Featured

• RCT: Sleep Extension Improves Neurocognitive Functions in Chronically Sleep-Deprived Obese Individuals.
• Obesity and seatbelt use: a fatal relationship.
• Portion sizes for children are predicted by parental characteristics and the amounts parents serve themselves.

Findings Contrary to Hypothesis or Popular Ideas

• Meta-Analysis of RCTs shows no effect of school-based physical activity and nutritional education interventions on BMI.
• Obesity not associated with outcomes in critically ill patients requiring invasive mechanical ventilation and very obese patients also had similar outcomes to obese patients.
• Body weight has no association on self-esteem of minority children living in inner city, low-income neighborhoods.
• RCT: No effects of a program designed to influence child having breakfast, drinking sweet beverages, watching television and playing outside.
• No significant association between BMI and SSB consumption was observed in any model among over 10,000 Canadian Youth.
• RCT: No significant effects of the walking intervention on circulating adipokines among overweight and obese postmenopausal women.
• “Results surprisingly provide no support for important individual roles of either gut hormone [GLP-1 and PYY] in the specific mechanisms by which RYGB rats settle at a lower body weight.”
• RCT: Intervention had no significant effect on the odds of achieving prepregnancy weight at 12 mo postpartum.
• RCT: No effect of caloric restriction on salivary cortisol levels in overweight men and women.

Clinical

• RCT: A gender-sensitised weight loss and healthy living programme for overweight and obese men delivered by Scottish Premier League football clubs (FFIT).
• RCT: The effects of the parent training program for obesity reduction on anthropometric measures of school-age children.
• Physical activity is an independent predictor of cognitive function in persons with heart failure.
• Increased glucose production seen with SGLT2 inhibitors.

Food

• RCT: Consuming a balanced high fat diet for 16 weeks improves body composition, inflammation and vascular function parameters in obese premenopausal women.
• Protein-enriched diet, with the use of lean red meat, combined with progressive resistance training enhances lean tissue mass and muscle strength and reduces circulating IL-6 concentrations in elderly women: a cluster RCT.
• Blueberry supplementation improves memory in middle-aged mice fed a high-fat diet.
• Male pups of female mice fed a high fat diet during lactation had elevated body fat and leptin.
• Study finds aesthetics in food packaging as important as brand names.

Sugar

• Sugar vs fat: Twin brothers take radical steps to show the real impact of our fad diets.
• Hypothalamic melanin concentrating hormone neurons communicate the nutrient value of sugar.

Energy Balance

• Energy gap in the aetiology of body weight gain and obesity: A challenging concept with a complex evaluation and pitfalls.
• Effects of a breakfast spread out over time on the food intake at lunch and the hormonal responses in obese men.

Exercise

• RCT: The effect of exercise intensity on endothelial function in physically inactive lean and obese adults.
• Games that are more enjoyable and engaging may produce greater intensity activity.
• Sedentary behavior changed the shape of neurons in rats.
• RCT: Impact of aerobic exercise on visceral fat in overweight chronic kidney disease patients.

Basic Science

• Mice lacking natural killer T cells are more susceptible to metabolic alterations following high fat diet feeding.
• A new study on worms with a genetic mutation could play a role in developing personalized diets for humans.
• The differing adipocyte morphologies of deep versus superficial midfacial fat compartments: A Cadaveric Study.
• Mfge8 promotes obesity by mediating the uptake of dietary fats and serum fatty acids.
• Glutamate gets fat.

Methods

• A latent class model for obesity.
• Quantitative Assessment of Pancreatic Fat by Using Unenhanced CT: Pathologic Correlation and Clinical Implications.
• Quantitative Assessment of liver fat in an obese patient population using non-contrast CT fat percent index.
• Quantification of epicardial fat volume using cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging.
• Automated quantification of epicardial adipose tissue in cardiac magnetic resonance imaging.

Bacteria

• Helicobacter pylori infection in obesity and its clinical outcome after bariatric surgery.
• Antiobesity and cholesterol-lowering effects of bifidobacteria animalis DY-64 in rats fed a high-fat/high-cholesterol diet.

