In her report, she described an explosion in childhood obesity as “one of the most serious health challenges of the early 21st Century”.

She said the issue of overweight children had trebled in the last three decades, and could lead to “serious health consequences, significant reductions in quality of life and a greater risk of bullying and social isolation”.

According to a programme brought in during 2011 to measure the height and weight of every school pupil at age five in Wales, 28% were overweight or obese.

Evidence presented in the report also suggested that there had been very little change in the rates of physical activity for any adult age group.

In addition, with the exception of the over-65s, fewer adults were eating five or more portions of fruit and vegetables a day compared with 2008.

In her conclusion, the chief medical officer stressed: “Action on obesity is urgent and there is growing evidence that physical activity benefits both our mental and physical health.

Lifestyle habits such as smoking and heavy drinking are identified as challenges by the report

“Everyone needs to be more active.”

BBC News – Obesity challenge ‘urgent’ warning by chief medical officer

The traditional diet in Mexico, which ranks No. 1 in the world in childhood obesity and No. 2 in adult obesity, was based on a balanced mix of foods rich in nutrients, vitamins, protein and minerals, the conservatory president said.

Mexico’s traditional diet was not “fully vegetarian,” but it was based on foods grown in the countryside, Lopez said.

About 70 percent of Mexico’s people are obese or overweight, the United Nations said in a recent report.

Lopez said she supported taxing soft drinks, a measure included by President Enrique Peña Nieto in his tax reform package.

Mexican World Gastronomy Forum vice president Eduardo Wichtendahl, for his part, said traditional cooking should be marketed differently.

“Gastronomy today should be placed (in the market) not so much as a subproduct of tourism but as a product in and of itself,” Wichtendahl said.

The Mexican World Gastronomy Forum will take place in the Pacific resort city of Acapulco Oct. 9-12.

There is great ignorance about Mexican food, with many people confusing it with “Tex-Mex” food, a regional cuisine created in the southwestern United States, or thinking it is limited to just tortillas, chilis and tacos, Wichtendahl said.

The traditional Mexican diet eaten by Indian peoples was based on corn, beans and chilis, and was loaded with vitamin C, Wichtendahl said.

The problem in Mexico is excessive consumption of soft drinks, Wichtendahl said, adding that the country’s soft drink consumption averages 163 liters (43.3 gallons) per capita annually.

Experts: Mexicans Should Return To Traditional Cuisine To Fight Obesity | Fox News Latino

The Royal College of Physicians has called on the Government to introduce a 20% tax on sugar sweetened drinks, including sports drinks, in the Budget to tackle obesity.

One in four Irish children is classified as overweight or obese and doctors say sugary foods and drinks are a big part of the problem.

Professor Donal O’Shea of St Vincent’s Hospital said the RCPI believes the tax would significantly impact childhood obesity and in time adult obesity.

“We simply have to act, obesity is killing 6,000 people a year in Ireland,” Prof O’Shea said.

He said the best way to impact the consumption of “free sugar” is to target sugar-sweetened drinks.

Prof O’Shea said a number of measures are needed together to tackle the problem of obesity in the population.

“Simply taxing sugar sweetened drinks without education wont work,” he said.But doing nothing “is not an option”, he added.

Physicians call for sugar tax to tackle obesity – RTÉ News

American coffee consumption is up 5 percent this year, with 83 percent of adults drinking it, according to the National Coffee Association’s 2013 National Coffee Drinking Trends report.

The difficulty, nutritionists say, is that only half of regular coffee drinkers are picking brewed coffee, consumption of which is down 7 percent from 2012.

“The old days of buying a cup of coffee and putting a packet of sugar in it are far behind us,” said Jane Hurley, senior nutritionist for the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Instead, 31 percent (about the same as last year) opt for gourmet drinks such as cappuccinos and lattes. Many go even fancier. A 2009 survey of orders in New York City by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found two-thirds of Starbucks customers and a quarter of Dunkin’ Donuts customers picked blended coffee drinks, which use more milk, flavored syrups and whipped cream.

Those drinks pack a higher calorie count — on average 240 calories, versus 75 for brewed coffee with cream and sugar, said Pat Fiducia, chief executive for CalorieKing Publications, which tracks nutrition information for restaurant items. But many contain even more calories, sugar and fat.

Here’s why your coffee habit is making you fat – NBC News.com

Popular U.S. dating site, OkCupid.com lets online daters pay $4.95 (£3) to hide anyone who classes themselves ‘curvy’, ‘skinny’, ‘thin’, ‘jacked’ or ‘used up’ among other body types.

