What You Need To Know News

A new study finds striking evidence that children who are obese or have high cholesterol show early warning signs of heart disease.

The study, presented Tuesday at the American Heart Association conference in New Orleans, found that the thickness of artery walls of children and teenagers who are obese or have high cholesterol resembled the thickness of artery walls of an average 45-year-old.

The study, which has not yet been published, was small, involving 70 children ages 6 to 19, and several experts said the results would need to be replicated to be considered conclusive. But they said the method used to measure artery wall thickness was considered a reliable indicator of heart disease risk, usually more reliable than cholesterol levels or other measures. The method, which uses ultrasound, has been applied to children in other studies in the last few years, but experts said this appeared to be the first time that results had been correlated to adults.

“I think this is a red flag,” said the lead author of the study, Dr. Geetha Raghuveer, a cardiologist and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Medicine. “These kids are more similar to middle-aged adults.”

Scientists not involved in the study said the findings supported a growing body of research suggesting that childhood obesity in the United States was likely to result in heart disease as the children age.

“These findings are potentially consistent with predictions that obesity and its complications would result in cardiovascular disease becoming a pediatric illness,” said Dr. David Ludwig, an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard, who was a co-author of a 2005 study predicting that obesity could shorten the average child’s lifespan by two to five years. “There are other indications that this might be the case, but much of that has been speculative, so this may well be significant hard data, which has been largely lacking. This is actually looking at the development of atherosclerosis, the process that we know will, if it is not dealt with, lead to heart attack or stroke.”

Childhood obesity is considered an epidemic in the United States, with about 16 percent of children ages 2 to 19 considered obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although the number of new cases of childhood obesity appears to be leveling off, some experts say they are now seeing an increase in Type 2 diabetes in children, which they believe is a consequence of increased obesity.

The Kansas City study was one of several presented at the conference that looked at the link between childhood obesity and heart disease.

A study of 991 Australian children ages 5 to 15 found that children who were obese had greater enlargement of their hearts, as measured by the size of their left atrium, said the study’s leader, Dr. Julian G. Ayer, a heart researcher at the University of Sydney.

Another Australian study, of 150 10-year-olds, found that in the heart pumping process, the left ventricles were slower to untwist in children with a higher body-mass index, a relationship of weight to height, said a co-author of that study, Walter Abhayaratna, a researcher at Australian National University.

“These studies are interesting, imperfect corollary evidence of something we all believe is true,” said Dr. Lee Goldman, a cardiologist who is dean of the faculties of health, sciences and medicine at Columbia University. “The obesity epidemic in adolescents is the biggest adverse time bomb we’ve got going on in coronary diseases. These are high tech ways of adding more evidence.”

Dr. Goldman was a co-author of a study published in December 2007 in The New England Journal of Medicine in which a computer model was used to predict whether heart disease deaths in the United States would rise. The authors predicted that by 2035, there would be 100,000 additional cases of heart disease attributed to current instances of obesity in children, an estimate especially noteworthy given that advances in treatment have reduced cardiac deaths in recent years.

Another study published in the same journal at that time further bolstered the link between childhood obesity and heart disease. Analyzing the records of 276,835 Danes who were examined as children in 1930, researchers from Denmark found that the higher the children’s body-mass index in 1930, the greater the chances they would develop heart disease.

While it is too early to know if the current generation of American children will suffer more heart attacks, strokes or other heart problems, or experience them sooner, many heart researchers consider the growing corroboration of links between childhood obesity and heart disease alarming. Still, Dr. Raghuveer said that for the children she studied, hope was not lost.

“A lot of these kids’ arteries, even though they are in the early stages of atherosclerosis, are not hardened or calcified, not really advanced,” she said. “There may be an opportunity to implement lifestyle alterations, be it exercise, be it diet, or perhaps even medication. Perhaps it may be reversed.”

Dr. Raghuveer’s study used an ultrasound method called carotid artery intima-media thickness or CIMT to measure the thickness of the inner walls of the carotid arteries, located in the neck. Scientists, who measure the carotid artery because it is easier to capture images of neck arteries than the coronary arteries directly connected to the heart, say increased thickness in the carotid artery wall indicates greater amounts of fatty plaque in the arteries leading to the heart and brain. When such plaque ruptures, it can result in clots that lead to heart attack or stroke.

