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It's something you learn right away at just about any weight loss control program. If you leave the chips out, you're going to want to eat them. Now a new study confirms it.  According to newswise.com, keeping foods visible throughout the house leads to obesity. The Ohio State University study focused primarily on determining whether the home environment – architectural features and food storage and availability – was associated with obesity, but also measured a number of psychological factors. While architectural features had no relationship to obesity status, several food-related findings did. People in the study who were obese kept more food visible throughout the house and generally ate less-healthy foods, such as sweets, than non-obese research participants. The two groups spent about the same amount of money on food and reported eating similar amounts of total calories, but non-obese participants spent less on fast food than did obese individuals. That...

Figures.  I just finished writing about how weight loss devices don't help you lose weight.  And now experts are saying cell phones can do the trick. That's because cell phones can besiege you with reminder texts about losing weight and maintaining it.   I say "besiege" because that's the absolute last thing I would want from my phone.  (I barely tolerate the texts from my friends.) “In conjunction with reducing caloric intake and increasing physical activity, mobile messaging services could help to maintain and sustain weight loss over time,” says Tanika Kelly, associate professor of epidemiology at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, who did a study on this.   “It reminds us to continue our good behaviors.” In the study, done in China (where, admittedly, not too many people are overweight), those who got weight loss reminders and encouragement over their phones lost 3 pounds more than those who did not.  That may...

I knew I shouldn't have binged on those Real Housewife shows.  All that drama and name-calling and bitchiness.   Not to mention the ones who hated each other. But now there's a reason it's a good idea to turn off these shows.  A new study says they can make you gain weight. According to newswise.com, the study finds that fast-paced television programs might lead people to eat twice as much food. “More stimulating programs that are fast paced and include many camera cuts, really draw you in and distract you from what you’re eating,” said lead author Aner Tal, post-doctoral researcher at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab at newswise.com. “They can make you eat more because you’re paying less attention to how much you are putting in your mouth.” An increasing amount of research shows an association between TV viewing and higher food consumption and a more sedentary lifestyle.   I have to admit the housewives make me depressed -- all that money a...

I live in an area (Fairfield County) where shops display dresses that are the size of dolls.  Yet women in this community fit into them, easily. Not me.  I couldn't get a toe through the leg of some of the slacks.  But a new study has found that where you live matters in the relationship between obesity and satisfaction. A new study suggests that how one compares weight-wise with others in his or her community plays a key role in determining how satisfied the person is with his or her life, according to newswise.com. “The most interesting finding for us was that, in U.S. counties where obesity is particularly prevalent, being obese has very little negative effect on one’s life satisfaction,” said study co-author Philip M. Pendergast, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder at the Web site. “In addition, we found that being ‘normal weight’ has little benefit in counties where obesity is especially common. This illustrates the im...

Great.  Now I have to worry about my cholesterol medicine making me fat. A new study has found that people who take statins tend to eat more calories and fat than those who do not. According to newswise.com, "p eople who take statin drugs to lower their cholesterol appear to have developed a false sense of security that could lead to heart disease and other obesity-related illnesses." That's because a  new UCLA-led study suggests that people who took statins in 2009–2010 were consuming more calories and fat than those who used statins 10 years earlier. There was no similar increase in caloric and fat intake among non–stain users during that decade, researchers said. In 1999–2000, statin users were consuming fewer calories and less fat than individuals who didn't take these medications, the Web site reports, but that is no longer the case. "Increases in body mass index — a measure of obesity that considers body weight and height — were greater for statin-u...

Hooray!  R ecent studies have indicated that many people with B.M.I. levels at the low end of normal  are less healthy than those now considered overweight , blogs Jane E. Brody at The New York Times. And some people who are overly fat according to their B.M.I. are just as healthy as those considered to be of normal weight, as discussed in a new book, “The Obesity Paradox,” by Dr. Carl J. Lavie, a cardiologist in New Orleans, and Kristin Loberg, she reports. My B.M.I. has long been too high so I've never paid too much attention to it, losing 20 pounds recently and upping my exercise quotient significantly.  So what if the number's too big? Now it looks like some pros are agreeing with me.   Recent studies have " prompted many to question the real meaning  of B.M.I. and to note its potential drawbacks: labeling some healthy people as overweight or obese who are not overly fat, and failing to distinguish between dangerous and innocuous distributions of bod...

Eat an egg.  Chew a cheese stick.  Swallow a hunk of steak.  Then, go exercise. Experts are now promising that some women who do this will lose more weight, or lose it faster.   According to newswise.com, "A  high-protein meal followed by 30 minutes of moderate exercise is an effective way of burning calories, especially when compared to exercising on an empty stomach." I was actually told this several years ago when I had a trainer for three months.  He suggested I eat something, anything, before I went for my jog.  I usually picked fruit and I can't say it helped me lose much weight (maybe I chose the wrong thing).  The idea? You will exercise longer and tire less, if you have food in your stomach.  But this new study found something else. “We looked at the effects of protein consumption alone on total energy expenditure, and protein consumption combined with exercise,” newswise quotes  Ashley Binns, a doctoral student in kine...

