Author: Robert

The “bottom” line: we think ours are too big

ZoneDiet.com conducted a survey of 1,000 adults in June asking them how far away from their ideal weight they felt they were, in pounds. Sixteen percent were perfectly fine with their weight, which is not the same as saying they were actually at an ideal weight for their height, but presumably most were in at least decent shape heft-wise. The rest felt they had varying amounts of weight to lose (or perhaps in a few cases, to gain), according to results published in USA Today.

Broken down by amount, 15 percent felt they were one to five pounds away from ideal, 14 percent six to 10 pounds away, 9 percent 11 to 15 pounds away, and a whopping 38 percent 16 or more pounds above their ideal. But before you carve these numbers in stone, a different survey just released by the NPD group finds that an even more whopping 61 percent would like to lose no less than 20 pounds.

The glaring disparity between the two surveys may reflect a difference in the wording of the questions, or the fact that the NPD poll was taken just after the year-end holidays when most of us are still swollen from overindulgence, or that the primary function of surveys in general is to confuse the public. However you interpret it, it’s good news for the weight-loss industry.

If the fast food don’t get ya, the fast drink will

You know that you need to lose weight, and that part of your difficulty in doing so is that you just can’t resist a tall, cool, sugary soft drink to go with your fast food burger or taco or fried chicken. If only you had a little more motivation.

Well, try this: There’s about a 50-50 chance that your tall cool one will be home to some E. coli, Staphylococcus, Candida, or other nasty little bacteria, the kind that originate in feces. Still thirsty?

Here’s the essence. A team of microbiologists at Hollins University tested 90 beverages from 30 fast-food soda fountains and found coliform bacteria present in 48 percent of them. And there’s more: most of the detected bacteria are resistant to one or more antibiotics.

Admittedly, outbreaks of illness from such soft drinks are almost unheard of, but that could simply mean they don’t make enough people sufficiently ill to be reported to a health agency.

Might we suggest a nice, single-serving carton of nonfat milk?

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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How we feel about our weight, and the sickening truth about fast food sodas

“7-11″ evidently stands for how the number of pounds a regular customer will gain in six months

The University of Montreal conducted a study of 632 kids and their families from across the economic scale in an effort to determine how their neighborhoods affected their weight. Most of the children were of normal heft, but 42 percent were overweight and 22 percent downright obese. The researchers looked for correlations between weight on the one hand, and parks and green spaces and commercial food outlets on the other.

Their conclusions: Neighborhood availability of parks, playgrounds and other open areas doesn’t seem to have any affect on children’s weight; fast food restaurants may be somewhat relevant to childhood overweight, but there appears to be a direct connection between childhood obesity and proximity to convenience stores.

The researchers feel strongly enough about this to have recommended that convenience-store-free zones be established in the vicinity of Canadian schools.

Of course, it’s possible that this study was secretly funded by McDonald’s as part of a blame-shifting strategy, but when you think about it, the fast food chains at least make some effort to address their role in our national fat problem, whereas your typical convenience store seems dedicated to selling the least healthy food products permitted by law. Then again, what would you expect from a place that also sells cigarettes and lottery tickets?

Further proof, if any were needed, that people who enter eating competitions are batpoop loony

If eating competitions merely involved widely beloved food items, such as your hot dog and hamburger and pancake and apple pie and other items off the classic Norman Rockwell America menu, that would be one thing. It would be simple gluttony.
But eating competitions don’t stop there. They go on to include items than ordinary, rational Americans would eat only to avoid offending hosts in a hostile foreign land or to humor future in-laws here at home. And that verges on crazy.

Think I’m exaggerating? Herewith are a few such items, and the current world records for consuming them, straight from the Uncle John’s Endless Engrossing Bathroom Reader, 2009 edition.

