Losing weight might be a matter of getting paid. Losing weight is easier when money is involved, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday. Weight-loss programs that reward people with money – and remind them of the cash they stand to lose if they fail – provided a powerful incentive to lose weight, compared with more conventional approaches. Dr. Kevin Volpp of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine was looking for an effective way to treat obesity, a growing problem that carries serious health risks, when he happened upon the finding. He said many weight-loss programs fail because people are being asked to make sacrifices now for rewards in the future. “We wanted to create a reward system which gave them rewards in the present,” said Volpp, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Volpp and colleagues studied two kinds of incentive programs for weight loss: One was a lottery-based design in which participants played a lottery and were allowed to collect their winnings if they met their weight-loss target; the other was a deposit contract, in which participants invested a small amount of their own money – between 1 cent and $3 per day – which they would lose at the end of the month if they failed to reach their goals. People in the lottery incentive groups lost far more weight than those who got no pay for their efforts, with about half of the participants in each group meeting their weight loss goals. People who were enticed with money earned a total of $378.49 and lost about 13 pounds (5.9 kg), while people in the deposit group got $272.80 and lost 14 pounds (6.35 kg). Those in the control group, who were merely rewarded by better-fitting jeans, lost about 4 pounds after four months.

A new study is buttressing the widely held assumption that Black youths are getting a raw deal from the U.S. justice system. A recent report concludes that African-Americans suffer disproportionate arrest rates and tougher prison sentences than White youths. While Blacks under 17 years old comprise just 17 percent of the nation’s youths, they represent about 30 percent of those arrested, says the report, “Critical Condition: African American Youth in the Justice System,” released this month by the D.C.-based Campaign for Youth Justice. Get the rest at BET.com/News. 

An Alabama bank settles with Black customers. An Alabama bank has agreed to pay Black borrowers more than $185,000 in a settlement prompted by the U.S. Justice Department, which accused it of charging African-American customers higher mortgage rates than its White customers. The First Lowndes Bank will compensate Black customers for charging them more on mobile home loans. In addition to the $185,000 plus interest, Lowndes has also agreed to begin procedures to prevent racial discrimination in setting its interest rates and to train its employees in those procedures, The Associated Press reports.

Obama’s health plan could help more. A new analysis of the two very different presidential health plans of plans suggests that Se. Barack Obama’s plan has the best chance of helping more uninsured people. The report by the Commonwealth Fund, which sizes up the health plans of Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain, says Obama’s plan makes health care more affordable, accessible, efficient and is a better quality than McCain’s. Democrat Obama’s pan would cover 34 million of the nation’s 67 million uninsured people in 10 years, compared to 2 million covered under McCain’s plan, says the report. “It’s a plan that tries to deal in a serious way with the uninsured,” Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund, said of Obama’s plan in a telephone interview. “That is clearly a top priority. He doesn’t eliminate it, but in my view he cuts it in half over a 10-year period.” Obama’s plan seeks to build on the current employer-based insurance system, which now provides coverage to 160 million people, or more than 60 percent of the population under 65. His plan would require all employers except small businesses to either offer health insurance or contribute to the cost of coverage, reports The Chicago Tribune. It would replace the current individual insurance market with an insurance exchange in which small businesses and those without access to coverage could buy a private or public health plan with tax credits. The plan also eases qualifications for low-income families to be covered under Medicaid, the state-federal insurance program for the poor, and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Obama’s plan mirrors the one put forth earlier this year by the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund, which would also build on the current employer-based health system, the paper reports. McCain’s plan seeks to put health insurance into the hands of individuals by removing tax breaks for employer-paid health benefits and offering tax credits of $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families instead. “I think Sen. McCain’s plan is more concerned with health care costs and doing something about that through a market solution. It’s basically saying let’s have people buy their own insurance,’ Davis said. McCain would also ease state insurance restrictions and allow people to buy policies across state lines, and he would expand existing state high-risk pools for people who cannot get individual insurance because of health problems. Researchers at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center project McCain’s plan would reduce the number of uninsured people by 1.3 million in the first year at a cost $185 million. About 20 million people would lose their employer-sponsored coverage under McCain’s plan, but 21 million would gain coverage on the individual market.

Study says AIDS started a century ago. The AIDS virus has been circulating among people for about 100 years, decades longer than scientists had thought, a new study suggests. Genetic analysis pushes the estimated origin of HIV back to between 1884 and 1924, with a more focused estimate at 1908, reports The Associated Press. Previously, scientists had estimated the origin at around 1930. AIDS wasn’t recognized formally until 1981 when it got the attention of public health officials in the United States. The new result is “not a monumental shift, but it means the virus was circulating under our radar even longer than we knew,” says Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, an author of the new work. The results appear in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. Researchers note that the newly calculated dates fall during the rise of cities in Africa, and they suggest urban development may have promoted HIV’s initial establishment and early spread. Scientists say HIV descended from a chimpanzee virus that jumped to humans in Africa, probably when people butchered chimps. Many individuals were probably infected that way, but so few other people caught the virus that it failed to get a lasting foothold, researchers say. But the growth of African cities may have changed that by putting lots of people close together and promoting prostitution, Worobey suggested. “Cities are kind of ideal for a virus like HIV,” providing more chances for infected people to pass the virus to others, he said.