Of the 34 boys and 36 girls in the Kansas City study, patients at Dr. Raghuveer’s cardiology clinic at Children’s Mercy Hospital, 40 were obese and 30 were not considered obese but had high levels of LDL or bad cholesterol. Many also had high levels of triglycerides. Their average age was 13; average weight was 140 pounds. Nearly 90 percent were white.

The researchers found that 52 of the 70 participants had a maximum CIMT of at least 0.5 millimeters, a thickness that corresponded with the CIMT of an average 45-year-old or what Dr. Raghuveer called a “vascular age” of 45. She did not measure CIMT in normal-weight children and said there was no standard CIMT chart for children.

Vascular age is “an interesting idea, and I hope it gets out there,” said Dr. Gerald S. Berenson, head of the long-running Bogalusa Heart Study in Louisiana, who has taken CIMT measurements of children in the last few years.

Dr. Ludwig, director of the Optimal Weight for Life program at Children’s Hospital Boston, said that seeing risk factors like CIMT in children was especially worrying because “there’s not only a much longer period of time for it to be damaging the body, but it is also occurring at a stage of life where the body is still forming and the physiological systems are still being fine-tuned.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/health/12heart.html?hp

A WEIGHT-loss pill waiting for approval for use in Australia has been suspended in Europe over concerns it may be linked to suicide and sudden death.

Health officials said the risk of side effects from the drug, Acomplia, outweighed its benefits.

Seven deaths, including a suicide, have been associated with the anti-obesity treatment, which also doubles the risk of psychiatric disorders, the Daily Mail reported today.

Around 2500 adverse reactions have been reported by British patients since it became available to private buyers two years ago.

US authorities refused to approve the drug amid mounting scientific evidence of the suicide dangers.
Acomplia was approved four months ago as a “last-chance” solution on the National Health Service by the British Government’s health body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.
Although warnings on packets about the higher risk of depression, anxiety and other serious side effects were strengthened, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has decided to suspend the medicines licence for Acomplia because the “benefits no longer outweigh its risks”, the Daily Mail said.

‘New data from post-marketing experience and ongoing clinical trials indicated that serious psychiatric disorders may be more common than in the clinical trials.’

Acomplia, also known as rimonabant, was licensed for obese people, as well as overweight patients who have type 2 diabetes or cholesterol problems.

The drug’s maker, Sanofi-aventis, said”: The company will comply with the European authorities request to temporarily suspend the marketing authorisation of Acomplia in obese and overweight patients and will make every effort to actively support patients and health care professionals in this process.”

Sanofi-aventis has applied to the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration to sell the drug here and a decision was expected early next year.

A spokeswoman for Sanofi-aventis in Australia said those plans were now on hold pending the final decision of the EMA after it receives more data from the company.
Source: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24545607-1702,00.html

Wolfing down your food and eating until your seams are straining could double your risk of becoming overweight, Japanese researchers have found.

A study published in the British Medical Journal this week reveals that men and women who eat rapidly or eat until they are full are twice as likely to be overweight compared to people who eat more sensibly.

People who both eat quickly and eat too much are around three times as likely to be overweight, the researchers found.

They also report that the link between the eating behaviour and overweight remains the same no matter what the actual calorie intake from the food itself.

Co-author of an accompanying editorial, Dr Elizabeth Denney-Wilson, says the study provides more evidence that eating behaviours themselves are a significant promoter of ‘positive energy balance’ - the situation where energy intake is higher than energy spent - and may be contributing to the current obesity epidemic.

Part of the problem is that humans are not very good at knowing when to stop eating, says Denney-Wilson, research fellow at the Centre for Primary Health Care and Equity, University of New South Wales in Sydney.

“Humans are not good at using the cues from their bodies to determine when they’re full,” she says.

“They’re much more likely to use visual cues so if they have a great big portion in front of them they’re likely to eat the lot.”

The researchers suggest these unhealthy eating habits are not necessarily there from birth but instead appear to be learned, or taught.

