China researchers link obesity to bacteria

China researchers link obesity to bacteria


Chinese Study Finds Intestinal Bacteria Controls Obesity

What would it feel like one day to be vindicated?

I often ponder this, though I find myself doubting it will ever happen in America, where too many of us are just fodder for the profit-mills.

It's interesting the research being done in OTHER COUNTRIES. This one barely hit American news. Hmm wonder why? It made the New York Daily news and UK, but haven't seen it in any other mainstream place. That tells you something does it not?

What is coming through our food? Think about that one. I know in my body there are serious serious mal-absorption problems--I'm low on Vit D, and various Vit Bs with recurring episodes of anemia, and no I never have had weight loss surgery. Some have gotten into the gut flora studies, but it could go even deeper then that. I have my theories, that since human beings have done away with truly fermented foods, and real bacterias digesting things, that people's weights are indeed going up. In other words our foods aren't even being broken down like they once were.

Researchers in Shanghai found that mice bred to be resistant to obesity even when fed high-fat foods became excessively overweight when injected with a kind of human bacteria and subjected to a rich diet.

The bacterium—known as enterobacter—had been linked with obesity after being found in high quantities in the gut of a morbidly obese human volunteer, said the report, written by researchers at Shanghai's Jiaotong University.

The mice were injected with the bacterium for up to 10 weeks as part of the experiment.

The experiments show that the bacterium "may causatively contribute to the development of obesity" in humans, according to the paper published in the peer-reviewed journal of the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISMEJ).

A human patient lost over 30 kilograms in nine weeks after being placed on a diet of "whole grains, traditional Chinese medicinal foods and prebiotics", which reduced the bacterium's presence in the patient's gut to "undetectable" levels, the paper said.

One of the report's authors, Zhao Liping, lost 20 kilograms in two years after adopting a diet of fermented probiotic foods such as bitter melon to adjust the balance of bacteria in his gut, the American magazine Science said in an article this year on his previous research.

Zhao's work on the role of bacteria in obesity is inspired by traditional Chinese beliefs that the gut is the "foundation for human health", Science reported.

The scientists wrote in their latest paper that they "hope to identify more such obesity-inducing bacteria from various human populations" in future research.

Obesity worldwide has more than doubled since 1980, according to the World Health Organisation, with more than 500 million adults worldwide suffering from the condition according to 2008 statistics.

I definitely think they are on to something here.

Scientists Discover Immune Cells Could Protect Against Obesity

Scientists Discover Immune Cells Could Protect Against Obesity

Well wouldn't this make sense if something went awry in the body to begin with, that started the process of piling on the weight and pounds or affected these immune cells to start? How do you lose weight if you do not have the protection of these cells effectively? What would be interesting to know is why these immune cells are depleted to begin with? I found this study via another article but it had so much blathering about how great weight loss surgery was [what happens when the patients regain the weight?] and idiocy about fat people eating bear claws, I bypassed it and went straight to the source.

New research has found that a type of anti-tumour immune cell protects against obesity and the metabolic syndrome that leads to diabetes. Results showing that immune cells known to be protective against malignancy called invariant natural killer T-cells (iNKT), that are lost when humans become obese, but can be restored through weight loss, have been published online this week in the journal Immunity. Marie Curie Fellow, Lydia Lynch at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland made the discovery and as first author in collaboration with colleagues at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, and St Vincent’s University Hospital have shown that therapies that activate iNKT cells could help manage obesity, diabetes, and metabolic disease. 

  iNKT cells had been thought to be rare in humans until work by Dr Lydia Lynch at Trinity College Dublin, Consultant Endocrinologist at St Vincent’s University Hospital Professor Donal O’Shea, and Trinity’s Professor of Comparative Immunology, Cliona O’Farrelly, found they were plentiful in human omental fat. 

  “We then found a large population of iNKT cells in fat tissue from mice,” said Dr Lynch whose Marie Curie Fellowship gave her the opportunity to work with Mark Exley and Steve Balk both assistant professors of medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and leaders in the field of natural killer T-cell (NKT) investigations. “Now we have identified a role for these cells in the regulation of body weight and the metabolic state, likely by regulating inflammation in adipose tissue.” 

The team also discovered that a lipid called alpha-galactosylceramide (aGC) can lead to a dramatic improvement in metabolism, weight loss, and fatty liver disease, and can reverse diabetes by bolstering cells that have been depleted.

