Greuel faults DWP for bypassing bids on lobbying contracts

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power repeatedly bypassed its competitive bidding process when it awarded $480,000 in contracts to lobby Sacramento decision-makers, according to a report issued by City Controller Wendy Greuel.

DWP executives issued four no-bid contracts for state lobbying over the last two years, two of them to Mercury Public Affairs, a firm that includes former state Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez as one of its partners. No public debate or vote by the utility's five-member Board of Commissioners was required under DWP contracting rules because each agreement was $150,000 or less.

Greuel, who is running for mayor in the March 5 election, said the city utility had "lax controls" over the lobbying contracts and failed to require that two of the firms prepare reports showing what they had accomplished. Mercury also was paid $50,000 for a month of work to help secure passage of legislation on power plant upgrades that had been withdrawn on the first day of the firm's contract, the report found.

---

FOR THE RECORD:
DWP lobbyist: An article in the Jan. 3 LATExtra section about DWP lobbying practices said the agency had been paying $15,000 to its in-house lobbyist Cindy Montañez in 2009. The article should have specified that Montañez was being paid $15,000 per month.

---

"DWP should have terminated" the contract, Greuel wrote.

The inquiry, which was conducted with help from the city Ethics Commission, was launched last year after Greuel's office received a tip alleging that the lobbying work was awarded in exchange for favors. But no evidence of "a 'pay to play' arrangement" was found, her report said.

Mercury received DWP lobbying contracts worth $50,000 in 2010 and $150,000 in 2011, both focused on state government. The firm also received a no-bid, nine-month contract worth $141,000 in 2010 for lobbying at the federal level, which was not examined in the controller's report.

The DWP said the no-bid contracts were reviewed and approved by the city's lawyers. The three lobbying firms helped shape costly state regulations dealing with greenhouse gas emissions and pollution of ocean plant life caused by coastal power plants, utility officials said.

"Their effective advocacy contributed to favorable outcomes that will save LADWP's customers in excess of a billion dollars," the DWP said in a statement.

Mercury Managing Director Roger Salazar said his firm provided strategy for dealing with water quality regulators, as well as state lawmakers. "The legislative process doesn't always end with the pulling of a bill," he added.

The DWP's hiring practices for outside lobbyists attracted scrutiny in 2009 after high-level officials proposed a contract worth up to $2.4 million with Conservation Strategy Group — a Sacramento-based firm that planned to use Mercury and a second company as subcontractors.

The deal would have included the involvement of Nuñez, author of the state's landmark 2006 climate change law. But it was scuttled after DWP commissioners raised questions about the cost. The agency already was paying $15,000 to its in-house lobbyist Cindy Montañez, a former Assembly member who is now a City Council candidate.

DWP officials subsequently began using simple purchase orders instead of competitive bidding procedures to hire lobbying firms. The utility awarded a one-year, $130,000 agreement to Weideman Group in 2010 and a one-year, $150,000 agreement with Conservation Strategy Group in 2011.

Mercury received its $150,000 contract in April 2011, during the same week that Nuñez contributed $3,000 to three of the mayor's legal defense funds and $1,000 to a separate officeholder account belonging to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The defense funds were set up to pay nearly $42,000 in ethics fines levied against Villaraigosa for accepting free tickets to sports and cultural events.

Salazar said there was no link between the contracts and the donations from Nuñez. "Any insinuation that they are connected is absurd and irresponsible," he said.

Last month, the DWP's five-member board awarded a Sacramento lobbying contract worth $1 million annually to KP Public Affairs. That vote was taken after a competitive search process.

david.zahniser@latimes.com

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World Briefing | Africa: South Africa: Government Says Mandela Is Recovering

The recovery of President Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa, is “on track” at his home, the government said Wednesday in its first statement since Mr. Mandela was released from a hospital a week ago. Mr. Mandela, 94, spent nearly three weeks in the hospital in December for treatment of a lung infection and surgery to remove gallstones, his longest stay for medical care since his release from prison in 1990. “We are now in the phase where if we do not hear from his doctors, we assume he is all right,” a spokesman said.

