'Obesity Gene' Linked to Runaway Appetite

Minnesota rep slams breastfeeding campaign

(NEWSER) - Just a few days after Andrew Breitbart ran a cartoon basically calling her fat , Michelle Obama and her anti-obesity campaign came under attack again, this time from Michele Bachmann. The Minnesota congresswoman and Tea Party favorite ripped Obama's push to advocate breastfeeding as part of the fight against childhood obesity, Politico reports. "To think that government has to go out and buy my breast pump for my babies? You wanna talk about the nanny state, I think you just got a new definition,” Bachmann said yesterday on Laura Ingraham's radio show . More»

Choice is great—but we're making the wrong ones, writes Cathy Young

(NEWSER) - As Michelle Obama and Congress champion efforts to fight childhood obesity, the right, led by Sarah Palin and Fox News, is angrily firing back. While some of their concerns are fair—that healthy-eating messaging can escalate into “propaganda,” for example—others suggest “a reality check is in order,” writes Cathy Young at RealClearPolitics . "For the right, 'my body, my choice' means not only that the government shouldn't be able to ban your favorite junk food or ship you off to a fat-farm gulag, but that you should be able to gorge yourself into obesity without having to endure societal disapproval or lectures from do-gooders." But the anti-obesity campaign is about “persuasion,” not “coercion.” More»

Child-care centers do far better at restricting boob tube time

(NEWSER) - Children in home-based daycare watch far more TV than kids in formal child-care centers, with preschoolers averaging as much as 3.4 hours a day. The numbers in a new survey haven't changed much from stats recorded in previous years, which the researchers say they find "disconcerting, given the intervening publication of the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines regarding television use for young children." More»

Nursing infant outside norms for age; 'absurd,' cry parents

(NEWSER) - A Colorado couple is baffled that their baby has been denied health insurance coverage because of a preexisting condition: obesity. “I could understand if we could control what he's eating,” says the boy’s father. “But he's 4 months old. He's breast-feeding. We can't put him on the Atkins diet.” An insurance company exec understands the consternation but tells the Denver Post there’s nothing he can do. “Everybody else in the industry does it.” More»

(AP) - A striking new study says almost 1 in 5 American 4-year-olds is obese, and the rate is alarmingly higher among American Indian children, with nearly a third of them obese. Researchers were surprised to see differences by race at so early an age. Obesity is more common in Hispanic and black youngsters, too, but the disparity is most startling in American Indians, whose rate is almost double that of whites. More»