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Minnesota's childhood obesity problem is a threat to national security, a group of retired military generals said Thursday in St. Paul. Mission: Readiness, a national nonprofit group of more than 500 retired senior military leaders, says one-third of young Americans are too overweight for military service. In Minnesota, it said, 69 percent are unqualified for duty for a variety of reasons, including obesity, asthma, criminal histories and the location of their tattoos. In a report called "Too Fat, Frail and Out-of-Breath to Fight," the group highlighted three ways to address physical fitness in America's youth: -- More community paths for...

America is fat and getting fatter. Today 140 million American adults are overweight or obese. Their bodies carry 4 billion pounds of excess fat, the result of eating 14 trillion excess calories. Numbers of this size belong in the domain of economists, not physicians. And therein lies the solution. Medical and public health attempts to control obesity should continue, but it is time to add marketplace approaches. The first step is realizing that, nationally, weight gain is not a medical problem, it's a pollution problem.

America's largest foodmaker and its biggest cigarette company for years have likened themselves to distant siblings, giants that just happened to be owned by the same parent company. In fact, Kraft Foods Inc. and Philip Morris USA have pooled expertise in search of making more-alluring foods and cigarettes since the dawn of their corporate pairing two decades ago, a Tribune examination of tobacco-lawsuit documents has found. Documents show Northfield-based Kraft collaborated on flavor issues with some of the same Philip Morris brain researchers who probed what gives cigarettes their kick. None of those scientists was more controversial than Frank Gullotta,...

There has been no hesitation in the historical record to refer to industries producing armaments as "war profiteers". Generally, that label had been reserved for industries or individuals that benefit from the inevitable shortages of necessities consequential to a protracted and destructive conflict. The implication is that branded industries and individuals have an interest in promoting war for gain and opposing efforts for peaceful resolution. Liberals have given us a new breed of war profiteers as well as retaining some of the old. In the best tradition of the New York World and the New York Morning Journal, it was...

<p>NEW YORK — You eat a lot of cheeseburgers at fast-food restaurants and you get fat.</p> <p>But whose fault is that?</p> <p>Lawyers for two obese teenagers in New York say McDonald's is to blame, and they're taking Ronald to court.</p>

<p>The Atkins low-carb, high-fat diet is supposed to be simple, but it's raising complex medical and nutrition questions. Now two new studies show that those who follow the diet can lose significant amounts of weight, but other research is raising concerns about the safety of the program, linking it to an increased risk of kidney stones and bone loss.</p>

It's tough to be the Minister of Health. It's not like being Minister of Justice, where you actually get to make laws. The provinces run health care, and also pay for it, and consequently the Minister of Health has nothing much to do. So Anne McLellan needed a crusade. And she has found one. It is fat. And the enemy is us. "One of the the things that shocked me when I saw the statistics was that we are a nation, or becoming a nation, of obese people," she declared. Actually, you don't need to see the statistics. All you...