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Obese children in America are much less physically active, consume larger quantities of food during school meals, and watch much more TV than their normal-weight schoolmates, researchers from the University of Michigan Medical School revealed in The American Heart Journal. Lifestyle is by far the major driving force behind childhood obesity in the USA, and not heredity, the authors stressed after examining data on check-ups of 1,003 Michigan sixth-graders in a school-based health program.

The obese children in this study tended to eat a school lunch rather than a packed one made at home, and spent a considerable amount of time either playing video games or watching television.

58% of the obese children in the study had watched at least two hours of TV the day before, the authors reported, compared to 41% among the other kids. 34% of non-obese children ate school lunches regularly, compared to 45% of the obese ones. Regular exercise, being a member of a school sports team, and rates of physical activity were considerably lower among the obese pupils.

Researchers at Oregon Health and Science University scanned the brains of nine healthy, normal-weight  subjects in the minutes after each got an infusion of equal volumes of glucose, of fructose and of saline. The brain scans aimed to capture activity in a relatively small swath of the human brain in and around the hypothalamus, which plays a key but complex role in setting appetite levels and directing production of metabolic hormones. The researchers, led by Dr. John Purnell, found that "cortical control areas"--broad swaths of gray matter that surrounded the hypothalamus -- responded quite differently to the infusion of fructose than they did to glucose. Across the limited regions of the brain they scanned, Purnell and his colleagues saw that glucose significantly raised the level of neural activity for about 20 minutes following the infusion. Fructose had the opposite effect, causing activity in the same areas to drop and stay low for 20 minutes after the infusion. Saline--the control condition in this trial--had no effect either way.

Poor eating and activity habits, not genetics, are the underlying causes for most cases of adolescent obesity, new research suggests. The finding stems from an analysis involving more than 1,000 Michigan sixth-grade students who participated in the Project Healthy Schools program, which is in place in 13 middle schools across the state.

The authors noted that, in 1980, just 6.5 percent of U.S. children aged 6 to 11 years were considered obese, but that percentage rose to nearly 20 percent by 2008. The recent study found that 15 percent of the participants were obese. And almost all had poor eating habits. Nearly one-third of all the students said they drank a soda the day before, while fewer than half said they could recall having eaten two portions of fruits and vegetables in the same time frame. And while 34 percent of non-obese kids consumed lunches provided by their school, that figure rose to 45 percent among obese students. Only one-third of all the kids reported exercising a half hour for five days during the previous week. Obese children were much less likely than non-obese kids to participate in regular exercise and/or physical education classes, and less likely to be a part of a sports team. Among obese children, 58 percent reported watching two hours of TV in the past day. That compared with 41 percent of non-obese kids.

I asked Rodney what's so great about meditation, and the first thing he told me was, 'You and I take our thoughts way too seriously.' When you meditate, you learn to notice all these stray thoughts that ping around in your head, and take you out of real life. "We're constantly wrapped up in everything we think. We don't really see what we're seeing. We see what we're thinking about what we're seeing," says Smith.

When you meditate, you learn to watch your thoughts come and go, and you don't have to attach to them. You might learn that you're really stuck on your own need to please people or prove something to yourself. And now we're getting into therapy stuff that basically life isn't doing anything to you, it's all about your reaction. And when you learn to see that, you're lightening yourself up to have a good time on this planet.