People urged to do at least 150 minutes of aerobic exercise a week to lose weight

People who want to lose meaningful amounts of weight through exercise may need to devote more than two-and-a-half hours a week to aerobic training such as running, walking or cycling, researchers say.The finding emerged from a review of 116 published clinical trials that explored the impact of physical exercise on weight loss, waist size and body fat. In total, the trials reported data for nearly 7,000 adults who were overweight or obese, meaning their body mass index (BMI) was more than 25.Analysis of the trials’ results showed that body weight, waist size and body fat all decreased as people did more aerobic exercise each week, but training for less than 30 minutes a day, five days a week resulted in only minor reductions, the researchers found.“At least 150 minutes per week of aerobic exercise at moderate intensity is required to achieve important weight loss,” said Dr Ahmad Jayedi, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, and first author on the study published in the medical journal Jama Network Open

Resist ‘predatory’ Boxing Day gambling offers, say NHS bosses amid worsening crisis

The “barrage” of betting advertisements around Boxing Day sporting fixtures will exacerbate Britain’s growing gambling problem, NHS bosses are warning.Promotional techniques by unscrupulous betting firms, including free Christmas bets, will increase gambling-related harm by encouraging punters to wager sums they cannot afford, they say.Gambling addiction is causing so much damage that the NHS in England has almost doubled from eight to 15 in the last year the number of specialist clinics it runs to help addicts, it said.The health service is facing “an uphill battle” to provide enough care to the increasing number of people whom GPs are referring to its network of clinics with gambling-related health problems.Dr Matt Gaskell, the head of the NHS Northern Gambling Service, urged people who come into money as a Christmas gift or bonus not to risk losing it by using it to place wagers

‘Wild west’: experts concerned by illegal promotion of weight-loss jabs in UK

Weight-loss injections are being aggressively marketed to British consumers through often illegal promotions, in a practice experts have described as a “wild west” industry of drug selling.The booming market for jabs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro has triggered a price battle among online pharmacies, with even high-street chains cashing in on the soaring demand.Last month, the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk revealed global sales of Wegovy hit £1.94bn in the third quarter of the year, up 48% from the previous quarter and outstripping expectations.However, a Guardian review of reports by the watchdog that regulates medical advertising in the UK shows that many online pharmacies are flouting strict rules that govern how prescription-only drugs can be marketed in Britain

Shrinking waistlines and growing profits: the weight-loss drug boom

It is a trend rooted in profit-making. Adverts featuring prescription-only weight-loss medications are splashed across the internet – and it is causing concern among experts.But the question remains: who is driving the boom?Consider drugs for other conditions, be it asthma or high blood pressure: a quick internet search might throw up a couple of online pharmacies, but not page after page of results offering discount codes for consultations, special offers for returning customers or money-off emails.Yet when it comes to weight-loss jabs, it is a different story.Boots offers returning customers 10% off each time they reorder a weight-loss treatment – a promotion that appears at the bottom of a page featuring Wegovy, Mounjaro and other prescription-only medications

Blind people excluded from benefits of AI, says charity

Blind and partially sighted people are being excluded from the benefits of artificial intelligence tools and facing “a new level of discrimination”, the new president of the Royal Society for Blind Children has claimed as he called for better design of everything from video games to AI agents.Tom Pey said existing difficulties for blind children were “now compounded because they’re excluded [and] distanced from their non-disabled peers, because those people can experience games, alternative realities and the AI-driven visual types of technology”.Pey lost his sight as a child and created the Waymap app which offers step-by-step audio navigation instructions. His comments come as tech firms launch more visually based AI-powered systems such as Meta’s range of spectacles and the Google Lens function, which relies on users pointing their phone camera at objects or places.Pey called on the technology secretary, Peter Kyle, to “formulate laws that will support the needs of disabled people, but also help direct the big companies and startups, so they include disabled people”

Latin America’s rise in tuberculosis linked to imprisonment rates

High incarceration rates in Latin America – the region with the world’s fastest-growing prison population – are exacerbating tuberculosis in a region that is bucking the global trend for falling incidents of the disease, experts have warned.A study published in The Lancet Public Health journal has estimated that, contrary to previous assumptions, HIV/Aids is not the primary risk factor for tuberculosis in the region – as it remains in Africa, for example – but rather imprisonments.While the global incidence of tuberculosis decreased by 8.7% between 2015 and 2022, it rose by 19% in Latin America. Using mathematical modelling, researchers concluded that this increase was linked to the exponential rise in imprisonment in the region, surpassing other traditional risk factors such as HIV/Aids, smoking, drug use and malnutrition