The emirate isn’t just the world’s richest country, it’s also one of the fattest. Half of adults and a third of children are obese, and almost 17 percent of the native population suffers from diabetes. By comparison, about a third of Americans are obese, and 8 percent diabetic. The problem is that Qataris are so rich that they don’t need […]
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The species of bacteria that dominate our guts may strongly affect whether we’re thin or fat. Researchers at Washington University collected samples of gut bacteria from pairs of twins in which one was obese and the other thin. Then they transplanted the bacteria into mice. The mice that received the bacteria from the obese twins became obese; the mice that […]
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Research has concluded the main cause of America’s obesity epidemic is that food has become too cheap and easy to get. The findings challenge conventional wisdom about obesity in the U.S., shifting the focus from sedentary lifestyles to the economics of eating. “It isn’t just the fact that we may be eating more high-calorie food, but we are eating more […]
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The average American woman now weighs 166.2 pounds, about the same as the average American man weighed in the early 1960’s. Over the same time period, U.S. men have gained nearly 30 pounds, from 166.3 in the ’60’s to 195.5 today.
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A scary new trend among college students combines starvation with binge drinking, says TheAtlantic.com. Researchers say “drunkorexia” now affects as many as one in four college students, who diet all day so that they can drink at night without gaining weight. In one recent study of 22,000 students at 40 universities, those who reported working out or dieting to shed […]
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