• Haggis (sheep lungs, liver and heart, plus oatmeal and onion, boiled in a sheep’s stomach): three pounds in eight minutes.
• Pickled beef tongue: one entire three-pound tongue plus a few bites of another (because who can stop at just one tongue?) in 12 minutes. On Fox TV, no less, which somehow makes sense.
• Cow brains: 57 of them, totaling about 17.7 pounds, in 15 minutes.
• Jalapeno peppers: 247, in an unspecified space of time, but probably not as long as the winner later spent in the bathroom.
• Butter (a classic American food item, granted, but always on something else, such as toast or corn on the cob; I mean, if somebody brought you a “snack” that was simply pats of butter, wouldn’t you be weirded out?): seven quarter-pound sticks in 5 minutes.

If the images of the eaters setting these records don’t curl your hair, or at least curb your appetite, keep in mind that these were competitions, meaning that whole bunches of people were desperately and zealously hammering down the cow brains or sheep innards or whatever. We’re not talking about isolated individual nutjobs, here, but whole legions of demented enthusiasts.
And you were worried about vampires and zombies.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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Mini-marts linked to childhood obesity; eating competitions linked to insanity

Meeting our health goals: A 10-year review

Every 10 years, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sets a number of health-and-fitness goals for the American public, and every 10 years the department looks back and evaluates how we’ve done as a nation in meeting the previous set of 10-year goals.

Since this is a government agency, there are a lot of goals. A huge amount, in fact. Let’s put it this way: each decade’s list of goals is issued as, and fills, an entire book.

Since the latest 10-year span just ended on the 31st, the data has not yet been finalized, but we’re so close that it’s safe to take some numbers as bankable. Among those:

• 117 goals can be said to have been met, but that is out of 635 targets, for a skimpy 18.5 percent success rate. Even more discouraging, in about 23 percent of the goals, we’re actually worse off than 10 years ago.
• One of those fallbacks has been in weight control, where the goal was to reduce our obesity rate from 25 percent to 15 percent. In fact, that rate has ballooned to 34 percent. Similarly, instead of reducing our rate of high blood pressure from 28 percent to 16 percent, we increased it by a point or two. We also put up worse numbers in the areas of childhood tooth decay and undersized newborns, among others.
• But overall, the experts are encouraged. Along with the 117 met goals, significant progress was made in the case of 332 others, with at least some improvement shown in 70 percent of the goals. Cancer death rates are down, for example, and childhood vaccination rates up.

Maybe this will be the decade in which we actually do lose weight and get in shape. Check back with us in 2020.

“I didn’t fail the sobriety test, Your Honor, I failed the adiposity test.”

To our growing list of crimes and court cases in which a defendant has claimed to be too obese (a) to have committed the crime, or (b) to fit through the courtroom door, or (c) to be confined to a cell, or (d) to execute by any humane means, we can now add (e) to be required to take a field sobriety test.

This comes to light via the case of a clinically obese (five-foot-ten, 230 pounds) driver of a 1997 Honda who refused to take a Breathalyzer test and then failed several routine roadside sobriety tests and was busted for DWI in Portsmouth, Maine. The defendant took the case to court and was initially found guilty, but an appeal by his attorney argued that a number of standard sobriety exercises, such as stepping toe-to-toe and turning, were unduly difficult for obese people in general, sober or otherwise, and should not be applied to them, and that indeed traffic cops were trained to not do so. A judge agreed, and lifted the conviction.

But before you slap your forehead and cry, “What?!”, the judge did find him guilty of reckless driving, which cost him $500 and a license suspension. Our verdict? Anybody who is physically able to fit behind the wheel of a Honda should be able to walk toe-to-toe and swivel without falling over.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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A ten-year assessment of our national health, and being too fat for roadside sobriety tests

You may not want to wear them where your less-gullible friends can see them A recent CalorieLab post offered a few tips on spotting weight-loss drugs, programs and devices that are probably fraudulent, such as boasting that the product “works for everyone” or produces “miraculous results.”

The Federal Trade Commission also offers some basic guidelines for the wary consumer, such as: Distrust anything that promises a weight reduction of more than two pounds in a week. One thing the FTC explicitly warns against is pinning your hopes on any weight-reducing substance that is supposedly absorbed into the skin, which would include a number of weight-reduction patches now on the market.

