While the economy is still performing CPR on itself, you may find yourself without a job. Worse still, you may not be able to find another one. In the meantime, here are 101 ways to improve your life (and take up some extra time) when you can’t find a job no matter how hard you pound the pavement.

You can catch up on all the reading you’ve wanted to through the library.
You can spend more time with your family.
Be sure to exercise; you’ve certainly got enough time.
Check out the free and/or low-cost museums and art galleries in your area.
If you can swing financial aid or scholarships, it’s a great time to go back to school.
You can learn a new language.
Become a part of local community programs and youth programs.
You can volunteer more at your local church.
Become politically active and help a local candidate with their needs.
You can learn to play an instrument.
Catch up on your social networking; if you’re lucky, it could turn into employment networking, too.
You can write a book.
You can start a blog.
You can take up phoography.
You can return to an old hobby.
You can study philosophy; what IS the meaning of life?
You can take MIT’s free online courses.
You can begin correspondence (online and/or offline) with old friends and family.
You can become a Big Brother/Big Sister to a kid in need.
You can plant a garden.
You can take up roller skating.
You can volunteer at your local library.
You can volunteer at an animal shelter.
You can volunteer for the Red Cross.
You can join the Peace Corps.
You can play board games with your significant other, friends or children.
You can visit old friends.
You can spend more time with your pet(s).
You can keep your lawn immaculately maintained.
You can clean out your car.
You can re-organize your closets.
You can learn new things from TV channels like Discovery and PBS.
You can contact old professors and see if they’ll let you sit in on their classes.
You can learn meditation techniques.
You can make peace with those you have a grudge against.
You can become a part of local theatrical productions.
You can explore somewhere new each day.
Try cooking through the items in your pantry and trying new things.
You can join a choir or other musical group.
You can do lots of free reading/people watching at the bookstore.
You can research your family genealogy at the library.
You can spend lots of time with your pooch at the local dog parks.
You can start a band.
You can go on mission trips with your church.
Look up an old flame and see how they’re doing.
You can learn to play tennis.
You can learn to paint.
You can begin scrapbooking.
While not quite as productive, you can watch a whole lot of Youtube.
You can join a book club, on or offline.
You can start a Web site.
You can create videos and put them up on Youtube.
You can visit your alma mater and see all of your favorite professors.
You can visit your parents.
You can go bowling.
You can take dancing lessons.
You can practice swimming.
Go window shopping as an extra incentive to land some work.
You can become a history expert.
You can take up bike riding throughout the town.
Take up jogging/running.
Embrace your inner child and take up skateboarding. 

This is only part of the list.  To see the rest visit Suzane Smith's website at:
constructionmanagementdegree.org/

Whatever you do, have fun.

By Margaret Furtado, M.S., R.D. - Posted Mon, Jul 27, 2009, 12:23 am PDT Say it isn't so!

A recent study out of the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill cites what animal studies have hinted at for years: MSG (aka monosodium glutamate) could be a factor in weight gain.

The study focused on 750 Chinese men and women, ages 40-59, living in 3 rural villages in north and south China. Most of the study subjects prepared their meals at home without commercially processed foods and roughly 82 percent used MSG. Those participants who used the highest amounts of MSG had nearly 3 times the incidence of overweight as those who did not use MSG, even when physical activity, total caloric intake, and other possible explanations for body mass differences were accounted for. The positive correlation between MSG and higher weight confirmed what animal studies have been suggesting for years.

Maybe you're wondering what monosodium glutamate is exactly, and what you can do to avoid it in your diet. MSG is a flavor enhancer in foods—some believe it may even provide a fifth basic taste sensation (in addition to sweet, sour, salt, and bitter), what the Japanese call "umami" (roughly translated as "tastiness"). MSG is considered an "excitotoxin," since its action in the body is to excite neurotransmitters (important brain chemicals), causing nerve cells to discharge and also exciting nerves related to taste. Perhaps this ability to excite these nerves is a factor in an association between increased MSG usage and weight gain.

How prevalent is MSG in the U.S. diet? Americans consumed about 1 million pounds of MSG in 1950, and today that number has increased by a factor of 300!

