obesity

Researchers have been exploring breath tests for all sorts of uses -- from sniffing out everything from lung cancer to heart disease to diabetes. But testing for obesity? Could that really be possible?

According to a new study in the April issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, the bacterial overgrowth that can be caught by a standard breath test may also reveal one's body fat percentage.

Apparently when one's microbiome (the complex infrastructure of good and bad bacteria that live in and on us) gets out of balance, with the bad bacteria outperforming the good, … Read more

Oxford University Ph.D. student Jessica Richman, who today finished raising some $350,000 from more than 2,500 people wanting to take part in the uBiome project, isn't shying away from reality: "Yes, we are going to be sampling people's poo," she told the Guardian this week.

And for the squeamish, she offered an asterisk: "You'll only have to wipe it on the toilet paper."

The uBiome project is a "citizen science" effort to sequence the genomes of the trillions of bacteria that colonize our bodies and likely play pivotal … Read more

Next time you see an obese adolescent, blame the parents. At least that's what researchers at the Imperial College London are suggesting. They have developed a calculator to predict a newborn's chances of developing childhood or adolescent obesity

With only one in 10 cases of obesity being the result of a rare genetic mutation, researchers set out to determine which environmental factors played the largest roles in the development of childhood obesity.

"Once we compare different statistical models, and we added the genetic variants [associated with causing obesity], their ability to explain childhood obesity didn't improve … Read more

High electromagnetic field levels of household appliances (such as washing machines and hair dryers) and wireless devices (such as laptops and routers) may be at least partially to blame for the rise in childhood obesity in recent years, according to a 13-year study by Kaiser Permanente that followed hundreds of pregnant women and 733 of their children.

After controlling for several factors, including child gender, pre-pregnancy BMI, maternal age at delivery, race, education, breastfeeding, and smoking, researchers write in Nature's Scientific Reports that children exposed to high in-utero levels are nearly twice as likely to be overweight or obese … Read more

All fat is not equal. Brown adipose tissue, more commonly called brown fat and abundant in both newborns and hibernating mammals, is the good fat, playing a prominent role in how quickly our bodies burn calories.

Brown fat also produces as much as 300 times more heat than any other tissue in the body, according to scientists at the University of Nottingham, so these scientists have developed a thermal imaging technique to measure not only a person's brown fat stores but also how much heat that fat produces.… Read more

Being obese can bring on a wide range of health complications, some less obvious than others.

So when a physician in Houston asked bioengineering students at Rice University to help relieve his obese patients' burden of breathing during surgery, the idea "sounded a little weird," said senior Norman Truong, according to a press release. But his team, calling themselves R-Aides, took on the challenge.

The resulting device literally lifts the burden obese patients carry on their abdomens during surgery by using a simple suspension device that consists of suction cups attached to a horizontal beam and tied in … Read more

Obesity is a growing problem in the U.S. Just this week, researchers at the American Heart Association projected that by 2020, the vast majority of Americans will be overweight or obese, with more than half of the country either diabetic or pre-diabetic.

Amidst all the bad news, however, researchers at Johns Hopkins University are offering a small ray of light. Their recent study on telephone counseling by health coaches finds it to be just as effective a means of losing weight as more traditional in-person programs.

That's particularly important because in-person programs are, by nature, more time-consuming and … Read more

Some say the those who don't look after themselves are a pox on society. They eat up public resources as they eat their way through cupcake stores and drink their way through to carbonated kingdom come.

However, some of those very same critical people believe gaming is a sport.

So an intrepid university professor took it upon himself to see if he could settle this once and for all. According to the Telegraph, Dominic Micklewright, of the University of Essex in England, tested gamers' physical and physiological condition and compared them with that of, you know, real sports people … Read more

It's been criticized for contributing to the obesity epidemic and condemned by PETA, but now a Burger King franchise in the New York metro area has announced that it wants in on the green movement. The high-traffic restaurant in Hillside, N.J., will install a speed bump designed to harness the kinetic energy produced by the hundreds of cars that pass through the drive-thru daily.

As they wait for their Double Whopper, customers will roll through a section of the drive-thru lane lined with metal plates that move down and up as cars head to the next window. The … Read more