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There is no excuse for being fat, Tories claim
The Conservative party has launched a new "responsibility" campaign telling overweight people that there are "no excuses" for being obese.
The shadow health secretary, Andrew Lansley, set out proposals on how government and businesses can cooperate to tackle problems caused by poor diet, alcohol abuse and lack of exercise.
"Tell people that biology and the environment cause obesity and they are offered the one thing we have to avoid: an excuse," he said. "As it is, people who see more fat people around them may themselves be more likely to gain weight. Peer pressure and social norms are powerful influences on behaviour and they are classic excuses."
Vowing to "take away the excuses", Lansley unveiled proposals for the party's second "responsibility" deal with business.
He will ask a new working group to consider:
· supporting EU-wide proposals for mandatory front-of-pack food labelling
· asking the food industry to reduce portion sizes
· a clampdown on food advertising
· using role models and positive peer pressure to promote healthy living
· local campaigns to promote sport, exercise and healthy lifestyles.
Do you think any of his ideas will work and make a drastic difference to the number of obese people in the UK? Do you agree that there are 'no excuses' for being overweight? The Conservative party has launched a new "responsibility" campaign telling overweight people that there are "no excuse... more -
Overtraining: What is it? How to avoid it.
Professional male model and personal trainer, Duke Greenhill, shares Manhattan male model training tips with you!
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Workouts for fat loss, weight loss, and muscle
Professional male model and personal trainer, Duke Greenhill, shares Manhattan male model training tips with you!
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Male Fitness Model Workout, Pt. 4
Professional male model and personal trainer, Duke Greenhill, shares Manhattan male model training tips with you!
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Male Fitness Model Workout, Pt. 3
Professional male model and personal trainer, Duke Greenhill, shares Manhattan male model training tips with you!
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Male Fitness Model Workout, Pt. 2
Professional male model and personal trainer, Duke Greenhill, shares Manhattan male model training tips with you!
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Male Model Workout
Professional male model and personal trainer, Duke Greenhill, shares Manhattan male model training tips with you!
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Free Weights versus Machines
Professional male model and personal trainer, Duke Greenhill, shares Manhattan male model training tips with you!
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6 Top Machine Moves for the Body of Your Dreams
Professional male model and personal trainer, Duke Greenhill, shares Manhattan male model training tips with you!
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6 Best Free-Weight Moves to Build Muscle and Get Ripped
Professional male model and personal trainer, Duke Greenhill, shares Manhattan male model training tips with you!
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Scientists Make a Fat-Burning Fat
Image: Green depicts cells with inactivated PRDM16; red, a muscle protein is expressed; all nuclei, including those of brown fat cells, are blue.
What if fat could make you lose weight?
So suggests research into a little-known type of adipose tissue called brown fat.
Though it's commonly thought that fat -- beyond the bit necessary for insulation and spare energy -- is unequivocally bad, there are actually two types: white and brown.
White fat is the traditional bane of struggling dieters and would-be beach bunnies. Brown fat is quite different. It's full of mitochondria -- the body's energy-producing cellular machines -- and burns calories to produce heat.
Abundant in babies, whom it helps keep warm, brown fat is found only in traces in adults. But with a flick of two genetic switches, scientists showed that cells destined to become muscle have the potential to become brown fat.
If the findings -- presently observed in mice -- apply to humans, it could give people a new way to stay slim and prevent diabetes.
"In theory, you'd affect the whole energy metabolism of the organism," said Harvard Medical School cell biologist Bruce Spiegelman, co-author of one of two brown fat papers published today in Nature.
Spiegelman's team observed that some so-called muscle precursor cells developed into brown fat. This stopped when they inactivated the PRDM16 gene, suggesting the gene's critical role in brown fat formation. When another team of researchers, led by Harvard Medical School researchers Yu-Hua Tseng and C. Ronald Kahn, inactivated the BMP7 gene, mice again failed to develop brown fat.
Earlier research by Spiegelman showed that adding PRDM16 to white fat made it go brown. Adding genetic triggers to fat removed during liposuction or to precursor muscle cells could provide a brown fat supply that -- once re-implanted in the body -- would rapidly burn excess calories.
The findings "take us a step closer to the ultimate goal of promoting the brown fat lineage as a potential way of counteracting obesity,” writes University of Stockholm fat cell specialist Barbara Cannon in an analysis accompanying the papers. Cannon was not involved in either study.
