Juice exudes health and vitality. It is officially one of your ‘five-a-day’. It’s what they sell in juice bars, those yogafied temples of wheatgrass.

But fruit juice is also, according to the American obesity expert Robert Lustig, basically just sugar and is therefore, in his view, a ‘poison’. Lustig is the author of Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth about Sugar (4th Estate, £13.99), published earlier this year. He sees sugar as the major culprit in the obesity crisis. Not so surprising, except for his shock revelation that the worst sugars may be those that appear the healthiest. ‘Calorie for calorie, 100 per cent orange juice is worse for you’ than sugary sodas, Lustig says.

This sounds alarmist, until you read some of the case studies from Lustig’s childhood obesity clinic in San Francisco. One eight-year-old already has high blood pressure, thanks to a three-glasses-a-day juice habit. A six-year-old Latino boy comes to the clinic weighing 100lb, ‘wider than he is tall’. His mother, a poor farm worker, has been letting him drink a gallon of juice a day because a government welfare programme gives them the juice for free.

Obviously, most of us drink nothing like a gallon of juice a day. But our juice portions are still out of whack. Over the past 30 years consumption of fructose – the sugar in juice – has more than doubled. Juice didn’t used to be seen as something with which you quenched your thirst; it was more like a vitamin shot, a tiny dose of goodness. A book from the 1920s on feeding children by L Emmett Holt says that you should give toddlers just one to four tablespoons (15-60ml) of fresh orange or peach juice. Compare this with today’s 200ml children’s juice boxes, which contain about 17g sugar, the equivalent of more than four teaspoons.

The biggest problem with juice, as far as Lustig is concerned, is the lack of fibre. When you eat a whole apple, the sugar is ‘nicely balanced’ by the fibre, giving ‘the liver a chance to fully metabolise what’s coming in’. When you down half a pint of apple juice it ‘brings a huge dose of energy straight to the liver’. Smoothies are not much better, no matter how pretty the packaging, because when fruit is blended the insoluble fibre is ‘torn to smithereens’.

Is fruit juice bad for your health? – Telegraph

Preschool parents take note: If your kid is clamoring for a daily hit of soda, sugary sports drinks, or fruit drink, you may want to just say no.

Young children who drink sugar sweetened beverages every day are more likely to be obese than their non-sugary-drink-guzzling friends, according to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics.

While this may seem self-evident, some previous reports that looked at a smaller group of preschool-aged children had not seen the same correlation.

Sugary drinks cause weight gain in preschoolers, study finds – latimes.com

When mice were fed a diet that was 25% added sugars – an amount consumed by many humans – the females died at twice the normal rate and the males were less likely to reproduce and hold territory, scientists said in a study published Tuesday.

The study shows “that added sugar consumed at concentrations currently considered safe exerts dramatic impacts on mammalian health,” the researchers said in the study, published in the journal Nature Communications. “Many researchers have already made calls for reevaluation of these safe levels of consumption.”

The study’s senior author, University of Utah biology professor Wayne Potts, said earlier studies fed mice sugars at levels higher than people eat in sodas, cookies, candy and other items. The current study stuck to levels eaten by people.

Scientists say sugar at levels considered safe is harmful – latimes.com

Babies born to obese mothers may face an increased risk of dying early from heart problems in their adult life, according to research published late Tuesday that paints an alarming picture of the future as obesity-related disease is handed down from one generation to the next.

The comprehensive study looked at nearly 30,000 women who gave birth in Aberdeen between 1950 and 1976 and who were weighed and measured in early pregnancy. When the researchers then searched for death certificates among the nearly 38,000 children – by then aged 34 to 61 – they found that those whose mothers had been obese had a 35% higher chance of dying as a result of cardiovascular disease than the children of normal-weight mothers. Health records showed that they also had a 42% higher risk of being treated in hospital for heart problems.

Experts called for more effort to educate young women who might become pregnant about good eating habits and exercise as the implications of the study became clear. One in five pregnant women today is obese. If the researchers are right, the UK could face a huge rise in heart disease and early deaths as the children of these obese mothers hit middle age.

Obese mothers’ babies face bigger risk of early death, says report | Society | The Guardian

A man has died after competing in a State of Origin pie-eating competition.

The man, 64, was taken to Townsville Hospital from the pub at Bushland Beach, northwest of Townsville.

He died at 10.30pm, police say.

An employee at the Bushland Beach Tavern confirmed the man appeared to choke while competing in a half-time chilli pie-eating competition last night.

The employee said he was working in the bar when he saw the man, a regular at the pub, fall to the ground.

