Grizzly bears pile on the fat every autumn. But in their obese state through hibernation, they don’t appear to suffer health consequences like overweight humans do. Scientists in eastern Washington are trying to figure out why. A new study involving those bears may yield insights into possible therapies for human obesity and diabetes.Michael Werner: Plump. Pudgy. Portly. Call them what you will, but for grizzlies, being fat is being happy.Heiko Jansen, Associate Professor, Washington State University: They’re sort of OCD eaters in the fall. They will consume so much of that that they're putting on nearly 10 pounds a day. If you translate that to pizzas, it’s about 16 large pepperoni pizzas a day.Werner: For humans, this kind of weight gain could cause some serious health problems like heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes. But grizzlies have trouble surviving without it.Jansen:  All their focus is on, is eating. It’s just born out of necessity. If they don’t have enough fat, they won’t survive hibernation. Brutal lesson to learn, if you’re a bear.

Werner: Grizzly bears can easily double their body fat in the lead up to hibernation. Some of the brown behemoths here at Washington State University's Bear Center will reach more than 700 pounds!Wild bears developed the ability to hibernate as a way to survive winter, when food is scarce. The fat they store up over the summer and fall fuels them through their six to seven month slumber.And during that time, their bodies change in surprising and incredible ways.Joy Erlenbach, WSU Bear Center Manager: They don’t eat or drink or urinate or defecate during the hibernating season. The bear’s metabolism decreases drastically. Their heart rate drops from somewhere around 60 beats per minute to much lower, maybe around 10 beats per minute.

Werner:  But perhaps the most remarkable adaptation during hibernation is that the bears become diabetic, or something that looks a lot like it. Their bodies become resisitant to insulin, a hormone that regulates blood sugar.Jansen: What we see in bears looks very similar to what happens in diabetic humans. The big difference, though, the bears transition into and out of that state every year. So they exhibit a reversible, if you want to call it, diabetic state. Which is not something that’s very easy to do for humans.Werner: Heiko Jansen studies seasonal changes in grizzlies, with help from the biotech giant Amgen, he is trying to solve the mystery of how the bears make this switch. The answer could one day lead to a treatment for human diabetes.But to study this phenomenon you need access to hibernating bears, and the WSU bear center is the only place in the world where captive grizzlies hibernate.

Jansen: We know so little about bear physiology that every time we generate a hypothesis, it’s almost invariably rejected because we just know so little. And despite our best efforts, the questions we ask are almost always answered in a very different way than we expected.Werner: Many of these bears were nuisance animals rescued from the wild. And studying a wild 700-pound grizzly is no picnic.Jansen: The bears are not something you can mess with. Even trained bears will rear their ugly heads at time, unpredictably. So we have to work with them in a protected environment and very, very carefully.Erlenbach: The bear center has worked to train bears because, if we can work with trained bears, we can avoid the need to anesthetize them to do simple procedures like blood draws and echocardiograms.Erlenbach: We feed the bears honey when we’re doing voluntary blood draws because they like it and it’s a way to reward them for working with us and it’s also a way to keep their mouth occupied. As soon as we start feeding them honey, we can ask them to sit, and we can ask them to lay down, and then we can ask them to stick out their foot and then they’ll stick their foot out through one of the slats in the crate and we’ll be able to do a voluntary blood draw that way.

Werner:  But not every bear is so accommodating. Some have to be tranquilized.Erlenbach:  We’ll load up a darting pistol with the drug that we’ll use to anesthetize the animal, and we’ll use that to inject the drug into the animal, and then a few minutes later, the bear will basically fall asleep.Werner:  Researchers can then draw blood and take tissue samples. The key to understanding how beras switch in and out of a diabetic state may lie in the bear's fat cells. Here in Jansen's lab they're growing grizzly fat cells, hoping to get an up-close look at the mechanism that allows grizzlies to go from being diabetic to non-diabetic, and back again.

Jansen: Our hypothesis is that it’s occurring at the fat cell, so we wanted to work with those cells directly. Somewhere within that cellular molecular machinery is a mechanism that can explain this switch. I think ultimately the hope of everyone is that we would be able to treat diabetes. Of course we all realize that it’s a very long shot and we’re working with exotic species that have mechanisms that we don’t fully understand, but insulin seems to do similar things in the bear that it does to people, and thereby understanding those mechanisms could allow diabetics to overcome their disease.Jansen: Studying the bears has forced us to rethink so many things not only about our biology but their biology. We’re understanding and learning more every day.Werner: As long as food is involved, the bears at the center are happy to help.This was first reported for the KCTS9 program, IN Close, which airs throughout Western and Central Washington Thursdays at 7 p.m.

Since recent studies have surfaced about the detriments of sitting all day at a desk, the modern day office has hatched all sorts of ideas to help out employees, like standing desks, telecommuting and treadmill desks. But as it turns out, walking while working is just another fad.

A new study out of Oregon State University found that while treadmill desks can help overweight or obese employees, the increase of activity only has limited results, and in the end, it doesn't help workers get their daily dose of exercise.

John Schuna, an assistant professor of exercise and sports science at OSU, determined that employees could increase the daily steps by 1,000 with the treadmill desk, but none experienced any significant weight loss or changes in their body mass index during the 12-week experiment.

"Treadmill desks aren't an effective replacement for regular exercise, and the benefits of the desks may not justify the cost and other challenges that come with implementing them," said Schuna in a statement.

The experiment included 40 participants with half using treadmill desks. Treadmill desk users walked about 1.8 miles an hour, so that they could still focus on their tasks. Researchers concluded increasing daily steps don't replace the benefits of moderate to vigorous exercise.

The Portland Veterans Administration will receive nearly $34 million dollars to increase staffing at its facilities around Oregon and Southwest Washington.

The Portland VA will use the funds to hire an additional 200 medical personnel.

Daniel Herrigstad, a spokesman with the agency, said the money comes with strict guidelines.

“It’s specifically earmarked toward hiring direct patient care staff to improve the access for veterans for primary care, mental health and specialty care services," he said.

The positions are especially helpful because the Portland VA is the fastest growing facility of its kind in the country, Herrigstad said.

“The average rate of growth for new veterans coming into a facility nationwide is below two percent, I believe it’s about 1.7 percent, so we’re over three times the growth rate," he said.

The federal funds are part of the Choice Act, which President Obama signed into law last August.

The hundreds of thousands of Oregonians who signed up for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act last year, are younger and healthier than expected -- according to a new study out of the state.

The age and health of new Oregon Health Plan enrollees is important, because on average a population is more expensive to care for if it's older and sicker.

But Lori Coyner with the Oregon Health Authority says the 380,000 Oregonians who were added to Medicaid last year, tended to be young and healthy.

"The biggest jump has been in the age 19 to 35 and then 35 to people in their 50s," said Coyner. "They do not have, it appears, a lot of what's called 'pent-up demand,' meaning that they are very sick and they haven't seen a doctor."

Other parts of the report show Oregon's Coordinated Care Organizations continue to see a decrease in ER visits and fewer hospital re-admissions. That has helped the bottom line, keeping the average cost of care below what it was 2011.