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anonymous

Arsenic in Rice: of Baby and Bath Water - 0 views

health.usnews.com/...in-rice-of-baby-and-bath-water

health arsenic

shared by anonymous on 01 Oct 12 - Cached
  • Arsenic is an element present in the earth's crust. There would likely be some of it in ground water even without the human activities that traumatize that crust in a variety of ways, but not enough to threaten health. Our various activities that have moved both rocks and water, from mining to drilling wells into aquifers, have resulted in significant mobilization of arsenic from rock into ground water.
  • Arsenic comes in two forms, organic and inorganic.
  • Organic arsenic, which is present in foods in very small amounts, is probably non-toxic, and may even be an essential trace element.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Inorganic arsenic is certainly a toxin, as was made famous in the movie, Arsenic and Old Lace. It is the primary variety released from rocks into water, and the main concern for human health.
  • Attention to arsenic in the environment by the Environmental Protection Agency, and in our food by the FDA, can only be a good thing, advancing food safety. Eating a variety of whole grains, for those without reasons to avoid them such as gluten sensitivity, is good for health in general—and may also reduce arsenic intake.
  • But inevitably, when a peril in our food or medicine cabinet or environment is pointed out to us, it invites the hyperbole of concentrated media attention, an inclination to invoke conspiracy theories, and at least some temptation to panic. When we do give in to panic, we tend to jettison the baby along with the bath water, resulting in net harm.
  • 1. Don't make perfect the enemy of good.
  • since we can't have perfectly pure food, the operative question in the real world is: Which of the available choices are best for health?
  • The presence of a contaminant in food does not reliably indicate that eating the food is harmful.
  • Similarly, there is more arsenic in brown rice than white, but the health benefits of eating a whole grain may outweigh that.
  • 2. Don't exaggerate a risk just because you don't control it.
  • We have known for decades that the four leading causes of chronic disease and premature death in industrialized countries are smoking, poor dietary pattern, lack of physical activity, and obesity. Yet these four are routinely ignored or neglected by people who get very worked up over the latest chemical threat in our food or environment.
  • We should not ignore big risks just because they are under our control, nor exaggerate much smaller ones simply because they are not.
  • 3. New in the news is not new in the world.
  • The tendency when a chemical threat is highlighted in the news is to think the threat itself is new, and the consequences are unknown, and in the future. But if arsenic in rice or other foods does actually contribute to cancer risk, it has been doing so for years.
  • the notion that there is a spike in cancer or other disease rates looming around the next bend is misguided; we are already around that bend, and any harms of arsenic are already part of the epidemiologic landscape we know.
  • Perfectly pure food is, alas, not available on this planet. So those of us living here should focus on net health effects rather than the media hype du jour, and do the best we can with the food supply we've got.
  • anonymous on 01 Oct 12
     
    "Predictably, there was widespread media attention to a recent release by Consumer Reports highlighting contamination of rice by arsenic. In customary "consumer watchdog" fashion, Consumer Reports presented a long list of popular consumer products, from cooking rice, to rice cakes, to breakfast cereal, and most worrisome, baby food, with arsenic levels in each. The story was covered extensively by the major network news programs."
anonymous

Ten Great Public Health Achievements-United States, 2001-2010 - 1 views

jama.ama-assn.org/...36.full

layscience public health US

shared by anonymous on 09 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 09 Jul 11
     
    "During the 20th century, life expectancy at birth among U.S. residents increased by 62%, from 47.3 years in 1900 to 76.8 in 2000, and unprecedented improvements in population health status were observed at every stage of life.1 In 1999, MMWR published a series of reports highlighting 10 public health achievements that contributed to those improvements. This report assesses advances in public health during the first 10 years of the 21st century. Public health scientists at CDC were asked to nominate noteworthy public health achievements that occurred in the United States during 2001-2010. From those nominations, 10 achievements, not ranked in any order, have been summarized in this report." July 6, 2011, 306 (1): 36 - JAMA
anonymous