Asked whether his technique could deprive the body of muscle, Spiegelman said that precursor muscle cells are self-replenishing: Redirect a few into brown fat, and they'll be quickly replaced.
But Spiegelman, who is now looking for gene-triggering pharmaceuticals, still advised caution.
"Would this work with a spoonful of brown fat, or a truckload? That's not clear at this point," he said. "It's not ready for human beings. But we're excited." Image: Green depicts cells with inactivated PRDM16; red, a muscle protein is expressed; all nuclei, including those of brown fat cells... more -
420 Pound 8 Year Old Girl - Talkin With Dave#12 David Spates
David Spates Shows and Talks about a story he saw about a 420 lbs 8 year old girl. This is number 12 of David's on-going video commentaries. Check out some of his other videos like "To My Grandmother"," "The First Black Homosexual", "My Invisible Dog", and many others with more to come! Don't forget to add me as a friend and subscribe. :-)
Also if you have a youtube, Myspace, Facebook, or tagged account, please add me there too. Just search for my name. David Spates :-) David Spates Shows and Talks about a story he saw about a 420 lbs 8 year old girl. This is number 12 of David's on-going video co... more -
Wider chairs and bigger coffins: Councils struggle with the costs of obesity
The Local Government Association said in a report that the cost of dealing with the growing number of obese people in the UK is taking its financial toll.
Schools have to invest in new larger chairs to accommodate the estimated one million obese children that will be studying at British schools by 2012. The new school furniture will cost local authorities hundreds of thousands of pounds.
And it does not end there: local buses have to reduce their standing only capacity, ambulances have to be redesigned to deal with obese patients and crematoria have to order new hearses and furnaces for 40-inches-wide coffins.
Councillor David Rogers, the LGA's spokesman on public health, said: "Obesity is increasingly costing the council taxpayer dear. It falls to social services to care for the house-bound obese adults, to invest money in encouraging people to be active and to replace school furniture that is just too small for larger pupils. Council equipment and infrastructure is having to be modified to deal with a population that is getting larger and larger." The Local Government Association said in a report that the cost of dealing with the growing number of obese people in the UK is taking... more -
Obesity as threatening as terrorism?
Rising obesity is as grave a threat to Britain and the NHS as terrorism, a top expert says.
Durham University public health expert Professor David Hunter, who also acts as a government adviser, said it was possible that obesity-related diseases could overwhelm the NHS, with some predicting a doubling of the number of people with type II diabetes by 2025: "The threat to our future health is just as significant as the current security threat."
Hunter said ministers should be taking "bold action" now, for instance, by compelling manufacturers to improve the salt, fat and sugar content of their products.
"Lots of the initiatives are under a voluntary agreement - but it has just come to the point where things like these are simply not working." He said that bigger warning labels, changes in the taxation of "unhealthy" foods, and even the use of compulsory regulations to force manufacturers to cut levels of salt, sugar and fat in their foods could be employed.
Do you agree with Hunter's assessment of the situation and does the comparison between obesity and terrorism make sense to you? Rising obesity is as grave a threat to Britain and the NHS as terrorism, a top expert says. ... more -
Half of overweight adults may be heart-healthy
You can look great in a swimsuit and still be a heart attack waiting to happen. And you can also be overweight and otherwise healthy. A new study suggests that a surprising number of overweight people _ about half _ have normal blood pressure and cholesterol levels, while an equally startling number of trim people suffer from some of the ills associated with obesity.
The first national estimate of its kind bolsters the argument that you can be hefty but still healthy, or at least healthier than has been believed.
The results also show that stereotypes about body size can be misleading, and that even "less voluptuous" people can have risk factors commonly associated with obesity, said study author MaryFran Sowers, a University of Michigan obesity researcher.
"We're really talking about taking a look with a very different lens" at weight and health risks, Sowers said.
In the study, about 51 percent of overweight adults, or roughly 36 million people nationwide, had mostly normal levels of blood pressure, cholesterol, blood fats called triglycerides and blood sugar.
Almost one-third of obese adults, or nearly 20 million people, also were in this healthy range, meaning that none or only one of those measures was abnormal.
Yet about a fourth of adults in the recommended-weight range had unhealthy levels of at least two of these measures. That means some 16 million of them are at risk for heart problems.
It's no secret that thin people can develop heart-related problems and that fat people often do not. But that millions defy the stereotypes will come as a surprise to many people, Sowers said.