I read this list with some trepidation.  What am I eating that I thought was good for losing weight that really isn't (though the scale probably tells me, anyway)? According to Greg Presto at yahoo health, the list contains some foods that are obvious, and others that aren't. Like, take, for example, Dannon Light&Fit yogurt.  I live on the Greek kind (hope that's not next!), but this one, says Presto, takes t he "light" part--removing the fat from the yogurt--a step that actually makes it less satisfying, "so you're bound to be starving an hour after eating." What's worse is the fat is replaced with sugar, 16 grams of carbs, 11 of which are, you guessed it, sugar. That's a popular trick of many "light" foods. They have to make it taste good somehow. Next foe of diets: instant breakfast drinks.  More than 50% of their ingredients are, yes, again, sugar. " This super-sweet beverage can actually make you hungrier,...

Imagine this. You can lose weight by using your nose. Researchers have found that humans can use smell to detect dietary levels of fat, according to newswise.com.  As food smell almost always is detected before taste, the findings identify one of the first sensory qualities that signals whether a food contains fat. Innovative methods using odor to make low-fat foods more palatable could someday aid public health efforts to reduce dietary fat intake. “The human sense of smell is far better at guiding us through our everyday lives than we give it credit for,” said senior author Johan Lundström, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist at Monell at newswise.com. “That we have the ability to detect and discriminate minute differences in the fat content of our food suggests that this ability must have had considerable evolutionary importance.”   The reason?  " As the most calorically dense nutrient, fat has been a desired energy source across much of human evolution," the Web ...

Fast food restaurants for some time have posted calorie contents on their burgers and fries so you know what you're eating and can make good decisions.  But now experts are saying that nutrition guidelines are needed for full-service restaurants, as well. For example, did you know that Outback slathers your steak with butter before grilling it?   Food prepared away from home is typically higher in calories and lower in nutrition than food prepared at home, but it now makes up more than one-third of all calories purchased in the United States, according to newswise.com.  Now we can see why. "Consumers tend to view full-service restaurants as providing healthier, higher quality food than fast-food restaurants, but some studies have found much higher calorie, fat, and sodium levels in food at full-service restaurants," the Website reports. Nutrition information provided at full-service restaurants has lagged behind fast-food restaurants. “The need to educate custome...

OK.  What's the biggest cause of cancer?  If you guessed smoking, you'd be right.  But if you guessed meat , you'd be right, too. A multicountry study just published finds that smoking, diets rich in animal products, and alcohol have the strongest correlations with cancer incidence rates, according to newswise.com.   This study is an ecological study in which incidence rates for the various types of cancer for males and females from 87 countries with high quality cancer incidence rate data as well as all 157 countries with cancer incidence rate data were compared statistically with indices for various risk modifying factors.' The animal products index included meat, milk, fish, and eggs.  "For the 87 countries with high quality cancer data, the smoking and animal products indices explained over half of the cancer incidence rates, with alcoholic beverage supply explaining a smaller amount," newswise.com reports.  Surprisingly, in men, the smoking ind...

Quick.  Would you pick a creamy milkshake over a Big Mac?  A bag of M&Ms over macaroni and cheese? A red velvet cupcake with gobs of icing over a hotdog loaded with sauerkraut? If so, you've just proved a new theory.   Sugar wins out over fat every time. According to Anahad O'Connor at The New York Times, " An intriguing new study suggests that what really draws people to such treats, and prompts them to eat much more than perhaps they know they should, is not the fat that they contain, but primarily the sugar." She notes that new research tracked brain activity in more than 100 high school students as they drank chocolate-flavored milkshakes that had the same amount of calories but were either high in sugar and low in fat, or vice versa. "While both kinds of shakes lit up pleasure centers in the brain, those that were high in sugar did so far more effectively, firing up a food-reward network that plays a role in compulsive eating," she reports. ...

Sounds like stealing a car and then being invited to join a country club.  But studies are now showing that people who are fat -- and fit -- are no more unhealthy than people who are skinny and fit (well, maybe, thin and fit). The study, done by researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital's Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, tracked more than 60,000 participants' weights and metabolic health. In each of the eight studies, participants were followed up after an extended period of time -- ranging from three to 30 years -- to see if they had either died or had a stroke or heart attack during the intervening years, according to Anna Almendraia at the Huffington Post. "Overweight and healthy is not too good to be true in the context of this study," she writes. She points to news reports on major media, including NBC News and NPR, which stated the exact opposite this week and calls them out on it. "NBC's headline -- 'New Research Dispute...

