According to the NYT, hospitalization rates are increased for obese/morbidly obese people with swine flu infections.

Obesity appears to be a risk factor on a par with pregnancy for developing complications from an infection with pandemic H1N1 influenza, according to the most comprehensive look yet at swine flu hospitalizations.

About a quarter of those hospitalizations have been for people who were morbidly obese, even though such people make up less than 5% of the population. That fivefold increase in risk is close to the sixfold increase observed in pregnant women…When the merely obese are included with the morbidly obese, they make up 34% of the American population. Yet they accounted for 58% of the hospitalizations in the study.

…The researchers found that two-thirds of the obese patients had a health problem that was previously recognized as an underlying risk factor for swine flu. The most common were chronic lung disease, heart disease and diabetes.

But that still left one-third of obese patients without other risk factors, said Dr. Janice K. Louie, lead author of the study and chief of the state health department’s influenza and respiratory syndromes section.

There are many possible explanations.

This parallels a University of Michigan report released a few months ago.

This Johns Hopkins study confirms some anecdotes I’ve heard/read.

October 22, 2009-Doctors have less respect for their obese patients than they do for patients of normal weight, a new study by Johns Hopkins researchers suggests. The findings raise questions about whether negative physician attitudes about obesity could be affecting the long-term health of their heavier patients.

Mary Margaret Huizinga, M.D., M.P.H., an assistant professor of general internal medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, says the idea for the research came from her experiences working in a weight loss clinic. Patients would come in and “by the end of the visit would be in tears, saying no other physician talked with me like this before. No one listened to me,” says Huizinga, the study’s leader and director of the Johns Hopkins Digestive Weight Loss Center.

“Many patients felt like because they were overweight, they weren’t receiving the type of care other patients received,” she says.

Not good – no one should be disrespected by their doctors, particularly people who are at risk for future health problems (even if they’re apparently healthy now).

…Diet, that is. 

The New York Times has a commendably skeptical take on the principal cookie-based diets on the market: Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet, the Hollywood Cookie Diet, Smart for Life and the Soypal Cookie diet.  Eating cookies on a diet may seem like a luxury, but the reality is pretty stark… these diets typically provide only 800 – 1,000 calories per day!

Critics of cookie diets are not convinced. Weight-loss plans that center around a diet of below 1,000 calories do not, they say, lead to long-lasting weight loss and can result in potassium deficiency, gallstones, heart palpitations, weakened kidney function and dizziness. The cookie diet particularly concerns eating disorder activists, who have long criticized fad diets, such as the grapefruit diet, Master Cleanse and Optifast shakes. “Generally speaking, fad diets misinform the public and fuel a fire of continued curiosity with this dieting mentality, which we know gets us nowhere,” said Dr. Ovidio Bermudez, medical director of Laureate Eating Disorders Program in Tulsa, Okla. “They tend to promise a huge return for very little investment,” he said, adding, “We need to be very aware of that fact that whenever we skew our eating in any direction; the chances are that we’re going to hinder our health and not enhance it.”

…“For weight loss to stick, you have to be able to settle into an eating pattern that you can adhere to over time,” said Suzanne Havala Hobbs, a clinical associate professor at the Gillings School of Global Public Health, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “That eating pattern needs to provide you with all the nutrients you need while holding calories in balance with the number you expend.

“Diets with a gimmick,” she added, “aren’t harmful for a short period of time. But they’re not likely to cause a meaningful change in behavior that will enable you to keep your weight at an optimal level.”

While the article probably won’t tell you anything that you didn’t already know (or suspect), it reinforces what those of us in the bodybuilding community have understood for years… there are no shortcuts to getting “lean ‘n mean”.  Gimmick diets can certainly take some weight off in the short-term, but they aren’t a path to either long-term weight maintenance or achieving an optimal body composition.  They aren’t worth the effort or the costs, which – in the case of the various cookie diets – can be considerable.

(h/t Pandagon)

And it’s not a pretty sight. I think his article in the LA Times, on the recent White House “Healthy Kids Fair,” was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but it failed… both as humor and reporting.  The problem?  Malcolm evidently couldn’t decide who he has more contempt for… Michelle Obama for using her position to promote healthy living, or overweight/obese Americans, whose “…flabby thighs are hidden by their drooping stomachs.”
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The “War on Obesity” has definitely lost its bearings when a healthy, 4 month old, 100% breast fed infant can be labelled “obese” and denied health insurance.

By the numbers, Alex is in the 99th percentile for height and weight for babies his age. Insurers don’t take babies above the 95th percentile, no matter how healthy they are otherwise.

“I could understand if we could control what he’s eating. But he’s 4 months old. He’s breast-feeding. We can’t put him on the Atkins diet or on a treadmill,” joked his frustrated father, Bernie Lange, a part-time news anchor at KKCO-TV in Grand Junction. “There is just something absurd about denying an infant.”

Bernie and Kelli Lange tried to get insurance for their growing family with Rocky Mountain Health Plans when their current insurer raised their rates 40 percent after Alex was born. They filled out the paperwork and awaited approval, figuring their family is young and healthy. But the broker who was helping them find new insurance called Thursday with news that shocked them.

” ‘Your baby is too fat,’ she told me,” Bernie said.

…At birth, Alex weighed a normal 8 1/4 pounds. On a diet of strictly breast milk, his weight has more than doubled. He weighs about 17 pounds and is about 25 inches long.

…The Langes, both slender, don’t know where Alex’s propensity for pounds came from. Their other child is thin. No one in their families has a weight problem.

At this point, there’s no reason to suspect that the kid is anything but an outlier.  He’s large for his age, but it’s reasonable to suspect that his growth will slow down… within a year from now, I’d be willing to bet that his size will be quite average.  My own son, Ryan was like that: he was in the 90th percentile during his first few months of life, but his growth rate tapered off after 6 months.  At 19, he’s 5′ 11″ (tall, but not as tall as his dad) and a real beanpole – so his early growth spurt wasn’t an indication of his adult size/girth.  Same deal with my nephew, Sam, who was an absolute tank as an infant, but at 22, is quite lean and athletic.

Unreal…

According to the New York Times, the law mandating that chain restaurants in NYC post the calorie counts of their food isn’t working… or so a recent study reports.

The study, by several professors at New York University and Yale, tracked customers at four fast-food chains — McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken — in poor neighborhoods of New York City where there are high rates of obesity.

It found that about half the customers noticed the calorie counts, which were prominently posted on menu boards. About 28 percent of those who noticed them said the information had influenced their ordering, and 9 out of 10 of those said they had made healthier choices as a result.

But when the researchers checked receipts afterward, they found that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect, in July 2008.

…Tameika Coates, 28, who works in the gift shop at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, ordered a Big Mac, 540 calories, with a large fries, 500 calories, and a large Sprite, 310 calories.

“I don’t really care too much,” Ms. Coates said. “I know I shouldn’t, ’cause I’m too big already,” she added with a laugh.

April Matos, a 24-year-old family specialist, bought her 3-year-old son, Amari, a Happy Meal with chicken McNuggets, along with a Snack Wrap for herself. She said with a shrug that she had no interest in counting calories. “Life is short,” she said, adding that she used to be a light eater. “I started eating everything now I’m pregnant.”

Nutrition and public health experts said the findings showed how hard it was to change behavior, but they said it was not a reason to abandon calorie posting.

NYC is conducting its own, considerably larger study, so this isn’t the final verdict, although the early returns don’t look promising.

LOL – I didn’t write that, just so you know.  It’s one of the comments posted in response to this article in the Sacramento Bee.

A sweeping statewide study released today points to soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages as one of the main reasons why we are fat.

“For the first time, we have strong scientific evidence that soda is one of the – if not the largest – contributors to the obesity epidemic,” Dr. Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, said Wednesday.

…”Bubbling Over: Soda Consumption and Its Link to Obesity in California” – a joint effort by the California Center for Public Health Advocacy and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research – interviewed 42,000 Californians of all ages.

…The study found that 24 percent of adults drink one or more non-diet sodas a day, and these adults are 27 percent more likely to be overweight.

The results for children were worse, researchers said. Sixty-two percent of adolescents ages 12 to 17 and 41 percent of children ages 2 to 11 imbibe at least one sugar-sweetened drink a day.

The report is here.

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I wrote a bit about NYT restaurant critic Frank Bruni’s struggle with overweight and bulimia a few weeks ago.  The Times just posted a Q & A with him that’s also worth a read.

Here’s a couple of points I thought were especially relevant:

Before becoming the restaurant critic, you had already lost a significant amount of weight. How did you do it?

A. I stopped turning to fad diets. I stopped trying to yoke myself to such extreme calorie deprivation regimens that it was bound to fail. Instead I just tried to cut my intake significantly but not in an untenable way, while way way upping the exercise. It was serious sustained exercised married with an absence of binges. It wasn’t 1,200 calories a day. That had always failed me. It wasn’t even 1,500 a day. It was probably like 2,400 a day but with very serious exercise every day.

I’ve read this article on obesity by NYT columnist David Leonhardt so you don’t have to.  Here’s the short version:

“There’s an obesity crisis and the government needs to do something about it.”

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‘Cause it could cost you your job.

PANAMA CITY — Bay County’s Health Department director, who courted controversy with a proposal to ban Gatorade from schools and equated Kentucky Fried Chicken and Dunkin Donuts to obesity and death, resigned Friday.

…Bay County Commissioner Mike Thomas asked for Dr. Newsom’s resignation in a letter released Thursday saying the “vitriolic messages on the billboard outside the health department,” some of which have mentioned specific local businesses such as the soon-to-open Dunkin’ Donuts, could expose the county to a lawsuit.

It’s a sad story, since Dr. Newsom sounds like a dedicated public servant… he’s someone who clearly lives according to his values and sets a high bar for his own performance.  Unfortunately, it’s a case of childish behavior all around: from the thin-skinned local business owners who complained; to the panicky commissioners who demanded the resignation of a valuable asset… to Dr. Newsom himself, whose intemperate choice of words was a) virtually guaranteed to step on some toes; and b) unlikely to yield benefits commensurate with the hassle.

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Back in March, I wrote a brief post on Australian trainer/model Paul James, who decided to gain 40kg of fat in an effort to understand what his clients go through when attempting to lose weight.

He ’s now on his way back down… naturally, he’s finding it difficult.

After months of eating nothing but fatty, fried foods and sugary drinks, James began liking his new diet — perhaps too much.

“I really enjoyed the food,” he said. “But it soon became an addiction and I am currently fighting that addiction as well to sugar and fat.”

James’ first step to getting fit was to break his addiction, but he couldn’t do it cold turkey. He gradually weaned himself off of sugar and fat. Today he believes he has kicked his habit.

…When James finally did make it back to the gym to begin an exercise regimen, he couldn’t do what he used to do. 

He had so much extra weight on his ankles and knees that he couldn’t run because he was afraid of injuring his joints and he was unable to do a set of sit-ups.

Here it is, in his own words:

Adult obesity rates are still rising…

Still, compared with 2008, obesity rates rose in almost half the states, and decreased in none. In four states — Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and West Virginia — more than 30 percent of adults are obese. Eight of the 10 states with the highest obesity rates are in the South, and Colorado is the only state with a rate under 20 percent. Seven of the 10 states with the highest poverty levels are also among the 10 states with the highest obesity rates.

The trend is up sharply. In 1991, no state had an obesity rate above 20 percent, and in 1981 the national average was 15 percent.

The study, published by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Trust for America’s Health, found that in 30 states, 30 percent or more of children ages 10 to 17 were overweight or obese.

Full ”F As In Fat” report here.

That’s what I felt about this article in Time, “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin“, by John Cloud.  It’s 4 pages long, but these two paras tell you all you need to know:

“More than 45 million Americans now belong to a health club, up from 23 million in 1993. We spend some $19 billion a year on gym memberships. Of course, some people join and never go. Still, as one major study — the Minnesota Heart Survey — found, more of us at least say we exercise regularly. The survey ran from 1980, when only 47% of respondents said they engaged in regular exercise, to 2000, when the figure had grown to 57%.

And yet obesity figures have risen dramatically in the same period: a third of Americans are obese, and another third count as overweight by the Federal Government’s definition. Yes, it’s entirely possible that those of us who regularly go to the gym would weigh even more if we exercised less. But like many other people, I get hungry after I exercise, so I often eat more on the days I work out than on the days I don’t. Could exercise actually be keeping me from losing weight?

When I read this, my initial response was, “WTF???”  Even the researchers he quotes, Eric Ravussin and Timothy Church, don’t go that far.  Is he serious?

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“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Lao Tzu

About a decade ago, my husband, John, was tipping the scales at 257 lbs.  Despite his height (he’s 6′ 3″), he was borderline obese, and – even worse – had a family history of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.  He knew he had to deal with the weight, and was taking action, but had a looong way to go.  Needless to state, I was on the lookout for ways to inspire and motivate him to succeed, and – after some searching - I found what looked like the perfect e-book for him.

It was Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle by Tom Venuto.

BFFM was my first introduction to Tom’s writings, and I could not have asked for a better one.  Unlike many other programs, it was a detailed roadmap – not only for getting into shape – but for reaching the next level.  Tom truly is one of those ”teachers” alluded to in the above quote… Unlike many other popular and “fad” diet programs, BFFM provides readers with a template for lifelong fitness and maintenance of their ideal weights.

