Many schools are sending notes home to parents, telling them their children are overweight.

Lauren Schmitt, a registered dietitian, starts the school year by checking out the weight of hundreds of preschoolers in the San Fernando Valley.

“We look at growth charts and percentiles. And when a child is at 95 percent of their…we can look at weight for age or weight for height…that child would be considered obese,” she said.

By October, CBS2’s Suraya Fadel reported that parents will get what is called “healthy or unhealthy” letters. Kids call them “fat letters.”

Schmitt said out of the 900 2 to 5-year-old children she looks at, roughly 200 are listed as obese.

“We let the parents know in a gentle fashion, but we also send out a ton of handouts to try to help that family,” she said.

Experts said 19 states around the country are cracking down on childhood obesity with similar letters.

“Every year there are a few phone calls from parents who are upset,” said Schmitt.

Many districts in Southern California, such as Riverside County, choose to follow state guidelines and instead send test results of the child’s body mass index to their parents.

“It shouldn’t be a stigma. It’s not a way to categorize someone. It’s just showing that this child has increased risk to be obese as an adult, which then could lead to quite a few chronic diseases,” said Schmitt.

The dietitian said the goal is to empower and educate parents with the tools to make healthier lifestyle choices for children.

Schools Sending ‘Fat Letters’ To Parents About Overweight Children « CBS Los Angeles

A study published Monday in a Psychological Science found that after a sports team loses, fans of that team eat 16 percent more saturated fats than they usually do.

Fans of winning teams apparently are getting thinner, too. The study found the winning fans ate 9 percent less saturated fat.

Fans have such a deep attachment to their NFL teams that losing can trigger a food binge, the study said.

However, at the Fan Central booth at the Minnesota State Fair, some Vikings fans don’t buy it.

“I don’t know. The Vikings lost a lot last year and I actually stayed the same weight, so I don’t know if I actually believe it,” Vikings fan Steve Hanson said.

The study says fans after a loss not only eat more, they turn to fatty often fried comfort foods and sweets.“I definitely don’t do that. I just hope they win the next game that is all you can do,” fan Michael Coleman said.

Other studies have linked sports losses to an increase in domestic violence and calls to police.

A study released by the National Institute of Health said if a team — that is expected to win – loses, 911 calls to police increased by 10 percent. But overeating, while some fans say no – others agree.

Study: Link Found Between Losing Sports Teams, Heavier Fans « CBS Minnesota

At least one North Texas school district has turned up its nose at the new federal lunch program.  Many schools report kids refused to eat the healthier meals that are supposed to be packed with whole grains, fruits and vegetables.

Carroll Independent School District has dropped out for a year.  Nutrition Services Director Mary Brunig says the requirements are too restrictive.  “You have to follow exactly what is in this meal pattern, if you are the national school lunch program.”

Brunig says as a result, a lot of food wound up in the trash.

“With the new program in place, the new meal pattern, our participation started to drop.  And the other thing was there was food waste.  Children were not eating the food,” she said.  “If the children aren’t eating the food, there’s no nutrition.”

Brunig says the district plans to create its own healthy meals without federal restrictions.

Carroll ISD Opting Out Of Federal Lunch Program « CBS Dallas / Fort Worth

Beginning a day of protests that organizers say will spread to 50 cities and 1,000 stores across the country, a crowd of chanting workers gathered Thursday morning at a McDonalds in midtown Manhattan to call for higher wages and the chance to join a union.

About 500 people, including workers, activists, religious leaders, news crews and local politicians, gathered outside the McDonalds on Fifth Avenue. The protesters chanted “Si Se Puede” “Yes, We Can” and “Hey, hey, ho, ho $7.25 has got to go,” holding signs saying “On Strike: Cant Survive on $7.25,” referring to the federal minimum wage.

The protesters plan to spread out to other stores throughout New York during the day. Protests are also expected in Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, N.C., and other cities.

Meanwhile, the Employment Policies Institute, a Washington-based think tank, has placed a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal with a picture of a robot making what looks like pancakes. It explains that restaurants have to reduce their costs of service to keep prices low, which might mean switching to robots if wages get too high.

“Why Robots Could Soon Replace Fast Food Workers Demanding a Higher Minimum Wage,” the ad reads.

The fast-food protests began in New York on Nov. 29. There have been three protests in New York since then, and they have spread to Chicago and other cities. Thursdays protest is to mark the first for fast-food workers in Los Angeles and other cities.

National fast-food wage protests kick off in New York – latimes.com

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