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) describes MSG as "naturally occurring," and has it on the GRAS ("generally regarded as safe") list. However, not only could MSG be causing us to gain weight, but some studies also reveal that as many as 25 to 30 percent of Americans have adverse reactions to it (e.g., palpitations and migraine headaches), and as many as 30 percent are extra sensitive to it if they consume more than 5 grams at one sitting.

OK, if you're an MSG user who could stand to lose a little weight (or know someone who is), what should you do?

Unfortunately, eliminating MSG from the diet is much easier said than done, since—given the fact that food processors often change recipes—there's no list of "safe" foods that never contain MSG. A good start is to avoid anything with MSG anywhere in the ingredient list, but there will still be many foods that have MSG hidden inside other ingredients. Likewise, even products labeled "no MSG added" can still contain these hidden sources.

Best bets for avoiding MSG

Buy organic produce whenever possible.

Make things from scratch, avoiding processed ingredients as much as possible.

Limit making stews or soups in a crock pot, since slow-cooking tends to cause small amounts of glutamic acid to be released from the protein sources (e.g., meat, chicken) in the recipe.

By: Jolinda Hackett

Most of these tips really apply to everyone, not just vegetarians. They may seem trite, but they are tried and true and you will notice the difference in your health and energy levels.

* Eat a dark green vegetable (broccoli, spinach, kale, collard greens) at least three times a week. These nutritional powerhouses are packed full of vitamins such as calcium and iron. On the run or hate spinach? Try drinking your greens. I recommend Naked Juice’s Green Machine—its made with fruit juice as well as greens, so it tastes better than others.

* Take a vitamin supplement that contains B12 or include nutritional yeast in your diet regularly, especially if you're vegan or mostly vegan.

* Water water water! It’s been said over and over again for a reason—because its true! Most people don’t drink nearly enough. Bring a water bottle with you wherever you go and invest in a simple filter for your home. Water is especially important when adjusting to a new way of eating, as it will help curb any cravings you may experience.

* Make it a goal to eat at least one piece of raw fruit or a handful of raw vegetables every dayI try to eat an apple first thing in the morning to get it out of the way.

* Reduce your refined sugar intake. I’ve got as much of a sweet tooth as anybody, but I try to keep it under control by using such sugar replacers as maple syrup, stevia and agave nectar whenever possible (such as in coffee and tea) and indulging in the refined stuff only occasionally.

* Keep your favorite salad dressings on hand. I find that I’m much more likely to eat my greens or some raw veggies when my favorite salad dressings are in the fridge. A little variety is great too--I try to keep at least two kinds, either store bought or homemade on hand at all times. Some of my favorites are homemade goddess dressing, Thai peanut sauce from my local Asian grocer and rasberry vinaigrette. A vegan ranch dressing was helpful as well when I was trying to wean myself off dairy.

* Eat the rainbow! Fruits and vegetables all contain different nutrients. A simple way to remember to eat a range of vitamins and minerals is to vary the colors of the vegetables you eat. Of course, greens are always good, but try eating a rainbow of tomatoes, yellow squash and purple cabbage!

Article Source: vegetarian.about.com/od/healthnutrition/qt/HealthTips.htm

By Mike Stobbe, AP Medical Writer
ATLANTA — In a disturbing new projection, health officials say up to 40% of Americans could get swine flu this year and next and several hundred thousand could die without a successful vaccine campaign and other measures.
The estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are roughly twice the number of those who catch flu in a normal season and add greater weight to hurried efforts to get a new vaccine ready for the fall flu season.

IN EUROPEOfficals are fast-tracking vaccine

Swine flu has already hit the United States harder than any other nation, but it has struck something of a glancing blow that's more surprising than devastating. The virus has killed about 300 Americans and experts believe it has sickened more than 1 million, comparable to a seasonal flu with the weird ability to keep spreading in the summer.

Health officials say flu cases may explode in the fall, when schools open and become germ factories, and the new estimates dramatize the need to have vaccines and other measures in place.

A world health official said the first vaccines are expected in September and October. The United States expects to begin testing on some volunteers in August, with 160 million doses ready in October.

The CDC came up with the new projections for the virus' spread last month, but it was first disclosed in an interview this week with The Associated Press.

