Obesity Medicine

Facts about overweight and obesity Some recent WHO global estimates follow. In 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults aged 18 years and older were overweight. Of these over 650 million adults were obese. In 2016, 39% of adults aged 18 years and over (39% of men and 40% of women) were overweight. Overall, about 13% of the world’s adult population (11% of men and 15% of women) were obese in 2016. The worldwide prevalence of obesity nearly tripled between 1975 and 2016. In 2019, an estimated 38.2 million children under the age of 5 years were overweight or obese. Once considered a high-income country problem, overweight and obesity are now on the rise in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in urban settings. In Africa, the number of overweight children under 5 has increased by nearly 24% percent since 2000. Almost half of the children under 5 who were overweight or obese in 2019 lived in Asia. Over 340 million children and adolescents aged 5-19 were overweight or obese in 2016. The...

  Eating milk chocolate every day may sound like a recipe for weight gain, but a new study of postmenopausal women has found that eating a concentrated amount of chocolate during a narrow window of time in the morning may help the body burn fat and decrease blood sugar levels. To find out about the effects of eating milk chocolate at different times of day, researchers from the Brigham collaborated with investigators at the University of Murcia in Spain. Together, they conducted a randomized, controlled, cross-over trial of 19 postmenopausal women who consumed either 100g of chocolate in the morning (within one hour after waking time) or at night (within one hour before bedtime). They compared weight gain and many other measures to no chocolate intake. Researchers report that among the women studied: Morning or nighttime chocolate intake did not lead to weight gain; Eating chocolate in the morning or in the evening can influence hunger and appetite, microbiota composition, sleep an...

   Liza Makowski, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Medicine and the UTHSC Center for Cancer Research, has long been interested in how the immune system is altered by obesity and how this impacts cancer risk and treatment. "Obesity is complex, because it can cause both inflammation and activate counter-inflammation pathways leading to immunosuppression," Dr. Makowski said. "How obesity impacts cancer treatments is understudied." Obese patients with breast cancer often have worse outcomes than non-obese patients. However, exciting developments are being made in other cancers that may also hold promise for treating breast cancer. In studies of a new type of immunotherapy drug, called a checkpoint inhibitor, obese patients appear to respond better, compared with their leaner counterparts in some cancers, such as melanoma, ovarian, certain lung, and kidney cancers. It is not clear if this finding is also true for breast cancer patients. Dr. Makowski teamed up with J...