Word: weights
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...lose 100 pounds or more - they want to look the way they looked in high school. But doctors usually have more modest goals, tempered by their patients' experience - and by concerns about health over vanity. By a doctor's standard, even a 5% to 10% reduction in body weight can make a big difference to a patient's health. On that level, at least, there's little doubt anti-obesity medications can help. The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) paper, a comprehensive review of 30 controlled trials on anti-obesity drugs, showed unambiguously that orlistat (Xenical), sibutramine (Meridia...
...reasons are many. A course of medication can be expensive - hundreds of dollars a year. Drugs also have side effects. Orlistat prompts weight loss by limiting the body's ability to absorb fat, but that can result in oily feces and sometimes incontinence. Sibutramine can raise blood pressure and lead to nausea and insomnia. Rimonabant is associated with an increased risk of psychiatric disorders like depression and anxiety. Still, Padwal says, "I think the main problem is the disappointment." For a lot of patients, the meager results of the medication don't justify their cost and unpleasantness...
...obesity epidemic, meanwhile, is swelling quickly. The World Health Organization estimates that a billion people worldwide are overweight, and 300 million are obese; more than a third of U.S. adults are now obese. So, why is it so hard to lose weight? "It looks very simple: People need to eat less and exercise more," Padwal says. "But if you drill down it's more complicated." Telling a single mother who works full-time that she should take a brisk walk in the inner city after work each day is not the most practical advice - she's unlikely...
...people who are very overweight or obese, Padwal says, virtually the only intervention that consistently gives impressive results is radical surgery, like gastric bypass. To curb the obesity epidemic, he says, patients need good old-fashioned commitment: They have to follow through with their weight-loss plan long-term, monitoring and adjusting it year after year. But, for now, he still prescribes anti-obesity drugs...
Learning your planets used to be a lot easier. There were only nine of them, and they all circled our own sun. With Pluto kicked out of the club for failing to make weight, the local census has dwindled even further. But the sun we know is hardly the only one around, and elsewhere in the cosmos, planets are popping up everywhere...