The estimates are based on a flu pandemic from 1957, which killed nearly 70,000 in the United States but was not as severe as the infamous Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19. The number of deaths and illnesses from the new swine flu virus would drop if the pandemic peters out or if efforts to slow its spread are successful, said CDC spokesman Tom Skinner.

"Hopefully, mitigation efforts will have a big impact on future cases," he said. Besides pushing flu shots, health officials might urge measures such as avoiding crowded places, handwashing, cough covering and timely use of medicines like Tamiflu.

Because so many more people are expected to catch the new flu, the number of deaths over two years could range from 90,000 to several hundred thousand, the CDC calculated. Again, that is if a new vaccine and other efforts fail.

In a normal flu season, about 36,000 people die from flu and its complications, according to the American Medical Association. That too is an estimate, because death certificates don't typically list flu as a cause of death. Instead, they attribute a fatality to pneumonia or other complications.

Influenza is notoriously hard to predict, and some experts have shied away from a forecast. At a CDC swine flu briefing Friday, one official declined to answer repeated questions about her agency's own estimate.

"I don't think that influenza and its behavior in the population lends itself very well to these kinds of models," said the official, Dr. Anne Schuchat, who oversees the CDC's flu vaccination programs.

The World Health Organization says as many as 2 billion people could become infected in the next two years — nearly a third of the world population. The estimates look at potential impacts in a two-year period because past flu pandemics have occurred in waves over more than one year.

Swine flu has been an escalating concern in Britain and some other European nations, where the virus' late arrival has grabbed attention and some officials at times have sounded alarmed.

In an interview Friday, the WHO's flu chief told the AP the global epidemic is still in its early stages.

"Even if we have hundreds of thousands of cases or a few millions of cases ... we're relatively early in the pandemic," Keiji Fukuda said at WHO headquarters in Geneva.

The first vaccines are expected in September and October, Fukuda said. Other vaccines won't be ready until well into the flu season when a further dramatic rise in swine flu cases is expected.

First identified in April, swine flu has likely infected more than 1 million Americans, the CDC believes, with many of those suffering mild cases never reported. There have been 302 deaths and nearly 44,000 laboratory-identified cases, according to numbers released Friday morning.

Because the swine flu virus is new, most people haven't developed an immunity to it. So far, most of those who have died from it in the United States have had other health problems, such as asthma.

The virus has caused an unusual number of serious illnesses in teens and young adults; seasonal flu usually is toughest on the elderly and very young children.

Associated Press writer Frank Jordans in Geneva contributed to this report.

Article Source: www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-07-26-swineflu27_N.htm

