TUNKHANNOCK, Pa. (AP) — State police are searching for a husky thief who made off with four 32-inch LED televisions, three car stereos and a coffee maker from a Wal-Mart store in Pennsylvania.

They say the suspect who’s about 25 years old and weighing more than 325 pounds put the items in his shopping cart and left without paying around 2:30 a.m. Sunday in Eaton Township, Wyoming County.

Police say the suspect has a light beard and mustache, glasses, a ball cap, blue jeans and coat and sweatshirt.

Source: COPS: Husky Thief Stole 4 TVs, 3 Car Stereos From Pa. Wal-Mart « CBS Philly

A quick trip down the frozen-food aisle at the supermarket can be anxiety-ridden. Given the sheer range of options for everything from popcorn to cereal to tomato soup, it’s tough to know what to buy (if you’re not going based on cost alone). Now, a new study suggests having so much variety may be wreaking havoc on our waistlines.
The new study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, shows having so many different brands of the same food may be making us overeat. The researchers asked people nearly 200 people about their consumption of pepperoni pizza. In the study, there were over 70 different pepperoni pizza brands consumed, and the calorie content varied by well over 300%. The researchers then compared the eating habits of people who regularly ate multiple varieties of pizza to people who only regularly consumed the same brand.

Source: The Weird Thing That Packs on Calories—And Pounds | TIME

She never ate dessert in public. But at night, by the dim light of the refrigerator, she gorged on goodies. Then one day in 1961, Jean Nidetch, a 214-pound Queens housewife with a 44-inch waist and an addiction to cookies by the box, ran into a neighbor at the supermarket.

“Oh, Jean, you look so good!” the neighbor said. “When are you due?”

That was it. Mrs. Nidetch, who had tried many times to subdue her compulsive eating — dieting, losing weight, then gaining it all back again — had to do something.

She shed 72 pounds and helped found Weight Watchers, the organization that turned the drab, frustrating diet into a quasi-religious quest, with membership commitments, eating systems, inspirational meetings and cookbooks, food products and motivational success stories to reinforce the frail will.

Mrs. Nidetch, the organization’s public face for decades, proclaiming its manifesto that managing weight is a lifelong task, died on Wednesday at her home in Parkland, Fla., according to a Weight Watchers spokeswoman. She was 91. A visitor in 2011 found that she weighed 142 pounds, the same as she did after her dramatic weight loss in the early 1960s.

With her overweight husband and two overweight friends, Mrs. Nidetch (pronounced NIE-ditch) incorporated Weight Watchers in 1963. It spawned thousands of franchises and enrolled millions around the world. It came to encompass weight-control classes that resembled group therapy sessions, summer camps for overweight children, a daily syndicated television program, magazines in America and Britain and many other enterprises.

Source: Jean Nidetch, a Founder of Weight Watchers, Dies at 91 – The New York Times

Children who watch even one hour of TV a day have a significantly higher risk of becoming overweight or obese, researchers have warned.  Those who watched as little as 60 minutes were more likely to have weight problems compared to youngsters who watched TV for less than 60 minutes each day.

 

Previous research has shown that children who watch a lot of TV are at risk of being overweight. But this is the first to look specifically at the link between TV watching and obesity among five-year-olds, the authors claim.  They are now calling for more stringent recommendations on how much television children should watch.

Source: Children more likely to be overweight or obese with ONE hour of TV a day | Daily Mail Online

Steak Tips Susanne, the $21 entree at the Hilton Garden Inn in Manchester, N.H., arrived as a carefully composed plate: strips of sirloin, sautéed peppers and caramelized onions atop a bed of linguine with a side of garlic bread.

Then the dish underwent the Jeb Bush treatment. The garlic bread was instantly banished to the plate of a nearby aide. The pasta was conspicuously pushed aside.A sympathetic guest at the table, convinced that Mr. Bush, 62, could not possibly be sated, offered him a piece of her salmon.Was it true, the guest asked him, that a stomach shrinks during a diet, easing the pangs of hunger? Not at all, Mr. Bush replied.“I am always hungry,” he said.

Jeb Bush is thinking of running for president. And he is starving.

