TUESDAY, Jan. 25 (HealthDay News) — Higher indoor temperatures during the winter may be contributing to rising rates of obesity in the United States and other developed countries, according to a new British study.

Reduced exposure to cold may affect the ability to maintain a healthy weight by minimizing the need for energy expenditure to stay warm, as well as reducing the body’s capacity to produce heat, said the researchers.

They found that winter indoor temperatures in the United States and the United Kingdom have increased over the past few decades, which means people are spending more time in milder temperatures.

“Increased time spent indoors, widespread access to central heating and air conditioning, and increased expectations of thermal comfort all contribute to restricting the range of temperatures we experience in daily life and reduce the time our bodies spend under mild thermal stress — meaning we’re burning less energy. This could have an impact on energy balance, and ultimately have an impact on body weight and obesity,” study author Fiona Johnson, a researcher in the department of epidemiology and public health at University College London, said in a UCL news release.

“Research into the environmental drivers behind obesity, rather than the genetic ones, has tended to focus on diet and exercise, which are undoubtedly the major contributors. However, it is possible that other environmental factors, such as winter indoor temperatures, may also have a contributing role. This research therefore raises the possibility for new public health strategies to address the obesity epidemic,” Johnson said.

The study appears in the current issue of the journal Obesity Reviews.

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases explains how you can achieve weight loss for life.

TUESDAY, Jan. 25 (HealthDay News) — Longevity isn’t increasing as fast in the United States as it is in other developed countries, says a new report that points a finger at high rates of smoking and obesity.

For 25 years, U.S. life expectancy at age 50 has increased, but more slowly than in most of the other 21 countries studied, including Japan and Australia, notes the report from the National Research Council, an arm of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Since the United States spends more on health care than any other country, this slowed pace is striking, said report co-author Samuel H. Preston, a professor of demography at the University of Pennsylvania. The results are “surprising in terms of our self-concept,” he added.

“We determined the most likely source of our shortfall is cigarette smoking, particularly the heavy amount of smoking done by American women,” he said.

“Obesity also appears to be important, but we are less certain of its role,” he added. “We are the heaviest country in the Western world.”

For U.S. women, life expectancy at age 50 is 33.1 years, while it’s 35.5 on average for women in Japan, Australia, Sweden and Switzerland, Preston said. “And we are a couple of years behind France, Italy and Spain. Men are not as far behind, maybe 1 to 1.5 years behind the leaders,” he added.

Fifty years ago more Americans smoked than Europeans and Japanese, and this difference still affects life expectancy today. A similar effect from smoking is seen in shortened lifespans in Denmark and the Netherlands, according to the report.

The effects of smoking on mortality rates take up to 30 years to be seen, so life expectancy for U.S. men will probably improve in coming decades because fewer men have been smoking over the last 20 years, the report says.

Among women, whose smoking habits peaked later than men’s, lifespan increases will likely be slow during the next decade.

Although the exact contribution of obesity to shortened lifespan isn’t known, it might be responsible for one-fifth to one-third of the life expectancy gap between the United States and other developed countries, the report says.

Moreover, the obesity epidemic could make the years gained by reduced smoking moot, according to the report. However, recent data find the obesity epidemic leveling off and the risk of death associated with obesity may be in decline, the authors say.

“It’s clear that our behavioral patterns are not what would lead to optimal health,” Preston said. “That’s partly a reflection of personal decisions. It’s perhaps a reflection that we are not doing a good job in preventive medicine.”

While lack of access to health care also affects lifespan, this is less of a factor because those over 65 have access to Medicare, the report notes.

Among aging Americans, cancer and cardiovascular disease remain the main causes of death, and diagnosis and survival rates from these diseases appear to be better in the United States than in most other industrialized countries, the report says.

Hormone replacement therapy did not appear to influence women’s longevity, nor did social ties seem to have a bearing on life expectancy, the authors say.

However, the report, titled Explaining Divergent Levels of Longevity in High-Income Countries, suggests that gaps in research make it difficult to draw hard and fast conclusions about how factors such as diet, physical inactivity and social integration affect longevity.

Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, said he believes the shortfalls revealed in the report are indicative of a problem much deeper than personal behaviors such as overeating and smoking.

“While we are an affluent country, we tolerate and even propagate enormous economic disparities. A large volume of research suggests that disparities in wealth predictably create disparities in health,” he said.

What Americans call a health-care system is predominantly a disease-care system, focused on the treatment of disease after it develops, Katz said.

“Health is more about what happens in communities and homes, schools and supermarkets, restaurants and churches, than emergency rooms and cardiac care units,” he said.

“Only when we confront the widening divide between haves and have-nots in the U.S., and invest in health promotion programming in the places people work and learn and play, will this kind of comparison to our peers prove less embarrassing,” Katz said.

More information

For more information on life expectancy, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

WEDNESDAY, March 30 (HealthDay News) — A combination of diet and exercise can help obese seniors lose weight and stay fit much better than either diet or exercise alone, researchers reported Wednesday.

The finding may sound obvious, but the lead author of the new study said it had not been proven previously in people over 65.

In fact, some physicians worry about recommending dietary changes and exercise for older people for fear that weight loss may cause them to lose muscle and bone mass and increase their frailty, said geriatrics specialist Dr. Dennis T. Villareal, whose study is published in the March 31 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

But the findings suggest that older people, with approval from a physician, should combine diet and weight management “to improve their physical function and their quality of life and delay the need for institutionalization,” Villareal said.

At least 20 percent of the elderly are obese — a step above being simply overweight — and that number will grow as more baby boomers age, Villareal added. He is currently chief of geriatrics at New Mexico VA Medical Center, but he started the research when he was at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

In a year-long trial, Villareal and his colleagues tracked the health of 93 obese people who were 65 or older. The participants were assigned to one of four groups: Some took part in a 90-minute exercise routine (including stretching, aerobic activity and training on weight machines) three times a week. Others reduced their diets by 500 to 700 calories a day, roughly equal to a couple of servings of low-sugar cereal with non-fat milk. A third group dieted and exercised, while a fourth group, acting as a control, did none of the programs.

Those who dieted and exercised did the best, losing 9 percent of their weight while retaining lean body mass, increasing oxygen consumption and improving their strength and balance. The diet-alone group lost 10 percent of their weight but did not achieve similar physical improvements.

And the exercise group, along with the control group, lost no weight.

It’s not surprising that those who only exercised didn’t shed pounds, Villareal said. “There’s a myth that exercise is effective in inducing weight loss,” he said, adding that exercise must be intense to cause people to shed pounds.

Overall, the researchers reported in their study, diet or exercise alone did improve physical function, by about 12 percent and 15 percent, respectively. But a combination of diet and exercise improved overall physical performance by 21 percent.

That’s important because “obesity exacerbates the age-related decline in physical function, which causes frailty, impairs quality of life, and results in increases in nursing home admissions,” they noted in the study.

The findings make sense, said Alice H. Lichtenstein, director of the Cardiovascular Nutrition Laboratory at Tuft University’s Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging. “It’s impressive that they were able to get the people to adhere to a diet and to engage in physical activity,” she added.

More information

For more about obesity, try the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

TUESDAY, Jan. 25 (HealthDay News) — Higher indoor temperatures during the winter may be contributing to rising rates of obesity in the United States and other developed countries, according to a new British study.

Reduced exposure to cold may affect the ability to maintain a healthy weight by minimizing the need for energy expenditure to stay warm, as well as reducing the body’s capacity to produce heat, said the researchers.

They found that winter indoor temperatures in the United States and the United Kingdom have increased over the past few decades, which means people are spending more time in milder temperatures.

“Increased time spent indoors, widespread access to central heating and air conditioning, and increased expectations of thermal comfort all contribute to restricting the range of temperatures we experience in daily life and reduce the time our bodies spend under mild thermal stress — meaning we’re burning less energy. This could have an impact on energy balance, and ultimately have an impact on body weight and obesity,” study author Fiona Johnson, a researcher in the department of epidemiology and public health at University College London, said in a UCL news release.

