Weight Control
Action-Packed Viewing and Mindless Munching
Television viewing may lead to overeating. This has been variously attributed to commercials for appealing, fattening foods or to the sedentary nature of watching TV. Now a small study of 94 college s…
Is White Bread Making You Fat?
Scientists have a new scapegoat in the search for the drivers of the obesity epidemic. A study conducted among more than 9,000 Spanish university students for five years found a link between eating wh…
Added Sugar Makes the Standard American Diet Dan…
Sugar may be an unexpected contributor to death from heart disease. For decades, Americans were told to reduce the amount of fat in their diets. Food companies compensated for the loss of flavor in lo…
Drinking Diet Soda Is Not an Easy Way to Lose We…
For millions of Americans diet soft drinks have seemed like the solution to obesity. The implied promise: Have your cake and eat it too...or more specifically, drink your favorite soda without gaining…
Beware Bogus Weight Loss Products, Says Federal …
While people are still struggling to keep their New Year's resolutions to lose weight, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is trying to make sure supplement companies don't take unfair advantage of the…
New Nordic Diet Offers Another Path to Weight Co…
The Mediterranean diet has gotten a lot of attention in the past few years, but researchers in Denmark say it is not the only way to lose weight and lower blood pressure. In a study of 181 Danes with …
Diet Dictocrats May Have to Eat Their Words
The flip-flop is official. Nuts are no longer bad. Thanks to new research from The New England Journal of Medicine (Nov. 21, 2013), we are now urged to eat nuts daily to reduce our risk of heart disea…
Be Wary of Herb Being Promoted for Weight Loss
Q. Do you have any information about Garcinia cambogia? It is being touted as the next big thing for weight loss. Is there any research to back this up? Any concerns? A. The data to support the effect…
Exercise Intensity Trumps Duration When It Comes…
Exercise is a critical part of the weight loss equation. But those who are pressed for time--and who isn't--should be encouraged by the findings of a new study. 2,200 women and 2,300 men participated …
Diet Soda and Dessert
Diet soda seems like a sensible way to cut calories, but it has been controversial. Some scientists feared that the taste of artificially sweetened beverages would lead people to have a greater intere…
How Dangerous Are Those Extra Pounds?
Americans are being urged to shed pounds, but a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that a little extra weight may offer unexpected health benefits. For the last seve…
Fructose Flies Under the Brain’s Radar
High fructose corn syrup is a popular and inexpensive sweetener used in many processed foods such as breakfast bars, yogurts, bread, lunch meat and soup. It is also widely found in beverages such as j…
Burning Fat with Exercise
Aerobic exercise trumps resistance training for burning fat. Exercise physiologists have been debating the best type of activity for improving weight loss. Now the experiment has been completed and th…
Weight Loss Lowers Inflammation
Losing weight can have unexpected benefits by lowering inflammation throughout the body. There is increasing evidence that belly fat, is metabolically active. By secreting inflammatory compounds this …
Lasting Benefits from Weight Loss Surgery
Gastric bypass surgery can have lasting benefits for weight, metabolism, and overall health, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. There were approximately…
Swedes Did Well with Weight Loss Surgery
These results are consistent with the results from another long-term study of bariatric surgery, the Swedish Obese Subjects study, or SOS. In this project, approximately 2,000 Swedes received bariatri…
Sweet Drinks Connect with Fat Genes
Epidemiologists from Harvard report in The New England Journal of Medicine that an interaction between genes and dietary habits may be contributing to the obesity epidemic. Data on weight, height, swe…
Losing Weight: New Diet Pills or Changing Lifest…
The FDA made headlines this week by approving not one but two new diet pills. Belviq (lorcaserin) and Qsymia (pronounced kyoo-sim-EE-uh and containing phentermine plus topiramate) are the first new we…
Calories Are NOT All the Same
Not all calories are created equal when it comes to weight loss. We have been told for decades that the source of calories doesn't matter. A calorie is a calorie is a calorie. Eat more calories than y…
Scale May Not Tell the Truth on Obesity
The obesity epidemic has public health experts wringing their hands. Now, a new study suggests the situation may be even more dire than they thought. A study of 1,393 New Yorkers compared a common mea…
Chocolate Lovers Weigh Less
Cocoa flavonoids found in chocolate have documented health benefits, such as lower blood pressure, more flexible blood vessels and more sensitive insulin response. Despite these modest but consistent …
Fructose Not to Blame for Obesity
Fructose has taken a lot of blame for the obesity epidemic. High fructose corn syrup is widespread in soft drinks, baked goods, ketchup and other processed foods. Some experts have postulated that fru…
Will Your Diet Make You Fat?
