Re: Reducing Bodyfat

> Uh huh, so if I eat *ONLY*  hamburgers, fat ridden chips and donuts *BUT*
I
> eat fewer calories than I burn I'll still get fat. NOT!!!!!!!!!!
>

Hahahah.
Yeah that "statement",  is a good indicator of how much credibility you
have.
For people who do have some intelligence and interest in the subject,
following is a good short article that describes what I think is an obvious
current dietary problem.


Nov. 2, 2003
Jerusalem Post Online Eddtion
Young, fat, lazy, and diabetic
By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH


Type 2 diabetes used to be a 'lifestyle' disease of the middle-aged and
elderly, but now it is increasingly appearing in young people, even
children.

If you thought AIDS is the world's worst pandemic, think again. Although no
virus is behind it, diabetes - especially the kind connected to lack of
exercise, obesity and a junk-food diet - affects hundreds of millions of
people around the world, and will become much more common in the coming
decades.

While an increase in Type 2 diabetes is to be expected in an ageing
population, it is increasingly appearing in young adults, teenagers and even
children, threatening to overburden the public health systems that will have
to finance treatment and rehabilitation. Among the complications suffered by
Type 2 diabetics whose blood sugar/insulin ratio is not under control are
heart disease, stroke, hypertension, blindness, kidney disease, diabetic
neuropathy, vascular problems and limb amputation.

Type 2 diabetes reportedly affects more than 15 million Americans and
400,000 Israelis, and many more may be undiagnosed. That Type 2 diabetes is
afflicting increasingly younger people was a major topic at the
International Symposium on Diabetology held at the Jerusalem Renaissance
Hotel to mark the 50th anniversary of the Israel Diabetes Association
(www.sukeret.co.il). It has also been a major focus of research by experts
around the world. The two-day event, chaired by IDA head Prof. Itamar Raz of
Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, was attended by more than a
dozen foreign diabetes experts who paid their own way to lecture and voice
support for Israel.

Dr. Francis Kaufman, a pediatric endocrinologist at Children's Hospital in
Los Angeles and immediate past president of the American Diabetes
Association, told the Jerusalem symposium that a quarter of new diabetes
patients in her pediatric wards have Type 2 diabetes; only a decade or so
ago, the vast majority had Type 1 - an autoimmune disease with a genetic
background in which the body's immune system destroys the insulin-producing
beta cells in the pancreas, meaning that insulin injections are needed
several times a day.

According to the US Surgeon General, more than 16% of youngsters aged six to
18 are overweight - double the figure of two decades ago. The steady diet of
high-fat, high-sugar food and long hours in front of the TV and computer are
responsible for the sharp rise in Type 2 diabetes among young Americans;
Kaufman had no doubt that this growing phenomenon is relevant to the rest of
the Western world, including Israel.

Many US schools have trimmed or dropped physical education classes because
of a decline in the academic level. School systems are now investing
increasing amounts of time and money in academic subjects so pupils can pass
statewide tests, she explained. Thus children get away from their desks
infrequently, if at all, become inactive and gain weight.

"But studies have shown that kids who pass physical fitness tests do as well
on academic tests as those who don't, so keeping physical education in the
curriculum doesn't lower academic standards," she insisted. The US National
Institutes of Health has funded a long-term study on the prevention of Type
2 diabetes in teenagers, said Kaufman, who is involved in the five-year
prospective study of 750 youngsters around the US.

With Israel lagging considerably behind the US in awareness of this problem,
and most of the Western world hardly better off, the US pediatric diabetes
expert urged that a global effort be made to change social norms.

"This means changing how people live their lives. It will need a
comprehensive effort by government, family, the health system, schools, the
food industry, non-governmental organizations and the media."

Food companies such as McDonalds and Kraft, which have been sued - but the
cases were dropped in court - by obese consumers who blamed them for their
illnesses are changing their practices. There are efforts to reduce portion
size, improve labelling information and change the meals that children are
getting at school.

"The explosion of Type 2 diabetes cases is important for all of us... A
massive effort has to start now. Youngsters will have to get less soft
drinks, fruit juice, white flour and saturated fat and more water, fiber,
fruits and vegetables," she concluded.