Oreos are just one food that the participants enjoyed

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter – Wed Jul 22, 7:04 pm ET
WEDNESDAY, July 22 (HealthDay News) -- When it comes to weight control, it might not be the kind of snack that matters, but who eats it.
When researchers gave similarly "sinful" snacks to obese and non-obese women, the healthy-weight women wanted less of the treat over time, but obese women kept wanting more.
"Obese and non-obese women respond to high-energy, high-density snacks in different ways," said Jennifer Temple, lead author of the study, which appears in the August issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. "For us, this underscores a need for really doing detailed studies comparing obese and non-obese women in terms of how they respond to food to try to understand things that work better to improve healthy eating."
"You can't take what you see in non-obese women and think it will automatically have the same effect in obese women," added Temple, an assistant professor in exercise and nutrition science at the University at Buffalo, in New York.
Such information could one day be useful in tailoring dieting strategies for different people.
According to background information in the study, only 10 percent of people who lose weight through dieting and exercise manage to keep that weight off for five years.
Scientists have postulated that one reason for the high failure rate is that people feel deprived of their favorite foods and end up making up for their period of abstinence.
In an earlier study, the same research team had found that "food reinforcement," the term they use to describe motivation to eat, decreased in non-obese women who were asked to consume their favorite snack, be it M&Ms or Oreo cookies, for days at a time.
"After two weeks of eating the same snack food, the women came back into the lab and said, "I don't ever want to see a potato chip again,'" Temple said. "They had no interest in working for the food."
But 300 calories is a large portion, so the researchers decided to do a similar study but with smaller (100-calorie) portions as well as the large portions. In addition, a third group of women consumed no snack calories. The study included 31 obese and 27 non-obese women.
All participants were asked to "work" for their food by performing tasks on a computer program set up as a sort of slot-machine. When all of the shapes on the screen matched, volunteers earned points toward eating.
The women were given pre-packaged portions of their favorite snack to eat every day for two weeks. Snacks tended to fall into one of two categories: high-fat and high-sugar (cookies, candy bars) or savory, meaning just high in fat (such as potato chips).
"For the zero and 100-calorie portions, the obese and non-obese groups looked the same," Temple said. "The food reinforcement didn't change before and after the two weeks, which would be expected."
However, non-obese women who snacked on 300-calorie portions exhibited no increase in motivation to eat, but motivation did increase in obese women who consumed the larger portion, the study found.
"They actually worked harder for the food," Temple said. "This was surprising to us. We had anticipated in the beginning that we might not see a decrease or as large of a decrease, but we didn't expect to see an increase."
In some cases, women reported still wanting the food even though they didn't like it.
The pattern is strikingly similar to that seen in drug addicts.
"We're exploring this idea of sensitization, which happens with drug use," Temple said. "Response to a drug will actually decrease over repeated use."
And that leads to more drug use.
"I stop short of calling overeating an addiction," she added. "I don't think it has all of the same properties, but I think we can learn something about overeating behavior from the drug world. We're applying the same experimental paradigms to food and trying to see if obese people might be more susceptible to having an increased response to repeated food administration."
Marianne Grant, a registered dietitian and health educator with the Texas A&M Health Science Center's Coastal Bend Health Education Center in Corpus Christi, said that something else could be at work.
"This suggests to me that people who were obese were not eating out of hunger," Grant said. "There was some other need that eating was filling for them."
"Everyone is different and approaches eating in a different way," she said. "What works for one person may not work for another person. Overeating may be because of some reason other than hunger. That issue needs to be addressed."

Article Source: news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20090722/hl_hsn/eatinghabitsintheobesemayechodrugaddictspatterns

Picture Source: willrunforcake.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/oreos_1.jpg

Evidence for the expanding epidemic of childhood obesity is thinning.

Nutritionists, health advocates and media reports have been sounding the alarm about a rise in childhood obesity, which could lead to diabetes, heart disease and other problems. But a series of studies from half a dozen countries suggest that rates have held steady over the past five to 10 years, albeit at levels much higher than in the 1960s and 1970s.

The reasons behind the leveling off in childhood obesity in the U.S., Australia, France, Switzerland, Sweden and New Zealand remain shrouded in mystery.

Map: Compare childhood obesity rates, state by state, in 2003 and 2007.

Obesity rates could have hit a plateau, some scientists propose, if only a certain percentage of children are genetically predisposed to obesity, and that share has gotten fat already. Timothy Olds, a professor of health sciences at the University of South Australia, believes genetics could play a role, but he also points to "all the little things people are doing to encourage healthy weight."

Some researchers argue the data used to produce these conclusions are flawed. And other scientists say that while the methodology of the recent batch of studies appears sound, the findings aren't definitive. Future surveys using different methodologies, they say, could show obesity rates on the move again.

"Most developed countries are not doing annual surveys," says Tim Lobstein, director of policy and programs for the International Obesity Taskforce, a London-based research and advocacy group. "We probably know more about growth patterns in cattle than we do for human children."

In the U.S., obesity rates among children hovered at about 16% between 2002 and 2006, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The leveling off was a surprise to William Dietz, director of the CDC's division of nutrition, physical activity and obesity, who notes that prominent anti-obesity-awareness campaigns have only been around for a few years. (A survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, a group based at the University of Chicago, showed increases in most states between 2003 and 2007, but that was based on phone interviews rather than physical examinations.)

Similar trends have shown up in Australia, where childhood obesity has held at 5% to 6% for about a decade. Prof. Olds led the research at the University of South Australia that found the stable level of childhood obesity in that country. But his findings are disputed by another group of Australian researchers, working with the Obesity Taskforce in London. According to their own analysis announced earlier this month, there has been a continued increase in the number of Australian children who are overweight or obese. The two camps disagree over which surveys should be included in the study, and over whether to consider the overweight and the obese separately, or together.