Are Antibiotics Making Us Fat?

Antibiotics fuel obesity by creating microbe upheavals

We aren’t single individuals, but colonies of trillions. Our bodies, and our guts in particular, are home to vast swarms of bacteria and other microbes. This “microbiota” helps us to harvest energy from our food by breaking down the complex molecules that our own cells cannot cope with. They build vitamins that we cannot manufacture. They ‘talk to’ our immune system to ensure that it develops correctly, and they prevent invasions from other more harmful microbes. They’re our partners in life.

What happens when we kill them?

Farmers have been doing that experiment in animals for more than 50 years. By feeding low doses of antibiotics to healthy farm animals, they’ve found that they could fatten up their livestock by as much as 15 percent. You can put the antibiotics in their feed or in their water. You can give the drugs to cows, sheep, pigs or chickens. You can try penicillins, or tetracyclines, or many other classes of antibiotics. The effect is the same: more weight.

Consistent though this effect is, no one really understands why it works. The safe bet is that the drugs are exerting their influence by killing off some of the microbiota. Now, Ilseung Cho from the New York University School of Medicine has confirmed that hypothesis. By feeding antibiotics to young mice, he has shown that the drugs drastically change the microscopic communities within their guts, and increase the amount of calories they harvest from food. The result: they became fatter.

Cho exposed young mice to a range of different antibiotics including penicillin, vancomycin, the two together, or chlortetracycline, all at levels that the US Food and Drug Administration approves for use in agriculture. After 7 weeks, the treated mice were no heavier than those that didn’t drink any drugs, but they had more body fat – around 23 percent, compared to a typical 20 percent.

Personally interesting to me, as my chronic bronchitis in my 20s meant a lot of time on antibiotics. I even have had bronchitis this week from a very bad cold. It was chose to go on antibiotics or end up in the hospital, I was coughing up colored phlegm. I tried to delay as long as I could but didn't have many options, this was the first time I had been on antibiotics in a year. I am glad they are studying some of these issues. Obviously finding out that ranchers use antibiotics to fatten up livestock, is pretty disgusting, one wonders how far greed will out weight common sense in this country.

This one is a hard one to deal with. I could have been playing with pneumonia if I didn't take an antibiotic on this go around, obviously I've had my life saved from antibiotics with my horrible infections, but I think the science here has a lot of truth, what is it doing to the gut flora and the utilization of our calories?

Among diabetes patients, the obese outlive the trim

Among diabetes patients, the obese outlive the trim

I am not sure what to make of this study. I always used to hear from a very fat friend that diabetics as they grew more severe LOST WEIGHT. She would tell me, that she saw 500lb people whittle down to very small weights just due to the ravages of diabetes. She knew one brittle diabetic who could barely keep weight on his body. I wasn't sure what to make of that. I wonder if you live long enough with diabetes if it will make you lose weight just due to health. It does seem some diabetes illnesses do make you lose weight in the severe categories as opposed to the insulin resistant-gain weight category. It's a hard one to fathom.

I've been a diabetic for 12 years, My A1C ran around 6.6 this time around. I sometimes do not understand the trajectory of this disease, such as what will I suffer even having kept the sugars in the controlled arena for the last 12 years? They've been controlled except outside of one 4 month period, where I had to add Januvia to the party. I was on Metformin even while just PRE-DIABETIC for the treatment of PCOS. I can still feel my feet and toes. Any diabetics of long duration want to chime in?

Slower Growth Seen In Infants Born To Overweight Mothers

Slower Growth Seen In Infants Born To Overweight Mothers

This study bugs me because they conclude it's the obesity epidemic, rather then going to the root of the problem, which definitely has something to do with the endocrine/hormonal system! They also seem to have the study bias of blaming the fat mother! I know I am not a scientist but I can tell with this particular study they need to dig deeper.

After combing the literature for an explanation, Larson Ode and researchers at the University of Minnesota who assisted in the study think there are two reasons why babies of overweight or obese women lag initially in their physical development. The first deals with inflammation: fat cells that normally help suppress a person's immune system flare up when an adult is overweight, studies have shown. The researchers believes this state of warfare being waged in an overweight/obese pregnant mother's immune system may also inflame the fetus's developing immune system, diverting energy that otherwise would go to the baby's development.

