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Obesity is an epidemic. Over a billion people worldwide are overweight or obese. So naturally weight-loss drugs are big business. New research reveals that though over $1.2 billion was spent on obesity drugs worldwide in 2005, pills do not help people lose a significant amount of weight. BBC News reports that a team from the University of Alberta Canada culled "evidence from thirty placebo-controlled trials, involving nearly 20,000 people, where adults took one of three anti-obesity drugs — orlistat, sibutramine or rimonabant — for a year or longer." They found that pills like orlistat reduce weight by less than 5%. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence recommends stopping the use of anti-obesity drugs if 5% of total body weight is not lost after three months. In other words, the Institute cannot justify using pills to lose weight. More »
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Are you sitting down? Are you ready to believe that everything you know is wrong? Because in the new issue of New York magazine, Gary Taubes writes that exercise does not make us thinner. The article is extremely long, but luckily, in the Wall Street Journal today, Bob Cwiklik breaks it down. Taubes admits that working out is great for your health, but, "the one thing that might be said about exercise with certainty is that it tends to makes us hungry." He suggests that what really determines how fat or lean a person is has more to do with the body's own internal programming. Taubes also questions the idea that exercise makes us feel better about ourselves, writing, "This may be purely a cultural phenomenon. It's hard to imagine that the French, for instance, would improve their self-esteem by spending more time at the gym." More »
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