And only a small percentage of patients initially deemed too heavy were ultimately able to lose enough weight to donate a kidney, according to Dr. Mala Sachdeva, of North Shore-LIJ Health System Transplant Center.

Researchers conducted a retrospective analysis which found that morbid obesity can prevent people from potentially donating their kidneys.

America’s chronic obesity epidemic has triggered a crisis in organ donations, because a quarter of prospective donors are too fat to undergo the procedure.

Although there are no established national weight criteria, however, most centers exclude living donors who have a body mass index (BMI) of 35 or above, according to MedPage.

As a result, America’s rising obese population may be playing a role in the national organ shortage by shrinking the donor pool, the researchers said.

Sachdeva and colleagues analyzed 104 potential living kidney donors seen at their institution between 2008 and 2011.

Only 18 per cent of them had a BMI within the normal range (25 or below), while most fell into the overweight-to-obese category: 37 per cent had a BMI between 25 and 30, the rest had a BMI of 30 or above.

To increase the size of the donor pool, Sachdeva believes that transplant centers should put in place more rigorous weight reduction programs, check in more regularly for follow-ups at the transplant center, and join social support groups for motivation.

‘Something needs to be done to increase the number of live donors but also to make it as safe as possible for them to donate,’ Sachdeva said.

National Kidney Foundation President Dr. Lynda Szczech said in a statement that the study points out ‘the impact of obesity as a barrier to donation.’

Doctors were forced to reject nearly a quarter of potential donors because they had a BMI of 35 or higher, which classified them as morbidly obese.

These patients were then referred to a nutritionist who created an individual diet and lifestyle modification plan and followed up with these patients on a monthly basis.

Of the total 23 who were considered morbidly obese, only three succeeded at losing weight and donating a kidney. About a third of the patients failed to lose enough weight.

The rest declined for medical reasons, opted out of donating, or did not follow through for other reasons.

Once caloric food is taken, fat is stored on the waistline within hours, say scientists, far faster than previously thought.

A study made by Fredrik Karpe and Keith Frayne of Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Oxford, found the first fat from any meal enters the blood around an hour after being ingested.

By the time three or four hours have passed, they found, most of it had been incorporated into the adipose tissue, much of which lies in the short-term fat stores in the waist.

Fat stored on the waistline is short term, but excessive eating could lead to more fat on the hips, bottom and thighs.

The finding that it is possible to ‘become fat’ within three hours contradicts the widely-held belief that weight gain is gradual.

Previously, many have believed the process is much more gradual with food traveling from the gut into the blood, where is was used by muscles, with any excess being stored as fat.

However, the Oxford University research suggests a more complex and rapid process.

In the experiments, volunteers ate fat which could be traced around the body. This was found to take around an hour to be broken down in the gut and then enter the bloodstream as tiny droplets.

The droplets are then whisked around the body, but not for long, before they are ‘caught’ and stored. ‘The process is very fast,’ Karpe, professor of metabolic medicine, said.

‘The cells in the adipose tissue around the waist catch the fat droplets as the blood carries them and incorporates them into the cells for storage.’

In a paper published in the Physiological Reviews, the scientists also suggested fit people found it easier to get rid of unwanted fat, as exercise gives a long-term boost to fat-burning mechanisms.

The good news is the storage system is temporary, with the fat deposited quickly drawn on, or mobilized, to feed our muscles. But when we overeat, it is a different story, because ‘there will just be constant accumulation and you will start to put on weight,’ Professor Karpe warns.

The finding comes in the wake of a warning that fat which settles around the middle is particularly harmful and could take years off your life.

The European Congress on Obesity heard last week that the secret of a long and healthy life is as simple as keeping your waist circumference measurement to under half that of your height.

New research shows dieting raises levels of hormones that stimulate appetite and lowers levels of hormones that suppress it.

Meanwhile, brain scans reveal that weight loss makes it harder for us to exercise self-control and resist tempting food.

It’s also thought the brain changes in the way it reacts to food. This wilts our willpower, according to Michael Rosenbaum, a researcher at Columbia University Medical Center who studies the body’s response to weight loss.

‘After you’ve lost weight, there’s an increase in the emotional response to food,’ he says, adding that there is also ‘a decrease in the activity of brain systems that might be more involved in restraint’.

Our calorie-hoarding frames have strong mechanisms to stop weight loss, but weak systems for preventing weight gain. If you manage to lose ten per cent of your weight, your body thinks there’s an emergency. So it burns less fuel by slowing your metabolism.

The body learns to function on fewer calories, resetting your metabolism. The problem is if you then stop dieting and start eating more again, those extra calories are stored as fat.
Worse still, the more people diet, the stronger these effects can become, leaving some almost doomed to being overweight as a result of their attempts to become slim.

