Tag: obesity

Some Americans getting more physically fit, some growing more obese

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The exercise part of the story

❝ It may seem like a contradiction, but more adults in the U.S. say they are exercising at the same time more of them are becoming obese.

About 24 percent of adults last year said they exercise enough each week to meet government recommendations for both muscle strengthening and aerobic exercise, according to a large annual health survey. That was up from 21 percent in 2015.

The same survey says 31 percent of adults indicated they were obese last year, up slightly. Another, more rigorous government study has also found adult obesity is inching up.

❝ In a report…released Thursday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked at survey responses from 2010 through 2015 and found that level of leisure-time exercise was more common in some states than others.

Nearly a third of non-elderly adults in Colorado, Idaho, and New Hampshire met exercise guidelines. Only about one-seventh in Mississippi, Kentucky and South Carolina did.

Higher levels of exercise were more common in people who were working than those who weren’t, the study also found.

❝ Of course, unhealthy eating has a lot to do with obesity. Research indicates that “a change in diet is needed to see any dent or reduction in obesity,” said the CDC’s Tainya Clarke…

RTFA. Better yet, get off your butt and go for a walk. There are more than graphic reasons for reports like this to be called a dumbbell curve.

Canada Wants Junk Food Warnings — Trump Using NAFTA to Stop Them

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Health Canada down to 4 choices for warning labels

According to a leaked document shared with Vox, US trade representatives are seeking to override national food labeling policies in Mexico, Canada — as well as in the US — through the NAFTA renegotiation.

Specifically, the US is proposing a provision about packaged food and non-alcoholic beverages that suggests that countries involved in the trade deal should not adopt front-of-package symbol warnings that “inappropriately denotes that a hazard exists from consumption of the food or non-alcoholic beverages.”…

On Wednesday, in a House Ways and Means Committee meeting about America’s trade agenda, the United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, confirmed that he is indeed pursuing this provision, arguing that national food labeling policies are “protectionist.”

Predictably, Trump and his GOP pimps oppose protectionism if it’s profits that may be harmed.

Why are these countries obese? Let’s start with walking

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❝ A recent study found that more than 2 billion adults and children globally are overweight or obese and suffer health problems because of that — but this is nothing new.

There are, however, pockets of the global population who remain somewhat unaware of this public health crisis, despite the growth of waistlines all around them, and this lack of awareness is just one of the underlying problems, according to Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard…

“Different countries have different issues,” Hu said. “You need to mobilize (their) whole society to tackle the problem. … it’s not just a medical problem.”

❝ The Pacific Islands, Middle East and Americas lead the way in terms of regions with the greatest obesity rates. In 2014, more than 48% of the population of the Cook Islands was classified as obese. Qatar led the way in the Middle East with 34%, followed closely by the United States at 33%, according to the World Health Organization…

❝ When assigning blame, two factors are common: diet and physical activity, namely poor diets and a lack of physical activity. But a number of smaller factors combine to fill these two large umbrellas, and those need to be understood to truly tackle the problem, Hu believes.

RTFA. Pretty halpful analysis, methods of analysis that can be appreciated by pretty much anyone.

I’m not making recommendations. I can only speak to what works for me – and it’s exactly what I’ve known all my life. Good nutrition reducing sugars, easily accessible exercise – and for me, tracking meal-by-meal, day-by-day. The health app built into the operating system of Apple iPhones works fine for me. I combine it with a daily calorie tracker that has a ginormous database.

Taking a look, right now, year over year, I’ve averaged 3.1 miles per day walking, 9146 steps per day. That’s every day – averaging in high summer temperatures or the occasional blizzard mid-winter. Not too many of either at our altitude in northern New Mexico. Being an ancient creaky old Leftie is no copout.

I’m happy about weighing what I weighed in 1956 – and aiming for less.

Obesity? We’re number one, we’re number one!

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❝ Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fattest country in the world?

