Contents tagged with obesity

  • The sour side of sugary drinks and what family physicians can do about obesity

    Tags: obesity, sugar-sweetened beverages, family physician, weight of the nation, weight loss

    Tuesday, September 25, 2012 2:21:00 PM
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    Regularly drinking sugar-sweetened beverages like soda and sports drinks will make you fat.

    By now this is an old message, but it gains more ground with each new article, study, or documentary released about the American obesity epidemic. The latest research comes from three studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Two of the studies found that drinking noncaloric drinks could lower children’s weight gain, and the third study found that people with a genetic predisposition for weight gain were twice as likely to gain weight if they drank sugary beverages compared to people who did not drink these beverages.

    One of the studies’ authors, Dr. David Ludwig from Boston Children’s Hospital, told Reuters Health, “I know of no other category of food whose elimination can produce weight loss in such a short period of time. The most effective single target for an intervention aimed at reducing obesity is sugary beverages.”

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  • Best practice: What one Austin practice is doing about obesity

    Tags: best practice, obesity, weight loss

    Tuesday, March 20, 2012 8:56:37 AM
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    By John K. Frederick, M.D.

    If your clinic is anything like ours, we are being deluged with obesity and its downstream effects of diabetes, hypertension, obstructive sleep apnea, and heart disease.  New evidence surfaces almost daily in the medical literature describing some new correlation between obesity and negative health consequences. This situation is also discouraging because there aren’t many good community resources that are both easy to access and effective. The inertia of poor diet and lack of exercise is overwhelming. Repeated advice and encouragement often seem useless, and eventually it feels as if there is no point. Even the employees in our own clinic seem to be disproportionately affected with this condition.

    Several factors contributed to our recent action. Perhaps it was seeing how fast the box of doughnuts emptied in our break room. Or, maybe it was the Medscape article pointing out that overweight doctors tend to spend less effort on recognizing and treating obesity. That hit close to home!

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