Funmurphys: the Blog

The Triumph of Hope over Experience

Posts Tagged obesity

Obesity Has Replaced Starvation

Jan 8

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Current Events | No Comments

I admit it’s an odd sort of good news: Obeseity has replaced starvation as the main problem with world food supply. As a onetime Guidance and Controls guy (GPS isn’t guidance, its Nav!) I hope it’s just overshoot until we settle into a proper caloric balance:

One of the most surprising news items of 2006, at least to me, was the announcement that there are now more overweight people in the world than hungry ones.Say what? It was not that long ago that all the experts were predicting that our skyrocketing human population would soon outstrip its food supply, leading directly to mass famine. By now millions were supposed to be perishing from hunger every year. It was the old doom-and-gloom Malthusian mathematics at work: population shoots up geometrically while food production lags. It makes eminent sense. I grew up with Malthus’s ideas brought up-to-date in apocalyptic books like The Population Bomb.

Who defused the bomb? Instead of mass starvation, we seem to be awash in food. And it’s not just the United States. Obesity is on the increase in Mexico. Fat-related diabetes is becoming epidemic in India. My parents used to tell me when I didn’t eat my dinner to think about the hungry children in China. Today one in five people in China is overweight, 60 million are obese, and the rate of overweight children has increased 28-fold since 1985. Everywhere you look, from Buffalo to Beijing, it’s ballooning bellies.

Needless to say, reality hasn’t caught up to everyone just yet, but with world population set to peak around 2050, the looming problem is aging/shriking populations (yes Virginia, evenChina) and how will countries deal with that?

Hat tip to TinkertyTonk

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Diabetes, Not Obesity Kills

Sep 26

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Science | No Comments

I count this as good news/bad news – obesity by itself carries no extra risk of early death, but diabetes sure is a killer. Since obesity is a significant risk factor in diabetes, and being overweight is no picnic, don’t start ignoring your size. And in light of the last post about how scaring people into action is ineffective, this quote makes double sense:

“Telling an overweight person that they either need to lose weight or they will die is the wrong message,” he says. “There is increasing evidence that aggressively treating diabetes and other risk factors that go along with obesity, like cholesterol and high blood pressure, is even more important than losing weight.”

Not everyone is convinced:

But JoAnn Manson, M.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, doesn’t buy the idea that diabetes alone is responsible for the increased risk of early death in people who are obese. Manson led the team which reanalyzed the CDC data. She tells WebMD that there is plenty of good evidence implicating obesity in death from cardiovascular disease and several types of cancer, as well as diabetes.”There are clearly pathways through which obesity increases the risk of death that do not involve type 2 diabetes,” she says.

That’s the beauty of science — it’s only settled once you’re dead.

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Too Good to Be True

Dec 5

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Science | 1 Comment

Moderate consumption of alcohol reduces the odds of obesity. So maybe those beer adds where whippet thin yuppies meet to run and then have a light beer aftwards isn’t so far fetched after all.

Maybe this is just good news for me, given as how I have far more than I want, but research by investigators at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine indicates that stem cells from hair follicles help heal skin.

I sit on the pinnacle of happiness because I said “I do” 17 years ago.. Or in the words of a researcher “Some commitment appears to be good, but more commitment appears to be even better”, and marriage is a the top of the committment heap.

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Its My Gene’s Fault

Nov 4

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Science | No Comments

Science Blog reports on the discovery of an appetite stimulating gene called GAD2. One form of the gene stimulates the appetite much more than the other, an in what should be a surprise to no one, the people with the non-stimulating form were more likely to have normal weights. I have a good idea which form my wife (who can go from starving to full in three bites) has, and which form I (who never feels full as much as painfully stuffed) have.

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