“It is possible to have children self-regulate their energy intake, and we certainly see that with breast-fed babies who are clearly regulating their own energy intake because they are able to determine when they are full.”

However the dramatic increase in portion sizes and unprecedented availability of food makes it harder to exercise restraint, the researchers say.

“Until recently there was just never more food than people needed, so it was impossible to eat beyond satiety,” says Denney-Wilson.

She says it is possible to overcome this urge to overeat by learning to recognise the cues of fullness, something that health professionals could work on with their patients.

While this is not the first study to suggest a link between fast eating and overweight, Denney-Wilson says the cultural context of the study is particularly surprising, as the Japanese are generally considered to be more ’social’ eaters compared to those in Western nations, where fast food is so readily available and eaten.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/10/22/2398053.htm?site=science&topic=latest

Obesity may increase with each generation because overweight mothers give birth to offspring who have a tendency to become heavier, researchers have claimed.

A team of scientists believe that the genetic mechanisms that control the weight of a baby may be changed if the mother is obese before and during pregnancy.

This change could lead in turn to the baby becoming heavier than normal.

Scientists in Houston, America, made the claim after studying the eating habits of several generations of mice.

Dr Robert Waterland from Baylor College of Medicine, led the study.

He explained: “There is an obesity epidemic in the United States and it’s increasingly recognised as a worldwide phenomenon.

“Why is everyone getting heavier and heavier?

“One hypothesis is that maternal obesity before and during pregnancy affects the establishment of body weight regulatory mechanisms in her baby.

“Maternal obesity could promote obesity in the next generation.”

The team split the mice, all of which had a genetic tendency to overeat, into two groups.

One group was provided with a normal diet while the other was provided with nutrient-supplemented diet.

The nutrients in the supplemented diet encouraged the process of DNA methylation - a chemical reaction that silences genes with the hope that it would render the over-eating gene inactive.

The mice on the normal diet gained weight with each generation while the mice on the altered diet stayed roughly the same size.

Dr Waterland explained: “We wanted to know if, even among genetically identical mice, maternal obesity would promote obesity in her offspring, and if the methyl-supplemented diet would affect this process.

“Indeed those on the regular diet got fatter and fatter with each generation. Those in the supplemented group however, did not.”

Dr Waterland said the research had led the team to believe that the process of DNA methylation plays an important role in the development of the region of the brain that regulates appetite - the hypothalamus.
Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1567852/obesity_may_rise_with_generations/

Heart attacks are hitting the overweight more than a decade sooner than “normal” weight people, researchers are reporting.

A study of more than 111,000 people is one of the first to put real numbers to the risk of obesity and suggests “excess adiposity” - fat tissue - is more dangerous to the heart than smoking.

“The leading theory in cardiology right now is that the fat tissue is actually producing factors that precipitate heart attacks,” says lead author Dr. Peter McCullough, consultant cardiologist and chief of nutrition and prevention medicine at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan.

The theory is that cholesterol builds up in the coronary arteries and inflammatory or other chemicals produced by fat cells trigger the plaque to suddenly rupture, causing a blood clot to form and unleashing an acute heart attack.

But until now, earlier studies “simply just didn’t have enough patients of different body sizes having their first heart attack to really evaluate” whether obesity is associated with premature heart attacks, McCullough says.

His team analyzed data from a nationwide U.S. registry of people hospitalized for heart attack and unstable angina, or chest pain, from 2001 to 2007.

A total of 111,847 men and women who had experienced a first heart attack were included in the final analysis. They were grouped according to their body mass index, or BMI, a measure of body fat based on height and weight.

Researchers found that, the heavier the person, the younger the age of a first heart attack.

The most obese people had their heart attacks on average when they were 59.

That compares to about 75 for the leanest group (average body weight 47 kilograms, or about 103 pounds, meaning they were actually considered underweight), and 71 for people of “normal” weight, where the average weight is 65 kilograms, or about 142 pounds.

The most obese group had a BMI of 40 or more and weighed on average 127 kilograms, or 280 pounds.