Drugs

• Sitagliptin, insulin combination preserved beta-cell function in LADA.
• RCT: Changes in Weight Loss–Related Quality of Life among Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Patients Treated with Dapagliflozin.

Policy Related

• FTC issues updated media guidance for screening fake weight loss claims.
• What happens when the definition of disability changes? The case of obesity.
• World Health Organization recommendations are often strong based on low confidence in effect estimates.
• FDA says nutrition facts label will get a makeover.
• The FDA-mandated withdrawal of 23andMe’s personal genome service.

Economics

• When Value Trumps Health in a Supersized World.
• Decomposing Socioeconomic Inequalities in Childhood Obesity: Evidence from Ireland.

Epidemiology

• Incidence of childhood obesity in the United States.
• Obesity is found to gain hold in earliest years.
• The effect of incarceration on adult male BMI trajectories, USA, 1981–2006.

Pregnancy

• Gestational weight gain and maternal and neonatal outcomes in term twin pregnancies in obese women.
• Gestational weight gain in twin pregnancies and maternal and child health: a systematic review.

Psychology

• Laugh Away the Fat? Therapeutic Humor in the Control of Stress-induced Emotional Eating.
• Two simple, brief, naturalistic activities and their impact on positive affect: feeling grateful and eating ice cream.

Temperature

• Is Your Furnace Making You Fat?
• Intermittent cold exposure increased metabolic rage, activated brown fat, and improved glucose homeostasis in mice.
• Habituation of the metabolic and ventilatory responses to cold-water immersion in humans.
• Recruited brown adipose tissue as an antiobesity agent in humans.
• Inbreeding effects on standard metabolic rate investigated at cold, benign and hot temperatures in Drosophila melanogaster.
• The hidden cost of housing practices: using noninvasive imaging (thermography) to quantify the metabolic demands of chronic cold stress of laboratory mice.

Thermogenesis

• Cold acclimation recruits human brown fat and increases nonshivering thermogenesis.
• Dietary factors evoke thermogenesis in adipose tissues.
• Autonomic regulation of brown adipose tissue thermogenesis in health & disease: Potential clinical applications for altering BAT thermogenesis.

Driving

• Driver obesity and the risk of fatal injury during traffic collisions.
• Truck driving associated with high BMI and among truck drivers Type-2 Diabetes associated with crashes.

General Science

• Newspapers were more likely to cover observational studies than RCTs and when the media does cover observational studies, they select articles of inferior quality.
• Lack of blinded outcome assessors in randomized trials with subjective time-to-event outcomes causes high risk of observer bias.
• NIH thoughts on scientific fidelity: pre-clinical research in animals is not reproducible.
• Vitamin A deficiency can boost innate immunity in mice.
• The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness.
• Volunteering and having positive views about others can buffer the effects of stress on health.
• An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments.
• Is communication a casualty of computers in the exam room?

Ecology, Evolution & Energetics

• Elephant obesity concerns in preserve planned in California for 'near-wild' herd.
• Polar bears have shifted to a diet of more land-based food in response to climate change.
• Metabolic rate and prehibernation fattening in free-living arctic ground squirrels.

Commentary

• The role of personal responsibility in health and weight control.
• You are fat, it is not your fault.
• 'Worst Headline: "I Give Up, Pass the Pie"'.
• Today's BAD science Reporting award goes to NPR for this headline and photo....on a mouse study.
• Disappointing APHA obesity story.
• Don’t drop the ball on food safety this Super Bowl!
• Labeling obesity as a disease may undermine healthy Intentions of obese individuals.

Announcements

• Fighting fat in Alabama: UAB channels resources to battle obesity (The Weight Loss Medicine Program).
• New IOM interactive website: getting 60 minutes of physical activity during the school day.
• Passing of Sir John Cornforth: Distinguished Nobel Prize winning scientist and pioneer in the field of stereochemistry.