Free Republic

Universal’s Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey has bedeviled many big and tall riders who discover at the last moment that their journey aboard the new attraction is indeed forbidden because they don’t fit in the “enchanted benches.” The uncomfortable scene is a familiar one to anybody who has ever visited a theme park: The overweight rider becomes increasingly embarrassed as the ride attendant pushes and shoves with all his might on the over-the-shoulder restraint that stubbornly refuses to click closed. Everybody waiting in line knows what comes next: the walk of shame. “The walk of shame is an embarrassing...

The University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health was a lot less healthy this week. In celebration of “International No Diet Day,” the school of public health, together with the University of Minnesota’s School of Social Work and its College of Food and Agriculture, invited Virgie Tovar, a self-proclaimed “fat activist,” to instruct America’s future nutritionists, dietitians and social workers on the finer points of “fat oppression.”

Just a few months ago, Mexico looked like the poster country for soda tax advocates.“One of the world’s highest soda taxes appears to be working. After just one year, purchases of sugary drinks in Mexico are down 12 percent, a new study shows,” crowed the Bloomberg editorial board in January. “Public health authorities hailed the findings as the first hard evidence that a nationwide tax could spur behavioral changes that might help to chip away at high obesity rates,” reported The New York Times.But now new data shows a different outcome.While Mexico’s roughly 10 percent tax (or 1 peso per...

An impressive array of brainpower —“Fat? Blame your genes, say doctors” —“Overweight? Maybe you really can blame your genes” —“Blame your genes for obesity” Headlines such as these have become a staple of science and health journalism. Are they right? Are obese people really helpless victims of their genes? Let us begin by distinguishing between “monogenic” obesity and what scientists call “common” obesity. Monogenic obesity, as the name implies, is caused by a mutation in a single gene, which is inherited in a Mendelian fashion, just as conditions such as sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis are. In the case of...

It’s been more than six years since Michelle Obama kicked off her “Let’s Move!” initiative to fight against childhood obesity, and children are as overweight as ever before. That’s according to a new study published Tuesday in the journal Obesity. A team led by Duke University scientist Asheley Skinner studied data from the CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and found that the percentage of overweight and obese children between 2 and 19 years old has increased across the board since 1999. That comes as bad news for the Obama administration, which has sought to force children to...

When I was a kid, the milkman came right to our back door. He brought us bright glass bottles of rich whole milk and thick sweet cream. We drank a lot of milk. Nobody had heard of skim. On weekends my dad cooked up breakfasts of eggs fried in butter, piles of bacon, delicious German sausages. For dinner, we had big chunks of fatty meat every night. That was in the 1950s. Nobody was fat, except for one lone girl at school who everybody picked on. Most kids ate like horses and were skinny as rakes. Then the experts came...

The obesity crisis sweeping Britain is now so acute that dozens of shops are selling XXXXXXXXL size clothes. A huge 8XL T-shirt would fit an incredible 80in chest and 80in waist – the equivalent of almost seven feet in circumference. Demand for supersize clothes has increased so much in recent years that one in ten items now sold in plus size stores is 8XL

'I began with small steps, I didn't actually change the way I ate until fairly far into my fitness journey.'I guess you could say I hit a plateau - so I started to change the way I ate.'I watched my portions and ate more fruits and veggies, less packaged food more whole food.'She reached 115lb then hired a coach to help to weight train to sculpt her figure and entered her first fitness competition in 2014.She admitted being nervous the first time she stepped on stage but praised her coaches who helped prepare her.'I truly enjoyed the process. I was...

The past 40 years have seen an unprecedented increase in the number of obese adults worldwide, climbing to about 640 million from 105 million in 1975. If the current trend continues, about one-fifth of adults will be obese by 2025. The rate has more than doubled for women and tripled for men, according to a new analysis published in the Lancet. Under the present trajectory, the chance of meeting a goal set by the World Health Organization to halt the increase over the next decade is, according to the study, “virtually zero.” Behind the global spike is greater access to...

Navy Petty Officer Lentoyi White, 26, feared she’d be dismissed from the service after twice failing the Navy’s body composition assessment (BCA), which measures body fat percentage. But in January, the Navy loosened its body fat restrictions for both men and women, giving White and thousands of other sailors another chance to stay in the Navy. “I am very grateful for a second chance with this new policy,” said White, a single mother with a 5-year-old daughter. White has gone from 212 pounds to 188 and is optimistic she’ll pass this spring under the new standards. Under the Navy’s previous...