“It’s not uncommon in daily life to see people at that size,” McCullough says. “I’m sure there are people in your office and people you see all the time at that body weight.”

The rate of diabetes was 17 per cent in the leanest group, and 49 per cent in the most obese. “You can get a feeling of how obesity-driven diabetes is,” McCullough says.

All the patients, regardless of body size, had about the same level of LDL cholesterol, the so-called bad cholesterol thought to be a major risk factor for heart attacks. That means the excess fat is causing heart disease in other ways, McCullough says.

In addition, rates of smoking were equal across the board. “We really can’t blame it on smoking.”

“Those patients at the highest body weight on average lost 12 years of life before their first heart attack.” The second most important factor was smoking, “where they lost just under 10 years of life before a first heart attack.

“This is really the first study that shows now that some factors are more powerful than smoking in terms of the prematurity of myocardial infarction (a heart attack),” McCullough says.

The study involved a type of heart attack called non-ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction. They always require hospitalization and have an in-hospital fatality rate of about 10 per cent, and about 20 per cent over the next six months, McCullough says. “They are not trivial events. They account for a leading cause of patients to lose time away from work and actually seek medical disability.”

The study clearly shows “that, contrary to some of the arguments out there about whether or not excess weight may be protective … there is a tremendous risk difference in terms of having your first heart attack if you are overweight or obese,” says Dr. Arya Sharma, chair of obesity research and management at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

“You’re having a heart attack a decade before those who don’t have a weight problem,” Sharma says. “And 59 is actually a very young age. These are people who aren’t even close to retirement.”

McCullough says people could reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease by losing weight and body fat. According to the Canadian Community Health Survey, 23 per cent of Canadians aged 18 and older are obese.
Source: http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=b172edd0-a4c2-41a3-bd89-a00f698871e1

Obesity significantly increases the risk of recurrent miscarriages, UK researchers have claimed.

When the body mass index (BMI) of almost 700 women who had experienced at least three unexplained miscarriages was investigated, 45% of the women were found to be overweight or obese.

All women had previously undergone comprehensive investigations, but no cause as to why they kept miscarrying was established.

In total, 1% of the women were underweight, 54% were of normal weight, 30% were overweight and 15% were obese.

In those who went on to have a subsequent pregnancy, 19% of those who miscarried again were obese, compared to 11% who had a successful pregnancy.

Mothers being over the age of 35 and high numbers of previous miscarriages were associated with poor pregnancy outcome.

When maternal age and number of previous miscarriages were adjusted, obese women were shown to have a significantly increased risk of a further miscarriage compared to those with a normal weight.

“Ours is the first study to look directly at the link between BMI and recurrent miscarriage. It shows that obese women who experience recurrent miscarriage are at greater risk of subsequent pregnancy loss,” said Winnie Lo of St Mary’s Hospital, London.

Ms Lo advised that all women with recurrent miscarriage should be weighed at their first consultation. Those who are found to be obese should be counselled regarding the benefits of weight loss in increasing their chances of a successful pregnancy, she said.

“Programmes should be in place to help with the weight loss progress,” Ms Lo concluded.

The research was released at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists 7th International Scientific Meeting in Montreal.
Source: http://www.irishhealth.com/?level=4&id=14281

Regular moderate exercise helps people with diabetes to reduce fat in their livers, in turn potentially preventing liver failure and heart disease, U.S. researchers said on Friday.

People with type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease and one closely tied to obesity, often have elevated liver fat levels and are at high risk for a condition called nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

Diabetics who did a six-month program of cardiovascular exercise and weight lifting three times a week cut the fat in their livers by about 40 percent in the study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

They said the study, which used magnetic resonance imaging scans, is the first to show exercise can get fat out of the livers of people with type 2 diabetes.

“What we were able to demonstrate pretty definitively is that yet another benefit of exercise is to help reduce liver fat,” Johns Hopkins exercise physiologist Kerry Stewart said in a telephone interview.

Stewart presented the findings at an American Association of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation meeting in Indianapolis.

The condition, also known as hepatic steatosis, can lead to cirrhosis of the liver, liver failure, liver cancer and a higher risk for diabetes-related heart problems.

