Legislating Away Obesity? | Dr. Sharma's Obesity Notes

Today is the beginning of the 2nd National Obesity Summit hosted by the Canadian Obesity Network in partnership with the Canadian Association of Bariatric Physicians and Surgeons and the Coalition Poids here in Montreal.

Over the next five days, almost a 1000 researchers, clinicians, policy makers and other stakeholders from across Canada will be discussing the latest in obesity prevention and management.

Just in time for this meeting, the Canadian Medical Association Journal released an article by Mark Eisenberg and colleagues from Montreal’s McGill University on legislative approaches to tackling the obesity epidemic - a topic that will be broadly discussed and addressed at this Summit.

In their paper, the authors present a comprehensive look at the many legislative instruments that policy makers could potentially use to address the obesity problem at a population and individual level.

The paper looks at a wide range of legislative initiatives including taxation and bans of ‘obesogenic’ foods, changing the built environment to promote active transportation, introducing school and workplace programs, and addressing advertising to children - i.e. is the full complement of topics that are generally looked at in ‘policy’ discussions on this topic.

via drsharma.ca

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Canadian kids get failing grade for physical activity - CTV News

Canadian schoolchildren are getting poor grades over how much, or how little, physical activity they get on a daily basis.

Active Healthy Kids Canada issued its 2011 Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth Tuesday, and Canadian youth received an "F" for how much so-called "active play" they engage in every day.

According to the report card, only seven per cent of Canadian youth and children get the recommended 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per day. Only nine per cent of boys and a mere four per cent of girls meet the guidelines, the report said.

During the after-school period between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m., Canadian kids are getting only 14 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise.

Dr. Mark Tremblay, Chief Scientific Officer of Active Healthy Kids Canada, told CTV.ca that the after-school period is one of the best times for kids to engage in physical activity.

"They need a break from school after sitting in classes for six or seven hours," he said. "It's a time when everybody is out and about, it's still light out so it is safer than other times of the day."

He says kids should be making a remarkable change to the typical pattern of coming home, sitting in front of the couch, watching TV and engaging in other sedentary activities.

"Focusing on the after-school period as a window of opportunity to try to overcome inactivity in children and the obesity crisis we're seeing is worth exploring."

via ctv.ca

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I can't imagine American Kids are doing much better.

See also: http://www.nursefriendly.com/obesity/

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Contagious Habits: How Obesity Spreads | Wired Science | Wired.com

• By Jonah Lehrer
• April 19, 2011  | 
• 2:06 pm  | 
• Categories: Frontal Cortex, Science Blogs

A few years ago, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler made a striking discovery about obesity: it spreads from person to person, much like a contagious virus. They were able to demonstrate this by mining the data sets of the Framingham Heart Study (FHS), a longitudinal survey that has revealed many of the risk factors underlying cardiovascular disease. Because the FHS noted each participant’s close friends, colleagues, and family members, Christakis and Fowler were able to recreate the social network of the town, to see how everyone was connected to everyone else.

And this is when they made their remarkable discovery about weight gain. According to the data, if one person became obese, the likelihood that his friend would follow suit increased by 57 percent. (This means that the network is far more predictive of obesity than the presence of genes associated with the condition.) If a sibling became obese, the chance that another sibling would become obese increased by 40%, while an obese spouse increased the likelihood that the other spouse would become obese increased by 37%.

The Christakis/Fowler work is an important reminder that Donne was right: No man is an island/entire of itself. Instead, we are all plugged into a vast network of social contacts and cultural norms. While we think ourselves as autonomous individuals, that autonomy is severely constrained by those around us.

But this longitudinal data – it’s a bird’s eye view of human life – still begs the question: How do other people influence us? Why does an obese friend make us so much more likely to gain weight? Why do the habits of others influence our own habits?

via m.wired.com

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Obesity In Childhood Leads To Poor Posture And Back Pain

Being overweight as a child and adolescent can lead to poor postures linked to back pain, according to new research by Curtin University's School of Physiotherapy, the Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute and the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research.

The research team compared the Body Mass Index (BMI, a common benchmark for obesity), of 1,373 children from the long-term Raine Study over a period of 12 years (from the age of three to 14) with specific standing postures measured at age 14

via medicalnewstoday.com

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