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Sunday, February 13, 2011

Obesity Linked To Income, Education; Not Sprawl

Obesity is more prevalent in areas with lower educational attainment and certain ethnic profiles than in areas of suburban sprawl, according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Researchers at UIC's Urban Transportation Center revisited their 2005 analysis of data from about 7 million northern Illinois drivers licenses, which found that body-mass index scores in most city neighborhoods differ little from those in the farthest outlying areas.

The 2005 findings contradicted the conventional wisdom that city dwellers are thinner because their dense, centralized environment encourages walking, while suburbanites and rural residents tend to drive to widely scattered destinations.

The new analysis expanded the data set by comparing personal and environmental attributes at the zip-code level throughout the 2005 study area: Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties in the Chicago metropolitan area, and the more rural DeKalb, Kendall, Grundy and Kankakee counties.

The data confirmed that sprawl is not significantly associated with obesity, the researchers said, although drivers living in most neighborhoods closer to downtown Chicago have slightly lower body-mass indexes than those living very far from the city.

Within zip codes, body-mass indexes increased with age and male gender, and also with the percentage of zip-code residents who commute by car, are African American or Latino, or own their homes.

The prevalence of obesity decreases in zip codes with higher median income and more residents who have attended college.

Paul Metaxatos, UIC research assistant professor, said the results of the study can inform urban planning initiatives.

"Ambitious land use policies to address obesity may have little success with the low-income ethnic minorities who are most in need of assistance," Metaxatos said. "Those in marginal, transportation-disadvantaged communities would benefit from better access to medical help, better food markets, and information about lifestyle modifications."

UIC ranks among the nation's leading research universities and is Chicago's largest university with 27,000 students, 12,000 faculty and staff, 15 colleges and the state's major public medical center. A hallmark of the campus is the Great Cities Commitment, through which UIC faculty, students and staff engage with community, corporate, foundation and government partners in hundreds of programs to improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas around the world.

Source:
University of Illinois at Chicago

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Starting Solids Too Early May Increase Obesity Risk

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends waiting to introduce solid foods until infants are between 4 and 6 months old. A new study in the March issue of Pediatrics found that among formula-fed infants, introduction of solid foods before age 4 months was related to a higher risk of obesity. The study, "Timing of Solid Food Introduction and Risk of Obesity in Preschool-Aged Children," published online February 7, compared obesity rates among 847 children at age 3.

Among children who were breastfed for at least four months, the timing of solid-food introduction did not affect the odds of becoming obese at age 3. Among children who were never breastfed or who stopped breastfeeding before the age of 4 months, the introduction of solid foods before the age of 4 months was linked to a six-fold increase in the odds of obesity at age 3 years. Researchers found this increased risk was not explained by rapid early growth. Researchers suggest greater adherence to guidelines regarding the timing of solid food introduction may reduce the risk of childhood obesity.

Source:
American Academy of Pediatrics

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Secretary Sebelius Highlights 2010 Accomplishments Of The U.S. Department Of Health And Human Services

New video covers implementation of the Affordable Care Act; efforts to reduce fraud and waste; public health initiatives to address obesity, tobacco use and food safety.

In a new video released by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius highlighted the work of HHS over the course of 2010. Sebelius outlined some of the important programs and services that the department provides and discussed some of the new laws that went into effect this year and what they mean for consumers. Sebelius also praised the work of the employees of the department.

"This year, thanks to new laws passed by Congress and signed by the President, HHS was able to take a number of steps that have directly improved the lives, health and security of Americans," said Sebelius. "Through the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, more Americans have access to health coverage as well as new rights and benefits in their health insurance. Efforts to improve public health and reverse the twin epidemics of obesity and tobacco use in the U.S. made significant progress. HHS emergency response teams and public servants at almost every HHS operating division helped to ease the impact of the earthquake in Haiti and the oil spill off the Gulf Coast. And we end the year with newly enacted legislation that will allow us to improve food safety with important new authorities and changes that are decades overdue. I'm proud of these accomplishments and the men and women in our department who made them possible and remain firmly committed to our mission to provide critical health and human services to the people of this nation."

Watch the Secretary's video message here

Some of HHS' 2010 accomplishments include:

- Implementation of the Affordable Care Act: The Patient's Bill of Rights and other new tools and resources are helping hold health insurers accountable and giving consumers more value for their health care dollars. A new website, helps consumers take control of their health care and make the choices that are right for them by putting the power of information at their fingertips.

