Visit the SWLC booth and get an information bag. We’ll see you there!

National Women’s Show
Metro Toronto Convention Centre
South Building, 222 Bremner Blvd
Toronto, ON M5V 2W6

For more information on the National Women’s Show, please visit http://www.nationalwomenshow.com/toronto/index.html.

The Surgical Weight Loss Centre (SWLC) is proud to return as one of the exhibitors at the Weight Wise Expo taking place on October 2nd – 3rd at the Direct Energy Centre in Toronto.

Known as the event of the year for those interested in the latest weight management, nutrition and fitness information, the Weight Wise Expo is an educational and motivational event that SWLC is pleased to be a part of. With various topics from weight loss programs to healthy cooking to fitness assessments, attending the Weight Wise Expo is an ideal place to be. Two of the Biggest Loser’s successful contestants, Alexandra White and Antoine Dove, from Season 8 will be amongst the guest speakers scheduled for the weekend.

Visited by hundreds of guests last year, SWLC will showcase two of its bariatric programs, the Lap-Band and the Gastric Balloon. Recognized as the highest volume Lap-Band clinic in Canada, SWLC has performed over 2, 800 weight loss procedures since 2005.

Join us as SWLC’s own Drs. Chris Cobourn and David Mumford will be keynote speakers at this year’s Weight Wise Expo! Dr. Cobourn is scheduled to speak at 2pm on Saturday, October 2nd while Dr. Mumford will be speaking at 1pm on Sunday, October 3rd. Bring your list of questions and take advantage of the free seminar!

Weight Wise Expo 2010
Exhibition Place – Direct Energy Centre, Hall D
100 Princes’ Boulevard
Toronto, ON M6K 3C3
http://www.weightwiseexpo.ca/about/program-2010

MONDAY, August 16th, 2010 (Science Alert) — Inflammation-causing cells in fat tissue may explain the link between obesity and diabetes, a team of Walter and Eliza Hall Institute researchers has shown.

The discovery, by Professor Len Harrison and Dr John Wentworth from the institute’s Autoimmunity and Transplantation division, opens the way for new anti-inflammatory treatments that prevent insulin resistance (where the body is unable to respond to and use the insulin it produces) and other complications associated with obesity.

“We have shown that insulin resistance in human obesity is closely related to the presence of inflammatory cells in fat tissue, in particular a population of macrophage cells,” Professor Harrison said.

Macrophages, white blood cells derived from the bone marrow, are immune cells that normally respond to infections. In obese people, macrophages move into the fat tissue where they cause inflammation and release cytokines, which are chemical messenger molecules used by immune cells to communicate. Certain cytokines cause cells to become resistant to the effects of the hormone insulin, leading to diabetes and heart disease.

Professor Harrison and Dr Wentworth worked with Mr Gaetano Naselli, Ms Belinda Phipson and Dr Gordon Smyth at the institute as well as Professor Paul O’Brien at Monash University’s Centre for Obesity Research and Education to analyse the fat tissue of more than 100 Victorians who had undergone lapband surgery.

Their findings, published in the journal Diabetes, provide the first evidence in humans that macrophages in the fat tissue are producing cytokines that prevent cells from appropriately responding to the presence of insulin.

“The complications of obesity such as insulin resistance and diabetes, cardiovascular disease associated with hardening of the arteries, and liver problems are the result of inflammation that occurs in the fat tissue,” Professor Harrison said. “These complications could be prevented by developing drugs that target certain cytokines released by the macrophages.

“Encouragingly, our study also showed that when obese people lost weight the macrophages in the fat tissue disappeared, as did the risk of developing insulin resistance and diabetes.”

Diabetes affects more than a million Australians and is a disease in which the body does not produce or properly use insulin, a hormone necessary to convert sugar, starches and other food into the energy needed for daily life.

The research was supported by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, the Victorian Government, Diabetes Australia Research Trust and the Royal Australasian College of Physicians Research and Education Foundation.

Link to Article |http://www.nationalpost.com/Weight+loss+surgery+helps+obese+diabetes+patients+study/3405256/story.html

Written By: Julie Steenhuysen

MONDAY, August 16th, 2010 (Reuters) – Three-fourths of obese diabetics who had weight-loss surgery were able to quit taking diabetes drugs within six months of their operation, U.S. researchers said today, citing a new study.