Where scientists tend to agree, though, is that even countries with relatively high levels of health-care spending don't do enough to monitor children's weight, making it difficult to pinpoint turnarounds.

The Numbers Guy Blog

Maybe Children Aren't Getting Fatter
Dr. Lobstein pines for the days when students expected to be lined up by the school nurse for height and weight measurements. Instead, researchers today struggle to find samples suitably large and representative. Few countries assess students on an annual basis, as some scientists advocate, and there is a considerable lag in crunching the numbers and identifying trends. The CDC has measured children and adults by height and weight since 1999, compiling enough numbers for a statistically robust report every two years. Other countries' surveys are more haphazard. And outside the developed world, data can be scarce, and more time elapses between surveys.

Even when a child's height and weight have been measured, it isn't clear how to determine who is overweight and who is obese. Body mass index -- weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters -- is notoriously unreliable for diagnosing individual adults with obesity, ensnaring brawny body builders along with the genuinely corpulent.

BMI is an even worse barometer for children, whose growth patterns change over time. So rather than rely on absolute BMI numbers to define obesity, as is done for adults, researchers generally label children as overweight when their BMI exceeds the 85th percentile, and obese if their BMI tops the 95th percentile.

These percentiles are defined using height and weight data from decades ago, before obesity rates surged and children were at healthier weights. That approach helps avoid overlooking some plump children, but it introduces some uncertainty about exactly how far back to go when comparing today's youth with yesterday's.

And the numbers researchers have amassed on obesity don't offer a precise picture of which children might be at risk of health problems due to weight. For some conditions, excess weight below the "overweight" level can be dangerous. Meanwhile, some studies have shown that slightly overweight people -- which could include those muscle-bound BMI false positives -- live longer than their thinner counterparts.

Statisticians noted these limitations when asked to review the various studies showing no signs of an increase in children. Susan Paddock, a senior statistician at RAND Corp., a think tank, found the methodologies to be "generally sound," but added, "these papers do not prove that obesity/overweight rates have leveled off, but rather that a significant trend was not found." It is possible that obesity rates were increasing slightly -- or even declining slightly -- but that these changes were too subtle to be detected by the infrequent, comparatively small surveys.

Still, this represents a change from the 1990s, when rapid increases in childhood obesity in developed countries were statistically significant. "Hopefully we have come to some kind of an end to this story," says Max Petzold, associate professor in epidemiology at the Nordic School of Public Health in Goteborg, Sweden. "It's not stopping at a good level. But the problem seems to be a little more under control."

Nonetheless, the global spread of obesity, and increases in adult rates even where childhood rates have leveled off, have helped make the notion of an unabated epidemic the prevailing storyline.

"When the data of rather high obesity rates were first published in 2004, everyone was talking about it and we had calls...at the lab," says Isabelle Aeberli, who studies obesity in Switzerland at Zurich's Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. But when new data were made public showing a decrease in obesity, there was little reaction outside the scientific community. "It just seems to be more interesting to the general public to show something bad as compared to something good," Ms. Aeberli adds.

Some health advocates have been leery of giving too much attention to the encouraging numbers, noting that a plateau or small decrease won't stave off the high financial and medical toll likely in store for today's overweight children.

"What I worry about is that people will read these numbers and think we've got this solved," says Dr. Dietz of the CDC. "I'm encouraged by the results, but this is no time for complacency."

Write to Carl Bialik at numbersguy@wsj.com

Article Source: online.wsj.com/article/SB124821547930269995.html

FRIDAY, July 17 (HealthDay News) -- A dose of baking soda a day may slow the progression of chronic kidney disease, a new study has found.

The study included 134 advanced chronic kidney disease patients with metabolic acidosis, a condition caused by low bicarbonate levels. The patients were randomly divided into two groups, one of which took a small daily tablet of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda).

The rate of kidney function decline was about two-thirds slower in the patients who took sodium bicarbonate than in other patients. Rapid progression of kidney disease occurred in 9 percent of patients taking sodium bicarbonate, compared with 45 percent in other patients, the researchers found.

The study found that patients taking sodium bicarbonate showed improvement in several measures of nutrition, and, even though their sodium levels increased, there were no problems associated with higher blood pressure. These patients were also less likely to develop end-stage renal disease requiring dialysis.