- Supporting Let's Move: With the leadership of First Lady Michelle Obama, new prevention activities are helping address the rising problems of obesity and chronic diseases in America, including Communities Putting Prevention to Work, which is funding some of the most promising local strategies for promoting wellness.

- Reducing Fraud and Waste in our Health Care System and Strengthening the Medicare Trust Funds: Anti-fraud efforts are continuing to protect Medicare beneficiaries and the program's trust fund. HHS and the Justice Department held four fraud summits around the U.S. and our joint efforts have resulted in over 500 defendants being charged with defrauding Medicare out of more than $1 billion. Billions have been returned to the Medicare Trust Funds thanks to stepped up efforts by HHS and DOJ. Efforts are continuing to meet the President's challenge to reduce Medicare fee-for-service improper payments by 50 percent by 2012. And the Senior Medicare Patrol is helping form seniors about what they can do to help protect themselves and Medicare from fraud. Read more about the efforts to stop fraud here.

- Responding to H1N1 and Seasonal Flu: Working together with the public and private sector on a targeted and fast response helped us avoid the worst predictions for last flu season and the H1N1 epidemic. Also, unprecedented efforts were made to modernize the medical countermeasures pipeline so we can respond faster to flu and other health emergencies in the future. Read more about steps everyone can take to reduce the spread and impact of flu here.

- Lowering Tobacco Use: Thanks to legislation signed by President Obama in 2009, we're cracking down on marketing flavored cigarettes to kids and have restricted terms like "light" or "mild." Also, the FDA proposed new graphic warning labels for cigarettes - the most significant update to cigarette warning labels in 25 years. Read more about what the FDA is doing here.

- Making Care Safer: HHS is working with hospitals across the nation (all 50 states and the District of Columbia) to eliminate serious infections in intensive care unit patients, and is also supporting a grant to Washington State to promote safe surgical care. In addition, we provided consumer friendly safety information to help patients taking blood thinners, including a new video for patients and their families, which is available here.

- Assisting Children and Families During the Recession: Employees at HHS worked with states to fund subsidized employment programs for more than 200,000 jobless parents and disadvantaged youth. These jobs helped families afford the basics while providing the dignity that comes with a job.

- Raising the Bar in Early Childhood Education: We expanded support for early education through increased support for child care and Head Start programs - programs that saw increased demands during the recession. HHS also introduced new regulations that will hold Head Start programs accountable for classroom quality and high standards of program integrity, helping the programs fulfill their mission to help vulnerable children achieve their full potential.

- Addressing Mental and Behavioral Health Needs: In partnership with the Department of Defense, HHS created the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention to accelerate our efforts to prevent suicide. Bringing together public and private partners, the Alliance has established programs to improve detection of suicide risk and access to care, a national Suicide Prevention Resource Center, the Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-TALK); and systems to track and understand suicides. We have also made strides to support and promote better primary care and behavioral health services for individuals with mental illnesses or substance use disorders.

- Food Safety: We are continuing to monitor the safety of America's food supply, and are working to protect the public health through clear communications about recalls and providing consumers with detailed, up-to-date information on here.

- Expanding Use of Health Information Technology (HIT): We're eliminating barriers to the meaningful use of HIT with Regional Extension Centers, training for Health IT workforce, Beacon Communities they can use as models, and Health Information Exchanges that allow information sharing with full protections for privacy.And most importantly, the new incentives for doctors and hospitals to use HIT to improve care are beginning to pay off as the number of providers using HIT is on the rise.

Investing in Research: The first step for many medicines on their way to our pharmacy shelves is a discovery in an NIH-funded laboratory. The last step for all of them is a careful analysis at the FDA. A new partnership between the FDA and NIH will help researchers navigate the regulatory process and give regulators the scientific tools they need to quickly assess a treatment's risks and benefits. For Americans, this is going to mean that new treatments are available, safer and sooner.

- Indian Health Service: The Indian Health Care Improvement Act was permanently authorized as a part of the Affordable Care Act, and updates and modernizes the Indian Health Service (IHS) to address the health needs of eligible American Indians and Alaska Natives. IHS is also working with the Veteran's Administration to better coordinate and collaborate on services to veterans. The IHS Special Diabetes Program for Indians was reauthorized and will continue supporting programs proven to help reduce diabetes and cardiovascular disease risk factors.

- Gulf Oil Spill Clean-up: After this year's oil spill on the Gulf Coast, HHS deployed senior health officials to ensure health issues were addressed at all levels of the response, including monitoring the health and safety of clean-up workers, providing mental health support to the region, and ensuring the safety of seafood prior to the reopening of the waters for fishing. Read more about the response and recovery efforts here.

