Tag: obesity epidemic (Page 2 of 5)

Big Corn Loses Battle With FDA To Rename Corn Syrup

May 31, 2012 / Staff

This is a small victory for consumers who, finally aware of the dangers of high fructose corn syrup, will continue to be able to identify it in the products they buy.

Michael M. Landa, director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the F.D.A., denied the petition, saying that the term “sugar” is used only for food “that is solid, dried and crystallized.”
“HFCS is an aqueous solution sweetener derived from corn after enzymatic hydrolysis of cornstarch, followed by enzymatic conversion of glucose (dextrose) to fructose,” the letter stated. “Thus, the use of the term ‘sugar’ to describe HFCS, a product that is a syrup, would not accurately identify or describe the basic nature of the food or its characterizing properties.”

The Corn Refiners Association is afraid that consumers will avoid the product, which has received a bad reputation, under the pretext of “false information”, namely that corn syrup is natural and is the same as sugar.

The fact is that it is NOT natural , it is manufactured in a lab and can harm to people who can not properly metabolize the ingredient.

And further, to argue that HFCS is the same as sugar only calls into question the efficacy of sugar in the human diet.

There are many who would postulate that there already exists an overabundance of sugar which is causing obesity and Type 2 diabetes in epidemic proportions.

Nutrition, Quality Control, Wellness

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Over 40 Percent Of Americans Predicted To Be Over Weight By 2030

May 9, 2012 / Staff

It is estimated in a recent study that 42 percent of Americans are predicted to over weight or obese by 2030.

The CDC’s Weight of the Nation conference released it’s findings and will be highlighted in a four-part HBO documentary airing next week.

Cheap and easily available calorie dense food and sedentary lifestyles are largely to blame.

The stress on the health care system could be 550 billion dollars in additional medical expenditures.

Finkelstein and co-authors estimate that 11% of the population will be severely obese by 2030. Severe obesity is defined as a body mass index over 40 or being roughly 100 pounds overweight. Obese people have shorter life expectancies and greater lifetime medical costs, “suggesting that future healthcare costs may continue to increase even if obesity prevalence levels off,” wrote the authors.
“Those individuals have much greater risk of early mortality, diabetes, heart disease,” said Finkelstein. “They’re much, much more expensive and they’re on the rise, partly because 50 years ago, it was really, really hard to weigh that much. You’d have to eat all the time.”

Nutrition, Quality Control, Research, Resources, Wellness

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Children Suffer More From Type 2 Diabetes

May 3, 2012 / Staff

Dr. Mark Hyman, author of “The Sugar Solution: The Ultra Healthy Program for Losing Weight, Preventing Disease and Feeling Great Now!”, points out that 2 million kids are now morbidly obese.

Diabetes and pre-diabetes are just around the corner and the treatments are failing.

Hyman noted the the average child in the U.S. has 34 teaspoons of sugar a day. He said, “The food industry have hijacked our brain chemistry, our taste buds, our homes, our kitchens, our schools, and we need to take them back. We need to do things like have soda taxes, change food marketing practices to kids because this is not a problem solved in the doctor’s office.”

Health Care Policy, Nutrition, Wellness

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Catch Your ZZZZ’s To Fight Off Fat Genes

May 1, 2012 / Staff

Getting a good night’s sleep may be more than just refreshing.

Obesity genes that respond to lifestyle stimuli when you are fatigued get turned off when you get adequate sleep.

Being well rested helps your efforts to make healthy choices have a real impact on your weight.

“The less you sleep, the more important genetic factors are to how much you weigh,” says lead author Nathaniel F. Watson, M.D., co-director of the University of Washington Medicine Sleep Center, in Seattle. “The longer you sleep, the greater the influence of environmental factors like meal composition and timing.”
Previous research has found that too little sleep is associated with a higher BMI, but many of those studies haven’t been able to entirely rule out the possibility that genes, or complicating factors such as sleep disorders, are partly responsible for the link.

Research, Wellness

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Putting An End To Obesity Trends Needs To Start In Childhood

April 13, 2012 / Staff

Kids are going to have to make serious calorie cuts to avoid obesity as they get older.

If current trends continue, childhood obesity will transition into adult obesity.

In setting the Healthy People 2020 goals, the feds were more pragmatic. They hope to reduce the childhood obesity rate by 10 percent of the 2005-2008 levels, to 14.6 percent of children and teens. Getting there would require kids to cut 23 calories a day, on average. Teens, who are more likely to be obese than young children, would have to cut more.

The good news is that obesity seems to be leveling off but even if the obesity epidemic has peaked, children are heavier than they have ever been in human history.

Nutrition, Quality Control, Research

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