Obesity a result of modern life

Wed Oct 17, 2007 6:38am EDT

By Jennifer Hill

LONDON (Reuters) - Obesity does not result simply from over-eating and a lack of exercise, but is a consequence of modern life, a British government think-tank said on Wednesday.

Weight gain does not result from people's actions -- such as over-indulgence or laziness -- alone, and is a far more passive phenomenon than is often assumed, according to Foresight.

It found that the technological revolution of the 20th century has led to weight gain becoming unavoidable for the majority of the population, because our bodies and biological make-up are out of step with our surroundings.

"Stocking up on food was key to survival in prehistoric times, but now with energy dense, cheap foods, labor-saving devices, motorized transport and sedentary work, obesity is rapidly becoming a consequence of modern life," said Sir David King, the British government's chief scientific adviser and head of the Foresight program.

The British Department of Health-sponsored project is the result of a two-year-long study into the causes of obesity involving almost 250 experts and scientists.

They predicted that the so-called obesity "epidemic" would take at least 30 years to reverse

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Nearly Half of U.S. Workers Have Gained Weight at Their Current Jobs, CareerBuilder.com Survey Finds

Yahoo Finance, Wednesday October 10, 7:00 am ET

- Expert Offers Tips to Avoid Extra Pounds During the Winter -

CHICAGO, Oct. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- With cold weather and holiday parties just around the corner, the office can be particularly hazardous for putting on extra pounds. Forty-nine percent of workers say they have gained weight at their current jobs, according to a recent CareerBuilder.com survey, conducted by Harris Interactive, of more than 5,600 workers nationwide.

Twenty-eight percent of workers report they have gained more than ten pounds and 13 percent say they have gained more than 20 pounds while in their present positions. Comparing genders, more women (52 percent) than men (46 percent) say they have gained weight at their current jobs.

"In the fall and winter, it becomes particularly difficult to stay on track," said Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder.com. "Holiday and end-of-year business obligations, along with the temptations of office treats and cold weather keeping workers indoors, all combine to make it difficult to maintain healthy habits. Workers who plan ahead and apply moderation will be in a much better position to avoid fall and winter weight gain."

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New Clue To Why Eating Fewer Calories Can Help You Live Longer

Medicalnewstoday.com

US scientists appear to have discovered a cellular mechanism that explains why eating fewer calories can help humans and other mammals live longer.

The study is published in the 21st September issue of the journal Cell and is the work of researchers at Harvard Medical School, Boston, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, National Institute on Aging, Institutes of Health, Baltimore, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston.

For the best part of the last 100 years scientists have known that restricting calories prolongs life. This is true for all living creatures, from yeasts to primates, including humans. Lifespan can be prolonged by as much as one third through restricting calorie consumption.

But the underpinning biological mechanisms have to date eluded us.

Not any more, it would seem, for the researchers in this latest study have discovered two mammalian genes called SIRT3 and SIRT4 that are directly involved in prolonging cell life.

They showed that when cells are put under stress, such as when calories are restricted, the two genes go into action and protect cells from the diseases of aging.

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Kids rarely apply nutrition lessons

Belief, behavior diverge, studies find

By Martha Mendoza, The Associated Press

Dailynews.com, 07/04/2007 09:34:50 PM PDT

PANORAMA CITY - The federal government will spend more than $1 billion this year on some healthy snacks and nutrition education - videos of dancing fruit and hundreds of hours of lively lessons about how great you will feel if you eat well.

But an Associated Press review of scientific studies examining 57 such programs found mostly failure. Just four showed any real success against the growing epidemic of childhood obesity.

"Any person looking at the published literature about these programs would have to conclude that they are generally not working," said Dr. Tom Baranowski, a pediatrics professor and nutrition researcher at Houston's Baylor College of Medicine.

The results have been disappointing, to say the least:

Last year a major federal pilot program offering free fruits and vegetables to fifth-graders showed the children became less willing to eat them than they had been at the start. Apparently they didn't like the taste.

