Interesting nutrition journal/email newsletter

While researching markets for freelance writers, I ran across the website for this magazine. It had several articles I was interested in. Also, you can sign up for free weekly or monthly email newsletters. If you do, they give you the free gift of a downloadable PDF mini-cookbook with about 13 pages of recipes.

http://www.eatingwell.com/

x-posted to nutritionnews

Queer-loving Quakers

Anyone who has read my journal for a while knows that, while I generally have no use for organized religion, I LOVE the Quakers, especially their focus on social equality and justice issues. I am on their mailing list for the "Faith Action Network" which alerts supporters to opportunities to help out with various GLBT-related causes.

A link:

http://afscstar.org/sc/fan/default.aspx

To sign up for email updates:

http://www.afsc.org/contact.htm

Mostly for my own reference

Scientific American Article
Obesity: An Overblown Epidemic?
June 2005

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?SID=mail&articleID=000E5065-2345-128A-9E1583414B7F0000&chanID=sa006

excerpts:

-One of those complicated realities, concurs Campos, a professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the widely accepted evidence that genetic differences account for 50 to 80 percent of the variation in fatness within a population. Because no safe and widely practical methods have been shown to induce long-term loss of more than about 5 percent of body weight, Campos says, "health authorities are giving people advice--maintain a body mass index in the 'healthy weight' range--that is literally impossible for many of them to follow."

-When Flegal (Katherine M. Flegal, a senior research scientist at the CDC) and her co-workers analyzed just the most recent survey, which measured heights and weights from 1988 to 1994 and deaths up to 2000, even severe obesity failed to show up as a statistically significant mortality risk. It seems probable, Flegal speculates, that in recent decades improvements in medical care have reduced the mortality level associated with obesity. That would square, she observes, with both the unbroken rise in life expectancies and the uninterrupted fall in death rates attributed to heart disease and stroke throughout the entire 25-year spike in obesity in the U.S.

( Read more... )

-Weight-loss advocates point to two trials that in 2001 showed a 58 percent reduction in the incidence of type 2 diabetes among people at high risk who ate better and exercised more. Participants lost little weight: an average of 2.7 kilograms after two years in one trial, 5.6 kilograms after three years in the other.

"People often say that these trials proved that weight loss prevents diabetes. They did no such thing," comments Steven N. Blair, an obesity researcher who heads the Cooper Institute in Dallas. Because the trials had no comparison group that simply ate a balanced diet and exercised without losing weight, they cannot rule out the possibility that the small drop in subjects' weights was simply a side effect. Indeed, one of the trial groups published a follow-up study in January that concluded that "at least 2.5 hours per week of walking for exercise during follow-up seemed to decrease the risk of diabetes by 63 to 69 percent, largely independent of dietary factors and BMI."