Featured

• Waists, health and history: obesity in nineteenth century Britain.
• RCT: Small Cash Rewards for Big Losers – Experimental Insights Into the Fight Against the Obesity Epidemic.
• Hope thinking and past trauma mediate the relationships of BMI with perceived mental health treatment need and mental health treatment use.
• Leptin Mediates the Increase in Blood Pressure Associated with Obesity.

Headline vs. Study

• Headline: Chinese licorice used in traditional medicine can prevent diabetes.
• Study: A study in mice studied substances found in licorice (but not licorice).

Findings Contrary to Hypotheses or Popular Beliefs

• RCT: No effects of dietary protein-to-carbohydrate ratio on cognitive performance, mood or self-reported sleep quality were observed during energy balance or energy deficit.
• “Expression of fetal miRNA is not altered in umbilical cord blood in response to in utero exposure to obesity. Alternate mechanisms underlying the fetal effects of maternal obesity should be explored.”
• Summer vacation, not school year, associated with zBMI gain in school children.
• Neither dietary nor supplemental intake of vitamin A or vitamin C nor supplemental intake of vitamin E was significantly associated with mortality after multivariate adjustment.
• This meta-analysis does not support the routine use of testosterone treatment in men with T2D and/or the metabolic syndrome without classical hypogonadism.
• Type 2 diabetes and cancer: "Though type 2 diabetes has been extensively studied in relation to risk of developing cancer and cancer mortality and strong claims of significance exist for most of the studied associations, only a minority of these associations have robust supporting evidence without hints of bias.”
• Metabolically normal obese people are protected from adverse effects following weight gain.
• Overall, lunch FV intake was not significantly higher for students who had a play-before-eating vs a play-after-eating lunch schedule at school.

Exercise

• The Physical Education Hall of Shame, Part IV: More Inappropriate Games, Activities, and Practices.
• RCT: Post-dinner resistance exercise improves postprandial risk factors more effectively than pre-dinner resistance exercise in patients with type 2 diabetes.
• “Quasi-causal associations” of physical activity and neighborhood walkability with BMI: A twin study.
• Modern standup desks coax office workers back on their feet.
• Adenovirus 36 Attenuates Weight Loss from Exercise but Improves Glycemic Control by Increasing Mitochondrial Activity in the Liver.

Methods

• Comparison of Gestational Weight Gain z-Scores and Traditional Weight Gain Measures in Relation to Perinatal Outcomes.
• Optimizing methods for the study of intravascular lipid metabolism in zebrafish.

Food

• Temporal Trends in Fast-Food Restaurant Energy, Sodium, Saturated Fat, and Trans Fat Content, United States, 1996–2013.
• Gluten-Free Diet for Type 1 Diabetes Still Questionable.
• What’s the Best Diet in America?
• Effects of weight loss via high fat vs. low fat alternate day fasting diets on free fatty acid profiles.
• The role of higher protein diets in weight control and obesity-related comorbidities.
• Large portion sizes increase bite size and eating rate in overweight women.

Aging

• Meta-analysis of global metabolomic data identifies metabolites associated with life-span extension.
• The suppression of ghrelin signaling mitigates age-associated thermogenic impairment.

Epidemiology

• Association of Uric Acid With Vascular Stiffness in the Framingham Heart Study.
• Over the past four decades, the share of families with only one child has been rising steadily and singletons have a higher level of BMI and a higher obesity rate than children with siblings.
• Childhood adiposity trajectories and risk of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in adolescents.
• In-store marketing strategies of low-nutrient foods appear to be risk factors for a higher BMI among regular shoppers.
• Relationship Between Social Support and BMI Among Overweight and Obese African American Women in the Rural Deep South, 2011–2013.
• “Short-term disability claims related to obesity have increased by 3,300 percent, according to Cigna's study."
• BMI Is Associated With Mucosal Disease in Crohn’s: Results of a Case-Control Study.
• Cardiovascular Mortality During Dates of National Cardiology Meetings.
• Motor Vehicle Crash Injury Costs Topped $18 Billion in 2012.
• Examining Rural-Urban Obesity Trends among Youth in the U.S.: Testing the Socioeconomic Gradient Hypothesis.