In Pennsylvania, researchers went so far as to give prizes to schoolchildren who ate fruits and vegetables. That worked while the prizes were offered, but when the researchers came back seven months later, the kids had reverted to their original snacks:

In studies of schoolchildren who say they are eating better or exercising more, researchers usually find no change in blood pressure, body size or cholesterol measures. The children want to eat better, and might even think they're doing so, but they're not.

Knowing is not doing

The studies don't tell Leticia Jenkins, a teacher at Vista Middle School in Panorama City, anything she doesn't know. She's one of the bravest teachers in America - not because she gave 30 sharp knives to her students in seventh and eighth grades to chop tomatoes, onions, jalape os and limes for a lesson on salsa and nutrition, but because she understands the futility of what she is trying to do.

"Oh, it's so hard, because at the end of the day sometimes I take a moment. I think, gosh, I did all this, and we still see them across the street picking up the doughnuts and the coffee drinks," she said.

Since the 1970s, obesity rates have nearly quintupled nationally among children ages 6 to 11 and tripled among teens and children ages 2 to 5, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

The medical consequences of obesity in the U.S. - diabetes, high blood pressure and even orthopedic problems - cost an estimated $100 billion a year. Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr., a Kentucky cardiologist nominated as the next surgeon general, says fighting childhood obesity is his top priority.

Tough fight

The challenges to changing the way children eat are as numerous as the factors that have produced the obesity epidemic in the first place.

The forces that make kids fat "are really strong and hard to fight with just a program in school," said Dr. Philip Zeitler, a pediatric endocrinologist and researcher who sees a steady stream of obese children struggling with diabetes and other potentially fatal medical problems at The Children's Hospital in Denver.

What does he tell them?

"Oh, God, I haven't figured out anything that I know is going to work," he said. "I'm not aware of any medical model that is very successful in helping these kids. Sure, we try to help them, but I can't take credit for the ones who do manage to change."

Biology a factor

The obstacles are daunting:

PARENTS. Researchers agree that, although most funding targets schools, parents have the greatest influence, even a biological influence, over what their children eat. Zeitler says when children slim down, it's because "their families get religion about this and figure out what needs to happen."

But often, they don't.

"If the mother is eating Cheetos and white bread, the fetus will be born with those taste buds. If the mother is eating carrots and oatmeal, the child will be born with those taste buds," said Dr. Robert Trevino of the Social and Health Research Center in San Antonio.

By the time they reach age 10, most kids have learned what tastes good to them and what tastes nasty.

"If we don't reach (them) before they get to puberty, it's going to be very tough, very difficult, to change their eating behavior," said Trevino.

POVERTY. Poorer kids are especially at risk, because unhealthy food is cheaper and more easily available than healthy food. Parents are often working, leaving children unsupervised to get their own snacks. Low-income neighborhoods have fewer good supermarkets with fresh produce.

"If Mom can't find tomatoes in her local grocery store, nothing is going to change," said Zeitler.

Meanwhile, it's harder for children to exercise on their own. Parks often aren't safe, and sports teams cost money.

"Calorie burning has become the province of the wealthy," said Zeitler. "I fear that what we're going to see is a divergence of healthy people and unhealthy people. Basically, like everything else, it costs money to be healthy."

ADVERTISING. Children ages 8 to 12 see an average of 21 television ads each day for candy, snacks, cereal and fast food - more than 7,600 a year, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study. Not one of the 8,854 ads reviewed promoted fruits or vegetables.

There was one ad for healthy foods for every 50 ads for other foods.

Taste irresistible

Children may be the best sources to explain why they eat junk food despite lessons about nutrition.

"I think it's because they like it so much, because like, I don't know if you've seen the new hot Cheetos that are like puffs. Oh my God, they're so good. Like everyone at the school has them, and they're so good," said Ani Avanessian, 14, of Panorama City.

Her classmate George Rico, a 13-year-old whose mother is a manager at a McDonald's, said he loves his nutrition class. But does it affect what he puts in his mouth?

"Well, no, but it makes me think about what I eat," he said. "I think kids don't change because they've been eating it for so long, they're just accustomed to eating that way.

