The report presents a mixed picture. Over the past 25 years, there have been notable improvements in child well-being in the group of countries examined in this report: steady decline in child mortality, overall reduction in adolescent suicide and increase in school completion rates. But the last five years have …
India, like the rest of the world, is experiencing an epidemic of diabetes, a chronic disease characterized by dangerous levels of sugar in the blood that cause cardiovascular and kidney disease, which lower life expectancy. The prevalence of diabetes (the proportion of the population with diabetes) has been increasing steadily …
Fifteen months after moving into a new town, house and job, Michelle Obama is defining her role as first lady by taking on the $600 billion food and beverage industries in a quest to end childhood obesity within a generation. Her lobbying of companies to make products healthier, labels easier …
The objective of the study was to analyze the macronutrient, micronutrient, food intake pattern, anthropometry, and lipid profile of urban Asian Indian adolescents and young adults and compare it with the nutrient profile of rural Asian Indian and American adolescents.
Increasing prevalence of childhood obesity calls for comprehensive and cost-effective educative measures in developing countries such as India. School-based educative programmes greatly influence children's behaviour towards healthy living. We aimed to evaluate the impact of a school-based health and nutritional education programme on knowledge and behaviour of urban Asian Indian …
As the Romanian Government considers introducing a far-reaching fast food tax that covers both sweet and savoury snacks, experts warn of potential stumbling blocks. Ed Holt reports.
Obesity has recently emerged as a major global health problem. According to World Health Organization estimates, ≈1.6 billion adults worldwide were overweight (body mass index [BMI] ≥25 kg/m2) and at least 400 million were obese (BMI ≥30 kg/m2) in 2005, numbers that are expected to reach 2.3 billion and 700 …
Obesity kills, everyone knows that. But is it possible that we've been looking at the problem in the wrong way? It seems getting fatter may be part of your body's defence against the worst effects of unhealthy eating, rather than their direct cause.
The statistics are grimly familiar. According to the latest National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, every other child in the USA now has a body-mass index (BMI) at or above the 85th centile on age-specific national growth charts for ideal weight gain. And a nationwide survey by the Kaiser Family …
Rates of obesity and other childhood chronic conditions have increased over recent decades. Patterns of how conditions change over time have not been widely examined. This study aims to evaluate change in prevalence of obesity and other chronic conditions in US children, including incidence, remission, and prevalence.
The food processing industry knows that pleasing the tongue is the way to its success. So it finds new ways to pamper the taste buds. But this often leads to overeating and that too the wrong kind of food. The hitch here is that healthy foods often tend to taste …
This study was conducted to document the prevalence of obesity, overweight and underweight in the school children aged 5 to 16 years from Mysore. 5 Principal Investigators and 13 Co-Investigators trained the teachers of 139 schools. A total of 43152 school children (23527 boys and 19625 girls) were surveyed.
The objective of the study was to study the effectiveness of a multi-component intervention model of nutrition and lifestyle education on behavior modification, anthropometry and metabolic risk profile of urban Asian-Indian adolescents in North India.
Link To Obesity Unclear: Study New York: Studies reporting a link between sugar-sweetened beverages and weight gain have garnered a lot of attention but actually research on the issue has yielded mixed results, researchers note in a new report.
This study from the Prospective Studies Collaboration (PSC) is a meta-analysis of individual-level information shared by investigators of 57 primary prospective cohort studies to examine the relationship of body-mass index (BMI) with overall and cause-specific mortality.
Kerala State is a harbinger of what will happen in future to the rest of India in chronic non-communicable diseases (NCD). We assessed: (i) the burden of NCD risk factors; (ii) estimated the relations of behavioural risk factors to socio-demographic correlates, anthropometric risk factors with behavioural risk factors; (iii) evaluated …
Obesity is a well recognized risk factor for various chronic diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes mellitus. The aim of this study was to shed light on the patterns of overweight and obesity in sub-Saharan Africa, with special interest in differences between the urban poor and …
The tummy, they say, is a mirror of emotions. A stick of a girl in the outpatients department of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi, has a stomach issue. In that crowded OPD, where everybody befriends everybody to while away the waiting hours, she sits like a zombie, …
PLANT SCIENCES Never too late Flowers are more resilient than they appear. They shoot up against all odds. The credit goes to genetic matter called microRNA that inhibit protein formation crucial to flowering in young plants. External cues like sunlight make them flower. But in the absence of cues, too, …