"These (fat tissue-derived) hormones and inflammatory factors tend to have appetite/satiety regulating effects early on, and may exert their negative effects on growth both during gestation and through passage into the breast milk during postnatal development as well," says Ellen Demerath, Larson Ode's advisor at Minnesota and senior author on the paper.

The second cause has to do with how babies grow in the womb. One is through free fatty acids delivered by the mother via a growth hormone called IGF-1. The other is through a growth hormone secreted by the pituitary gland in the baby's brain. The researchers think the cosseted baby is getting so many free fatty acid-derived growth hormones from its overweight mother that the other growth generator - the pituitary gland - slows its production.

Consider what they come up with here, fat mother automatically means more fatty acids?

I have noticed on my own labs that my growth hormone has been LOW for years. Every adult has a set amount. In my case it is not severe enough to warrant meds, well as far as I know...but folks here know I talk about the interchange of the obesity epidemic and outside factors affecting hormonal and endocrine systems. If the adults are low...why wouldn't the children be?

Also why don't they ever question what came first?

The fat or the inflammation. They always assume it's the other way around....

Study: We Believe We're Losing Weight When We're Actually Gaining

Study: We Believe We're Losing Weight When We're Actually Gaining

Hey why wouldn't we? They tell us less food and all this means weight loss, but often it's a joke! How about this scientists? We are told one thing while the body does another?

IMPLICATIONS: "We didn't have the ability to look specifically at the reasons driving these discrepancies," said Dr. Catherine Wetmore, the lead author of the study. "Certainly vanity or optimism could be one, or it could be a real true lack of awareness about what is happening." Regardless of why this is happening, it's clear that the first step in fighting obesity is acceptance. If we believe we're losing weight when we actually aren't, our further health behaviors will be misinformed and potentially harmful.

I think the problem is, all the good behaviors in the world aren't changing the fat and people are being told things, THAT DO NOT WORK IN THE REAL WORLD.

Getting more sleep helps to dampen obesity genes

If you tend towards being fat, never take a third shift job, trust me on that one. Remember my 400lb weight gain, a big chunk of that came when I was put on third shift, I had to take that job or end up homeless....When I was young, I was seriously sleep deprived, too much restaurant work, not enough sleep, and later too many pieced together jobs and bad schedules. This is another reason I think the lower classes tend to be higher in weight.


Getting more sleep could dampen effect of obesity genes

The results suggest that shorter sleep provides a more permissive environment for the expression of obesity related genes,” study leader Dr. Nathaniel Watson said in a statement. “Or it may be that extended sleep is protective by suppressing expression of obesity genes.”

Just how sleep interacts with the body’s weight gain processes remains unknown, but it could have something to do with sleep deprivation triggering a rise in stress hormones that increase appetite, decrease metabolism, and encourage the accumulation of fat around the waist.

What does this mean in a society that prides itself on as little sleep as possible? That is something that definitely needs changed.

"Animals and 6-Month-Old Infants Are Getting Fatter … Which Mean that It’s Something In the Environment"

This is a MUST-READ. Please read the entire article at the link!

These studies prove we are all being bamboozled by the "IT'S YOUR Lack of Willpower!" lies

Animals and 6-Month-Old Infants Are Getting Fatter … Which Mean that It’s Something In the Environment


The animals are getting fatter too!

We’ve extensively documented that toxic chemicals in our food, water and air our causing an epidemic of obesity … even in 6 month old infants.

No matter how lazy and gluttonous adults may have become recently, 6-month-olds can’t be lazy … they can’t even walk, let alone go to the gym.

And 6-month-olds can’t “binge” … Gerber doesn’t make corn dogs or milk chocolate truffles with rum.

The same thing is being observed in animals … hardly your stereotypical couch potatoes.

Specifically, the Proceeding of the Royal Society published a scientific paper in 2010 showing that animals – as well as humans – are getting hit with more obesity:

Another article discussing the fattening of animals including even lab animals who have a controlled diet.

Could Air Pollution Be Making People Fat?

Could air pollution be making people fat?

I don't know this seems like more global warming stuff, but using fat people to advance the cause...

Steadily rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may be affecting brain chemistry, increasing appetite and contributing to the obesity epidemic, according to a new hypothesis, which still awaits rigorous testing and inevitable debate.