- Assisting Haiti: Following last year's devastating earthquake, HHS helped send hundreds of medical personnel to Haiti and helped assess the country's long-term health needs. Since the recent outbreak of cholera, HHS has helped improve access to treatments and clean drinking water, as well as helping Haiti track and understand the epidemic. HHS also played a critical role in the U.S. government's mission to bring some 1,150 children from Haiti who were previously matched with adoptive families in the United States prior to the earthquake so they could join their new families.

Source:
HHS

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Losing Body Fat Before Pregnancy Could Help Break Obesity Cycle

Losing body fat before pregnancy could help break the obesity cycle and improve the lifelong health of babies born to obese mothers, according to US researchers who are studying what happens across generations that could be contributing to the obesity crisis.

Obesity is a growing problem worldwide, and more and more women are obese when they fall pregnant.

Babies born to obese mothers are themselves more likely to become obese children and adults, another factor that drives the obesity and overweight epidemic.

However, a collaborative study between the Center for Pregnancy and Newborn Research at the University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHSC) at San Antonio and the National Institute of Nutrition in Mexico City, suggests that if obese mothers lose body fat before they fall pregnant, they can pass on health benefits to their children.

Dr Peter Nathanielsz, a professor in UTHSC's Center for Pregnancy and Newborn Research, and colleagues studied female rats raised on high-fat diets, comparing one obese group that continued eating the same diet through mating, pregnancy and lactation with another group that was switched to a healthier lower fat diet one month before mating.

They then studied the male offspring of both groups and found those born to mothers who remained obese and stayed on the high-fat diets through pregnancy to lactation, had higher levels of triglycerides, leptin, insulin and insulin resistance at the weaning stage, whereas in babies born to mothers who were put on low fat diets before pregnancy so they lost body fat, these levels were normal.

They also found the babies born to obese mothers had increased fat mass and fat cell size, whereas these changes were significantly reversed, although not totally, in babies born to mothers in the group that switched to a low fat diet before pregnancy.

The researchers told the press that, although the extent of reversibility depended on the tissue affected, this was the first time research had shown it was possible to reverse metabolic effects in offspring born to obese mothers by changing the mothers' diets before pregnancy.

Nathanielsz said it was interesting that the offspring born to obese mothers had high levels of leptin, a hormone that tells the brain to reduce appetite.

Perhaps this means the offspring developed a brain that was resistant to the signal that tells them they are getting fat and they just go on eating and getting fat, like their mothers.

"That is what we mean when we say that the effects are transgenerational," said Nathanielsz.

"Leptin levels were normal in the offspring of the intervention group, showing that we can break this cycle," he added.

Nathanielsz explained they were able to achieve at least 50 to 60 per cent return to normal levels, which he regards as a first step.

Perhaps the next stage is to try a no-fat diet or add micronutrients to the diet, but this has to be done carefully because there could be unwanted consequences in trying to restore levels to normal too quickly.

"We believe this sort of information is necessary to provide guidelines as to the type of dietary intervention for women during pregnancy. Much remains to be done," he cautioned.

The role of leptin is not straightforward. It is natural for it to peak after birth in newborn rodents, and it seems this peak is an important feature in the development of the brain's hypothalamic appetite control centers.

But from this and other experiments with rodents, Nathanielsz and colleagues showed that newborn offspring of obese mothers have larger and longer-lasting leptin peaks.

In another recent study published online on 24 January in the Journal of Physiology, Nathanielsz and colleagues from the University of Wyoming, describe a similar experiment with sheep, which suggests that the presence of higher levels of cortisol in lambs born to obese ewes could be disrupting the normal peaking of leptin in the lambs' first few days of life, thereby "predisposing them to increased appetite and weight gain in later life".

"Maternal obesity eliminates the neonatal lamb plasma leptin peak."
Nathan M. Long, Stephen P Ford, and Peter W Nathanielsz.
The Journal of Physiology, published online before print, 24 January 2011.
DOI: 10.1113/jphysiol.2010.201681

Additional source: University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (2 Feb 2011 press release), Wikipedia.

Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today

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Drinking Vegetable Juice May Help Increase Vegetable Intake And Support Weight Management

Studies show drinking V8® 100% vegetable juice may be a simple way for people to increase their vegetable intake and may help them manage their weight - two areas of concern outlined in the newly released 2010 U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans.1

A study conducted by researchers at the University of California-Davis found that adults who drank one, 8-ounce glass of vegetable juice each day, as part of a calorie-appropriate Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet, got nearly twice as many vegetable servings a day than those who did not drink any vegetable juice. Additionally, nine out of 10 participants who drank V8 100% vegetable juice said they felt they were doing something good for themselves.2

Researchers attribute the results to the ease, convenience and enjoyment of vegetable juice as a way to get more vegetables.

"This study suggests that it's not enough to just educate people on the importance of vegetables, you need to show them ways to easily incorporate them into their daily routine," said study co-author Carl Keen, PhD, Professor of Nutrition and Internal Medicine at the University of California-Davis. "What we found was that something as simple as drinking your vegetables can be an effective tool in achieving behavior change."

The new U.S. Dietary Guidelines report also reinforces the need for Americans to achieve and sustain a healthy weight. Current data shows that 64 percent of women and 72 percent of men are overweight or obese.3 Eating more vegetables can be a helpful strategy to manage weight because they are "low-energy-dense," meaning they have more nutrition for fewer calories.

Again, vegetable juice can play a key role. A study from Baylor College of Medicine shows that overweight individuals with metabolic syndrome who drank one to two servings of V8 100% vegetable juice as part of a calorie-appropriate DASH diet lost more weight compared to non-juice drinkers. Over the 12-week study period, the juice drinkers lost an average of four pounds compared to the non-juice drinkers who lost one pound.4 In addition to weight loss, the vegetable juice drinkers had significant increases of vegetable intake, vitamin C and potassium over the course of the study compared to the non-juice drinkers.

"Making vegetable consumption easy is critical because it has so many benefits, from disease prevention to weight management," said John Foreyt, PhD, Director of the Behavioral Medicine Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine. "We have a lot more work to do in finding ways for people to improve their health, but providing them with something simple like vegetable juice is a step in the right direction."

About the Studies

Both studies were randomized controlled trials, each lasting 12 weeks. The University of California-Davis study involved 90 healthy adults, ages 40-65 years. The Baylor College of Medicine study enrolled 81 adults (83.5% of whom were minority) aged 35-65 with metabolic syndrome risk factors. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of risk factors for heart disease and diabetes that includes excess body fat in the midsection, high blood pressure, high blood sugar and elevated blood cholesterol.

The studies were supported in part by Campbell Soup Company and by resources provided from University of California-Davis and Baylor College of Medicine.

1. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), USDA. 2010. Dietary Guidelines for Americans. 7th edition, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. January 31, 2011.

2. Shenoy A, Kazaks A, Holt R, et al. Easy accessibility to a vegetable beverage can result in marked increase in vegetable intake: an approach to improving vascular health. Poster presented at Experimental Biology, New Orleans, LA, 2009.

3. Flegal KM, Carroll MD, Ogden CL, Curtin LR. Prevalence and trends in obesity among U.S. adults, 1999-2008. JAMA. 2010;303:235-241.

4. Shenoy S, Poston W, Reeves R, et al. Weight loss in individuals with metabolic syndrome given DASH diet counseling when provided a low sodium vegetable juice: a randomized controlled study. Nutr J. 2010;9:8.

Source:
Emily Jane Meyer
Weber Shandwick Worldwide

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Teen's Best Friend: Young Dog Owners More Physically Active

They're furry, fun loving and could be the key to getting your sedentary teen off the couch, finds a new study on dog ownership and adolescent physical activity.

"You can think of your dog not only as your best friend, but also a social support tool for being active," said John Sirard, Ph.D., the study's lead author and an assistant professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

In the study, which appears in the March issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Sirard and his colleagues surveyed 618 pairs of Minneapolis adolescents and their parents about the number of dogs in their home and how much time they spent in physical activity. For a week, 318 of those teens also wore accelerometers - devices used to collect data on time spent moving.

It turns out that teens from dog-owning families recorded greater amounts of movement on the accelerometer devices, even after researchers took into account demographic variables, like gender, race and socioeconomic status.

That might mean that teens with dogs could log about 15 additional minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week, according to the authors.

The association with adolescent physical activity took the researchers by surprise. They expected that if anyone in the family were to walk the dog, it would be the parents. "If dog ownership has an effect, we hypothesized it would have an effect on adults, but we didn't see that. We saw it in the kids," Sirard said.

Finding ways to encourage teens' physical activity levels is critical, since time spent exercising drops precipitously after the elementary school years, said Cheryl B. Anderson, Ph.D., a visiting assistant professor of pediatrics at the Children's Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine.

