I recently found myself in a friendly argument over the origins of the obesity epidemic. It (the argument, not the epidemic) started with a post on my Facebook page (scroll down to January 2), which itself came from this article on weight loss in the New York Times Magazine.
The argument was over how much of the rise in obesity can be attributed to genetics vs. environment. Anoop Balachandran, a fitness professional studying for his Ph.D. in exercise science, argues that it’s virtually all genetics, and makes his case on his blog in this post and this one. His biggest point is that the people who are obese today are the people who would’ve been obese anyway, and what we call an epidemic is a rise in their weight,…
After The Fitness Summit in May and Perform Better in early June, I wasn’t sure what to expect at the International Society of Sports Nutrition conference in Las Vegas last weekend. I knew I’d get to hang out with the smartest people I know — you can’t spit at ISSN without hitting a Ph.D, M.D., or doctoral candidate — but I wasn’t sure how much I’d get out of it. In previous years some of the presentations have been way over this bald head of mine.
Lucky for me that I got to eat some bugs.
Daniella Martin, host of a show called Girl Meets Bug, gave a presentation on the case for eating more insects. Some of them are seriously high in protein and calcium, and in some…
Saturday morning, and I’m sitting in my car while one of my kids does one of those things parents pay money for kids to do. I’m geeking out on the sequel to A Game of Thrones, and I’m happy to have an hour to do nothing but read.
A couple of the other parents, though, are more ambitious. They’re dressed for a workout, and apparently serious about it. They take off jogging, and don’t come back until the hour is almost over. When they do, I can see by the way they’re walking — short, stiff-legged strides with feet splayed slightly — that they’ve pushed themselves. They spend the next five minutes going through a choreographed stretching routine.
They move like people who work out. But they don’t look like people who work out. They’re obese by…
In Part 1, I talked about my friend Gregg, who has a simple and entirely logical approach to weight loss: When his weight becomes a problem, he gets back in shape and loses the excess. At that point, he stops thinking about it until it becomes a problem again.
The proposed solution, which Gregg came up with, is to stop thinking of weight loss as a problem to be fixed when something is broken. It’s more useful to think of body weight as an ongoing maintenance issue, akin to cleaning up the kitchen after each meal.
But what if a person’s weight is not just a health problem? What if it’s a solution to an entirely different problem? I’d never thought about this until my friend Lisa Wolfe, a personal trainer, alerted me to this study…
In a 16-year study that followed more than 45,000 male health professionals, researchers found a steady decrease in suicides as B.M.I. increased, even after controlling for variables including smoking, dietary factors, physical activity, marital status and alcohol use. There were 131 suicides during the time of the study.
Compared with those in the lowest 20 percent in B.M.I., men in the highest one-fifth were almost 60 percent less likely to kill themselves.
“It’s a surprisingly strong relationship,” said Kenneth J. Mukamal, the lead author and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard University. “But even though we see that heavier men are less likely to commit suicide, there are plenty of other studies that link obesity to poor health. Gaining weight is not the best way to improve anyone’s mental health. I hope these findings will provide insight into new strategies to prevent suicide.”
We now know that obesity in childhood can trigger early puberty in girls:
Lee noted that girls in the United States are entering puberty at younger ages than they were 30 years ago. Over that same time, there’s been a significant increase in obesity rates among American children.
“Previous studies had found that girls who have earlier puberty tend to have higher body mass index (BMI), but it was unclear whether puberty led to the weight gain or weight gain led to the earlier onset of puberty. Our study offers evidence that it is the latter,” said Lee, who is also assistant professor in the department of pediatrics and communicable diseases at the U-M Medical School.
We also know that Shaquille O’Neal is trying to help kids with health and weight-control issues:
Shaquille O’Neal will be taking a shot at a TV reality show focused on childhood obesity and health. The ABC…
If it’s Monday, that means there’s a one-in-four chance that the kids are off school for some reason. Today it’s Martin Luther King day. Next month it’ll be Presidents’ Day. We get a break in March, but then double up in April with the spring break/Passover/Easter juggernaut.
I’m not complaining about the observance of any of those holidays in particular. I just wish the MLK/PD holidays could be combined into a single holiday. Call it Great Americans Day. We could have that holiday in early February, when the kids really need a break, as opposed to mid-January, when a holiday is a burden on parents still trying to recover from the kids’ Christmas vacation.
I don’t say that to disrespect Dr. King, George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln. It’s just that in this age of historical illiteracy, it makes more sense to me to have a holiday celebrating all the great Americans and…
According to new research, a type of bacteria may cause obesity:
According to two studies being published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, both obese mice and people had more of one type of bacteria and less of another kind.
A “microbial component” appears to contribute to obesity, said study lead author Jeffrey Gordon, director of Washington University’s Center for Genome Sciences.
Obese humans and mice had a lower percentage of a family of bacteria called Bacteroidetes and more of a type of bacteria called Firmicutes, Gordon and his colleagues found.
The researchers aren’t sure if more Firmicutes makes you fat or if people who are obese grow more of that type of bacteria.
But growing evidence of this link gives scientists a potentially new and still distant way of fighting obesity: Change the bacteria in the intestines and stomach. It also may lead to a way of fighting malnutrition in the developing…
According to this, the power of the human sense of smell is highly underrated:
New olfactory research suggests that when it comes to tracking scent at ground-level on open terrain, the average human’s sense of smell is stronger than most people believe.
“There’s this general assumption that people have a bad sense of smell,” said study lead author Jess Porter, a Ph.D. candidate in biophysics at the University of California at Berkeley. “But we found that people can certainly sniff their way accurately around a spatial context — although less successfully and slower if they have only one nostril to work with.”
The new American-Israeli study, published online Dec. 17 in Nature Neuroscience, reports that people can, in fact, be trained to rely exclusively on ground-level smelling to successfully navigate unknown territory. In fact, they instinctively mimic certain animal behaviors, including enlisting each nostril to independently identify distinct smells and “triangulate” a…
Back in the late 1890s, a guy named Horace Fletcher hit on the ultimate weight-loss protocol: He would chew each mouthful of food 32 times, then spit out whatever hadn’t dissolved and slid down his throat. According to this (scroll down toward the bottom), he lost more than 40 pounds by turning every bite of food into a chew toy. One of the biggest fans of “Fletcherizing” was John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan, the subject of The Road to Wellville, T.C. Boyle’s very entertaining novel about the healthy-living craze of the early 20th century.
(I’m finally reading Road to Wellville now; I have no idea why I waited so long, considering I’ve read most of Boyle’s books and I’m actually interested in the subject.)
Reading about century-old health and nutrition fads is humbling, in a way, especially for someone who attempts to offer advice in those…
