The national health impact could be substantial, preventing more than 190,000 cases of diabetes and 16,000 cases of cancer

We don’t often equate the kilojoules we drink in our glass of wine or pint of beer with the weight that accumulates around our middle. But our new study shows increasing the price of alcohol is the foremost value-for-money policy option to prevent obesity in Australia.

The study, released today, shows if we increase alcohol taxes by standardising them across different types of alcohol, overall alcohol consumption would go down. This would lead to substantial reductions in the kilojoules Australians consume each day.

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A selection of games, tools and platforms to help family life run that bit smoother

With junk food available on every street, it’s never been more important for children to get to grips with home cooking and proper nutrition. Crazy Cooking Chef helps tweens develop creativity in the (virtual) kitchen with different dishes and ingredients, letting them run their own restaurant and make meals from scratch. The more they hone their skills, the better and more popular their restaurant becomes.

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Comparison with OECD countries shows Australia doing well for life expectancy and infant mortality, but worse on male obesity

Australian men have the highest rate of cancer within the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), though the result may be down to the country’s highly detailed data collection, a comparison of international health statistics has found.

A new tool, released on Tuesday by the Australian Institute for Health and Welfare, helps compare Australia’s performance with other OECD nations against a range of key health indicators by synthesising a range of data sets.

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AmiMoJo shares a report from Boing Boing: Researchers at Flinders University knocked out a gene known as RCAN1 in mice, hypothesizing that this would increase "non-shivering thermogenesis," which "expends calories as heat rather than storing them as fat" -- the mice were fed a high-calorie diet and did not gain weight. In particular, the modified mice did not store fat around their middles -- a phenomenon associated with many health risks, including cardiac problems -- and their resting muscles burned more calories. [Vice News reports:] The study's authors point out that there's a time and place for RCAN1's role in preventing calories from being burned: namely, back when food was scarce and calories weren't so readily available. In the modern world of "caloric abundance," however, too much fat is being stored and real health problems are ensuing as a result. The researchers suggest that "These adaptive avenues of energy expenditure [such as RCAN1] may now contribute to the growing epidemic of obesity." "We looked at a variety of different diets with various time spans from eight weeks up to six months," said Damien, "and in every case we saw health improvements in the absence of the RCAN1 gene. "Mice on a high-fat diet that lacked this gene gained no weight."

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Demonising parents for not getting kids out of nappies is part of a wider class agenda at the heart of the austerity programme

Potty training is a parent’s job, according to Amanda Spielman, the head of Ofsted, interviewed earlier this week. It’s such an uncontroversial statement – who could think otherwise? Even on a practical level, if you left it to a teacher, you’d run the risk of a child who was only potty-trained during school hours. Yet the statement fails a basic authenticity test: it does not mean what it appears to mean.

Related: Potty training gets messy. But I wouldn’t pay anyone else to do it | Fran Taylor

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Despite rise in obesity, NHS health survey found smoking and drinking in decline

Children of obese parents are more likely to be obese than other children, an NHS survey has found.

The Health Survey for England 2017, an annual report into the state of the nation’s health, surveyed 8,000 adults and 2,000 children about topics including obesity, smoking, and drinking.

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Inspectors say pupils are dropping off rolls as schools appear to be trying to boost exam performance illegally

Thousands of difficult-to-teach pupils are being removed from school rolls in an illegal attempt to boost exam performance, Ofsted has said.

Related: Schools can’t be substitute parents, Ofsted chief warns

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Teachers should not have to tackle obesity or toilet training, England's chief inspector of schools will say.

Issues such as obesity are better handled in the home, says Amanda Spielman

Parents must not “abdicate their responsibility” by expecting schools to solve all the major problems children face, the chief inspector for schools will warn this week.

In a robust intervention attacking the increasing burdens placed on teachers, Ofsted chief Amanda Spielman will say schools “cannot be a panacea” for all social ills and will criticise some parents for neglecting some of the “most basic of parenting tasks”, such as toilet training.

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This is a dinner that educates me, rather than one that makes me drool

If you follow the restaurant scene on Instagram, you’ll possibly think of Two Lights in Shoreditch as “the fishtail hanging out of a sandwich place”. All restaurants in 2018 must have a dish to provoke Instagram users. I don’t make these rules; I am but a conduit. You may recall Red Farm’s Pac-Man dumplings or Kerridge’s Bar & Grill’s lobster omelette. And it is reported that at new Notting Hill mega-opening Caractere, Emily Roux is agitating – excuse me, enticing – diners with a Bourbon biscuit filled with mushed sardine butter. This, let’s be frank, sounds like something one might have been tricked to eat while blindfolded at an 1990s children’s birthday party.

Hence, at Two Lights, a small, breaded sardine lies between two slices of purposefully bog-standard white bread, with its wispy tail draping out à la Tom & Jerry’s supper. It’s a sardine katsu sandwich for £4.50, a play on Japanese junk food. In the maze of morality that is food-scene cultural appropriation, a loophole allows the Japanese to play with the drab 70s British way of making a sandwich and flog it back to us via Shoreditch.

