A unique partnership focusing on curbing childhood obesity has been selected to demonstrate its success to attendees at the annual meeting of the National Association of Counties (NACo) today in Nashville. The Nashville Collaborative, an innovative partnership between the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt and Metro’s Parks & Recreation Department develops and tests innovative, family-based, community-centered programs to reduce pediatric obesity.

Crack open the latest medical textbook to the chapter on type 2, or adult-onset, diabetes, and you'll be hard pressed to find the term "immunology" anywhere. This is because metabolic conditions and immunologic conditions are, with a few exceptions, distant cousins.

Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have identified women who are likely to gain weight while using depot medroxyprogesterone acetate, more commonly known as Depo-Provera or the birth control shot. These findings dispel the myth that all women who use DMPA will gain weight and will help physicians to counsel patients appropriately.

Researchers have identified a potential biological mechanism that could explain why oral contraceptives may be less effective at preventing pregnancy in obese women, as some epidemiological studies have indicated.

Obesity, among other factors, is strongly associated with an increased risk of rapid cartilage loss, according to a study published in the August issue of Radiology.

The relationships between children and their parent of the same gender in the earliest years of life could be the key to understanding why some young people become obese and others do not, new research conducted by the EarlyBird Diabetes Study has shown.

A flavonoid derived from citrus fruit has shown tremendous promise for preventing weight gain and other signs of metabolic syndrome which can lead to Type 2 Diabetes and increased risk of cardiovascular disease. The study, led by Murray Huff of the Robarts Research Institute at The University of Western Ontario looked at a flavonoid (plant-based bioactive molecule) called naringenin. The findings are published online in the journal Diabetes.

Americans are continuing to get fat with around 80 million people out of a population of 306 million now classed as obese, a new study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention said. Obesity, particularly child obesity is becoming a major health issue in America, but more an more people are being conscious of weight loss and healthy lifestyle.

The world-wide explosion of overweight people has been called an epidemic. The inflammatory nature of obesity is widely recognized. Could it really be an epidemic involving an infectious agent? In this climate of concern over the increasing prevalence of overweight conditions in our society, investigators have focused on the possible role of oral bacteria as a potential direct contributor to obesity.

We Americans are getting fatter, for the most part. In fact, today's annual obesity rankings, outside of fairly healthy Colorado, there's lots of bad news. The new report from the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation shows that obesity rates among adults rose in 23 states over the past year and didn't decline anywhere.

Obesity is probably the most important factor in the development of insulin resistance, but science's understanding of the chain of events is still spotty. Now, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have filled in the gap and identified the missing link between the two. Their findings, to be published in the June 21, 2009 advance online edition of the journal Nature, explain how obesity sets the stage for diabetes and why thin people can become insulin-resistant.

I came across a book by Mireille Guiliano French Women Don't Get Fat. This is indeed a very interesting and intriguing title, but it did not surprise me. Last November I spent a week in France and I think I know why the French women don't get fat. They eat well and healthy. They eat less and walk a lot. They use red wine.