Emergency officials had to knock down Jose Luis Garza’s bedroom wall and put him in the back of a friend’s pickup truck to take him to a hospital as he fought for his life. The 47-year-old was pronounced dead on arrival.

Garza followed in the footsteps of the world’s fattest man, fellow Mexican Manuel Uribe of Monterrey, by taking his weight problem public. Garza lived about an hour away from Uribe in the northern town of Juarez.

Garza said he had always struggled with his weight but fell into a cycle of depression and overeating nine months ago after his parents died of natural causes within two weeks of each other. He had been bedridden for four months.

Garza’s condition deteriorated over the weekend as he struggled to breathe and eat.

Family members criticized officials for not moving Garza to a hospital before he became critically ill.

“If he had received support at the time he asked for it, he would still be with us,” said his brother Pedro Garza.

State officials argued there was little they could do.

“The attention he would have received at a hospital would have been the same he received at home,” said Julio Cesar Cano, spokesman for the Nuevo Leon state health department. “Moving a patient of that magnitude is very difficult.”

About 150 friends and family waited for more than four hours at a cemetery in the Monterrey suburb of Guadalupe while carpenters built a special coffin for Garza’s burial.

“The family wanted to cremate him but there wasn’t an adequate oven for someone his size,” funeral home worker Maribel Cantu said. “He is the biggest man we have buried.”

Garza’s coffin arrived to the cemetery in a white van and 20 relatives and workers lowered it to the ground. His burial was delayed as cemetery workers enlarged the grave.

Uribe, whose record weight of 560 kilos (1,230 pounds) earned him a place in the 2008 Guinness Book of Records, had tried to help Garza by sending him kiwis, grapefruit, pears and a protein supplement.

Uribe’s fiancee, Claudia Solis, delivered the food on Friday evening.

Half-ton Mexican man dies after pleading for help – Yahoo! News

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Health ministry official Chun Myung-sook said the rate of childhood obesity had tripled over the past three years due to a changing diet higher in fatty foods and a more sedentary lifestyle.

Under the government plan, elementary school students whose body mass index indicates obesity will be able to receive up to 40,000 won ($33.58) a month to help them bring their weight down.

“Kids won’t be able to waste the money on eating sweets. We will give them electronic vouchers that can only be used in designated places,” Chun said.

Costs to the government and the economy related to childhood obesity were 2 trillion won in 2006, the ministry said, making the voucher program cost effective.

South Korea pays for gyms for obese children on Yahoo! Health

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In mid February of this year (2008) the American College of Physicians (ACP), the second largest doctors group in the United States, released a statement urging that the use of marijuana by patients with certain diseases be reconsidered by the U.S. Government.

Currently some states; Montana, Oregon, Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Washington, Maine, and Vermont, have medical marijuana laws. Ann Arbor, Michigan and Columbia, Missouri have local medical marijuana measures

The federal government still lists marijuana, used in any form, as illegal. The US Supreme court ruled against the use of medical marijuana saying that federal agents can arrest anyone who plants or uses marijuana, even if their health care professionals advised use of the plant could be beneficial.

The physicians group said additional research is needed to clarify the therapeutic effects of marijuana and determine standard doses and the method of delivery. One active ingredient has been isolated from marijuana by the drug industry and has been proven as an effective pain killer. The ACP statement reads “ACP encourages the use of non-smoked forms of THC (the main psychoactive element in marijuana) that have proven therapeutic value.” Additional research will not be possible without the support of the US Government, and the government discourages research on marijuana for medical use according to the doctors group.

Marijuana is a member of the hemp family and it was not illegal in the United States until the 1937 “Marijuana Tax Act”. History records ‘reefer madness’ was prevalent in the United States during and after the great depression and the act did not make it illegal to grow the product, it simply taxed the farmer to the extent that they could not afford to grow the plant. The law was not discriminating and applied to all hemp products, not just the intoxicating variety of hemp. Citizens lost the availability of many hemp related products as a result of this law.

The marijuana variety of hemp has intoxicating properties. So does the opium poppy. Codeine and morphine, which are used extensively for pain control, are derivatives of opium. Both codeine and morphine are used after surgery, and prescribed regularly by physicians for pain control. Perhaps, as has been suggested by many people from all walks of life, the lack of a medical marijuana law is more political than health related.

Marijuana may not prove to be any more effective for medical purposes than other substances, but the research should be allowed to prove or disprove its value.

Alternative Medicine – Medical Marijuana – Myth or Reality? | Health News

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On the spot, the 5-foot-6-inch, 240-pound lab researcher joined “Vamos Por Un Million de Kilos” (Let’s Lose a Million Kilos), a national campaign to get Mexicans to collectively trim about 2 million pounds.