Stigma

• Too fat, too thin: Understanding bias against overweight and underweight.
• Obese individuals’ perceptions of health and obesity and the lived experience of weight loss, gain, or maintenance over time.
• What are your experiences with obesity bias in physical activity/physical education settings?
• Neural Activation during Anticipated Peer Evaluation (Rejection) Alters Brain Activity and Laboratory Meal Intake in Overweight Girls.

Sleep

• Review: The Role of Sleep in the Control of Food Intake.
• Sleeping more to improve appetite and body weight control: dream or reality?

Drugs

• Cannabis use in relation to obesity and insulin resistance in the Inuit population.
• New drug tricks metabolism into burning fat as if you’ve just finished a meal.
• Intestinal FXR agonism promotes adipose tissue browning and reduces obesity and insulin resistance.
• The Effectiveness (Association) of Pharmaceutical Interventions for Obesity: Weight Loss With Orlistat and Sibutramine in a United Kingdom Population-Based Cohort is Less Than in Published RCTs.
• Case Report: In young boy with novel leptin gene mutation, treatment with recombinant human leptin (metreleptin) rapidly normalized eating behavior and resulted in weight loss.

Surgery

• Association Between Bariatric Surgery and Long-term Survival.
• The influence of an individual's weight perception on the acceptance of bariatric surgery.
• RCT: Benefits of Heated and Humidified High Flow Nasal Oxygen for Preoxygenation in Morbidly Obese Patients Undergoing Bariatric Surgery.
• Impact of bariatric surgery on clinical depression. interrupted time series study with matched controls.

Neuroscience

• Neural dissociation of food and money related reward processing using an abstract incentive delay task.
• RCT: Neural Effects of Cannabinoid CB1 Neutral Antagonist Tetrahydrocannabivarin (THCv) on Food Reward and Aversion in Healthy Volunteers.

Psychology

• Dietary Self-Control Is Related to the Speed With Which Attributes of Healthfulness and Tastiness Are Processed.
• Can Behavioral Health Organizations Change Health Behaviors?
• Obesity and onset of depression among U.S. middle-aged and older adults.
• Physical activity and energy expenditure during depressive episodes of major depression.
• Perceived stress and freshman weight change: The moderating role of baseline BMI.
• Self-perceived successful weight regulators are less affected by self-regulatory depletion in the domain of eating behavior.

Evolution, Energetics, & Ecology

• Parasitism alters three power laws of scaling in a metazoan community: Taylor's law, density-mass allometry, and variance-mass allometry.
• Scaling of free-ranging primate energetics with body mass predicts low energy expenditure in humans.
• The effect of temperature and body size on metabolic scope of activity in juvenile Atlantic cod Gadus morhua L.
• Mammalian energetics. Flexible energetics of cheetah hunting strategies.

Transgenerational Effects

• Association of Trimester-Specific Gestational Weight Gain With Fetal Growth, Offspring Obesity And Cardio-Metabolic Traits in Early Childhood.
• Study Shows Mice Passing Down Drug Benefits To Offspring.
• The B'more Fit for healthy babies coalition of Baltimore.
• Mitigating or exacerbating effects of maternal-fetal programming of female mice through the food choice environment.
• A Maternal High Fat Diet Has Long-Lasting Effects on Skeletal Muscle Lipid and PLIN Protein Content in Rat Offspring at Young Adulthood.
• Obesity during pregnancy harms stem cells in developing babies.