The obesity rate for American adults (aged 15 and over) came in at a whopping 38.2%, which puts the birthplace of the hamburger and the Cronut at the top of the heftiest-nations-in-the-world rankings, according to an updated survey from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development…

❝ On average, 19.5% of adults are #obese across OECD countries.

❝ In most countries, the OECD has found that women are more obese than men, though obesity rates for the male population are growing rapidly. Education is a determinant as the organization found that less schooling makes a woman two to three times more likely to be overweight than the more educated in about half of the eight countries for which the data was available…

And the OECD has found that obese people have poorer job prospects than their slimmer counterparts, earning about 10% less, and are then less productive at work, with fewer worked hours and more sick days…

❝ The future is fatter: Perhaps even more disturbing is the glimpse that the OECD offers into the coming years…Obesity rates are expected to increase until at least 2030, led by the U.S., Mexico and England, where 47%, 39% and 35% of the population are expected to be obese by 2030.

❝ As for solutions, the OECD suggest food labeling, and offered praise for health promotion campaigns across Facebook and Twitter, or dedicated mobile apps that have been shown to have the potential to help with weight loss and body fat. As one survey showed this week, obesity puts individuals at risk from related illnesses — diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol and more. In other words, you can’t be fat and healthy at the same time.

If that isn’t depressing enough, watch for the posts I have coming up on Artifical Intelligence – and jobs – in the United States. Not all countries handle knowledge the same, eh? 🙂

Eating less calories — kids still getting more obese

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crap fries
Veggies for your kids

❝ According to a 2015 New York Times analysis of government and private-sector data, the number of calories consumed annually by the average US child declined 9 percent between 2004 and 2013. And yet, researchers from Duke and Wake Forest have found that trend has not improved the child obesity situation.

Using body mass index data from the National Health Examination Survey, which tracks randomly selected households with health exams and surveys every two years, the researchers calculated moderate (class 1), mid-level (class 2) and extreme (class 3) obesity rates among kids aged 2 to 19. Here’s what they found…

The “overweight” rate — which encompasses the above “obese” categories as well as slightly overweight kids — also nudged upward from an already-high level: 28.8 percent from 1999 to 2000, compared with 33.4 percent from 2013 to 2014…The authors broke out data by age, gender, and race, and not a single group showed a statistically significant decline in obesity or being overweight over the time frame…

So, despite the above-mentioned drop in calorie intake, our kids are still packing on too much weight too fast. What gives?

❝ …Barry Popkin, a veteran obesity researcher…said that while kids have eased up on problematic items like sugary sodas in recent years, they’re “not shifting the quality of their diets toward healthy foods.” Instead, “we continue to see our children mainly eat what we would call junk food,” relying heavily on cookies and other grain-based sweets, along with plenty of salty snacks, fruit juice (which acts an awful lot like soda in our bodies), and other sugary beverages.

❝ A recent analysis of another big federal data set, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, bears out Popkin’s claim. When infants transition from baby food to solid food, they still tend to get plied with plenty of processed junk and few vegetables…The report noted that 40 percent of babies get brownies or cookies, and that French fries and chips are the most common form of vegetables kids eat by the time they’re two years old.

And we carry forward from there to the expected. Insufficient exercise, proper training to develop lifetime, lifestyle habits. Politicians without inclination to challenge the least lobbyist for crap food sold to meet budget cuts in school cafeterias. And on and on.

Letting beancounters overrule what we do to and for our children should be a crime.

The global surge in diabetes – in one map

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❝ Around the world, the number of people living with diabetes has quadrupled since 1980, and most of the burden of the disease is concentrated in poorer countries.


Click to enlarge

❝ As this chart from Statista shows, many of the biggest increases in diabetes prevalence have happened in the developing regions of the world, such as the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. In 2014, 422 million adults were living with diabetes, compared with 108 million in 1980, according to a new report from the World Health Organization.