The project is one of several new efforts to fight obesity in Mexico, which is on track to catch up with the United States within a decade as one of the world’s fattest countries, according to the Mexican government. Nearly half of Mexico’s 110 million people are overweight, and the number of fat children has climbed 8 percent a year over the last decade.

“The longer we carry this excess weight, the more serious the problem becomes,” said Dr. Samuel Flores Huerta, director of the Department of Community Health at Children’s Hospital. “Obesity is costing this country a lot of money.”

Mexico is working to mandate more physical education in public schools and encourage employers and unions to give workers time for exercise. The administration of President Felipe Calderon says it has built or renovated more than 800 public sports facilities around the country. The National Institute of Public Health is promoting food education and healthier choices in schools, such as fruits and vegetables instead of chips and soda.

Mexican cuisine has always been high in fat and carbohydrates. But for decades, people living in small villages could not grow enough crops to eat a lot and had to travel long distances to gather more food.

Now, as the middle class grows and more people move to cities seeking work, diets have become laden with processed and fast foods. At the same time, doctors say, Mexicans spend more time in sitting in cars or watching TV.

The country has the disease rates to prove it. According to government statistics, new cases of high blood pressure increased 24 percent in Mexico in just six years, from 2000 to 2006. New cases of Type 2 diabetes, believed to be linked in part to obesity, jumped 31 percent during that time.

Companies spend a lot to market unhealthy foods in Mexico, said Margarita Safdie, an investigator at the public health institute. In one so-called health-conscious promotion, a company offered a free bottle of water to anyone buying two soft drinks.

“It should be the other way around,” Safdie said. “It’s not that healthy food is much more expensive. What happens is that calories have become cheaper.”

At Alvaro Lozano’s taco stand in downtown Mexico City, customers line up every day for a choice of fatty meats on two corn tortillas washed down with a sugary soft drink. He said his customers are more concerned about money and time than about health.

Mexicans have also developed a taste for fast food.

“The food is good, and sometimes I don’t feel like cooking,” said Ana Lopez, 35, a Mexico City homemaker dining at Kentucky Fried Chicken on the Zona Rosa pedestrian mall.

“Vamos Por Un Million de Kilos” came out of a promotional campaign by the Televisa media company, launched after its sports department noticed a certain irony.

“Some of our sportscasters were talking about fitness while they themselves were obese,” said Rafael Bustillos, Televisa director of sport. “It was after that that we decided to start creating awareness about this issue.”

Advertisers sponsored spots encouraging viewers to eat healthier foods and showing easy and free ways to exercise in a country where few can afford gym memberships. Then the Mexican Institute of Social Security signed on, recruiting clinic patients like Leon for the weight-loss challenge. The campaign reached its goal in just four months with 2 million people.

“We only recommend that people lose a half to a full kilo (1 to 2 pounds) a week,” said Dr. Ernesto Krug, a public health unit director. “More than that is not healthy.”

The campaign is now starting a second phase, “Vamos Por Mas Kilos” (Let’s Lose More Kilos), targeted more widely, including at adolescents.

Leon, 39, has dropped 40 pounds since May. Before his checkup, he ate tacos, burgers and whatever his wife prepared, and didn’t exercise. Now he has learned to cook so he can choose healthy ingredients. He takes the stairs at work and walks at least twice a week with his wife. He also tries to be a role model.

“I have tried to tell my brother to do what I did. He’s overweight,” Leon said. “But he won’t listen to me.”

Leon plans to lose 20 more pounds. But already he worries less about heart disease and more about how to replace his baggy wardrobe.

“I think that it has paid off,” he said. “Physically, I feel great and more secure with myself.”

Mexico pushes national campaign to lose weight on Yahoo! Health

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But a new study introduces a curious wrinkle in the evidence. Led by Dr. Guilherme Campos, director of the Bariatric Surgery Program at the University of California, San Francisco, the study found that gastric-bypass patients with diabetes did not lose as much weight as other patients after the surgery. Of the 310 patients in the study, 92% of those without diabetes were able to lose more than 40% of their excess weight – statistically, that’s considered a successful procedure – while only 79% of diabetes patients were able to drop that much weight after one year. In both cases, doctors used the same surgical technique, which involves permanently sectioning off a small pouch from the stomach and connecting it directly to the intestines, which forces patients to eat less and allows food to bypass the rest of the stomach and the upper part of the intestines.

So why the difference in weight loss between the two groups? Campos notes that although the procedure is the same from patient to patient, doctors currently do not use a standard size when creating the new stomach sac. Instead, surgeons use anatomical landmarks unique to each patient to determine the size of his or her new, smaller stomach. But because the stomach lining remains elastic and flexible, sometimes the small stapled-off pouches simply balloon back to a larger size, which explains why 5% to 15% of people who get gastric bypass surgery often experience little or no weight loss.