The diet wars are heating up again. This is the time of year that many people want to shed the excess pounds they put on between Thanksgiving and New Years. But should the diet be low or high in prote…
Lower Carb Diets Benefit Girls
The epidemic of childhood obesity has researchers looking for solutions. Researchers at the University of Alabama have found that a low-carbohydrate diet can improve metabolic measures in a group of o…
Changing Behavior Helps Weight Loss
Behavioral therapy helps people lose weight. There are dozens of diets, exercise programs and weight loss formulas to help people shed excess pounds. A new meta-analysis of 58 clinical trials shows th…
Why Do We Get Fat?
For decades we believed the experts when they repeated the mantra: "calories in-calories out." The standard advice has always been to eat less and exercise more if you wanted to lose weight. By counti…
Counting Calories
Some public health experts are hoping that providing restaurant customers with information about the calories in the meals they are ordering will help control obesity. No one knows yet if such a progr…
For Weight Control, Step Away from That Spud
Harvard researchers have advice on how to keep from gaining weight. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine analyzed data collected over two decades from more than 100,000 men and wom…
Diet Soda Doesn’t Aid Weight Loss
Many people drink diet soda with the understanding that this habit will help them lose weight, or at least not put on pounds. Two new studies suggest, however, that they may be disappointed. In one st…
Fat-Free Chips Make Rats Fatter
Americans have been told for years that they can lose weight by cutting the amount of fat they eat. The low-fat food craze of the past two decades has not produced a noticeably thinner population. Nev…
Low-Carb Diet Targets Visceral Fat
Visceral fat wrapped around the organs in the belly is especially harmful to health. Now scientists suggest that a moderate low-carb diet can help get rid of this deep belly fat, even if the person do…
Will Losing Weight Improve Health?
Weight loss is a primary tool in the fight against obesity, but Australian scientists say it is not very effective at improving health. The primary reason is that most people who diet have difficulty …
To Keep Pounds Off, Keep Moving
Middle-aged paunch is a common complaint for men and women alike. More people than ever are now classified as obese, with more than 30 percent of American adults in that category. The CARDIA study, fo…
Best Diet to Maintain Weight Loss
There has been a great deal of controversy about the best diet for weight loss and maintenance. Experts have been debating the pros and cons of high or low protein as well as high or low carbohydrate …
Sleep to Stay Slim
Teens who need to lose weight might start by getting more sleep. A new study has found that adolescents 16 to 19 years old who get less than eight hours sleep most week nights consume more calories. W…
The Atkins Diet Diatribes
We were astonished to discover that the diet dictocrats have so brainwashed the American public that data has been trumped by dogma. We recently interviewed Eric Westman, MD. He is associate professor…
Self-Monitoring Helps Motivated Dieters
Losing weight is one of the more difficult challenges of modern life, but one simple strategy may make a huge difference. Scientists have discovered that motivation is key, but so is a daily diary. Wr…
How Much Exercise Prevents Weight Gain?
A new study from Harvard sheds some light on a perpetual question: how much exercise is needed to avoid gaining weight. More than 30,000 healthy women were surveyed every few years between 1992 and 20…
Will Diet Pill Roulette Put You at Risk?
The season to be jolly is over. Now starts the season to step on the scales. If you are like most people, you've probably added a few pounds between Thanksgiving and New Years. Perhaps you have resolv…
Nurse Support Helps Weight Loss
Women losing weight did just as well with brief support from a nurse as those who got much more intensive sessions with dieticians and personal exercise trainers. The New Zealand scientists randomly a…