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Holder to oil fraud panel: Report if gas prices don't fall Washington (CNN) -- Attorney General Eric Holder on Friday ordered the newly formed government working group investigating oil and gas prices to make sure gasoline prices are dropping after this week's sudden decline in crude oil prices. Holder sent his memo to several federal agencies, including the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the departments of Treasury, Energy and Agriculture. He also sent the directive to state attorneys general.

"Clerks" director Kevin Smith has lost 65 pounds after an embarrassing incident where he was deemed too heavy to fly last year. In an interview with Joy Behar on her "HLN" show last Tuesday, Smith shared that the moment made him angry and spurred him to lose weight. He said: "I felt at that moment, I was like, 'You know what? I'll lose the weight, but I'm not putting on thinner clothes.' Because why? I'm still the same person I was when I was 65 lbs. heavier.” He added that the incident made him a more forceful advocate for...

At 285 pounds and 5 feet 7 inches, I may not be the tallest, but I am almost always one of the biggest passengers on a plane. That’s “one of”: as anyone with even the most tangential relationship with news headlines over the last several years knows, Americans are getting fatter and fatter. .. “How many kilos you weigh?” asked a customs officer at Ho Chi Minh Airport when I visited Vietnam a few years ago. “Is that a question on the form?” I responded, slightly unnerved. Smiling, she told me no. She was apparently just curious. After giving me...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Persistent exposure to light at night may lead to weight gain, even without changing physical activity or eating more food, according to new research in mice. Researchers found that mice exposed to a relatively dim light at night over eight weeks had a body mass gain that was about 50 percent more than other mice that lived in a standard light-dark cycle. "Although there were no differences in activity levels or daily consumption of food, the mice that lived with light at night were getting fatter than the others," said Laura Fonken, lead author of the study...

"There's no question that most people who easily gain weight, and/or quickly regain weight after losing it are different from other folks," says Scott Kahan, MD, co-director of the George Washington University Weight Management Program in Washington, D.C., in an email. "The general public tends to think of 'fat' people as lazy and as having no willpower [but] it couldn't be further from the truth." "Ample evidence, now including this study, suggests that there are physiologic reasons for weight gain, difficulty at losing weight, and rapid weight regain after a diet," he says. "There is no question that certain people...

The weight-centric approach to health is the most common, but least effective philosophy. A healthy metabolism is more important than numbers on a scale. Despite what personal trainers, nutritional gurus and the diet industry have been telling you all of these years, weight loss and weighing less is not the key to living a healthy lifestyle. As a matter of fact, there have been studies that show weight loss can increase the risk of premature death from heart disease. But these findings haven’t dissuaded the forces that perpetuate the notion that thin is in. Rather than worry about numbers on...

Lizzie Velasquez weighs just four stone and has almost zero per cent body fat but she is not anorexic. In fact, the 21-year-old from Austin, Texas, must eat every 15 minutes to stay healthy. Miss Velasquez has a rare condition which prevents her from gaining weight even though she eats up to 60 small meals a day.

A former Hooters worker in Roseville stands a chance of winning her weight discrimination lawsuit based on a law written by a retired Grand Rapids legislator -- a law not found in most states. Cassandra Smith, 20, alleges a Hooters restaurant -- known for its scantily-clad waitresses -- placed her on 30-day "weight probation" earlier this month. She resigned, filing suit Monday in Macomb County Circuit Court. The suit cites the Michigan Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination by employers based on a number of factors. Height and weight discrimination were added in a 1976 amendment written by then-state...

Snacking under stress can contribute to weight gain, and new research shows the snacking doesn't stop for women when the pressure slacks off. Jennifer Waugh, a clinical nutrition manager at Baltimore's Mercy Medical Center, said stress is a common trigger for snacking, especially eating comfort foods, including sweets, pastries, soft drinks or chips. "It seems like people either want sweet, bland, salty, chocolate, high-fat things that are not healthy and are very much considered junk food," Waugh said. "You can have a bottled water, that's always good, or yogurt or milk because it has protein that can make you feel...

<p>PORTLAND, Ore. --The ketchup packet has been around for more than 40 years, and complaints about it for nearly as long: too messy, too small, too hard to open. Now ketchup giant H.J. Heinz Co. is unveiling the first major packaging change to the to-go condiment.</p>

Obesity is a disease of excess, but a new study suggests that a few obese patients are actually lacking something--a piece of one of their chromosomes. The loss might remove a gene that helps the body manage blood sugar and appetite. Obesity runs in families, and researchers have identified several genetic variants that seem to boost the odds of becoming obese. However, these variants only explain a minority of cases. In the last decade, researchers have discovered that genetic differences among people can stem from lost or duplicated sections of chromosomes, called copy number variants (CNVs). Because of CNVs, for...