The findings appeared online July 16 in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

"This cheap and simple strategy has the potential of translating into significant economic, quality of life and clinical outcome benefits," researcher Dr. Magdi Yaqoob of Royal London Hospital in England, said in a news release from the American Society of Nephrology.

Low bicarbonate levels in patients with chronic kidney disease can lead to other health problems, said Yaqoob, who added that a "simple remedy like sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), when used appropriately, can be very effective.

Article Source: healthday.com/Article.asp

Water is excreted from the body all the time, which is why it’s so important to keep filling that vessel back up on a regular basis.

If there are circumstances that make the body lose even more water than normal — such as hot Central Valley temperatures — then it’s even more susceptible to dehydration.

“The body is predominantly liquid, and our fluid content in our bodies is extremely high,” said Dan Allain, nursing director of emergency and critical care services for Kaweah Delta Medical Center.

Allain’s emergency employees treat people for heat stroke and exhaustion throughout the intense summers here, and it’s usually because the patients didn’t pay attention to their water intake.

“As you dehydrate, the body shifts fluid from cells to keep the body up, and that’s when we get into electrolyte balance,” Allain said.

There are three electrolytes balanced in the body: potassium, sodium and chloride, he said. Of those, disrupting the balance of potassium is potentially life threatening.
Too much or not enough potassium can cause the heart to beat too fast, and eventually result in a heart attack.

Some of the first signs of heat exhaustion, according to Visalia Battalion Chief Danny Wristen, are:

Being dizzy or lightheaded
Having a lot of body cramps
When the body stops sweating
If a person experiencing these symptoms doesn’t change the conditions they are in as well as hydrate, they could die, he said.

Allain and Wristen offer the following tips to stay hydrated and prevent heat exhaustion:

“If you’re thirsty, you need to drink water,” Allain said.
Too many people ignore thirst and should respond to the body’s signals to prevent dehydration.

Don’t spend prolonged periods of time exposed to the sun.
“For our city employees, we tell them to take a five-minute break in their vehicle if they’re away from the office,” Wristen said.

Just sitting for five minutes in a shaded and air-conditioned car can help the body cool, he said.

Wear light-colored clothing so the body can breathe better.
“If you’re wearing dark clothing or tight clothing, you’re not giving your body a chance to breathe correctly,” Wristen said.

Drink water or sports drinks to hydrate and avoid alcohol and caffeinated drinks.
“If you’re excessively sweating in sports, you want to drink Gatorade and such drinks that have a little more substance. But in general, water is the best hydration,” Allain said.

The general rule of thumb for water intake is six to eight 8-ounce glasses a day, according to Allain.
Those who are sweating excessively due to heat or exertion should drink more, as should pregnant or breastfeeding women. People who are experiencing excessive nausea or vomiting also need to take careful measures to stay hydrated.

“Don’t drink when you’re just thirsty,” Wristen said. “If you’re outside working in the sun, drink regularly, drink consistently. That way, you don’t give your body a chance to get behind.”

Article Source: www.visaliatimesdelta.com/article/20090713/LIFESTYLE/90713006/Hydration+key+to+keeping+healthy+as+temperatures+rise
 

By MANDY KATZ
Published: July 15, 2009
FIVE-FOOT-NINE and 184 pounds, Kathryn Griffith, a retired teacher in Oakland, Calif., counted calories for decades, trying everything from the grapefruit diet to a regimen based on cabbage soup. She also did Weight Watchers — 27 times. “I knew it wouldn’t be successful, but I went back anyway,” she said.

So earlier this year, just when Oprah, the nation’s über-dieter, renewed her resolve to snack on flaxseed, Ms. Griffith went the other way, joining a tenacious movement that is scorning the diet industry and what one pair of bloggers labels, “the obesity epidemic booga booga booga.”

This movement — a loose alliance of therapists, scientists and others — holds that all people, “even” fat people, can eat whatever they want and, in the process, improve their physical and mental health and stabilize their weight. The aim is to behave as if you have reached your “goal weight” and to act on ambitions postponed while trying to become thin, everything from buying new clothes to changing careers. Regular exercise should be for fun, not for slimming.

