Monday, September 10th, 2012
Stephan: The other day I had to go in to the little hospital we have on the island -- 25 beds -- for an echocardiogram, a kind of sonogram for the heart. While I was lying on the gurney I noticed the treadmill they use for stress tests. On the machine there was pasted a little sign that read, 'Not for use with patients over 350 pounds.' I asked the technician if that was a problem, 'do you have a lot of patients over 350?'
'Three or four a week,' she replied, adding, 'but that's nothing. At the place where I used to work in Tennessee, a bigger hospital, we had that many a day sometimes. Finally we had to to order a special machine to be made that went up to 1,000 pounds. They didn't have to make it special though as it turned out,' she said, as she was taking the electrodes off my chest. 'They already had them in stock, because the call for them was that large.'
A significant part of the population, particularly in the South, where morbid obesity is much higher than it is in the Northwest, are literally killing themselves with food -- both the wrong kind, and in quantities too great.
Fatty foods may damage the region of the brain responsible for regulating a person’s appetite, which could account for why overweight people often find it difficult to stick to a diet, scientists said.
A study has found that a diet rich in saturated fats leads to the sort of damage to the brain’s hypothalamus that would normally be seen during ischaemic stroke, when the nerves are starved of oxygen.
The hypothalamus is a key region of the brain involved in controlling appetite so the findings suggests that saturated fats may be having a direct affect on the ability of the body to stick to a diet, said Lynda Williams of the Rowett Institute for Nutrition and Health at Aberdeen University.
‘The hypothalamus is a small area at the base of the brain containing neurones that control the amount of food we eat and the energy we expend. However, this control breaks down in obesity – the system appears not to work – and we don’t really know why this happens,
