Studies have linked excessive TV-watching in young children to all manner of ills: an increased risk of childhood obesity and high blood pressure, problems with attention and language development, and a decrease in the quality of relationships between children and parents.
Now new research, published Monday in the Archives of …
Santa Clara County, California became the first to ban toys in fast food meals for children. As CNN reports, county officials voted 3 to 2 to ban the plastic toys in any meals with more than 485 calories. County supervisor Ken Yeager said the decision was made in an effort to prevent “restaurants from preying on children’s love of toys
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More than a quarter of all Americans between the ages of 17 to 24 are too overweight to join the military, according to a new report highlighted by the Associated Press. That many Americans are too tubby to meet the basic entry requirements for military service isn’t new—in 2008 roughly 12,000 would-be soldiers failed the initial
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While applauding the First Lady’s efforts to combat childhood obesity through the Let’s Move initiative, researchers from the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco say that the campaign’s efforts focused primarily on behavioral and nutritional intervention—in school or at home—will yield “limited
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Despite concerns about stigma faced by obese patients—and research suggesting an inverse relationship between physicians’ respect for patients and patients’ weight—a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that obese patients receive the same quality of care as their slimmer peers. A team of
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Exploring the hypothesis that deficits in reward processing may contribute to obesity by making it difficult for certain individuals to stop eating once their energy needs are met—either because they are prewired with faulty reward systems or because “excessive consumption of palatable food can drive reward dysfunction”—researchers
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To analyze how portion sizes have changed, not just in the last two decades, but in the last millennium, the director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab and his brother, a biblical scholar at Virginia Wesleyan College, sized up portion sizes in paintings of the Last Supper over time, according to an article published earlier
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For middle-aged women who aren’t counting calories, how much exercise does it take to keep off extra weight? According to a new study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, roughly an hour per day. Though current recommendations from the Department of Health and Human Services suggest that a weekly 150
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A provision included in the more than 2,000 pages that make up the recently passed health care bill will expand a policy of putting calorie counts on chain restaurant menus, the Wall Street Journal health blog points out. Currently a handful of cities and counties across the U.S.—including New York City, and Washington state’s King
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A new study from researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington suggests that four preventable risk factors—high blood pressure, smoking, high blood sugar and overweight/obesity—are significantly reducing life expectancy across the U.S. In the new
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A natural fiber found in seaweed may reduce the body’s fat absorption by as much as 75%, according to findings presented this past weekend at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco. As part of a three-year research project funded by the U.K.’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council researchers Iain
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A large scale study of children between the ages of 2 to 19 finds that a growing number of young children are extremely obese—or have a body mass index greater than 35 kg/m. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), children who are in the 85th up to 95th percentile (or have a BMI higher than 25 kg/m,
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A recent study examining the potential impact of sin taxes—increasing the cost of junk food, in particular—as a means to promote healthier choices found that, in a lab setting at least, when unhealthy foods cost more, people tended to eat them less. Now, new research attempts to size up the value of sin taxes in the real world. A
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