Welcome to “FitnessMantra Weekend”, your once-a-week health news update. As always you can also stay updated with the latest in fitness news by subscribing separately to the Fitness Mantra del.icio.us feed.

When an article begins with …

“If you’ve ever found yourself not just wanting but needing a gooey slice of pizza, you know what it’s like to crave food.”

… you just know you want need to read it! Take a bite out of your cravings describes the irresistible urge that certain foods present to us and the complex chemical reactions that decide how we deal with these urges.

Did you know that Food Cravings …

• need not indicate a nutritional deficit? (people with enough sodium in their regular diets could still crave salty foods)
• activate three regions of the brain: the hippocampus, insula and caudate, three areas also reported to be involved in drug cravings?
• could simply be hormonal as indicated in a study on college-aged women?

For more, simply read the article and understand your food cravings.

Here are the week’s top health and fitness stories:

1. Middle class fuelling child obesity: Middle-class mothers who work are more likely to have obese children than mothers with poorer families, according to alarming new research published this week.
2. Private gym for teens aims to address obesity: Welcome to Overtime Fitness Inc., one of the nation’s only private gyms for teens.
3. Curry Spice Chemical Could Curb Alzheimer’s: A chemical found in curry (turmeric) may help the immune system clear away brain plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease, a new study suggests.
4. Intensive Vegetable-Fruit Diet Shows No Effect on Breast Cancer Return: Hopes that a diet low in fat and chock-full of fruit and vegetables might prevent the return of breast cancer have been dashed by a seven-year experiment in more than 3,000 women.
5. Fast food brands hit kids online: Fast food brands are getting around laws banning the promotion of unhealthy snacks online, research suggests.
6. 75 percent of Americans overweight by 2015: If people keep gaining weight at the current rate, fat will be the norm by 2015, with 75 percent of U.S. adults overweight and 41 percent obese, U.S. researchers predicted on Wednesday.
7. Hummus in the school cafeteria?: The dynamo treat? Single-serve portions of hummus and it may be coming to a school cafeteria near you.
8. Healthy weight link to longevity: Keeping a healthy weight may help people live longer by limiting brain exposure to insulin, say US scientists.
9. No love handles now? Just wait: How do you feel about gaining 10 to 20 pounds? Researchers say most Americans probably will within the next 10 years if they continue their current exercise and eating habits.
10. Take a bite out of your cravings: If you’ve ever found yourself not just wanting but needing a gooey slice of pizza, you know what it’s like to crave food.
11. Health: ‘Good Carbs’ Yield Newfound Benefits: Researchers are now linking bad carbs, said to rate high on the ‘glycemic index’, with health problems as dissimilar as acne and eye diseases.
12. Weight Training for Heart Disease: It’s no longer a no-no. Moderate weight training offers big benefits to people with heart disease, the American Heart Association says.
13. Hunger ‘links asthma and obesity’: Researchers say they may have worked out why the obese are more prone to asthma than those of normal weight.

Get the best health and fitness stories of the week in your RSS inbox.

Have a great weekend!

Technorati Tags: health, fitness, health news, fitness news, health links, fitness links, del.icio.us

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I was just wondering what the U.S. Government would do if it were entrusted with the task of ensuring its citizens were healthy and fit. I am sure one of the first orders of business would be to print out posters similar to this one!

While it will soon become clear that the poster alone will not do the trick, I am positive the next ‘logical’ step might work: Additional taxation on unhealthy eaters! According to a report in BBC News, Fat taxes ‘could save thousands’, Oxford researchers are suggesting that more than 3000 deaths attributed to heart-disease and stroke could be prevented each year simply by slapping on additional taxes on pre-determined unhealthy foods - a so-called “fat-tax”.

The proposed raise in taxes was not arbitrary and, in fact, was done pretty scientifically. For example, researchers even took into account what foods consumers would turn to if their primary “unhealthy-food” became expensive because of the fat-tax:

They first applied the tax only to dairy products containing high levels of saturated fats - such as butter and cheese, as well as baked goods and puddings.

However, their analysis found that people would simply switch over to other unhealthy foods such as those containing high levels of salt, perhaps even increasing the risk of stroke and heart disease.

Finally, the scientists used a scoring system for foods called SSCg3d score (PDF) which is based on 8 nutrients in 100g of the food. Then the range of foods was tweaked until a good balance was reached between unhealthy foods and their alternates that people might turn to. Once this range of foods was taxed, research showed a most dramatic decrease of almost 3200 deaths.

Of course scientists argue that the results are mostly theoretical and many more considerations will have to be made before this can be implemented. Also, when the topic of fat-taxes was raised earlier in the U.K. it was dismissed by then Prime Minister Tony Blair because it was too suggestive of a “nanny state” where the government interfered with the lives of its citizens.

I am all for small governments and lower taxes. Infact, in many cases, I would rather the government let pure market dynamics and forces dictate the outcome. For example, if there are two competitors selling bottled water and one sells a gallon for $5 and the other for $25, it doesn’t take a genius to realize what will happen soon: if the two products are reasonably similar in nature, the $25 seller will be out of business before you can say “H 2 O”! - a classic example of market forces dictating outcomes.

But I am not so sure if “fat-taxes” would mean the country was turning into a nanny state. After all, the increase in taxes on cigarettes is a fine example of a method that has worked in reducing smoking.

What is your take on this? Should the government impose “fat-taxes” on unhealthy foods? Comment away!

Technorati Tags: health, nutrition, junk-food, fat-tax

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