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A third of children never eat fruit every day with malnutrition a concern in both rich and poor countries, warns global report

More than four in 10 children drink sugary drinks every day and one in three never eat fruit every day, according to a global report that warns most countries are unlikely to meet nutrition targets.

Researchers warn the standard of diets around the world is “diabolical”, and that problems such as obesity, anaemia and micronutrient deficiency are being neglected.

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With tree planting rates in the UK the lowest they have been in 40 years, and more trees being cut down than planted, action is needed to balance the losses. Can a pledge to plant a million trees in five years save our forests? By Amy-Jane Beer

It’s easy to view trees as scenery. They don’t move about, their longevity gives them an air of permanence, and they support complex biological communities. They are habitat, but they are also inhabitants – fellow Earthlings, whose ability to sense and respond to the world around them we are only just beginning to understand.

From a human standpoint, trees provide priceless ecosystem services: regulating the air we breathe, contributing organic matter to soil, and supplying building material, fuel, food, medicines and textiles. They are also among the most effective ways of storing both water and carbon. And they have other benefits, too: a view of trees from a hospital window can speed patient recovery, and conditions as diverse as obesity, diabetes and anxiety can be improved with regular visits to a forest.

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The 21-year-old has appeared disengaged and immature at Barça – but he has a habit of scoring when it matters

By night, he plays video games and eats junk food; by day, he rides to the rescue, saving the same men who have been trying to save him from himself.

Ousmane Dembélé’s national team manager says arriving late is “a little habit of his”, and it’s one that the manager of his club is trying to get him out of, his teammates too, but on Saturday he arrived just in time.

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This week’s Upside digest looks at ways to tackle health concerns from drug addiction to diabetes

*An expert says

It can often feel like health-related news is relentlessly negative – and this at a time when, on average, we’ve never been healthier. Certainly, diabetes and mental illness tend to dominate the headlines (healthlines?) these days.

Yet for every gloomy report, there is usually an upside to be found. The numbers of teenagers using online services and apps to cope with their mental health issues has soared in recent years – one app for under-18s has been rolled out to more than half the NHS commissioning services in the UK.

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Adverts for fatty, sugary foods will vanish from London's transport network next year, City Hall says.

Tube, train and tram ban could cost TfL millions in lost revenue, says advertising industry

Junk food adverts will be banned on London Underground, train, tram and bus services from February under plans announced by London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan.

Advertising will be banned for most sugary drinks, hamburgers, chocolate bars and salted nuts across the entire Transport for London network, which also includes London Overground, tram services and bus stops.

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Sadiq Khan, not content with banning ‘beach body ready’ adverts, is this evening set to announce a ban on “junk food” advertisements across London tubes, busses, and overground rail. TfL is already crippled with a £1 billion debt mountain, and this ad ban would increase that by over 10%, due to £125 million in lost […]

The post Censoring Sadiq Strikes Again appeared first on Guido Fawkes.

New figures reveal huge rise in children and young people with diabetes linked to obesity

Nearly 7,000 children and young Britons under 25 have been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, the chronic condition linked to obesity that can lead to amputations and blindness.

Type 2 diabetes used to be virtually unknown in young people. It usually develops over the age of 40 in white Europeans, or after the age of 25 in people who are African-Caribbean, black African, or south Asian.

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Obesity campaigners criticise U-turn on granola ad that used sugary brand’s character

Kellogg’s, the maker of Coco Pops, has beaten a junk food advert ban after lobbying to overturn a decision by the UK’s advertising regulator, in a move that has outraged obesity campaigners.

In August, the Advertising Standards Authority banned a Kellogg’s TV ad campaign for a Coco Pops granola product for breaking rules against advertising junk food to children.

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Millions worldwide may be unable to access the drug by 2030, scientists predict

About 40 million people who will need insulin to manage their type 2 diabetes in 12 years’ time will not get it unless access to the drug is significantly improved, according to new research.

Diagnoses of type 2 diabetes are soaring worldwide, linked to the obesity epidemic. Not all of those diagnosed will need insulin, which is essential to keep people with type 1 diabetes alive, including UK prime minister Theresa May. But a study in the Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology journal shows that 79 million people with type 2 will need it by 2030 and that half of them will not be able to get it. About 33 million people who need insulin currently do not have access to the drug.

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A new report published in the journal Science Direct says there is no link between insomnia and early death. The researchers reportedly "reviewed 17 studies, which covered close to 37 million people, to compile their results," the BBC notes. From the report: This new report goes against what the NHS says, which claims that as well as putting people at risk of obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes, that insomnia shortens life expectancy. The NHS recommends things like exercising to tire yourself out during the day and cutting down on caffeine. It also says smoking, eating too much or drinking alcohol late at night can stop you from sleeping well. Other recommendations include writing a list of things that are playing on your mind and trying to get to bed at a similar time every night. "There was no difference in the odds of mortality for those individuals with symptoms of insomnia when compared to those without symptoms," the study says. "This finding was echoed in the assessment of the rate of mortality in those with and without symptoms of insomnia using the outcomes of multivariate models, with the most complete adjustment for potential confounders, as reported by the individual studies included in this meta-analysis. Additional analyses revealed a tendency for an increased risk of mortality associated with hypnotic use."

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