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HTC rumored to debut flagship ‘M7′ smartphone at CES

HTC (2498) will reportedly unveil a new flagship smartphone code-named “M7″ at the Consumer Electronics Show next week. The rumor comes to us from XDA-Developers forum member “Football,” who reported accurate information about unreleased HTC devices in the past. The phone is believed to the be the successor to the One X and could be equipped with a 4.7-inch full HD 1920 x 1080-pixel display, a 1.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon processor, a 13-megapixel rear camera, LTE and HSPA+ connectivity, Beats Audio, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of internal memory and a 2,300 mAh battery. The M7 is also said to be HTC’s first smartphone to utilize on-screen navigation keys in place of traditional hardware buttons. 

[More from BGR: ‘iPhone 5S’ to reportedly launch by June with multiple color options and two different display sizes]

The problem for HTC in the past has been the company’s ability to market its high-end devices to consumers. Despite class-leading features and hardware, HTC’s smartphone sales have stalled in the past year and the company has continued to lose market share. It will be interesting to see if it can turn things around in 2013.

[More from BGR: Microsoft lashes out at Google’s decision to spurn Windows Phone]

The Consumer Electronics Show is scheduled to take place from January 8th to January 11th in Las Vegas, Nevada.

This article was originally published by BGR

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Jennie Garth Wants to Date a Man with 'Positive Energy'

01/02/2013 at 07:10 PM EST

When it comes to her current love life, Jennie Garth has a new mantra.

"I'm learning to date again," the actress, who split from husband Peter Facinelli in March 2012, tells Health in its January issue, "[and] looks aren't important to me anymore. ... I like positive energy."

The actress, who dropped 30 lbs. last year, plans to keep her health a priority in 2013.

"Every day, I just renew my healthy choices," she says. "I feel really good about myself now, and I don't want to do anything to change that."

That means avoiding trendy diets or weight-loss gimmicks.

"My biggest regret is putting my body through fad diets: Atkins, cleanses, the hCG diet," Garth, 40, says. "I lost like 18 lbs., but it came right back. The worst was fasting with colonics for three or four days. It was the most horrifying experience ever."

In addition to her body, Garth says she's trying to maintain a positive outlook, even when times are tough.

"When I'm in excruciating pain, like with what I've been through with my breakup and that grief and loss that's just immobilizing, it helps to remember that it only lasts for 13 to 15 minutes, max," she tells Health. "And then it's over."

"Your mind is ready to go to something else," Garth continues. "You might come back to it, but it helps to just know that that pain is not going to last forever."

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Brain image study: Fructose may spur overeating

This is your brain on sugar — for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating.

After drinking a fructose beverage, the brain doesn't register the feeling of being full as it does when simple glucose is consumed, researchers found.

It's a small study and does not prove that fructose or its relative, high-fructose corn syrup, can cause obesity, but experts say it adds evidence they may play a role. These sugars often are added to processed foods and beverages, and consumption has risen dramatically since the 1970s along with obesity. A third of U.S. children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.

All sugars are not equal — even though they contain the same amount of calories — because they are metabolized differently in the body. Table sugar is sucrose, which is half fructose, half glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. Some nutrition experts say this sweetener may pose special risks, but others and the industry reject that claim. And doctors say we eat too much sugar in all forms.

For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart.

Scans showed that drinking glucose "turns off or suppresses the activity of areas of the brain that are critical for reward and desire for food," said one study leader, Yale University endocrinologist Dr. Robert Sherwin. With fructose, "we don't see those changes," he said. "As a result, the desire to eat continues — it isn't turned off."

What's convincing, said Dr. Jonathan Purnell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Health & Science University, is that the imaging results mirrored how hungry the people said they felt, as well as what earlier studies found in animals.

"It implies that fructose, at least with regards to promoting food intake and weight gain, is a bad actor compared to glucose," said Purnell. He wrote a commentary that appears with the federally funded study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers now are testing obese people to see if they react the same way to fructose and glucose as the normal-weight people in this study did.

What to do? Cook more at home and limit processed foods containing fructose and high-fructose corn syrup, Purnell suggested. "Try to avoid the sugar-sweetened beverages. It doesn't mean you can't ever have them," but control their size and how often they are consumed, he said.

A second study in the journal suggests that only severe obesity carries a high death risk — and that a few extra pounds might even provide a survival advantage. However, independent experts say the methods are too flawed to make those claims.

The study comes from a federal researcher who drew controversy in 2005 with a report that found thin and normal-weight people had a slightly higher risk of death than those who were overweight. Many experts criticized that work, saying the researcher — Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — painted a misleading picture by including smokers and people with health problems ranging from cancer to heart disease. Those people tend to weigh less and therefore make pudgy people look healthy by comparison.