David Berreby - The obesity era - 0 views

www.aeonmagazine.com/...david-berreby-obesity-era

shared by anonymous on 27 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • And so the authorities tell us, ever more loudly, that we are fat — disgustingly, world-threateningly fat. We must take ourselves in hand and address our weakness. After all, it’s obvious who is to blame for this frightening global blanket of lipids: it’s us, choosing over and over again, billions of times a day, to eat too much and exercise too little. What else could it be? If you’re overweight, it must be because you are not saying no to sweets and fast food and fried potatoes. It’s because you take elevators and cars and golf carts where your forebears nobly strained their thighs and calves. How could you do this to yourself, and to society?
  • Hand-in-glove with the authorities that promote self-scrutiny are the businesses that sell it, in the form of weight-loss foods, medicines, services, surgeries and new technologies.
  • And so we appear to have a public consensus that excess body weight (defined as a Body Mass Index of 25 or above) and obesity (BMI of 30 or above) are consequences of individual choice.
  • ...42 more annotations...
  • Higher levels of female obesity correlated with higher levels of gender inequality in each nation Of course, that’s not the impression you will get from the admonishments of public-health agencies and wellness businesses.
  • Yet the scientists who study the biochemistry of fat and the epidemiologists who track weight trends are not nearly as unanimous as Bloomberg makes out. In fact, many researchers believe that personal gluttony and laziness cannot be the entire explanation for humanity’s global weight gain.
  • As Richard L Atkinson, Emeritus Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Wisconsin and editor of the International Journal of Obesity, put it in 2005: ‘The previous belief of many lay people and health professionals that obesity is simply the result of a lack of willpower and an inability to discipline eating habits is no longer defensible.’
  • Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets.
  • As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas.
  • In fact, the researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased.
  • ‘Virtually in every population of animals we looked at, that met our criteria, there was the same upward trend,’ he told me.
  • It isn’t hard to imagine that people who are eating more themselves are giving more to their spoiled pets, or leaving sweeter, fattier garbage for street cats and rodents. But such results don’t explain why the weight gain is also occurring in species that human beings don’t pamper, such as animals in labs, whose diets are strictly controlled. In fact, lab animals’ lives are so precisely watched and measured that the researchers can rule out accidental human influence
  • On the contrary, the trend suggests some widely shared cause, beyond the control of individuals, which is contributing to obesity across many species.
  • In rich nations, obesity is more prevalent in people with less money, education and status. Even in some poor countries, according to a survey published last year in the International Journal of Obesity, increases in weight over time have been concentrated among the least well-off. And the extra weight is unevenly distributed among the sexes, too.
  • To make sense of all this, the purely thermodynamic model must appeal to complicated indirect effects.
  • The story might go like this: being poor is stressful, and stress makes you eat, and the cheapest food available is the stuff with a lot of ‘empty calories’, therefore poorer people are fatter than the better-off. These wheels-within-wheels are required because the mantra of the thermodynamic model is that ‘a calorie is a calorie is a calorie’: who you are and what you eat are irrelevant to whether you will add fat to your frame. The badness of a ‘bad’ food such as a Cheeto is that it makes calorie intake easier than it would be with broccoli or an apple.
  • Yet a number of researchers have come to believe, as Wells himself wrote earlier this year in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, that ‘all calories are not equal’.
  • The problem with diets that are heavy in meat, fat or sugar is not solely that they pack a lot of calories into food; it is that they alter the biochemistry of fat storage and fat expenditure, tilting the body’s system in favour of fat storage.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 27 Aug 13
       
