AN upmarket Brisbane childcare centre at Ferny Grove has engaged a professional chef to provide restaurant quality meals to its 120 children.

Children at the Habitat Early Learning Centre feast on dishes such as lamb tagine and cous cous, fishcakes and rice, beef hotpots, pasta, risotto and lightly curried sausages.

However, chef Emma Hendry insists it is all part of a nutritionally balanced diet of dairy, meat, seafood, fruit and vegetables, and legumes.

Gained some pounds recently chowing down comfort food?

Katherine Trevisol is right there with you.

After an impeccable 13-year career with a baby products company, she was laid off. And she sought solace in food. M&M's, rum raisin ice cream, popcorn. She packed on 15 pounds in three months.

Having bariatric surgery to induce weight loss might put a person at greater risk for broken bones, a new study says.

About one in five cases reviewed by Mayo Clinic researchers revealed that the person fractured a bone within an average of seven years after the surgery. Most breaks occurred in the bones of the hands and feet, but hip, spine and humerus (upper arm bone) fractures also were found.

In teenagers, laparoscopic gastric banding surgery for treatment of extreme obesity can significantly improve and even reverse the metabolic syndrome, a new study found. The results were presented at The Endocrine Society's 91st Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Most people would like to lose a few pounds, improve muscle definition or smooth away their crow’s feet. Some, however, take this desire for youth and beauty further by paying thousands of pounds to achieve a flawless standard encouraged by celebrity magazines and television shows like Dr. 90210 and 10 Years Younger. Here are the top ten most expensive surgical treatments, which promise to slice, prod and plump you towards perfection.

Some years ago, for a nutrition study, researchers at Purdue University gave 15 willing 20-somethings an extra 450 calories a day of sugar.

Sometimes the study participants got soda, sometimes they got jelly beans. In both instances, they had to consume their treat every day and, on some randomly selected days, tell the researchers what else they ate and drank.

Through this study and others, the researchers discovered an interesting phenomenon that has implications far beyond the value of soda versus jelly beans.

According to a research abstract that will be presented on June11, at Sleep 2009, the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, a link exists between the severity of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and weight gain.

WHEN tubby Michelle Bowater weighed in at nearly 25 stone, doctors broke the devastating news that she would never have a baby because of her size.

But after shedding 15 stone, the businesswoman from the Midlands has now given birth to the child she thought she could never have.

Tiny son AJ was born four weeks premature weighing 5lb 12oz, six weeks ago and is already the apple of his mother’s eye.

People usually gain weight because they overeat, but what makes them overeat? A new study suggests that obese people have a different physiological response to food: they continue to salivate longer in response to a new taste than do people of normal weight.

Brian Dunaway looks at pictures of himself weighing almost 500 pounds and admits he never realized how big he was.

Now at a muscular 264 pounds, the 31-year-old Davison man looks back on himself just 16 months ago and he says he won’t ever let himself gain that much weight again. “I was depressed,? said Dunaway. “If I wouldn’t have lost the weight it would have killed me.? Plagued by bad feet from his weight and pre-hypertension and pre-diabetes, Dunaway said he made the decision to lose the weight because of his two sons, Hunter and Austin. On Valentine’s Day 2008 he underwent lap band bariatric surgery at Hurley Medical Center in Flint — having already lost weight to prepare for the surgery he was at a formidable 417 pounds.