Not that the concept is crazy or impossible, mind you; an effective weight-reduction drug could be administered by absorption. It’s just that none of the patches have been shown to contain such a drug.

Instead, they are marketed with names like Ezee Slimming Patch and Be-Slim, and their typical ingredients include bladderwrack (a diet patch favorite even though there’s no evidence that it effects one’s weight or appetite), 5-HTP (an amino acid alleged to suppress the appetite), L-carnitine (makes your cells’ mitochondria just lap up the fat!), yerba mate and menthol, among other esoterica.

The only thing liable to come out weighing less is your wallet

The various patches’ claims are right out of the diet industry handbook: “stops cravings for sweets and junk foods,” “enjoy a healthier figure,” “feel more energetic than ever,” “lose weight permanently,” and the shameless come-on from Pink Patch, marketed expressly to young females, “You WILL have the hottest body and the dream life.”

As the head of Duke University’s Diet and Fitness Center told the Los Angeles Times, “The more hyperbolic the claims, the more people can quickly dismiss the product.”

The fact is, no patch on the market has been subjected to an independently conducted and published weight-loss study, a simple and inexpensive test that would have long ago been done if any of these things actually worked.

Even some of the patch makers acknowledge that they won’t be effective unless the wearer starts eating less. That being the case, the most effective application of the patch would probably be taped over the user’s mouth.

For the record, they come in packages of 15 and 30 and will run you from $1 to $1.65 per patch. At any price, say the experts, they’re a waste of money.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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Weight-loss patches: just another skin game?

Some recent research findings may sour your attitude toward the ubiquitous sweetener

The fructose manufacturing industry, when it hasn’t been coming up with new food items that it can incorporate its product into, has lately been downplaying the notion that fructose is not exactly the finest thing a human being can shovel into his or her body.

About the best defense they’ve come up with so far is that hey, fructose comes from fruit, after all, and it’s certainly no worse than any other form of sugar.

Well, it turns out that they are, as the phrase goes, dead wrong. First, a little factual background. Fructose indeed does occur naturally in fruit, but in small amounts, comprising just 5 to 10 percent of the weight of the fruit in question.

By contrast, commercial fructose, the version the industry produces, occurs precisely nowhere in nature. In fact, it is a synthesized form of corn syrup that is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose, which was concocted in a lab in 1971 and was immediately seized upon by packaged food companies because it was both cheaper and fully six times sweeter than the cane sugar you spoon into your coffee.

Next stop: Warning labels on yogurt and catsup?

And now, given the results of a study done by the University of California, we know it is more hazardous as well. The UC researchers found that persons placed on a controlled diet involving high levels of fructose wound up with newly produced fat cells around their hearts, livers and other vital organs, and with digestive abnormalities that are associated with early heart disease and diabetes.

As to whether fructose is any worse than alternative sugars, very simply: it is.

Fructose is not broken down during the digestive process the way other sugars are, and it slams into the liver like an express train, disrupting a number of metabolic processes, including those that determine whether the body burns fat or stores it. A control group in the study, fed glucose instead of fructose, was free of any negative effects.

Of course, we’ve known for years that fructose is a major dietary contributor to the current obesity epidemic, but now we’ve got serious evidence that it’s not just bad for your weight, but sets you on a path to possible heart disease and/or diabetes. One study does not make scientific fact, of course, and the UC research will have to be replicated, but if future results are the same, the FDA may have to take a hard look at fructose’s extensive and often excessive use by the processed food industry.

At the very least, it could become the trans fat of the 2010s. Don’t be surprised if, a few years down the road, Kellogg’s and Post and General Mills cereal boxes begin displaying such headline-sized claims as, “Now with 50% less fructose!!”

Sweet.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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Time to freak out about fructose?

For openers, there’s the word “miracle” . . .

Jeffrey White is the house expert on alternative medicines at the National Cancer Institute, and in that capacity he was asked by USA Today if there were telltale signs that could tip people off to advice, treatments, drugs and therapies that shouldn’t be trusted.

He came up with four basic things to watch for, and while he was specifically referring to scams directed at cancer patients, his red flags seem applicable to the dizzying world of weight-reducing programs, devices, supplements, regimens, books and so on.

