• A government study of nursery schools in 29 British councils found that some were offering children inadequate amounts of food because of pressure from parents.
  
• Some parents wanted their children to eliminate red meat, whole milk, and desserts, and yet the very young children cannot yet obtain adequate nutrition from fruits and vegetables alone.

If you want your teens to exercise, you need to get out there with them and show how it's done.

"Parents have an incredible, powerful ability to model behavior," says Daniel Kirschenbaum, a professor at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago and clinical director of Wellspring, which provides treatment services for overweight youths and adults at several U.S. locations. ...

Kirschenbaum suggests buying an inexpensive pedometer for each member of the family.

“Get one for everybody and have steps become a part of the language of the family,” he says. He recommends that families work toward 10,000 steps a day, about 5 miles, which he says is double what most adults walk in a day.

"You start to look forward to ways to get steps. You park farther away" when shopping, for instance, says Kirschenbaum. "Studies show just getting a pedometer and wearing it regularly increases activity."

• Dr. Kristin Hairston and her colleagues studied 332 African-American and 775 Hispanic-American adults over the age of 18 years old. The researchers asked about their subjects' sleep, diet, exercise, and other lifestyle habits, and then followed up with them five years later.

• Study participants who slept five hours or less a night had a greater accumulation of abdominal fat, and the same was true for those who slept five hours or less.
  

• People who got less than average sleep had a 32 percent gain in visceral fat and those who slept eight or more hours a night gained 22 percent.

• Study subjects who slept six or seven hours a night, which is the average, averaged a 13 percent gain.
  

• Researchers at Queens University studied the diets of 489 people ages 12 to 15.
• The researchers followed up with their subjects 10 years later, when the subjects were ages 20 to 25.
• For every 1 percent increase in sugar consumed as a teenager, the researchers found a 2 percent increase in insulin resistance as an adult.

• Dr. Paul Kenny and his colleagues allowed one group of rats to eat as much bacon, sausage, cheese cake, frosting, and other high calorie foods as they wanted.
  
• These rats quickly became obese, but the researchers also found that they developed a tolerance to the pleasure they got from food.
  
• Like drug addicts, they had to keep eating more to experience the same pleasures.
  
• Overeating caused levels of dopamine receptors in their brains to drop, a phenomenon associated with drug addiction and obesity.

• Roland Sturm and his colleagues analyzed data from 7,300 fifth graders who were surveyed in 2004 about their height, weight, and soda consumption.
  
• Some children lived in states that had special taxes on soda that amounted to four to seven cents on the dollar.
  
• These taxes had a small effect on a few children, mostly those whose families earn less than $25,000 a year.
  
• However, Sturm calculated that the tax would have to be more like 18 to 20 cents on the dollar to make a significant difference on consumption.

"Researchers noticed that mice with an altered immune system were fatter than regular mice, and had a collection of disorders – high blood pressure, and cholesterol and insulin problems – called metabolic syndrome, often a precursor of heart disease and diabetes." [The Associated Press]

• Dr. Diana Fernandez and her colleagues studied almost 3,000 employees in a large factory in New York, and found that the ones that were working in the most high job strain conditions were heavier than those who worked in more passive areas.
  
• About one third of the people in the study were overweight and another 35 percent were obese, which mirrors the American population in general.
  
• If a person went home and watched more than two hours of television, they were more likely to be obese. Watching four or more hours of TV a day increased the risk of obesity by 150 percent.
  
• Eating a diet high in fruits and vegetables did not protect against being overweight, although those who managed to exercise were better able to cope with stress and maintain their weight.

• Researchers from the University of Tampere asked parents of five-year-olds and 11-year-olds to fill out questionnaires about the weight class of their children.
  
• A majority of the parents of five-year-olds and half the parents of 11-year-old misclassified their overweight children as normal.
  
• Very few parents of normal weight children believed their children were overweight.

• Merrie Rebecca Walters, RN and Julie Smith Taylor, PhD, RNC, WHNP-BC, the article's authors, reviewed data to determine the potential consequences of maternal obesity.
  
• The researchers found that obese women are more likely to have an infant with a neural tube defect, a heart defect, or multiple problems, than women who are within the normal weight range.
  
• In addition, obese women are more likely that normal-weight women to experience pregnancy complications such as gestational diabetes, hypertension, preeclampsia, labor induction, cesarean delivery, and postpartum hemorrhage.

• Obesity among pregnant women is linked to childhood obesity in infants.
  
• A mother's obesity during pregnancy more than doubles the risk that the child will be obese at two to four years of age.
  
• These children are also at greater risk for obesity in adolescence and adulthood.
  

The next time you’re tempted to purchase a Happy Meal for your child, think about these photos. Food is SUPPOSED to decompose, go bad and smell foul…eventually. ...

Food is broken down into it's essential nutrients in our bodies and turned into fuel. Our children grow strong bodies, when they eat real food. Flies ignore a Happy Meal and microbes don't decompose it, then your child's body can't properly metabolize it either. Now you know why it’s called "junk food."

I think ants, mice and flies are smarter than people, because they weren't fooled. They never touched the Happy Meal. Children shouldn’t either.

• Dr. E. Elizabeth Jackson and her colleagues studied 1,300 sixth graders, asking them to report what they had eaten in one day.
  
• Among those who bought lunch at their school's cafeteria, 39 percent were obese -- compared to 24 percent of the children who bought their lunches from home.
  
• The children who bought lunch at school were more likely to consume sugared drinks and to eat fewer vegetables and fruits.

• Professor Bart Hoebel and his colleagues gave laboratory rats drinks sweetened with either corn syrup or table sugar (sucrose).
• The researchers found that that corn syrup group gained more weight, especially belly fat.
  
• In a second experiment, rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained 48 percent more weight and developed metabolic syndrome, although those on a normal diet did not.

• Researchers asked 414 children ages five to ten years old to look at pictures of three figures that varied only by size.
  
• The children tended to attribute positive qualities, such as athletic and artistic ability, to average weight and thin figures, and negative qualities to overweight children.
  
• All the children were asked to make a list of three children to invite to a party, and three that should not be invited.
  
• The popular children were more likely to have average or thin builds.

Sugar contains "empty calories" -- it has no nutritious benefit whatsoever. Diets that include too many calories cause children to become overweight. Too much sugar can also cause tooth decay and diabetes.

Milk and fruit juices, though nutritious in many ways, contain high levels of sugar. Soda typically contains 10 teaspoons of sugar in an 8-ounce can ... So limit your children's consumption of beverages that have a high sugar content.