PORT OF SPAIN (AFP) – Commonwealth leaders representing two billion people on the planet on Saturday threw their combined weight behind upcoming climate talks, driving momentum towards a new carbon-cutting treaty. "We, as the Commonwealth, representing one third of the world's population, believe the time for action on climate change has come," Australian Prime Minister Rudd said as he unveiled an agreement struck at a summit in Trinidad. The Port of Spain Climate Change Consensus, backed by all 53 member states of the Commonwealth, supported the December 7-18 climate talks in Copenhagen and committed to seeking a legally binding treaty...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Parents may be setting their daughters up for weight problems simply by allowing them to drink two or more sweetened drinks daily while young, study findings hint. Higher sweetened beverage intake, such as sodas and fruit and sport drinks, at age 5 years was linked to more body fat during the following 10 years, Dr. Laura Fiorito, at The Pennsylvania State University in University Park, told Reuters Health in an email. Higher body fat during the teen years has been tied to long-term overweight and other health problems such as diabetes and later heart disease,...

The study, conducted by Aletha Akers, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor of gynecology and reproductive sciences at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and colleagues, further links girls at weight extremes with an increased risk for engaging in sexual risk-taking behaviors. "This study will contribute to sexual health education prevention efforts, which can be tailored to address how cultural norms regarding body size may influence adolescent sexual decision making. Knowing how a girl perceives her weight may be just as important as knowing her actual weight," noted Dr. Akers. Of the nearly 7,200 high school girls asked about their sexual...

Lose weight while you sleep? It sounds too good to be true—but recent research indicates that there is a connection between how much you weigh and the amount of shut-eye you get per night. Two hormones, ghrelin and leptin, help to control appetite. When you do not get enough rest, levels of ghrelin, which increases hunger, rise; levels of leptin, which promotes feelings of fullness, sink. A study in the May issue of Psychoneuroendocrinology found a significant disruption in nighttime ghrelin levels in chronic insomniacs. According to the study, this hormone imbalance leads insomniacs to experience an increase in appetite...

As I write this, tomorrow is Tuesday, which is a cardio day. I'll spend five minutes warming up on the VersaClimber, a towering machine that requires you to move your arms and legs simultaneously. Then I'll do 30 minutes on a stair mill. On Wednesday a personal trainer will work me like a farm animal for an hour, sometimes to the point that I am dizzy — an abuse for which I pay as much as I spend on groceries in a week. Thursday is "body wedge" class, which involves another exercise contraption, this one a large foam wedge from...

I just purchased a package of Peanut Butter M&M's that has led me to ponder three things: Why does the name M&M's contain an apostrophe-s? Why is the package Net weight 1.63 oz.? Maybe related to a metric measure you might suggest. Well they also list that at 46.2g. Why not 1.5 oz. or 50g? Why can't they balance the colors? There's always at least one under represented color. My package has 6 blue, 6 orange, 5 green, 4 brown, 3 yellow, and only 2 red.

Being overweight won’t kill you — it may even help you live longer. That’s the latest from a study that analyzed data on 11,326 Canadian adults, ages 25 and older, who were followed over a 12-year period. The report, published online last week in the journal Obesity, found that overall, people who were overweight but not obese — defined as a body mass index of 25 to 29.9 — were actually less likely to die than people of normal weight, defined as a B.M.I. of 18.5 to 24.9. By contrast, people who were underweight, with a B.M.I. under 18.5, were...

Last year, 200,000 Americans had weight loss surgery and while gastric bypass surgery can significantly reduce weight, the surgery comes with risks. Now a procedure that was once commonly used to treat ulcers is being tested as a safe alternative to weight loss surgery. Action News reporter Kimberly Tere has the details. The vagus nerve controls your feeling of hunger. Some even say every single thing the vagus nerve does is designed to make you gain weight. That is why San Francisco Doctor Robert Lustig is testing laparoscopic vagotomy, a surgery in which the vagus nerve is cut. Cutting the...

So let’s add another item to the list of impossibles: I have lost more than 20 pounds in less than 24 hours on more than a dozen occasions. The most extreme example was 33 lbs. — from 185 lbs. to 152 lbs. — in less than 20 hours, which produced a rather unpleasant 120 beat-per-minute resting pulse while attempting to sleep. In 1999, I was a gold medalist at the Sanshou (Chinese kickboxing) national championships in the 165-lb. weight class (here is a video sample of Sanshou). This is perhaps the most controversial accomplishment in the 4HWW, as I make...