OK, so they got rid of the cheesy pizzas and french fries and fried chicken.  But what about the chocolate cake? A new study has found that while school lunch programs have indeed dropped most of the fatty foods, they've done nothing about the sugar. philly.com reports, "The federal government caps the amount of fat and salt in breakfasts and lunches. It sets minimum standards for servings of fruit, vegetables, grains, milk and meat. But one widely used and often-overused product has no official limits: sugar." And here's a chilling thought: do the feds not focus on sugar because of its powerful lobbyists? According to the Web site, recent research shows that sugar levels in school meals are more than double what is recommended for the general public. "Elementary school lunch menus contain 115 percent of the recommended daily calories from added sugars and fats, according to a November study by the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service." And mid...

What now?  We've been told and told to stay away from fat .  But now scientists are finding that a certain kind of fat can help raise metabolisms, to burn more calories. In mice. According to newswise.com, scientists looked into why "skeletal muscles of obese people contained a certain type of enzyme that breaks down saturated fats." So researchers used a transgenic mouse model (one that's had DNA from a different animal injected into it), and we took the gene that makes the enzyme that’s not normally expressed and took away it’s regulation to make it active all the time,” newswise.com quotes Chad Paton, an assistant professor of nutritional biochemistry in the Department of Nutrition, Hospitality and Retailing. “What we found in those animals is they had a hypermetabolic rate compared to the wild mice, increased energy consumption and greatly increased these animals’ exercise capacity.” The enzyme apparently "converts saturated fat into monounsaturated f...

I hate to say it. You couldn't prove it by me. But the CDC says childhood obesity is dropping and they have the study to prove it. But in 18 states, there were at least slight drops in obesity for low-income preschoolers, health officials said Tuesday, according to the Associated Press. But the news may not be quite as good as it sounds.  Basically, what the CDC found that obesity rates are staying flat, just not increasing.  "However, a few places — Philadelphia, New York City and Mississippi — reported improvements in the last couple of years. But the report from the Centers for Disease and Control Prevention shows signs of wider-ranging progress," the AP reports. "Now, for the first time, we're seeing a significant decrease in childhood obesity" nationally, Dr. Thomas Frieden, CDC director, told the AP. But rates are still too high, he added. One in 8 preschoolers is obese in the United States, and it's even more common in black and Hispanic k...

You're not going to believe this.  After all my posts about obesity, especially in kids, a new report came out today that it's actually going down. According to Lydia DePillis at The Washington Post, "Obesity rates are leveling off and even dropping, in a sign that the public health crisis of the moment may have eased." Reductions in childhood obesity were seen in New York and Philadelphia, two of the cities where it hit hardest, perhaps because of the numbers of poor who live near fast food restaurants, who, other studies have shown, tend to be heavier, most likely because of the proximity (and low prices). But Mississippi beats them both, achieving an impressive drop from 43.9% of children being obese and overweight in 2005 to 40.9% in 2011, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, as referenced by DePillis.  That may not sound like much but we're talking 90,000 kids. DePillis also noted in her story that "an April 2013 analysis showed tha...

O.K.  So now they're making heavy people pay more for airline seats.  But now your boss may also make you pay.  OMG, can't we just be fat in peace? According to a story in today's Wall Street Journal, any man with a waist over 40 inches may wind up eating more of his employer's health care costs, shelling out more for health insurance.  The idea is to penalize people for thick waists and high blood pressure, two of the largest health concerns that cost companies the most, and that you can do something about. Theoretically. It makes sense to try to get people to live healthier lives, not just to save money but to help them live longer, too.  But along with NYC's Mayor Michael Bloomberg outlawing Big Gulps (at least, until the courts got their hands on him), and maybe salt, too, the world seems to be deciding more and more the price for being, shall we say, overweight? It's not just having to bear models with their hip bones sticking out and a constant par...

According to a WSJ story, residents of Boston opted to try to lose one million pounds last year.  Big surprise. They didn't.  As the story points out, an exercise class started in June gave way to an all-you-can-eat ice cream bonanza. Guess which one won? I'm as stumped as the next one about losing weight.  I've made my goal THREE times at Weight Watchers and am now going for a fourth.  The trick isn't losing it; it's keeping it off. A very sad fact notes that 95 percent of people who lose weight gain it all (and more) back. So Boston, we understand.  Maybe next year. . . http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324468104578245650625969038.html

Curious about the calories in your (butter-covered) steak at Outback?  (I was shocked to learn that that's indeed why those steaks taste so good.) You won't be finding out anytime soon, thanks to the power of the massive food and restaurant lobby, who don't really want you to know.  http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/some-lobbyists-resist-straight-skinny-on-calories-86418.html