“Research into the environmental drivers behind obesity, rather than the genetic ones, has tended to focus on diet and exercise, which are undoubtedly the major contributors. However, it is possible that other environmental factors, such as winter indoor temperatures, may also have a contributing role. This research therefore raises the possibility for new public health strategies to address the obesity epidemic,” Johnson said.

The study appears in the current issue of the journal Obesity Reviews.

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases explains how you can achieve weight loss for life.

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 27 (HealthDay News) — Children with symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are at increased risk for obesity in adulthood, a new study claims.

Having three or more of any of the symptoms of ADHD — such as inattention, hyperactivity or impulsivity — significantly increases the chances of being obese, according to researchers from Duke University Medical Center, who examined federal data on 15,197 adolescents followed from 1995 to 2009.

“It’s not just the diagnosis of ADHD that matters; it’s the symptoms,” study co-author Scott Kollins, director of the Duke ADHD Program, said in a Duke news release.

Another study author agreed, adding that the more symptoms, the higher the risk.

“It’s a dose effect. We showed that as the number of symptoms increase, the prevalence of obesity also increases,” said study co-author Bernard Fuemmeler, director of the Pediatric Psychology & Family Health Promotion Lab in the Department of Community and Family Medicine.

Even among children with only symptoms of hyperactivity or impulsiveness — the most influential of the risk factors studied — the risk of obesity rose to 63 percent. These symptoms were also associated with greater weight gain in the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

The data on the teens came from the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

“The findings support the idea that certain self-regulation capacities, like the ability to regulate one’s impulses, could be a relevant trait to understanding why some people may be more vulnerable to obesity,” Fuemmeler said, adding that this might help with the design of interventions.

The study appears online in the International Journal of Obesity.

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health has more about ADHD.

WASHINGTON – Before there was Dr. Atkins, there was William Banting. He invented the low-carb diet of 1863. Even then Americans were trying out advice that urged fish, mutton or “any meat except pork” for breakfast, lunch and dinner — hold the potatoes, please.

It turns out our obsession with weight and how to lose it dates back at least 150 years. And while now we say “overweight” instead of “corpulent” — and obesity has become epidemic — a look back at dieting history shows what hasn’t changed is the quest for an easy fix.

“We grossly, grossly underestimate” the difficulty of changing behaviors that fuel obesity, says Clemson University sociologist Ellen Granberg, after examining archives at the Library of Congress. She believes it’s important to show “we’re not dealing with some brand new, scary phenomenon we’ve never dealt with before.”

Indeed, the browning documents are eerily familiar.

Consider Englishman William Banting’s account of losing almost 50 pounds in a year. He did it by shunning “bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer and potatoes, which had been the main (and I thought innocent) elements of my existence” in favor of loads of meat.

His pamphlet, “Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public,” quickly crossed the Atlantic and become so popular here that “banting” became slang for dieting, Granberg says.

While obesity has rapidly surged in the last few decades, we first changed from a nation where being plump was desirable into a nation of on-again, off-again dieters around the end of the 19th century, Granberg says.

Before then, people figured a little extra weight might help withstand infectious diseases that vaccines and antibiotics later would tame. It also was a sign of prosperity. But just as doctors today bemoan a high-tech, immobile society, the emergence of trolleys, cars and other machinery in the late 19th century scaled back the sheer number of calories people once burned, Granberg explains. Increasing prosperity meant easier access to food.

“An excess of flesh is to be looked upon as one of the most objectionable forms of disease,” the Philadelphia Cookbook declared in 1900. Low-cal cookbooks hadn’t arrived yet; the calorie wasn’t quite in vogue.

By 1903, La Parle obesity soap that “never fails to reduce flesh” was selling at a pricey $1 a bar. The Louisenbad Reduction Salt pledged to “wash away your fat.” Soon came an exercise machine, the Graybar Stimulator to jiggle the pounds. Bile Beans promoted a laxative approach.

As the government prepares to update U.S. dietary guidelines next week, the Library of Congress culled its archives and, with Weight Watchers International, gathered experts recently to discuss this country’s history of weight loss.

Granberg recounted how real nutrition science was born.

