As doctors and researchers grapple with the U.S.'s runaway rates of obesity, they have begun to look for causes of it in a critical if little understood period of life: the nine months before birth. Research has found that women who gain too much weight in pregnancy have heavier babies — and that heavier babies are more prone to obesity later on. Until now, researchers had not been able to rule out the role of genes. If heavier ...

Maybe this is how the obesity epidemic ends: by giving chefs TV shows. Because people on TV don't like looking fat. And perhaps when chefs start to worry about their own weight, they'll start to worry about their customers'.

Obesity and smoking may be the most conspicuous causes of illness in this country, but physical factors don't account for everything. Your psychology — namely, your personality and outlook on life — can be just as important to your well-being as exercising and eating right. And especially these days, with the world's economy tumbling toward a depression, it's a good time to prevent yourself from slipping into one too. An entire science has grown up around the perils of negative ...

Obesity — or fatness, as it used to be called — is the touchiest of topics. From Michelle Obama to Anthony Bourdain, when you talk about America's weight, you talk at your own risk. And a lot of chefs, restaurant chains and food manufacturers face the same quandary. Our feelings are mixed-up at best. Fatness is a thing to be loathed and a condition to be accepted; a medical contagion but also a lifestyle choice; a condition ...

Dr. Vincent Felitti, founder of Kaiser Permanente's Department of Preventive Medicine and director of its obesity-treatment program, was seeing some good results. His patients were losing 50, 80, even hundreds of pounds. He might have considered the program a success, if not for the fact that the participants who were doing the best — those who were both the most obese and losing the most weight — kept dropping out. Felitti was baffled. Why, invariably, did so many ...

Some families, alas, are fatter than others. But for dieters continually at war with their genes, there's good news in a study published in this week's PLoS Medicine: they can burn off 40% of their genetic predisposition to obesity by exercising. Led by Dr. Ruth Loos from the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit in Cambridge, U.K., the study evaluated more than 20,000 Britons aged 39 to 79, asking about their exercise habits and surveying their genes. Researchers focused ...

It's not easy watching your own history repeat itself. At first, Jo--a 49-year-old mother of two from Georgia--thought she would be spared having to witness her children relive her long struggle with obesity. Indeed, when Jo's second child Renee was born 12 weeks early, weighing just 2 lb. 11 oz. , obesity was the last thing on Jo's mind. Today, things are different. Now 11 years old, Renee weighs 126 lb. and stands 4 ft. 5 in. ...

It's not easy watching your own history repeat itself. At first, Jo--a 49-year-old mother of two from Georgia--thought she would be spared having to witness her children relive her long struggle with obesity. Indeed, when Jo's second child Renee was born 12 weeks early, weighing just 2 lb. 11 oz. , obesity was the last thing on Jo's mind. Today, things are different. Now 11 years old, Renee weighs 126 lb. and stands 4 ft. 5 in. ...

Ana Idolo may be too young to order her own food, but the 2-year-old knows what she wants. As her father Marco unpacks the Happy Meal he ordered for her at a Barcelona McDonald's, she ignores the chicken nuggets and French fries, and instead holds out her hand in eager anticipation for the best part of the meal: a small plastic statue of the Star Wars character Yoda. "Sometimes I think we just buy these for the toys," says ...

Meet "network man." He has basic desires of his own, but has many arbitrary preferences, such as in music or clothes, that have been influenced by the people he knows. Network man's likes and dislikes, in turn, affect the behavior of his friends, and their friends, and their friends. For example, when he gets into an obscure indie rock band, he shares an album with his friend, who likes it so much that he recommends it to his cousin, who ...