‘While it will probably be common knowledge to many internet dating aficionados, OkCupid’s premium search options are eyebrow-raising in an era of tolerance and political correctness,’ writes Kermalmag.com journalist James Cook, who spotted the function.

OkCupid also allows its ‘A-list members’ – who pay a monthly subscription fee of between $4.49 and $9.95 – to filter people by both looks and figure.

You can select people in a drop-down menu who have body types such as ‘thin’, ‘skinny’, ‘overweight and ‘curvy’.

You can also filter people based on their attractiveness rating, as ranked by other users.

An anonymous OkCupid user added: ‘I’ve been using OkCupid for just over a year now, and it’s pretty disconcerting to think men have the ability to filter me out by my body type.

However, the function is still placing a lot of trust in people’s accurate description of themselves. I myself have been lucky that every guy I’ve met from the site has looked their pictures, but others I know have had some horrible surprises when they meet in person.’

‘Ultimately, what freaks me out the most is the kind of person that would pay to exercise that degree of control over their results. To me, that suggests that the weird and wonderful world of online dating might not be for you.’

Rowan Pelling added: ‘OkCupid is clearly the Abercrombie & Fitch of dating sites, allowing curvy types to be screened out of supposed A-List members searches.

‘All I can say is that you’re pretty dumb and Z-list if you allow screening so prejudiced that some brainless body-fascist can screen out all plus-size suitors: goodbye Marilyn Monroe, Sophie Dahl, Lena Dunham, Gerard Depardieu, James Corden, Seth Rogen.’

OKCupid.com lets you pay to filter out fat ugly people | Mail Online

The city’s obesity rate among adults has skyrocketed 25 percent since Mayor Bloomberg took office in 2002, city Health Department figures show.

That year, nearly one in five New Yorkers was considered obese. Now almost one in four is.

The figures are surprising given Gotham’s residents are doing better according to other health indicators.

For example, the percentage of adults who drink one or more sugar-sweetened beverages a day dropped to 28 percent last year from 36 percent in 2007, says the Health Department’s Take Care New York 2012 report.

The data also show more people are physically active and eating vegetables.

Both improvements come after Hizzoner pushed for the expansion of bike lanes and healthier school meals.The city also banned unhealthy trans fats from eatery menus starting in 2007.

The obesity epidemic is one reason Bloomberg and city Health Commissioner Tom Farley issued the edict last year to limit the sizes of soda and other sugary drinks to 16 ounces. It has been struck down in court.

Health officials admit fat is a formidable foe.

“Despite recent declines, sugary-drink consumption remains far higher today than it was in the 1970s, when the obesity epidemic began to surge,’’ a department spokeswoman said.

“Nationwide, adult obesity rates have been going up for at least the last 30 years, and we expect a lag in changes in the adult obesity rate after a change in diet.

“We are seeing declines in obesity in children, and [the] fall in sugary-drink consumption may have prevented our city from having even higher obesity rates.”

Nutrition experts praised the Bloomberg administration for releasing anti-obesity ad campaigns and requiring calorie counts for meals in fast-food joints.

But they said education goes only so far.

“It’s easier to gain weight than lose weight. We live in a toxic environment of junk food and excess. It’s a culture we still embrace,” said Lisa Young, an NYU nutrition professor who writes The Portion Teller blog.

Obesity up 25 percent in NYC | New York Post

A morbidly obese two-year-old has become the youngest person in the world to undergo bariatric surgery.

The parents of the toddler from Saudi Arabia who weighed 72 lbs and had a Body Mass Index of 41 sought help because he suffered sleep apnea that caused him to stop breathing while asleep.

Two attempts to control his weight by dieting failed said the medics who carried out the bariatric surgery Mohammed Al Mohaidlya, Ahmed Sulimana and Horia Malawib in an article in the International Journal of Surgery Case Reports.

When he first presented to an endocrinologist at 14 months, the toddler weighed 46 lbs but after dieting for four months his weight increased by 17 pounds.

The doctors from Prince Sultan Military Medical City at Riyadh were unable to ascertain whether the child’s parents stuck to the diet.

By the time the boy was referred to the obesity clinic he weighed 54 lbs and his obesity had led to sleep apnea and bowing of the legs.

A further attempt at dieting failed and when he reached 72 lbs doctors decided to perform surgery.

Surgeons carried out a laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy on the boy which involved removing the outer margin of the stomach to restrict food intake, leaving a sleeve of stomach, roughly the size and shape of a banana.

Unlike a lap band, the surgery is not reversible.

