Obese

In an age of long commutes, late sports practices, endless workdays and 24/7 television programming, the image of Mom hanging up her dish towel at 7 p.m. and declaring "the kitchen is closed" seems a quaint relic of an earlier era. It also harks back to a thinner America. And that may be no coincidence. A new study, conducted on mice, hints at an unexpected contributor to the nation's epidemic of obesity - and, if later human studies bear it out, a possible way to have our cake and eat it too, with less risk of weight gain and the diseases that come with it. Just eat your cake - or better yet, an apple - earlier.

I was a pioneer of childhood obesity. By the time I was a junior in high school, I weighed more than 200 pounds. I was a fat kid before being a fat kid made you the topic of a national conversation and the first lady's pet project, back when Gatorade still tasted gross and no one knew how many calories there were in anything. For most of my childhood, I was the only fat girl in my class - I can still name the other two fat girls in my grade. Now, fat kids fill the playground and the high school bleachers, including a whole new breed of fat girl who wears skin tight jeans and mid-riffs and dares anyone to say anything.

The health benefits of breast-feeding for mothers and babies are widely known. Studies have shown it may improve cognitive development among children and could reduce a woman's risk of getting breast cancer or cardiovascular disease. But new research suggests that some very obese woman may not breast-feed as much or for as long as their normal-weight counterparts. The study, released in the January issue of the journal Obesity, looked at information about 3,517 white women and 2,846 black women from 2000 to 2005.

Americans eat too damn much. And we all pay a rising cost for this gluttony in the form of higher insurance premiums and lost productivity. A study last year by the Society of Actuaries calculated the total economic cost of an overweight and obese population in the United States and Canada at about $300 billion a year (with 90% of that figure attributable to America's dietary issues). Now comes word from the American Journal of Preventive Medicine that, if current trends continue, about 42% of the U.S. population will be obese by 2030.

Re "Revised Policy Treats Obesity Under Medicare," July 16, and "Big Fat Mistake About Your Body," an Opinion article by Paul F. Campos on July 4: As a physician working with many overweight and obese patients, I felt compelled to offer my two cents on the oft-cited Washington, D.C.-based Cato Institute position, which suggests that Americans who make healthy lifestyle decisions will now be subsidizing those who do not. This view also reflects law...

Re "On Some Airlines, Size Does Matter," June 21: If you've sat next to someone in an airplane whose obesity overflows onto your seat, straitjacketing you into your seat so that it is virtually impossible for you to move, then you can imagine why the people of Southwest Airlines want to have obese people pay for two seats instead of one. If these obese people can't afford a first-class seat where the seats are generally much wider than in coach,...

Since when do those of us who are not "fat" always stop eating when we feel full? ("Heavy on the Activism," Dec. 27). Tell me about "fat acceptance" when there are food diaries or other evidence that obese people are eating reduced-fat meals, exercising and consuming fewer than 2,000 calories a day. If there is a gene that results in obesity despite taking care with one's eating habits, then I will sympathize with people who have to buy extra airline seats...

Slim society's tolerance is wearing thin. As more people over the last decade have tipped the scales toward obesity, normal weight folks have signed up for employee wellness programs that offer them lower premiums and other financial perks as a reward for their healthy weight -- and that indirectly penalize heavier workers. They've crafted policies, most unsuccessful, to compel individuals to lose weight. They've become vocal, sometimes vehemently so, in their support for "sin taxes" on junk food and soda.

The South tips the scales again as the nation's fattest region, according to a new survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. More than 30% of adults in Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee are considered obese. In part, experts blame Southern eating habits, poverty and demographic groups that have higher obesity rates. Colorado was the least obese, with about 19%. Nationwide, about 26% of adults were obese. Obesity is based on the body mass index, a calculation using height and weight.

Poverty appears to trump smoking, obesity and education as a health burden, potentially causing a loss of 8.2 years of perfect health. In a new study, researchers looked at health and life expectancy data from the National Health Interview Surveys and the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys and came up with various behavioral and social risk factors that affect quality of life, then used a formula to estimate the quality-adjusted years of life that...

