Obesity

There's good and bad news when it comes to American obesity, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Tuesday at an event addressing the nation's increasingly costly and deadly weight problem.

Barely 300 feet separate Fullerton Union High School from a McDonald's restaurant on Chapman Avenue. Researchers say that's boosting the odds that its students will be super-sized. Teens who attend classes within one-tenth of a mile of a fast-food outlet are more likely to be obese than peers whose campuses are located farther from the lure of quarter-pound burgers, fries and shakes.

A regulation banning the establishment of new fast-food restaurants in South Los Angeles is unlikely to curb obesity rates, according to a study by researchers at Santa Monica think tank Rand Corp. Concerned about high levels of obesity, the lack of traditional grocery stores and a proliferation of fast-food eateries, the Los Angeles City Council approved a moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in one of the poorest sections of the city last year. It has extended the ban through March of next year.

Restaurants get a bad rap for serving gargantuan portions of food and contributing to Americans' expanding waistlines. But what if something in your home were equally guilty? Something as innocent as . . . "Joy of Cooking"? The classic cookbook, first published in 1931, has done some girth-expanding of its own, a study has found. Published as a letter Tuesday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the report examined 18 classic recipes found in seven editions of the book from 1936 to 2006.

Three new studies show that most adults have unexpectedly large and active deposits of a calorie-burning type of fat that biologists once thought disappeared after infancy. The persistence of brown fat suggests a potential new strategy to fight obesity, which is epidemic in the United States and increasing rapidly in the developing world.

Links found by researchers between snack foods and obesity in poor communities are prompting new calls for more regulation of convenience stores in South Los Angeles. The proposed new regulations under discussion are an outgrowth and expansion of last year's city restrictions on new fast-food restaurants in a 32-square-mile area of South Los Angeles. The area is home to about 500,000 residents, including those who live in West Adams, Baldwin Hills and Leimert Park. Motivated by new data focusing on convenience stores, civic activists and a City Council member favor limiting the development of new convenience stores.

As a registered dietitian, Sharon Salomon of Phoenix teaches clients how to eat right and lose weight. But despite her expertise, Salomon says there's just one word to describe her own physique: "fat." To some, Salomon's 5-foot-2, 170-pound body would be a professional deal-breaker. After all, are chubby dietitians or portly physicians in any position to advise others how to get healthy? That question is at the heart of a debate set off when Dr. Regina Benjamin was nominated for surgeon general.

A portion is a portion is a portion -- unless, that is, it's a giant, super, king or grande portion, in which case it's probably trouble. Over the last 30 years, portions have grown by heaps and mounds in restaurants across the country and in many homes as well. During that same time, the waistlines of Americans consuming those mega-meals have grown more and more generous too -- to the point that now two-thirds of American adults are considered overweight.

What's new: Obesity appears to increase a person's chances of cognitive decline in old age -- but so, paradoxically, does weighing too little for one's height. The finding: People who maintain a healthy weight have a lower risk of dementia compared with those who are underweight or obese, according to a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Iowa, published in the journal Obesity Reviews last month.

Parents WHO think their teenager is overweight are no more likely to banish junk food and keep healthful foods around the house than those who don't -- or to encourage habits such as family meals, less eating in front of the tube and more exercise. But they are more likely to urge their teen to diet. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota and published this month in Pediatrics, was part of a larger one gauging the weight and eating habits of 902 Minneapolis-St.