For years, researchers and health agencies have warned that urbanization and the influx of cheap, sugary, and processed foods into low- and middle-income countries are linked to the surge in noncommunicable diseases, including diabetes and obesity…

❝ “If we are to make any headway in halting the rise in diabetes, we need to rethink our daily lives: To eat healthily, be physically active, and avoid excessive weight gain,” Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO director general, said in a statement. “Even in the poorest settings, governments must ensure that people are able to make these healthy choices and that health systems are able to diagnose and treat people with diabetes.”

Whether they’re poor or rich, countries are also going to have to find ways to counter the ​food marketing messages​ urging people to consume more if they want to turn the trend around.

Any Libertarians, liberal or conservative, on your block who will support that approach? The right to sell people crap food is as sacrosanct as “debate” anchors refusing to challenge political lies from presidential candidates.

Phony anti-obesity organization fronting for Coca-Cola shutting down

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❝The Global Energy Balance Network, an organization founded to help combat obesity, will be disbanding after months of criticism following a New York Times report…that revealed Coca-Cola had funded the organization.

The group wiped its website clean, leaving a post that said it was discontinuing operations “due to resource limitations.”

❝Following the August article, public health officials across the country argued that Coca-Cola had funded the group in an effort to play down the association between sugary soft drinks and obesity. While the group had previously claimed that Coke had given them an “unrestricted gift” and the company had “no input” on the research, the Associated Press reported last week that they had obtained emails between Coca-Cola and GEBN group leaders that showed the beverage company had both hand-picked GEBN’s group leaders and, “edited its mission statement and suggested content for the group’s website.” In response, Coke told the AP that its chief scientist, Rhona Applebaum, would be retiring as well.

❝The New York Times reported yesterday that in an email exchange between James O. Hill, GEBN’s president, and Applebaum, Hill had suggested a study to focus the blame for the rise in obesity on a lack of exercise, and keep it away from the rise in consumption of Coca-Cola’s soft drinks.

Credit where and when due. NY TIMES did the work that exposed Coca-Cola. They deserve measured applause.

Mail me a penny postcard when they stop fronting for the State Department in the Middle East and Asia.

That desert you just ate may shape your eating habits

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Findings, published online in the journal Hippocampus, show that neurons in the dorsal hippocampus, the part of the brain that is critical for episodic memory, are activated by consuming sweets. Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events experienced at a particular time and place.

In the study, a meal consisting of a sweetened solution, either sucrose or saccharin, significantly increased the expression of the synaptic plasticity marker called activity-regulated cytoskeleton-associated protein (Arc) in dorsal hippocampal neurons in rats. Synaptic plasticity is a process that is necessary for making memories.

“We think that episodic memory can be used to control eating behavior,” said Marise Parent, professor in the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State. “We make decisions like ‘I probably won’t eat now. I had a big breakfast.’ We make decisions based on our memory of what and when we ate.”…

Forming memories of meals is important to a healthy diet. A London-based study shows that disrupting the encoding of the memory of a meal in humans, such as by watching television, increases the amount of food they consume during the next meal. Researchers have found that people with amnesia will eat again if presented with food, even if they’ve already eaten, because they have no memory of the meal.

To understand energy regulation and the causes of obesity, scientists must consider how the brain controls meal onset and frequency, Parent said.

Studies have found that increased snacking is correlated positively with obesity, and obese individuals snack more frequently than people who aren’t obese. Research also shows that over the past three decades, children and adults are eating more snacks per day and deriving more of their daily calories from snacks, mostly in the form of desserts and sweetened beverages.

In the future, the research team would like to determine if nutritionally balanced liquid or solid diets that typically contain protein, fat and carbohydrates have a similar effect on Arc expression in dorsal hippocampal neurons and whether increases in Arc expression are necessary for the memory of sweet foods.

Good thing my brain works well enough that I don’t volunteer for studies about food.

Sugar vs corn syrup = both “natural” enough to kill you in mass quantities

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Corn refiners cannot “make stuff up” and claim that high fructose corn syrup is the same as sugar, an attorney for big sugar processors said in court on Wednesday.