      RELEVANT.
  • if the problem isn’t the number of calories but rather biochemical influences on the body’s fat-making and fat-storage processes, then sheer quantity of food or drink are not the all-controlling determinants of weight gain. If candy’s chemistry tilts you toward fat, then the fact that you eat it at all may be as important as the amount of it you consume.
  • More importantly, ‘things that alter the body’s fat metabolism’ is a much wider category than food. Sleeplessness and stress, for instance, have been linked to disturbances in the effects of leptin, the hormone that tells the brain that the body has had enough to eat.
  • If some or all of these factors are indeed contributing to the worldwide fattening trend, then the thermodynamic model is wrong.
  • According to Frederick vom Saal, professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri, an organic compound called bisphenol-A (or BPA) that is used in many household plastics has the property of altering fat regulation in lab animals.
  • BPA has been used so widely — in everything from children’s sippy cups to the aluminium in fizzy drink cans — that almost all residents of developed nations have traces of it in their pee. This is not to say that BPA is unique.
  • Contrary to its popular image of serene imperturbability, a developing foetus is in fact acutely sensitive to the environment into which it will be born, and a key source of information about that environment is the nutrition it gets via the umbilical cord.
  • The 40,000 babies gestated during Holland’s ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1944-1945 grew up to have more obesity, more diabetes and more heart trouble than their compatriots who developed without the influence of war-induced starvation.
  • It’s possible that widespread electrification is promoting obesity by making humans eat at night, when our ancestors were asleep
  • consider the increased control civilisation gives people over the temperature of their surroundings.
  • Temperatures above and below the neutral zone have been shown to cause both humans and animals to burn fat, and hotter conditions also have an indirect effect: they make people eat less.
  • A study by Laura Fonken and colleagues at the Ohio State University in Columbus, published in 2010 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported that mice exposed to extra light (experiencing either no dark at all or a sort of semidarkness instead of total night) put on nearly 50 per cent more weight than mice fed the same diet who lived on a normal night-day cycle of alternating light and dark.
  • A virus called Ad-36, known for causing eye and respiratory infections in people, also has the curious property of causing weight gain in chickens, rats, mice and monkeys.
  • xperiments by Lee Kaplan and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston earlier this year found that bacteria from mice that have lost weight will, when placed in other mice, apparently cause those mice to lose weight, too.
  • These theories are important for a different reason. Their very existence — the fact that they are plausible, with some supporting evidence and suggestions for further research — gives the lie to the notion that obesity is a closed question, on which science has pronounced its final word.
  • It might be that every one of the ‘roads less travelled’ contributes to global obesity; it might be that some do in some places and not in others. The openness of the issue makes it clear that obesity isn’t a simple school physics experiment.
  • obesity is like poverty, or financial booms and busts, or war — a large-scale development that no one deliberately intends, but which emerges out of the millions of separate acts that together make human history.
  • In Wells’s theory, the claim that individual choice drives worldwide weight gain is an illusion — like the illusion that individuals can captain their fates independent of history. In reality, Tolstoy wrote at the end of War and Peace (1869), we are moved by social forces we do not perceive, just as the Earth moves through space, driven by physical forces we do not feel. Such is the tenor of Wells’s explanation for modern obesity. Its root cause, he proposed last year in the American Journal of Human Biology, is nothing less than the history of capitalism.
  • In a capitalistic quest for new markets and cheap materials and labour, Europeans take control of the economy in the late 18th or early 19th century. With taxes, fees and sometimes violent repression, their new system strongly ‘encourages’ the farmer and his neighbours to stop growing their own food and start cultivating some more marketable commodity instead – coffee for export, perhaps. Now that they aren’t growing food, the farmers must buy it. But since everyone is out to maximise profit, those who purchase the coffee crop strive to pay as little as possible, and so the farmers go hungry. Years later, when the farmer’s children go to work in factories, they confront the same logic: they too are paid as little as possible for their labour. By changing the farming system, capitalism first removes traditional protections against starvation, and then pushes many previously self-sufficient people into an economic niche where they aren't paid enough to eat well.
  • Eighty years later, the farmer’s descendants have risen out of the ranks of the poor and joined the fast-growing ranks of the world’s 21st-century middle-class consumers, thanks to globalisation and outsourcing. Capitalism welcomes them: these descendants are now prime targets to live the obesogenic life (the chemicals, the stress, the air conditioning, the elevators-instead-of-stairs) and to buy the kinds of foods and beverages that are ‘metabolic disturbers’.
  • a past of undernutrition, combined with a present of overnutrition, is an obesity trap.
  • Wells memorably calls this double-bind the ‘metabolic ghetto’, and you can’t escape it just by turning poor people into middle-class consumers: that turn to prosperity is precisely what triggers the trap.
  • ‘Obesity,’ he writes, ‘like undernutrition, is thus fundamentally a state of malnutrition, in each case promoted by powerful profit-led manipulations of the global supply and quality of food.’
  • The ‘unifying logic of capitalism’, Wells continues, requires that food companies seek immediate profit and long-term success, and their optimal strategy for that involves encouraging people to choose foods that are most profitable to produce and sell — ‘both at the behavioural level, through advertising, price manipulations and restriction of choice, and at the physiological level through the enhancement of addictive properties of foods’ (by which he means those sugars and fats that make ‘metabolic disturber’ foods so habit-forming).
  • In short, Wells told me via email, ‘We need to understand that we have not yet grasped how to address this situation, but we are increasingly understanding that attributing obesity to personal responsibility is very simplistic.’ Rather than harping on personal responsibility so much, Wells believes, we should be looking at the global economic system, seeking to reform it so that it promotes access to nutritious food for everyone.
  • One possible response, of course, is to decide that no obesity policy is possible, because ‘science is undecided’. But this is a moron’s answer: science is never completely decided; it is always in a state of change and self-questioning, and it offers no final answers. There is never a moment in science when all doubts are gone and all questions settled,
  • which is why ‘wait for settled science’ is an argument advanced by industries that want no interference with their status quo.
  • Faced with signs of a massive public-health crisis in the making, governments are right to seek to do something, using the best information that science can render, in the full knowledge that science will have different information to offer in 10 or 20 years.
  • Today’s priests of obesity prevention proclaim with confidence and authority that they have the answer. So did Bruno Bettelheim in the 1950s, when he blamed autism on mothers with cold personalities. So, for that matter, did the clerics of 18th-century Lisbon, who blamed earthquakes on people’s sinful ways. History is not kind to authorities whose mistaken dogmas cause unnecessary suffering and pointless effort, while ignoring the real causes of trouble. And the history of the obesity era has yet to be written.
  • anonymous on 27 Aug 13
     