The other reason for the weight-loss disparity, Campos says, may have something to do with the medications that diabetes patients take to control blood sugar. “One of the known factors for why diabetics have trouble controlling their weight is the types of medications they take,” says Campos. “Diabetes is a consequence of being overweight, but [another complication] is having to take medications that add to weight gain. It’s a double-edged sword, and a vicious cycle.” The solution, he points out, may be to rely on newer anti-diabetes drugs, such as the DPP-IV inhibitors (like Januvia, the first to receive FDA approval), that can help patients keep their blood sugar and weight under control. “We can have even better results in controlling diabetes after gastric bypass surgery if we change the way we manage diabetes until these patients can get off their drugs,” he says.
(See photos of what makes you eat more food here.)

But despite the fact that diabetes patients lost less weight after surgery than patients without the disease, 90% of the former group still saw their blood-sugar levels fall after the procedure. That meant they could also cut back significantly on the amount of medication they needed. According to Dr. Osama Hamdy, director of the Obesity Clinical Program at Joslin Diabetes Center, the chances may be even better for those patients who address their diabetes early on. “If you have had diabetes for a long time, your response to surgery may not be as good as that of people who have had diabetes for a short period of time,” he says. “People who have had a longer duration of diabetes may reduce their medication, but they may never be able to stop them completely.”

Campos’ study did not stratify the diabetes patients in his study by how long they had been living with their disease. But researchers think the benefits of gastric bypass may indeed be greatest in those obese patients who are recently diagnosed with diabetes, since their bodies are more likely to revert back to normal sugar metabolism after surgery. That’s because much of the post-bypass weight loss is spurred by a shift in the hormonal feedback loop that controls hunger and satiety. Production of certain weight-related hormones, such as ghrelin, or the hunger hormone, are directly reduced by the patient’s physically smaller stomach (ghrelin is produced by glands in the stomach), leading to a reduction in food intake. Meanwhile, the smaller stomach more readily triggers hormones that signal satiety to the brain, sending the message that the body has taken in its fill of calories. But the longer this system has been overwhelmed with too much sugar and too many calories as occurs in diabetes, experts suspect, the more difficult it is to normalize the body’s metabolic thresholds and molecular messages.

“I believe that the benefits of gastric bypass surgery outweigh any risk that a patient will have,” says Hamdy. “If you look at the mortality in relation to obesity itself, especially if it occurs with diabetics, that is much, much higher than the risk of mortality from the surgery.”

What Campos’ study shows, however, is that patients should have realistic expectations of what the surgery can do for them: People without diabetes have the best chance of losing weight and reaping the heart and metabolic benefits of being slimmer; among diabetes patients, those undergoing surgery early on in their disease might fare better than those who wait longer. Both Campos and Hamdy remind patients that surgery is never the final answer – weight-loss maintenance continues long after you’re discharged from the hospital, and can only be done the old-fashioned way, with a healthy diet and exercise plan. Surgery, after all, can only get you so far.

Gastric Bypass Surgery Less Helpful for Diabetics – Yahoo! News

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Researchers found that among 87 healthy men ages 19 to 48, those who were obese were less likely to have ever fathered a child. More importantly, they showed hormonal differences that point to a reduced reproductive capacity, the researchers report in the journal Fertility and Sterility.

Compared with their thinner counterparts, obese men had lower levels of testosterone in their blood, as well as lower levels of luteinizing hormone (LH) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) — both essential to reproduction.

According to the researchers, these relatively low levels of LH and FSH are suggestive of a “partial” hypogonadotropic hypogonadism. This is a condition in which the testes do not function properly due to signaling problems in the hypothalamus or pituitary gland, two brain structures involved in hormone secretion.

The findings suggest that obesity alone is an “infertility factor” in otherwise healthy men, write Dr. Eric M. Pauli and his colleagues at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine in Hershey.

Of the 87 men in the study, 68 percent had had a child. Pauli’s team found that the average body mass index, or BMI, was lower among these men compared with those who’d never fathered a child; in the former group, the average BMI was 28, which falls into the range for “overweight,” while the average BMI for childless men was nearly 32, which falls into the “obese” range.

When the researchers assessed the men for several reproductive hormones, they found that the more obese a man was, the lower was his LH and FSH levels. On the other hand, increasing obesity correlated with increasing estrogen levels.

Excess body fat, Pauli’s team explains, may increase the conversion of testosterone to estrogen in a man’s blood. Such hormone alterations could, in turn, signal the brain to suppress FSH and LH production.

Past studies have linked obesity with a dampened libido and increased risk of erectile dysfunction, the researchers note. Those effects, they say, along with the hormonal alterations seen in this study, could act together to decrease an obese man’s fertility.

Obesity may diminish a man’s fertility | Health | Reuters

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An active lifestyle may help people combat obesity, the study found. For the study, researchers measured the amount of physical activity volunteers carried out with a device called “accelerometer” and found that being genetically predisposed to obesity “had no effect on those with above average physical activity scores.” Researchers concluded that the gene variants which have been linked to obesity are associated with a 20 percent risk of obesity.