“Fat acceptance” ideas date back more than 30 years, but have lately edged into the mainstream, thanks in part to public hand-wringing by celebrities like Oprah, Kirstie Alley and the tennis player Monica Seles, who said she had to “throw out the word ‘diet’ ” to deal with her weight gain. (Oprah now cites her goal as being not “thin,” but “healthy and strong and fit.”)

Even television is bellying up to the bar, with Lifetime’s introduction of a hefty heroine in “Drop Dead Diva” and a show having its premiere this month on Fox that stresses the “reality” in reality TV. The show, “More to Love,” matches plus-size dates with a bachelor boasting “a big waist and an even bigger heart.” And elbowing the weight-loss guides on “health” bookshelves, is a spate of new, more diet-neutral books that track the sociology of obesity, including “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite” (Rodale Books) by David Kessler, the former surgeon general, and “The Evolution of Obesity” (The Johns Hopkins University Press) by Michael L. Power and Jay Schulkin.

Adding credence to the “fat acceptance” philosophy, are recent medical studies that suggest a little extra fat may not be such a bad thing. Among the latest is a 12-year Canadian analysis in last month’s Obesity journal that confirmed earlier findings that overweight “appears to be protective against mortality,” while being too thin, like extreme obesity, correlates with higher death risk. Other recent studies have linked weight cycling (or “yo-yo dieting”) to weight gain, and to medical conditions often attributed to obesity.

Many appetite warriors have coalesced under the banner of “Health at Every Size” (or HAES), which is also the title of a book by Linda Bacon, a nutrition professor at City College of San Francisco. Ms. Bacon ran a federally financed, randomized trial to compare outcomes for 78 obese women who either dieted or were schooled in Every Size precepts. The results, published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association in 2005, showed that HAES participants fared better on measures of health, physical activity and self-esteem. Neither cohort lost weight.

These pro-fat results are a trickle, admittedly, in a flood of contrary reports that condemn obesity as a health risk. But that doesn’t worry the online denizens of the “fatosphere,” dominated by irreverent sites like fatshionista.com Fat Rant and Big Fat Blog, as well as those of the “booga booga” bloggers, Kate Harding (Shapely Prose) and Marianne Kirby (therotund.com). “Fat doesn’t equal lazy or ugly or even, necessarily, unhealthy,” says another blogger, the Fat Nutritionist.

Find it all too much of a stretch? You’re not alone. Antidiet advice defies a $30-billion weight loss industry, a cultural obsession with thinness and the fundamental public health tenet that it is dangerous to be fat. In Obesity Guidelines first published in 1998, the government’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute blames obesity for everything from heart disease to cancer. Within a month of the Canadian mortality report, University of Wisconsin researchers announced in Science that calorie-restricted rhesus monkeys seemed to be outliving an amply fed control group.

“Virtually everyone who is overweight would be better off at a lower weight,” said Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health. “There’s been this misconception, fostered by the weight-is-beautiful groups, that weight doesn’t matter. But the data are clear.”

What remains undisputed is that no clinical trial has found a diet that keeps weight off long-term for a majority. “If they really worked, we’d be running out of dieters,” said Glenn Gaesser, professor of exercise physiology at Arizona State University and author of “Big Fat Lies: The Truth About Your Weight and Your Health.”

Both sides agree that regular exercise, at any size, improves health. “If you want to know who’s going to die, know their fitness level,” said Steven Blair, a self-described “fat and fit” professor of exercise science, epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of South Carolina. His research indicates that “obese individuals who are fit have a death rate one half that of normal-weight people who are not fit.”

Still, giving up dieting can be a tough sell in a society besotted with Kate Moss’s skeletal build. In “Lessons From the Fat-O-Sphere,” a new book by Ms. Harding and Ms. Kirby, the authors suggest surrounding yourself with nonjudgmental companions as an antidote, and seeking out fat-friendly media like the “Illustrated BMI Categories” photo set Ms. Harding assembled on Flickr.

So, if yo-yo dieting often leads to weight gain, does quitting ever lead to weight loss?