Despite the link that researchers established between dog ownership and teenagers' physical activity, they said they could not be certain that getting a dog means people will be more active. "It might be that more active people choose to get dogs because it fits their lifestyle already," Sirard said.

"You may walk it, you may not, but the fact that you have this animal in the house makes you get up off the chair more. Every bit of activity is important," Anderson said.

Sirard JR, et al. Dog ownership and adolescent physical activity. Am J Prev Med 40(3), 2011.

Source:
Health Behavior News Service

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Saturday, February 12, 2011

Global Obesity Exceeds 1 In 10

More than one in ten of us around the world is now obese, nearly double the figure of thirty years ago, according to a major analysis of global risk factors that also reports high-income nations have achieved impressive reductions in blood pressure and cholesterol, with some doing much better than others.

The analysis, published as three papers in The Lancet today, shows country by country trends from 1980 to 2008 in three important heart disease risk factors: obesity, cholesterol, and blood pressure; and comes from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factors Study, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization (WHO).

An international team of researchers, led by Professor Majid Ezzati from Imperial College London in the UK and Dr Goodarz Danaei from the Harvard School of Public Health in the US, reviewed the available global data to assess how body mass index (BMI), blood pressure and cholesterol changed between 1980 and 2008.

The World Health Organization and a number of other institutions also collaborated on the work.

Ezzati told the press:

"It's heartening that many countries have successfully reduced blood pressure and cholesterol despite rising BMI."

"Improved screening and treatment probably helped to lower these risk factors in high-income countries, as did using less salt and healthier, unsaturated fats," he suggested.

The BMI analysis shows that in 2008, more than one in ten of the adults in the world was obese, with women more likely to be so than men. The researchers estimate 205 million men and 297 million women, that is more than half a billion adults worldwide, were obese in 2008.

The analysis on blood pressure shows that between 1980 and 2008, there was a modest fall in the proportion of the world's population with uncontrolled hypertension or high blood pressure, but because the world's population is aging and growing, the number of people with this condition went up from 600 to nearly 1 billion over the three decades.

High-income countries achieved large drops in population proportions with high blood pressure, the steepest being in Australasian women and North American men, said the researchers, who defined hypertension as having a systolic pressure higher than 140 mmHg or a diastolic pressure higher than 90 mmHg.

The cholesterol analysis shows that over the same period, the average levels of total blood cholesterol fell in high-income nations in North America, Australasia and Europe but went up in East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific region.

Ezzati said these figures show that overweight and obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol are no longer just Western problems or problems of wealthy nations.

"Their presence has shifted towards low and middle income countries, making them global problems," he said.

He and his colleagues also looked within these global patterns at how countries compare in terms of each of the three risk factors: BMI, blood pressure, cholesterol. The highlights include:

Body Mass Index (the ratio of a person's weight to their height squared, measured in kg per meter squared, kg/m2) is a measure of obesity, which is defined as having a BMI over 30 kg/m2). The proportion of adult women in the world classed as obese rose from 7.9% to 13.8% between 1980 and 2008.
For men this figure went from 4.8% to 9.8%.
Over the period, BMI went up by 0.4 kg/m2 per decade for men and 0.5 kg/m2 for women, the fastest rise being in the US (more than 1 kg/m2 per decade), followed by New Zealand and Australia for women and followed by UK and Australia for men.
In some Western European countries there was hardly any rise in BMI for women.
The region with the highest average BMI in the world is the Pacific Island nations with 70 per cent more people with BMI in the range 34-35 kg/m2 than some Southeast Asian and sub-Saharan African countries.
Average BMI was lowest in Bangladesh (20·5 kg/m2) for women and lowest in Democratic Republic of the Congo (19·9 kg/m2) for men.
Among high-income nations, the US has the highest average BMI (over 28 kg/m2 for men and women), followed by New Zealand, with Japan having the lowest (about 22 kg/m2 for women and 24 for men), followed by Singapore.
The UK has the sixth highest BMI in Europe for women and ninth highest for men (both about 27 kg/m2).
In Europe, the countries with the highest BMI are Turkey for women and the Czech Republic for men (both about 28 kg/m2).
Swiss women appear to have the lowest BMI in Europe (about 24 kg/m2).In most regions of the world, men have higher blood pressure than women.
Average systolic blood pressure is highest in Baltic and East and West African nations, up to 135 mmHg for women and 138 for men.
These levels are on a par with those of Western European nations in the 1980s, before they started to come down rapidly.
Nations with some of the lowest average blood pressure in both the female and male adult population include South Korea, Cambodia, Australia, Canada and the US (below 120 mmHg for women and 125 for men).
Portugal, Finland and Norway have the highest average blood pressure among high income nations.Although total cholesterol fell in the high-income region consisting of Australasia, North America, and western Europe, and in central and eastern Europe, Western European countries like Greenland, Iceland, Andorra, and Germany have the highest cholesterol levels in the world, with mean serum total cholesterols of around 5.5 mmol/L.
The lowest average cholesterol levels are in sub-Saharan Africa at 4·08 mmol/L for men and 4·27 mmol/L for women.
Greece has the lowest cholesterol for both men and women in the high income countries (under 5 mmol/L), and the US,
Ezzati said that:

