Genetics news | Genetics news

When you think about aging, you think that all that stuff is coming.

It doesn't have to.

I can ski better than I could 15 years ago.

A summer ago, I did a 100-mile bike ride with a pal in the Colorado Rockies.Lodge: If someone who is sedentary really commits to exercising six days a week, he would be something like 10 or 15 years younger in the functional respect within a year.How much exercise?

Crowley: Steady, remorseless exercise.

You've got to do strength training; you've got to do aerobics.

Six days a week, 45 minutes a day.

If you have to start out at 20 or 30 minutes, fine and dandy, but you really should get to 45 minutes and stay there for the rest of your life.Lodge: Your other choice is to grow old.

A patient of mine came to see me before he retired - 100 pounds overweight, blood pressure and cholesterol way up, apathetic and depressed.

He looked like hell.

I'd talked to him for years about exercise, and he just said, no.

Well, he finally heard the message.Crowley: You told him he was going to die, Harry.Lodge: I said something like that, and he went down to Florida, and he started walking on the beach.

The first day, he went for a quarter-mile, and the next day he couldn't get out of bed.

A year later, he was walking five miles a day on the beach and looked like a million bucks.Why weight training?

Crowley: You get more bo...

Michael Strober, a clinical psychologist at UCLA and editor of the International Journal of Eating Disorders, said conventional wisdom is that genetic factors do play a role in susceptibility.

This latest study, published in the March issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, further confirms previous research, Strober said.

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It took decades with tobacco, asbestos and other substances now known to cause cancer, and met strong industry opposition.

It would be especially tough for a disease as complex as obesity.Diet is hard to study.

Most people drink at least some sweetened beverages and also get calories from other drinks like milk and orange juice, diluting the strength of any observations about excess weight from pop alone.Here is the "food police" indictment of pop and its sugar-sweetened co-conspirators.

You be the judge:1 Guilt by association.Soft drink consumption rose more than 60 percent among adults and more than doubled in kids from 1977-97.

The prevalence of obesity roughly doubled in that time.Scientists say these parallel trends are one criterion for proving cause-and-effect.Many studies link sugary drink consumption with weight gain or obesity.One by Dr.

David Ludwig, a Harvard pediatrician who wants a "fat tax" on fast food and drinks, looked at 548 Massachusetts schoolchildren and found that for each additional sweet drink consumed per day, the odds of obesity increased 60 percent.2 Physical evidence.Biologically,...