Lawyers delivered opening statements in a trial pitting sugar processors against major corn refiners including Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill… The billion-dollar lawsuit could shape how consumers view two bitter foes in a deteriorating U.S. sweetener market.

Several sugar refiners including global leader ASR Group sued in 2011, alleging that a corn trade group’s ad campaign describing high fructose corn syrup as “corn sugar” and “natural” was false. The corn refiners countersued, saying the Sugar Association falsely claimed in its newsletter that corn syrup causes obesity and cancer.

The case comes amid a decline in sweetener demand. The U.S. slowdown is due in part to concerns about high rates of obesity and diabetes…

In 1999, the average American consumed 85.3 lb of corn sweeteners per year, compared with 66.4 lb of sugar, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. However, by 2014 corn sweetener consumption had dropped to 60.7 lb, while sugar consumption stood at 68.4 lb.

Overall, the average American consumed 131.1 lb of sweetener in 2014, down from 153.2 lb in 1999…

Any responsible doctor, any modern nutritionist will survey your diet and tell you to get rid of most of the sugar – whether it’s fructose or sucrose. At least if you eat the crap our TV Talking Heads, contrived family magazines, most versions of what passes for media news-as-entertainment are paid to recommend.

Take the time to read up on discussions between professional nutritionists. Try the Mayo Clinic. You not only might live a bit longer, you may enjoy it better.

Addicted to soda? You don’t need to be obese to acquire diabetes

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Regular consumption of sugary drinks was linked to onset of type 2 diabetes independent of obesity, and fruit juices and no-calorie artificially sweetened drinks didn’t appear to be any healthier, in a new review.

Looking at 17 cohorts and more than 38,000 cases, researchers found that higher consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages was associated with an 18% increase in incidence of type 2 diabetes…per one serving a day. And when they adjusted for obesity, there was still a 13% increase…over those who drank no sugary drinks, found the researchers, who were led by Fumiaki Imamura, PhD, at the University of Cambridge in the UK…

There is indeed a wealth of existing evidence that soft drinks can significantly increase risk of diabetes. But Imamura and colleagues wrote that it wasn’t clear if the risk is present independent of obesity status, and in an email to MedPage Today he wrote that this is what spurred him to do the study.

“We identified a lack of clear evidence to tell if soft drinks elevate the risk of diabetes, regardless of obesity status,” he wrote. “This lack of evidence attracted us, and we thought the evidence would help further the ongoing policy debate.”

The relative risk of diabetes for artificially sweetened beverage consumption was 1.25…in ten studies. Independent of obesity, the number dropped to 1.08…

And for fruit juice, the risk ratio was 1.05…in 13 studies after adjustment and 1.07…independent of obesity.

Imamura said that it’s natural for people to look for alternatives to sugar sweetened beverages. “Diet drink and fruit juice are possible options, though there was no strong summary evidence for each,” he wrote. “We wanted to address the question of the association of consuming each with diabetes before and after accounting for obesity status.” There was some evidence for publication bias in the fruit juice studies.

Nestle added that there wasn’t enough information here to draw definitive conclusions about fruit juice, and that she’d want to see more information about the amounts consumed. “It doesn’t make sense that small amounts of fruit juice would do much of anything (other than providing vitamins),” she wrote. “It’s the large amounts you have to worry about.”…

None of the studies were industry sponsored. “We did not deliberately exclude industry-funded research,” wrote Imamura, but all of the studies that met the criteria were not sponsored by industry. “We wished to see the quality of evidence from government-funded studies and from industry-funded studies, but we could not,” he wrote…

Imamura and his team concluded that soft drinks may contribute to nearly 2 million diabetes cases in the U.S. and the U.K. over 10 years. “But this estimate is under assumption that everyone had the same weight,” he wrote in the email. “If we consider that soft drink consumption contributes to weight gain, the estimate should be higher.”

Keep those fasting glucose levels down, folks. Taste buds aside – and how they’re conditioned by your family and peers – we don’t need a whole boatload of sugar for any reason whatsoever.