"Their teacher, Jenkins, offers fact-filled and engaging nutrition lessons as part of a $7 million U.S. Department of Agriculture program that reaches about 388,000 students a year in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The most recent evaluation of the eight-year-old program was disheartening: Kids participating in the program ate no more fruits and vegetables than nonparticipating kids ate. Teachers who spent more hours on nutrition education had no greater impact than other teachers. And parental behavior didn't change.

"It's true: It didn't change what they actually eat. But the program really made a difference in how kids were feeling about fruits and vegetables. They really had a more positive attitude toward fruits and vegetables," said Dr. Mike Prelip of the University of California, Los Angeles, who headed the evaluation.

Kate Houston, USDA deputy undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services, oversees most federal funds - $696 million this year - spent on childhood nutrition education. Funding has steadily increased in recent years, up from $535 million in 2003.

Exercise needed

When asked about the many studies that don't show improvement in kids' eating habits, Houston asked for copies of the research. And she said the USDA doesn't have resources for "long-term, controlled, medical-modeled studies" to determine the impact of its programs.

Dr. Tom Robinson, director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University, said studies aren't needed; research has already shown nutrition education alone doesn't work.

"I think the money could be better spent on programs that are more behaviorally oriented, " he said.

There may be pieces of solutions found in limited studies being tested around the country. In some situations, obese children can lose weight and get healthy through rigorous hospital and clinic-based interventions including regular check-ins, family involvement and scheduled exercise, as well as nutrition education.

Increased physical activity at school is more likely to have an impact than nutrition education.

This spring the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announced plans to spend $500 million over the next five years to reverse the trend of childhood obesity. It will fund an array of programs and encourage more exercise at school.

One thing it won't fund: school projects that only provide nutrition education.

Overweight elderly don't have higher death rates

Reuters, Thu Jun 28, 2:44 PM ET

After the age of 80, carrying a few extra pounds may not subtract years from your lifespan, a new study from Japan shows.

Among a group of 80-year-olds followed for four years, the researchers found that underweight individuals were more likely to die from cancer, heart disease or pneumonia than normal-weight or overweight people. "Overweight status was associated with longevity and underweight with short life," Dr. Yutaka Takata and colleagues from Kyushu Dental College in Kitakyushu City conclude.

While being overweight has been tied to a greater risk of heart disease, studies have also found that being underweight with heart disease may carry an increased risk of morbidity and mortality, Takata and his team note.

To better understand the controversial relationship between body mass index (BMI) and mortality from heart disease, as well as all-cause mortality, the researchers looked at men and women who were 80-years-old.

Fifty-two were underweight, with an average BMI of 17.2; another 468 were normal-weight, with BMIs averaging 21.8; and 155 were overweight, with an average BMI of 27.3. Just five people in the study were obese (with a BMI of 30 or greater), so they were included in the overweight group. People with BMIs between 18.5 and 25 are considered normal weight, while individuals with BMIs of 25 or greater are classified as overweight.

Mortality rates from heart disease, pneumonia and cancer for normal-weight and overweight individuals weren't significantly different, the researchers found. But underweight men and women were nearly four times as likely to die from any cause compared with as overweight individuals, and nearly 18 times more likely to die from cancer. Heart disease mortality in the underweight group was almost four times greater than among normal-weight individuals.

Other studies have found a protective effect of extra pounds among older individuals, Takata and his colleagues note; for example, among elderly US men, the lowest mortality is seen among men with BMIs of 26 and among women with BMIs of 29.6. While Takata and his colleagues attempted to control for the effects of illness, it is still possible that existing disease accounted for some of the increased mortality risk seen among the underweight individuals, they note.

"It is likely that only mild obesity (but not severe obesity) or overweight status in older people and in patients with heart disease may be associated with a lower mortality rate from any disease, as well as with lower mortality from cardiovascular disease," the researchers conclude.

SOURCE: Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, June 2007.