And as research lays bare the dangers of yo-yoing weight, some experts argue it would be better not to diet at all.

Scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York discovered that when starved of food, brain cells actually consume each other.

This causes the release of fats, which in turn results in higher levels of a powerful brain chemical that stimulates appetite, the journal Cell Metabolism reports.

All bad news for dieters, as going without food could make them even hungrier.

All of this helps to explain why an analysis of 31 long-term clinical studies found that diets don’t work in the long run. Within five years about two-thirds of dieters put back the weight and more.

The researchers from the University of California found that dieting works in the short term, with slimmers losing up to 10 per cent of their weight on any number of diets in the first six months of any regimen.

But after this, the weight returns, and often more is added, says their report in the journal American Psychologist.

The analysis concluded that most volunteers would have been better off not dieting. Their weight would be pretty much the same and their bodies would not have wear and tear from yo-yoing.

People who start habitually dieting young tend to be significantly heavier after five years than teens who never dieted.

This mix of biology and psychology translates into a sobering reality, once we become overweight, most of us will probably remain that way.

Certainly, we should all be worried about what dieting does to our health. Restricting calories may increase the risk of heart disease, diabetes and cancer, according to a study from 2010 in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

Current standards in the United States, where sixty six percent of people are overweight or obese, advise people that trimming down calories by a certain amount will result in a slow and steady weight loss over time.

But that advice fails to account for how the body changes as it slims down, burning less energy and acquiring a slower metabolism, researchers told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Vancouver.

The result is a plateau effect that ends up discouraging dieters and sending them back into harmful patterns of overeating.

Everything people know about dieting is wrong, say US scientists who have devised a new formula for calculating calories and weight loss that they hope will revolutionize the way people tackle obesity.

As an example, researcher Kevin Hall, a scientist with the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), purchased a large vanilla latte that contained about 240 calories.

“The notion was if I drank one of these every day and then I replaced it with just black coffee no sugar, then over the course of a year I should lose about 25 pounds, and that should just keep going,” Hall said.

“People have used this sort of rule of thumb to predict how much people should lose for decades now, and it turns out to be completely wrong.”

Hall said, his work aims to ‘come up with better rules and better predictions of what is going to happen when an individual changes their diet.’

He and colleagues said their scientific model is aimed to help doctors and policymakers, while a ‘back-of-the-envelope calculation’ for consumers means cutting small amounts of daily calories, but expecting to cut more over time.

The new model gives dieters one calorie goal for short term weight loss and another for permanent weight loss. Exercise is also calculated in to help set realistic goals.

Tests on small numbers of adults who were fed strictly controlled diets showed the model was accurate, though real-life situations are harder to predict.

Study co-author Carson Chow, also with NIH, said the daily calorie reduction needed for weight loss was actually smaller than researchers anticipated.

“It is essentially one cookie different a day, so a 150 calorie cookie leads to a seven kilogram (15 pound) difference in weight. That is huge in my opinion,” Chow said.

Their model was first published in The Lancet in August 2011.

Also, if a dieter enters an extreme weight goal, the number of calories the model returns may be much too low to be realistic or healthy, so it needs an expert’s interpretation.

Only six per cent of overweight people believe their weight is bad enough to be classified in that category or they should be described as obese, a survey found, according to a survey published today.

A person would be considered as obese, when he has a body mass index (BMI) above 30 while a healthy score ranges from 18.5 to 25.

According to the latest government figures, more than 60 per cent of adults in England and a third of 10 and 11 year olds are overweight.

Britain’s obesity epidemic is reaching crisis point as the National Health Service (NHS) struggles to cope with increasing numbers of patients with conditions caused or exacerbated by being overweight.

According to the latest government figures, more than 60 per cent of adults in England and a third of 10 and 11 year olds are overweight.

Dr Jacquie Lavin, the head of nutrition and research at Slimming World, which conducted the survey, said: “This worrying new data reveals the complex psychological issues associated with being overweight.

Obesity and chronic health conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes cost Britain US$ 32 billion dollars (£20 billion) a year in lost productivity, it was claimed last month, while studies show that people fail to recognize obesity in their own family members, especially when they live in areas where being overweight is common.

Twenty five percent of the population in Britain is obese, but the vast majority deny how severely their weight could be affecting their health, according to research.

Only six per cent of overweight people believe their weight is bad enough to be classified in that category or they should be described as obese, a survey found, according to a survey published today.
A person would be considered as obese, when he has a body mass index (BMI) above 30 while a healthy score ranges from 18.5 to 25.

