Hard to swallow: The diet pill scammers
It’s hardly suprising that diet pills bought over the internet, or in fact, bought at all, are only successful in helping you shift pounds of the stirling variety.
Yet people who usually buy these products are desperate and looking for a quick fix, but come on, how can you expect a pill to undo years of delightful gluttony, in a few weeks?
The Daily Mail article exposes this diet scam and the clinics that asre more than happy to take your money and offer you miracle pills, the only miracle being you were stupid enough to part with up to £60 a jar of what sometimes is just repackaged multivitamins.
However the scary part of this article is the rather lax regulations surrounding the diet pill industy, as pointed out by Dr David Haslam, clinical director of the National Obesity Forum
‘I’m sure there are some decent private clinics operating out there,’ he says. ‘But most should be avoided at all costs. Many are simply a front for making huge sums out of selling obsolete or unethical drugs like Ionamin and Phentermine - which cost just a few pounds to produce.
‘In truth those drugs were only re-licensed due to a loophole, so although it’s legal to prescribe them, it’s not ethical. GPs wouldn’t offer them to patients due to the high risk of heart problems.
Double or quits: Second wife will bring you longevity
Acording to the Time of India, a study has discovered the key to a long life is polygamy, after finding that men from cultures that practise polygamy live longer those from monogamous ones
After accounting for socioeconomic differences, men aged over 60 from 140 countries that practice polygamy to varying degrees lived on average 12 per cent longer than men from 49 mostly monogamous nations, says Virpi Lummaa, an ecologist at the University of Sheffield, UK.
Obese children = Neglectful parents?
This is a story i am torn on because i agree that if a child is dangerously obese, and repeated attempts to help the child by working with the parents have failed, then the last resort should be to take the child out of the situation.
The Belfast Telegraph articlesaid that Local Government Association (LGA) warned that social services might have to treat very fat children as victims of “parental neglect” just as malnourished children are and that this abuse could lead to social services being able to remove the child.
But allowing that would lead to a host of other problems surely, one being the fact the child might blame themselves for the situation they find themselves (in a children’s home or with a foster family) and what pyschological damage could that cause?
Also who decides how fat a child need to be before they are removed, do the parents get the child back once they have returned back to a ‘normal weight and what if the child is in fact, not cooperating with their parent’s attempt to help them lose weight?
Related, is the news of Leanne Salt, who became the world’s heaviest mother to triplets, a prize i am sure she fought tooth and nail to win.
Much has been made about the enormous cost to the NHS of helping this woman give birth, a mere £200,000, four times the cost of a normal pregnancy. Being a 40st single parent with triplets, much has been made about of ability of this woman to look after her children, and whether she should have considered that before she had them, though the pregnancy was not planned apparently.
Don’t desert the dessert
Awww a feelgood story at last, nutrition experts are seeking to change US nutrition guidelines to allow for discretionary calories, which are foods that tend to be higher in calories but provide little nutritional value (the tasty stuff like cakes, biscuits, fast good and ice-cream).
However :
People can’t look for treats if they are overweight, because they already have used up their discretionary calories.
I think whilst the idea of discretionary calories might not make it into the revised guidelines, a lot of people practise this in one way or another, especially those on diets who give themselves a day in a week of slimming and being good, to eat tasty treats.
ADHD drug aids weight loss
Research has found that rats given the Elipesy drug Vigabatrin, lost 12-20% of their body weight after 40 days. What also is interesting, is scientists claim they saw no side effects in the rats.
The drug is works by stopping the dopamine, which is said to be the cause of ‘reward seeking behaviours’.
Restaurant to charge children based on their weight – all in the name of good old fashioned fun.
Not much to say on this story apart from that this is clearly an ill thought out gimmick offered by Oulton Hall Hotel. The restaurant bosses are unrepentant, with their spokesman pretty much claiming the ‘PC Brigade’ are responsible for all the fuss and that ‘frankly they should get a life and stop being so miserable.’
Yeah, how dare the PC brigade worry about any possible humilation children may feel from being weighed in a restaurant. For the purposes of fairness, i should point out that the scheme is voluntary, however should the child decline to be weighed, they will be charged at half the price of a adult meal – £11.25.