“To our knowledge LSG has never been tried in very young age children,” the surgeons say in their report. “We present here probably the first case report of the successful management of a two year old morbidly obese boy.”

Within two months the boy lost 15 per cent of his body weight and two years after the 2010 surgery his weight had fallen from 72 lbs to 52 lbs and his BMI of 24 was within the normal range.

Obesity expert adjunct professor Paul Zimmett from the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute said the case was “shocking” and “very unusual”.

“It’s rather like the other day when we saw one of our spacecrafts going out of our solar system into the dark regions of space, it’s going into unknown territory,” he said of the case.

“We have no idea what effect this may have on the child’s growth and unless he has proper follow up he may suffer vitamin deficiencies.”

Obese toddler has gastric bypass surgery | New York Post

New research from the University of Adelaide in Australia, however, notes that people who become obese are even less likely to keep the weight off due to a damaged switch in the stomach that tells the brain it’s full. In other words, even though an obese person loses weight and begins eating less, their brains never register that their stomachs are full and satiated.

This research highlights two key components about obesity: As noted in prior research, obesity can be a vicious cycle of hunger and health risks. Second even after a person loses weight, this faulty switch will continue to urge a person to eat more and return to a high-fat diet.

“The stomach’s nerve response does not return to normal upon return to a normal diet. This means you would need to eat more food before you felt the same degree of fullness as a healthy individual,” explains study leader Amanda Page, associate professor and the university’s Nerve Gut Research Laboratory.

According to Page, the hormone leptin is responsible for desensitizing the nerves in the stomach which relay information to the brain. After being subjected to high-fat diets for long periods of time, this hormone essentially wears away at the stomach nerves and stops regulating food intake. In a healthy person’s stomach, leptin works to let the brain know the stomach has received enough food. This change, says Page, occurs once high-fat diets are introduced and isn’t reversed once a person changes their diet and loses weight.

“Unfortunately, our results show that the nerves in the stomach remain desensitized to fullness after weight loss has been achieved,” said Page. “We know that only about 5% of people on diets are able to maintain their weight loss, and that most people who’ve been on a diet put all of that weight back on within two years.”

It’s not yet known if this effect is long-lasting or if the leptin eventually returns to its normal function.

Obesity Can Be Programmed Through High-Fat Diets – Health News – redOrbit

A growing number of Americans are standing, walking and even cycling their way through the workday at treadmill desks, standup desks or other moving workstations. Others are forgoing chairs in favor of giant exercise balls to stay fit.

Walking on a treadmill while making phone calls and sorting through emails means “being productive on two fronts,” said Andrew Lockerbie, senior vice president of benefits at Brown & Brown, a global insurance consulting firm.

Lockerbie can burn 350 calories a day walking 3 to 4 miles on one of two treadmill desks that his companys Indianapolis office purchased earlier this year.

“Im in meetings and at my desk and on the phone all day,” he said. “Its great to be able to have an option at my work to get some physical activity while Im actually doing office stuff. You feel better, you get your blood moving, you think clearly.”

Treadmill desks designed for the workplace are normally set to move at 1 to 2 mph, enough to get the heart rate up but not too fast to distract from reading or talking on the phone comfortably.

It’s been a decade since scientific studies began to show that too much sitting can lead to obesity and increase the risk of developing diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. Even going to the gym three times a week doesn’t offset the harm of being sedentary for hours at a time, said Dr. James Levine, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic.

“There’s a glob of information that sitting is killing us,” Levine said. “Youre basically sitting yourself into a coffin.

More Americans Exercise While They Work

American eaters love a good villain. Diets that focus on one clear bad guy have gotten traction even as the bad guy has changed: fat, carbohydrates, animal products, cooked food, gluten. And now Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California at San Francisco, is adding sugar to the list. His book “ Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease ” makes the case that sugar is almost single-handedly responsible for Americans’ excess weight and the illnesses that go with it. “Sugar is the biggest perpetrator of our current health crisis,” says Lustig, blaming it for not just obesity and diabetes but also for insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease, stroke, even cancer. “Sugar is a toxin,” he says. “Pure and simple.”

His target is one particular sugar: fructose, familiar for its role in making fruit sweet. Fruit, though, is not the problem; the natural sugar in whole foods, which generally comes in small quantities, is blameless. The fructose in question is in sweeteners — table sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, maple syrup, honey and others — which are all composed of the simple sugars fructose and glucose, in about equal proportions.

Is sugar a toxin? Experts debate the role of fructose in our obesity epidemic – The Washington Post