    "For the first time in human history, overweight people outnumber the underfed, and obesity is widespread in wealthy and poor nations alike. The diseases that obesity makes more likely - diabetes, heart ailments, strokes, kidney failure - are rising fast across the world, and the World Health Organisation predicts that they will be the leading causes of death in all countries, even the poorest, within a couple of years. What's more, the long-term illnesses of the overweight are far more expensive to treat than the infections and accidents for which modern health systems were designed. Obesity threatens individuals with long twilight years of sickness, and health-care systems with bankruptcy."
anonymous

Jon Stewart to Christie, 'If you have cancer and don't have health insurance, that's Sa... - 0 views

www.politicususa.com/insurance-hurricane-sandy.html

shared by anonymous on 07 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • On The Daily Show, Chris Christie claimed there was a difference between disaster relief and setting up the health insurance exchange. Jon Stewart replied, ‘If you have cancer and don’t have health insurance, that’s Hurricane Sandy.’
  • Christie said that he vetoed the health insurance exchange because he wasn’t sure how much it would cost his state. Stewart pointed out that the government didn’t stonewall Christie on disaster relief by asking for all the details first. Gov. Christie replied, “The difference is that here, we have people in New Jersey who are in a crisis situation that could not be anticipated. And from my perspective, the federal government’s always stood up for that proposition, whether it’s Katrina, Ike, Gustav, they’ve come forward and done that, so they are not doing anything different here. Stewart said, “Here my point, and this is where I part ways with the Republican Party in an enormous way. If you have cancer and don’t have health insurance, that’s Hurricane Sandy.” Gov. Christie said that not having a state exchange is not the same as not having coverage. Stewart made a broader philosophical observation about the Republican Party, “It always seems to me that for the Republican Party. If it’s not something they need, it’s an entitlement of the forty seven percent that are sucking things out of the government. But when they need it, there’s all the reasons in the world it should be there to the tune of thirty billion dollars.” Christie said that he was representing all of New Jersey, while dancing around the idea of priorities. Stewart expanded on his point, “The philosophy that I always seem to see from them is things that other people need are entitlements. Things that they need are things that should be done quickly and immediately…They have empathy for things that affect them, but have a hard time seeing the picture that other people are suffering.”
  • Chris Christie dodged Stewart’s point that Republicans appear to have an inconsistent set of priorities. They are all about the federal government when they need something, but the federal government is bad when they try to extend healthcare coverage. How would Christie like it if the federal government told New Jersey that no disaster relief would be released until the exact cost was known? Christie didn’t want to tell Stewart the truth. Last month the Koch Brothers warned him not to set up the health insurance exchange. His veto had everything to do with trying to get back into the good graces of the right wing billionaires who will be critical to his 2016 presidential campaign. Christie doesn’t want his “brand” tarnished by working with the Obama administration on the health insurance exchanges. That’s what this is really about. The Republican governors who are taking an ideological stand against these exchanges are hurting the people of their states. I believe that the state/federal partnership option would be the most effective. States should at least have a hand in running these programs, because local and state governments understand the needs of their residents and are in the best position to efficiently run these exchanges. But when Republican governors put partisan politics or presidential aspirations ahead of doing what’s right for their states, the result is a muddled and inconsistent philosophy like Chris Christie’s. Jon Stewart was right. For the uninsured who are dying everyday, their illness is their Sandy. Chris Christie doesn’t want to say this, but he’d rather be president than help the uninsured get the best care possible.
  • anonymous on 07 Dec 12
     
    "Gov. Christie said that not having a state exchange is not the same as not having coverage. Stewart made a broader philosophical observation about the Republican Party, "It always seems to me that for the Republican Party. If it's not something they need, it's an entitlement of the forty seven percent that are sucking things out of the government. But when they need it, there's all the reasons in the world it should be there to the tune of thirty billion dollars.""
anonymous

Health care reform: A simple explanation, updated - 0 views

politifact.com/...orm-simple-explanation-updated

healthcare layscience scientificadmin partisan politics

shared by anonymous on 16 Apr 10 - Cached
  • The Senate bill does not require employers to offer insurance, but it does impose taxes on employers if they don't offer insurance and their employees qualify for new health insurance tax credits.
  • regulate the exchanges so that insurance companies couldn't discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, or charge wildly different amounts for similar coverage.
  • Insurers would have to cover preventive care, and they wouldn't be able to cut off coverage unfairly or set annual limits on benefits.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • expands eligibility for insurance programs like Medicaid and the state Children's Health Insurance Program. All poor people would qualify for Medicaid.
  • People who don't buy insurance would have to pay a penalty on their taxes. Under the Senate bill, the share of legal nonelderly residents with insurance coverage is expected to rise from about 83 percent currently to about 94 percent.
  • promote standardized electronic health records
  • A comparative effectiveness research center would conduct and publish scientific research to find which treatments are the most effective.
  • the new rules aim to pay doctors for good patient outcomes instead of paying them per procedure, also called "fee-for-service."
  • For the large group market, the CBO found that rates would either stay the same or decline slightly. For the small group market, rates would essentially stay the same as well. The individual market is a more complicated story
  • Covering millions of people who are now uninsured would cost billions more per year.
  • Critics say the Democratic plans would lead to health care rationing.
  • The public option is an insurance plan run by the government that individuals can choose over private insurance.
  • The more generous the benefits, the higher the costs.
  • The House measure put more restrictions on how insurers could offer coverage for abortion services.
  • the CBO warns that it's very difficult to put dollar figures on many of these things, because of the size of the health care industry and the inherent unpredictability of major policy changes over many years.
  • It's good to keep in mind that when it comes to health care reform, no one has a crystal ball.
  • anonymous on 16 Apr 10
     