The idea proposes that breathing in extra CO2 makes blood more acidic, which in turn causes neurons that regulate appetite, sleep and metabolism to fire more frequently. As a result, we might be eating more, sleeping less and gaining more weight, partly as a result of the air we breathe.

Major studies are in the works to test the hypothesis, which is still very much in the what-if stage. But if the link pans out, the research would offer yet another reason to reduce the CO2 we produce, while also potentially inspiring new obesity treatments.

Wouldn't that mean that people in metro cities would be far fatter then ones in rural and more remote areas? At least this time they aren't blaming the fat people for global warming, remember when they said we were causing them to have to use more gas on airplanes and have turned it around.

I consider global warming a hoax, this year is warm but we froze until May last year. Of course last year in the news, they stuck to the term "climate change" as we dug through a foot of snow, now that we are having a warm spell, they are calling it GLOBAL WARMING again...

Wish they'd make their minds up...

That said, I had an asthma doctor tell me once that people with asthma/COPD, could see their metabolisms drop and have problems losing weight or not gaining because they weren't being oxygenated as well. I can agree that the world is far more polluted, that is for sure, Co2 levels or not.

Are Fido and Fluffy Greedy Gluttons Lacking Willpower?

More than half of America's pets are obese, survey shows

It's the chemicals, people. Dog and cat food is full of so much crud.

I don't think Fido and Fluffy woke up one day, hating exercise, and wanting to get big and fat.

Hmm some think it's from feeding "grains" to dogs and cats. Whoever came up with that bright idea when they all mostly eat meat in the wild?

It's interesting what this vet website says about cats eating too much to get protein out of deficient food.

Video:Are Your Food Allergies Making You Fat?

I found this video interesting...

considering this blog article...

"Food Allergies Related to Obesity? My Food Allergies are Extreme"

I found this video very interesting....

I took his test Is Inflammation Wrecking Your Metabolism?
Thank you for completing the quiz!

Results:

You scored a: 15
You have a relatively high inflammation problem that requires your immediate attention. Do the basic UltraMetabolism program, but customize it using the specific recommendations in the chapter on inflammation. If you score high (7 and above) you would benefit from taking the additional tests noted in that chapter. In addition to further testing, I strongly recommend that you seek professional medical assistance.

Are Chemicals Not Calories Making Us Fat?

Frankly I find calories a joke, even when my eating is reduced from illness, little weight is lost. It is like some "magic" trick they want me to pull off, where these invisible "calories" or lack there of, will supposedly CHANGE MY LIFE. By the way, to the people sending me DIET information:. I can't afford your overpriced stuff, 2. None of it works, 3. I am already on a massively restricted diet due to severe allergies that would probably leave puddles of tears on your epilectic machine.

But I am noticing some theories, I spoke of YEARS ago, hitting mainstream science and research, FINALLY, I wrote THIS years ago...


"Poisoned Endocrine Systems: Bloating Bodies

There is a basic increase in endocrine diseases due to environmental poisonings. Higher estrogen in the environment is leading to smaller sperm counts and now one in every seven couples is infertile. This is something never seen before. Hormonal diseases that used to be rare, like PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome), hypothyroidism and diabetes are now worsening in number. Scientists alone have identified 51 synthetic chemicals in our environment that disrupt hormones. Some mimic estrogen, which is a hormone that adds weight, especially in women, and others conflict with testosterone and thyroid. Among them include everything from PCBs, Dioxin and Furans, many from heavily-used pesticides on our food supply.

Girls are even entering puberty earlier due to these factors, which is leading to higher body weights at early ages. The obesity epidemic has been blamed on higher rates of weight due to the increased insulin (the cart before the horse syndrome again) and leptin from the fat cells. However, the article "Teens Before Their Time" in Time magazine points out:

"The most prominent effect, reported last spring in the Journal of Pediatrics, was the boys exposed to DDE and girls exposed to PCBs were heavier than their unexposed peers at age 14. The study also noted an intriguing fact: girls with high prenatal PCB exposure tended to hit the first stages of puberty a bit earlier than others."

It is pointed out that the sample may be too small statistically but this
certainly needs more investigation. Other researchers are even pointing to plastics.

now on to the article:

"Are Chemicals, Not Calories Making Us Fat?"

YES, DOUBLE YES!

Eat less, move more. That’s been the prevailing weight-loss strategy for years now, but even obesity experts acknowledge that few people who lose weight manage to keep it off.