The government’s first advice to balance proteins, carbohydrates and fat came in 1894. A few years later, life insurance companies reported that being overweight raised the risk of death. In 1916, the Department of Agriculture came up with the five food groups. Around World War II, charts showing ideal weight-for-height emerged, surprisingly close to what today is considered a healthy body mass index.

Diet foods quickly followed, as did weight loss support groups like Overeaters Anonymous and Weight Watchers — putting today’s diet infrastructure in place by 1970, Granberg says.

Yet fast-forward and two-thirds of Americans today are either overweight or obese, and childhood obesity has tripled in the past three decades. Weight-loss surgery is skyrocketing. Diet pills have been pulled from the market for deadly side effects, with only a few possible new ones in the pipeline.

More and more, specialists question how our society and culture fuel overeating.

“Should it be socially desirable to walk down the street with a 30-ounce Big Gulp?” asks Patrick O’Neill, president-elect of The Obesity Society and weight-management director at the Medical University of South Carolina.

Negotiating a weight-loss menu for a family with different food preferences is a minefield that affects how people feel about themselves and their relationships with loved ones, adds Clemson’s Granberg, who began studying the sociology of obesity after losing 120 pounds herself.

“If what you need is a nutritionally sound, healthful weight-loss plan, you can get 100 of them,” she says. “That, we have figured out in the last 100 years. It’s how to do all this other stuff that I think is the real challenge.”

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.

THURSDAY, June 16 (HealthDay News) — Obese patients whose body-mass index (BMI) falls below the minimum level recommended for weight-loss surgery may have better outcomes than those who are more obese, new research suggests.

An analysis of data from nearly 1,000 patients revealed that those patients whose pre-surgery BMIs were below the federal guideline threshold of 35-plus experienced a 100 percent remission from type 2 diabetes in the year following surgery.

In contrast, the remission rate for type 2 diabetes in obese patients with a BMI of 35 or more was about 75 percent.

“There was a clear trend that as your weight was lower when having gastric bypass surgery, your outcomes were actually better,” noted study co-author Dr. John Morton, director of bariatric surgery at Stanford Hospital & Clinics at Stanford University in Palo Alto.

“This finding suggests that perhaps we should be getting patients to surgery sooner than later, before their weight goes too high and the surgery comes less effective,” Morton said.

“After all, when we talk about patients below a BMI of 35, we’re not talking about people who are just pleasantly plump,” Morton added. “These are people with real, substantial risks associated with excess weight, particularly with respect to diabetes, which has a lot of negative consequences.”

Morton and his colleagues are slated to present their findings Thursday at the American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery annual meeting, in Orlando, Fla. Because the study has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, its findings should be viewed as preliminary.

Guidelines from the National Institutes of Health recommend gastric bypass only for patients whose BMI is 35 or more and who have an obesity-related condition (such as high blood pressure, sleep apnea, joint disease and/or metabolic syndrome) and who have not been able to lose weight through less invasive methods.

For someone with a BMI of 40 or more, an obesity-related disease is not necessary to qualify for weight-loss surgery, according to NIH guidelines.

Morton noted that ideally one’s BMI should clock in under 25. For a woman with a height of 5-foot-4, this would roughly equate to weighing about 140 pounds.

A woman of the same height who weighs 200 pounds would actually fall just short of the BMI threshold of 35, he said, while at 300 pounds the same woman would have a BMI of nearly 52.

Morton explained that the current study came about almost accidentally, as a result of a Stanford pre-surgical program designed to educate prospective patients about the surgery and to encourage them to adopt better nutritional habits before the operation.

Out of the 980 obese patients who had met the NIH criteria when they were initially slated for surgery between 2004 and 2010, 12 patients actually showed up for the procedure at BMI levels below the recommended cut-off point for surgery.

The result: a year following surgery, those patients with a BMI under 35 not only experienced better outcomes in terms of diabetes, but lost more weight than those who met the recommended BMI threshold for weight-loss surgery. They also showed more improvement in obesity-related conditions in addition to diabetes.

