregladen | July 13, 2009... or is obesity simply Yet Another Risk Factor in severity of this illness?
Probably the latter, but health officials seem interested in the developing data.
From CTV:
... in a report released Friday, health officials detailed the cases of 10 Michigan patients who were very sick from swine flu in late May and early June and ended up at a specialized hospital in Ann Arbor. Three of them died.
Nine of the 10 were either obese or extremely obese. Only three of the 10 had other health problems. Two of the three that died had no other health conditions.
This hardly settles the question of…
razib | June 23, 2009Obesity May Have Offered Edge Over TB:
Over the course of human evolution, people with excess stores of fat have been more likely to survive famines, many scientists believe, living on to pass their genes to the next generation.
But these days, obesity is thought to be harmful, leading to chronic inflammation and metabolic disorders that set the stage for heart disease. So what went awry? When did excess fat stop being a protective mechanism that assured survival and instead become a liability?
A provocative new hypothesis suggests that in some people, fat not only stores energy but also revs…
razib | May 22, 2009It is well known that different ethnic groups vary when it comes to diseases such as Type II Diabetes. Or, more specifically they vary in terms of risk, all things equal (if you use an online Type II Diabetes calculator you'll see immediately as they sometimes have a parameter for ethnicity). American blacks for example are heavier than American whites. This seems to be true even when you control for socioeconomic status (though as Oprah once said, "You don't need to do a 'study' to figure that out"). There has been research on genetic loci correlating to obesity in European populations…
razib | May 16, 2009I was looking up some data on obesity rates, mostly for American states, and I stumbled onto the maps below on obesity rates by nation for males & females (in that order):
You can find the source and legend here. In any case I was totally surprised at how fat Arabs are, particularly Gulf Arabs. They aren't in the NationMaster data set so I had never encountered any numbers on obesity. And the Gulf Arabs I've met in my life didn't strike me as disproportionately obese. But in hindsight I think I have an explanation: most of the Gulf Arabs I've met are upper or upper middle class males…
razib | May 13, 2009Via Marginal Revolution, Has Overweight Become the New Normal? Evidence of a Generational Shift in Body Weight Norms:
We test for differences across the two most recent NHANES survey periods (1988-1994 and 1999-2004) in self-perception of weight status. We find that the probability of self-classifying as overweight is significantly lower on average in the more recent survey, for both men and women, controlling for objective weight status and other factors. Among women, the decline in the tendency to self-classify as overweight is concentrated in the 17-35 age range, and, within this range, is…
denialism | May 12, 2009In response to the conversation on "Obesity, Evolution and Delayed Gratification" on the main page and Razib's coverage of a fascinating new study on the relationship to the lactase gene and obesity, I thought now would be a good time to write about an important new study that helps define the boundaries of what normal and healthy weights are in humans.
This study, entitled Body-mass index and cause-specific mortality in 900 000 adults: collaborative analyses of 57 prospective studies is a whopper of a meta-analysis. That is, a study that increases the power of other similar studies by…
razib | May 11, 2009You might have already see this chart relating obesity to time spent eating in The New York Times:
The commentary accompanying the chart goes like so:
On Monday, in posting some of the data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Society at a Glance report, I noted that the French spent the most time per day eating, but had one of the lowest obesity rates among developed nations.
Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.
Jim Manzi dug deeper into the data and found something very interesting:
I recreated the original analysis (minus the inclusion of the OECD average as a data…
edyong | December 1, 2008You are not alone. Even if you're currently reading this in complete isolation, you are still far from a singular individual. You're more of a colony - one human, together with microbes in their trillions. For every one of your own genes, your body is also host to thousands of bacterial ones. Some of the most important of these tenants - the microbiota - live in our gut. Their genes, collectively known as our microbiome, provide us with the ability to break down sources of food, like complex carbohydrates, that we would otherwise find completely indigestible.
Peter Turnbaugh from the…
sb admin | November 14, 2008
Last week's New England Journal of Medicine gave us some remarkable news, via the JUPITER Trial, adding additional evidence to the pile of articles on the cardioprotective effects of statins. This article is getting lots of press, which is great, but I'd hate to see this week's edition of the Journal get lost. Specifically, there's a huge population-based study on obesity and mortality. We've explored previously the dangers of obesity, and we've been fought the whole way by various denialists.