Meanwhile, in research labs, frogs, mice and zebra fish exposed to minuscule amounts of estrogen replacement drugs, dioxins, bisphenol A and other chemicals are getting fat – very fat.

The phenomenon is so striking that some scientists believe that common chemicals, dubbed obesogens, are messing with our hormonal systems and the natural balance of “calories in, calories out.”

The obesogen theory goes prime time Thursday on the CBC Television series The Nature of Things. In a phone interview, science journalist and filmmaker Bruce Mohun explains the research behind his new documentary, Programmed to be Fat?

We’ve been bombarded with theories about the obesity epidemic, including the idea that antibiotics have disrupted our gut bacteria and made us fat. Why should we pay attention to this one? 

By the way does anyone know if this article hit American news at all?

Study: Hate Your Mom? You Must Be Fat!

"Hating your mother means you're twice as likely to grow up fat"

Children who have a poor emotional relationship with their mother are more than twice as likely to become obese, research claims.

A study found toddlers who struggle with their mothers are at higher risk of being grossly overweight by the time they are 15.

Those who had the worst emotional relationship were almost two-and-half times more likely to be obese at 15 than those with a strong bond.


Having a bad emotional relationship with your mother from an early age doubles your chance of obesity in adolescence

Meanwhile, only 13 per cent who had close bonds in their formative years became obese.

U.S. researchers studied nearly 1,000 toddlers and their mothers at play then rated how strong the bond was between mother and child.

The participants were then assessed for obesity at 15.

The prevalence of obesity in adolescence was 26.1 per cent among children with the poorest early maternal-child relationships according to the research, which will appear in the online Journal of Paediatrics next month.

I wonder how much of this has to do with cortisol levels, certainly if a child has less of a bond with their mother, they are going to be far higher. I have talked about how I think low-level unrelenting stress has jacked up everyone's cortisol levels, so why not in kids who fail to have a bond with their mother? Then there is the implicit fat hatred, I have seen myself mothers who far perfer their thin children opposed to the one who is fat by a young age. Are the bonds of motherhood even affected by societies hatred of that fat in some cases? I guess it depends on the mother and her values, but still remember the day, I saw a mother at a table at a restaurant cooing to a thin daughter and then yelling at a fat daughter, that she was a pig to want a sandwich to go with her bowl of thin soup. One thing that can be hurtful is watching how the thin children are treated in comparison to the fat ones, even via their care-givers.

Can Antibiotics Make you Fat?

"Can Antibiotics Make You Fat"?
This is kind of a shocking article. Remember when I talked about how they were fattening up livestock by the rampant use of antibiotics, sure there is something here...

New research suggests that taking medicine for ear infections might be related to a reckless appetite


Antibiotics have done wonders for extending human life by killing off deadly pathogens. But they target "a particular disease the way a nuclear bomb targets a criminal, causing much collateral damage," says Karen Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times. Incidental victims include a whole host of microbes that actually help us, and "our friendly flora never fully recover," argues New York University microbiologist Martin Blaser in the journal Nature. The unintended targets of antibiotics might also include our waistlines, according to new theories linking the drugs to a sharp rise in obesity. Here's what you need to know:

How do antibiotics hurt us?

Bacteria have lived in and on us as long as there have been humans, creating a symbiotic relationship. But that's changed over the past 80 years, Blaser says, because the development of antibiotics started disrupting the population of mostly beneficial bacteria that help us digest our food, metabolize vitamins and nutrients, and even fight off invading organisms. "Antibiotics kill the bacteria we do want, as well as those we don't," he notes.
And there's evidence of this?

Blaser points to Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium he's worked with for 26 years. Discovered in 1982, H. pylori "has been the dominant ancient organism of the human stomach since time immemorial," he tells The Scientist. Now it's disappearing. In the early 1900s, it thrived in the guts of all people; today, fewer than 6 percent of American, Swedish, and German kids have any trace of H. pylori. A likely cause, says Blaser, is antibiotics: A single course of amoxicillin or other antibiotics used to clear up, say, an ear infection, also wipes out H. pylori up to 50 percent of the time.
Is losing a little bacteria really so bad?

