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[stocks]

Bariatric surgery for babies

Childhood obesity has reached epidemic levels in the United States. Researchers did a cohort study on 19,397 babies, from their birth until age seven and discovered that fat babies at four months were 1.38 times more likely to be overweight at seven years old compared to normal weight babies. Fat babies at the age of one were 1.17 times more likely to be overweight at age seven compared to normal weight babies.


http://www.babybariatrics.com/

Yes, this is a spoof. But sometimes those can help us see reality more clearly than all the research in the world.


The obesity epidemic. Follow the money.

Future healthcare professionals can now get a college degree in “fighting fat.” The new program offered by the University of Guelph, collaborating with Humber College, is not to foster the science of obesity and disseminate factual information, but to teach students interested in careers capitalizing off the war on obesity “how to prescribe exercise and diet to an unhealthy population.” According to its press release, the program will focus on such things as lifestyle modification and the benefits of wholegrain foods and fiber and dangers of saturated fats, says the University.

The career field is so lucrative, the University has already had seven times more applicants than it can accept.

“There is a crying need,” according to Terry Graham, Ph.D., the chair of the Department of Human Health and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Guelph, which heads the bachelor degree program. “If you go to any mall or to any beach in the summertime and take a look at the people, clearly we have an epidemic of obesity.”

A number of medical professionals have been expressing concerns over the growing influx of alternative woo and pseudoscience into medical curriculums, but only the most outrageous woo has been highlighted. This new degree in “fighting fat” illustrates how far obesity and preventive health initiatives have crossed over into woo-ville. If what you already know about CON isn’t enough to worry you about what these young students will be taught, then some of the nutritional information stemming from research at the University of Guelph will.


http://junkfoodscien...ghting-fat.html

[stocks]

This suggestion epitomizes the beliefs and stigma of obesity lamented by one of the country’s foremost obesity researchers, Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University in New York, who wrote that the “simplistic notion” obese individuals can ameliorate their condition by simply eating less and exercising more is “at odds with substantial scientific evidence illuminating a precise and powerful biological system that maintains body weight within a relatively narrow range.” Yet, obese people continue to be victimized by these prejudicial beliefs, he wrote, while the known science on the natural diversity of human sizes and shapes continues to not find its way into the minds of the public and even a significant proportion of the scientific community, who believe their personal experience of gaining and losing a few dozen pounds with diet and exercise translates to an obese person simply needing to apply that several more times to become a different body type. Our body shapes and sizes are, to the most significant extent, genetically determined with a surprisingly narrow range of weight under our long-term control. “The heritability of obesity is equivalent to that of height and greater than that of almost every other condition that has been studied — greater than for schizophrenia, greater than for breast cancer,” he wrote.


A healthy lifestyle and simply eating healthy will not result in everyone losing weight and having a BMI between 19-25 because a “tremendous body of research employing a great variety of methodologies has failed to yield any meaningful or replicable differences in the caloric intake or eating patterns of the obese compared to the nonobese,” as professors and clinicians David Garner, Ph.D., and Susan Wooley, Ph.D., concluded in their classic review of 500 studies on the long-term efficacy of weight loss interventions and the biology of weight regulation. The renowned clinical research of doctors Michael Rosenbaum, Rudolph Leibel and Jules Hirsch at the Laboratory of Human Behavior and Metabolism at Rockefeller University, for example, found nondieting fat and lean people eat and expend the same amount of calories per unit of lean body mass and that the proportions of protein, carbohydrates and fat do not determine (cause) true obesity, either.


http://junkfoodscien...be-tuesday.html

[stocks]

Biology

The human body is a remarkable and incredibly complex and sophisticated system that normally keeps all sorts of things in balance, such as our fluid and electrolyte levels, our body temperature… and, yes, even our fat stores. When fat levels deviate from each body’s natural range, compensatory mechanisms kick in over weeks to return the body to its individual normal state, all without us having to think about it or having much to say about it. Even when eating a range of calories, our body weights stay within a surprisingly narrow range.


“Body weight is remarkably stable in humans,” explained Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University in New York. “The average human consumes one million or more calories per year, yet weight changes very little in most people. These facts lead to the conclusion that energy balance is regulated with a precision of greater than 99.5%, which far exceeds what can be consciously monitored.” In fact, error ranges in food calorie labels, assessed by calorimetry, are typically greater than 10%!


In study after study, the Rockefeller University researchers found that each person has a weight range of about 10-20 pounds that their body naturally gravitates to. Within that range people can gain and lose without much effort. But go above or below that range and the body’s metabolism resists. [That ease of gaining and losing 10-20 pounds tricks genetically leaner people into wrongly believing that fat people should be able to just as easily step and repeat that weight loss ten more times to be thin. It doesn’t work that way, of course.]

The body's metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep weight within its natural range. Gain weight and metabolism can as much as double; lose weight and it can slow down to nearly half its normal rate.


Interestingly, the men in the prison study who had gained weight well beyond their set point range felt nearly as lethargic, neglectful of their prison tasks, and moody as the starving men in the Minnesota study. This observation, wrote Dr. Bennett, suggests that the weight at setpoint is optimal for activity and mood, and weights appreciably above or below negatively affects people in much the same way.



http://junkfoodscien...cs-in-real.html