US Fitness Guide

Multiple chins, bulging tummies and flabby arms: It’s easy to see where fat accumulates on the body.

When a person starts losing weight, where does the fat go? And what parts of the body can you expect to see results?

Headlines from fitness magazines promise exercises to blast away belly fat and activities to spot-reduce flab. Read more…

What’s Reeaallly Making You Fat?

From today I can legitimately say I have witnessed someone who is probably eating themselves to death. An obese man, perhaps 200 kilos, sitting in a sea of food.

And that’s only a slight exaggeration. Literally on every side of him he had another shopping bag full of chocolate, candy, and potato chips, and in the two hours or so I spent near him, he ate his way through all of it.

Now I need to say that I don’t know this man personally, so perhaps he has a condition? Maybe a thyroid problem? Or some sort of genetic disposition to putting on weight?

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The study’s lead author, Aaron Cypess, MD, PhD, is presenting the results at The Endocrine Society’s 93rd Annual Meeting in Boston.

“We are now even more optimistic that brown fat could be used for treating obesity and diabetes,” said Cypess, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston.

Cypess heads the research team that two years ago published a study showing that brown fat is present in adults, not just in infants and small mammals, as scientists had thought.

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High fat at birth is a possible risk factor for childhood obesity, said the study’s principal investigator, Jami Josefson, MD, a pediatric endocrinologist at Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital and assistant professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“Previous studies have shown that children of mothers who gain too much weight during pregnancy are more likely to be overweight for their age,” Josefson said. “However, not all these studies accounted for the mother’s diabetes status during pregnancy, which is a known risk factor for offspring obesity.”

The new study evaluated only pregnant women without gestational diabetes, therefore ruling out the chance that this disorder could account for their findings.

Josefson and her colleagues wanted to learn whether pregnant women who gain more than the recommended amount of weight have fat infants.

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