Weight Hacker is a website and book that focus on losing weight in a very geeky way. The creator of weight hacking writes about geeky things all the time and he decided to take his appeal of geeky things to his diet. Sometimes I tried dieting, but ei…

Starting each day with a balanced and healthy breakfast is one of the most robust dietary recommendations – especially for anyone trying to better manage their weight.
Interestingly enough, however, starting your day with a breakfast may have other important benefits – perhaps, even reducing your risk for type 2 diabetes.
According to a paper by Rania [...]

Never mind that it is usually impossible to infer causality from observational studies or, even if significant associations are noted, to predict what may or may not happen, when one of the variables is targeted (as in an intervention). It is also worth noting that many common stereotypic assumptions we make about what may or [...]

Regular readers of these pages are well aware of the importance of the adverse effects that environmental factors during fetal development can have on the subsequent health risks of the offspring.
This is again documented in a study in rats by Emily Hayes and colleagues from McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, published in the latest issue of [...]

Yesterday, I was in Medicine Hat (Southern Alberta), speaking at a Nutrition and Metabolism Workshop, hosted by the Palliser Primary Care Network.
While I spoke on obesity management in primary care, I was very much intrigued by a presentation on celiac disease given by Daniel Leffler from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, USA.
Leffler [...]

Regular readers will be well aware of the emerging evidence that quality and amount of sleep can have profound effects on eating behaviour and may well be an important factor in the development of obesity.
A study by Marie-Pierre St-Onge and colleagues from Columbia University, New York, in a paper published in the American Journal of Clinical [...]

The virtual omnipresence of high-fructose corn syrup in our diet has prompted significant angst regarding the role that fructose may play in both general health and in obesity.
Despite many interesting theories on how fructose may or may not be ‘metabolically’ different from sucrose or glucose, whether fructose in and of itself is a major [...]

Continuing my series of past papers on obesity, here is a rather technical paper that we published in METABOLISM back in 2000.
This work was again led by my student Iris Kunz and was done in collaboration with Susanne Klaus at the German Institute of Human Nutrition, Potsdam-Rehbrücke.
The aim of this work was to carefully examine [...]

Given the recent controversy over sugar, one might look to artificial sweeteners for an easy alternative to thorny scientific and ethical questions. But to anyone seeking pastel-packaged reassurance that regulators won’t ever need to pry donuts from their cold, dead and pudgy fingers, science offers only more uncertainty.

Cut the calories–and the crap

This is a guest post by David Veibl. David writes for Well Wisdom. Well Wisdom is a service business with products like organic whey protein developed specifically for individuals in need of help to recover from and to prevent relapse of immune compromised diseases. Whey protein is a great compound that everyone can use for supplementing a [...]

Also, pick a topic for the first post of 2012

Diurnal changes in hormones and metabolism are well known and how these can be influenced by timing and sequencing of external stimuli (e.g. eating, exercise, sleep, etc.) has always been of considerable interest.
A study by Sigal Sofer and colleagues from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, published in OBESITY, suggests that eating most of your [...]

 People who suffer with acne and other skin problems could benefit from a low sugar or sugar free diet. This can be a challenge to begin if you already consume lots of hidden sugars that appear so abundantly in packaged and pre-prepared foods. Refined…

Hundreds of animal studies show that restricting caloric intake (while avoiding malnutrition) can expend the lifespan – often by periods, which translated into humans, would amount to an impressive number of years.
How does this work and can any of these findings be relevant to promote healthy aging in humans?
This is the topic of an article [...]

An unusually sophisticated analysis of cave lion bones is revealing what the creatures ate and why they may have disappeared.

Glycemic Index (GI) refers to comparable ease with which a given carbohydrate load appears in the circulation – this index varies considerably between various sources of carbohydrate and is a function of the ease with which this carbohydrate is digested into and absorbed (as glucose) into the blood stream.
But how important the GI of foods, [...]

This question appears almost a ‘no-brainer’ and many readers will once again put the very fact that I touch on this topic down to ’sports-bashing’ – but, the ‘uncomfortable truth’ for youth sports enthusiasts is that the answer to this question is far less clear than one would perhaps expect.
Given the rather mixed literature on [...]

I applaud Monica Marier’s commitment and the good intentions of Sesame Street’s producers in drawing trying to draw attention to child hunger in the United States. Certainly, far too many children grow up in bad circumstances in the United States and some of these circumstances relate to food.
All that said, no matter how often Sesame Street, [...]

Image: Bill Lehane via flickr

Walmart stores in southwest China’s Chongqing have been forced to close following allegations that they have been labeling non-organic pork as organic and selling it at a higher price. There’s speculation that the incide…