Featured

• Intelligence and obesity: which way does the causal direction go?
• Lifestyle interventions for cardiovascular disease risk reduction: a systematic review of the effects of diet composition, food provision, and treatment modality on weight loss.
• Sensory-specific appetite is affected by actively smelled food odors and remains stable over time in normal-weight women.
• RCT: Modified sham feeding of foods with different macronutrient compositions differentially influences cephalic change of insulin, ghrelin, and NMR-based metabolomic profiles.

Findings Contrary to Hypotheses or Popular Beliefs

• “Eating at sit-down restaurants can be worse for you than fast food.”
• RCT: Evidence against a role for GLP-1 in postprandial satiety in humans.
• “From this review, evidence for an association between sugar-sweetened beverage intake and obesity risk is inconsistent when adjustment for energy balance is made.”
• The results of this meta-analysis do not support an independent association between diets high in total fat and pancreatic cancer risk.
• RCT: No discernable effect of an inpatient weight loss intervention with postdischarge follow-up results in weight loss at 6 months when compared to control.
• Weight loss in initially healthy overweight/obese older adults was not associated with psychological benefit.
• Pharmaceutical pollutants in water seem to benefit at least one species.

Exercise

• Exercise of any kind benefits patients with diabetes and people at risk for diabetes.
• Impact of exercise training without caloric restriction on inflammation, insulin resistance and visceral fat mass in obese adolescents.
• RCT: Effect of a 3-month physical activity program on body composition in African American college females.
• RCT: Additive effects of isoflavones and exercise training on inflammatory cytokines and body composition in overweight and obese postmenopausal women.

Muscle

• Preoperative quality and quantity of skeletal muscle and mortality.
• Sarcopenic obesity: under-recognised and over treated?

Methods

• Scientists use fruit flies to study diabetes.
• Method of assessing parent-child grocery store purchasing interactions using a micro-camcorder.
• Validity of the Bite Counter device in a controlled laboratory setting.
• Just-About-Right and ideal scaling provide similar insights into the influence of sensory attributes on liking.
• Meta-analysis as evidence: building a better pyramid.

Economics

• The impact of wealth on weight.
• Neighborhood deprivation and diagnosed childhood obesity: a nationwide multilevel study from Sweden.

Food

• RCT: Impact of medium and long chain triglycerides consumption on appetite and food intake in overweight men.
• RCT: Effects of a normal protein vs. high protein breakfast on food cravings and reward signals in overweight/obese “breakfast skipping,” late adolescent girls.
• RCT: Effects of varying the inter-meal interval on relationships between antral area, gut hormones and energy intake following a nutrient drink in healthy lean humans.
• RCT: Breakfast replacement with a low-glycaemic response liquid formula in patients with type 2 diabetes.

Epidemiology

• Association between obesity, race and Knee osteoarthritis: The Multicenter Osteoarthritis Study.
• Heavier people, no matter what age, may have less endurance in manufacturing jobs.
• Associations of grandparental schooling with adult grandchildren's health status, smoking, and obesity.
• Moderate to severe obesity is associated with a poorer invasive breast cancer prognosis.
• Body mass index, physical activity, and smoking in relation to military readiness.
• Malaria’s toll in the Peace Corps.
• CDC projects 40 percent of Americans will develop diabetes.

Stigma

• Obese body sizes are associated with perceived laziness, isolation, and negative social stigma in Botswana.
• Physiotherapists demonstrate weight stigma: a cross-sectional survey of Australian physiotherapists.
• Stigma and the perpetuation of obesity.

Drugs

• RCT: oral administration of Gelesis100, a novel hydrogel, significantly decreases body weight in overweight and obese subjects.
• Overview of new antiobesity drugs.
• RCT: effect of a melanocortin receptor 4 (MC4R) agonist, RM-493, on resting energy expenditure (REE) in obese subjects.
• RCT: naltrexone to counteract antipsychotic-associated weight gain: proof of concept.
• Preventing olanzapine-induced weight gain using betahistine: a study in a rat model with chronic olanzapine treatment.
• Nicotine enhances modulation of food-cue reactivity by leptin and ghrelin in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
• FDA-approved medications for the treatment of overweight and obesity.

Surgery

• RCT: preoperative intervention to increase physical activity in bariatric surgery patients.
• RCT: weight loss, adipokines, and quality of life after sleeve gastrectomy in obese patients with stages 3-4 CKD.
• Bariatric surgery for severely obese adolescents.
• Large-volume liposuction and fasting insulin levels.

