People from the South aren't the fattest – they're just more honest

Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released maps of American obesity that pegged the country's Southern states as the fattest at Fat Camp USA. Now, a study out of the University of Alabama at Birmingham is taking the CDC to task. Southerners aren't the fattest, the study concludes, they're just…

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FINALLY: Obesity rates among America's impoverished children are…

Some not-so-surprising facts and figures on fat and figures: Americans are fat. According to data released earlier this year by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, America is the fattest country in the developed world; and tragically, it's kids who bear much of obesity's burden.

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Are antibiotics making your kids obese?

The science of studying the human gut microbiome is still in its early days — but research into this area is beginning to reveal some pretty startling things. Take two recent studies published in Nature and the International Journal of Obesity, both of which indicate that the use of antibiotics in young children could …

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"Fat maps" show where the obesity epidemic has hit the United States…

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have released new data on weight gain among people living in the United States. What they discovered, as you can see in the map above, is that people in many regions of the country are more than 30 percent over their ideal BMI, or body mass index. BMIs are used to measure the…

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Vitamin D could cure your depression — but also make you miserable

Vitamin D could be a miracle worker, when it comes to treating some of the most common ailments that afflict Americans, such as depression and diabetes. But it could also cause some serious problems, if you get too much of it.

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Food porn is making you fat

One of the great pleasures of the internet — and quite possibly the entire reason for Pinterest's existence — is to look at gloriously shot pictures of decadent foodstuffs. After all, just looking won't make you fat, right? Unfortunately, it seems as though simply by looking at those amazing food pictures, you're…

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Doctors say fat people can live as long as thin ones

A study published earlier this year suggests that fat people can be as healthy as thin people. A group of medical doctors tracked the weights and habits of 12,000 people over several years. They found that the people who are most at risk of dying young are those who are obese but do not engage in any "healthy activities" …

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Extra gene keeps mice cancer-free and permanently skinny

The gene PTEN is a tumor suppressor, making it one of the best genes to have in the fight against cancer. But the latest research suggests that preventing cancer is just the beginning of all the amazing things this gene can do.

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Starving orangutans may explain why humans evolved to become obese

They're not as closely related to us as chimps and gorillas, but we share something crucial with orangutans: we both evolved to survive long periods without decent food. And that shared past could help explain our modern obesity epidemic.

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