A curious — and good — thing has happened on the road to Obesity Nation: the share of the U.S. adult population with high cholesterol has dropped.

Data just out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that only 13.4 percent of adults in this country have high cholesterol, according to data collected in 2009 and 2010.

A decade earlier, 18.3 percent of adults in the U.S. had high cholesterol.

High cholesterol starts at 240 milligrams of cholesterol per deciliter of blood. Having high cholesterol more than doubles the risk of a heart attack compared with desirable total cholesterol, which is less than 200 milligrams per deciliter.

The government had set a public health goal of getting the proportion of adults with high cholesterol down to 17 percent or less by 2010.

Lately, the obesity wave appears to have leveled off, but at a pretty high mark. Some two-thirds of American adults are obese or overweight.

Being overweight can raise your cholesterol. So what gives?

“Experts believe it’s largely because so many Americans take cholesterol-lowering drugs, but dropping smoking rates and other factors also contributed,” the Associated Press reports.

Fat Thanks to Sona S. for the tip!

Americans’ Cholesterol Levels Shrink, Even As Waistlines Expand : Shots – Health Blog : NPR

From dropping off laundry to grabbing some food, people can do pretty much anything at a drive-thru these days.

Now, a Pentecostal church is extending its spiritual services by offering drive-thru prayer once a week, the Sun-Sentinel reports.

Every Friday, just outside the Christian Life Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., volunteers hold placards advertising the prayer offering to commuters.

So far the church has served about 150 people since the program started one month ago, according to the Associated Press.

The volunteers offer to pray with the drivers on any issue, whether it is a bad day, a divorce or a fight with cancer.

Believe it or not, drive-thru prayer isn’t only available in Florida.

The trend also sprung up in Texas, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and California.

Drive-Thru Prayer: Fort Lauderdale Church Connects With Commuters

The maker of Twinkies and Wonder Bread heads to court Tuesday to try to throw out its union contracts, in a battle that leaves the iconic baker’s future very much in doubt.

Hostess Brands, which makes Ding Dongs and a variety of other sweet treats, is asking the bankruptcy court in White Plains, N.Y. to tear up labor agreements, which would, among other things, allow Hostess to change how it funds union pensions. The hearing is expected to last two days.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, together represent more than three-quarters of the 18,500 workers at the company.

The Teamsters have vowed to strike if the judge agrees with management’s request and dumps the labor deals.

But both management and the unions agree that the company is unlikely to survive a strike.

“We would no longer have cash to keep operating,” said Hostess management in a letter sent to employees on Monday. “All Hostess Brands operations would shut down and liquidation would begin. The 18,500 jobs, plus the health insurance that comes with them, would be lost for good.”

The company filed for bankruptcy in January, it’s second trip to bankruptcy court since 2004. And management has said that the investors who are financing the company during bankruptcy would pull out if there is a strike.

Strike threat at Hostess could kill off Twinkies – Apr. 17, 2012

Brides-to-be looking to shed that final 10, 15 or 20 pounds in order to fit into their dream wedding gown have taken a controversial approach to crash dieting that involves inserting a feeding tube into their noses for up to 10 days for a quick fix to rapid weight loss.

The K-E diet, which boasts promises of shedding 20 pounds in 10 days, is an increasingly popular alternative to ordinary calorie-counting programs. The program has dieters inserting a feeding tube into their nose that runs to the stomach. They’re fed a constant slow drip of protein and fat, mixed with water, which contains zero carbohydrates and totals 800 calories a day. Body fat is burned off through a process called ketosis, which leaves muscle intact, Dr. Oliver Di Pietro of Bay Harbor Islands, Fla., said.

“It is a hunger-free, effective way of dieting,” Di Pietro said. “Within a few hours and your hunger and appetite go away completely, so patients are actually not hungry at all for the whole 10 days. Thats what is so amazing about this diet.”

Di Pietro says patients are under a doctors supervision, although theyre not hospitalized during the dieting process. Instead, they carry the food solution with them, in a bag, like a purse, keeping the tube in their nose for 10 days straight. Di Pietro says there are few side effects.

“The main side effects are bad breath; there is some constipation because there is no fiber in the food,” he said.

The K-E Diet: Brides-to-Be Using Feeding Tubes to Rapidly Shed Pounds – Yahoo!

