From WashingtonPost.com

Being overweight as a child significantly increases the risk for heart disease in adulthood as early as age 25, according to a large new study that provides the most powerful evidence yet that the obesity epidemic is spawning a generation prone to serious health problems later in life.

The study, of more than 276,000 Danish children, found that those who were overweight when they were 7 to 13 years old were much more likely to develop heart disease between the ages of 25 and 71 — even those who were just a little chubby as kids, and possibly regardless of whether they lost the weight when they grew up.

“This is incredibly important,” said Jennifer L. Baker of the Institute of Preventive Medicine in Copenhagen, who led the research, being published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. “This is the first study to convincingly show that excess childhood weight is associated with heart disease in adulthood, or with any significant health problem in adulthood.”

The study was published with an analysis of U.S. health statistics that projects teenage obesity will raise the nation’s rate of heart disease by at least 16 percent by the year 2035, causing more than 100,000 additional cases.

“This offers a frightening glimpse of what we have in store,” said David S. Ludwig of Harvard Medical School, who wrote an editorial accompanying the studies. “The epidemic of childhood obesity is not a cosmetic problem. It can have profound long-term consequences for adult illness and death.”

The proportion of U.S. children who are overweight has tripled since 1976 and now totals more than 9 million. The sharp rise has already caused a jump in children developing Type 2 diabetes, which used to be known as adult-onset diabetes because it occurred almost exclusively among adults. Children are also increasingly being diagnosed with high blood pressure and cholesterol, which raised fears they will be more likely to develop heart disease — the nation’s leading cause of death.

Previous studies had produced mixed results. “Although studies have hinted there may be an association, none has been able to confirm it,” Baker said. “They didn’t have the power to show the association.”

Baker and her colleagues analyzed information collected about the height and weight of 276,835 Danish schoolchildren between 1955 and 1960 and scoured hospital records from between 1977 and 2001 to see which of them went on to be hospitalized for heart problems as adults.

The risk increased with any amount of excess weight in childhood, the researchers found.

“Even a few extra pounds increases the risk,” Baker said. “That’s the very frightening message from our results.”

For example, a 4-foot-1-inch boy who weighed about 61 pounds at age 7 faced a 12 percent increased risk of developing heart disease between the ages of 25 and 71, compared with a similar boy who was at the normal weight of about 52 pounds.

The greatest increased risk, however, was for the heaviest older children, the researchers found.

For example, a 5-foot-1-inch boy who weighed 121 pounds at age 13 had a 34 percent greater risk compared with a boy of the same height and age who had a normal weight of 96 1/2 pounds. The risk was 51 percent higher if the boy weighed 132 1/2 pounds.

The risk was significantly lower for those who were overweight at age 7 but not at age 13, indicating that a child who can lose excess weight while still young, and remain at a normal weight, can reduce the extra risk substantially.

“This gives us hope,” Baker said. “This really suggests that if an intervention occurs during this short period of time to help a child attain and maintain a normal weight, the risk of heart disease could be reduced.”

Because the researchers did not have data on the subjects’ adult weight, they could not definitively determine whether the increased risk was due to the effects of being overweight when young or because overweight children are more likely to become overweight adults.

“We speculate that it’s the early exposure,” Baker said. “It’s plausible that because these heavy children have these risk factors and are exposed to them early in life and continue to be exposed to them, that leads an increased risk in heart disease.”

In the second study, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo of the University of California at San Francisco and colleagues used federal statistics from the year 2000 and other data to project that by the time today’s adolescents turn 35 in 2020, up to 37 percent of men and 44 percent of women will be obese, resulting in an additional 100,000 cases of heart disease by 2035. Bibbins-Domingo said the projections would have been even higher if the analysis had included the Danish data.

“We took a very conservative approach,” she said.

Melinda Sothern, an expert on childhood obesity at Louisiana State University in New Orleans, said the findings are disturbing because they suggest not only that overweight children experience more disease and disability in childhood but also that many are also destined to be more sickly young adults.

“Overweight children are already losing their childhood. They can’t do the same types of activities as healthy-weight children,” she said. “Now they will lose their early adulthood as well.”

Ludwig likened the childhood obesity epidemic to the threat from global warming, saying that even though hard evidence is just now emerging about the consequences of the threat, society should act more aggressively to counter the trend.

“We don’t have all the data yet. But by the time all the data comes in it’s going to be too late,” Ludwig said. “You don’t want to see the water rising on the Potomac before deciding that global warming is a problem. We need national policies to address childhood obesity, too.”

FromRevolution Health

What people eat and how fast they grow are both significant causes of cancer, but many Americans still incorrectly believe that factors such as pesticides on food are bigger causes, experts reported on Wednesday.

Breastfeeding reduces the risk of cancer for mother and child, and tall people have a higher risk of cancer than shorter people, the report found.

(Dr. Julie Silver explains this new report.)

“We need to think about cancer as the product of many long-term influences, not as something that ‘just happens,’” Dr. Walter Willett, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health in Massachusetts, told a news conference.