Flegal's new analysis bolsters her original one, by assessing nearly 100 other studies covering almost 2.9 million people around the world. She again concludes that very obese people had the highest risk of death but that overweight people had a 6 percent lower mortality rate than thinner people. She also concludes that mildly obese people had a death risk similar to that of normal-weight people.

Critics again have focused on her methods. This time, she included people too thin to fit what some consider to be normal weight, which could have taken in people emaciated by cancer or other diseases, as well as smokers with elevated risks of heart disease and cancer.

"Some portion of those thin people are actually sick, and sick people tend to die sooner," said Donald Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The problems created by the study's inclusion of smokers and people with pre-existing illness "cannot be ignored," said Susan Gapstur, vice president of epidemiology for the American Cancer Society.

A third critic, Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, was blunter: "This is an even greater pile of rubbish" than the 2005 study, he said. Willett and others have done research since the 2005 study that found higher death risks from being overweight or obese.

Flegal defended her work. She noted that she used standard categories for weight classes. She said statistical adjustments were made for smokers, who were included to give a more real-world sample. She also said study participants were not in hospitals or hospices, making it unlikely that large numbers of sick people skewed the results.

"We still have to learn about obesity, including how best to measure it," Flegal's boss, CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden, said in a written statement. "However, it's clear that being obese is not healthy - it increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and many other health problems. Small, sustainable increases in physical activity and improvements in nutrition can lead to significant health improvements."

___

Online:

Obesity info: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html

___

Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

Mike Stobbe can be followed at http://twitter.com/MikeStobbe

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Eric Garcetti invokes Latino-Jewish ancestry in mayor's race

Working a recent breakfast gathering of business owners in Northridge last week, Los Angeles mayoral contender Eric Garcetti introduced himself in Hindi when a Sikh businessman approached.

A few hours later, Garcetti donned a colorful Peruvian headpiece with ear flaps as he spoke Spanish with immigrants on the steps of City Hall, part of a show of solidarity for designating a stretch of Hollywood's Vine Street as "Peru Village."

After lunch, Garcetti joined rabbis at a City Hall menorah lighting. Wearing a yarmulke, the Hollywood-area councilman sang Hanukkah songs in Hebrew, English and Spanish. "Toda la familia," Garcetti said as the group huddled for a photo.

A top contender to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Garcetti prides himself on his ease with the city's diverse cultures. He sees his mixed ancestry ("I have an Italian last name, and I'm half Mexican and half Jewish," he says) as a powerful part of his appeal in a city where voters for decades have split along racial and ethnic lines in mayoral elections.

But as the campaign begins to capture public attention, a big question is whether Garcetti can recreate the surge of Latino support that helped secure Villaraigosa's historic election eight years ago as the first Latino mayor of modern Los Angeles.

Garcetti, whose district includes Silver Lake and Echo Park, is counting on strong support citywide from Latinos and liberals, buttressed by scattered support from other groups. Weaving a multiethnic tapestry of voters will be crucial to offsetting his opponents' strengths, such as San Fernando Valley white voters who tend to turn out heavily in local elections and might favor City Controller Wendy Greuel, who previously represented the area on the City Council.

It's no small challenge. Greuel and City Councilwoman Jan Perry of South Los Angeles each aspire to be the first woman elected mayor of Los Angeles, another historical marker that could spark — to Garcetti's detriment — the kind of enthusiasm that carried Villaraigosa into office.

Also, some of the city's most prominent Latino political leaders have shunned Garcetti's candidacy in the March 5 mayoral primary, deciding to close ranks behind Greuel.

Villaraigosa has stayed neutral, but Greuel has won the backing of L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina, an iconic figure in Latino politics who broke barriers as the first Latina elected to the state Legislature, City Council and Board of Supervisors.

Also backing Greuel are Dolores Huerta, co-founder of United Farm Workers, and state Assembly Speaker John Pérez (D-Los Angeles).

When he announced his support for Greuel, Pérez, a cousin of Villaraigosa's, appeared to challenge Garcetti's bid to assume a leadership position among the city's nearly 2 million Latinos.

"There isn't a Latino candidate running for mayor that I know of," he told KPCC  public radio.

