Watch what you order

Food choices when eating out can make a big difference to one’s weight. The BMI of those eating three to six fast-food meals per week was significantly greater than the BMI of those who reported never eating
fast-food meals or eating one to two fast-food meals per week. A Temple University analysis (2004-2006) also found that Americans are less willing to pay more for healthy dishes, less knowledgeable about healthy menu items, and more likely to consider healthy items bland-tasting than they were three years ago.

Source:
Medical News Today (October 23, 2007)

Some U.S. corporations are offering cash incentives in wellness plans in hopes of reducing health care costs related to obesity. RTI International found that the more money people were paid to lose weight, the more weight they lost. In the study, people were paid either nothing, $7 or $14 per percentage point of body weight they lost. After three months, people who received no incentive lost an average of two pounds, while the $7 group lost about three pounds and the $14 group lost five pounds and were five times more likely than those receiving no incentive to lose 5% of their body weight.

Source:
Medical News Today (November 13, 2007)

Men and women who eat in response to emotional issues lose less weight and regain more weight than those who eat in response to external factors (such as social events). Researchers say, “Modifying our treatments to address these triggers for unhealthy eating and helping patients learn alternative strategies could improve their ability to maintain weight loss behavior, even in the face of affective and cognitive difficulties.” Research was led by the Miriam Hospital’s Weight control and Diabetes Research Center and published in the October 2007 issue of Obesity.

Source:
Medical News Today
(November 9, 2007)

A new report documents obesity as a worldwide pandemic with global implications for health and disease. In one of the largest studies ever to examine obesity rates across the globe, researchers found that more than 60% of men and 50% of women were either overweight or obese.

That’s one-half to almost two-thirds of the overall study population being overweight or obese, says researchers of the French health service INSERM. The study involved 69,049 men and 98,750 women from 63 countries across five continents who were evaluated by their primary care doctors for body weight, height, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and waist circumference. The U.S.— where over two-thirds of the population is overweight — was not included in the study, which was published in the October issue of the American Heart Association journal Circulation.

Source:
WebMD Medical News (October 22, 2007)