Those long commutes so typical of Southern California may be doing more than boring you and raising your fatigue level: They also raise your blood pressure and make you fatter, researchers reported Tuesday. For higher blood pressure, the effects kick in at about 10 miles, while for obesity they show up at about 15. Those who traveled the farthest to work every day were also those who were least likely to get adequate exercise. They probably also were more likely to eat fast food and to snack in the car, and were more highly stressed.

The ranks of obese Americans are expected to swell even further in the coming years, rising from 36% of the adult population today to 42% by 2030, experts said Monday. Kicking off a government-led conference on the public health ramifications of all those expanding waistlines, the authors of a new report estimated that the cost of treating those additional obese people for diabetes, heart disease and other medical conditions would add up to nearly $550 billion over the next two decades.

They sifted through about 800 programs to prevent and fight obesity--to find the ones most likely to counter the nation's growing girth. In the end, a panel of independent experts asserted that only by implementing many of those initiatives at once can the nation make real progress. Reversing the nation's "obesogenic," or fat-promoting, culture will require sweeping changes across all aspects of daily life, "modifying factors that shape individual choices and incidental behaviors," the Institute of Medicine concluded in a report issued Tuesday.

A new study of low-income mothers of toddlers has found that two-thirds did not correctly perceive their children's size. And most - including all of the misperceiving moms with kids who were overweight - thought their kids were too small, not too big.    The discovery, which echoes findings in older children, illustrates how perceptions about weight complicate doctors' efforts to keep kids healthy, wrote Dr. Eliana Perrin in an invited commentary...

Obesity in the United States is projected to continue its rise over the next 18 years, extending to 42% of Americans by 2030, according to a study released Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That expected growth in the proportion of obese Americans -- up from 34% -- contained good news and bad: Obesity's growth has slowed from the record-setting pace that has marked most of the last three decades; at the same time, the numbers of the severely obese -- those carrying 80 or more pounds more than the healthy, normal weight for their height -- is expected to grow by 130%.

It's a Friday afternoon and the movie "Moneyball" is playing in a medical clinic waiting room at 9001 Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills. No one is there to watch it, just rows of vacant chairs. Perhaps it's just an off day, but on two other recent visits, no more than a handful of people could be found in the waiting room. It was a much different scene two years ago, when a visitor to the Beverly Hills clinic found the waiting room packed, every seat filled and patients spilling out into an overflow area.

A Colorado insurance company is changing its attitude about fat babies. Rocky Mountain Health Plans said it would no longer consider obesity a "preexisting condition" barring coverage for hefty infants. The change comes after the insurer turned down a Grand Junction 4-month-old who weighs about 17 pounds. The insurer deemed Alex Lange -- whom his parents called a "happy little chunky monkey" -- obese and said the infant didn't qualify for coverage. The infant's father works at a local NBC affiliate, and news accounts about the boy's rejection made national headlines.

As long as Peter Ueberroth is trying to clean up baseball's image, I suggest he fine the gross (pun intended) number of overweight umpires for "unsportsmanlike appearance." The thought of facing another season with those fat derrieres blocking my view makes me cringe. Where do they find these guys? Have you ever seen an obese referee in football, basketball, soccer? The commissioner should dock these guys $10 for every pound they're overweight and donate the money to the poor. BERYL WINN North Hollywood

In a new study examining diet, physical activity and obesity in prison populations, researchers at the University of Oxford in England have found that in most cases, male prisoners are less likely to be obese than men in the general population. Female prisoners, on the other hand, were more likely to be obese than other women - at least, in the U.S. and Australia. The findings, which were published Thursday in the journal Lancet (subscription required), reflect broader health disparities between advantaged and disadvantaged people, the researchers wrote.  They noted that in 2008, 36 million out of 57 million deaths worldwide resulted from non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer and respiratory disease.

Pregnant women might now have one more good reason to watch their diet and exercise: A new study links autism and developmental delays in young children to metabolic conditions, like obesity and diabetes, in their mothers. The findings, published in Monday's edition of the journal Pediatrics, found that women who had diabetes or hypertension or were obese were 1.61 times as likely as healthy women to have children with autism spectrum disorders. They also were 2.35 times as likely to have children with developmental delays.