The report, released jointly by the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research, is the result of five years of study by nine teams of scientists.

They reviewed 7,000 studies on diet, exercise, weight and cancer.

Most of what they recommended is in line with what health experts, including governments and the World Health Organization, have long been advising — that diets based on fruits, vegetables and whole grains and that go easy on red meats, dairy products and fats protect against heart disease, diabetes and cancer. (Read 10 ways to avoid cancer.)

They found evidence that factors such as hormones that cause the body to grow quickly may be involved in some cancers.

“We found that tallness is also probably linked to increased risk for ovarian, pancreatic and pre-menopausal cancer as well,” said Willett. He stressed that tall people are not destined to get cancer but should take care to maintain healthy habits.

The groups make keeping a healthy weight their No. 1 recommendation to reduce the risk of cancer.

AS LEAN AS POSSIBLE

“Be as lean as possible within the normal range of body weight,” the 400-page report reads. That means keeping a body mass index, they said, of between 21 and 23. BMI is a calculation of height to weight, and the normal range is usually considered to be 18 to 25, with anything over 25 being overweight.

Exercise is also key. “Be physically active as part of everyday life,” is the second of 10 recommendations made by the expert panel. The recommendations also include eating mostly plant foods, such as fruits, vegetables and grains, avoiding calorie-dense foods such as sugary drinks, and limiting red meat, alcohol and salt.

The American Institute for Cancer Research also released a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults that show most do not understand these risks. Only 38 percent knew of the link between cured and processed meats and cancer, 49 percent knew that diets low in fruits and vegetables raised the risk of cancer and 46 percent knew that obesity was a well-documented risk.

But 71 percent thought that pesticide residue on produce was a cause — something that has never been shown; 56 percent thought stress causes cancer, again not proven; and 49 percent believed hormones in beef cause cancer.

“Americans are increasingly likely to attribute cancer to factors over which they have no control, and for which no proven links to the disease exist,” the report reads.

“This reflects an ‘everything causes cancer’ mindset,” it adds.

The meat industry quickly denounced the report.

“WCRF’s conclusions are extreme, unfounded and out of step with dietary guidelines,” said American Meat Institute Foundation Vice President of Scientific Affairs Randy Huffman

From HealthScout

Eating disorders rose significantly among American boys between 1995 and 2005, according to a study that examined weight control behaviors among high school students.

The study, based on an analysis of national data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, identified a large increase in all forms of weight control behaviors among males, including dieting, diet product use, purging, exercise and vigorous exercise.

Hispanic males were most likely to practice weight control, while white males were least likely, said the study authors, led by Y. May Chao of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn.

They also found a significant overall increase in dieting and diet product use among female adolescents. White females were most likely practice weight control while black females were least likely, the researchers said.

The increased weight control behavior noted in males suggests growing social pressure for males to achieve unrealistic body expectations, thus increasing the risk of body dissatisfaction and eating disorders, the study authors said.

“Considering that males have negative attitudes toward treatment-seeking and are less likely than females to seek treatment, efforts should be made to increase awareness of eating disorder symptomatology in male adolescents, and future prevention efforts should target male as well as female adolescents,” the researchers wrote.

The study was published online in the International Journal of Eating Disorders

From Bloomberg.com: Canada

Overweight men are more likely to die of prostate cancer within five years of diagnosis than those who are thinner, according to a study in the U.S.

Extra fat raised the risk of dying from the disease by 52 percent and obesity increased it to 64 percent, after researchers adjusted for some other medical reasons, scientists reported in the Dec. 15 issue of the journal Cancer.

More than 218,000 American men are expected to be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year, according to the researchers. More studies are needed to determine whether weight loss will lower the chances of dying from prostate cancer, said senior author Matthew Smith.

“There’s lots of reasons to try to maintain an ideal body weight: lesser risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes,” said Smith, a director of research at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston, in a telephone interview on Nov. 9. “It may be that those same lifestyle approaches would reduce the risk of adverse outcomes from prostate cancer.”

The researchers examined the records of 788 patients who were diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. Of those, 241 were considered of normal weight, 402 were overweight and 145 were obese, according to a measure called body mass index. BMI is weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. A figure of less than 25 is deemed normal, while a BMI over 30 is considered obese.

The five-year rate of mortality ascribed specifically to the disease was 13.1 percent for “overweight” men in the study and 12.2 percent for “obese” men, compared with 6.5 percent for other men, according to the study. The relative risk suggested by those rates is before adjustment for tumor size at the time of diagnosis and other circumstances.

More Work Urged

It may be that prostate cancer treatments are less effective in men who have higher weights, Smith said, or that other illnesses these men may have, such as diabetes, play a role in the increased risk of prostate cancer death.

“More work needs to be done to understand the mechanisms,” Smith said.

Prostate cancer occurs in the tissue of the prostate, a walnut-sized gland in the male reproductive system that is found below the bladder. More than 27,000 Americans are expected to die of the disease this year.

The journal Cancer is published by the American Cancer Society, a voluntary health organization based in Atlanta.