Late-starters can benefit from healthy habits: study

Reuters, By Ishani GanguliFri Jun 29, 9:04 AM ET

Even in middle age, adopting a healthy lifestyle can lower the risk for heart disease and premature death within years of changing habits, researchers reported on Thursday.

Middle-aged adults who began eating five or more fruits and vegetables every day, exercising for at least 2 1/2 hours a week, keeping weight down and not smoking decreased their risk of heart disease by 35 percent and risk of death by 40 percent in the four years after they started.

"The adopters of a healthy lifestyle basically caught up. Within four years, their mortality rate and rate of heart attacks matched the people who had been doing these behaviors all along," said Dr. Dana King at the Medical University of South Carolina, who led the research.

That is not to say people should wait until their 40s or 50s to get on track, he added.

"But even if you have not had a healthy lifestyle previously, it's not too late to adopt those healthy lifestyle habits and gain almost immediate benefits."

King and his team set out to find if late-starters could reap the rewards of habits like eating vegetables and walking 30 minutes a day.

When they began tracking nearly 16,000 Americans between the ages of 45 and 64 in the late 1980s, only 8.5 percent were following all four of the habits they were studying, they reported in the American Journal of Medicine.

Out of the other adults, 8.4 percent started practicing all four habits by six years after the study began.

Those 970 lifestyle converts were most likely to pick up the fruit and vegetable habit at that late stage. Losing weight to fall within the healthy to overweight range -- which the researchers counted as one of the healthy habits -- was the least popular change.

LIVING LONGER

When they had picked up all four habits, they enjoyed a sharp decline in heart disease risk and in death from any cause.

It took all four -- having just three of the healthy habits yielded no heart benefits and a more modest decrease in overall risk of death.

Still, said Dr. Nichola Davis at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, "these benefits are on a continuum. The more of the healthy habits that you can adapt, the better. ...These are modest changes that they're talking about."

King's team took age, gender, race, and other risk categories for cardiovascular disease into account, although King said the converts likely took up other healthy life changes -- such as cutting down on salt or upping their calcium intake -- that might have contributed to their health benefits.

He and Davis, who was not involved in the study, said they were troubled so few Americans were doing them.

In particular, men, blacks, people with less education and lower incomes, and people with high blood pressure or diabetes were less likely to follow the health guidelines from the beginning or adopt them later in life.

Being breastfed may not cut kids' obesity risk

By Anne Harding Fri Jun 29, 3:20 PM ET

Yahoo.com

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Breastfeeding has many benefits for babies, but protection from obesity may not be one of them, a UK research team reports.

Instead, the researchers say, the protective effect of breastfeeding some studies have found is likely due to the fact that women who breastfeed their infants also tend to have qualities that make them less likely to raise obese children.

"There are several reasons for why mothers should breastfeed their children, independent of obesity," Dr. Andre M. Toschke of Kings College London, the study's lead author, told Reuters Health. "(Our) study questions a little bit the argument of breastfeeding for protection against obesity."

To better understand the breastfeeding-obesity link, Toschke and his team used a technique called dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) to measure fat mass in a group of 4,325, 9- to 10-year-olds. Most studies to date have used body mass index (BMI) to measure overweight, which is less precise, the researchers note in the June issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Children who were breastfed, who represented 82 percent of the total, had lower fat mass percentages. But once the researchers used statistical techniques to control for factors linked to both breastfeeding and obesity risk, including mother's education and socioeconomic class, maternal BMI, time the mother spent watching television daily, and time spent in a car for each weekday, the effect of breastfeeding was weakened.

The association did remain strong, however, for children who had been breastfed for six months or longer. They were 55 percent less likely than their non-breastfed peers to fall into the top tenth of the group based on body fat percentage.

To get a definitive answer on whether breastfeeding truly protects children from becoming overweight later on, it would be necessary to randomly assign mother-infant pairs to breast or bottle-feeding, which would be unethical, Toschke said.

But studies of breastfeeding promotion interventions with adequate follow-up could also help answer this question, he added, and would be free of the confounding factors at play in other research.

SOURCE: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, June 2007.