So before the fat police could throw her in pudgy purgatory, Miki Yabe, 39, a manager at a major transportation corporation, went on a crash diet last month. In the week before her company’s annual health check-up, Yabe ate 21 consecutive meals of vegetable soup and hit the gym for 30 minutes a day of running and swimming.

“It’s scary,” said Yabe, who is 5 feet 3 inches and 133 pounds. “I gained 2 kilos [4.5 pounds] this year.”

In Japan, already the slimmest industrialized nation, people are fighting fat to ward off dreaded metabolic syndrome and comply with a government-imposed waistline standard. Metabolic syndrome, known here simply as “metabo,” is a combination of health risks, including stomach flab, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, that can lead to cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Concerned about rising rates of both in a graying nation, Japanese lawmakers last year set a maximum waistline size for anyone age 40 and older: 85 centimeters (33.5 inches) for men and 90 centimeters (35.4 inches) for women.

In the United States, the Senate and House health care reform bills have included the so-called “Safeway Amendment,” which would offer reductions in insurance premiums to people who lead fitter lives. The experience of the Japanese offers lessons in how complicated it is to legislate good health.

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(CNN) — A dating site that markets itself as an elite community for beautiful people with a “strict ban on ugly people” has axed about 5,000 members for packing on the pounds during the holiday season.

The international site BeautifulPeople.com threw out members after they posted photos “revealing that they have let themselves go,” according to a company statement.

“As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld,” said Robert Hintze, founder of BeautifulPeople.com. “Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.”

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There’s a new diet trend which claims dizzyingly high success rates, promises painless life-long commitment and allows dieters to eat anything they want.

Faith-based diets take the principles of Christianity and apply them to our overwhelming craving for chocolate, chips and cheese.

Advocates say dieters learn to fill the spiritual hole inside themselves with something more powerful than saturated fats.

The basic principle common to the U.S. programmes Christian Weigh Down and Thin Within (‘Helps you grow in faith while shrinking your waistline’), and the British equivalent Fit For Life Forever, is that dieters need to identify the deeper reasons why they over-eat, before they can hope to lose weight and keep it off permanently.

The trend began in America in the Eighties, but it’s finally taking hold here, with Christian weight-loss groups springing up, and dramatically increased sales of ’spiritual dieting’ books such as What Would Jesus Eat?, Hallelujah Diet and The God Diet.

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Kidney donors may face huge medical bills because having one kidney may constitute a pre-existing condition under which coverage is denied, officials confirm.

A Texas hospital official said organ donors are told, but only orally, that having one kidney may be a pre-existing condition affecting insurance.

Philip Knisely, 53, of Austin, Texas, who donated a kidney to a co-worker a year ago, has received more than $18,000 in related medical bills, and said he was not informed that if he ever lost his employment-related insurance, insurers might consider his having a single kidney an uninsurable pre-existing condition, the American-Stateman reported Sunday.

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Hoagland had refinanced his Nashville home to pay off the $25,000 tab for his weeklong diabetes-related stay at Southern Hills Medical Center. The new mortgage left Hoagland out of medical debt but afraid to get sick again. Unfortunately, he did. In 2004, Hoagland was in a health insurance waiting period on a new job when a cold turned into two days at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. This time, the bill was just over $1,200.

When a collection attorney working for Vanderbilt filed suit in 2005, Hoagland was afraid to take time off from work to show up in court. After a series of hearings, attempts to collect the debt and what Hoagland says were genuine efforts to pay it, an attorney working for Vanderbilt asked a judge to issue what’s known as a body attachment.

One Friday in late 2008, a sheriff’s deputy went to Hoagland’s home. Because he was at work, Hoagland was allowed to turn himself in the following Monday.

“They fingerprinted me, took my picture and asked some questions about my medical history,” he said. “When the guy who tested (my blood sugar) asked me why I was there and I told him … he said, ‘I didn’t know we did that in this country.’ I told him, ‘Until now, I didn’t either.’ - Read the whole article

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A 107-year-old Malaysian woman says she is ready to marry for the 23rd time because she fears her current drug addict husband might leave her for a younger woman, a report said Monday.

Wook Kundor made headlines four years ago when she married Muhammad Noor Che Musa, a man 70 years her junior in northern Terengganu state, with pictures of the couple’s wedding splashed across regional newspapers.

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TEENAGE lotto winner Callie Rogers today confesses how instant riches plunged her into a crazy drug hell - as she blew an astonishing £250,000 on COCAINE.

With only £20,000 left from her £1.9 million jackpot she reveals she is battling to overcome the nightmare dark depression that has plagued her since her win aged just 16.

“I was spending a fortune on cocaine, a nasty evil drug which tears your life apart. I’ll be honest, about £¼ million of my win has been wasted on it. Most of it wasn’t for me, it was for my ex Nicky Lawson who was addicted to it.

“I started taking coke within weeks of winning the Lottery and pretty soon I was hooked. It made me forget about all the problems in my life and at the start made me feel like everything was OK.

“But that didn’t last long and soon drugs made me fall into a deep, dark place. Somewhere which made me feel I didn’t want to live any more.

“I honestly just felt so low I thought in death I’d find a safer happier place.”

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The stimulus package is living up to its provocative name by funding a bacchanalia of behavioral sex research, a Post analysis reveals. The next fiscal year is set to be one of the friskiest ever in the nation’s science labs, as researchers probe the ins and outs of sex patterns among humans and even some of our four-legged friends. Among the most titillating grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health are studies that would:

Examine “barriers to correct condom use” at Indiana University, at a cost of $221,000.

Study “hookups” among adolescents at Syracuse University. Study’s cost: $219,000.

Evaluate “drug use as a sex enhancer” in an analysis of “high-risk community sex networks” at the University of Illinois, Chicago. That study will cost $123,000.

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Children should not be given the anti-viral drug Tamiflu for swine flu because its harms outweigh any benefits, Oxford researchers have said. They called on the Department of Health to have an urgent rethink of its current policy in the swine flu pandemic. Their study found that Tamiflu caused vomiting in some children, which can lead to dehydration and complications.
[...]
Dr Carl Henegan, a GP and expert from the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, said the current policy of giving Tamiflu for mild illness was an “inappropriate strategy”. He added: “The downside of the harms outweigh the one-day reduction in symptomatic benefits.”

The study comes little over a week after other research found that children given Tamiflu preventatively reported side-effects including nausea and nightmares.

Researchers analysed four studies involving children aged one to 12 taking Tamiflu or another anti-viral, Relenza.

The children were being treated for normal seasonal flu but the experts behind the research said their findings would extend to the current swine flu pandemic.

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