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The More There is of You, the Sooner You’ll be Gone

There has been an amount of debate lately between those in the overweight-acceptance movement and those in the field of public health — and sometimes even between public health professionals — over whether and to what extent being overweight is actually detrimental to one’s health in general. We know it’s linked to heart disease and diabetes and certain cancers, among other specific maladies, but the evidence has been inconclusive as to whether being fat in itself is unhealthy.  Some studies have indicated that being a bit hefty might actually be beneficial.

However, according to a massive mega-study just reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, that positive take is only accurate if your definition of “beneficial” includes “dying before your time.” The study, conducted by the National Cancer Institute and other agencies, crunched the data from 19 individual long-term studies involving 1.5 million adults, and their ultimate conclusion is unambiguous and cheerless: If you’re overweight, you run an increased risk of dying prematurely, and the more overweight you are, the greater the risk.

Taking the average life span of persons with an optimal Body Mass Index of 22.5 to 25 as the norm, here are the grueling statistics:

Here’s one more statistic to make your skin crawl: At latest count, fully two out of every three Americans have BMIs greater than the healthy 25 figure. If your kids are looking for a long-term career with guaranteed growth potential, they could do worse than consider the funeral industry.  It may be set to take off.

Enforcing the Fourth R: Recreation

The good news in the campaign to reduce childhood obesity is that California’s state education code requires all elementary schools to provide 200 minutes of physical education every 10 days; middle and high schools must provide 400 minutes. That means minutes of actual exertion in the gym or on the playground, not including lunch and recess breaks. The bad news is that among the many things California can’t afford these days is an agency or department to actually monitor the schools and make sure they’re meeting the PE requirement. And according to one sample study, more than half the state’s schools haven’t been, largely because there hasn’t been anyone forcing them to.

That may change, however. A state court of appeals has ruled that parents can go to court and file suit forcing their school district to comply with the exercise law. A significant number of parents can probably be expected to do so, since California also requires the schools to test all students for fitness each year; the last time they did so, in 2009, only about one-third of the state’s school kids could meet six basic fitness standards. Parents, start your lawyers…

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

How Fat Can Shorten Your Life, and Taking No-P.E. Schools to Court is a post from: CalorieLab

Sometimes Being Number 1 is Nothing to Cheer About

Statistically, the fattest country on the face of the earth is American Samoa, fully 93.5 percent of whose residents are overweight. This is evidently the kind of statistic you get when you take a Polynesian culture that prizes corpulence and add the American fast-food and packaged food industries. Of course, in hard numbers that only amounts to about 53,000 individuals; there are considerably more fat people than that just in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

In fact, there are more fat people than that in virtually every U.S. municipality with a population greater than 200,000. How do we know this? Because the U.S. boasts the highest percentage of obese citizens of any major, advanced country in the world, well over 30 percent overall.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development crunched the national data for the 33 countries with the world’s largest economies to determine which had the highest obesity rates. For your information, here are the five with the highest percentages of obese adult women and men:

Also, for purposes of comparison and envy, here are the countries with the five lowest rates: Japan — 3 percent and 3 percent. Korea — 4 percent and 4 percent. Switzerland — 8 percent and 9 percent. Norway — 8 percent and 11 percent. Italy — 9 percent and 11 percent.

And, yes, we were as shocked that Italy was that slender as you are. Who knew?

Belly Fat Can Bury You

That spare tire around your midsection can literally be the death of you, according to a new study by the American Cancer Society, which found that men and women with the largest waistlines are twice as likely to die in a given ten-year period than those with the leanest. Moreover, this holds true even if the rest of your body is trimmer and your overall BMI is in the normal range. This is particularly significant news if you’re over 50, an age group in which over half the men and more than 70 percent of the women have unhealthy waistline measurements.

And what are those measurements? For men, a waist measurement of 35.4 inches or less is Low risk, 40 inches or above is High, and 47 inches or more is Very High. For women, it’s 30 inches for Low, 34.6 inches for High, and 43.3 inches for Very High. According to those who conducted the study, if you’re at the High end or above, it’s time to get serious — seriously serious — about eating more healthfully and getting more exercise.

Sources:
33 Countries — Inset, “Battling the bulge,” USA Today, 9/24/10, p. 2A, citing Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

World’s Fattest Countries, and a Worrisome Waistline Warning is a post from: CalorieLab Diet News

Why the Residents of Fat City are Lean

We’ve known for a while that people who are wealthy live longer than people who aren’t, and we’ve generally ascribed that to the most obvious factors: the rich can afford a level and quality of medical care and treatment that most of us can’t, and are largely insulated from society’s more health-hazardous occupations and neighborhoods.

But now it seems the rich are different from the rest of us in another unexpected way: their bodies manufacture more life-extending hormones. A fairly massive study conducted by University College London found that wealthier people have higher levels of DHEAS, a natural steroid hormone produced by the body that extends the individual’s life expectancy.

Why do the well-heeled crank out so much of the stuff? Probably because its production is increased by regular exercise and a healthy diet, two lifestyle elements that the upscale among us have both more time and more financial wherewithal to pursue.

Overeating May be All in Your Mind

Consider this to be entry number 2,000 or so on our ever-lengthening List of Things That Might be Making You Fat: You may have an undersized orbitofrontal cortex. What’s that? Just a key part of the brain’s frontal lobe, which plays a vital part in such mental activities as monitoring oneself and modifying one’s behavior.

