A resource for health professionals, parents, teachers, counselors & kids on the childhood obesity epidemic.

A lot of dirty words have only four letters, but this one has nine, and Childhood Obesity News has been looking at why so many medical professionals think “sedentary” is a dangerous word that signifies frightening futures. For instance, Gretchen Reynolds reported for The New York Times how:

[...] researchers determined that watching an hour of television can snip 22 minutes from someone’s life. If an average man watched no TV in his adult life, the authors concluded, his life span might be 1.8 years longer, and a TV-less woman might live for a year and half longer than otherwise.

Writing for the Mayo Clinic, Jennifer Nelson and Katherine Zeratsky also give longevity estimates based on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys:

If Americans would cut their sitting time in half, their life expectancy would increase by roughly:

• 2 years (by reducing sitting to less than 3 hours a day)
• 1.4 years (by reducing TV time to less than 2 hours a day)

Length of life is not the only issue. Quality of life is hugely important. Quality of life is very much diminished when the persistently sedentary patient develops hypertension, elevated blood sugar, abnormal cholesterol levels, Type 2 diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, breast cancer, or colon cancer.

Persuasive connective lines have been drawn between all these conditions and too much sitting. Moreover, cardiovascular disease experienced by the overly sedentary appears to be unassociated with known risk factors like smoking.

No doubt, all the diseases people can get from sitting too much can eventually contribute to obesity. The worse a person feels, the less inclined she or he is to do active things, leading to the occurrence of one of the vicious cycles to which humans are so prone. Sitting is the villain here. The sedentary life is the unhealthy life.

On the other hand…

On the positive side, research has found plenty of benefits to moving around. Frequent physical activity, even if mild, seems to increase insulin sensitivity, which is good. And hormonal imbalances seem to be affected for the better. Inflammation is not so severe. Body fat is reduced.

A University of Massachusetts study showed that volunteers who stood up all day used up a lot more energy and “burned hundreds more calories,” than when they sat for the same period of time. This was just standing, not jogging or even walking. Dr. James A. Levine of the Mayo Clinic says:

[...] [T]he muscle activity needed for standing and other movement seems to trigger important processes related to the breakdown of fats and sugars within the body.

Being a helpful person can create benefits for the self. A reader relates her experience working in the office of a large church:

I don’t just give directions, but accompany visitors to the part of the building they need. If a tape dispenser is missing from one of the desks, I go and look for it. If someone returns a pair of crutches loaned by the church’s medical equipment center, I volunteer to go put them away. I check the mailbox at the main entrance, sometimes knowing the mail hasn’t been delivered yet. Any excuse to get up and move.

From the pros

For daily life, Dr. Levine and his colleagues makes these suggestions (condensed here):

• Stand while talking on the phone or eating lunch
• Try a standing desk — or improvise with a high table or counter
• Walk laps with your colleagues rather than gathering in a conference room
• Position your work surface above a treadmill
• Walk or bike to work
• Use a “fitness ball” in place of a chair
• Keep small weights or giant rubber bands in your desk for quick exercise breaks
• Hold a meeting while walking, inside or outside
• When traveling on business, choose a hotel with a workout room

A website called JustStand.org suggests, not surprisingly, more ways to stay upright and/or mobile:

• Park your car farther away… Use stairs, not elevators; take a long route
• While computing, set a timer to remind you to stand up and stretch every half hour
• Don’t send emails if the recipient is near; walk over and talk to him or her
• Avoid long sitting commutes by standing on the bus, subway or train
• When watching TV, lose the remote; get up to change the channels
• Stand or exercise while you watch TV
• During intense gaming, stand up in between sessions and screen loads

The Washington Post not only makes suggestions, but offers a series of 12 brief animated videos, just to show how to do exercises that might reasonably be adapted into the work environment. The movements were developed by:

Toni Yancey, professor of health services at UCLA… Alice Burron, exercise physiologist… Catrine Tudor-Locke, who studies walking behavior… [E]xperts whose jobs involve studying motion, preventing obesity and generally getting people off their duffs.