OVER THE past two decades, all age groups in the US - not just children and
young adults - boosted their calorie intake by eating foods such as soft
drinks and pizza, a trend responsible for the growing obesity epidemic,
according to researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The study also found that Americans of all ages are eating more restaurant
food - including fast food - than a generation ago. Many Israeli kids whose
stay-at-home mothers used to cook for them are now doing so as well, as
women work outside the home and have less time for domestic chores.

The study, which appeared in Obesity Research, showed that rapidly changing
dietary patterns are important contributors to the growing epidemic of
obesity and diabetes in the US - and the trends are clear in Israel as well.
The US researchers urge children and teenagers to eat more fruits and
vegetables and lower-calorie foods that are high in vitamins and minerals,
as well as to drink more water, so that they get filled up while taking in
fewer calories.

A new Pennsylvania State University survey of a group of school food service
personnel in that state revealed that the respondents perceived childhood
obesity as a national problem - but not in their own school. Nutritionist
Dr. Claudia Probart, who headed the study, said that initially, the
respondents did not see that school meals play a role in childhood obesity.
But after they participated in a Penn State project on nutrition education,
they recognized their role and the school's ability to help deal with the
problem. As a result, the state's education authorities developed programs
that trained school food service managers, who in turn taught 4,000 food
staffers in the 501 school districts throughout Pennsylvania. This and a
master instructor-training program on childhood obesity are beginning to
have an impact.

Unfortunately, only a minority of Israeli school pupils receive meals in
school, despite growing reports of child malnutrition due to poverty. Since
the poor are known to eat cheap, fatty, sweet and highly processed food that
can lead to obesity and diabetes, school lunch programs like those in
Pennsylvania could have a doubly beneficial effect.

US researchers recently managed to explain what healthy adolescents and
patients with Type 2 diabetes have in common. Scientists at the University
of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of South Carolina found that
over the first few stages of puberty, cells in children's bodies respond
less and less to insulin, the natural hormone that - among other things -
helps cells convert sugar into energy. Writing in the November issue of the
journal Diabetes, they noted that puberty is a metabolically critical time.

"In a way, teenagers' metabolism becomes rebellious, too."

Results of the study, which is the first to track sensitivity and response
to insulin from childhood through young adulthood, carry implications for
preventing Type 2 diabetes during adolescence through steps such as diet and
exercise.

Normally, after a meal, the body breaks down carbohydrates into glucose in
the blood. That signals the pancreas to secrete insulin, because insulin
helps the body's cells pick up the glucose and convert it to energy. But
when cells become resistant or less sensitive to insulin, as they do in Type
2 diabetes, they cannot absorb glucose as well as they should and the sugar
remains in the blood.

In healthy teens, insulin resistance disappears after puberty ends. Yet
among people with Type 2 diabetes, cells can ignore insulin more and more
until they stop responding to it altogether. The researchers found no link
between insulin resistance and the release of sex hormones such as
testosterone during puberty - nor were gender, ethnicity or body fat
implicated as causes for insulin resistance. As a result, they concluded
that something about the changes of puberty - not simply getting older -
contributes to lowered sensitivity to insulin. Teenagers who do not recover
their insulin sensitivity by adulthood may end up with Type 2 diabetes. The
fact that children today tend to enter puberty at younger ages than their
parents did - likely linked to high body fat during childhood - may play a
role in not recovering from teenage insulin resistance at the end of
puberty.

MEANWHILE, a furry Israeli rodent is providing diabetes researchers with
more understanding of diabetes. Prof. Paul Zimmet of the Melbourne Diabetes
Institute in Australia told the Jerusalem symposium that certain genes are
suspected of being involved in a proclivity for Type 2 diabetes. It is
Psammomys obesis, a sand rat species that lives in the Negev, that has sugar
and insulin metabolism very similar to that of humans. Thus continuing study
of the rodent is sure to be helpful in the worldwide war against diabetes in
which Israeli researchers, Zimmet said, are serving major roles.