According to the latest government figures, more than 60 per cent of adults in England and a third of 10 and 11 year-olds are overweight.

Britain’s obesity epidemic is reaching crisis point as the National Health Service (NHS) struggles to cope with increasing numbers of patients with conditions caused or exacerbated by being overweight.

According to the latest government figures, more than 60 per cent of adults in England and a third of 10 and 11 year-olds are overweight.

Dr Jacquie Lavin, the head of nutrition and research at Slimming World, which conducted the survey, said: “This worrying new data reveals the complex psychological issues associated with being overweight.

Obesity and chronic health conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes cost Britain US$ 32 billion dollars (£20 billion) a year in lost productivity, it was claimed last month, while studies show that people fail to recognise obesity in their own family members, especially when they live in areas where being overweight is common.

According to the Bupa Health Pulse poll, four in 10 people who were actually obese thought they were a ‘healthy’ weight, suggesting Britons are ‘blissfully unaware’ of the dangers of eating too much and not taking enough exercise.

According to the Bupa Health Pulse poll, four in 10 people who were actually obese thought they were a ‘healthy’ weight, suggesting Britons are ‘blissfully unaware’ of the dangers of eating too much and not taking enough exercise.

In it Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University and Dr. James Fowler of the University of California used data gathered from 12,067 subjects in along running American government study, the Framingham Heart Study.

The data included 32 years of medical records, including such routine data as body weight and smoking habits. But the Framingham researchers also happened to know who among the subjects were friends.

In analyzing the Framingham data, Dr. Christakis and Dr. Fowler found that friends, and friends of friends, had similar levels of obesity, but neighbors did not. The researchers proposed a possible explanations.

One was homophily, the tendency to choose friends like oneself. A second explanation was that people are affected in the same ways by the environments they share with their friends. The third explanation, and the one that garnered so much attention, was contagion.

Does obesity spread like a virus through networks of friends and friends of friends? Do smoking, loneliness, happiness, depression and drug use proliferate through social networks?

In recent years, a series of highly publicized studies of two researchers have concluded that these behaviors can be literally contagious, passed from person to person.

And there was an important public health corollary, the researchers said: It should be possible to curb a behavior like obesity by focusing on small groups of people who influence their networks.

But now those surprising conclusions have drawn criticism from other scientists who claim that the studies methodology was flawed and the original date were inadequate to estimate the role that contagion might play in the spread of these behaviors.

The social scientists who published the original studies, Drs. Christakis and Fowler, say they are aware of the limitations of their analyses but mantain that their conclusions are robust.

But critics are not convinced that it is possible to separate homophily from contagion with observational data. “It is very hard to be sure you have properly accounted for all the confounding variables in any observational study,” said Hans Noel, a social scientist at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., who has criticized Dr. Christakis’s and Dr. Fowler’s work.

The explanations have different implications for public health. If behaviors cluster together because of homophily or shared environments, there is no need to regard other people as potentially harmful.

But if contagion is real, it might follow that people who are fat should stay away from fat people to control their weight.

Dr. Christakis and Dr. Fowler focused on this as a cause of obesity, saying that they could estimate its effect and it was large. They theorized that a person’s idea of an acceptable weight , or an acceptable portion size, changes when he sees how big his friends are or how much they eat.

One goal is to try to figure out the hormonal mechanisms by which the surgery can quickly resolve diabetes, so that drugs might be developed to have the same effect.

The study will do what cannot be done with people, kill some of the monkeys to examine their brains and pancreases.

The monkey’s daily diet consists of dried chow pellets, with about one third of the calories coming from fat, similar to a typical American diet, according to Kevin L. Grove, a neuroscientist who directs the Oregon program, though the diet also contains adequate protein and nutrients.

They can eat as many pellets as they want, and are treated to peanut butter, popcorn or peanuts. They also drink a punch with the fructose equivalent of about a can of soda a day. They might consume about twice as many calories as a normal weight monkey.

Researchers say the high fructose drink appears to accelerate the development of obesity and diabetes. Still, about 40 percent do not put on a lot of weight.

At the Oregon National Primate Research Center, a colony of monkeys has been fattened up to help scientists study the twin human epidemics of obesity and diabetes. The overweight monkeys also test new drugs aimed at treating those conditions.

The corpulent primates serve as useful models, experts say they resemble humans much more than as rats do.They tend to eat when bored, even when they are not really hungry. And unlike human subjects, “non human primates don’t lie,” Dr. Grove said. “We know exactly how much they are eating.”

Some of the obese monkeys are kept alone in cages for months or years to monitor their food intake which also limits their exercise.

Demand for the overweight primates is growing as part of the battle against the obesity epidemic according to researchers.