After Garcetti called Pérez to complain, the Assembly speaker apologized, saying he misunderstood Garcetti's ethnic heritage.

Garcetti has Mexican roots through his father, former Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti. Eric's grandfather, Salvador Garcetti, was born in Mexico and grew up in Boyle Heights. Salvador was brought to the United States as a baby after his father, Massimo Garcetti, a judge who had emigrated from Italy, was hanged during the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910, Garcetti says. Eric's grandmother, Juanita Iberri, one of 19 children in a family that migrated from Sonora, Mexico, was born in Arizona.

On his mother's side, Garcetti is a descendant of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Poland and the Ukraine. They too settled in Boyle Heights in the early 20th century. Garcetti's maternal grandfather, Harry Roth, turned the family's Los Angeles clothing business, Louis Roth & Co., into a major national brand of high-end suits for men.

Eric Garcetti and seven relatives now oversee the Roth Family Foundation. On its website, it has reported giving $5.9 million in grants since 2000 to hundreds of organizations, among them the PUENTE Learning Center, Planned Parenthood LA and the Silverlake Conservatory of Music.

Garcetti, 41, was raised in Encino and attended a public elementary school at UCLA. From 7th to 12th grade, he went to Harvard, then a private boys' school in Studio City. The family moved to Brentwood when he was a senior.

"Weekends involved bowls of menudo at my grandparents' and bagels at my cousins' house," Garcetti said in an interview. "I think if you're Latino, you're very comfortable with the idea of mestizo, being mixed. So I kind of joke that I'm mestizo doble, double mixed."

At Columbia University, Garcetti earned a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's in international affairs. He studied the Eritrean Revolution as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, a stint that led to travels around the world.

"Having studied international relations, having taught it, having visited, I think, 80 countries in my life, having lived on a number of continents, in some ways prepared me to be mayor of this town, where over 200 languages are spoken, 140 countries are represented," Garcetti said.

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With a Mall Boom in Russia, Property Investors Go Shopping

MOSCOW — Shoppers who find that 250 stores aren’t enough can go ice skating, watch movies or even ride a carousel, all under a single roof.

While it sounds like the Mall of America, this mall is outside Moscow, not Minneapolis.

“I feel like I’m in Disneyland,” Vartyan E. Sarkisov, a shopper toting an Adidas bag, said recently while making the rounds of the Mega Belaya Dacha mall.

Instead of bread lines, Russia is known these days for malls. They are booming businesses, drawing investments from sovereign wealth funds and Wall Street banks, most recently Morgan Stanley, which paid $1.1 billion a year ago for a single mall in St. Petersburg.

One mall, called Vegas, rose out of a cucumber field on the edge of Moscow and became, its owners say, larger than the Mall of America if the American mall’s seven-acre amusement park is not counted in the calculation of floor space.

A few offramps away on the Moscow beltway, another mall scored a different kind of victory: the Mega Tyoply Stan shopping center drew 57 million visitors at its peak in 2007, well ahead of the 40 million annual visits reported by the Mall of America.

As American malls dodder into old age, gaptoothed with vacancies, Russia’s shopping centers are just now blossoming into their boom years, nourished by oil exports that are lifting wages.

“It’s 1982 all over again in Russia,” said Lee Timmins, the country representative of Hines, a Texas-based real estate group that is opening three outlet malls in Russia, referring to the heyday of the American mall experience. Russians, he said, love malls.

The mall boom illustrates an extraordinarily important theme in Russian economics these days. The growing crowds at malls, and the keen interest in Russian malls on the part of Wall Street banks, are signs that the emerging middle class that made up the street protests against Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow last winter is becoming a force in business as well as politics.

Investors, who with money at stake are a bellwether of the new trends, are not waiting for the next round of protests; they are already placing bets on the rise of a broad affluent class in Russia.

“Over the past 10 years, Russia has turned into a middle-class country,” Charles Slater, a retail analyst at Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate consulting firm, said in an interview. “What better to do than go to an enclosed, warm environment with many things on offer, whether that be bowling, cinema or food courts, things the customers have not been used to in the past?”

Moscow now has 82 malls, including two of the largest in Europe, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, a New York-based trade association. Both are owned by Ikea Shopping Centers Russia, the branch of the Swedish assemble-it-yourself furniture franchise that manages 14 malls here. In Russia, malls are still novel; the first Western-style suburban mall opened in 2000. They are now changing hands as developers sell to institutional investors, like Morgan Stanley, shedding light for the first time on their eye-popping values.