Clinical

• Calculating energy needs in critically ill patients: Sense or nonsense?
• Fat-free mass loss generated with weight loss in overweight and obese adults: What may we expect?
• Rapid Deterioration of Insulin Secretion in Obese Adolescents Preceding the Onset of Type 2 Diabetes.
• Severe Obesity and Comorbid Condition Impact on the Weight-Related Quality of Life of the Adolescent Patient.
• Triad of Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura, Preeclampsia, and HELLP Syndrome in a Parturient: A Rare Confrontation to the Anesthetist.
• In a sauna, persons with a high BMI are at higher risk of dehydration, and they should pay particular attention to replenishing fluids during a visit to the sauna.

Policy Related

• Many Insurers Do Not Cover Drugs Approved To Help People Lose Weight.
• FDA Regulation of Laboratory-Developed Diagnostic Tests.
• “The results show that the SNAP is not responsible for the higher prevalence of obesity among adolescents of low-income households. Proposed SNAP changes such as more frequent benefit distribution and a focus on fresh fruits and vegetables are likely to be ineffective in reducing childhood obesity, although they might encourage healthy dietary practices among SNAP participants.”
• Easy access may boost kids' water consumption.
• Some forced to buy on health insurance exchanges for the first time.
• Visual gut punch: persuasion, emotion, and the constitutional meaning of graphic disclosure.

New Books

• Nutrition in Clinical Practice – David Katz et al.
• Childhood Obesity: Impact on Health Care – Diane Thompson.
• The Obesity Paradox: When Thinner Means Sicker and Heavier Means Healthier – Chip Lavie.
• Fashioning Fat: Inside Plus-SSIze Modeling, by Amanda M. Czerniawski.
• Fat, Gay, and Proud: Review of Fat Gay Men: Girth, Mirth, and the Politics of Stigma, by Jason Whitesel.
• Epidemiology of obesity among Austrian adults: Long-term trends, social inequalities and obesity-associated diseases and disorders.

Commentary

• Wearable Devices as Facilitators, Not Drivers, of Health Behavior Change.
• 2014 FDA Obesity Scorecard: Drugs 2, Devices 0.
• As a Matter of Fact: The Chicago Tribune Misses on Obesity.
• Science and Humanity.
• A Bigger Body Does Not Equal a Diseased Body.
• How the world could better fight obesity.
• Fork in the Road of Obesity Policy toward Paternalism.
• Many Consumers Misled About Bogus Weight-Loss Supplements, Survey Says.

Basic Science

• Cilia Dysfunction May Promote Development of Type 2 Diabetes.
• Dermal adipocytes protect against invasive Staphylococcus aureus skin infection.
• mTOR signaling in cellular and organismal energetics.
• Obesity-induced oxidative stress, accelerated functional decline with age and increased mortality in mice.
• Fat Isn’t All Bad: Skin Adipocytes Help Protect Against Infections.
• Magainin-related peptides stimulate insulin-release and improve glucose tolerance in high fat fed mice.

Video

• Video: Edward Archer, "Childhood Obesity Epidemic as a Result of Nongenetic Evolution"
• UAB’s Robert Kessler uses new cyclotron to study obesity.

General Science

• Reproducibility in Science: Improving the Standard for Basic and Preclinical Research.
• Mathematical model of the Action of body forces in tumor growth.
• Safety of Assisted Reproductive Technology in the United States, 2000-2011.
• Working with Nitric Oxide and Hydrogen Sulfide in Biological Systems.
• In cardiovascular RCTs, half were reported as nonregistered and that these nonregistered trials were more likely than trials that were reported as registered to report statistically significant positive outcomes, suggesting that clinical trial registration mitigates selective reporting.
• The strange case of East African annual fishes.
• The man who revolutionized our knowledge of the human body.
• Body suit makes the best lie detector, say scientists.
• Obesity 'not always linked with metabolic problems'.
• Variants for HDL-C, LDL-C and Triglycerides Identified from Admixture Mapping and Fine-Mapping Analysis.
• The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States.

Announcements

• The 2015 Charles River Prize for Laboratory Animal Science.
• The American Gut Project.