 Recently, I was speaking with a student about income and weight in the United States, and he described the difference he saw between his hometown in rural California, where many people appeared obese, and Cambridge (and especially Harvard), where seeing someone with overweight or obesity was a rarity. While it’s true that in the United States, socioeconomic status and rates of obesity tend to be inversely related – with lower-income groups tending to have higher obesity rates, and vice versa – other, rapidly developing countries are wrestling with high rates of both underweight and obesity, also known as the dual burden.
0 Comments
 Obesity is one of the greatest current public health concerns, as it is a major risk factor for metabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic syndrome, which is a cluster of risk factors that raises risk for heart disease and other health problems.
 We’ve all heard why eating non-organic animal products is a bad idea: the animals may be raised in poor conditions, industrial agriculture produces large amounts of air and water pollution, it’s a leading cause of deforestation in the U.S., and the animals may be fed antibiotics.
 In my last blog entry, I highlighted how the high fat/low carb Inuit diet could counter-intuitively be healthy for its adherents. One of my students read the article and asked me if I knew anything about the (also) high-fat, low-carb ketogenic diet. Sometimes used as a treatment for pediatric epilepsy, the diet has also become increasingly popular not just for weight loss, but to change body composition - that is, to increase muscle mass and decrease body fat percentage. The student asked me if the ketogenic diet could do that in a safe way for a young person like him.
 It’s hard to go too long in today’s 24-hour news cycle without seeing headlines announcing the “latest scientific report” on weight loss, fad diets, or why the health trend of the moment is the best thing you never knew about. And as exciting as many of these news reports seem at first, these research headlines are often a sugar-coated version of the real story. And the outcomes of these studies may not even be the most important part.
|
RSS Feed
©2017 WeighingInBlog. All rights reserved. 401 Park Drive, Boston, MA