At the core of the attraction for investors is the rising disposable income of Russians, nudged along by policies favoring the middle class, lest their challenge to President Putin’s rule intensify.

Russia has a flat 13 percent income tax rate. Most Russians own their homes, a legacy of post-Soviet privatizations, and so pay no mortgage or rent. Health care is socialized.

Not surprisingly, then, Russians have become fanatical shoppers. Russians spend 60 percent of their pretax income on retail purchases, a category that includes food, according to Jones Lang LaSalle, a real estate consulting firm. The country in second place in Europe is Sweden, where retailing accounts for 40 percent of total private spending. Germans, by comparison, spend 28 percent of their salaries shopping, according to Jones Lang LaSalle.

Malls, where the secrets of Western capitalism were finally peeled open and laid bare, with fast food, clothes, ice rinks, electronics and appliances wherever the eye falls, have mesmerized shoppers here — much as they did in their early years in the United States, from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Olga N. Zaitsova, 55, who was in the Mega Belaya Dacha mall with her granddaughter Anastasia, said she came every weekend, drawn by the warm play area for toddlers. “It’s just not comfortable to be outside when it’s so cold,” she said.

When she shops, she said, “now we buy things we want, not things we need.”

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9 Apps to Fast-Track Your New Years’ Resolutions

Whether your goal in 2013 is to lose five pounds, manage your finances, or spend more time with friends and family, there are a growing number of apps that fall into the self-help category and can assist you in accomplishing these resolutions.

At Mashable we’ve tested a lot of them out, but we’re still always hearing about new ones. There are a ton of fitness and health apps to chose from, but you might be pleasantly surprised to know they’re not all about weight loss. A device and app called Tinke monitors your stress levels and how deeply you’re breathing. An app called Fig will remind you to drink more water, skip fried foods and take breaks at work to keep you feeling good. Arianna Huffington also released an app called, “GPS for the Soul” that focuses on wellbeing.

[More from Mashable: Time Machine App Transports You Back to 2012]

Other apps can help you organize your social life, make new friends or save money for a vacation.

We’ve compiled a list of apps that can help you accomplish all sorts of goals this year. Check it out and let us know if we missed any that you plan on using in 2013.

[More from Mashable: It’s Easy to Save Videos From Facebook Poke Permanently]

OurGroceries

If you’re trying to eat out less and cook at home more often, make sure you always have a current grocery list at your fingertips. Mashable wrote about several grocery list apps this year. The standout seems to be OurGroceries for Android and iOS. If you have roommates or a significant other, everyone can download the app and sync lists. That way if you’re making a quick after-work trip to the grocery store you’ll not only be able to see the items you added, but also see what they’ve added, too.

Click here to view this gallery.

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, hocus-focus

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Jessica Simpson and Kendall & Kylie Jenner Make Readers Smile - and Frown

01/01/2013 at 07:00 PM EST

Splash News Online; Michael Simon/Startraks

What's on the minds of PEOPLE readers this week? We love getting your feedback, and as always, you weighed in – even while celebrating during the holidays – with plenty of reactions to all of our stories.

From Kelly Osbourne's dramatic weight loss to Jessica Simpson's happy baby news to the tragic death of hero surfer Dylan Smith in Puerto Rico, readers responded to what made them happy, what made them laugh out loud and what made them sad this week.

Check out the articles with the top reactions on the site this week, and keep clicking on the emoticons at the bottom of every story to tell us what you think!

Kelly Osbourne says loving herself was the key to her 60-lb. weight loss. She had to get to a place where she respected herself enough to take care of her health – and she emerged a fierce style star who is not afraid to rock a bikini.

Jessica Simpson became a new mom just 8 months ago – so the news that she's expecting baby No. 2 with fiancé Eric Johnson made readers say, "Wow!"

Reality stars Kendall and Kylie Jenner showed off expensive Christmas gifts on Instagram, and their pricey public display turned many readers off. From a pair of Louboutin spike heels to Balenciaga boots with a more than $1,000 price tag, the teens cleaned up with lavish presents that most could only dream about.

