Did you see last night on Channel 4 that tiny, tiny baby kangaroo/joey emerge from its mother and make its difficult way to the teat in her pouch?

Extraordinary Animals in the Womb

As I write, there are 30 days in which you can catch up with viewing it here - http://www.channel4.com/video/brandless-catchup.jsp?vodBrand=extraordinary-animals-in-the-womb

More details of the programme are here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/10/15/nosplit/bvtvanimalwomb15.xml and here:

http://forums.digiguide.com/topic.asp?id=27454&subject=Extraordinary+Animals+in+The+Womb+showing+on+Channel+4

and on many other webpages.

Extract:

""In Extraordinary Animals in the Womb, the embryonic journeys of four very remarkable animals are brought to life as they develop from conception to birth. The shark, whose cannibalistic embryos will eat their own siblings to survive; the emperor penguin, whose egg-bound chicks must battle the coldest weather on the planet; the kangaroo, whose underdeveloped foetus will undergo an exceptionally premature birth; and the parasitic wasp - whose larvae must hijack and exploit the body of another creature.

Filming across three continents, and making use of the latest HD camera technology, the Animals in the Womb team swam with pregnant sharks and witnessed up close the torment of parasitised caterpillars. Groundbreaking photography takes us inside the pouch of a kangaroo, and remarkable scans and special effects reveal 14 half-metre young inside the womb of a wild shark."

The miniscule joey interested me the most - blind, so tiny, so red, so delicate, so vulnerable and dependent. - You may wonder why it is red. - This is because its skin is extremely thin and what you are really seeing is its blood vessels through the transparent window of the ultra-thin skin. - It so obviously needs a safe place in which to feed and grow (the mother's pouch with the teat) till its skin, etc are strong enough to be exposed to the 'outside' world and its hazards and stresses.

There are some similarities, you may be surprised to learn, between the joey and a morbidly obese steroid victim! - The fatter anyone becomes, the thinner their skin becomes and so the closer to the surface are the blood vessels and so the redder their skin appears - red face, red hands, red arms, red-skinned legs, red or purple feet, etc - swollen with distended veins, swollen with pain, vulnerable to knocks, harmed by pressure, easily bruised and further damaged...

But unlike the joey, obese people have no chance of building up the strength and thickness/firmness of their skin: - once depleted, the skin's thickness cannot return. - These problems are worsened by dieting. - Dieting, by which I mean eating less food/fewer calories than the body requires in the mistaken belief that this will reduce obesity, is EXTREMELY HARMFUL. - The skin gets very much thinner very much faster, and the blood vessel walls get very much thinner very much faster too. - This obviously causes the blood vessel walls to be overstretched and stressed and much weaker, which results in them becoming distended (fluid retention) with extra fluid, so causing WEIGHT GAIN, NOT WEIGHT LOSS.

To reduce excess weight you need to reduce the fluid retention that has caused the weight gain. - So you need to avoid dieting/'slimming' and instead concentrate on avoiding salt and salty food, because that extra fluid in the veins is extra sodium and water, and to lose some of it you need to reduce your sodium intake.

When people whose blood vessels are weaker than the norm eat salt, the result is weight gain and obesity (because of excess sodium and water held in the blood vessels and elsewhere). This condition is also known as sodium retention, water retention, fluid retention, salt sensitivity or oedema. If these people reduce their salt intake they lose some of the excess sodium and water, and so lose weight, and if they eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables they lose weight faster, because the potassium in the fruit and vegetables displaces some of the excess sodium from the body.

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Children and Obesity

And see Sodium in foods and

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION