Obesity is contagious

This is one study that will come as no shock to anyone who's tried to stay on a diet while hanging out with sugar-loving friends. They have found that having obese friends is likely to lead you into obesity as well.

The more obese friends you have, the more likely you are to become obese, a new study suggests. This confirms previous research that gaining weight may be socially contagious...

"We find that having four obese friends doubled people's chance of becoming obese compared to people with no obese friends," says Alison Hill, the study's lead author and a Harvard researcher.

About the rising incidence of obesity, she says, people have gotten better at gaining weight in recent years, but not at losing it.

David Rand, a Harvard research scientist who also worked on the study, says that the more obese people you have contact with, the more likely you are to become obese.

From my experience, the opposite is true as well - have a few friends working to lose weight or maintain their weight-loss makes you much more likely to be losing weight. Why? Simple - it's easier to exercise together, just as it's easier to pig out together. Whatever you make the center of your social calendar becomes central when you're craving human contact.

Some simple ways to cut fat

Over the last two years, I have been on a quest to lose weight and maintain my weight loss. Some of the keys to weight loss are complex - setting up a calorie and nutritionally-balanced diet, setting up regular exercise. But some of the keys are finding little tricks that work for you. Mens Health has up a good collection of tips that may be useful to anyone looking to lose a few pounds or keep them off.

Slice Fat from Pizza
Always order your pizza with double tomato sauce and light cheese. Men who eat a lot of tomato products tend to have less prostate cancer—probably because tomatoes are a rich source of lycopene. Reducing the mozzarella by just one-third (you won't miss it) will save you 20 grams (g) of fat per pie. That's as much as in a McDonald's Quarter Pounder.

Order the Steak Fries
If you love french fries, always order the steak fries. Large-cut fries don't absorb as much oil as shoestring or curly fries, which lowers the fat count.

I can SO relate!

Made me laugh out loud

Treat Fatty Foods like Tobacco?

Hat tip to Mod-blog reader Nick for this one.

Regular readers know that I have been fighting my own "battle of the bulge" for a over a year now, and have lost 75 lbs through a combination of diet changes (portion control, no sugar, few carbs) and focused exercise (bicycling). It was hard work, and I am not sure if I would have had time or the extra energy/money to pursue all of this if I had been married or had children. (Although, hopefully now that the habits are established, it won't be a problem to take into a marriage, if I should be so fortunate.)

But policy-makers right now don't see obesity as a personal challenge for individuals. They see it as a monetary black hole sucking up health care dollars, just as the President is trying to pass health care reform. "Obesity-related diseases" (mostly heart disease and diabetes) are on the rise, and lawmakers are looking for any way to cut cost and raise money to pay for their proposed health care plans. Now, they are turning to the model of the wars on tobacco, and are considering taxing fatty or sugar-laden foods in order to pay for universal health care. The idea is if you make it expensive to buy sugar, either people will stop eating it or they will be paying for their own health care thru taxation.

It is an interesting idea, but we also need to look at the other lessons from the tobacco wars. To this day, the government both taxes tobacco products AND subsidizes the growth of tobacco in America. Government is fundamentally two-faced, and we need to be ready to face this fact as we look to increase health.

Obesity causes Globbal Warming?

Regular readers know that I have lost 75 lbs this year thru a combination of diet and exercise (biking). There were many reasons why I wanted to lose weight: looking better for the opposite sex, health concerns, back pain, etc. Global warming was not one of my reasons.

Overweight people eat more than thin people and are more likely to travel by car, making excess body weight doubly bad for the environment, according to a study from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine...

They estimated that each fat person is responsible for about one tonne of carbon dioxide emissions a year more on average than each thin person, adding up to an extra one billion tonnes of CO2 a year in a population of one billion overweight people.

The conclusions being drawn from this study by the popular media are idiotic. But we all know that the last people it is okay to make fun or and discriminate against are the overweight. In general, the "fat people" I have known are more likely to be homebodies who stay around the house and don't travel. The extremely thin people I know, on the other hand, tend to be movers and shakers, who tend to drive their SUVs everywhere, smoke like chimneys, and always demand the latest and greatest. Does this mean thinness is a threat the planet? Of course not. But you watch. A "fat tax" is only a few years away.

Fat-Burning Fat Cells

The last year has been a battle of the bulge for me, as I have been working hard to lose fat through diet and exercise. A large part of weight loss is self-knowledge, knowing how your own body works, so that you can know what behavioral changes will work for you.

Now, a new study is suggesting that there may actually be fat cells that burn calories by producing heat.

Their papers, appearing Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, indicate that nearly every adult has little blobs of brown fat that can burn huge numbers of calories when activated by the cold, like sitting in a chilly room that is between 61 and 66 degrees.

Thinner people appeared to have more brown fat than heavier people, younger people more than older people; people with higher metabolic rates had more than those whose metabolisms were more sluggish, and women had more than men. People taking beta blockers for high blood pressure or other medical indications had less brown fat.

It makes me wonder if winter training might actually burn more calories than we think, if this "brown fat" activates in the cold. Self-knowledge is power.

Is obesity contagious?

While it is true that the current generations are eating more fats and artificial flavorings/preservatives than past ones, scientists have still been at a loss to explain why more Americans and Europeans are obese than ever before. Not merely overweight, mind you, which is explainable by the rise of the couch potato, but actually obese. Many theories have been advanced, but now one is gaining the attention of more and more doctors. Obesity, in some cases, may be contagious - passed from person to person by a form of the common cold. A recent study showed that specific forms of one virus can cause fat cells to multiple unusually quickly, and laboratory animals infected with the virus grew fatter than uninfected controls, even when fed the same amount of food.

Of course, this is no excuse for failing to exercise or try to eat better. But it may provide a new therapy for those who have found it difficult to shed the pounds.