Even if it can’t be directly proven that any of these suggestions will prevent the gain of pounds, none of them can hurt.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Don’t Just Sit There,” The New York Times, 04/28/12
Source: “Do you have ‘sitting disease’?,” MayoClinic.com, 07/25/12
Source: “What are the risks of sitting too much?,” MayoClinic.com, 06/16/12
Source: “Workplace exercises: How to burn calories at work,” MayoClinic.com, 09/24/11
Source: “The Facts,” JustStand.org
Source: “A workout at work?,” The Washington Post, undated
Image by William Murphy.

Yesterday, Childhood Obesity News mentioned the decreased life expectancy of TV addicts, office workers, and other sedentary people. “Sedentary” is, of course, the dirty nine-letter word referred to in our title, and the habit or necessity of long-term sitting turns out to be an insidious hidden killer. The effects of immobility can be grim.

Gretchen Reynolds reported for The New York Times on a study with nearly 250,000 participants. That’s almost a quarter of a million. These subjects were questioned, measured, and tested over an eight-year period by the National Cancer Institute. The information collected concerned their time spent sitting at a computer or watching TV or commuting, and their exercise habits, and their health in general. Reynolds says:

At the start of the study, none suffered from heart disease, cancer or diabetes. But after eight years, many were ill and quite a few had died. The sick and deceased were also in most cases sedentary.

In other words, with such a large sample, science feels pretty comfortable about connecting the dots between a sedentary lifestyle and serious illness, leading often to an early grave. The gentleman in the photo on this page might very well be suffering from the effects of too much sitting still, over the years. Now he is under doctor’s orders to exercise as best he can, in a wheelchair, with the pedal machine. He has an excuse for watching TV. But given the choice, the likelihood is high that he would rather be up and walking around.

A healthier world

If all televisions had treadmills in front of them, the world would be a better place. What if each person made a rule for herself or himself, to never watch a TV show or a movie unless doing some exercise at the same time? While this practice would not single-handedly solve the obesity epidemic, there would no doubt be a massive overall improvement in health.

For office workers, expected to sit at desks, staying in motion might be more challenging. A treadmill desk might cause more typos, and audible breathing could cause the person on the other end of a phone call to wonder what on earth is going on.

The Mayo Clinic’s Dr. James Levine once consulted with a company that manufactures treadmill desks (from which he receives no profit). While 60,000 of those have gone out into the world, of course, for many work environments, the notion is just too extreme. But maybe they should get with the program. It is Dr. Levine’s belief that “even regular and zealous gym workouts can’t undo the damage” done by long periods of daily sitting.

Australian study

Gretchen Reynolds also wrote about a study from Melbourne’s Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute. On different days, volunteers followed prescribed regimes, which included sitting still for seven hours; or getting up every 20 minutes for a two-minute walk (not run) on a treadmill; or “jogging gently” during comparable break times.

Remaining sedentary for seven hours in a row proves to be a stress on the body. The blood sugar levels go up and the insulin levels are not what they should be. The good news is, those two-minute mild exercise breaks are enough to keep blood sugar levels stable. Interestingly, the Australian study showed that jogging doesn’t improve blood sugar equanimity any more than walking.

Indeed, this observation about the usefulness of merely being upright is reinforced by results from a University of Massachusetts study showing, Reynolds says:

… [W]hen volunteers stood all day — nothing else; no walking or jogging; just standing — they burned hundreds more calories than when they sat for the same period of time.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Don’t Just Sit There,” The New York Times, 04/28/12
Source: “Obesity expert says daily workouts can’t undo damage done from sitting all day,” NBCNews.com, 01/09/13
Image by NCVO London.