In order:

• Hyperbolic claims and descriptions. Words such as “miraculous” and “breakthrough” and “incredible” are signals that you are being hustled, as are descriptions of successful results that seem unbelievable. Don’t believe them. If something came along that lived up to such claims, it would be all over the news, with no need to advertise or promote.
• No downside whatsoever. There is no drug known, whether concocted in a lab or derived from some plant or animal source, that is completely free of negative possible side effects. It’s certainly hard to envision anything that could dramatically affect one’s weight that would not in the process disrupt one’s metabolism, and any weight-loss product, including exercise programs, that doesn’t point out possible hazards is not dealing honestly with you. Also beware of anything portrayed as working equally well for anyone and everyone. Nothing on earth does that.
• Anecdotal evidence is basically no evidence. As a corollary to the above, almost anything will work, or seem to, for a certain number of people. But such personal testimonials, either from acquaintances, celebrities on TV, or in ads, don’t tell you how many people had negative experiences with the product, or why other people’s experiences have anything to do with you.
• Show me the numbers. In the case of pharmaceuticals, the proof of their usefulness lies in the result of clinical trials required by the FDA to establish a drug’s safety and effectiveness. The results of such trials, for any drug you’re considering, should be findable at Clinical Trials or PubMed. If you can’t find any reference to said drug at either site, be skeptical. The same goes for homeopathic and naturpathic and nutritional supplement products, which the FDA has no jurisdiction over. Without clinically derived statistics on the product’s performance and effects, you’re just rolling the dice.

For that matter, any product, regimen or device that fails more than one of these tests is a gamble, and one you probably don’t have to take.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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How to tell when “miracle” weight loss products and programs are bogus

If we ate all our meals at home, the question wouldn’t be necessary

According to data compiled by the NPD Group, if you’re an average American, you will purchase just a hair fewer than 200 meals at sit-down or fast-food or takeout or other types of restaurants in the coming year.

Just for the record, you’ll consume 78 of those meals where you buy them, take 58 of them home, eat 34 of them in your car and take 23 of them to work.

That’s a tidy number of meals, a little more than one every other day, and it highlights the recent debate over whether to post the calories contained in food items on the menus at those restaurants. The essence of the debate is: Do such postings actually do any good, as measured by whether they significantly influence how many calories the patrons order?

So far, the handful of studies on the subject tend to contradict one another: posting seems to reduce calorie intake in some circumstances, and not in others. But a bit of clarity may be at hand, thanks to one of the serious heavyweights in health education, the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, which just reported a research project involving more than 300 restaurant customers.

It turns out that the key element is context

The essentials: One-third of the diners were given menus with calorie listings for the entrees, one-third of them got menus with calorie listings and a printed reminder that the recommended daily calorie load for a typical adult is 2,000, and a third got menus with no caloric information.

The last group wound up consuming around 1,630 calories at dinner and later in the evening. The first group, by comparison, consumed . . . around 1,630 calories.

It looks pretty gloomy for the pro-posting advocates, but wait: the second group, those who got the postings and the daily limit reminder, put away just 1,380 calories. That’s a difference of 250 calories per meal, no small potatoes when you multiply it by 193 restaurant meals, which gets you a total of 48,250 calories a year, the rough equivalent of at least one clothing size.

This experiment will have to be repeated with considerably more test subjects in more eating establishments located in more geographical areas, especially if the restaurant industry has anything to say about it, but if the results hold, we’ve learned something fairly important weight-control-wise: we tend to take calories more seriously, and consume them accordingly, when we know how much of our healthy daily allotment they use up.

To really be effective, perhaps the postings shouldn’t even be in numbers of calories, but in the percentage of a healthy daily intake that they represent. At least the math would be a bit easier.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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To post calories on menus or not to post: There may be an answer

No, you can’t write off your Starbucks tab as a medical expense

If you absolutely must, must, MUST have that slab of coffee cake, or slice of pecan pie, or bear claw the size of, well, a bear claw, at least wash it down with a good strong cup of coffee. Or two. Or three. Researchers at the University of Sydney have pored over a raft of studies involving almost a half million people, and found that for every cup of java you consume, your risk of developing type 2 diabetes falls by 7 percent.

