Often mistaken for obesity, lipoedema is a life-changing condition that causes causes swollen limbs.

The problem could become worse as young people age, the American Cancer Society's study says.

The author on packed summer beaches, empty winter ones, surf culture and being a connoisseur of Cornish junk food

Apparently the area where I grew up is one of the furthest places from a train station in Britain. It’s a place of huge cliffs, wide, stony beaches, trees bent over like fishermen. When rain comes in sideways, or gales brew up, there’s nowhere to hide. I once saw someone blown across the street into a shop window. Isolated is how it’s most often described. But for almost half the year it’s the opposite: full to the brim with holidaymakers.

It was strange, I suppose, growing up with this kind of disparity, where the place I lived changed so radically from season to season. Beaches were suddenly packed. Cars jostled for spaces. Lights came on in holiday houses. It felt like mine and not-mine at the same time. I played tennis, but in the local town, Bude, it was often too busy to get a court. Mum would go shopping early, before everything ran out.

Continue reading...

The global food system is causing an ecological and health catastrophe – individual action won’t be enough

The distinguished medical journal The Lancet has issued not one but two apocalyptic warnings about our food in under a month. One of its special commissions reported earlier this month that civilisation itself was at risk from the effects of the current food system on both human health and the Earth’s ecosystems. This week comes the next instalment from another special Lancet commission which finds that pandemics of obesity and malnutrition are interacting with climate change in a feedback loop and represent an existential threat to humans and the planet. The modern western diet has become a highly damaging thing that needs a complete overhaul if we are to avoid potential ecological catastrophe. It concluded that we need to halve global meat consumption, and more than double the volume of whole grains, pulses, nuts, fruit and vegetables we eat.

Cue howls of indignation from big food and its cheerleaders, the libertarian right. Those nanny statists have gone nuts eating their own double dose of nuts! Cue cries of distress from champions of local, low-impact agriculture who include grass-fed animals, and their meat and manure, in their sustainable mix. These self-appointed experts don’t understand farming! Cue grim food wheels with only a quarter of a rasher of bacon or a fifth of an egg a day. Those miserabilist medics want us all to go vegan!

Continue reading...

Experts call for influence of ‘big food’ to be curbed to also tackle issue of climate change

The influence of “big food” must be curbed around the world if obesity, malnutrition and climate change are to be effectively tackled, according to a report.

Overconsumption of junk food and not having enough to eat are two sides of the malnutrition coin, said a commission of experts brought together by the Lancet medical journal. A third major global problem is interlinked – climate change that is worsened by food production, waste and transportation.

Continue reading...

London cafes bring people together while tackling the UK’s food waste problem

Mothers with toddlers at their ankles sit beside elderly men and women out for a welcome bit of company on a Monday lunchtime. Plates are piled with steaming pasta, couscous salad and warm bread rolls as the chefs wipe sweat from their foreheads in a galley kitchen next door.

This is a bustling local restaurant in an affluent area of south-west London, but there is one big difference from the many fashionable cafes that line the streets of this London “village”. The food has all been saved from the bin.

Continue reading...

Campaign aimed at children and young adults seeks to curb rise in obesity and tooth decay

The celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is joining forces with Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, to ask consumers to halt their consumption of fizzy drinks for a month.

Their backing of the Fizz Free February campaign coincides with the release of figures that show a 70% rise in the number of teenagers with diabetes over four years.

Continue reading...