Source: Jeb Bush Is Definitely, Grumpily Running … Away From Calories – The New York Times

A lot of people say we should stand up for education but, at Vallecito Elementary in San Rafael, they’re actually doing it.“To me, this is the wave of the future,” says 4th grade teacher Maureen Zink.In four of the school’s classrooms, chairs have been removed and students spend the day standing at their desks. Some parents, concerned about how sedentary kids have become, donated money for the new desks.

Source: Marin County School Nixes Sedentary Education With Standing Desks For Students « CBS San Francisco

A lot of people say we should stand up for education but, at Vallecito Elementary in San Rafael, they’re actually doing it.“To me, this is the wave of the future,” says 4th grade teacher Maureen Zink.

In four of the school’s classrooms, chairs have been removed and students spend the day standing at their desks. Some parents, concerned about how sedentary kids have become, donated money for the new desks.

Source: Marin County School Nixes Sedentary Education With Standing Desks For Students « CBS San Francisco

Being dangerously overweight is all down to bad diet rather than a lack of exercise, according to a trio of doctors who have reopened the debate about whether food, sedentary lifestyles or both are responsible for the obesity epidemic.

In an article for a leading health journal the authors – who include British cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, an outspoken critic of the food industry – accuse food and drink firms such as Coca-Cola of having wrongly emphasised how physical activity and sport can help prevent people becoming very overweight.

The truth, they say, is that while physical activity is useful in reducing the risk of developing heart disease, dementia and other conditions, it “does not promote weight loss”.

“In the past 30 years, as obesity has rocketed, there has been little change in physical activity levels in the western population. This places the blame for our expanding waistlines directly on the type and amount of calories consumed.”

The authors add: “Members of the public are drowned by an unhelpful message about maintaining a ‘healthy weight’ through calorie counting, and many still wrongly believe that obesity is entirely due to lack of exercise.”

That “false perception”, they claim in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, “is rooted in the food industry’s public relations machinery, which uses tactics chillingly similar to those of big tobacco … denial, doubt, confusing the public and even buying the loyalty of bent scientists, at the cost of millions of lives.”

Given the worsening scale of obesity “let us bust the myth of physical activity and obesity. You cannot outrun a bad diet”, say Malhotra and his co-authors.

They challenge conventional wisdom further by arguing that those who want to avoid excess weight gain should adopt a diet that is high in fat but low on both sugar and carbohydrates.

Athletes and others about to do exercise should ditch high-carbohydrate intake regimes and instead eat more fat, they say, because “fat, including ketone bodies, appears to be the ideal fuel for most exercise. It is abundant, does not need replacement or supplementation during exercise, and can fuel the forms of exercise in which most participate.”

In a broadside against food industry practices, they also urge celebrities to stop promoting sugary drinks, call on health clubs and gyms to stop selling them and denounce “manipulative marketing” for sabotaging government efforts to introduce taxes on those drinks and to ban the advertising of junk food.

But their comment piece was dismissed by the food industry and divided opinion among experts in diet, obesity and health.

Fat Thanks to Ketul P. for the tip!

via Exercise is good … but it won’t help you lose weight, say doctors | Society | The Guardian.

Obesity rates nationwide are rapidly increasing. According to Gallup, the national rate in 2013 was 27.1% — the highest it’s been since the organization started tracking the numbers. But some communities’ obesity rates exceed even that. These metro areas have the highest rates in the country.

Source: America’s Fattest Cities | Forbes

French MPs have approved tough measures in an attempt to combat anorexia that will make it a crime for fashion agencies to use dangerously thin or undernourished models.

Members of the lower house of parliament also voted on Friday for measures that will make it illegal to promote anorexia on the internet and will oblige agencies to clearly mark all photographs of models that have been retouched to alter their body shape.

The legislation will attempt to impose an as-yet-unspecified minimum body mass index (BMI) for models employed by agencies, who will be under threat of prison and a fine for flouting the law.

Although the measures will only apply within France, they will have a symbolic impact on the fashion industry given Paris’s role within it.

French health minister Marisol Touraine supported the ban on overly thin models – most of whom are women – presented as an amendment to her health bill, saying their use was worrying.

Source: France votes to ban ultra-thin models in crackdown on anorexia | Fashion | The Guardian