obesity

The anti-obesity group Global Energy Balance Network "announced this week that it was shutting down after months of pressure from public health authorities who said that the group’s mission was to play down the link between soft drinks and obesity," said the New York Times.

A report by a select committee of lawmakers in Britain backs a 20-percent tax on sugary drinks as "an essential part of a wider package of measures to tackle childhood obesity," reports the Guardian.

After winning a referendum in Berkeley in 2014 to institute a soda tax, "public health advocates ... are plotting to bring voter referendums and legislation to tax soda in as many as a dozen U.S. cities in 2016," writes Politico's Helena Evich, who says it's part of a strategy to reduce obesity and chronic diet-related disease.

The USDA's National Institute of Food and Agricultural Research awarded grants of $1 million each to the University of Tennessee and Utah State University for research on nutrition education and obesity prevention for poor children and families.

The splashy false-advertising lawsuit filed against corn refiners by the sugar industry was settled out of court under confidential terms. The settlement was announced with the trial under way in federal court in Los Angeles.

In an editorial, the Washington Post advocates a national tax on sugar as the best way to discourage consumption and improve the general health of Americans. Some 16 percent of the calories consumed by Americans daily comes from sugar added to foods during processing, says the Post.

More than one-third of adult Americans - 36 percent - are obese and so are 17 percent of youth, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a "Data Brief," the agency says there was no significant change in rates over the past couple of years after a steep climb in the early 2000s. Obesity is associated with chronic disease such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

British Prime Minister David Cameron ruled out a sugar tax, with a spokesman saying there are "more effective ways" of dealing with childhood obesity, reports Sky News. Cameron’s decision came just as Public Health England (PHE) - "the government's own advisers," said Sky - recommended a sugar tax of 10-20 percent, restrictions on advertising high-sugar foods and drinks, limits on supermarket promotion of the sugary products, and calling on foodmakers to reduce the amount of added sugar.

Lawmakers in Mexico are ready to soften the groundbreaking one-peso-per-liter soda tax that took effect at the beginning of 2014 and is credited with reducing consumption of sugary drinks, says the Guardian. The finance commission in the lower house of Mexico's Congress approved a tax of one-half peso on low-calorie beverages as an incentive to drink companies to offer lower-calorie options.

Children and teenagers get an average 12.4 percent of their daily calories from fast food, said the National Center for Health Statistics, a part of the CDC.

Political reporters from newspapers in Chico and Sacramento, California, and Reno, Nevada, collaborated on a list of “10 issues that the presidential candidates absolutely need to discuss but probably won’t.” The “F-word” -- as in food -- comes in at number four.

The world's largest producer of sugary beverages "is backing a new 'science-based' solution to the obesity crisis" - exercise more and worry less about calories - says the New York Times.

A study by U-Arkansas researchers says a program that provides free fresh fruit and vegetable snacks to school children reduced obesity rates by 3 percentage points among elementary school pupils.

"After decades of worsening diets and sharp increases in obesity, Americans' eating habits have begun changing for the better," says the New York Times.

Mexicans reduced their purchases of sugary beverages by 6 percent following implementation of a one-peso-per-liter tax on sugar-sweetened beverages such as soda, according to a study by the Mexican National Institute of Public Health and the University of North Carolina.

Rice, one of the world's staple foods, feeds hundreds of millions of people daily. It's also high in starch, "which turns to sugar, and often thereafter body fat," says the Washington Post.