SEC Finally Says Companies Can Communicate Via Social Media

DailyDirt: Creative Ways To Eat Less

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fri, Apr 5th 2013 5:00pm — Michael Ho

A pretty concerning statistic for Americans is that 17% of kids in the US are obese. The solutions to reduce that figure range from getting kids to eat better school lunches to eliminating various kinds of advertising aimed at getting kids to equate food with fun. There are a few other crazy ideas to keep people from getting fat, without trying to eat less or exercise more. Here are just a sampling of such suggestions.

There's a chance that the bacteria in our intestines have some influence on obesity. From a preliminary study, morbidly obese people were found to have different bacterial communities in their intestines, but it's not clear if the different flora are a cause (or a result) of obesity. If there is a causal relationship, maybe there will be an effective treatment that involves cultivating different intestinal microbes. [url]
"The Parasite Diet" isn't a new idea. At the turn of the 20th century, some people used tapeworms to lose weight (before modern medicine convinced people this was a very bad idea). But genetically modified tapeworms that are benign to people could be a reality someday. [url]
Freakonomics has yet another podcast on obesity called "100 Ways to Fight Obesity" that covers some interesting proposals to prevent overweight adults and children. Some suggestions, such as smelling a vial of vomit to curb an appetite, are not so pleasant -- and not really guaranteed to work that well, either. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: bacteria, diets, eating, flora, food, obesity, tapeworm

2 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Anonymous Coward, 5 Apr 2013 @ 5:59pm

symbiotic parasites for people... great idea.
Maybe instead of liposuction, there's some kind of fat-eating parasite we can let loose under people's skin, too.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
StupidPeopleSurroundMe, 5 Apr 2013 @ 11:43pm

Stupid people do stupid things
How about people just start eating healthy and realize your body needs to burn off calories instead of thinking eating man made, modified foods like the lazy ones do.

Paleo diet, and just some basic exercise depending on your daily life will do wonders.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]