Free Republic

Army Gen. George W. Casey, Jr., the Army's chief of staff, administers the oath of enlistment to 26 recruits in New York City, April 1, 2009.The military is facing a growing recruiting crisis: 71% of Americans between 17 and 24 can’t meet the minimum criteria for service, which places the burden of service on an ever-small and shrinking pool of troops with a family history of joining the military. At an Oct. 12 Heritage Foundation panel in Washington, D.C., Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican and former Air Force one-star general told attendees “the single most important ingredient to readiness...

Even the kids in America's fittest state are too fat to fight their nation's wars, a pro-military nonprofit argues in a new study. The military has long bemoaned America's tubby youth, and the Council for a Strong America says Colorado is part of the problem, with more than 27 percent of the state's children categorized as overweight. "Low levels of physical activity and the obesity epidemic are contributing to an unprecedented readiness problem for our armed forces," the nonprofit said. Those extra candy bars compound a complex problem for military recruiting. Between other health issues, criminal records and other troubles...

Praise the power of potatoes. This man says he ate only potatoes for a year and lost 110lb as a result. Whoa. We’ll be honest – we were more than a little skeptical when, back in the heady, carb-loving days of 2016, Andrew Flinders Taylor announced the launch of the Spud Fit project, which would see him eating only potatoes for a full year. He originally announced the mission by explaining he wanted to take control of his eating. ‘I wanted to change the way I thought about food so that it’s not really controlling my life,’ Andrew said at...

World's heaviest woman, Eman Abdul Atti, died at Abu Dhabi's Burjeel Hospital today. According to a statement by the management of Burjeel Hospital, Eman at 4:35 am. Her death was due to an intestinal shock with dysfunction of the body organs including kidney failure. The statement added that during her stay at the hospital, Eman has been supervised by a team of more than 20 doctors. They added that her health had been steadily improving since her arrival in the UAE however it took a turn for the worse this morning. Eman had earlier been treated by a doctor in...

Study compiling data from every country finds people are living longer but millions are eating wrong foods for their health. Poor diet is a factor in one in five deaths around the world, according to the most comprehensive study ever carried out on the subject. Millions of people are eating the wrong sorts of food for good health. Eating a diet that is low in whole grains, fruit, nuts and seeds and fish oils and high in salt raises the risk of an early death, according to the huge and ongoing study Global Burden of Disease. The study, based at...

Gabrielle Deydier’s book about being obese has ignited her native France. She tells Stefanie Marsh how her life has been a battle against ‘grossophobia’, discrimination and verbal abuse – until nowIn August 2015, 37-year-old Gabrielle Deydier went for a job interview which she passed with flying colours. The job was for a position as a teaching assistant at a Parisian special needs school and the interview panel, including the school’s headmaster, had been so impressed with Gabrielle that they even told her they were worried in case she left for a better-paid job. There had been only one uncomfortable moment:...

Editor’s Note: I have no idea why Heather Heyer died of a heart attack. It does seem strange though. She isn’t one of the people we see flying through the air in these videos. The mom says she died of a heart attack in an NBC interview: Heather Heyer’s mom said in an NBC interview she died of a heart attackhttps://t.co/23UpWuARQk — Hunter Wallace (@occdissent) September 5, 2017 I found her. https://t.co/Tw81iMAAkb that pic i posted, you can see the antifa doing cpr on her. Read the article. 100% confirmation. — The Cat Is Awake (@thecatisawake) September 5, 2017 Heather...

Americans continue to get fatter and it’s delivering a huge blow to the country, both in higher health care costs and undercutting military recruiting, according to a huge new study. The 14th annual State of Obesity: Better Policies for a Healthier America report from the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation bluntly reported that 70 percent of the nation is obese or overweight. And while the rate of obesity growth is leveling off, the costs aren’t. The report, for example, said additional health care for obese adults and children is $150 billion a year and billions...

While a third of American adults and one in six children are obese, a report Thursday suggests the rate of increase could be stabilizing in some states. Citing statistics collected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the report by the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation said West Virginia had the highest obesity rate at 37.7 percent. Mississippi was second at 37.3 percent and Alabama and Arkansas were tied for third at 35.7 percent. The report says the adult obesity rate increased between 2015 and 2016 in Colorado, Minnesota, Washington and West Virginia,...

An Arizona State University professor was distressed to discover in a recent study that her female peers do not desire "the stigma of extreme weight gain.” Professor Breanne Fahs, a self-described “fat woman,” recently published an article in the Women’s Studies International Forum in which she declared that “the fear of fatness is far more extreme, exaggerated, and terrible than the lived realities of living in a fat body.”

