Scientists are linking obesity with inflammation and scarring in the key brain area that controls weight, which could explain why it’s so hard to lose weight and keep it off.

When researchers switched mice and rats genetically bred to become obese from low-fat chow to high-fat and highly palatable chow, they began showing signs of inflammation in the hypothalamus within 24 hours.

The hypothalamus takes signals from body fat and other tissues that tell the brain we need food or we’ve had enough. It also regulates how much fat we burn.

“We saw direct evidence of neuron injury and, ultimately, after months on the diet, a loss of neurons in this hypothalamic area that’s vital for body weight control,” said lead researcher Dr. Michael Schwartz, professor of medicine and director of the Diabetes and Obesity Center of Excellence at the University of Washington, Seattle.

The switch to the high-fat diet “is actually injuring the neurons that are supposed to protect them from obesity,” he said.

Brain scarring may help explain obesity battle, study finds

While shift workers are needed to help our 24-7 world go ’round, an editorial written by Dr. Virginia Barbour, chief editor of the journal PLoS Medicine, warned that such work schedules can put a person at increased risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes. She even argued that unhealthy eating habits on the job should be considered an occupational health hazard.

“We have a long-standing interest in publishing on the diseases and risk factors that cause the highest burden of disease,” Barbour told ABCNews.com.

“We would suggest that employers need to take unhealthy eating very seriously, to the extent that they consider that unhealthy foods are essentially environmental hazards and that they should consider what the implications are of exposing their employees to high levels of such hazards in the form of vending machines and fast-food restaurants.”

Shift Work Might Lead to Type 2 Diabetes, Obesity

The Washington state ferry service isnt going to start turning away hefty passengers, but it has had to reduce the capacity of the nations largest ferry system because people have been packing on the pounds.

Coast Guard vessel stability rules that took effect nationwide Dec. 1 raised the estimated weight of the average adult passenger to 185 pounds from the previous 160 pounds, based on population information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Obesity Rise Prompts Wash. Ferry Capacity Change – ABC News

The number of obese New York City schoolchildren fell by 5.5 percent over five years, federal and city officials said Thursday, offering a glimmer of optimism about one of the country’s intractable health scourges.

The decline, documented by annual fitness exams given to most of the city’s kindergarten through eighth-grade students, was the biggest reported by any large city. Over all, the rate of obesity dropped in New York City to 207 children per 1,000 in the 2010-11 school year, down from 219 five years earlier, meaning that 20.7 percent were still considered obese.

Obesity Rate Falls for New York Schoolchildren – SchoolBook

In lush times, orangutans on the island of Borneo gorge themselves on forest fruits, packing on extra pounds in preparation for leaner years, when they live off leaves and bark and their own stored fat.

This behavior of overeating is all too common in humans, but rarely seen in nonhuman primates, and studying it may offer some clues about obesity and eating disorders in people, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

“Orangutans make very interesting models for studying human obesity because they are really the only apes and potentially the only nonhuman primates in the wild that actually store fat deposits,” said Erin Vogel, an evolutionary anthropologist from Rutgers University in New Jersey, whose study appears in the journal Biology Letters.

Orangutans shed light on obesity in people | Reuters

A womans risk of developing breast cancer appears to rise if she has diabetes or is obese after age 60, a new study indicates.

Previous research has linked obesity and increased breast cancer risk, but “the diabetes link had not been clearly shown,” said researcher Dr. Hakan Olsson, a professor of oncology at Lund University in Lund, Sweden.

Breast cancer linked to diabetes – USATODAY.com

On Thursday, Dec. 1, the city’s de facto ban of the Happy Meal commences. San Francisco has accomplished what the Hamburglar could not. Or has it?

In order to include a toy with a meal, restaurants must now comply with city-generated nutritional standards. Those are standards that even the “healthier” Happy Meals McDonald’s introduced earlier this year don’t come close to meeting. (As SF Weekly noted in January, the school lunches our children eat aren’t healthy enough to qualify, either).

And yet it seems McDonald’s has turned lemons into lemonade — and is selling the sugary drink to San Francisco’s children. Local McDonald’s employees tell SF Weekly the company has devised a solution that appears to comply with San Francisco’s “Healthy Meal Incentive Ordinance” that could actually make the company more money — and necessitate toy-happy youngsters to buy more Happy Meals.

It turns out San Francisco has not entirely vanquished the Happy Meal as we know it. Come Dec. 1, you can still buy the Happy Meal. But it doesn’t come with a toy. For that, you’ll have to pay an extra 10 cents.

Huh. That hardly seems to have solved the problem (though adults and children purchasing unhealthy food can at least take solace that the 10 cents is going to Ronald McDonald House charities). But it actually gets worse from here. Thanks to Supervisor Eric Mar’s much-ballyhooed new law, parents browbeaten into supplementing their preteens’ Happy Meal toy collections are now mandated to buy the Happy Meals.

Happy Meal Ban: McDonald’s Outsmarts San Francisco – San Francisco News – The Snitch

County officials in Ohio saw a big problem with an 8-year-old child living in Cleveland Heights — the third grader, name withheld, was tipping the scales at over 200 pounds.

Case workers in Cuyahoga County feared for their child’s life and have placed him into foster care after the working with their mother for more than a year to help remedy the boy’s obesity problem. Social workers tell the Cleveland Plain Dealer that the boy has been under protective supervision from the county since 2010 when he was diagnose with sleep apnea, a condition which is commonly weight-related. The child began to lose weight shortly after but has ballooned up to more than 200 pounds in recent months.

“A 218-pound 8-year-old is a time bomb,” University of Pennsylvania professor Arthur Caplan tells the Plain Dealer.

Even if that is the case, the child’s mother and others think that the government’s intervention wasn’t exactly necessary.

“They are trying to make it seem like I am unfit, like I don’t love my child,” the boy’s mother says. Her name is also being withheld.

“Of course I love him,” she adds. “Of course I want him to lose weight. It’s a lifestyle change, and they are trying to make it seem like I am not embracing that. It is very hard, but I am trying.”

200-lb third-grader placed in foster care for being too fat — RT

A British man who at one time was the fattest in the world is pleading with the NHS to remove unsightly flaps of flesh after he managed to lose more than half of his body weight.

Paul Mason, 50, who weighed 60 stone two years ago, underwent a gastric bypass after he was told he otherwise faced certain death.

But he has been left with rolls of unsightly excess skin after the extreme weight loss and now needs an operation to remove the flaps hanging from his stomach, arms and legs.

However, NHS bosses have refused to perform cosmetic surgery, insisting that he needs to maintain a stable weight before it can be considered.

Former world’s fattest man begs for NHS operation to remove folds of skin after losing 40 STONE | Mail Online

The passenger who had to stand during a seven-hour flight because of a morbidly obese man sitting next to him has today spoken about his ordeal.

Arthur Berkowitz, 57, said his 400lb neighbour on US Airways Flight 901 from Anchorage to Philadelphia made it impossible to get into his seat.

The obese man spilled over into Mr Berkowitz’s personal space and he could not move because the plane was full so he was forced to stand up.

Dangerous: Passenger Arthur Berkowitz had to stand for a seven-hour flight after a morbidly obese man next to him made it impossible for him to sit down

He said the obese man was very sorry. ‘The first thing he said to me was: “I want to apologise – I’m your worst nightmare”,’ he told MailOnline.

Passenger forced to stand on flight for seven hours because of 400-POUND man | Mail Online