National expert on obesity to speak Friday at ECU

GREENVILLE, N.C. —   In 2004, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranked obesity as the No. 1 health threat facing the United States. The obesity epidemic will be the topic of a lecture by a nationally recognized expert on obesity at 8 a.m. Friday, Feb. 17 in the Pitt County Memorial Hospital auditorium.

The lecture by Dr. George A. Bray, chief of the division of obesity and metabolism at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center and professor at Louisiana State University, is sponsored by the Department of Internal Medicine at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University. It is the department’s 13th annual Dr. Eugene D. Furth Lecture. The lectureship series honors the late Furth, who was the first chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine at ECU. Furth died in 1995.

Bray will explain how positive energy balance describes why people get fat but fails to tell how it happens, discuss how small weight losses can be beneficial to a person’s health, and document the evidence that current lifestyle, dietary and pharmacological treatments are less effective than surgery.

Individuals with disabilities requesting accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act should contact the Department for Disability Support Services at (252) 328-6799 (V) or (252) 328-0899 (TTY).