martes, 27 de mayo de 2014

Coca-Cola accused of 'obscene' hypocrisy in £20 million 'anti-obesity' drive

Coca-Cola has been accused of using a £20 million anti-obesity drive to distract attention from its contribution to Britain's obesity epidemic.
The drinks giant plans to pour millions into fitness programme called Coca-Cola Zero ParkLives, offering thousands of free sessions and coaching for families across 70 parks in England.

But the announcement immediately attracted criticism from nutrition campaigners who have labelled the scheme "obscene".

Dr Aseem Malhotra, cardiologist and science director for the Action on Sugar campaign group, told The Daily Telegraph: "I think this is a really disingenuous stunt. They are trying to deflect attention from their own part in creating an obesity epidemic, which has been fuelled almost entirely by rising calorie consumption."

Dr Malhotra added the programme was "obscene" because it encouraged such companies to associate themselves with active lifestyles.

Critics have cited warnings from Public Health England that soft drinks and fruit juices packed with sugar are creating an obesity epidemic, especially among young people.

A report commissioned by the National Diet and Nutrition Survey earlier this month found that those aged between four and 18 months are consuming around 40% more sugar than is recommended.

The findings also suggested that soft drinks like Coca-Cola contributed to 30% of sugar intake of those aged between 11 and 18.

But the company has insisted that is playing a part in tackling obesity in Britain, arguing that 40% of sales now come from 'zero calorie' versions of the drink.

Coca-Cola's general manager Jon Woods stressed the company was refusing to shy away from obesity and refused to accept blame for the epidemic.
 




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domingo, 25 de mayo de 2014

Always Hungry? Here’s Why

For most of the last century, our understanding of the cause of obesity has been based on immutable physical law. Specifically, it’s the first law of thermodynamics, which dictates that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. When it comes to body weight, this means that calorie intake minus calorie expenditure equals calories stored. Surrounded by tempting foods, we overeat, consuming more calories than we can burn off, and the excess is deposited as fat. The simple solution is to exert willpower and eat less.

The problem is that this advice doesn’t work, at least not for most people over the long term. In other words, your New Year’s resolution to lose weight probably won’t last through the spring, let alone affect how you look in a swimsuit in July. More of us than ever are obese, despite an incessant focus on calorie balance by the government, nutrition organizations and the food industry.

But what if we’ve confused cause and effect? What if it’s not overeating that causes us to get fat, but the process of getting fatter that causes us to overeat?

The more calories we lock away in fat tissue, the fewer there are circulating in the bloodstream to satisfy the body’s requirements. If we look at it this way, it’s a distribution problem: We have an abundance of calories, but they’re in the wrong place. As a result, the body needs to increase its intake. We get hungrier because we’re getting fatter.

It’s like edema, a common medical condition in which fluid leaks from blood vessels into surrounding tissues. No matter how much water they drink, people with edema may experience unquenchable thirst because the fluid doesn’t stay in the blood, where it’s needed. Similarly, when fat cells suck up too much fuel, calories from food promote the growth of fat tissue instead of serving the energy needs of the body, provoking overeating in all but the most disciplined individuals.

We discuss this hypothesis in an article just published in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association. According to this alternative view, factors in the environment have triggered fat cells in our bodies to take in and store excessive amounts of glucose and other calorie-rich compounds. Since fewer calories are available to fuel metabolism, the brain tells the body to increase calorie intake (we feel hungry) and save energy (our metabolism slows down). Eating more solves this problem temporarily but also accelerates weight gain. Cutting calories reverses the weight gain for a short while, making us think we have control over our body weight, but predictably increases hunger and slows metabolism even more.

Consider fever as another analogy. A cold bath will lower body temperature temporarily, but also set off biological responses — like shivering and constriction of blood vessels — that work to heat the body up again. In a sense, the conventional view of obesity as a problem of calorie balance is like conceptualizing fever as a problem of heat balance; technically not wrong, but not very helpful, because it ignores the apparent underlying biological driver of weight gain.
Continue reading the main story

This is why diets that rely on consciously reducing calories don’t usually work. Only one in six overweight and obese adults in a nationwide survey reports ever having maintained a 10 percent weight loss for at least a year. (Even this relatively modest accomplishment may be exaggerated, because people tend to overestimate their successes in self-reported surveys.) In studies by Dr. Rudolph L. Leibel of Columbia and colleagues, when lean and obese research subjects were underfed in order to make them lose 10 to 20 percent of their weight, their hunger increased and metabolism plummeted. Conversely, overfeeding sped up metabolism.

For both over- and under-eating, these responses tend to push weight back to where it started — prompting some obesity researchers to think in terms of a body weight “set point” that seems to be predetermined by our genes.

Read more.- nytimes.com

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lunes, 19 de mayo de 2014

What Causes Obesity?

A team of academic cardiologists published a paper in the April 15, 2014 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, one of the world's most prestigious cardiology journals, entitled "Obesity and Cardiovascular Disease."

One of their conclusions is that: "Progressive declines in physical activity over five decades have occurred and have progressively caused the obesity epidemic." They support this conclusion with data showing that energy expenditure at work and doing household chores has decreased significantly over the last 50 years.

We burn fewer calories on the job and in household chores, and this decrease in caloric expenditure has not been matched by a decrease in caloric intake.

Humans, like every other animal on earth, adjust our energy intake to match our energy expenditure. In his wonderful myth-smashing book Good Calories, Bad Calories, Gary Taubes points out that tailors on average consume 2,500 calories and lumberjacks 4,500.

How could it be otherwise? Imagine an animal in which energy intake and energy expenditure are truly independent of one another. Maintaining a normal weight then becomes a matter of chance. But living organisms must be efficient to survive, and energy balance is at the very heart of this efficient functioning.

That's why it seldom works to tell someone who wants to lose weight to just increase energy expenditure. Just run around the block every morning before work and keep everything else the same and you'll lose weight. It's impossible to keep everything the same. The energy expenditure causes energy depletion, and our brains through a complex cascade of hormones cause us to be hungry and to eat. Even if one can resist the hunger, and most of the time this semi-starvation state cannot be resisted indefinitely, our bodies have other ways of matching energy supply and energy demand.

Use up all of your available energy on that run around the block and your body will find other ways to lower energy consumption, like turning down the little furnaces in your cells a bit or decreasing mental activity. You might not even feel the slight drop in temperature or the slowed brain functioning.

If these academic cardiologists are right and the energy we burn from work and household chores has dropped and we haven't increased our energy demands in other areas, a well-functioning organism should decrease its caloric intake automatically. That's how we do it with thirst and that's how we are supposed to do it with hunger.

Read more.- huffingtorpost.com

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