News & Events: Obesity

UCSF News reports on new USDA dietary guidelines that were validated by a research team at UCSF Just in time for flailing New Year resolutions, the U.S. Department of Agriculture have served up new dietary guidelines, including one of the biggest changes in recent years: For the first time, they've placed a clear limit of no more than 10 percent of daily calories from added dietary sugars. The USDA guidelines, which are updated every five years based on the latest advances in nutritional science, specifically refer to sweetened foods such as sodas or candy, not naturally-occurring sugars [...]

Jennifer Kaplan, M.D., a research resident in the UCSF General Surgery Residency Program, won the John Halverson Young Investigator Award at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery held in conjunction with "ObesityWeek", for the abstract and presentation: "The Benefit and Cost Effectiveness of Laparoscopic Gastric Bypass Stems Largely From Resolution of Metabolic Disease, Not Just Weight Loss", co-authored by Dr. Kaplan and UCSF faculty in the Departments of Surgery and Medicine.   The Haverson award is given for "demonstrated excellence in [...]

The New York Times, reporting on a study by Johns Hopkins researchers, reports on the attittude of some doctors toward overweight patients: Are doctors nicer to patients who aren't fat? A provocative new study suggests that they are — that thin patients are treated with more warmth and empathy than those who are overweight or obese. For the study, published in the medical journal Obesity, researchers at Johns Hopkins obtained permission to record discussions between 39 primary care doctors and more than 200 patients who had high blood pressure. Although patients were there to talk about [...]

In a recent UCTV presentation, Jonathan Carter, M.D., Associate Professor of Surgery, discusses why Americans are increasingly obese and the medical and surgical approaches to treatment.

UCSF News reports on the "TOGA" study led by Stanley Rogers, MD, FACS, Associate Clinical Professor of Surgery and Co-Director of the UCSF Bariatric Surgery Center, and John Cello, MD, Professor of Medicine and Surgery, and Medical Director of Bariatric Surgery Center.  The investigational procedure, transoral gastroplasty, or "TOGA" for short, is being tested in a clinical trial. UCSF is one of nine U.S. trial sites. Drs. Rogers and Cello are principal investigators on the study. A team of specialists at UCSF Medical Center has treated its first patients as part of a multi-center clinical [...]

UCSF News reports on the relationship between obesity and the development of kidney failure: Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have determined that there is a strong relationship between being obese and developing end-stage renal disease, or kidney failure. The long-range study found that the obese have up to a seven times greater risk of kidney failure than normal weight people, suggesting that obesity should be considered a risk factor for the condition, and that kidney failure is yet another consequence of obesity. "There are more and more people with kidney [...]