Obesity

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.

For postmenopausal women who are obese, breast cancer is more likely. That's because fat tissue seems to behave essentially as an organ of the endocrine system, pumping out the hormone estrogen. And estrogen is a driver of many common breast cancers. But losing as little as 5% of one's body weight - 10 pounds for a 200-pound woman - drives down levels of estrogen and other hormones that raise breast cancer risk, a new study finds. In combination with weight loss, exercise drove down hormone levels even more, an effect that is likely to reduce a woman's risk of developing breast cancer.

For postmenopausal women who are obese, breast cancer is more likely. That's because fat tissue seems to behave essentially as an organ of the endocrine system, pumping out the hormone estrogen. And estrogen is a driver of many common breast cancers. But losing as little as 5% of one's body weight - 10 pounds for a 200-pound woman - drives down levels of estrogen and other hormones that raise breast cancer risk, a new study finds. In combination with weight loss, exercise drove down hormone levels even more, an effect that is likely to reduce a woman's risk of developing breast cancer.

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.

In a land where just staying alive is a challenge, Haider Kareem Said's problem might seem trivial. He's overweight. But that isn't a mere annoyance or something Said can fix with diet and exercise -- he's 5-foot-4 and weighs 495 pounds. So last month, Said had a band surgically strapped around his stomach, an operation relatively new to Iraq that is proving to be a godsend for people facing an unusual consequence of the war: obesity. For most of the last five years, sectarian violence has drastically altered Iraqis' lifestyles.

Rats fed fructose-laced drinking water for six weeks performed more slowly in a maze-navigating task, UCLA researchers have found. (Read this L.A. Times opinion article .) They think the effect is due to changes in the way the brain responds to insulin as a result of exposure to fructose. “Our study shows that a high fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body,” study senior author and UCLA professor Fernando Gomez-Pinilla said in a release about the finding, which was published in the Journal of Physiology (postdoc Rahul Agrawal was first author)

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.

It's familiar news by now that America's obesity epidemic is both dangerous and costly. Obesity significantly increases the risk of many diseases, including heart disease and diabetes, and is associated with at least 112,000 deaths a year. The economic impact is equally startling: Obese patients add an estimated $75 billion a year to the nation's medical bill.

Women in large swaths of the U.S. are dying younger than they were a generation ago, reversing nearly a century of progress in public health and underscoring the rising toll of smoking and record obesity. Nationwide, life expectancy for American men and women has risen over the last two decades, and some U.S. communities still boast life expectancies as long as any in the world, according to newly released data. But over the last decade, the nation has experienced a widening gap between the most and least healthy places to live.

Girls seem to be growing up faster these days, and not just because they dress to show more skin. Compared with their mothers, they actually have more skin to show -- and that added fat seems to be altering their rate of development. Pediatric experts had noticed that girls appeared to be developing breasts (the first outward sign of puberty) at earlier ages -- and that they tended to gain weight around puberty. But no one knew which came first: earlier development or weight gain.

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.

News flash: Eggs are really good for you. This message was brought to you by the American Egg Board. That's right - the folks who sell eggs paid for a study that comes to the shocking conclusion that eggs are an ideal breakfast food. They could have just asked people if they liked eating eggs for breakfast. Instead, they recruited 20 volunteers who were overweight or obese and assigned them to a week of either egg breakfasts or ready-to-eat cereal breakfasts. After a two-week gap, the groups were switched.

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...

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.

Bacteria in the intestines can modify the body's chemistry to alter the amount of food that becomes stored as fat, according to a finding in mice reported this week that could help in controlling obesity. A team from the Washington University School of Medicine in St.

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.