fat

Plentiful fat seems more reviled than revered in today's society, even when it has uses for the medical and cosmetic industries. But today police announced the arrest of a Peruvian gang accused of murdering people and selling their fat to the cosmetics industry, according to The Associated Press.

While mastectomies save many women from breast cancer, they often leave the subject feeling depressed, unattractive and ashamed. Some women opt for breast implants in an attempt to regain their lost positive body image, but an Australian doctor has now developed a device that allows women to regrow their lost breast using their own tissue.

In a development sure to give Eric Cartman some conflicted feelings, a pair of studies have found that cells taken from freckles or fat cells produce stem cells faster, and with a higher success rate, than more commonly used skin cells.

Currently, scientists create stem cells from regular skin tissue, in a lengthy and inefficient process. Only one in 10,000 skin cells succeeds in transforming into a pluripotent stem cell, and it takes a month for that transformation to occur. Both the fat cell and the freckle cell experiment improve on those numbers.

It takes researchers years, sometimes decades, to pin down subtle, important findings about your health, but it takes bumbling journalists (or their editors) just a few seconds to screw it all up. Here, a selection of the most misleading headlines, and a few tips to help you spot the hype early.

We all know the deal: Fat is evil, right? Buy low-fat, no-fat, fake-fat--anything that keeps you far, far away from the (other) F word. But recent research has some people saying fat's gotten the short end of the stick. Researchers at UC Irvine are rising to fat's defense in a new study that says fat could trigger long-term memory foundation.

We’ve all heard the news: We’re getting fat. Americans are inactive, McDonald’s-eating smokers with diabetes, right? That’s certainly a generalization, but you know what they say. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Tons of research dollars have been poured into studying this historic obesity epidemic. While some may imagine that obesity begins once a child is tall enough to reach the top shelf where mom and dad keep the cookies, a new study points to an even earlier age that jump starts obesity: infancy.

OBESITY IN AMERICA

State Lines

Obesity, defined as a body-mass index (BMI) of 30 or higher, is not equally distributed across the U.S. Check out this map to find out which state is the fattest (hint: it's the namesake of mud pie), which is the thinnest (think Coors Light), and which spends the most money on obesity-related health care (its governor pumps iron).

Read on, after the break, for more of America's (and the world's) fat facts.

Obesity is our century's version of the Kennedy assassination: Everybody's got a theory. But even with blame perpetually shifting -- one day it's fast-food corporations, the next it's genetics -- and a $40-billion-a-year diet industry, our waistlines just won't stop expanding.

As magic little pills go, the weight-loss drug rimonabant was destined to be huge. It was supposed to put a dent in the obesity epidemic and help people quit smoking and improve their cholesterol along the way. Pharmaceutical execs expected it to usher in a new class of drugs bigger than cholesterol-controlling statins, like Lipitor, Pfizer’s $1-billion-a-month blockbuster.

With all due respect to Snackwells, not all chocolate cookies taste the same. The human tongue, the stomach and the soul can tell the difference between a fat-free and a fat-filled snack. Sadly, so can the human waistline. But what if instead of eating less fatty food that taste so dang yummy, your body just absorbed less of the freaking fat? That’s the claim being made by Satisfit, a nutritional additive being developed not for a 3 am infomercial, but by the food and nutrition department of Dow. Hungry for more?