The House Energy and Commerce Committee has approved a measure to revamp the food safety system in the United States, the first step toward making it a law. The measure requires stepped-up inspections of food production plants, with inspections every year for high-risk facilities and every 18 months for other factories. Companies will pay $500 per location, up to $175,000 a year, to help fund new inspectors. A similar measure has already been introduced in the Senate, but there’s no timetable for discussion or a vote on it.

A Springfield woman feels and looks like a different person after losing 410 pounds without surgery.

Tammey Burns says she struggled with weight her entire life and used food as a crutch to deal with emotional issues.

In 2002 she was diagnosed as "morbidly obese." Tammey called it "confining, embarrassing, and shameful." But it wasn't until 2006 when Tammey had trouble breathing and had to have a tracheotomy that she decided she didn't want to live that way.

At 48-years-old Tammey joined a gym and met a friend who challenged her to walk.

For Lisa Bosshard, weight loss surgery was step one on the road to reducing belly fat.

"At my highest weight, I was around 320 pounds and around a size 32 in women's clothing," she said.

Aimee Sorley went from a size 12, down to a 4-6, in roughly six months. Exercising with trainer Scott Colby was a key for her. She says finding out the truth about some of those supposed healthy snacks and meals you can grab and go also helped.

When there are more fast-food restaurants in the neighborhood than grocery stores, patients are at an increased risk of obesity, Canadian researchers found.

Patients were 25% less likely to be obese if they lived in an area with a smaller ratio of fast-food chains to supermarkets, John C. Spence, PhD, and colleagues reported online in BMC Public Health.

Patients who underwent a popular form of weight loss surgery developed kidney stones, a painful and recurring condition, at almost double the rate of obese patients who didn’t have the operation, according to one of the largest studies to examine the rate of complications from bariatric surgery.

Is weight loss surgery the new 'cosmetic surgery'? Is it now a personal choice for those looking for enhanced physical appearance rather than purely on health grounds? Does weight loss surgery have unwelcome psychological consequences?

As long as Glen Pfleegor Sr., of Milton, can help it, only God is going to know when his time is up.

About eight months ago, Pfleegor’s doctor, who’s recommended for years that his patient should lose weight, told him he wouldn’t live to see 60.

Between that being a mere 15 years away, and his daughter, Kelley, being worried sick prior to dad’s surgery to remove a benign tumor from his chest — related to his weight — something had clicked.

A physiological response that normally creates a feeling of fullness seems to be out of kilter in some severely obese people, and may help explain why they have trouble controlling how much they eat, a small study suggests.

Researchers found that, unlike their normal-weight counterparts, obese men and women failed to show a significant decrease in saliva production when repeatedly exposed to the taste of lemon juice.

Leslie Fuller tried to stick to her shopping list on a recent grocery run. Instead, she found herself venturing down the candy aisle, throwing bags of Hershey's Miniatures and M&M's into her cart.

"I should just put them down on the seat and sit on them," said Fuller, a paralegal in Las Vegas. "That's where they're going to go -- on my behind. I eat them because it makes me feel better."

A new experimental technique lets surgeons staple the stomach smaller without surgery making obesity treatment easier.

Stomach stapling involves reducing the size of the stomach to make patients feel full more quickly. Both a band and staples are used to create a small stomach pouch. In the bottom of the pouch is an approximately one-centimeter hole through which the pouch contents can flow into the remainder of the stomach and thence onto the remainder of the gastrointestinal tract.