“Our results strongly suggest that the increased risk of obesity due to genetic susceptibility can be blunted through physical activity,” Dr Soren Snitker, who led the research, said. But in people with low levels of physical activity, the association between the gene and increased body mass index was significant, according to the study. Another study found that half of all Europeans carry either one or two copies of this gene.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease and Prevention, 25.6% of Americans are obese.

The results of this study emphasize the important role played by regular physical activity in public health efforts to combat obesity, the authors added in the study published in the September 8 issue of the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.

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An active lifestyle may help people combat obesity, the study found. For the study, researchers measured the amount of physical activity volunteers carried out with a device called “accelerometer” and found that being genetically predisposed to obesity “had no effect on those with above average physical activity scores.” Researchers concluded that the gene variants which have been linked to obesity are associated with a 20 percent risk of obesity.

“Our results strongly suggest that the increased risk of obesity due to genetic susceptibility can be blunted through physical activity,” Dr Soren Snitker, who led the research, said. But in people with low levels of physical activity, the association between the gene and increased body mass index was significant, according to the study. Another study found that half of all Europeans carry either one or two copies of this gene.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease and Prevention, 25.6% of Americans are obese.

The results of this study emphasize the important role played by regular physical activity in public health efforts to combat obesity, the authors added in the study published in the September 8 issue of the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.

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The Cleveland Clinic offers these suggestions to help prevent overeating:

• Use a smaller dish, so that it looks like your plate is more full.
• Serve up an appropriate portion, and don’t tempt yourself with seconds.
• Put away leftovers quickly after dinner, and store them in portion-controlled containers. Freeze whatever you don’t want right away.
• Never eat right out of the bag, box or takeout container.
• Put bowls or platters of food away or out of sight during dinner.

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But fighting that fat factor may be easier in the Amish community’s 19th century rural lifestyle. They don’t use cars or modern appliances. Many of the men are farmers and carpenters, and the women, who are homemakers, often care for several children.

The researchers found that Amish people with the genetic variant were no more likely to be overweight than those who had the regular version of the gene — as long as they got three to four hours of moderate activity every day. That included things like brisk walking, housecleaning and gardening.

And while physical activity is recommended for just about everyone, the study suggests that people with the gene variation need to be especially vigilant about getting exercise.

“These findings emphasize the important role of physical activity in public health efforts to combat obesity, particularly in genetically susceptible people,” the authors wrote in Monday’s Archives of Internal Medicine.

Study co-author Dr. Soren Snitker of the University of Maryland acknowledged that it’s unrealistic to expect most people to shun modern conveniences and return to a 19th century lifestyle for the sake of staying trim.

Every little bit helps
But he said every little bit helps, and that adding an extra few hours of activity daily might not be as hard as it seems.

Instead of watching TV for a few hours at night, take a brisk walk, he suggested. Or use stairs instead of elevators, walk instead of driving, or take up a structured exercise such as swimming.

Previous research based on self-reporting of physical activity has produced similar results. The new study used a more reliable measure — battery-operated monitoring devices worn round-the-clock for a week, said lead author Evadnie Rampersaud of the University of Miami.

Maybe you CAN blame being fat on your genes. But there’s a way to overcome that family history — just get three to four hours of moderate activity a day.

Sound pretty daunting?

Not for the Amish of Lancaster County, Pa., who were the focus of a new study on a common genetic variation that makes people more likely to gain weight. It turns out the variant’s effects can be blocked with physical activity — lots of it.

More research is needed to see if similar results would be found in other racial and ethnic groups, said Amy Zlot, a genetics researcher with Oregon’s Department of Human Services, who was not involved in the study.

The Amish study involved 704 people; blood samples determined which of those had a variation in the FTO gene linked to obesity. Among those with the variant, those who got about three or four hours of moderate physical activity a day weighed up to about 15 pounds less on average than the least active people.

Big trouble for couch potatoes
The least active group would be comparable to Americans who get little exercise beyond normal activities of daily living, Snitker said.

The authors said it is not clear how the FTO gene influences excess weight, but it is believed to be involved in the function of a protein that may affect how the body regulates food intake.

“It’s only if you’re not active that the gene hurts,” Snitker said. “If you are active, then either way, it doesn’t matter whether you have the gene or not.”

So far, blood tests identifying the gene variant are only available for research. Experts say there are likely many other genetic differences that also influence obesity, so it is too soon to recommend routine testing for the general public.

Dr. Joel Hirschhorn, a genetics and obesity researcher at Children’s Hospital Boston, said people should not interpret the study to mean, “I don’t have this gene variant so I don’t need to be physically active.”

He noted that other obesity gene variants might also be affected by physical activity, which has benefits beyond helping people stay trim.

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