Seventy-seven men and women with diabetes, most of whom were overweight or obese, took part in the study.

About half were assigned to moderate exercise including 45 minutes of running on a treadmill, using a stair-climbing machine or riding a bicycle for 45 minutes three times a week, along with 20 minutes of lifting weights.

The others were not placed in any formal fitness program, and most got little physical activity. At the end of six months, they had no improvement in liver fat.

Those in the exercise group also improved their overall fitness, shedding weight, gaining muscle strength and losing abdominal fat.

Type 2 diabetes is a growing problem in the United States and many other countries, fueled by increasing obesity. The American Diabetes Association said about 24 million people in the United States have diabetes, mostly type 2.
source: http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSN1944083420080919?sp=true

Thinner men in middle age, or those who lose substantial weight as they Action Points
Explain to interested patients that the study found men who were relatively thin when young or who lost weight as they aged were at increased risk of osteoporosis.

Explain that osteoporosis is a significant problem for older men, though less common than in women.

Explain that several treatment approaches are available for osteoporosis.
grow older, may have brittle bones in their 70s, researchers here said.
Some 15.1% of men who lost 10% or more of their body weight after their late 40s had osteoporosis when they reached 75, compared with 0.6% of those who had weight gains of at least 10%, reported Haakon E. Meyer, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Oslo, and colleagues in the Aug. 15 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology.

The researchers, who studied nearly 1,500 men over a 30-year period, found that combination of low initial weight and subsequent weight loss was an even stronger risk factor for osteoporosis.

The prevalence of osteoporosis in the quartile with the lowest baseline body mass index and who later lost at least 5% of body weight was 31% (95% CI 24% to 37%), compared with 4% (95% CI 1% to 7%) for those in the lowest quartile of BMI with weight gains of at least 5%.

“Low BMI in middle-age men was related to the risk of osteoporosis three decades later and … this risk was modulated considerably by later weight change,” Dr. Meyer and colleagues wrote.

They said a clinical implication of their findings is that weight loss, while generally beneficial, is not risk-free. “When considering weight-loss interventions, the effect on osteoporosis and fracture should also be included and, if possible, counteracted,” they suggested.

Slimness and short-term weight loss are already recognized as a risk factor for osteoporosis for men as well as women, the researchers said, but their effects had not previously been studied for such a long period.

The new findings emerged from studies of 1,476 Norwegian men in the cities of Oslo and Tromsø who underwent general health exams from 1972 to 1975 and again from 2000 to 2001. The follow-up screening also included bone mineral density testing of the hip.

Participants were 47 to 49 years old during the first scan and 75 to 77 at the second. The time between exams ranged from 26 to 29 years.

Mean baseline BMI was 24.4 (SD 2.6). At follow-up, mean BMI was 26.5 (SD 3.3), with mean weight change of 5.2% (SD 10.2%).

Weight change was inversely associated with baseline BMI (r = -0.21).

Mean age-adjusted bone mineral density at follow-up was 0.933 g/cm2 in the lowest quartile of baseline BMI, versus 1.024 g/cm2 in the highest quartile.

From the lowest to highest baseline BMI quartiles, the prevalence of osteoporosis was 10.9%, 3.5%, 4.4% and 1.2%, respectively, after adjusting for age and smoking status.

Dr. Meyer and colleagues calculated that total hip bone mineral density increased by 0.029 g/cm2 (95% CI 0.023 to 0.036) for each 10% of weight gain between evaluations.

This result was almost completely unaffected when the researchers excluded more than 800 participants who had serious comorbidities known to affect osteoporosis risk.

They also estimated that men in the lowest quartile of BMI who lost at least 5% of body weight would be 2.79 times as likely to suffer a future hip fracture relative to those in the highest quartile and with stable weight.

“Weight change might act on the skeleton through changes in mechanical loading, changes in mechanical muscle stress, changes in hormone regulation of bone metabolism, and changes in intake of nutrients,” the researchers wrote in addressing possible mechanisms.

Altered smoking habits or physical activity can affect weight as well as osteoporosis risk, they said.