A handful of walnuts may be an effective weight loss tool. Walnuts are rich in omega-3 fatty acids and other substances and, in moderation, have been linked to reduced risk of obesity and diabetes. They may also efficiently reduce appetite. Researchers now may have found out why. They had nine hospitalized obese patients drink, on five consecutive days, either a smoothie containing 48 grams of walnuts (1.7 ounces, or about 14 walnut halves and 315 calories) or a placebo smoothie identical in taste and calorie content. Then, after a month on their regular diet, the patients returned for a second...

You may want to rethink having that bowl of corn flakes for breakfast. New research by experts at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles show that cereal is making people obese. Published in the journal of Nature Communications, the paper states that chemical ingredients commonly used in breakfast cereals are having distressing effects on our bodies. Looking at the effects of three different chemicals commonly ingested or exposed to humans, they found that each one was damaging the hormones needed to communicate between our brains and our stomach. When all three were combined, the damage was worse. One of the...

Just when you thought all the possible microaggression scenarios humanly possible had been called out, more pop up. The latest offensives to avoid come courtesy of The New School, a private university in New York City. It has published an extensive list of “microinsults,” “microassaults” and “microinvalidations” to avoid, including ones specific to academia, like this one: “Seats in the classroom / auditorium / office are too small for many people.” Additional “academic setting” micros on The New School’s list include “food sold in the cafeteria does not include options for those with limited food budgets,” “being called ‘overly sensitive’...

Princeton University is offering a course this fall that will “examine the changing history, aesthetics, politics, and meanings of fatness” through dance and performance art. "FAT: The F-Word and the Public Body" is a 300-level course cross-listed under the Dance, American Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies programs, and will be taught by Professor Judith Hamera.

Oregon State University will offer a spring course on “fat studies” in order to teach students how “weight-based oppression” is a “social justice issue.” According to a syllabus for the course obtained by Campus Reform, students will examine “body weight, shape, and size as an area of human difference subject to privilege and discrimination that intersects with other systems of oppression based on gender, race, class, age, sexual orientation, and ability.”

A new documentary urging people to ditch animal food products and start eating vegan is 'irresponsible' and 'misleading', according to a leading nutritionist. What The Health, which debuted on Netflix in March, tells viewers that the is one healthy way to eat involving cutting out all animal products from our diet. The documentary, a huge success on the streaming site, says that meat, fish, poultry and dairy are making us fat, giving us cancer, and poisoning us with toxins. Directors Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn said their aim was to help Americans make healthier food choices. But New York City...

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans there was a brief moment of shocked compassion before racial anxieties flooded the Internet. Victims of the disaster were quickly recast as looters, criminals, and layabouts. They were government “dependents” seeking even more entitlements now that they were bona fide survivors. Some of these hideous opinions drew on the physical “evidence” of the bad character of hurricane survivors: their size. The mostly black bodies crowding the Superdome, getting on rafts, and being carried away by helicopters, were too large for online critics. Obesity, while common in the US and over-represented in the South, was...

There is a national tragedy sweeping across America, and it promptly needs to come to an end. For some inexplicable reason, American entertainment outlets think male consumers are entertained by “plus-sized” models. They’re not. Trust me when I say that there’s a reason men read the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit magazine, and it has nothing to do with the seemingly unending supply of bigger models. Naturally, I’m not suggesting that obese women are bad people. Obviously that’s not the case, and it’d be a lazy critique of my argument to even attempt to boil it down to that. My point is...

Life threatening obesity has become a worldwide epidemic, with 711 million overweight around the globe led by French fry loving Americans. A detailed report in the latest New England Journal of Medicine is winning alarmed attention in Washington because it finds that American children and adults are leading the obesity parade. "The highest level of age-standardized childhood obesity was observed in the United States, 12.7 percent," said the report. 1 in 5 adults in the OECD area is obese. How does your country compare? Read more in our #Obesity Update 2017 https://t.co/zej2FMV8J7 (PDF) pic.twitter.com/ofq2MwRjJO— OECD (@OECD) July 25, 2017 "The...

RUSH: Here is that sound bite from Susan Collins. She was caught on an open mic. This is following a Senate Appropriations Committee meeting yesterday. She was caught on a hot mic talking with Senator Jack Reed (Democrat-Rhode Island) about Congressman Blake Farenthold, who is a Republican from Texas. COLLINS: (muttering) Did you see the one who challenged me to a duel? REED: I know. Trust me, do you know why he challenged you to a duel? ‘Cause you could beat the s–t (bleep) out of him, trust me. COLLINS: (cackling) REED: (cackling) (muttering crosstalk) COLLILNS: That fat guy. He’s...