Knock back three to four cups a day, and you’re fully 25 percent less likely to be hit with type 2 than non- or one-cup drinkers.

Given that diabetes is a fearfully common result of way too many cakes, pies and the like, a coffee-with-all-baked-goods rule is worth considering. Incidentally, it’s not the caffeine. People who drank more than three cups of decaf daily were one-third less likely to suffer type 2, while those who drank more than three cups of tea cut their risk by 20 percent. Say, how about a refill?

Come to think of it, Willie Nelson could probably eat more Doritos than any human alive

We’ve been pretty vocal here in the past about our poor opinion of eating contests, and how counterproductive they are in a society besieged by excess weight problems. So we are amused whenever the eating competition concept makes a fool of itself, and it seems to have done so again.

In this case, the annual World Pie Eating Championships held in Greater Manchester, England, will this year feature random drug tests

It seems that, according to the president of the competition, contenders have been using “questionable concoctions” in order to have a “lubricative advantage” in getting the pies to slide down the hatch. Think of it as greasing the chute, so to speak. It also seems that one fluid in particular, Bisto cough syrup, can cut the time it takes to down a regulation championship pie by two full seconds. Really, they ran tests. So they’ll be frisking all the participants for cough medicine.

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Coffee cuts diabetes risk, plus pie eating cheating

A positive move, but not exactly altruistic

As reported in a post here, Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity recently leveled a broadside at the makers of children’s breakfast cereals with a report of a study that found that those cereals most heavily and aggressively marketed specifically to children were also those that were the least healthy for children to consume.

The chief offender in this regard, the report found, was General Mills, which (1) produced six of the 10 unhealthiest cereals, and (2) did the most intensely child-focused marketing of any cereal company. The report, or more likely the ensuing heat from health experts, consumer groups and regulating agencies, evidently got the attention of the folks at General Mills, who have announced reductions in the sugar content of 10 of their cereals. This would be joyous news, if not for a couple of qualifying notes.

Don’t hand over that Corporate Citizen of the Year trophy just yet

First, some GM cereals won’t be affected because, the company says, they aren’t advertised on children’s TV shows or other kid media. But among those are the likes of Boo Berry and Franken Berry, which hardly seem adult-oriented in name or concept. And although their sugar content had already been reduced two years ago, it still amounts to 12 grams of the stuff, just a shade under one-half ounce, per serving.

Second, the company hasn’t set any timeline or schedule for the sugar reductions, so this changeover could conceivably take longer than health care reform to actually become reality.

And finally, the cereals that are affected, such as Trix, Lucky Charms and Cocoa Puffs, will still deliver a quarter ounce or so of sugar per serving, and exactly what if anything the absent sugar will be replaced with hasn’t been revealed.

Thought for the day: A worried food company is a responsive food company

Even so, in the context of current childhood obesity statistics, any reduction is to be applauded, especially in light of another finding: that the more sugar a cereal contains, the more of it kids eat — almost twice as much as they do low-sugar cereals, in fact.

It’s also worth noting that GM isn’t the only cereal giant to be rattled by growing public concern over the effect of its products on children. Kellogg’s has trimmed the sugar content of Froot Loops, Corn Pops and several other sweet-tooth cereals by a gram or two per serving, and Post has cut the sugar load of Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles by one-fifth.

What’s really needed here, however, at least in terms of national weight reduction, is some kind of well-publicized, industrywide ceiling on the sugar content of any packaged cereal, regardless of whom its marketed to. Of course, that will require a considerable amount of pressure from those who buy their products.

Get those angry e-mails going, parents.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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General Mills to reduce sugar content in some kids’ cereals. Bravo. Or maybe Eh.

It’s that time of year when children’s eyes light up, their hearts race, and their clothes get tighter

If the holidays present adults with a kind of dietary minefield of high-calorie treats and temptations, it’s an even more treacherous time for the overweight or obese child, a description which statistically applies to one in every three American kids.

