“We found that implantable gastric stimulators induced significant changes in metabolism in brain regions associated with controlling emotions, effectively shutting down these obese subjects’ desire to eat,” said Dr Wang.

The changes were most noticeable in the hippocampus area of the brain. This is linked to emotional behaviour, learning and memory, movement, and processing of sensory information.

Obese may be food junkies

The average cyberchondriac, Harris says, searches the web for information five times a month. But these net users are also becoming more savvy, with the number of people describing the information they find as “very reliable” falling from 37 per cent in 2005 to just 25 per cent this year.

US becomes nation of cyberchondriacs

Under Mr. Burke’s proposal, establishments that failed to remove “artificial trans fats” from their kitchens would be fined $200 to $1,000 a day. In the crowd at the Taste of Chicago on a recent evening, most people seemed amused at the prospect that City Hall might legislate their waistlines. Others chuckled at what they considered naïve earnestness, to think that a city’s long love affair with big, tasty, greasy food could be undone with a simple vote of 50 aldermen (some of whom appear to have some appreciation of the affair).

Chicago Weighs New Prohibition: Bad-for-You Fats

We might ask what kind of society we have created in which so many parents do not control the diet of their own children, and what such a lack of control - surely not confined to diet - bodes for the future. Perhaps parents are just too busy nowadays to make the effort; or perhaps they subscribe to the sentimental (and lazy) idea that to give children what they want exactly when and how they want it is an expression of deep love.

PC Among the Docs

“People love it to eat, and they’re working here. Why would politicians cut them?” he said.

“This is the United States, everyone’s just trying to make money,” said one smoothie-carrying customer.

“I think it’s an absurd solution - not just from the point of individual choice, it just wouldn’t work. If you love fast-food and you’re fat, you’d just go to another neighbourhood - and you probably wouldn’t jog there, you’d probably take a cab,” she told the BBC.

While I’ve felt sad when I’ve seen someone use their Food Stamps or subsidized food EBT card to buy a cart of junk food this kind of restriction of choice will never fly.

Bid to thin out NY fast-food outlets

Brazilian researchers have found that leucine supplements reduced body fat in rats, but Seeley believes that could simply be explained by the rats not liking the taste of the leucine in their diet. (Leucine is found naturally in meat and dairy protein.)

The next big winner in the diet industry could come from micronutrients like amino acids

… One group drank water during the last trimester of pregnancy and then carrot juice during the first two months of lactation; a second group drank carrot juice during pregnancy, and water during lactation; and a third group drank just water during both pregnancy and lactation.

A few weeks after the babies began eating cereal but before they had ever been exposed to the taste of carrots, the researchers videotaped the infants as they were fed cereal prepared with water, then cereal prepared with carrot juice.

They found that infants who had been previously exposed to carrots exhibited fewer negative facial expressions while eating the carrot-flavored cereal compared with the plain cereal, whereas infants in the control group - whose mothers drank only water - displayed no difference. Moreover, those babies exposed to carrots prenatally ate more of, and were perceived to enjoy, the carrot-flavored cereal compared with the cereal and water.

If you want your kids to eat their vegetables, then you better eat yours

Type-2 diabetes – the body’s inability to regulate sugars, largely caused by lifestyle factors such as obesity, inactivity and smoking – is nearing epidemic proportions in the U.S. The Harvard School of Public Health estimates that more than 21 million Americans are currently living with the chronic disease (though up to a third of them don’t know it), while another 41 million have “pre-diabetes.” What’s more, while Type-2 Diabetes is often called “adult-onset” diabetes, about 46% of the overall cases of diabetes currently diagnosed in children are of the “Type-2” classification.

Katherine Mc Phee’s Battle with In a story that appeared this week in People Magazine about the American Idol contestant, Katherine Mc Phee, Katherine disclosed that she has secretly suffered from bulimia for the past five years. It was her success in the competition on television show American Idol that inspired her to come forward and get help to recover. Katherine, a vocalist, who at her worst point was self-inducing vomiting up to seven times a day, claimed that she realized her behaviors were “equivalent to taking a sledgehammer to her throat” and brought herself to treatment.

A martial artist friend came to me a few weeks ago, a little confused about stretching. He’d heard a lot of conflicting information about why, when and how to stretch for maximum benefit, and he wanted to some clear guidance. I’ve since had two other subscribers ask me exactly the same question – which suggests that it’s an excellent topic for a feature article.

WHY STRETCH?

Unless we’re talking about our bodies, and the amount of exercise they can do, we usually talk about being fit in relation to something. An object is ‘fit for use’, clothing is ‘fit to be worn at work’, and food is ‘fit to be eaten’. My parents used to have a running joke that they were fit – fit to drop! Everything else is fit ‘for something’. So why do we insist on describing ourselves as ‘fit’ or ‘unfit’ without relating the concepts to anything else?

Twinkies, they’re not just for dessert anymore. The new Twinkies Cookbook has recipes for everything from a Twinkie Burrito to Twinkie Lasagna.

Theresa Cogswell compiled about 50 recipes for the book.

Twinkie Burritos? Twinkie Lasagna?

An investigation turned up traces of chewing tobacco in the noodles — and led police to 39-year-old wholesale noodle vendor Sieng Seng, who had supplied the shops where people got sick.

Chewing tobacco in noodles sickens 30