Dylan Smith captured our hearts with his heroic efforts during Superstorm Sandy, saving six people on his surfboard. But the Queens, N.Y., lifeguard, 23, who was named one of PEOPLE's Heroes of the Year, drowned on Dec. 24 in a surfing accident off Puerto Rico.

Does the idea of Tom Cruise dating a new woman make you laugh? Maybe. A story that falsely linked the actor romantically to a 26-year-old restaurant manager, had readers clicking LOL. Or maybe the funny part was this quote from a source, who told told PEOPLE: "He's single and will be talking to women – all of whom he won't be instantly dating."

Check back next week for another must-read roundup, and see what readers are reacting to every day here.

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Brain image study: Fructose may spur overeating

This is your brain on sugar — for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating.

After drinking a fructose beverage, the brain doesn't register the feeling of being full as it does when simple glucose is consumed, researchers found.

It's a small study and does not prove that fructose or its relative, high-fructose corn syrup, can cause obesity, but experts say it adds evidence they may play a role. These sugars often are added to processed foods and beverages, and consumption has risen dramatically since the 1970s along with obesity. A third of U.S. children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.

All sugars are not equal — even though they contain the same amount of calories — because they are metabolized differently in the body. Table sugar is sucrose, which is half fructose, half glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. Some nutrition experts say this sweetener may pose special risks, but others and the industry reject that claim. And doctors say we eat too much sugar in all forms.

For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart.

Scans showed that drinking glucose "turns off or suppresses the activity of areas of the brain that are critical for reward and desire for food," said one study leader, Yale University endocrinologist Dr. Robert Sherwin. With fructose, "we don't see those changes," he said. "As a result, the desire to eat continues — it isn't turned off."

What's convincing, said Dr. Jonathan Purnell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Health & Science University, is that the imaging results mirrored how hungry the people said they felt, as well as what earlier studies found in animals.

"It implies that fructose, at least with regards to promoting food intake and weight gain, is a bad actor compared to glucose," said Purnell. He wrote a commentary that appears with the federally funded study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers now are testing obese people to see if they react the same way to fructose and glucose as the normal-weight people in this study did.

What to do? Cook more at home and limit processed foods containing fructose and high-fructose corn syrup, Purnell suggested. "Try to avoid the sugar-sweetened beverages. It doesn't mean you can't ever have them," but control their size and how often they are consumed, he said.

A second study in the journal suggests that only severe obesity carries a high death risk — and that a few extra pounds might even provide a survival advantage. However, independent experts say the methods are too flawed to make those claims.

The study comes from a federal researcher who drew controversy in 2005 with a report that found thin and normal-weight people had a slightly higher risk of death than those who were overweight. Many experts criticized that work, saying the researcher — Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — painted a misleading picture by including smokers and people with health problems ranging from cancer to heart disease. Those people tend to weigh less and therefore make pudgy people look healthy by comparison.

Flegal's new analysis bolsters her original one, by assessing nearly 100 other studies covering almost 2.9 million people around the world. She again concludes that very obese people had the highest risk of death but that overweight people had a 6 percent lower mortality rate than thinner people. She also concludes that mildly obese people had a death risk similar to that of normal-weight people.

Critics again have focused on her methods. This time, she included people too thin to fit what some consider to be normal weight, which could have taken in people emaciated by cancer or other diseases, as well as smokers with elevated risks of heart disease and cancer.

"Some portion of those thin people are actually sick, and sick people tend to die sooner," said Donald Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The problems created by the study's inclusion of smokers and people with pre-existing illness "cannot be ignored," said Susan Gapstur, vice president of epidemiology for the American Cancer Society.

A third critic, Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, was blunter: "This is an even greater pile of rubbish" than the 2005 study, he said. Willett and others have done research since the 2005 study that found higher death risks from being overweight or obese.

Flegal defended her work. She noted that she used standard categories for weight classes. She said statistical adjustments were made for smokers, who were included to give a more real-world sample. She also said study participants were not in hospitals or hospices, making it unlikely that large numbers of sick people skewed the results.

"We still have to learn about obesity, including how best to measure it," Flegal's boss, CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden, said in a written statement. "However, it's clear that being obese is not healthy - it increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and many other health problems. Small, sustainable increases in physical activity and improvements in nutrition can lead to significant health improvements."

___

Online:

Obesity info: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html

___

Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

Mike Stobbe can be followed at http://twitter.com/MikeStobbe

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