They said a limitation on their analysis was that they did not have actual fracture data for participants nor information on family history of fractures.

Also, the lack of bone mineral density testing at the initial evaluation precluded a direct comparison with weight change over time.
Source: http://www.medpagetoday.com/Endocrinology/Osteoporosis/tb/10982

Fat is not a feminist issue, despite what feminists used to say. It is a class issue. Well-to-do, well educated people are rarely fat, still less obese. You see few fat children in private schools. Fatness and obesity are directly related to low income and low education.

A fat map was published last week by Dr Foster Intelligence, showing the areas with the fattest populations, and sure enough the poorest industrial areas in the north of England and in Wales produce the most obese people. The problem seems to be getting worse, fast.

You hardly need expert medical data analysis to understand that. You need only to go to a few supermarkets. At a Tesco in western Scotland this summer I was astonished by the number of horribly obese shoppers waddling round the aisles with their elephantine children, who could not possibly have squashed themselves into an ordinary one-person chair. Young women, with eyes reduced to slits by the pressure of the fat on their faces, laughed grimly with each other as they scanned the shelves. And this is a rich country.

Even though the vast Oban Tesco is full of good food, the trolleys at the checkout were heaped with stuff that is either useless or positively bad to eat – crisps, snacks, swizzlers, twizzlers and guzzlers, cheesy dips and fatty whatsits, cakes puddings and pies, heavily dusted in additives. The obese seem to fill their carts regularly with several times their own weight in eatables that can make them only fatter, that they shouldn’t eat and that nobody should produce, as if they were determined to lay down yet more adipose tissue. Yet you rarely see such bloated people and trolleys in smart supermarkets in rich areas. These days you can easily tell people’s precise socioeconomic bracket and body weight by the contents of their trolleys.

Obesity seems to be the issue of the day, possibly because we are still in the silly season. Coincidentally last week, Andrew Lansley, the Tory health spokesman, spoke against obesity in a long speech to the Reform think tank. He was widely understood as saying that fatties have only themselves to blame; they must take responsibility for themselves and their weight because “we all have a choice”. And while that is a slightly unfair take on his speech, he does seem to mean something of the sort. Yet at the same time he offers what’s now called a whole raft of measures to stop people getting fat. This is awkward for Conservatives; either you interfere with people’s choices or you don’t. Empowerment, a word he used, is often just a weasel word for state intervention.

The question is why a Conservative government should interfere at all in people’s inalienable freedom to choke on deep-fried Mars bars if they choose to. The argument is that the fat and the obese (people with a body mass index over 30, which is something you could spot without a calculator) cost the country squillions in lost productivity and increased National Health Service costs. The obese tend to develop serious illness, particularly heart disease and diabetes, and are, generally speaking, crocked up and expensive to look after.

Somebody somewhere has come up with a figure for the cost of all this, which Lansley quotes – £7 billion a year, for what it’s worth. Last year’s Foresight report said this cost could go up by six times by 2050. And fat is getting fatter so fast. According to NHS figures, the proportion of obese men in the population rose during Labour’s time in office from 13.2% in 1993 to 23.1% in 2005. Among women it was even worse, from 16.4% to 24.8%. That is nearly a quarter of all women. If you consider people who are not obese but overweight (with a BMI of 25-30), 46% of men in England are overweight and 32% of women.

Fat is also an ethnic issue. According to NHS figures published in 2006, Irish and black Caribbean men had the highest incidence of obesity (25% each) and among women black Africans had 38%, black Caribbean 32% and Pakistani 28%. So, with migration trends and immigrant fertility, the costs of obesity are going to rise fast as well.

However, I wonder how much, if anyone knew the facts, the final cost of obesity would be to the taxpayer. For fat people die sooner and obese people die much sooner than others, thus relieving the NHS and the economy of their needs. It’s true that obese people need expensive treatment for diabetes and heart disease before they die, but that might easily be offset if they had significantly shorter lives – and they do. Current thinking seems to be that the obese die between five and seven years earlier than otherwise they would.