Anecdotal evidence suggests that many ex-dieters do slim down, especially if they are young. Even Ms. Griffith, the retired teacher who is 67, lost several pounds after quitting. Ms. Bacon, 46, ceased dieting in her 20s and wound up quite slim, as did Susie Orbach, a psychotherapist who, as author of “Fat Is a Feminist Issue” in 1978, was one of the earliest intuitive-eating proponents. (Her latest book, “Bodies,” published this year, addresses Western culture’s growing obsession with reshaping one’s body.)

But many who quit do not reduce. Ms. Harding, 34, gave up dieting five years ago. “I thought, ‘O.K., maybe I could be a size 10, and it won’t be so bad.’ As it turned out, I ended up as roughly an 18, which was exactly where I started.”

Yet, more than size-acceptance may be involved in quitting. For many dieters, “the pursuit of thinness as a dream is a place holder,” said Deb Burgard, a clinical psychologist in Los Altos, Calif., specializing in eating disorders. “It gets in the way of asking, ‘What is it I am dreaming of?’ “

A dieter may think, “ ‘If I could just lose weight, all that will take care of itself,’ so they don’t invest in getting what they want,” she said. Instead, she said, “they invest in weight loss.”

Article source: www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/health/nutrition/16skin.html

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, July 9 (HealthDay News) -- A new study that found that a lower-calorie diet slowed the aging process in monkeys could be the best proof yet that restricted diets might do the same for humans.

"The big question in aging research is, 'Will caloric restriction in species closely related to humans slow aging?'" said Richard Weindruch, senior author of a paper appearing in the July 10 issue of Science. "This is the first clear demonstration that, in a primate species, we're inducing a slowdown of the aging process -- showing increased survival, resistance to disease, less brain atrophy and less muscle loss.

"This predicts humans would respond similarly," added Weindruch, professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an investigator at the Veterans Hospital in Madison.

Another expert noted that, despite some highly publicized studies in certain species, the link between restricted eating and longer lifespan has been far from proven.

"The idea that dietary restriction extends lifespan in all species is not true. Many strains of rats and mice do not respond. In some strains, it's actually deleterious," explained Felipe Sierra, director of the biology of aging program at the U.S. National Institute on Aging (NIA), which supported the new study. "The fact that it didn't work in some mice but it does seem to work in monkeys is surprising and it gives us hope."

But there's a larger question: how to change humans' increasingly lax eating habits. "This [finding] doesn't give me hope that humans are going to go into dietary restriction," Sierra said.

Another expert agreed. "I think this is wonderful and it has promising benefits but the problem is not that we don't know this stuff, the problem is doing it, is getting people to eat less," added Marianne Grant, a registered dietitian at Texas A&M Health Science Center Coastal Bend Health Education Center in Corpus Christi.

As Sierra sees it, the ultimate value of this and other research like it will be to unveil the physiological mechanisms behind a slowdown in the aging process, and then come up with ways to mimic those processes with drugs or other interventions.

Previous research had shown that calorie restriction can increase survival and stave off many diseases in yeast, worms, flies and, as Sierra pointed out, in some strains of mice.

The new, two-decade-long study ultimately involved 76 rhesus monkeys, all of whom started the study as adults (aged 7 to 14 years). Thirty-three monkeys are still alive, 13 of whom are allowed to eat as they like. The other 20 are allowed a diet with 30 percent fewer calories.

Eighty percent of the original monkeys eating fewer calories are still alive, versus half of those in the control group, the researchers reported.

Among the benefits enjoyed by the lower-calorie group: fewer cancers, less cardiovascular disease, better preserved brain health (especially in regions of the brain involved in motor control and memory) and no diabetes whatsoever, despite this being a common problem in monkeys.

Weindruch said his group is continuing to study the monkeys, a process that could go on for 15 years. Meanwhile, they are collecting a new group of monkeys to more closely study mechanistic processes.

The NIA currently supports a study looking into calorie restriction in humans although, Sierra pointed out, such a study is difficult to conduct.

"Studies in humans can be done but they're not going to address longevity and it's a self-selected group," he said. "Monkeys are the closest we can get."

The findings come a day after U.S. researchers reported in Nature that rapamycin, a drug typically given to transplant patients, significantly extended the lifespans of mice.

Article Source: healthday.com/Article.asp