In the case of H. pylori, it appears to be a mixed blessing: The bacterium promotes gastric cancer and ulcers, which have gotten rarer along with the microbe. But Blaser's lab has also shown that kids lacking H. pylori are more prone to asthma, hay fever, and skin allergies. "And H. pylori is just one bacterium!" says Karen Kaplan in the L.A. Times.
Wait, what does this have to do with obesity?

H. pylori also affects the behavior of two stomach-producing hormones that control hunger — ghrelin, which tells the brain you're hungry, and leptin, which tells it you're full. If those hormones are thrown out of balance, your appetite probably is, too. Blaser says the rise in antibiotic use tracks with sharp increases in obesity. (Half of U.S. adults will be obese by 2030, according to a new study published in the journal The Lancet.) That's not proof the two trends are related, he concedes, but it's a fertile path for exploration.

NOW Read this article

"Most Antibiotics Fed To Healthy Livestock" and focus on THE  SENTENCE IN YELLOW..

Well if it fattens the animals up, why not us?

That said antibiotics have saved my life multiple amounts of times, before my weight gain I was on them constantly for chronic bronchitis [sometimes from constant illness I would get] and breathing problems.

New Weight Loss Drug Tested On Monkeys

New diet drug, I don't like the 'attacks blood vessels part"

"Obese Monkey's Lose 11% of their Body Weight"

11% doesn't seem like much, well for someone like me that is 50lbs.

HOUSTON — Obese rhesus monkeys lost on average 11 percent of their body weight after four weeks of treatment with an experimental drug that selectively destroys the blood supply of fat tissue, a research team led by scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center reports in Science Translational Medicine.

Body mass index (BMI) and abdominal circumference (waistline) also were reduced, while all three measures were unchanged in untreated control monkeys. Imaging studies also showed a substantial decrease in body fat among treated animals.

“Development of this compound for human use would provide a non-surgical way to actually reduce accumulated white fat, in contrast to current weight-loss drugs that attempt to control appetite or prevent absorption of dietary fat,” said co-senior author Renata Pasqualini, Ph.D., professor in MD Anderson’s David H. Koch Center for Applied Research of Genitourinary Cancers.

Looks like it attacks the fat itself like an inner lipsuction or something. The blood vessel thing maybe worrisome in long run, but guess we will see.

What is wrong with a FAT CURE?

I am not talking about turning everyone anorexic, but the size acceptance and fat acceptance crowd seem to be angry at me for desiring a fat cure that works. In fact it infuriates them.

As they hit their block buttons or erase my posts or tell me to go away, I have seen that complaint time and time again, "Five Hundred Pound Peep, wants a fat cure! How dare she!".

Hey the world of the midsized where fatness means having to buy your cute clothes at a special store and maybe getting a bit huffy on the third set of stairs, really can't relate to my world.

IF they came up with a fat cure, one that worked and didn't kill, maim, include torture, severe hunger, and worked in the long term, I'd be on it like a mouse on the biggest piece of cheddar cheese. Who could blame me?

They are crazy if they think someone at my weight and who has been near 700lbs, is going to sing the praises of fat

So wonder fat people have it so hard now.....caught between these two ends...

Size Zero Could Be Down To Genes

"Size Zero Could Be Down To Genes"

Show this one to any fat hating skinny people who think they are thin from their "good virtue".

Plenty of genes have been discovered to help explain obesity, but scientists have found that skinny people possess extra copies of extra genes, which could explain their naturally thin frames.

The identified gene is part of a group of 28 genes. In one in 2,000 people, these genes are abnormally duplicated resulting in carriers failing to put on weight as normal.

‘If we can work out why gene duplication in this region causes thinness it might throw up new potential treatments for obesity and appetite disorders,’ says Chief scientist Professor Philippe Froguel from the School of Health at Imperial College London.

‘We now plan to sequence these genes and find out what they do so we can get an idea of which ones are involved in regulating appetite.'

The study found that people with too many copies of these 28 genes tended to be underweight with a body mass index lower than 18.5, instead of a health BMI between 18.5 and 25.

The research throws light on weight issues in children, too. Half of children with the genetic duplication had been diagnosed with a non-specific condition called ‘failure to thrive.’

‘This shows that failure to thrive in childhood can be genetically driven,’ says Professor Froguel. ‘If a child is not eating, it’s not necessarily the parents fault.’

Last year, the same researchers discovered that people with a missing copy of these genes were 43 times more likely to be morbidly obese.