Consider: even the average diet-savvy adult, studies tell us, puts on about one pound of weight between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, while the overweight or obese adult can pack on as much as five — and that’s with an adult’s impulse control and awareness of the consequences.

The fact is, the overarching atmosphere of the year-end holidays is one of self-indulgence, so kids naturally feel entitled to loosen up and treat themselves right along with the grownups. Moreover, researchers have found that when school is not in session, kids tend to put on weight through inactivity and increased snacking — and that’s just during the summer, when nobody is baking Christmas cookies or cranking out gingerbread men.

According to some childhood obesity clinicians, the result of all this can be 5 to 7 added pounds by the time January arrives. So, what is the parent who wishes to prevent this from happening to her children to do? Here are a few recommendations from some health and weight-control professionals.

“Santa hates fat children,” while possibly effective as a deterrent, is far too heavy handed

• Set a good example: your kids will base a lot of their holiday eating behavior on yours. Be a pillar of moderation.
• If part of your family holiday fun or tradition involves making baked goods or candies or the like, you needn’t give that up. Just limit the amount of the goodies you actually consume, by freezing or giving away or sharing a healthy portion with friends and neighbors.
• Before heading out to holiday meals, give the kids a healthy snack — fruit, cheese, yogurt, etc. — so they won’t arrive hungry.
• Because a lot of gyms and sports programs and exercise classes catering to young people shut down for the holidays, make an extra effort to get the kids out of the house and physically active, weather permitting, even if you have to herd them yourself.
• Enlist the kids’ help. They’re not dunces, they understand cause and effect and that too much of a good thing (food) can lead to too much of a bad thing (flab). Set a goal for the family: to enjoy the holiday goodies, but with moderation and common sense. Remind them that the less eaten now, the more there will still be later on, and the longer it will last.
• Reason with your offspring. Who knows, the holidays are a magical time, and it just might work.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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Holiday goodies and overweight kiddies: Handle with care

Because no other explanation covers all the bases

Just when you thought every possible cause for the soaring number of overweight and obese citizens in the United States and worldwide had been identified and accused — from fast food lifestyles to computer games to kids’ TV commercials to neighborhoods designed for the automobile — up pops a new candidate for The Reason We’re All So Fat.

This one comes from Julie Guthman, a professor of community studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who noticed that none of the existing and widely cited causes really explain the empirical universality of the world’s weight gain. For example, obesity has increased by 73 percent since 1980 — in newborns!

It’s hard to pin that number on diet, physical activity, or other lifestyle elements at the age of a few months. Then there are those people who, even on healthy and disciplined diets and with physical activity, are and remain fat.

To quote The Graduate: “One word, Benjamin . . . plastics”

Given these gaps in the chain of causality, Guthman has come up with a fresh possibility, which she enunciated in a recent op-ed column in the San Francisco Chronicle: environmental toxins. Specifically, chemicals that can ramp up or inhibit certain hormones produced by the body. Even more specifically, chemicals that stimulate the body to create an overabundance of fat cells.

The evidence for this is wispy at best, mainly because no one has adequately researched a possible connection, but related studies have found that certain chemicals in commercial plastics are distinctly linked to obesity because of their estrogen-like effects, and that other hormone-disrupting drugs given to pregnant women had “time bomb” side-effects that manifested in their offspring years later.

Guthman may be onto something, but her cause is not helped by a tone of environmental self-righteousness that she brings to it, arguing that our attention should shift from such irrelevancies as diet and exercise behavior patterns and focus on “lax regulation of the chemical industry.” Especially irksome is her conclusion that “getting fresh food into the schools doesn’t take the place of sound environmental regulation and enforcement.”

Perhaps research will prove you right, Professor, but until we know what to regulate and are able to enforce it, education and social pressure to promote healthy lifestyles and childhood nutrition are the best tools we have in the Weight War. Derogating them before your theories have become facts is not helping.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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What’s to blame for our obesity epidemic, version 286: Environmental toxins

Better that it goes to our waste than our waist, you could say

Americans may well be the most wasteful people in history. Just finding ways to dump, bury, disintegrate or recycle all the stuff we go through and toss out is a major industry. But we are wasteful in at least one way that, if not exactly virtuous, is something we should probably be thankful for, and that is in the matter of food.