    From Politifact. A basic explanation.
anonymous

In defence of equality - 0 views

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/...in-defence-of-equality

society layscience

shared by anonymous on 17 Aug 10 - Cached
  • In our book The Spirit Level, Kate Pickett and I demonstrated that, first, many problems which are more prevalent lower down the social ladder are worse in societies with bigger income differences, and second, that almost everyone would benefit from reduced inequality.
  • Writing in the August 2010 edition of Prospect, Matthew Sinclair from the Taxpayers Alliance claimed our research was “simply untrue.”
  • While Snowdon is described as a “public health researcher,” in actual fact he has no public health qualifications and appears never to have published research in a peer-reviewed journal. Instead, his main contribution to public health is a diatribe against tobacco control and a denial of the ill effects of second-hand smoke.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • What The Spirit Level shows is that more equal societies enjoy better physical and mental health, lower homicide rates, fewer drug problems, fewer teenage births, higher maths and literacy scores, higher standards of child wellbeing, less bullying in schools, lower obesity rates, and fewer people in prison.
  • This left us with 23 rich market societies. We took our data from the best sources, such as the World Health Organisation, the United Nations and the World Bank. To double-check our findings, we then repeated our analyses for the 50 US states, to see if more unequal states showed the same consistent tendency to have more of these health and social problems. In almost 30 different cross-national analyses, we show the same tendency for one problem after another to be significantly worse in societies with bigger income differences.
  • Our critics also ignore the fact that these relationships have been widely demonstrated by other researchers. For example, as early as 1993 in the Criminal Justice Review, Hsieh and Pugh reviewed 34 studies of income inequality and violent crime and found a consistent correlation between the two—the authors estimated that it would need 58 new studies which found no effect in order to overturn this result. But studies since then have continued to confirm the link.
  • Similarly, our review of research papers published in peer-reviewed journals found that the tendency for health to be worse in more unequal societies has been demonstrated well over 100 times (see Social Science and Medicine, 2006).
  • anonymous on 17 Aug 10
     
    "In response to recent criticism, the authors of The Spirit Level defends its claim that there is always a link between social problems and inequality." By Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett at Prospect Magazine on August 10, 2010.
anonymous