"The findings are an opportunity to implement policies that lead to healthier diets, especially lower salt intake, at all levels of economic development, as well as looking at how we improve detection and control through the primary healthcare system."

He said the High-level Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly on Non-Communicable Diseases in September 2011 should pay special attention to ways to address cardiovascular risk with improved policies and targets.

Danaei said this was the first time that anyone has tried to estimate the trends in these risk factors at the global and country by country level:

"The amount of data we collected is unprecedented and vast, and allows us to draw robust conclusions," he stressed.

Dr. Gretchen Stevens, from the World Health Organization, who was also involved in the research said:

"We know that changes in diet and in physical activity have contributed to the worldwide rise in obesity, but it remains unclear which policies would effectively reduce obesity."

"We need to identify, implement, and rigorously evaluate policy interventions aimed at reversing the trends, or limiting their harmful effects," she urged.

"National, regional, and global trends in body-mass index since 1980: systematic analysis of health examination surveys and epidemiological studies with 960 country-years and 9.1 million participants."
Mariel M Finucane, Gretchen A Stevens, Melanie J Cowan, Goodarz Danaei, John K Lin, Christopher J Paciorek, Gitanjali M Singh, Hialy R Gutierrez, Yuan Lu, Adil N Bahalim, Farshad Farzadfar, Leanne M Riley, Majid Ezzati,on behalf of the Global Burden of Metabolic Risk Factors of Chronic Diseases Collaborating Group (Body Mass Index).
The Lancet, Early Online Publication 4 February 2011.
DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(10)62037-5

"National, regional, and global trends in serum total cholesterol since 1980: systematic analysis of health examination surveys and epidemiological studies with 321 country-years and 3.0 million participants."
Farshad Farzadfar, Mariel M Finucane, Goodarz Danaei, Pamela M Pelizzari , Melanie J Cowan, Christopher J Paciorek, Gitanjali M Singh, John K Lin, Gretchen A Stevens, Leanne M Riley, Majid Ezzati, on behalf of the Global Burden of Metabolic Risk Factors of Chronic Diseases Collaborating Group (Cholesterol).
The Lancet, Early Online Publication 4 February 2011.
DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(10)62038-7

"National, regional, and global trends in systolic blood pressure since 1980: systematic analysis of health examination surveys and epidemiological studies with 786 country-years and 5.4 million participants."
Goodarz Danaei, Mariel M Finucane, John K Lin, Gitanjali M Singh, Christopher J Paciorek, Melanie J Cowan, Farshad Farzadfar, Gretchen A Stevens, Stephen S Lim, Leanne M Riley, Majid Ezzati, on behalf of the Global Burden of Metabolic Risk Factors of Chronic Diseases Collaborating Group (Blood Pressure).
The Lancet, Early Online Publication 4 February 2011.
DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(10)62036-3

Additional source: Imperial College London (3 Feb 2011 press release).

Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today

posted by TJ on 4 Feb 2011 at 6:28 am

No one ever sets the goal of becoming obese (unless perhaps they're an actor preparing for a role), nor does obesity happen suddenly, rather it happens gradually over time. Taking these two obvious facts together, we realize that in about 95% of cases, obesity is a behavioral aberration: people don't respect and pay sufficient attention to their own bodies. I'm thin, I'm fit, I'm over 40, I'm not an athlete, yet I eat things like Baconators and Twinkies on a daily basis without any health problems. How do I manage this? I pay attention to my body, not in the sense of personal vanity, but in the spiritual sense of respecting physiology as the foundation for mental and emotional activity in the material world. If there's an obesity epidemic (and I'm not so sure there is), it probably derives from a general sense of alienation from one's own body. So learn to pay attention to your own bodies, people, and you can eat anything you want!

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