Few papers I’ve looked at on this subject discuss the possible cost-benefit of obesity, although one from an insurance company coyly mentioned the advantage to pension providers if a person died before he reached pensionable age. For years I used to argue that smokers were a net benefit, purely financially speaking, to the exchequer, because they died early. I still feel rather proud of being the first, I believe, to get a known expert (Professor Richard Peto in 1993) to agree publicly to this idea, now accepted. Might not the same be true of obesity? The real drain on the NHS is geriatric medicine; the obese might not reach old age.

If the only reason for interfering with what fat people eat is how much it costs the rest of us, perhaps we should leave them alone. It’s well known that obesity (and fatness) are associated with poor education, poor housing, poor employment or none, low expectations, low opportunities and all the rest. These are all social ills that this government has been trying to deal with for more than a decade. Yet little has improved and obesity – as an indicator of that fact – has swollen vastly while Labour has been in office. What prevents obesity is a good income, a good education, good opportunities and the kind of background that develops self-confidence. Prosperity, in short.

Obesity cannot be defeated by taskforces, better labelling on packets or investing in health accreditation schemes. This has all been tried and has failed. In the presence of a complex problem, and in the absence of a workable solution, perhaps it is better to leave people to their own devices. Nobody can pretend they don’t know what they’re doing. They should be left alone to do it.
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/minette_marrin/article4641974.ece

Who knew terms like downward facing dog, flowering lotus, and half camel would ever be phrases of popular culture without a chorus of snickers being heard throughout a studio, classroom, or lecture hall? Unless you’ve been hiding in a box since the Millennium started, you know what yoga is. The spiritual-based exercise trend has been popular since celebrities started showing up on the red carpet looking extremely lean and giving their props to their personal trainer, their handpicked menu, and the low-resistance, high-meditation strategy that is yoga.

You know that old saying, “You don’t know who you are until you know where you came from?” Well, Hollywood didn’t invent yoga; India did thousands of years ago as part of the ancient system of Ayurveda. Yoga, now more than ever, is popular among kids, young adults, and men and women alike.

However within the popularity of this trend, when it comes to spiritual enlightenment, some wonder if holding poses, using your core, and/or sweating out impurities are still yielding the best results that they can. More and more kids are being taught yoga in the classroom to help free up their stress levels and improve concentration inside and outside of the classroom for a better balanced mind and body. Even vacationing has an outlet for providing one of a kind workout options for kids these days. Princess Cruises just announced its kid’s yoga program onboard their ships. Launching this fall, children as young as three can take part in the free classes aimed at promoting movement and parents are encouraged to join in the thirty-to-sixty minute classes.

From kids to the elderly, and everyone in between, yoga has also seen a recent boost from menopausal women. Doctors in India took a group of 120 menopausal women between the ages of 40 and 55 and broke them into two groups: one group practiced yoga five days a week for eight weeks and the control group focused on controlling their diet and exercise regimens. The yoga group also was educated on the properties of yoga, as well as how to manage stress through posing, stretching and breathing. The control group was lectured on diet, stress management, exercise and the process of menopause. The Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana of Bangalore, India’s team of doctors including Dr. R. Chattha, noticed after eight weeks a significant change in the yoga group. The women in the yoga group overall had reductions in night sweats, problems sleeping, and hot flashes-usual symptoms of menopause-whereas the control group did not notice these changes.

If you’ve never tried yoga, the good news is that you still can. Yoga centers are popping up everywhere from Hollywood Boulevard to Hollywood, Florida, and flexibility is not an issue. With many different types of yoga, beginners can start small and work their way up to the peace of mind they want. Coincidentally, this September is also the first annual Yoga Month. Approved as a National Health Observance (NHO), Yoga Month is a year round, community-based sponsorship program used to promote health and wellness. During September, the Yoga Month tour throughout the United States and Canada will help to bring yoga awareness to others through support groups, teacher networking devices, and forums to promote new ideas and products that coincide with a yoga-centric lifestyle.

Whether you’re a cancer patient, survivor, health nut, or just looking to gain a healthier perspective, join in the fun, get stretching and remember that it’s alright to snicker when someone asks you to do a half camel.
Source: http://www.healthnews.com/fitness-exercise/yoga-more-popular-than-ever-1671.html