According to The Washington Post, "a growing number of scientists, not normally known for being advocates, are bringing evangelical zeal to the message that lack of sleep is an escalating public health crisis that deserves as much attention as the obesity epidemic." "We're competing against moneyed interests, with technology and gaming and all that. It's so addictive and so hard to compete with," said Orfeu Buxton, a sleep researcher at Pennsylvania State University. "We've had this natural experiment with the Internet that swamped everything else." From the report: The sleep research community, formerly balkanized into separate sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea, has begun to coalesce around the concept of "sleep health" -- which for most adults means getting at least seven hours a night. But time in the sack has been steadily decreasing. In 1942, a Gallup poll found that adults slept an average of 7.9 hours per night. In 2013, the average adult had sheared more than an hour off that number. In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that a third of adults fail to get the recommended seven hours. In the blink of an eye, in evolutionary terms, humans have radically altered a fundamental biological necessity -- with repercussions we are still only beginning to understand. For years, animal studies have shown that learning activities are reactivated during sleep, a critical part of how lasting memories are formed. More recently, Princeton postdoctoral researcher Monika Schonauer asked 32 people to sleep in the lab after they had been asked to memorize 100 pictures of houses or faces. By analyzing their patterns of electrical brain activity, she found she could effectively read their minds, predicting which images they had been studying while awake -- because they were replaying them. [...] Sleep problems have long been recognized as a symptom of psychiatric and neurological disorders, ranging from depression to Alzheimer's. But increasingly, researchers are exploring the two-way street between disrupted sleep and disease. And researchers who started out interested in cognitive functions such as memory or brain development are finding themselves focused on sleep because it is so fundamental.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Study suggests ‘genetic advantage’ keeps some people slim and healthy

As many people have long suspected, the genetic dice are loaded in favour of thin people when it comes to staying slim.

Some people seem to be able to eat all the burgers and chips they like and and stay the same size, shape and weight all their life. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have discovered that they have a genetic advantage over their overweight friends who live and eat in the same way that they do.

Continue reading...

Co-founder of new pro-Brexit party raised fears of ‘Muslim enclaves’ and blamed food banks for obesity

A former Ukip activist who is partnering with Nigel Farage in launching a new pro-Brexit political party has argued that crime and fatherlessness among black men are due to high testosterone levels and that their lower academic achievement could have a biological basis.

Catherine Blaiklock has also expressed concern at “Muslim enclaves” and has said food banks should be abolished as they create a “dependent, obese population”.

Continue reading...

Study finds new arrivals face increased risk of developing illnesses such as heart disease

Western culture and society pose more health risks to migrants and refugees than they do to host nations, according to a World Health Organization study.

The first report on refugee and migrant health in the west by WHO Europe suggests new arrivals are at risk of falling ill while in transit to another country, but face further dangers when they arrive in a host nation because of unhealthy living conditions, poor diet and the obesity epidemic.

Continue reading...

The obesity expert and author of Gene Eating on fad diets, the magic of miso and why he can’t say no to pork scratchings

Dr Giles Yeo arrives for lunch in Cambridge by bike from his research lab at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. In a corner of the Oak bistro he exchanges his clip-clop cycling shoes for a pair of sandals, hangs his fluorescent jacket on a peg, and explains to me the heart monitor that – if he keeps it above a certain daily level – saves him £250 a year on his life insurance. “Their goal and my goal are aligned – neither of us wants them to pay out…” Yeo, 45, is the scientific director of a group studying the effects of genetics on food intake and a pioneer in studies of the cause of obesity. He is, grinning at the prospect of lunch, a somewhat daunting picture of health.

I’m eager to see what he is going to order. His well-timed new book, Gene Eating, debunks much of what we might have taken as read about diet and dieting. It presents the evidence to show that any kind of one-size-fits-all regime is likely to be of little value. He has a gift for describing the science of how our bodies take in calories at different rates and respond radically differently to food groups. Calorie-counting ignores the fundamentals of calorie absorption, and is at best a very rough guide. Much of the trick is to find what works for you.

Continue reading...

For him, junk food signifies being down to earth; to others, it is all that they can afford

It comes to something when the perfect way to demonstrate wealth and status is by “slumming it” with junk food.

First up, President Donald Trump. Finding himself without catering staff (oh, you know, the shutdown unpleasantness) for a visit from the Clemson University football team, Trump piled tables with his beloved takeaway burgers (various brands). Or, as he initially tweeted, “hamberders”, stinking and steaming away in polystyrene cartons, presumably, after so many hours, giving off the kind of whiff you’d associate with an unregulated abattoir in a heatwave.

Continue reading...