Obesity

As both a pediatrician and a parent, I was shocked to read " What's for dinner? Don't ask Mom " (G section, May 9). I can only hope that Beth Teitell's suggestion that parents "start by blaming Michelle Obama" for "making a simple meal for one's family so tough" was a misguided attempt at humor. As it is, with obesity-related health care costs expected to reach $550 billion by 2030, the time to make light of this issue has come and gone. Yet instead of offering simple, low-stress strategies for serving healthy meals, Teitell espouses advice that flies in...

Emergency workers who needed to take an obese teenager from her home to a hospital in Wales had to break through a wall of the residence to get her out and into an ambulance, officials said Friday. The rescue on the second floor of the small house on Thursday used scaffolding as a ramp to lower the woman to the ground level, the local Rhondda Cynon Taf council said. The unidentified 19-year-old remained hospitalized Friday and her medical condition was not released. Neighbors said her weight had risen as high as 380 kilos (835 pounds)

The war on smoking can help guide the nation's fight against obesity. Trash food can be the cigarette. Obesity can be lung cancer. This week, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Weight of the Nation conference in Washington, researchers projected that 42 percent of Americans will be obese by 2030. That is more than triple the rates a half-century ago. The health care costs of obesity have, by most accounts, surpassed the medical costs of smoking. "Obesity is analogous to tobacco," Justin Trogdon, a research economist at RTI International in North Carolina and co-author of the...

Gaining weight is not just the result of the number of calories eaten but also may have to do with the time of day those calories are consumed, at least in mice. The researchers, from the Salk Institute in California and elsewhere, fed the mice a high-fat diet or a standard diet. Some of the mice were allowed to eat only within an eight-hour period each day and the others were given an unrestricted amount of time to eat. When mice on the high-fat diet were restricted to eating within eight hours, they consumed just as much as those on the same diet who were permitted to eat around the clock.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- West Virginia, a state with one of the worst obesity problems in the country, has called in the big guns for help. For the first time, federal disease investigators in Atlanta are studying obesity, just as they would investigate the rapid spread of an infectious disease. "We didn't suddenly realize we have this problem," state health official Keri Kennedy said yesterday. "But we are facing a severe health crisis, and this is a new way of looking at it. " Overall, 28 percent of West Virginia's 1.4 million adults are obese.

ATLANTA - People who sleep fewer than six hours a night - or more than nine - are more likely to be obese, according to a new government study that is one of the largest to show a link between irregular sleep and big bellies. The study also linked light sleepers to higher smoking rates, less physical activity, and more alcohol use. The research adds to a stream of studies that have found obesity and other health problems in those who don't get proper shut-eye, said Dr. Ron Kramer, a Colorado physician and a spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

IN DERRICK Z. Jackson's Feb. 26 op-ed, "Salad Days in Somerville," we learn of the town's decade-long initiative to inspire healthy options for school lunch. More communities throughout the state and country should experiment with similar measures. However, healthy eating is only part of the solution. Many towns should encourage more exercise and physical activity. It has been proven that diet, in addition to exercise, is the optimal way to reduce obesity. Jared Skvirsky Brookline

WASHINGTON — Obesity puts a drag on the wallet as well as health, especially for women. Doctors have long known that medical bills are higher for the obese, but that’s only a portion of the real-life costs. George Washington University researchers added in things like employee sick days, lost productivity, even the need for extra gasoline — and found the annual cost of being obese is $4,879 for a woman and $2,646 for a man. That’s far more than the cost of being merely overweight — $524 for women and $432 for men, concluded the report being released today, which analyzed...

CHICAGO -- Long-term exposure to American culture may be hazardous to immigrants' health. A new study found that obesity is relatively rare in the foreign-born until they have lived in the United States -- the land of drive-thrus, remote controls, and double cheeseburgers -- for more than 10 years. Only 8 percent of immigrants who had lived in the United States for less than a year were obese, but that jumped to 19 percent among those who had been here for at least 15 years.

RE "STATE bans unhealthy food sales in schools" (Metro, July 14): While I commend Massachusetts schools for evaluating their menus and snack options, banning certain foods will not solve the problem of obesity in our youth. Education will. We need to teach children to practice balance and portion control. Providing nutrition information to students without teaching them what it means will accomplish little. As a dietitian, I've been horrified hearing stories of what students eat in school.