Previous studies have shown that persons with impaired frontal lobes have more difficulty controlling their impulses than normal. Now a study by the NYU Medical School has found that the orbitofrontal cortex is smaller in obese teenagers than it is in lean ones, implying that the obese teens’ inclination to overeat may not be reflective of weak will or self indulgence, but of a neurological anomaly that causes what shrinks call “disinhibited” eating, and the rest of us know as impulsively pigging out.

These are just early study results; we still don’t know why the obese teens have smaller lobes, or whether the smaller lobe leads to obesity or obesity somehow produces a smaller lobe (possibly due to inflammation). Until we learn more, ignore any new weight-loss product ads that claim, for example, “With The Amazing New Orbitofrontal Cortex Enlarger, I Lost 288 Pounds!”

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

How Your Money and Your Mind Effect Your Midsection is a post from: CalorieLab Diet News

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

My close friend has been gaining weight for a while, and due to my concern for his health, I decided to broach the subject with him. I was very careful to express my views in a caring and tactful manner. It turned out quite well. He wasn’t offended, nor did he tell me it was none of my business. Nevertheless, his brief response did surprise me. He said, “Thank you for your concern, but I don’t think I’m fat!”

As it turns out, my friend is not alone in his misperception. A recent study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, has even given a name to this condition, “Body Size Misperception.” It refers to the difference between one’s self-perceived body size and ideal body sizes.

Body Size Misperception: The Study

The study, done by Dr. Tiffany M. Powell of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and her colleagues, investigated Body Size Misperception among 2,056 obese men and women who were participating in the Dallas Heart Study. The researchers evaluated the individuals’ body perceptions by having them look at a series of nine figures in a row, ranging from very thin to very obese, and first asking them to choose their ideal figure, and then to choose the figure that most resembled them. People who chose ideal body sizes that were the same or bigger than their actual obese body size were classified as having Body Size Misperception. This study found that eight percent tested positive for this condition. Prior studies have found the value in overweight individuals who misperceive their weight to be normal to range from 21 percent to as high as 46 percent.

Several problems seem to occur with people that have this perspective. Many of these individuals had previously undiagnosed medical problems. 44 percent had not seen a doctor at all in the past year, compared to 25 percent of those who accurately gauged their size. When the person with Body Size Misperception did see a health care provider, they were much less likely to discuss their diet, physical activity level, or whether they needed to lose weight.

In addition, those who felt this way were more likely to mistakenly say they felt more healthy than their peers of the same age, and they were less aware that they were at a high risk of developing diabetes and high blood pressure. Also, two-thirds of the already obese respondents felt their lifetime risk of eventually becoming obese was low. The conclusion was that these individuals failed to recognize the need for weight loss or physical activity in regards to their health and wellness.

Unhealthy Body Image and Obesity

“Based on these findings,” Dr. Powell said, “physicians may want to take a step back before discussing lifestyle habits with their obese patients, and asking them first about how they perceive their weight and whether or not they think they need to lose weight. The fact that many of these people may not see a doctor at all also makes it important to reach out to them in the community.

“The study points to really a lack of understanding about the effects of obesity. You walk a fine line, because you don’t want people to necessarily have an unhealthy body image, but you also want people to understand that they need to lose weight.”

I remember watching a rerun of an old Mary Tyler Moore show where Mary confronted the overweight Mr. Grant about his weight. Interestingly, his response, “I appreciate your concern Mary, and if I ever think I am fat I will do something about it,” evoked laughter from the audience.

Unfortunately, because of the health and wellness repercussions of this viewpoint, it is no longer a laughing matter!

Body Size Misperception is a post from: CalorieLab Diet News

Mirror, Mirror, in My Mind, What’s My Weight (Don’t Be Unkind)?

When we are asked to give our weight and height, studies show that we tend to understate the former and overstate the latter. For example, most objective scientific estimates put our national obesity rate at 34 percent, but a telephone survey just released in August found that if you go by people’s statements about their weight, our obesity rate is just 27 percent.

Human nature being what it is, that disparity is hardly news. What may be news is that three years ago, in 2007, only 25.5 percent of us said we were obese. Optimists call that slight, 1.5 percent uptick progress, and suggest that it means people are getting the message about our national heft problem. The rest of us hope the optimists are right.

Product Glut

Approximately 17,000 new packaged food items are introduced to supermarket shelves each year. I’m pulling this next number out of my hat, but I’d say the odds are that about 5,000 contain an excess of empty, fattening calories, while another 5,000 are lo-cal or sugar free or otherwise promoted as helping us to lose weight.

Priorities

Americans spend just under 10% of their income on food, the smallest percentage of any people in history, and spend just 31 minutes per day, average, preparing it, including cleaning up afterward.

On average, Americans spend $100 more per person per year on footwear than they do on vegetables. Then again, a lot of us seem to care more about what goes on our feet than into our stomachs.

Picking on the Kids

Of the total daily calories consumed by the average American kid aged 2 to 18, forty percent are in food items heavy with fat and sugar and totally lacking in nutrients. The food industry will defend to the death the “consumer’s right to freedom of choice,” of course, but there’s something fundamentally callous, even heartless, about that statistic.

Sources:
Product Glut — Michael Pollan, “The Food Movement, Rising,” The New York Review, 6/10/10, p. 31.
Priorities — M. Pollan, Ibid.
Footwear spending — Uncle John’s Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader, 2009, p. 356.
Kids’ calories — “Lab Report” item, Time magazine, 10/18/10, p. 26

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

Random Numbers: What We Weigh Vs. What We Say We Weigh; Marketing Overdose; Caloric Child Abuse, and More is a post from: CalorieLab Diet News