New National Initiative to Confront Obesity Crisis
As obesity continues to diminish the quality of people’s lives and raise health care costs, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) joins HBO, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and Kaiser Permanente in developing “The Weight of the Nation,” a new national campaign tackling the obesity crisis.
“The Weight of the Nation” will shed new light on the facts and myths of this urgent public health issue and explore how obesity is affecting our nation and the health care system. This multipronged project will feature a series of four documentary films, a three-part HBO Family series, 14 bonus short films, a social media campaign, a companion book, and a nationwide community-based outreach campaign. The four-part documentary series, which HBO announced on January 15, 2012, will air May 14 and 15.
Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention
Nearly 34 percent of U.S. adults and 17 percent of U.S. children are obese. Obesity is associated with increased disability, disease, and death and has substantial health, economic, and social costs. In 2005, The IOM brought a fresh perspective about the causes and consequences of, and potential solutions to, the growing obesity epidemic through Preventing Childhood Obesity: Health in the Balance. The IOM’s work on combating obesity has expanded since that time and the IOM has made a series of recommendations on obesity prevention actions, programs, and policies.
In this new study the IOM is reviewing the progress made in implementing these and other recommendations to prevent obesity. Based on its findings, the IOM will recommend critical steps for the nation that will lead to significant progress in preventing obesity over the next decade.
1 Soda = 50 Minutes Running
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University are calling for junk food packages to include labels informing consumers how much physical exercise would be needed to burn off the sugar, calorie, and fat content of less-than-nutritious foods. They believe that printing a “physical activity equivalent” on unhealthy drinks and snacks will take a serious toll on their popularity.
Turning To Big Business To Solve The Obesity Epidemic
The Partnership for a Healthier America is a Washington-based group and has Washington’s most prestigious woman as its honorary chair: first lady Michelle Obama. And in the last 12 months, it has managed to ink almost 20 deals with some of the biggest food companies in the country.
Sugar-sweetened beverages are the No. 1 single source of calories in the American diet and account for about half of all added sugars that people consume
Teens who drink soda, energy drinks and other sugary beverages are guzzling about 327 calories a day from them, which is equal to about 2½ cans of cola, new government data show.
The consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages has increased dramatically in the past decades, in parallel with increasing prevalences of overweight and obesity in the United States. Currently, sugary soft drinks contribute 8%–9% of total energy intake in both children and adults. Although it has long been suspected that soft drinks contribute at least in part to the obesity epidemic, only in recent years have large epidemiologic studies begun to investigate the relation between soft-drink consumption and long-term weight gain.
Diet-induced insulin resistance precedes other aspects of the metabolic syndrome
These results demonstrate that insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia occur before the other manifestations of the metabolic syndrome and that diet, not obesity, is the underlying cause.
We’re eating fat on fat on sugar on fat with flavor. And much of what we’re eating with these flavors, you have to ask yourself, ‘is it really food?’
Is Sugar Toxic?
As it was explained by Craig Thompson, who has done much of this research and is now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the cells of many human cancers come to depend on insulin to provide the fuel (blood sugar) and materials they need to grow and multiply. Insulin and insulin-like growth factor (and related growth factors) also provide the signal, in effect, to do it. The more insulin, the better they do. Some cancers develop mutations that serve the purpose of increasing the influence of insulin on the cell; others take advantage of the elevated insulin levels that are common to metabolic syndrome, obesity and type 2 diabetes. Some do both. Thompson believes that many pre-cancerous cells would never acquire the mutations that turn them into malignant tumors if they weren’t being driven by insulin to take up more and more blood sugar and metabolize it.
Sugar and Insulin Resistance
Because of the unique way in which we metabolize fructose and at the levels we now consume it, causes fat to accumulate in our livers followed by insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, and so trigger the process that leads to heart disease, diabetes and obesity.
50 percent of the population will be obese by 2030
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Fructose and Obesity
The obesity epidemic in the U.S. has been increasing alarmingly. The usual explanation is that we eat too much and exercise too little. But some scientists think that the explanation lies in the type of food now found in our supermarkets.
Americans consume more than 150 pounds of sugar each year, on average, which comes to about 22 teaspoons of sugar daily. Much of that is hidden in processed food. Dr. Robert Lustig, pediatric neuroendocrinologist at UCSF, believes that the processed food in our diet has contributed greatly to the epidemics of obesity and diabetes. He relates the biochemical explanation for why fructose is so damaging to children’s health.
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