Girls moving through adolescence may experience unhealthy levels of weight gain, but the reasons for this are not always clear. In fact, many potential causes of weight gain are easily overlooked.

Matt Damon's wife Luciana may be pregnant, but it's his apparent extra weight gain that's making all the headlines in Hollywood.

An analysis of 12 recent studies indicate that there is virtually no link between the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and weight gain in children and teens. The meta-analysis is published in the June issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Gaining body fat may be a good thing, at least for people with type 1 diabetes, say researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Their study, being presented at the 68th Scientific Sessions of the American Diabetes Association in San Francisco, followed 655 patients with type 1 diabetes for 20 years and found that patients who gained weight over time were less likely to die.

Small changes in schools lead to big results when it comes to preventing childhood obesity, according to a study published in the April issue of Pediatrics. The school-based intervention, which reduced the incidence of overweight by 50 percent, offers a potential means of preventing childhood weight gain and obesity on a large scale.

Discrimination against overweight people—particularly women—is as common as racial discrimination, according to a study by the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University.

Two cell proteins that relax the gut and help accommodate a big meal have been identified by UCL (University College London) scientists. The proteins could offer a future drug target against weight gain, by preventing the stomach from expanding.

According to Rena Wing, professor of psychiatry and human behavior at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and director of the Weight Control & Diabetes Research Center at The Miriam Hospital, people who are most successful in preventing weight gain, and dieters who lose weight and keep the pounds off, have made major changes in their in diet and exercise routines.

Want to lose weight" It might help to pour that diet soda down the drain. Researchers have laboratory evidence that the widespread use of no-calorie sweeteners may actually make it harder for people to control their intake and body weight.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have found new clues to why some people overeat and gain weight while others don't.

Researchers saying women who want to lose the extra weight gained in pregnancy should try to get more sleep. They found that mothers who slept five hours or less a day when their babies were six months old were three times more likely than more rested mothers to have kept on the extra weight at one year.

University of Cincinnati (UC) pathologists have identified a new molecular target that one day may help scientists develop drugs to reduce fat transport to adipocytes (fat cells) in the body and prevent obesity and related disorders, like diabetes.