At check-ins from three-months to a year after surgery, the patients who weighed less than that recommended for gastric bypass had also lost more weight than those with the higher BMIs. At the 12-month mark, they had lost 167 percent of their excess weight, in contrast to those with a BMI of 35 to 40 (112 percent), 40 to 45 (85.3 percent), and 50 (67 percent).

The authors also noted that the time it took to perform the gastric bypass procedure itself was also shorter for those with lower BMIs.

“What we found amounts to what I think is a big lesson: we ought to intervene with these patients earlier than previously thought,” said Morton.

Like all operations, weight-loss surgery is not without risk. Complications include serious infections, internal bleeding and blood clots, and the risk of dying is one in 1,000, according to the American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery.

Weight-loss surgeries are also expensive, costing about $20,000 to $25,000 or more, depending on the procedure.

Dr. David M. Kendall, chief scientific and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association, approached the findings with some caution.

“While these are exciting and interesting findings, it is really the first set of evidence that looks at this specifically,” he said. “We need more research with larger groups and for longer periods of follow-up before we can really start ringing the bell.”

“More generally, the other thing I would add is that while bariatric surgery has on several occasions shown impressive results across various bands of weight, people need to be reminded that even modest weight loss and improved glucose control in the absence of surgery can help immensely in terms of diabetes control” and prevention, Kendall said.

More information

For more on bariatric surgery, visit the National Institutes of Health.

Weight-loss surgery may treat infertility in some obese women, a new study says.

Six women in the study who were infertile due to polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), a condition that can occur with weight gain and cause infertility, became pregnant following weight-loss surgery, the researchers say.

The study was small and more research is needed to confirm the findings. But for women with PCOS, weight-loss surgery may be a cure for infertility, said study researcher Dr. Mohammad Jamal, an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

“Many other studies have shown bariatric surgery can improve or resolve a multitude of diseases and conditions,” including diabetes, Jamal said. “It appears that infertility now joins that list.”

However, infertility experts disagree the surgery is a cure. If women with PCOS regain the weight, their infertility would likely return, said Dr. Beth Plante, a clinical assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Brown University Medical School who was not involved in the study.

“We wouldn’t typically recommend having the surgery just to treat infertility,” Plante said.

But she said weight loss through any means has been shown to improve fertility in those with PCOS.

“If this is how a patient chooses to achieve that weight loss, then we would usually encourage that,” Plante said.

The study will be presented today (June 15) at the meeting of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery in Orlando.

Infertility and surgery

PCOS is a disorder in which a woman’s levels of sex hormones are out of balance, according to the National Institutes of Health. Symptoms include changes in the menstrual cycle, small cysts in the ovaries and infertility. The condition occurs in up to 10 percent of women of childbearing age, Jamal said.

It’s not known what causes PCOS. But obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes are common in those with the condition. Women are usually diagnosed with PCOS in their 20s and 30s, but symptoms can begin at puberty, according to the NIH.

In the new study, Jamal and colleagues reviewed the medical records of 20 women who had PCOS before weight-loss surgery.

Six of these women wanted to become pregnant but had been infertile. All six became pregnant within three years of having the surgery.

Seventeen women in the study had irregular periods before the surgery, and 14 of them saw a restoration of their menstrual cycle afterward.

After the surgery, the women lost an average of 60 percent of their excess weight, the researchers said.

Precautions

The surgery comes with risks, Plante said. For this reason, women with PCOS should only have the surgery if they were already considering it for other reasons, to treat their obesity or other conditions, including high blood pressure and diabetes, Plante said.

In addition, because of potential nutrition deficits after surgery, it is recommended women who undergo weight-loss surgery put off trying to conceive until 18 months after surgery, Jamal said.

Obesity itself can pose risks during pregnancy, including the risk of gestational diabetes. So weight-loss surgery can reduce the risk of many pregnancy complications, Jamal said.

Pass it on: Obese women with polycystic ovarian syndrome may be able to become pregnant after weight-loss surgery.

This story was provided by MyHealthNewsDaily, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow MyHealthNewsDaily staff writer Rachael Rettner on Twitter @RachaelRettner.