Derrick Z. Jackson, in praising the success of the war on tobacco, fails to mention how the decline in smoking has contributed to the nation's weight problem (" Obesity, the new cigarette ," Op-ed, May 9). In the 1970s the average weight of Americans was dropping, but between 1980 and 2000, as smoking fell, average weight rose 20 pounds. Michael Grossman, an economist at the City University of New York, found that for every 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes, the incidence of obesity rose 2 percent.

Obesity, once seen as a failure of personal responsibility and lack of willpower, has been repackaged in a four-part HBO documentary airing tonight through Thursday as a complicated phenomenon that's largely resulting from societal pressures that make it far easier for us to commute by car rather than by bike and to eat McDonald's rather than steamed vegetables with tofu. We're told that 60 to 70 percent of the risk for becoming obese lies in genes inherited from our parents but that these genes don't act in a vacuum; how they're expressed depends on...

As both a pediatrician and a parent, I was shocked to read " What's for dinner? Don't ask Mom " (G section, May 9). I can only hope that Beth Teitell's suggestion that parents "start by blaming Michelle Obama" for "making a simple meal for one's family so tough" was a misguided attempt at humor. As it is, with obesity-related health care costs expected to reach $550 billion by 2030, the time to make light of this issue has come and gone. Yet instead of offering simple, low-stress strategies for serving healthy meals, Teitell espouses advice...

The war on smoking can help guide the nation's fight against obesity. Trash food can be the cigarette. Obesity can be lung cancer. This week, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Weight of the Nation conference in Washington, researchers projected that 42 percent of Americans will be obese by 2030. That is more than triple the rates a half-century ago. The health care costs of obesity have, by most accounts, surpassed the medical costs of smoking. "Obesity is analogous to tobacco," Justin Trogdon, a research economist at RTI International in North Carolina and co-author of the...

Fighting obesity will require changes everywhere Americans live, work, play and learn, says a major new report that outlines dozens of options — from building more walkable neighborhoods to zoning limits on fast-food restaurants to selling healthier snacks in sports arenas. But schools should be a national focus because that's where children spend most of their day, eat a lot of their daily calories — and should be better taught how to eat healthy and stay fit, the influential Institute of Medicine said Tuesday.

WASHINGTON - The obesity epidemic may be slowing, but don't take in those pants yet. Today, about a third of US adults are obese. By 2030, 42 percent will be, said a forecast released Monday. That's not nearly as many as experts had predicted before the once-rapid rises in obesity rates began leveling off. But the new forecast suggests even small continuing increases will add up. "We still have a very serious problem," said obesity specialist Dr. William Dietz of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

WASHINGTON -- The GOP-controlled House has banned lawsuits that blame the food industry for people's expanding waistlines and health woes, saying such cases could bankrupt fast-food chains and restaurants. The House voted 276-139 yesterday to prevent suits that contend food companies and their supersize offerings are responsible for Americans' increasing obesity. House Republicans have in recent years approved similar bills barring suits against the gun industry for gun crimes and against businesses for asbestos-related health problems.

WASHINGTON -- In the buffet of reasons why Americans are getting fatter, researchers are piling more evidence on the plate for one still-controversial cause: a virus. New research announced yesterday found that human stem cells turned into fat cells when exposed to a common virus. This theory doesn't explain all or even most of America's growing obesity problem. But it adds to other recent evidence that blames more than just super-sized appetites and underused muscles. For several years, researchers have looked at a possible link between obesity and this common virus,...

In order to reverse the American obesity epidemic that has left 1 out of 3 children and 2 out of 3 adults overweight, the nation needs to pool its resources to implement a number of sweeping initiatives, according to a 462-page report issued Tuesday by the influential Institute of Medicine. While the report has earnest goals, the suggested measures have been underscored and proclaimed by others time and time again: make activity a routine part of the day; make nutritious foods cheap and accessible; get schools to implement an hour of daily activity and teach nutrition...

The connection between lack of sleep and obesity has long been established in research studies, but can getting more sleep actually help you overcome a genetic propensity to excess weight gain? Perhaps if you're not getting at least seven hours a night. While it's tough to tease out just how much of a role genes play in determining our body weight, University of Washington researchers gave it their best shot by measuring the body mass index in 604 pairs of identical twins (who share the same genes)