Obesity is fast becoming one of the most common diseases worldwide. This is especially so in America, where the rates of obesity in statistical surveys by the government shows an increasing trend in overweight adults. Most statistics of obesity around the world are obtained either via patient provided height and weight or actual measurement of height and weight. It is commonly understood that the patient provided data often shows a lower prevalence of obesity compared to the direct height and weight measurement. It is therefore important to know which method was used to collect the statistics. The rate of obesity seems to be increasing in the United States and data suggests that it is more than 15% in almost of the states in the US. An interesting trend though is … Read entire article »

Food addiction is more real than you think.  A study by Yale graduate students reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry that seeing certain food can activate the same areas of the brain as a drug addict sees a drug. This may help explain why it is often hard to lose weight and to combat obesity. The study makes use of the functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) to study areas of the brains that are activated amongst 48 women when they were given a chocolate milkshake or a tasteless liquid and the women were of varying weight and BMI. Milkshake seems to trigger the anterior cingulate cortex and the medial orbitofrontal cortex of the brain. These same areas have been previously studied in drug addicts. The activities in the brain were … Read entire article »

A new study published in the Social Psychology Quarterly found that the more overweight a person is, the more likely he is to feel that he suffers from weight discrimination. Even more interestingly, the more a person feels weight discrimination, the more likely he is to have worse health. The study is based on 1856 people from the National survey of midlife development in the US. Researches from Purdue university have a questionnaire to participants asking them for their height and weight, general health and whether they felt any weight discrimination. The paper postulated that the more obese a person is, the more likely he is to believe that he suffers from weight discrimination. How this believe leads a a health decline is not conclusively decided yet. The take home message from this? … Read entire article »

A study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology found a link between hostility and weight gain. The study was based on 6484 men and women and is an epidemiological study. This study lasted over a period of 19 years. In the study, the participants had their body mass index(BMI) measured at the beginning as a measure of their weight profile. They were also made to do a test which projected the amount of hostility in their personality. The results had 2 interesting results. The group that has higher hostility levels had higher BMI at the start of the study. In addition, this same group also has a higher weight gain over the 19 years of study. If you plan to lose weight, maybe it’s time to be nicer to your colleagues. … Read entire article »