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...8269

layscience science criticalthinking data

shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 10 - Cached
  • or whatever reason, the appendices removed from patients with Albanian names in six Greek hospitals were more than three times as likely to be perfectly healthy as those removed from patients with Greek names.
  • One of the researchers, a biostatistician named Georgia Salanti, fired up a laptop and projector and started to take the group through a study she and a few colleagues were completing that asked this question: were drug companies manipulating published research to make their drugs look good?
  • Just as I was getting the sense that the data in drug studies were endlessly malleable, Ioannidis, who had mostly been listening, delivered what felt like a coup de grâce: wasn’t it possible, he asked, that drug companies were carefully selecting the topics of their studies—for example, comparing their new drugs against those already known to be inferior to others on the market—so that they were ahead of the game even before the data juggling began?
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • Maybe sometimes it’s the questions that are biased, not the answers,” he said, flashing a friendly smile.
  • That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research.
  • He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong.
  • He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed.
  • “I take all the researchers who visit me here, and almost every single one of them asks the tree the same question,” Ioannidis tells me, as we contemplate the tree the day after the team’s meeting. “‘Will my research grant be approved?’” He chuckles, but Ioannidis (pronounced yo-NEE-dees) tends to laugh not so much in mirth as to soften the sting of his attack. And sure enough, he goes on to suggest that an obsession with winning funding has gone a long way toward weakening the reliability of medical research.
  • “I assumed that everything we physicians did was basically right, but now I was going to help verify it,” he says. “All we’d have to do was systematically review the evidence, trust what it told us, and then everything would be perfect.” It didn’t turn out that way. In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings. Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.
  • “I realized even our gold-standard research had a lot of problems,” he says.
  • This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was. “The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”
  • Perhaps only a minority of researchers were succumbing to this bias, but their distorted findings were having an outsize effect on published research.
  • In 2005, he unleashed two papers that challenged the foundations of medical research.
  • He chose to publish one paper, fittingly, in the online journal PLoS Medicine, which is committed to running any methodologically sound article without regard to how “interesting” the results may be. In the paper, Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time.
  • The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views.
  • sure, a lot of dubious research makes it into journals, but we researchers and physicians know to ignore it and focus on the good stuff, so what’s the big deal? The other paper headed off that claim.
  • Ioannidis was putting his contentions to the test not against run-of-the-mill research, or even merely well-accepted research, but against the absolute tip of the research pyramid. Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable. That article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
  • When a five-year study of 10,000 people finds that those who take more vitamin X are less likely to get cancer Y, you’d think you have pretty good reason to take more vitamin X, and physicians routinely pass these recommendations on to patients. But these studies often sharply conflict with one another. Studies have gone back and forth on the cancer-preventing powers of vitamins A, D, and E; on the heart-health benefits of eating fat and carbs; and even on the question of whether being overweight is more likely to extend or shorten your life. How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.
  • the odds are that in any large database of many nutritional and health factors, there will be a few apparent connections that are in fact merely flukes, not real health effects—it’s a bit like combing through long, random strings of letters and claiming there’s an important message in any words that happen to turn up.
  • But even if a study managed to highlight a genuine health connection to some nutrient, you’re unlikely to benefit much from taking more of it, because we consume thousands of nutrients that act together as a sort of network, and changing intake of just one of them is bound to cause ripples throughout the network that are far too complex for these studies to detect, and that may be as likely to harm you as help you.
  • nd these problems are aside from ubiquitous measurement errors (for example, people habitually misreport their diets in studies), routine misanalysis (researchers rely on complex software capable of juggling results in ways they don’t always understand), and the less common, but serious, problem of outright fraud (which has been revealed, in confidential surveys, to be much more widespread than scientists like to acknowledge).
  • And so it goes for all medical studies, he says. Indeed, nutritional studies aren’t the worst. Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest. The exciting links between genes and various diseases and traits that are relentlessly hyped in the press for heralding miraculous around-the-corner treatments for everything from colon cancer to schizophrenia have in the past proved so vulnerable to error and distortion, Ioannidis has found, that in some cases you’d have done about as well by throwing darts at a chart of the genome.
