Is Oprah’s weight up or down this month and really, is it possible to lose a lot of weight and keep it off for years without bariatric surgery?

It’s up—much to the dismay of the army she retains to keep it down—but maybe she needs guru replacement surgery because the results of a study in the International Journal of Obesity suggest that behavioral modifications involving diet and exercise can indeed cause sustained weight loss.

“Our findings suggest that it’s possible to maintain large weight losses through intensive behavioral efforts…regardless of whether you lost weight with bariatric surgery or through non-surgical methods,” concluded Dale Bond, the study’s lead author.
 
Bond is director of the Center for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine at Miriam Hospital.
 
Bond’s study matched bariatric surgical patients with those who went the behavior mod route. The 315 participants had lost 124 pounds on average and had maintained the lower weight for 5.5 years before the study began.

During the 2-year follow-up, the scientists found no difference between the groups in caloric intake or the amount of weight regained, which was about 4 pounds per year.
 
However bariatric patients consumed more fat and fast food and reported less conscious control over food intake. They also had an increased risk of depression and reported higher stress than the behavioral group.

Only a third of the bariatric patients engaged in physical activity whereas 60% of those in the non-surgical group did.
 
 “These findings underscore the need for eating and activity interventions focused on bariatric surgery patients,” Bond, told TJOLS. “Future research should focus on ways to increase and maintain physical activity and better monitor psychological parameters in bariatric surgery patients.”

On the occasion of Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th president of the United States of America, Pizaazz presents additional excerpts from Nat Hentoff’s article on the interplay between jazz and the civil rights movement:

“In his touring all-star tournament, Jazz at the Philharmonic, Norman Granz by the 1950s was conducting a war against segregated seating. Capitalizing on the large audiences JATP attracted, Granz insisted on a guarantee from promoters that there would be no “Colored” signs in the auditoriums.

After renting an auditorium in Houston in the 1950s…Granz personally, before the concert, removed the signs that said WHITE TOILETS and NEGRO TOILETS. When the musicians — Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Buddy Rich, Lester Young — arrived, Granz watched as some white Texans objected to sitting alongside black Texans.

Said the impresario: “You sit where I sit you. You don’t want to sit next to a black, here’s your money back.”

As this music reached deeply into more white Americans, their sensitivity to segregation, affecting not only jazz musicians, increased.

A dramatic illustration is the story told by Charles Black, a valuable member of Thurgood Marshall’s team of lawyers during the long journey to Brown v. Board of Education.

In 1931, growing up white in racist Austin, Texas, Black at age 16 heard Louis Armstrong in a hotel there.

“He was the first genius I had ever seen,” Black wrote long after in the Yale Law Journal. “It is impossible,” he added, “to overstate the significance of a sixteen-year-old southern boy’s seeing genius, for the first time, in a black. We literally never saw a black then in any but a servant’s capacity. It was just then that I started toward the Brown case where I belonged.”

Armstrong himself, in a September 1941 letter to jazz critic Leonard Feather, wrote: “I’d like to recall one of my most inspiring moments. I was playing a concert date in a Miami auditorium. I walked on stage and there I saw something I’d never seen. I saw thousands of people, colored and white, on the main floor. Not segregated in one row of whites and another row of Negroes. Just all together — naturally…when you see things like that, you know you’re going forward.”

As Stanley Crouch, a keenly perceptive jazz historian and critic, wrote recently in the New York Daily News: “Once the whites who played it and the listeners who loved it began to balk at the limitations imposed by segregation, jazz became a futuristic social force in which one was finally judged purely on the basis of one’s individual ability. Jazz predicted the civil rights movement more than any other art in America.”

During the 1950s and early ’60s…I wrote of the civil-rights surge among jazz creators: Sonny Rollins’s “Freedom Suite”; “Alabama” recorded by John Coltrane; and an album I produced for Candid Records that was soon banned in South Africa — Max Roach’s “Freedom Now Suite.”

If I’d been asked about the music to be played (on the occasion of Barack Obama’s inauguration), I’d have suggested…that the orchestra swing into a song I often heard during an Ellington set, “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.”

Clark Terry, long an Ellington sideman, told me: “Duke wants life and music to be always in a state of becoming. He doesn’t even like to write definitive endings of a piece. He always likes to make the end of a song sound like it’s still going somewhere.”

So we will be on Martin Luther King’s Birthday and Inauguration Day.”

Influenza is a viral infection of the nose and throat that typically causes fever, headache, muscle aches and weakness. Sometimes pneumonia complicates the flu. The cause can be bacterial or the virus itself. In a typical season, flu mortality is well below 1%.

In 1918, an extraordinary number of flu victims developed pneumonia. Mortality ran 400% higher than usual.

In fact, “The 1918 influenza pandemic was the most devastating outbreak of infectious disease in human history, accounting for about 50 million deaths worldwide,” according Yoshihiro Kawaoka and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin and the Universities of Kobe and Tokyo.

Now these scientists think they’ve discovered what triggered the pandemic.

The team isolated genes one-by-one from the 1918 strain, substituted them into the modern flu virus and then infected ferrets, which develop flu a lot like humans do.

Time after time the ferrets developed normal flu until the scientists used a 3-gene combination called PA, PB1, and PB2 (along with a 1918 version of the nucleoprotein or NP gene).

This combination enabled the flu virus to invade the lungs, causing pneumonia and death. The team has published its findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Most experts believe there will be another flu pandemic someday. No one knows when or which strain will cause it, but the H5N1 avian influenza virus that currently circulates among birds and domestic poultry in Asia, Africa and Europe remains a likely suspect.

The current strain of Avian flu rarely infects humans but when it does, it kills. More than 60% of the 391 people infected so far have died. 

A few mutations that increase its attack rate in humans would transform H5N1 into a monster that could kill millions in months.