How Many US Cardiovascular Deaths are due to Modifiable Risk Factors?

If the five commonest modifiable risk factors for cardiovascular disease – high cholesterol concentrations, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and smoking – were eliminated in the United States, deaths from cardiovascular disease would be halved, a new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine has found (Patel et al., 2015). Cardiovascular diseases such as coronary heart disease… Read More

Would More Physical Education Reduce Youth Overweight?

The prevalence of youth overweight has risen dramatically over the past three decades in the U.S. and now represents an epidemic. Since 1970, the fraction of children that are overweight has nearly quadrupled among 6 to 11 year olds and more than doubled among 12 to 19 year olds. Currently, one in six children aged… Read More

ALS: What’s the Role of Obesity & Type 2 Diabetes?

I think I can safely state that obesity can lead to diabetes, which in turn can lead to several other negative health issues. However, according to a recent study by Kiomourtzoglou and colleagues (2015) being obese and having type 2 diabetes can actually protect people against a few rare conditions. The population-based nested case-control study… Read More

Diet, Reductionism & Desire

I thought these two replies by Rosemary Sharples and Jan Horton, writing in the New Scientist, about diet and weight loss were interesting and quite apt: Rosemary writes: Once again, scientists working on ways to make it easier for people to lose weight are concentrating entirely on appetite (20 June, p.14) as though this and… Read More

Dose-Response Relation with Obesity is Identified

Postmenopausal women who are overweight of obese have a raised risk of invasive breast cancer, follow-up data from the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) trials have shown (BMJ, 2015). Research published in JAMA Oncology highlighted a dose-response relation where a higher BMI (body mass index) was associated with greater relative risk (Neuhouser et al., 2015). The… Read More

The Scottish buy more Super XL Size Clothes than anywhere else in the UK

Scots XL when it comes to the bigger sizes…that’s the headline of a story in the Metro newspaper from yesterday. Scots buy more super XL size clothes than anywhere else in the UK, it has been revealed. ‘Big boned’ men snap up the clothes in sizes from XL to 8XL (yes really), topping a poll… Read More

Do People in the UK Underestimate their Weight?

More than a third of UK residents who think of themselves as overweight are actually clinically obese, a European survey has shown. The survey, carried out for the European Association for the Study of Obesity, also found that a fifth (20%) of UK adults who consider themselves to be of normal weight are in fact… Read More