  • Though scientists and science journalists are constantly talking up the value of the peer-review process, researchers admit among themselves that biased, erroneous, and even blatantly fraudulent studies easily slip through it.
  • The ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly retest each other’s results—except they don’t. Only the most prominent findings are likely to be put to the test, because there’s likely to be publication payoff in firming up the proof, or contradicting it.
  • Of those 45 super-cited studies that Ioannidis focused on, 11 had never been retested. Perhaps worse, Ioannidis found that even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades. He looked at three prominent health studies from the 1980s and 1990s that were each later soundly refuted, and discovered that researchers continued to cite the original results as correct more often than as flawed—in one case for at least 12 years after the results were discredited.
  • Medical research is not especially plagued with wrongness. Other meta-research experts have confirmed that similar issues distort research in all fields of science, from physics to economics (where the highly regarded economists J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang once showed how a remarkably consistent paucity of strong evidence in published economics studies made it unlikely that any of them were right).
  • Ioannidis initially thought the community might come out fighting. Instead, it seemed relieved, as if it had been guiltily waiting for someone to blow the whistle, and eager to hear more. David Gorski, a surgeon and researcher at Detroit’s Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, noted in his prominent medical blog that when he presented Ioannidis’s paper on highly cited research at a professional meeting, “not a single one of my surgical colleagues was the least bit surprised or disturbed by its findings.” Ioannidis offers a theory for the relatively calm reception. “I think that people didn’t feel I was only trying to provoke them, because I showed that it was a community problem, instead of pointing fingers at individual examples of bad research,” he says. In a sense, he gave scientists an opportunity to cluck about the wrongness without having to acknowledge that they themselves succumb to it—it was something everyone else did.
  • The irony of his having achieved this sort of success by accusing the medical-research community of chasing after success is not lost on him, and he notes that it ought to raise the question of whether he himself might be pumping up his findings.
  • “If I did a study and the results showed that in fact there wasn’t really much bias in research, would I be willing to publish it?” he asks. “That would create a real psychological conflict for me.” But his bigger worry, he says, is that while his fellow researchers seem to be getting the message, he hasn’t necessarily forced anyone to do a better job. He fears he won’t in the end have done much to improve anyone’s health. “There may not be fierce objections to what I’m saying,” he explains. “But it’s difficult to change the way that everyday doctors, patients, and healthy people think and behave.”
  • What they’re not trained to do is to go back and look at the research papers that helped make these drugs the standard of care.
  • Tatsioni doesn’t so much fear that someone will carve out the man’s healthy appendix. Rather, she’s concerned that, like many patients, he’ll end up with prescriptions for multiple drugs that will do little to help him, and may well harm him. “Usually what happens is that the doctor will ask for a suite of biochemical tests—liver fat, pancreas function, and so on,” she tells me. “The tests could turn up something, but they’re probably irrelevant. Just having a good talk with the patient and getting a close history is much more likely to tell me what’s wrong.” Of course, the doctors have all been trained to order these tests, she notes, and doing so is a lot quicker than a long bedside chat. They’re also trained to ply the patient with whatever drugs might help whack any errant test numbers back into line.
  • patients often don’t even like it when they’re taken off their drugs, she explains; they find their prescriptions reassuring.
  • “Researchers and physicians often don’t understand each other; they speak different languages,” he says. Knowing that some of his researchers are spending more than half their time seeing patients makes him feel the team is better positioned to bridge that gap; their experience informs the team’s research with firsthand knowledge, and helps the team shape its papers in a way more likely to hit home with physicians.
  • Already feeling that they’re fighting to keep patients from turning to alternative medical treatments such as homeopathy, or misdiagnosing themselves on the Internet, or simply neglecting medical treatment altogether, many researchers and physicians aren’t eager to provide even more reason to be skeptical of what doctors do—not to mention how public disenchantment with medicine could affect research funding.
  • “If we don’t tell the public about these problems, then we’re no better than nonscientists who falsely claim they can heal,” he says. “If the drugs don’t work and we’re not sure how to treat something, why should we claim differently? Some fear that there may be less funding because we stop claiming we can prove we have miraculous treatments. But if we can’t really provide those miracles, how long will we be able to fool the public anyway? The scientific enterprise is probably the most fantastic achievement in human history, but that doesn’t mean we have a right to overstate what we’re accomplishing.”
  • being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 10
     