Kids are getting fatter, and many will have to do some serious calorie cutting to avoid that fate as they grow up.

Thats the grim news from a new study that looks at how children have become heaver since 1971. Its not news that the number of obese children has doubled since the 1970s, with 1 in 6 now officially obese.

Whats new is that these researchers calculated just how much less a child would have to eat on average to stop the trend towards obesity.

Lets do the math.

According to this new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, children and teens need to cut their calorie intake by 41 calories a day, to stop the weight gain trend. Otherwise, children and teens will weigh about four pounds more across the board.

But theyd have to cut those calories just to stop getting heavier. The federal government really wants children to be slimmer than they are now. The feds originally wanted to lower obesity rates so that just 5 percent of children were obese in 2010, the same percentage as back in the 1970s.

To reach the 5 percent goal, Americas children would have had to have cut an average of 120 calories a day – 33 calories for preschoolers, 149 calories for grade-schoolers, and 177 calories a day for teens.

Fat Thanks to Sona S. for the tip!

Kids Will Have To Cut Serious Calories To Halt Obesity Trend : The Salt : NPR

Children who are overweight or obese may miss more days of school than their normal-weight peers, a study finds.

A study published online recently in the International Journal of Obesity looked at absenteeism rates among 1,387 children age 6 to 11 and 2,185 teens age 12 to 18. Among all the study participants about 16% were overweight and about 19% were obese according to their body mass index.

When researchers looked at school days missed in the past year they saw no significant differences among the weight groups. However, the odds of missing two or more days per month doubled and quadrupled for overweight and obese children, respectively. The same was not seen among teens.

Although the study didn’t give definitive explanations as to why overweight kids miss more days of school than normal-weight children, the authors offered some theories. The missed days, they said, could be indicative of parents’ mental illness or socioeconomic status. But if weight is the reason kids are missing school, a number of factors could be to blame, including a fear of being bullied, of being teased, or of being embarrassed about participating in physical activities.

Fat Thanks to Sona S. for the tip!

Childhood obesity may be linked with missing more days of school – latimes.com

As if the nations weight problems were not daunting enough, a new study has found that the body mass index, the 180-year-old formula used to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy weight, may be incorrectly classifying about half of women and just over 20% of men as being the picture of health when their body-fat composition suggests they are obese.

The study, published Monday in the journal PLoS One, uses a patients ratio of fat to lean muscle mass as the “gold standard” for detecting obesity and suggests that it could be a better bellwether of an individuals risk for health problems.

The researchers suggested that body fat would predict individuals health risks better than the BMI. To measure fatness, they used a costly diagnostic test called dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, or DXA, and calculated subjects level of obesity based on fat-composition standards used by the American Society of Bariatric Physicians.

The results also suggest that the BMI is a poor measure of fatness in men — but not always in a way that underestimates their obesity. In all, 20% of the studys men shifted from normal and healthy into the obese column under the new measure. But far more frequently than was the case among women, men who were obese by the BMI standard were reclassified as normal and healthy when they were measured with the DXA.

Though men fared better than women under the proposed new standard, the resulting picture is uniformly grim, according to the studys authors, Dr. Nirav R. Shah, New Yorks state commissioner of health, and Dr. Eric Braverman, a New York City internist in private practice.

Fat Thanks to Sona S. for the tip!

Americans may be more obese than they think, researchers say – latimes.com

Babies are being medicated in the womb in an attempt to prevent them from being  born obese.

In a world first, dangerously overweight mothers-to-be in four British cities have started taking a diabetes drug during their pregnancy.

The doctors behind the controversial NHS trial say that obesity among pregnant women is reaching epidemic proportions and they need to act now to protect the health of tomorrows children.

However, there is likely to be unease about resorting to medication in pregnancy for a problem that can be treated through changes in diet and exercise.

If the strategy is a success, the treatment could be in widespread use in as little as five years, with tens of thousands of overweight but otherwise healthy mothers-to-be drugged each year.

The Daily Mail recently revealed the rise of the sumo baby, with the number of newborns weighing more than 11lb soaring by 50 per cent over the last four years.

More than 15 per cent of pregnant women are obese. This raises their odds of dying in pregnancy, of their baby being stillborn and of a host of pregnancy complications, some of which can be fatal.

Babies treated in the womb for obesity: Overweight mothers-to-be get diabetes pill to cut the risk of having a fat child | Mail Online