They said the surgery may eliminate the need for chronic medications to treat the disease and reduce overall healthcare costs, providing a strong argument for insurance companies to pay for the procedures.

Once developed, diabetes and obesity are rarely reversed, Dr. Martin Makary of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and colleagues reported in Archives of Surgery, a medical journal.

“Until a successful non-surgical means for preventing and reversing obesity is developed, bariatric surgery appears to be the only intervention that can result in a sustained reversal of both obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus in most patients receiving it,” they wrote.

Bariatric surgery, or weight loss surgery, has increased by 200 percent during the past five years, as obese people struggled to lose weight and avoid the health complications that accompany the extra pounds — such as diabetes, heart disease, joint pain and some cancers.

There are several ways to do the surgery with the aim of giving the patient the illusion of fullness with small meals.

In one approach, an adjustable band is inserted in a small incision and wrapped around the top of the stomach during the surgery. In another, known as Roux-en-Y, the stomach is closed off near the top, creating a small pouch.

But few studies have looked at how the surgery affected health costs in type 2 diabetics.

Makary and his colleagues analyzed insurance claims data from 2,235 patients who underwent bariatric surgery during a four-year period.

They found that among the diabetic patients who had bariatric surgery, only 25 percent were taking diabetes medication six months later, and that number kept falling.

A year after surgery, fewer than 20 percent of patients were taking diabetes drugs and two years after surgery, only 15 percent were still doing so.

Healthcare costs per diabetic averaged $6,376 per year in the two years before surgery. The median cost of the surgery and hospitalization was $29,959.

Health costs increased in the year after the study by nearly 10 percent, but then fell by 34 percent in the second year after surgery and by 70.5 percent in the third year.

“Because weight loss following bariatric surgery has been observed to be sustained for decades, we believe that the protective effect against complications of diabetes is also likely to be long-term,” the team wrote.

Based on the study, obese patients with diabetes should be told about the risks and benefits of bariatric surgery, and insurance companies should be encouraged to cover weight-loss surgery for appropriate patients, they said.

The National Institutes of Health recommends the surgery for someone with a body mass index of at least 40.

BMI is equal to weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. A person 5 feet 5 inches tall (165 cm) with a BMI of 40 would weigh more than 240 pounds (109 kg).

Both Johnson & Johnson and Allergan Inc make bands for weight-loss surgery.

Link to Article | http://www.ottawacitizen.com/health/Obesity+depression+grants+worth/3330401/story.html

WEDNESDAY, July 28th, 2010 (Ottawa Citizen) – Carleton University researchers have received $1.3 million in funding to continue their investigations in depression and obesity. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) said Monday that it had awarded Alfonso Abizaid more than $543,000 for his investigation into the role that a hormone called ghrelin plays in the struggle with obesity. His current study looks at a link between this hormone and stress-induced obesity. So far, Abizaid has learned that the hormone may generate cravings for food, and other things humans find pleasurable, such as drugs, sex and gambling. Meanwhile, Hymie Anisman, who received $815,514, spearheaded an investigation into how stress and anxiety could lead to depression. His funding will be used to examine the biological process that might be responsible for making animals resilient or vulnerable to stressful situations. Both researchers are members of Carleton’s neuroscience department.

As technology advances in the world so does the Surgical Weight Loss Centre (SWLC) and its services. Located in the heart of Mississauga, with a state of the art advanced surgical facility, SWLC continues to enhance its services by introducing SKYPE as a new method of counseling for its patients, particularly for those living out-of-province. SKYPE is a new form of technology where individuals can speak and view with whom they are speaking to. It is easy to use even for those who are not technologically savvy. With most of SWLC’s patients spanning across Canada, long distance patients can now benefit in audio and visual communication by means of the free online program, SKYPE, with the same professional counseling experience they received before. At this time, SKYPE is only available with SWLC’s dietitian services.

For more information on this service or to schedule an appointment, please contact Margeaux Maniatis at margeaux@swlc.ca.

Written By: Ginia Bellafante

WEDNESDAY, July 28th 2010 (The New York Times)— Earlier this year, the editors of V, a magazine so recherché it can make Vogue seem like Redbook, published an issue featuring large models in expensive body-baring clothes. In one photograph, a woman in a strapless bathing suit, cut to reveal three rolls of flesh, grabs at her platform stilettos. In another, Tara Lynn, a size 16 model, is clad in nothing but a pair of Dior sandals.