Nonetheless, it’s not for everyone.  Tom is a successful natural bodybuilder, and BFFM reflects his training and discipline.  While it’s “user-friendly”, it’s also fairly detailed – which is why he saw the need for a simpler program that would be just as effective, but more in tune with the “goals of ordinary ‘real people’”.

That program is The Body Fat Solution. It was written for…

…men and women who are overweight…This book is for the busy working person who doesn’t have all day to spend in the gym or in the kitchen preparing complicated meals.  It was not written for the full-time athlete, bodybuilder, fitness professional, or person with unlimited time to exercise.

The Body Fat Solution is for the layperson who wants simple explanations and practical action strategies to apply in daily life.

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No… it’s not a joke.

When we ran across an e-mail about a new weight loss product, we thought it had to be a joke — a knife and fork that weigh 1½ pounds each, the better to make you eat more slowly? Seriously?

This is quite serious, according to the Knife and Fork Lift’s inventor, Tom Madden. “Everybody approaches it as a joke,” he said, “but when you think about it, it does require you to eat more slowly.” Eating more slowly, say health experts, allows the brain time to register feelings of satiety, resulting in eating less.

The idea sprung from Madden’s own frustrating attempts, and those of his friends, at sticking with diets. “I’m always trying to lose a few pounds, and all the diets everyone has tried to my knowledge have failed. I thought, maybe I could make it more difficult to eat, and slow the process down.” Madden is the founder and chief executive of TransMedia Group, a Boca Raton, La.-based public relations firm.

He came up with a knife and fork encased in a dumbbell-shaped handle, several times the weight of most knives and forks. But he didn’t think this could be the next big thing since the Snuggie when he sent an early version to a friend — who loved it. “He said it was the most unique, creative, imaginative present someone had sent him,” Madden said. “And I thought, let’s make some more of these.”

For what it’s worth, I’ve written about the link between eating quickly and obesity before, so I can appreciate what Mr. Madden is trying to accomplish here.  But there’s no need to invest in…errr… creative (and somewhat pricey) silverware, when – at least for most Westerners - eating with a pair of chopsticks will do much the same thing.

I’ll give Mr. Madden points for ingenuity, however:  I expect the Knife and Fork Lift would make a great gag gift – for either the dieters or weightlifters in your life.

Introducing the new “Wheaties Fuel”…

Testosterone swirls around every aspect of Wheaties Fuel’s introduction. General Mills — maker of the most popular brand, Cheerios, and the second-largest cereal manufacturer, behind Kellogg’s — used a panel of only male athletes, including the Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning and the Boston Celtics power forward Kevin Garnett, to consult on both the nutritional profile and flavor.

From that, the company produced three prototypes of Wheaties Fuel. Samples are going out to about 1,000 “everyday athletes,” primarily Men’s Health readers who volunteered online. By popular vote, those readers will choose the winner, which will be announced Sept. 9; for a few months, the cereal will be available only online, and will be in supermarkets in January.

…The three prototypes bear little resemblance to the original Wheaties, a basic wheat flake: all are much sweeter than the original (each are 25 percent sugars by weight, compared to original Wheaties, at 15 percent). Two contain clusters that have a cinnamon-roll-like flavor and a third has raisins, cranberries and almonds. A cup, without milk, contains 210 calories, compared to 133 in the original Wheaties.

This is a great development, because we all know men require even more sugar and calories in their diets, right?

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One question, many answers… and no solution in sight.

I cannot believe that this idiot is opposing the appointment of Dr. Regina Benjamin as Surgeon General… because she’s overweight.  While I’m no fan of Neil Cavuto (or Fox News), it’s to his credit that he’s having none of it.

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I just finished reading Tom Venuto’s excellent book, “The Body Fat Solution“, and will be reviewing it here later this week.  For now, all I’ll say is that it includes a thorough discussion on emotional eating, which I thought was one of the most valuable parts.  Needless to state, eating for comfort - or in response to other “triggers” that have nothing to do with physical hunger - makes it difficult, if not impossible, for many people to achieve their weight loss/fitness goals.  Fortunately, Tom has extensive, first-hand experience with helping his clients and readers get their eating behavior(s) under control.  You can get a quick feel for his approach by reading his BurnTheFatBlog post on the subject: “5 Steps to Beating Emotional Eating“. 

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If you’ve ever seen the movie “Dodgeball”, then you know who White Goodman is.  Played by comedian Ben Stiller, the over-the-top fitness nazi and owner of “Globo Gym” is a short man with an oversized ego.  As he quips in the TV commercial that opens the movie: “Here at Globo Gym we’re better than you… and we know it.”

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