Sugar

• Commentary: “some of my colleagues have created a cottage industry in the indictment of sugar in general, and fructose in particular, for crimes against humanity.”
• RCT: Dietary Fructose Reduction Improves Markers of Cardiovascular Disease Risk in Hispanic-American Adolescents with NAFLD.
• Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption Among Adults — 18 States, 2012.
• RCT: The Effects of Fructose-Containing Sugars on Weight, Body Composition and Cardiometabolic Risk Factors When Consumed at up to the 90th Percentile Population Consumption Level for Fructose.
• Systematic Review: “Overall, the available evidence is not sufficiently robust to draw conclusions regarding effects of fructose, HFCS, or sucrose consumption on NAFLD.”
• Normal Roles for Dietary Fructose in Carbohydrate Metabolism.
• RCT: No Change in Oral Glucose Tolerance Tests As a Result of Ten Weeks of Consumption of Various Fructose Containing Sugars or Glucose.
• Concrete images of the sugar content in sugar-sweetened beverages reduces attraction to and selection of these beverages.
• Commentary: Uninterpretable results from a meta-analysis of fructose and metabolic syndrome.
• Loneliness, Social Integration and Consumption of Sugar-Containing Beverages: Testing the Social Baseline Theory.
• Editorial: Oh sugar!

Evolution, Energetics, & Ecology

• A thermodynamic theory of microbial growth.
• Energetics, scaling and sexual size dimorphism of spiders.
• Increasing energetic cost of biosynthesis during growth makes refeeding deleterious.
• Senescence or selective disappearance? Age trajectories of body mass in wild and captive populations.

Clinical

• RCT: effects of poly-bioactive compounds on lipid profile and body weight in a moderately hypercholesterolemic population with low cardiovascular disease risk.
• RCT: effects on glycemic control and weight of a widely available weight control program tailored for people with type 2 diabetes: six-month results.
• Obese individuals may require 40% higher vitamin D intake than non-obese individuals.
• Few diabetes patients test glucometers with control solutions and few physicians recommend it.

Obesity Paradox

• Metabolically healthy obesity-does it exist?
• To legitimize the contentious obesity paradox.

Policy Related

• DOE increases public access to research results.
• Put down the cupcake: new ban hits school bake sales.
• A systematic review of the effectiveness of food taxes and subsidies to improve diets: Understanding the recent evidence.
• “Our results suggest that anti-obesity advertising is more effective for overweight subjects and healthy food advertising is more effective for normal-weight subjects.”
• Lawmakers call for details on trial participants’ sex and race.

Commentary

• Advocacy groups take obesity naysayers to task.
• Explaining the obesity paradox.
• Are We Overdoing Salt Restrictions?
• Too much food or too little movement?
• Losing weight is depressing?
• E-cigarettes & sweeteners: who needs facts?
• What’s becoming of the word “Fat”?
• Shocking anti-obesity PSA sparks debate.
• Scientific studies biased by reward systems.
• Is fat shaming OK if you target parents?

Basic Science

• Intrinsic aerobic capacity impacts susceptibility to acute high-fat diet-induced hepatic steatosis.
• Syndecan-1 knockout mice lack proper intradermal fat, and are 60 to 80 percent more resistant to tumors than normal mice.
• Pterostilbene, a dimethyl ether derivative of resveratrol, reduces fat accumulation in rats fed an obesogenic diet.
• Foodborne transmission of bovine spongiform encephalopathy to non-human primates results in preclinical rapid-onset obesity.
• Grizzly Bears, insulin resistance, and hibernation.
• Why Zebrafish?

General Science

• Mapping ecologically relevant social behaviours by gene knockout in wild mice.
• Translational genomics: clues from the resilient.
• Boosting insect aggression by altering brain metabolism.
• Lab-based lucid dreaming (self-awareness in dreams).
• Electron theft, not drug effects, may be how anesthesia knocks people out.
• Covert images and anti-counterfeit drug labels.
• Student could be jailed for posting another scientist’s thesis online.
• Maryam Mirzakhani: first woman to ever win the Fields Medal – known as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics."
• The most realistic fake brain tissue ever.
• Photo editing algorithm changes weather, seasons automatically.
• Vaccine alternative protects mice against malaria.

Video

• Beating obesity: start with the exercise as a Vital Sign.
• Why don’t doctors prescribe physical activity?
• Exercise scripts: teaching doctors to prescribe exercise.

Announcements

• Call for Papers: weight stigma and eating behaviors.
• UAB researchers receive NIH grant to offer a New Short Course: "Strengthening Causal Inference in Behavioral Obesity Research."
• New book on obesity and sex lives.
• Joint ACSM/AND/ILSI/IFIC Foundation Webcast: Energy balance at the crossroads: translating the science into action