The Navy is giving another chance to thousands of sailors who otherwise would be kicked out for repeatedly failing their physical fitness tests because they exceeded body fat limits. The service branch loosened its body fat restrictions in January and is allowing those who failed their exams three or more times to get one more opportunity to be tested this spring under the more lenient guidelines. The Navy said it has been losing too many talented sailors. Some were resorting to liposuction, diet pills and other measures to save their careers. The Navy allowed about 2,400 sailors who passed a...

A small-town Alabama high school cheerleading coach was arrested on Tuesday on charges that she had a sexual relationship with a male student. The teacher is Katherine Nelson, reports The Birmingham News. Nelson, 29, is an English teacher at Brookwood High School in Brookwood, Ala. (pop: 1,828), just east of Tuscaloosa. She also coaches cheerleading and golf, and directs musical theater. The charge against the married teacher is engaging in a sex act with a student under the age of 19 (while also a school employee). Investigators say the sex occurred back during the 2012-2013 school year. The age of...

DALLAS (AP) -- A letter from the Supreme Court's doctor says Antonin Scalia suffered from coronary artery disease, obesity and diabetes, among other ailments that probably contributed to the justice's sudden death. Presidio County District Attorney Rod Ponton cited the letter Tuesday, when he told The Associated Press there was nothing suspicious about the Feb. 13 death of the 79-year-old jurist. He said the long list of health problems made an autopsy unnecessary.

Airbus has created a new seating plan that could help airlines deal with the growing number of obese passengers. A patent for a “Re-Configurable Passenger Bench Seat” has been submitted by the aircraft manufacturer that would see planes able to accommodate all shapes and sizes with adjustable chairs and seatbelts, writes the Daily Record . Worldwide obesity has nearly doubled since 1980, and, according to the National Obesity Forum, one in four Brits can now be considered obese. The obesity crisis has been a hot topic in the flight industry, with some smaller airlines charging passengers by their weight and...

It was 2013 and I was road tripping out in the American south west. I was lucky enough to get a car with Sirius satellite radio which meant even in the most remote locales of the country I was able to listen to pretty much whatever I wanted. So there I was, in Canyonlands National Park, far far away from the only civilization in Moab, when a hilarious comedian by the name of Amy Schumer came on the air. She was funny. She was hilarious. She made my trip all that much enjoyable. And I took a note in my...

For this year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, beauty isn’t measured by pounds or kilograms; it’s defined by Ashley Graham. The model just made history, becoming the first-ever size-16 body activist model to grace the cover of the magazine. And she almost started her celebration with a wardrobe malfunction.

Good news for some in the high-BMI crowd: A new study from UCLA finds that some 54 million Americans who are labeled as obese or overweight according to their body mass index are, when you take a closer look, actually healthy. The findings, published in the International Journal of Obesity, reveal that employers could potentially saddle people with unfairly high health insurance costs based on a deeply flawed measure of actual health. ... Body mass index is calculated by dividing a person's weight in kilograms by the square of the person's height in meters. According to the Centers for Disease...

The use of Body Mass Index to assess a person's health has led to millions of people incorrectly being labeled overweight or obese, researchers claim. The measurement has been used by doctors for more than 150 years, but has come under increasing criticism for being a flawed marker of health. [...] Now, however, Californian researchers claim their research will be will be 'the final nail in the coffin for BMI'. [...] This revealed almost half of Americans who are labeled 'overweight' by virtue of their BMIs (47.4 percent, or 34.4 million people) are healthy, as are 19.8 million who are...

California has given us three new truths about government. One, the higher that taxes rise, the worst state services become. Two, the worse a natural disaster hits, the more the state contributes to its havoc. And three, the more existential the problem, the more the state ignores it. California somehow has managed to have the fourth-highest gas taxes in the nation, yet its roads are rated 44th among the 50 states. Nearly 70 percent of California roads are considered to be in poor or mediocre condition by the state Senate. In response, the state Legislature naturally wants to raise gas...

Having solved all other problems plaguing our society, New York Times opinion author (and food journalist) Mark Bittman has his eye on the big prize. Taking a page from Michael Bloomberg’s big government playbook, Mark is looking for a new way stop people from drinking soda. Since efforts to ban sales of any sort fell flat in the courts (pun intended) the author is looking for more of a generational change, and the way to do that is to stop kids from getting in the habit of drinking the sugary beverages at an early age. How do we do that?...