Though it has more than four letters, “sedentary” is a dirty word in the anti-obesity business. Sure, workers who have to stand up all day suffer from discomfort and physical consequences. But according to an ever-increasing number of authorities, sitting down all day is literally killing office workers and anyone else whose job involves prolonged contact with a chair.

Journalist Mary Murphy puts it this way:

The body’s metabolic engines go to sleep. The muscles stop moving all together and the heart slows. Then, the body’s calorie-burning rate plummets to about one calorie per minute — a third of what it would be if you were walking. Insulin effectiveness drops and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. Fat and cholesterol levels rise too.

Apparently, the effects of immobilization are even worse and more widespread than anyone suspected. For The New York Times, Gretchen Reynolds describes lab animal experiments in which:

[...] casts have been placed on their back legs, after which the animals rapidly developed noxious cellular changes throughout their bodies, and not merely in the immobilized muscles. In particular, they produced substantially less of an enzyme that dissolves fat in the bloodstream. As a result, in animals and humans, fat can accumulate and migrate to the heart or liver, potentially leading to cardiac disease and diabetes.

Disuse

It has long been known that a broken leg healing in a cast becomes weak and flaccid. Injured athletes even do visualization meditations, mentally imagining that they are performing all their usual activities with intact extremities. In theory, the brain is somehow able to trick muscles into the perception of activity. Or maybe the practice keeps the communication pathways open.

At any rate, some swear that it works. But even if this method were 100% valid, it would be of little use to office workers, who not only sit immobile, but supposedly use their brains for their employers’ business, rather than imagining vigorous exercise.

After a fracture and/or surgery, even after the bone has knit, rehabilitation of a broken leg can take longer than the patient would have believed, prior to the injury. One reason is that a lot more is going on than anyone previously realized. A detailed picture comes from the University of Massachusetts, where researchers invented an experiment to simulate the effects of total non-use of a healthy leg, when compared to the corresponding limb on the other side. Reynolds describes it:

… [A] group of healthy young men donned a clunky platform shoe with a 4-inch heel on their right foot, leaving the left leg to dangle above the ground. For two days, the men hopped about using crutches (and presumably gained some respect for those people who regularly toddle about in platform heels). Each man’s left leg never touched the ground. Its muscles didn’t contract. It was fully sedentary.

Now, see what happened after not two months, not two weeks, but a mere two days. When the active muscles and the “sedentary” muscles were biopsied and compared, the legs that had started on the way to atrophy did not make a good showing. The genes were all messed up, being “expressed differently,” with evidence that the DNA repair mechanisms were out of order.

After only 48 hours of inactivity, the metabolism of each individual cell had slowed down, with increased oxidative stress and decreased insulin response. On a smaller scale, this is what happens to us when we sit around all day, whether laboring at a desk or driving or sitting in a subway car or watching TV.

Speaking of TV…

Reynolds also mentions another study that shows premature death resulting from the watching of seven or more hours of television out of each 24. One might think, “My daily TV watching is counteracted by all the hard work I do,” but one would be mistaken. She writes:

Exercise only slightly lessened the health risks of sitting. People in the study who exercised for seven hours or more a week but spent at least seven hours a day in front of the television were more likely to die prematurely than the small group who worked out seven hours a week and watched less than an hour of TV a day.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Obesity expert says daily workouts can’t undo damage done from sitting all day,” NBCNews.com, 01/09/13
Source: “Don’t Just Sit There,” The New York Times, 04/28/12
Image by Joe Hoover.

Last time, Childhood Obesity News considered deep brain stimulation, or DBS. Now, we revisit the brain to look at other research where mice took center stage, concerning a change on the cellular level that “accompanies obesity.” ScienceDaily says:

The findings could explain the body’s tendency to maintain undesirable weight levels, rather than an ideal weight…

One head of the research team is Ken Mackie, who teaches psychology and brain sciences at IU Bloomington. He is also affiliated with the university’s Gill Center for Biomolecular Science, which has long collaborated with Italy’s Institute of Biomolecular Chemistry, academic home of the other leader, Vincenzo Di Marzo.