Earlier studies have shown associations between excess body weight (as measured by body mass…
sb admin | October 7, 2008Still coughing and tired, so here's another one I'm migrating from the old blog. --PalMD
There has been much talk in the media over the last few years about the "obesity epidemic" in the U.S. This has led to a bit of a backlash among a small but vocal group of critics who don't believe the evidence linking obesity and poor health. The reasons for their disbelief are not all that clear to me, given the overwhelming amount of evidence linking obesity with both serious health conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, and adverse outcomes, such as premature death. When their arguments…
edyong | October 6, 2008
There is a widespread belief, that being overweight or obese is a question of failing willpower, fuelled in no small part by food, fitness and beauty industries. But if we look at the issue of obesity through a scientific spyglass, a very different picture emerges. Genes, for example, exert a large influence on our tendency to become obese often by influencing behaviour - a case of nature via nurture. But it's not just our own genes that are important.
In terms of processing food, humans are hardly self-sufficient. Our guts are the home of trillions of bacteria that help to break down…
edyong | July 16, 2008
Many measures to curb the obesity epidemic are aimed at young children. It's a sensible strategy - we know that overweight children have a good chance of becoming overweight adults. Family homes and schools have accordingly become critical arenas where the battle against the nation's growing waistlines is fought. But there is another equally important environment that can severely affect a person's chances of becoming overweight, but is more often overlooked - the womb.
Overweight parents tend to raise overweight children but over the last few years, studies have confirmed that this…
sb admin | July 2, 2008Sure, we have obesity problems in this country, but we also have more direct food safety problems. Summer has brought with it news of the bungled tomato-Salmonella affair, and now, from the Midwest, contaminated beef.
One of our local supermarket chains has been forced to recall hamburger meat because of over a dozen cases of E. coli-related disease. These cases have occurred over a wide area, and the bacteria are genetically linked, indicating a likely common source.
erv handed me some legitimate criticism regarding my very brief post on diarrhea. It was certainly not my intention to…
edyong | May 4, 2008This is a quick follow-up to my other post on fat cells, which as it happens, isn't the only obesity-related story out today. Another paper found a common genetic variant that increases the risk of obesity in its carriers.
A huge team of researchers scoured the genomes of almost 17,000 European people for genetic variations that are linked to obesity. Until now, only one has been found and it sits within a gene called FTO. This new study confirmed that FTO variants have the strongest association with obesity, but in the runner-up position is another variant near a gene called melanocortin-4…
edyong | May 4, 2008As fat people have an abundance of fat tissue, the natural assumption is that fat people have more fat cells, or 'adipocytes'. That's only part of the story - it turns out that overweight and obese people not only have a surplus of fat cells, they have larger ones too.
The idea of these 'fatter fat cells' has been around since the 1970s. But their importance has been dramatically highlighted by a new study, which shows that the number of fat cells in both thin and obese people is more or less set during childhood and adolescence. During adulthood, about 8% of fat cells die every year only to…
denialism | April 15, 2008Sometimes I just can't get too angry about some particularly insane rant from a denialist. In this case, HIV/AIDS denialist, scientific medicine denialist and all-around crank Mike Adams rants about the prospect of food sterilization by irradiation:
Let's be blunt about this: The corporations running this country (which also run the U.S. government) want the U.S. food supply to be dead. They don't want foods to be used as medicines, and they sure don't want the natural medicines found in foods competing with their own patented pharmaceutical medicines (that just happen to earn them a whole…
sb admin | March 31, 2008A reader, who happens to write one of the best-named blogs on teh tubes, pointed me toward an article I never would have seen. This parallels a news story we had here in the States late last year. So, since the story is getting press overseas (albeit late), it's time to dust off the old post and update it a bit.
The story repeats the finding that processed meats increase the risk of colon cancer. This news comes from a large report published by the World Cancer Research Fund, which looks at data surrounding diet and cancer. It states that there is no safe level of processed meat…
mikethemadbiologist | January 14, 2008According to the Boston Globe, bisphenol A levels lower than those found in 93% of people led to obesity in mice:
Thousands of chemicals have come on the market in the past 30 years, and some of them are showing up in people's bodies in low levels. Scientists studying obesity are focusing on endocrine disrupters - which have already been linked to reproductive problems in animals and humans - because they have become so common in the environment and are known to affect fat cells.
...A recent US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that about 93 percent of the US population…