Stuffed to death: Man dies after competing in pie eating contest – NYPOST.com

Winston Churchill knew it. Ernest Hemingway knew it. Leonardo da Vinci knew it. Every trendy office from Silicon Valley to Scandinavia now knows it too: there is virtue in working standing up. And not merely standing. The trendiest offices of all have treadmill desks, which encourage people to walk while working. It sounds like a fad. But it does have a basis in science.

Sloth is rampant in the rich world. A typical car-driving, television-watching cubicle slave would have to walk an extra 19km a day to match the physical-activity levels of the few remaining people who still live as hunter-gatherers. Though all organisms tend to conserve energy when possible, evidence is building up that doing it to the extent most Westerners do is bad for you—so bad that it can kill you.

That, by itself, may not surprise. Health ministries have been nagging people for decades to do more exercise. What is surprising is that prolonged periods of inactivity are bad regardless of how much time you also spend on officially approved high-impact stuff like jogging or pounding treadmills in the gym. What you need instead, the latest research suggests, is constant low-level activity. This can be so low-level that you might not think of it as activity at all. Even just standing up counts, for it invokes muscles that sitting does not.

Researchers in this field trace the history of the idea that standing up is good for you back to 1953, when a study published in the Lancet found that bus conductors, who spend their days standing, had a risk of heart attack half that of bus drivers, who spend their shifts on their backsides. But as the health benefits of exercise and vigorous physical activity began to become clear in the 1970s, says David Dunstan, a researcher at the Baker IDI Heart & Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, interest in the effects of low-intensity activity—like walking and standing—waned.

Arse longa, vita brevis

Over the past few years, however, interest has waxed again. A series of epidemiological studies, none big enough to be probative, but all pointing in the same direction, persuaded Emma Wilmot of the University of Leicester, in Britain, to carry out a meta-analysis. This is a technique that combines diverse studies in a statistically meaningful way. Dr Wilmot combined 18 of them, covering almost 800,000 people, in 2012 and concluded that those individuals who are least active in their normal daily lives are twice as likely to develop diabetes as those who are most active. She also found that the immobile are twice as likely to die from a heart attack and two-and-a-half times as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease as the most ambulatory. Crucially, all this seemed independent of the amount of vigorous, gym-style exercise that volunteers did.

Correlation is not, of course, causation. But there is other evidence suggesting inactivity really is to blame for these problems. One exhibit is the finding that sitting down and attending to a task—anything from watching television to playing video games to reading—serves to increase the amount of calories people eat without increasing the quantity that they burn. Why that should be is unclear—as is whether low-level exercise like standing would deal with the snacking.

A different set of studies suggests that simple inactivity by itself—without any distractions like TV or reading—causes harm by altering the metabolism. One experiment, in which rats were immobilised for a day (not easy; the researchers had to suspend the animals’ hind legs to keep them still) found big falls in the amount of fats called triglycerides taken up by their skeletal muscles. This meant the triglycerides were available to cause trouble elsewhere. The rats’ levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) fell dramatically as well. HDL is a way of packaging cholesterol, and low levels of it promote heart disease. Other studies have shown the activity of lipoprotein lipase—an enzyme that regulates levels of triglycerides and HDL—drops sharply after just a few hours of inactivity, and that sloth is accompanied by changes in the activity levels of over 100 genes.

The perils of sitting down: Standing orders | The Economist

Race is tied with socioeconomic status struggles; so is weight. There have been some studies of a link between a woman’s size and her socioeconomic status, showing that women with low incomes tend to be of higher weight. There are many theories on this – because of unsocial working hours, lower availability of healthy food in poor neighborhoods, and other factors that may affect food choice and metabolism.

On the other side of the scale, anorexia and other eating disorders tend to be more common in people of higher socioeconomic status. You don’t need science to tell you this: in the cold calculation of high-end fashion or jewellery or luxury bags, a woman’s dress size is often assumed to be a marker of her status, as much as race is. Both indicate a certain institutional bigotry, an assumption based on outdated – and just plain wrong – cliches about what a person’s bank balance looks like based on what their body looks like.

This is what most women know: when a woman walks into an upscale store, she has already been evaluated as to the size of her bank account or credit line (or whether she looks like she can attract a man with both of them). High-end shop assistants, like everyone who works on bonus, commission or by their wits – Wall Street traders and pool hustlers, for instance – are taught to size up a mark at a thousand paces. They read grooming, body language, clothing, and accessories as a sign of how likely someone may be to spend – or lose – money.

This is what that Zurich shop assistant was doing. Lacking the crucial information that Oprah was a celebrity, she relied on shallow markers: her size, her race. Even a Donna Karan dress is not enough to overcome those biases.

Oprah was looking to buy a handbag, which has no size measurements, but the product is not the point: in an upscale boutique, all buyers are judged, in part, by their weight. Many shops want the people in them to look “thin and cool”, in the words of Abercrombie & Fitch’s CEO. They may grudgingly sell larger sizes, but only online.