Mainstream fashion magazines have always purported to embrace diverse images of the female body, publishing periodic “shape” issues that juxtapose the thin and very thin with the moderately fleshy. But only in the last year or so have notably larger women been released from the fringes, appearing not only in magazines and on television but also in the more rarefied world of the runway, including a Chanel show in St.-Tropez this spring. This shift dates, more or less, to last fall, when Glamour ran a small picture of a 5-foot-11, 180-pound model comfortably exposing her paunch. So unusual was the appearance of belly fat in this context that the magazine received thousands of letters and comments, most of them roaring with support. The model, Lizzie Miller, appeared on the “Today” show and was profiled in The Guardian.

If defenders saw in these photographs a less-restrictive imagining of the female form, detractors perceived further instances of fetishistic extremism. “This is not a positive look at larger women in fashion
but a freak show,”one Internet poster wrote of the V shoot. Another pointed out that glorifying the other end of the weight spectrum did nothing to change fashion’s essentially unhealthful message: “We are taunted daily by skeletal fashion models. . . . However, I defy any of you to idolize these women. Nobody wants to be this fat!”

Size is a subject of considerable controversy in fashion, but it is equally so in American life. What is big? What is too big? What is not big enough? The plus-size woman — to use the marketing-sanctioned term — exists in an increasingly populous and contested ghetto. In recent years the fat-acceptance movement, born in the ’60s, has regained momentum online in what is known as the fatosphere, where much time is spent debunking the supposed benefits of dieting and the dangers of obesity. Fat studies has become its own academic discipline. Theorists investigate, for instance, desk size as a mechanism of education’s “hidden curriculum” and will to social control. But in popular culture any affirmation of corpulence feels decidedly ambivalent. In the series “More to Love,” broadcast on Fox last year, 20 women who weighed up to 279 pounds competed for the affections of an overweight single man: heavy women might be worthy of “The Bachelor”-style indignities but were decidedly unworthy of “Bachelor”-looking bachelors. Similarly, “Huge,” a new ABC Family drama about teenagers’ struggling at a weight-loss camp, casts the pressure to be thin as social bullying while suggesting that it really might be better if the campers stopped gorging on their contraband chocolate.

Perhaps nowhere is the cultural confusion surrounding the larger woman more pronounced than in the clothing industry’s efforts to dress her. According to a 2008 survey conducted by Mintel, a market-research firm, the most frequently worn size in America is a 14. Government statistics show that 64 percent of American women are overweight (the average woman weighs 164.7 pounds). More than one-third are obese. Yet plus-size clothing (typically size 14 and above) represents only 18 percent of total revenue in the women’s clothing industry. The correlation between obesity and low income goes some way toward explaining the discrepancy — the recession was particularly hard on this segment of the market, with sales declining 10 percent between 2008 and 2009, a drop twice that of the women’s apparel industry over all — but it doesn’t explain it entirely. That figure has been fairly constant for the past 20 years.

For more on the article, please visit http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/magazine/01plussize-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&emc=eta1

Link to Article | http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/opinion/article/1115767

Written By: Charles W. Moore

WEDNESDAY, June 30th 2010 (Telegraph Journal) – Some two million Canadians are diabetic, and according to a new report released by the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), that figure will double over the next seven years. ICES projects that by 2017, four million, or nearly one-in-10 Canadians will be afflicted with adult-onset diabetes, adding a huge increased burden of personal suffering, premature death, and further stressing already wobbly health care budgets.

The Type 2 Diabetes Guide says Canada’s highest rates for the disease are in Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick.

Health Canada ranks diabetes officially as the seventh leading cause of mortality, but says the actual number of deaths in which diabetes is a contributing factor would probably be five times higher.

The largest factor causing the diabetes demographic to skyrocket is excess body weight. Roughly one-quarter of Canada’s adult population has body mass indices (BMI) of 30 (the threshold for obesity) or greater. However, while clinically obese individuals have the highest risk of developing diabetes, it’s actually the group categorized as merely overweight (a BMI of 25 to 29.9, into which roughly 35 per cent or nearly nine million Canadians fall) that will account for the greatest increase in new diabetic cases, simply by force of numbers.

Together, the Atlantic Provinces take four of the top five rankings for overweight/obesity. According to U.S. studies, obese people incur 42 per cent greater health care costs annually than healthy-weight individuals.