Rhythm Pharmaceuticals in Boston tested its experimental diet drug on some of the monkeys. After eight weeks, the animals reduced their food intake 40 percent and lost 13 percent of their weight, without apparent heart problems.

The primate center here, part of Oregon Health and Science University, has more than 4,000 monkeys. About 150 of them are the rotund rhesus. Some receive daily insulin shots to treat diabetes, and some have clogged arteries. One died of a heart attack at a fairly young age.

One rhesus, who weighed a hefty 32 kilograms, ate “nothing but an American Heart Association recommended diet,” she said. (Rhesus typically weigh around 10 kilograms.)

Some companies see no need to use primates to study obesity and diabetes, saying it is almost as easy to do human studies. Monkey studies can cost up to several million dollars. And ethical reviews must precede a study.

Animal rights activists say primate studies, subject animals to needless suffering, like the stress of being caged. And they question whether the studies are needed.

They point to studies by Dr. Grove that when pregnant monkeys ate the high fat diet, their offspring had metabolic problems.

Dr. Grove defended using solitary cages, saying he need the animals separated so they could snack between meals, since that is a major reason people gain weight. “Our research model is a sedentary lifestyle with calorically dense diets,” he said.

He said the study found the diet induced chemical changes in the fetuses’ brains that might have been responsible for the problems in the offspring.

The findings may also apply to humans. The studies also found that a healthy diet during pregnancy reduced troubles in the offspring.

According to researchers of the University of South Carolina, dieters give importance to name labelings of food products that they give favorable inclination that such name is more healthier than the other, i.e., names like ‘salad’ for ‘pasta’ or ‘fruit chew’ for ‘candy chew’ while non dieters give no distinctions about them.

“The fact that people’s perceptions of healthfulness vary with the name of the food item isn’t surprising. What is interesting is that dieters, who try to eat healthy and care about what they eat, fell into these ‘naming traps’ more than non-dieters who really don’t care about healthy eating,” study author Caglar Irmak, an assistant professor of marketing, said in a university news release.

Results from the study of more than 520 people suggest that dieters rely on food names to identify supposedly healthy foods, rather than reading on the provided nutritional information on the food products and restaurant menus, Irmak said.

“These results should give dieters pause. The study shows that dieters base their food decisions on the name of the food item instead of the ingredients of the item. As a result, they may eat more than what their dieting goals prescribe,” Irmak explained.

BMI has been used to measure body fat for the past 200 years, but it is not without flaws, according to Richard Bergman of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and colleagues in their article they had written in the journal Obesity.

While there are other, more complex ways to measure body fat beyond simply stepping on a scale, BMI is widely used both by researchers and doctors.

BMI is calculated by dividing weight in kilograms by height in meters squared. A person who is 5 feet 5 inches tall is classified as overweight at 150 pounds (68 kg) and obese at 180 pounds (82 kg).

BMI numbers cannot be generalized across different ethnic groups or used with athletes, who have extra lean body mass especially to women and men with the same BMI might have very different levels of extra flab.

The team made the index using data from a Mexican-American population study. They confirmed the scale’s accuracy using an advanced device called a dual-energy X-ray absorption or DEXA scanner.

Tests in a study of African Americans showed similar findings, suggesting BAI can be used across different racial groups.

The rationale for such diet is to make fiber help in reducing fat absorption and to help the person feel full longer so he or she can minimize calorie intake. The 40 gram Fiber diet was never intended to increase fat burning.

The health benefits of corn has been known for its high contents of vitamins B1, folate, pantothenic acid and mineral (manganese). Its folate is known to help lower the blood levels of an amino acid that can directly damage blood vessels.

In a study conducted to rats, they were fed one gram of fiber in an array of eight soluble and insoluble fibers, after 3 months of feeding the soluble fiber from corn produced the most benefits.

The fibers in corn help in increasing the feeling of fullness and its soluble fiber may boost bone mineral content .

Aside from the three major components, the dieters can still take a calculated amount of other carbohydrate, protein and fat sources and this can give you an idea that truly corn, a healthy component in a weight loss diet.

The essential nutrients in corn are also known to support lung health. The orange red carotenoid (beta-cryptothanxin) found in corn, may significantly lower one’s risk in developing cancer.

The group consuming the most cryptothanxin rich food from corn were found to be 37 percent lower risk of lung cancer compared to smokers who ate the least of these health protective foods.

Corn can give protection against complex disease, in its simplest form, this carbohydrate is rich in vitamin B1 (thiamin) which is integral in the production of energy from foods we eat.

With the health benefits that the corn has brought, try to make it as a staple food in your diet.