Childhood Obesity - Do you have an overweight child? We offer tips to help your child lose weight and get fit!

The slips say, "Rx for Healthy Active Living.'' They list four daily tasks: eating at least five fruits and vegetables; limiting screen time to two hours or less; getting at least one hour of physical activity; and drinking fewer sugary drinks.

They also have a space for parents or kids to fill in which task they want to work on first.

The academy has downloadable versions of these prescription slips for pediatricians on its Web site.

Labels: awareness, prevention

• Researchers from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine looked for three markers that measure inflammation in more than 16,000 children ages 1 to 17 years old.
  
• About 60 percent of the obese teenagers in the study showed elevated levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) compared to 18% of teenagers with normal weight.
  
• The very obese children were even more likely to show elevated levels.
  

Labels: heart_disease, infant, toddlers

Governments over the years, have passed various pieces of legislation designed to reduce smoking, including increased taxation and packaging requirements, and some health experts have been pushing for similar initiatives to combat obesity.

Proposals include banning the advertising of unhealthy foods, increasing taxes on food that isn't nutritious, subsidizing fruits and vegetables to make them more affordable for Canadians and forcing the food industry to change its labelling, packaging and ingredients.

"This is a legitimate public debate about how far you go with voluntary versus legal restrictions," said [Dr. David] Butler-Jones. "The timing for that I think, really depends on when a community is educated enough, and ready enough and understands the implications."

Labels: awareness, canada, junk food, prevention

[Study co-author Staci D.] Bilbo and colleagues placed rats on one of three diets (low-fat, high-saturated fat, and high-trans fat) four weeks prior to mating and throughout pregnancy and lactation. The high-fat diets rendered the mice clinically obese.

The newborn pups' brains were analyzed. Offspring born to mothers on the high-fat diets showed increased immune cell activation and release of injurious substances known as cytokines, all right after birth. The changes stuck even until the newborns became adults, and even after they were put on low-fat diets.

"This hyper-response to inflammation remained dramatically increased compared to rats born to normal-weight mothers," the researchers write.

Labels: causes of childhood obesity, mothers, pregnancy

Peptides that target blood vessels in fat and cause them to go into programmed cell death (termed apoptosis) could become a model for future weight-loss therapies, say University of Cincinnati (UC) researchers. ...

"Think of fat tissue like a bathtub," [Prof. Seeley] says. "To keep the amount of water the same, you have to make sure that the speed of the water coming in and the water going out match. If the water is coming in faster than the water is going out, eventually you have to build a bigger bathtub.

"Obesity is the same. People who eat more calories than they burn have to build a bigger fat tissue 'bathtub,' and building new blood vessels is crucial to building this bigger bathtub. For each additional pound of fat tissue, you need to build a mile of blood vessels.

"What we found is that if we can target these fat tissue blood vessels, animals eat less and lose weight as their 'bathtubs' get smaller."

Labels: prevention, research