According to a report by the Department of Agriculture, roughly 40 percent of all the food produced in the U.S. gets thrown away. On the one hand, in a world where a billion people have insufficient food, that is truly shameful. On the other hand, the USDA calculates that each of us discards an average 1,400 calories per day in the process.

If you want a nightmare scenario, imagine what we would look like if we instead consumed all those leftovers and scraps and so forth. The diabetes rate alone would probably be around 85 percent.

It’s not such a small world after all

Despite the fact that tens of millions of people are chronically undernourished and lack secure, reliable access to food around the globe, the human race is steadily growing fatter. According to newly released World Health Organization numbers, so many people worldwide now carry too much excess weight that they’ve coined the word “globesity” just to label it. In fact, one in every three adults on earth is now overweight and one in every 10 is obese, an amazing stat given the vast legions of the underfed. WHO reckons that there will be some 2.3 billion overweight humans walking the planet in 2015, a number you also get by adding the combined populations of the US, Europe, and China.

Of course, if global warming causes the Pacific to rise enough, we’ll be number one

So, which is the fattest nation, per capita, in the whole wide world? Somewhat surprisingly, the United States only ranks third on the list, with 66.7 percent of us overweight or obese. Germany, land of fatty sausages and rich strudels? Nein; it’s on our heels in fourth place at 66.5 percent. Then comes, rather inexplicably, Egypt, at 66 percent. So who took the top two spots?

Two island nations in the South Pacific whose explosive post-World War II obesity epidemic was posted about here some time ago: American Samoa, at an appalling 93.5 percent, and Kiribati, at 81.5 percent. The cause is absolutely no mystery: a culture yanked from an environment of physical labor in pursuit of food which was mostly fish and fruit and vegetables, to one of processed, fat-and-calorie-laden Western food products, with no physical effort required. So much for the “island paradise” concept.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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The huge amount of calories we don’t consume, and the fattest nations on earth

The bigger they are, the harder their arteries, or something along those lines

Confronted with the unhealthy and sometimes crippling number of concussions that high school, college and pro football players routinely suffer on the field, the institution of organized football is already on the defensive. Now it may be about to be blindsided by another less dramatic but potentially just as troublesome bit of negative PR.

To wit: football linemen have an alarming tendency to be not just big and bulky but clinically, even dangerously, obese. This is based primarily on one study, of the Ohio State football team, but the Buckeyes approach the game about the same way all teams do, and that includes recruiting linemen they hope will be too big for opposing players to impede or push aside.

Over the years this has become a kind of caloric arms race, with pro linemen now commonly topping 300 pounds, a weight that is nearly impossible to achieve without being obese.

Measuring up at Ohio State

At Ohio State, researchers rejected using BMI as a measurement, since it fails to consider muscle weight, and instead measured body fat and other health metrics, with a reading of more than 25 percent body fat qualifying as obese. Their findings:

• Out of 90 football players, only 19 were obese, and they were all linemen. In fact, two-thirds of the linemen — 19 out of 29 total — were obese.
• Of the obese 19, 13 had developed an insulin resistance that made them vulnerable to type 2 diabetes, and eight had metabolic syndrome, a set of high-risk numbers for blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides and so forth.

It’s always possible that the Ohio State results do not accurately reflect the dietary situation in college football in general, but given another recent study that found retired NFL linemen also exhibit metabolic syndrome and die from heart ailments more often than other ex-players, it’s more likely that the Buckeyes are just the tip of the NCAA obesity iceberg.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this story is that college and pro coaching and fitness staffs were already wise to the problem, and team meals have swung heavily away from fatty meats and fried foods and toward lean grilled meats, chicken and fish.

Judging by the OSU and NFL studies, that has not solved the problem of unhealthy player obesity.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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NFL and college football behemoths playing a dangerous game