The hypothalamus is where the molecular drama takes place, involving neurons and a switch and a “massive shift of receptors.” The writer says:

This neurochemical system is involved in a variety of physiological processes, including appetite, pain, mood, stress responses and memory. Food consumption is controlled in part by the hypothalamus, a portion of the brain that regulates many essential behaviors. Like other important body systems, food consumption is regulated by multiple neurochemical systems, including the endocannabinoid system…

Leptin also enters the equation, contributing to the tendency of the molecular switch to go wonky. Various chemical events upset the delicate balance of this complicated network, which then makes our stubborn, traitorous meat vehicles want to be fat. The research has identified a mechanism that causes this to happen and hopefully will show where pharmaceutical intervention could potentially do some good.

Bad Tenants

Methanobrevibacter smithii (familiarly called M. smithii) live inside us, and they are up to no good. They consume hydrogen, which they get from more genteel and helpful gut bacteria. The M. smithii organisms, ingrates that they are, repay the favor by producing methane gas, which seems to somehow make us fatter. Maybe by slowing down the travel time through the intestines, giving the opportunity for more nutrients (soon to be calories) to be leached out of it, which leads eventually to overweight.

Scientists believe that a breath test can predict future obesity. Maggie Fox of NBC News says:

Researchers are trying to figure out if it’s possible to kill off the guilty germ and help people lose weight. But they know better than to just kill gut bacteria willy-nilly — studies have shown that taking antibiotics can alter the balance of microbes in a bad way, causing stomach upset, allowing deadly infections such as C. difficile to take hold and, perhaps, even allowing a takeover by the obesity-generating germs.

False Path

Here from LiveScience.com is the lowdown a certain substance:

Botox, short for Botulinum toxin, is a neurotoxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. Though it is one of the most poisonous substances in the world, specialists use it in very small amounts… [P]erhaps its most popular use is cosmetic: Botox can smooth out facial wrinkles by paralyzing the muscles that cause them to form.

At some time in the recent past, a study was performed that seemed to show that gastric Botox injections could facilitate weight loss by making the stomach muscles relax, so they wouldn’t squeeze as hard. Food stays there longer and, if all goes as planned, the patient feels full. This wouldn’t make much difference to the absorption of nutrients, because most of that action takes place in the small intestine.

The same stuff that plastic surgeons squirt into people’s facial frown lines, gastroenterologists now stick tubes down people’s gullets to give them shots of in the stomach. The subjects of early research felt increased sensations of fullness, because the Botox would delay the speed of the stomach emptying. There seems to be a flaw in that reasoning, because compulsive eaters will eat far beyond the feeling of repletion and well into the discomfort zone. They don’t care. What’s a little pain in the midsection, when you’re feeding your face?

Anyway, the Botox thing, forget about it. Newer research from the Mayo Clinic has refuted it. ScienceBlog.com says:

This study invalidates those findings because it is larger, used ultrasound to ensure injections were properly placed, and limited bias by ensuring that neither physicians nor patients knew who received Botox and who received placebo injections.

So, while Botox does delay the exit of partly broken-down food from the stomach, it doesn’t lead to weight loss. The admittedly inevitable risks, other than a mild sore throat from the esophageal tube, seem to remain largely unspecified.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Key Shift in Brain That Creates Drive to Overeat Identified,” ScienceDaily, 04/29/13
Source: “Breath test might show it’s not your fault you’re fat,” NBCNews.com, 03/26/13
Source: “Stomach Botox Injections Don’t Help Weight Loss,” LiveScience, 01/28/13
Source: “Injecting botox into stomach does not promote weight loss,” ScienceBlog.com, 01/29/13
Image by fekaylius (Jason Wilson).