The ICES study also found that new diabetes cases going forward will appear in relatively younger age groups. Principal investigator Dr. Doug Manuel of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute told CTV News that the most important preventative measure against diabetes is weight control, and that statistically, lowering average wright weight by just 3.3 per cent would prevent 10 per cent of new diabetes cases.

Likelihood of becoming obese is associated almost exclusively with two lifestyle factors: bad diet and insufficient exercise. People who eat fruit and vegetables fewer than three times a day are much more likely to be obese than individuals who consume those foods five or more times a day, and those whose work and/or leisure-time is sedentary are more likely than the physically active to be obese.

A higher proportion of service-related livelihoods as opposed to manufacturing and resource jobs, combined with computers, the Internet, a multi-channel TV universe, home-cinema, game consoles, ATVs and other powered toys, all conspire against maintaining active lifestyles. A recent Canadian Health Measures survey revealed that Canadian adults’ health deteriorated markedly between 1981 and 2009 in areas such as general fitness level, waist circumference, and incidence of high blood pressure.

Either you exercise or you don’t, but diet-wise, it’s more complex.

Getting people to permanently change eating habits is nearly as difficult as convincing them to change religions – maybe more difficult in some cases. Dietary traditions run in families and communities, creating strong cultural, familial, and emotional associations on top of being rooted in acquired taste and appetite.

Unhappily, the diet most North Americans are conditioned to is arguably one of the worst in history – heavy in fatty fast foods, greasy fried foods, high-fat dairy products, processed foods, soft drinks, fries and chips, white bread, pastries and baked goods, margarine, junk-food snacks, sweets and sugary desserts; with few of the vegetables, beans, whole grains, and fruit that are key to any really healthy diet. Sugar, refined flour products, and low-quality fats are the main offenders, with meat an accessory accomplice. Meat (lean bits anyway) is one of the few elements that actually has substantial healthy nutritional value, but fish is a better choice.

Unfortunately, loading foods with fat and sugar is a cheap and easy way to make them taste good – “mouth feel!” It’s tough convincing parents to deny their kids ice cream, sugary-fatty confections, baked foods, chips, hamburgers and hot dogs, cheese, fries, and snack foods, or for that matter to give up these tasty items themselves.

Maritz Research’s “Report Card on Nutrition for school children” gave Atlantic Canada an “F,” finding fewer than half (42 per cent) the region’s six- to 17-year-olds eating the minimum four servings of fruits and vegetables recommended by Canada’s Food Guide, and only 48 per cent the minimum two servings of whole grains and cereals daily.

This region has the highest consumption of french fries in the country. Almost half (49 per cent, compared with 19 per cent in Quebec) of Atlantic Canadians guzzle soft drinks daily. A Harvard School of Public Health study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found subjects drinking one or more sugar-sweetened drinks daily showed 83 per cent increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

Heading off the looming diabetes catastrophe is straightforward in theory. Eat better and get more exercise. It’s the level of sustained discipline required that’s the problem.

To schedule an appointment in advance or to receive more information, please contact a patient coordinator at (905) 278 – 8000 or 1 (888) 278 – 7952 or email at info@swlc.ca.

Link to Article | http://www.weightlosssurgerychannel.com/breaking-wls-news/obesity-weight-gain-increase-diabetes-risk-after-50.html/

Weight Loss Surgery Channel – Gaining weight after age 50 can increase the risk of developing diabetes, a new study suggests.

Researchers from the University of Washington followed a group of more than 4,000 seniors age 65 and older for over 12 years to determine the impact of weight gain and obesity on diabetes risk in the elderly. Of the participants, 339 new cases of diabetes were identified during the follow-up.

The heaviest study participants were two to six times more likely to develop diabetes when compared to participants of a normal weight. The likelihood of diabetes was five times greater for those who were considered obese at age 50 and gained more than 20 pounds prior to entering the study compared to those who were a normal weight and did not gain weight.

“We already knew it was important to maintain an optimal weight to lower diabetes risk, and this study finds that it remains important into old age,” Mary L. Biggs, PhD, of the University of Washington, Seattle, told WebMD.

The study, published in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that the risk of developing diabetes was four times higher for those who had the highest body mass index (BMI) and biggest waist circumference. People who were overweight or obese and older than 75 at the time of the study were twice as likely to develop diabetes.

The findings indicate that weight control, exercise and healthy eating are important at all stages of life to stave off diabetes; however, senior citizens should be careful of dieting because they can lose muscle mass in addition to excess weight.