Mathematical models of social contagion suggest that America’s obesity epidemic won’t plateau until at least 42 percent of adults are obese. The figures run counter to recent assertions by some experts that the obesity rate, which has been at 34 percent for the past five years, may have peaked. The new projections, by Harvard University […]
Exposure to light at night may lead to weight gain, even without changes in food intake and physical activity levels, according to new research conducted with mice. The researchers found that mice exposed to a relatively dim light at night over eight weeks had a body mass gain that was about 50 percent more than […]
A person’s risk of cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes and hypertension is known to be linked to obesity, and now researchers have established that being overweight can also affect a person’s brain. In the journal Human Brain Mapping, Paul Thompson, a UCLA professor of neurology, and colleagues compared the brains of people who were obese, […]
Prenatal exposure to an insecticide commonly used up until the 1970s may play a role in the obesity epidemic in women, according to Michigan State University researchers. More than 250 mothers who ate fish from Lake Michigan were studied for their exposure to DDE, a breakdown product of DDT. The study, published in Occupational and […]
Obese women appear to undergo alterations in their ovaries which might be responsible for an egg’s inability to make an embryo, according to a new study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. It has been documented in the past that obese women trying to become pregnant take longer to conceive, even if they […]
Women who are obese during pregnancy are putting their child at risk of birth defects such as spina bifida, heart defects, cleft palate, brain defects and gastrointestinal defects, according to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. To assess the relationship between maternal overweight and obesity and the risk of congenital […]
An international study has failed to find supporting evidence for the common belief that the number of calories burned in physical activity is a key factor in rising rates of obesity. Researchers from Loyola University Health System and other research centers compared African-American women in metropolitan Chicago with women in rural Nigeria. On average, the […]
Most adults in the United States will be overweight or obese by 2030, with related health care costs hitting nearly a trillion dollars, say researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “National survey data show that the […]
Obese men should consider losing weight if they want to have children, British researchers say, after finding that men with a higher body mass index (BMI) had lower volumes of seminal fluid and a higher proportion of abnormal sperm. The new findings were presented by Dr. A Ghiyath Shayeb, from the University of Aberdeen, at […]
Obesity isn’t only a problem for humans. The serious implications obesity has for heart disease, diabetes and other maladies are now also becoming evident in our four-legged friends – in record numbers. According to a recent study published in theJournal of Veterinary Internal Medicine, the prevalence of obesity in dogs is between 22 and 40 […]