Antibiotic Use May Be Bad for Body's Good Bacteria Equaling Weight Gain and Agricultural Abuses!

"Antibiotic Use May Be Bad for Body's Good Bacteria"

(WebMD) Antibiotic overuse doesn't just lead to drug-resistant superbugs, it may also permanently wipe out the body's good bacteria.


Good bacteria in the gut help people in many ways, including helping make vitamins and boosting immunity. Some researchers think that killing them off with antibiotics may be contributing to rises in chronic health conditions such as obesity, asthma, and cancer.

Antibiotics have saved my life, so I can't totally diss them myself but this is an interesting theory. I was on tons of antibiotics for chronic bronchitis related to severe asthma in my early 20s.

Farmers, for example, discovered decades ago that animals fed small amounts of antibiotics, below the doses used to treat infections, gain more weight.

"That works so well that it accounts for more than half of antibiotic use in the United States," Blaser says. "Since it works in chicken, turkeys, cows, and sheep, I presumed it would work in mice, and it does."

Antibiotics, he thinks, may also be contributing to obesity in humans, though Blaser says no one yet understands how.

Beyond obesity, he says studies have shown that a child's risk for inflammatory bowel disease increases with the number of courses of antibiotics taken

.

I need to look into this, are they feeding our animals antibiotics to get them to gain weight faster?

What do they expect to happen to us since we eat those animals?

OH MY GOODNESS!

"More than 90% of U.S. pig farms, for example, feed the animals antibiotics for such non-treatment reasons as promotion of weight gain"

More on the use of antibiotics on animals for weight gain...

This has been outlawed elsewhere. Even knowing what I know about how superbugs are outdistancing the antibiotics, this disgusts me to no end!!!

As I have talked about on this blog many times, they are doing very very bad things to our food.

Why Diets Don't Work: Starved Brain Cells Eat Themselves, Study Finds

Why Diets Don't Work: Starved Brain Cells Eat Themselves, Study Finds

This seems very interesting, well I always thought obesity is definitely with brain function and not the overly focused on stomach, but of course the entire system is more complex.

A report in the August issue of the Cell Press journal Cell Metabolism might help to explain why it's so frustratingly difficult to stick to a diet. When we don't eat, hunger-inducing neurons in the brain start eating bits of themselves. That act of self-cannibalism turns up a hunger signal to prompt eating.

"A pathway that is really important for every cell to turn over components in a kind of housekeeping process is also required to regulate appetite," said Rajat Singh of Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

The cellular process uncovered in neurons of the brain's hypothalamus is known as autophagy (literally self-eating.) Singh says the new findings in mice suggest that treatments aimed at blocking autophagy may prove useful as hunger-fighting weapons in the war against obesity.

"A Weight Off Your Mind": Australian Writer Confronts the Biased Researchers

I know I have confronted this issue here. "Letter to Obesity Researchers".
I believe us fat people have all been betrayed. Corporate and other interests are wiping out real true help, for profit.

It seems this writer also found out the nefarious connection between the "research" out there and the diet and weight loss surgery industry.

Just last year the Centre for Obesity Research and Education (CORE) - a department of Monash University - published a study that found lap-banding procedures were appropriate interventions for obese teenagers as young as 14. What they didn’t reveal, however, was that the study was funded by Allergan, Australia’s largest manufacturer of lap-banding products. In mid-2010, Allergan sought approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to market lap bands to US teens after sponsoring clinical trials, essentially opening up the global teenage market for profit.

They arrive at this very good question and I've asked it many times on this blog, why do they keep pushing the solutions that do NOT WORK?

What is odd then, is why there seems to be a dialectic approach to obesity. On the one hand, the obesity “experts” don’t have solutions that work long-term for the majority of the population, yet at the same time continue to prescribe their shonky solutions. If Viagra had a 98 per cent failure rate, doctors would not be allowed to prescribe it. Yet most of the time, individuals who cannot “lose the weight and keep it off” are treated like failures, as though they are “not trying damned hard enough” and shamed in hostile programs like The Biggest Loser.

The reality is that obesity research is riddled with conflicts of interest. It’s best to check who funded the research prior to reading it. Obesity research typically does not account for a person’s history of weight cycling, life fitness, stress, socioeconomic status, history of weight loss drugs, and nutrient intake. Is it the case that the solution might be worse than the disease?