Even so, there's growing debate about the accuracy of the standard method of calculating whether someone is overweight. Health officials rely on the body mass index, a weight-height ratio that does not distinguish between fat and lean tissue. The limits of that method were highlighted a few years ago when it was reported that the system would put nearly half of NBA players in the overweight category.
A number of experts say waist size is a more accurate way of determining someone's health risks, and the study results support that argument. You can look great in a swimsuit and still be a heart attack waiting to happen. And you can also be overweight and otherwise healthy. ... more -
86% of American adults could be overweight by 2030
If the trends of the past three decades continue, it's possible that every American adult could be overweight 40 years from now, a government-funded study projects.
The figure might sound alarming, or impossible, but researchers say that even if the actual rate never reaches the 100-percent mark, any upward movement is worrying; two-thirds of the population is already overweight.
"Genetically and physiologically, it should be impossible" for all U.S. adults to become overweight, said Dr. Lan Liang of the federal government's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, one of the researchers on the study.
However, she told Reuters Health, the data suggest that if the trends of the past 30 years persist, "that is the direction we're going."
lready, she and her colleagues point out, some groups of U.S. adults have extremely high rates of overweight and obesity; among African- American women, for instance, 78 percent are currently overweight or obese.
The new projections, published in the journal Obesity, are based on government survey data collected between the 1970s and 2004. If the trends of the past three decades continue, it's possible that every American adult could be overweight 40 years from now, ... more -
That Sinking Feline
Searches are up for fat cat, after a 44lb feline was found wandering the streets of southern New Jersey.
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Buying clothes = losing weight, says new report
Women will burn more than 12,000 calories each year just by going shopping, according to new research... carried out by a shopping centre.
According to the Daily Mail, "that's the equivalent of eating 65 packets of ready salted crisps, 43 Mars bars or 99 Starbucks cafe lattes.
Researchers found that the average woman will walk 2.02 miles on each shopping spree. Going on a total of five trips a month adds up to 10.1 miles - or 121.2 miles a year.
And with a mile of walking burning an average of 100 calories, women will work off more than 200 during every shopping trip or 12,120 every year.
But men aren't so lucky as their shopping trips will see them burn off just 8,928 calories over a year - or 744 calories a month.
The poll, of 2,000 people, revealed that the average Brit's shopping trips will take around a staggering 18,150 stores during their adult lifetime.That's 25 shops every month or 300 each year.
Golden Square Shopping Centre, in Warrington, which carried out the poll, said: "Not only is shopping fun but there is now proof that it really is good for you."
Brilliant! I can drop pounds as fast as I spend them. Now all my womanly wants will be fulfilled. I can be skinny *and* buy pretty dresses. Who says consumerism doesn't make you happy? Thank you Daily Mail! Women will burn more than 12,000 calories each year just by going shopping, according to new research... carried out by a shopping cen... more -
Parents of obese children to receive official letter of warning
The Department of Health has decided to send letters to parents of clinically overweight children in England in order to routinely inform them that their child's weight is above the healthy norm.
Parents will be warned that obesity is associated with a greater risk of heart disease, diabetes and cancer in later life and will be encouraged to change the child's diet and lifestyle.
Ministers decided that the letters should not contain derogatory terms such as 'fat' or 'obese' in order to reduce the stigmatisation of overweight children.
What do you make of this new controversial move? Is it an essential step forward in the fight against the obesity crisis or do you think it is slightly absurd to inform parents about something that is as obvious as an overweight child? What else can or should we do to assist parents of overweight children? The Department of Health has decided to send letters to parents of clinically overweight children in England in order to routinely inf... more -
Parents to receive letters if children are obese
Parents will receive official letters telling them if their children are too fat under a government initiative to tackle childhood obesity.
The heaviest children will be described as "very overweight", as ministers believe parents will not accept being told that their child is obese.
Health and weight measurements taken at schools in England could be automatically sent to parents from the autumn, under the Department of Health scheme.
Ministers want the results to raise parent's awareness of their children's weight and the need to live a healthy lifestyle.
Whose business is it if children are overweight? Do letters sent home like this risk stigmatising the fat kids even more? And if parents aren't feeding their children properly, is a letter from school really going to change their ways? Parents will receive official letters telling them if their children are too fat under a government initiative to tackle childhood obe... more
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