Study: Lead exposure may lead to obesity

Exposure to lead a toxic heavy metal found in older homes in the form of lead paint and some imported ceramic products may affect the unborn offspring of pregnant women. A study of mice looking at the effects of chronic low level lead exposure appears to subtly influence weight gain in the mice that are born to these females. If you needed another reason to avoid exposure to lead you've got one.

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Viral Infections May Be Linked To Obesity

This is not a brand new story but is of interest because it highlight s the complex nature of the problem. Contrary to much popular thinking that excessive weight is strictly a personal weakness, this story shows that specific types of viral infections ultimately lead to increased chance of weight gain in susceptible individuals. When researchers infected animal subjects with a human virus known as Human Adenovirus -36, they reported measurable increases in the infected animals' body fat and the visceral fat that surrounds the organs deep within the belly. In addition, studies also demonstrated that infection with Ad-36 and the resulting weight gain could be transmitted from infected animals to uninfected animals. There are numerous articles on this topic and here are two:

story here

and here

Carb-cutting Enzyme Stopped By Bean Extract, Endocrinologists Say

Can beans make you lose weight? Well an extract derived from white kidney beans may be able to help you lose weight by interfering with carbohydrate breakdown in your body thus causing weight loss.

UCLA researchers have found an extract in white kidney beans may help the body stop carbs from breaking down into sugars. A digestive enzyme in the body normally acts like scissors, literally cutting starches into little sugars. Phase 2 stops the enzyme from cutting, so the starches stay in the body as long fibers and are burned off quicker. Patients in the clinical studies who took Phase 2 lost body fat, not lean muscle.

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Is The Obesity Epidemic Exaggerated?

A recent British Medical Journal article suggests that claims about an obesity epidemic often exceed the scientific evidence and mistakenly suggest an unjustified degree of certainty, argue Patrick Basham and John Luik.

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Ordinary daily movements can shed pounds, research finds

An interesting notion is that you might burn a meaningful number of calories by making some minor adjustments to your daily routine like standing instead of sitting and by fidgeting in your free time at your desk, if you have a sedentary job.

Doctors at the Mayo Clinic believe it’s not the trips to the gym, but the everyday pacing, fidgeting and restlessness that may play a bigger role in whether someone’s fat or thin, according to a small study of self-described couch potatoes.

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related story is here

Obesity ops refused on cost grounds (UK story)

The National Health Service in the United Kingdom has been limiting access to obesity surgery because of unscientific prejudice against obese patients. They have extremely limited resources and are looking for excuses to not treat people that they deem unworthy of care. The latest trend is to deny obesity surgery to patients because the British government thinks that it is too expensive. This attitude will also be adopted in the US as the government takes on a greater role in healthcare decisions involving money.

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What is obesity surgery?

A nice Q and A story explaining obesity surgery. The surgery is a fairly extreme step reserved for the most serius cases of obesity. It has serious risks but on balance for the most severely obese it seems to have a net benefit because of long term reduction in illnesses related to morbid obesity like type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

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Metabolic Syndrome Linked To Cold Tolerance

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Researchers from the University of Chicago have discovered that many of the genetic variations that have enabled human populations to tolerate colder climates may also affect their susceptibility to metabolic syndrome, a cluster of related abnormalities such as obesity, elevated cholesterol levels, heart disease, and diabetes.
"The biological processes that influence tolerance to climatic extremes," the authors conclude, "are likely to play important roles in the pathogenesis of common metabolic disorders... Our results argue for a role of climate adaptations in the biological processes underlying the metabolic syndrome and its phenotypes."

Can gut hormones control appetite and prevent obesity?

Can gut hormones control appetite and prevent obesity?

link here

The current obesity epidemic is fuelled by the availability of highly palatable, calorie-dense food, and the low requirement for physical activity in our modern environment. If energy intake exceeds energy use, the excess calories are stored as body fat. Although the body has mechanisms that act to maintain body weight over time, they primarily defend against starvation and are less robust in preventing the development of obesity. Knowledge of this homeostatic system that controls body weight has increased exponentially over the last decade and has revealed new possibilities for the treatment of obesity. One therapeutic target is the development of agents based on the gastrointestinal hormones that control appetite. This review discusses the hormones oxyntomodulin, peptide YY, glucagon-like peptide 1, pancreatic polypeptide, and ghrelin and their emerging potential as anti-obesity treatments.

Evolutionary origins of obesity.

Evolutionary origins of obesity

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The modern obesity epidemic is the result of interaction between human biology and human culture over the long period of human evolution. As mammals and primates, humans have the capacity to store body fat when opportunities to consume excess energy arise. But during the millions of years of human evolution such opportunities were rare and transient. More commonly ancestral hominins and modern humans were confronted with food scarcity and had to engage in high levels of physical activity. In tandem with encephalization, humans evolved elaborate and complex genetic and physiological systems to protect against starvation and defend stored body fat. They also devised technological aids for increasing energy consumption and reducing physical effort. In the last century, industrialization provided access to great quantities of mass-produced, high-calorie foods and many labour-saving and transportation devices, virtually abolishing starvation and heavy manual work. In the modern obesogenic environment, individuals possessing the appropriate combination of ancestral energy-conserving genes are at greater risk for overweight and obesity and associated chronic diseases.

Study links obesity to more cancers

Study links obesity to more cancers

Evidence of the links between being obese and an increased risk of some common forms of cancer, and has found a number of less common cancers for which obesity also appears to be a risk factor.

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The findings, which are published in the Lancet medical journal, suggest that a BMI increase of 5 kg/m2 in men increases the risk of esophageal cancer by half, thyroid cancer by a third, and both bowel cancer and kidney cancer by a quarter.

n women, a similar increase in BMI increases the risk of womb cancer by 59 per cent, gallbladder cancer by 59 per cent, gullet cancer by 51 per cent, and kidney cancer by 34 per cent, and there was a slight link between increased BMI and postmenopausal breast, pancreatic, thyroid and bowel cancers.

Artificial sweeteners may cause weight gain

Artificial sweeteners may cause weight gain

Rats fed foods with artificial sweeteners gained more weight than those fed real sugar. The suprising findins were published in the American Psychological Association's Behavioral Neuroscience journal.
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he new findings are consistent with other studies involving humans that have raised the possibility that "increased intake of no-calorie sugar substitutes could promote increased intake and body weight gain," the study says.

For instance, research published last year by the Framingham Heart Study found that people who drank one or more cans of pop a day, regardless of whether it was diet, were 48 per cent more likely to suffer from obesity and other health problems.

Study Suggests 10 New Obesity Causes

Besides the obvious causes of obesity such as overeating and lack of exercise
10 Causes of Obesity that are important to the development and continuation have been suggested by University of Alabama researchers have been identified:

The Alabama group puts forth these 10 "additional explanations" for obesity:
full article link: here

1. Sleep debt.

2. Pollution. hormone like compunds

3. Air conditioning.

4. Decreased smoking.

5. Medicine.

6. Population age, ethnicity.

7. Older moms.

8. Ancestors' environment.

9. Obesity linked to fertility.

10. Unions of obese spouses.