The key thing for people of any size is to remain hidden from areas where status is important. The rather unintelligent thinking seems to be that fat is infectious, or that thin people won’t want products that have been merely glanced at by anyone over a size 10.

As a result, there is a kind of social segregation based on weight as well as on race. To test this, walk into any other fashionable shop in Zurich, or Gstaad, or London, or Paris, or Los Angeles, or New York: you may see women in flip-flops, women with messy ponytails, women in ripped jeans. Those are all perfectly acceptable – as long as she is also carrying an expensive handbag or accompanied by a man who looks like he has means. But you will rarely, if ever, see even a perfectly groomed, immaculately dressed woman above a size 10.

Shop assistants in upscale boutiques in fashionable areas of major cities have become practiced at hovering around ample women in a hurry to remind them:

Oh, I’m sorry: we don’t have anything in your size.

And this size bias trickles down the economic scale: clothing retailers at all levels perpetuate the idea that carrying an extra 30lb is anti-fashion. Identifying low body weight with low status seems to infect clothing retailers from Lululemon to Abercrombie & Fitch. Last week, Lululemon said that clothes above a size 12 “are not part of its business strategy”, and Abercrombie’s cheerleaders-only aesthetic has become the stuff of legend. “A lot of people don’t belong (in our clothes), and they can’t belong,” says Abercrombie CEO Mike Jeffries.

This is, of course, ridiculous. There are many reasons for a woman’s weight to vary, including everything from medication to thyroid issues to stress to lifestyle. Fat-shaming, as the fashion retail industry often indulges in, is also a form of fat-blaming: it assumes that a woman’s weight tells you all you need to know about her. This is irrational and, most importantly, completely false.

Oprah faced not just fashion retail racism, but size bias too | Heidi Moore | Comment is free | theguardian.com

For many years, doctors have been wringing their hands as more and more U.S. children grew fat. Now, that may be changing, with the first evidence of a national decline in childhood obesity.

In 18 states, there were at least slight drops in obesity for low-income preschoolers, health officials said Tuesday.

After decades on the rise, childhood obesity rates recently have essentially been flat. A few places – Philadelphia, New York City and Mississippi – reported improvements in the last couple of years. But the report from the Centers for Disease and Control Prevention shows signs of wider-ranging progress.

“Now, for the first time, we’re seeing a significant decrease in childhood obesity” nationally, said Dr. Thomas Frieden, CDC director.

But rates are still too high, he added. One in 8 preschoolers is obese in the United States, and it’s even more common in black and Hispanic kids.

“It’s not like we’re out of the woods,” he said during a conference call with reporters Tuesday.

Fat Thanks to Darshana P. for the tip!

Childhood Obesity Rate Shows Signs Of National Decline For First Time In Decades: CDC Report

In June, first lady Michelle Obama appeared in a hip-hop music video that featured rapper Doug E. Fresh, singer-songwriter Jordin Sparks and TV medical personality Dr. Oz. The catchy song urged kids to “work hard/eat right” and “tell somebody/it’s your body/c’mon.” The song was just the first of a 19-track album, the majority of which are hip-hop, to be released by the Partnership for a Healthier America, the anti-obesity nonprofit that launched in conjunction with Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! anti-obesity campaign, and a New York-based group called Hip Hop Public Health.

The full album, which includes songs with names like “Veggie Luv,” by Monifah and J Rome, “Hip Hop LEAN,” by Artie Green, and “Give Myself a Try,” by Ryan Beatty, will be released on Sept. 30.

Let’s Move! Executive Director and White House assistant chef Sam Kass says the White House is fully behind the initiative to use hip-hop – and other genres of music – as a tool to get kids to live healthier lives.

“Cultural leaders and visionaries in our country can give these messages to kids in a way that’s not preachy. Kids are going to be dancing and listening to the music,” he says. “I think hip-hop in particular – so many kids love hip-hop. It’s such a core part of our culture …and particularly in the African-American community and the Latino community which is being disproportionately affected by those health issues.”

Michelle Obama’s Newest Initiative: Using Hip-Hop to Fight Obesity – US News and World Report

New York City’s crackdown on big, sugary sodas is staying on ice.

An appeals court ruled Tuesday that New York City’s Board of Health exceeded its legal authority and acted unconstitutionally when it tried to put a size limit on soft drinks served in city restaurants.

The state Supreme Court Appellate Division panel upheld a lower court decision that had delayed the measure before it took effect in March.

The rule would stop many eateries from selling non-diet soda and other sugar-laden beverages in containers bigger than 16 ounces.

The beverage industry and other opponents say the measure is riddled with exceptions, unfair and ineffective.

The city’s law department has promised an appeal.

Appeals court strikes down NYC’s big-soda ban – Yahoo! Finance