Sitting will kill you

According to the latest study by people in White Coats at the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences (inventors of the Swedish Bikini Team), people who sit in chairs all day die faster and more gruesome deaths than people who don't. According to lab rat Elin Ekblom-Bak, "After four hours of sitting, the body starts to send harmful signals." She explained that genes regulating the amount of glucose and fat in the body start to shut down. People who sit, whether at home, in the car, or at work, are more likely to be fat, have heart trouble, and die early deaths than those who don't sit.

"No problem!" you say. "I often get up from my chair and walk to the water cooler to discuss the latest happenings with my office chums. I must be in the clear!" Sorry pal. You're still dead. Even a twenty-mile jog to the office won't do you any good. According to the Swedes, you'll just have a more muscular corpse as you lie decomposing next to the other ex-desk monkeys.

Interestingly, the inscrutable ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld may have had a key breakthrough about this problem years ago. In the wake of the revelations about US-military torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Rumsfeld was widely criticized for pooh-poohing one particular practice -- forcing prisoners to stand for hours at a time. According to declassified documents, Rumsfeld wrote on the margins of one torture memo "I stand for 8-10 hours a day," Rummy scrawled. "Why is standing limited to four hours?" Who knew he was just looking out for their health?

Obesity Epidemic Strikes Kid-Friendly Burros

In Spanish, the word "burrito" means "little donkey". The town of Oatman, Arizona, is having a different kind of donkey problem. It seems that one of the key attractions in the old mining town is that a lot of donkeys freely roam the streets. And since every kid who walks by can't resist handing out carrots and other goodies, those asses are now getting very fat.

The Bureau of Land Management is stepping in with a campaign to stop the wonton (oops, wanton) feeding of the animals.

MSG Will Make You Fat

A new report by people in white coats suggests that MSG will make you fat. In a new report in the journal Obesity (you gotta wonder what they serve in their cafeteria), researches noted that Chinese peasants who ate a lot of MSG with their food were nearly three times as likely to be obese than those who didn't pour the stuff on (after controlling for calories, exercise, etc.).

So how am I supposed to get my umami fix now?

Too MUCH sleep can make you fat too!

For the moment, my big problem is that I can't get Cinderella to sleep early enough. And this could make her fat.

Now my sister, Worried Aunt, has informed me of research reported on WebMD that too much sleep is associated with a whole host of problems, including diabetes, headaches, back pain, depression, heart disease, and, of course, obesity.

One recent study showed that people who slept for nine or 10 hours every night were 21% more likely to become obese over a six-year period than were people who slept between seven and eight hours. This association between sleep and obesity remained the same even when food intake and exercise were taken into account.

So, the previous studies suggested that you were at risk for obesity if you slept less than 9 hours a night. This one says nine or more and you're in trouble too.

Gee, thanks Sis!

Restaurant Food Isn't Good For Your Kid

Put this in the "hardly shocking, but still good to keep in mind" folder:

A new study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest released a report that showed that of the 13 largest restaurant chains, 93% of the possible kids' food combos contained a third of the total calories that kids 4-8 should consume in a day. Not too terrible in itself. However, for many of the places, though, almost all of the value-priced kids combos packed an entire days calories into a single meal.

The fast-food joints did about as poorly as you might expect (with the exception of Subway, mostly because they push milk instead of soda--ahhh!! milk!!!), but the big chains like Chili's and Denny's were some of the worst offenders. Many other chains don't make their nutrition info public.

We're bummed because one of our favorite neighborhood burrito joints, Boloco (with lots of cheap, fresh food on the menu), just closed the shop closest to our house. And, of course, it was the one location with a kids play area.

How are you supposed to feed your kid on the run without packing up half the fridge in your pack?

My inability to get my kid to sleep early will make her fat

My daughter, Cinderella, has so far been the victor in the ongoing bedtime battle. It doesn't help much that The Wife and I are night owls (actually, I'm a night owl, she's descended from vampires).

I'm not so good with the whole setting strict limits thing, for the most part. The family motto is "Put the [insert dangerous object] down and nobody gets hurt." Apparently, this isn't good enough to get me a fatherhood medal. It seems that my inability to turn Cinderella into Sleeping Beauty is dramatically increasing her chances of joining the national childhood obesity craze that's sweeping the nation.

Several studies by people in white coats from New Zealand and England point to what appears to be a clear link between the lack of sleep and the rise of childhood obesity. In one study, researchers following 13,000 children made the shocking discovery that children who sleep less tend to spend less time playing outdoors and have less energy for active play. More worryingly, they say that it appears that lack of sleep may alter children's hormones, leading them to overeat, and seek out the worst kinds of food.

Another smaller study of 591 children found that "children who slept an average of less than nine hours a night had a 3.34% increase in body fat compared with those who slept more than nine hours." The researchers noted that shortchanging your kid's sleep led to a three-fold increase in their risk of becoming obese, independent of the amount of exercise they got or the amount of television they watched.

Your wild youth messed up your kid's genes

How your kid turns out is a result of nurture and nature. As far as I've been concerned, Cinderella can blame me and the Wife for all our parental sins to the therapist, but she can't blame us for the genetic stuff. We put in all our chips and spun the wheel.

Or so I thought.

New research in the field known as epigenetics by people in white coats suggests that our behavior can affect our genes. The jury is still out, but the evidence is mounting that youthful indescretions can mark our kids and grandkids. Drowning your sorrows in Ben & Jerry's today means fat camp for junior tomorrow, and so on.

Rather unhelpfully, one study noted that the grandsons of men in an isolated Swedish village that had survived starvation during war lived longer than men who hadn't. Doesn't it always work out that way?

Kids Food Is Bad

According to a new study by a British scientific journal, 89% of food in supermarkets specifically targeted to kids have low or no nutritious value. To confront this, it appears that food marketers have decided to increase the number of dubious nutritional claims about their products. The investigators spotted a pizza carton labeled "Source of calcium" but made no mention that it was loaded with salt, and a jar of peanut butter mixed with chocolate was claimed to be a "source of six essential nutrients" (sure, peanut butter and chocolate, but what are the other four???).

Then again, the journal was called Obesity Reviews. I bet they say that about Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs too.

Swimming Pools: Summer Fun or Cauldron of Death?

Summer heat means it's time to head for a relaxing dip in the pool. Not according to a worrying article from WebMD. The biggest dangers are recreational water illnesses (RWIs):

RWI refers to any illness or infection caused by organisms that contaminate water in pools, lakes, hot tubs, and oceans, resulting in diarrhea, skin rashes, swimmer's ear, and other conditions. And they are on the rise. The rate has more than doubled in the past 10 years, according to data from the CDC.

"No one who swims is safe from RWIs," says Alan Greene, MD, an assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., and author of several books including From First Kicks to First Steps.

Okay, but doesn't chlorine keep it clean?

Chlorine in properly disinfected pools kills most germs that can cause RWIs in less than an hour, but it takes longer to kill some germs, such as cryptosporidium, which can survive for days in even a properly disinfected pool.

What to do if you come down with one of these nasties? Antibiotics are the usual treatment, but the article notes that they are over-prescribed, leading to increased resistance to antibiotics. The article warns that avoiding the pool altogether isn't a good alternative, considering America's obesity epidemic.

Happy swimming!