Did you know that YouTube offers over 12,000 items under the heading of “Food Porn”? It comes right through the computer screen, and a person can stare at food porn all day long without being ostracized by the community. The consumption of food porn has probably never been the grounds for a single divorce. It is not sent to the traditional mailbox in a plain brown wrapper, to frustrate the curiosity of neighbors and the postman, as was the custom in the days of relatively innocuous girlie magazines.

A couple of years ago, encouraged by the success of a campaign to require that tobacco products be sold in plain, rather than colorful, packaging, a group of Australian activists suggested doing the same with junk food. Generic packaging, they believe, should be more widely employed, along with yucky pictures of the end results of overindulgence in the product.

The Adam Smith Research Trust issued a report about all of this, noting that:

The most obvious targets would be alcohol, fatty foods and sugary drinks…

Imagine grabbing a can of cola, bringing its condensation-rimmed brim up to your mouth, and catching sight of the graphic on the side of the cylinder – bariatric surgery in progress. Would it make a difference?

While this topic was trending in the southern hemisphere, The Atlantic published a huge article by Marc Ambinder, which was a sort of “state of obesity” report. Among many other aspects and facets of world obesity, he demonstrated that people have different definitions of fat porn:

Obesity has become not just a scientific fad of sorts, generating intense research, curiosity, and public concern, but also a commercial gold mine that draws on the same kind of audiences that used to go to circus carnivals a century ago to peer at freakishly obese men and women.

Family TV Examples

The writer went on to describe various television shows and episodes that struck him as particularly objectionable, because despite their declared purpose of public service or education, they really seemed to be just presenting obese people as targets of ridicule. Ambinder wrote:

The impact of ‘fat porn’ on fat people is counterproductive… [T]here is little evidence that increasing stigma actually reduces obesity rates. And plenty of evidence shows that stigma makes fat people more likely to feel depressed, to experience stress, to receive poorer medical care, to experience discrimination in the workplace, to go on eating binges, and to duck exercise.

The sassy pop culture journalists of Jezebel have been on the case for a long time. Writer Irin Carmon was particularly interested in the fact that Marc Ambinder had bariatric surgery and noted:

[...] Ambinder does strike the delicate balance between raising concerns about obesity’s public and personal health repercussions, and staying away from fat-shaming. He also does a good job of clearly noting his class privilege — the money to sink into diet and exercise solutions, and then to have a $30,000 surgery not covered by insurance — and contrasting it with an analysis of the sociopolitical factors that contribute to childhood obesity in various low-income groups.

Real Fat Porn

But watching fat people bounce around trying to exercise, or struggling into and out of airplane seats, is only one kind of fat porn, the milder and socially acceptable kind. Out there in the wilds of cyberspace, the searcher can find every kind of fat porn subspecialty — pregnant, drunk, mature, hairy, even Australian. One website offers “chubby galls” [sic], typical of the general level of ignorance in the field.

Elsewhere, a young woman, Kelly Shibari, reveals how she is both a fat porn star and a role model. In Los Angeles, she was doing fine as a freelance production designer, until a major film industry strike caused jobs to disappear. A friend in the “adult” industry turned her on to the world of websites featuring overweight women glamorously dressed (or undressed) and made up like movie stars.

The rest is second-career history, and also where the role model claim enters the picture. Shibari writes:

[T]he number one thing I’ve always maintained is to be true to myself — and that means I’m a confident, brainy, nerdy, slightly dorky (okay, mostly dorky) fat Asian girl who doesn’t mind being naked… I’ve been able to use my status as a performer to run fundraisers, speak at marketing conferences, produce and direct my own projects… Where my ‘role-modeling’ comes in is to share the importance of being confident in yourself, to try as many things as possible, be open to life changes, and don’t let a little thing like what other people think of you get you down.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Beating Obesity,” The Atlantic, 04/13/10
Source: “On Obesity: Fat Chicks And Fat ‘Porn’ As Entertainment,” Jezebel, 04/13/10
Source: “It Happened to me: I’m a Fat Porn Star,” xoJane, 11/16/12
Image by birgerking.