    "Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors-to a striking extent-still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science." By David H. Freedman at The Atlantic on November 2010.
anonymous

4 Bad Justifications For Detoxing - 0 views

www.burnthefatblog.com/...ustifications-for-detoxing.php

shared by anonymous on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • For the sake of this article, I’ll use the terms “cleanse” and “detox” interchangeably as any dietary strategy that employs strict rules on eating or drinking – usually involving the elimination of many foods/drinks/substances and/or involves fasting or the addition of special supplements for a period of time.
  • 1.  want to rid my body of toxins:
  • The word “toxin” itself is largely misunderstood and misrepresented by peddlers of cleansing plans.  They keep things intentionally obscurantist when it comes to the precisely what they mean by “toxins” for good reason.   Making specific claims ie. “Our sooper-dooper clenz™ removes polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons”, would place a specific burden of proof on the manufacturer.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • 2. I just need a weight loss “boost”:
  • Will subsisting on ridiculously low amounts of calories for days on end “boost” weight loss?  Very likely, yes.  Your likelihood of keeping it off, however… almost zero.  Prolonged periods of sizeable caloric deficits will force your body to slow down and conserve energy. 
  • I don’t care what supplements/herbs/juices you are taking, there is no substitute for getting adequate calories from good old-fashioned food.
  • 3.  I’ve been eating like crap/boozing too much:
  • Along with our aforementioned “instant/quick fix” mentality, we as a westernized culture are poster children for all-or-nothing thinking.  We think we can atone for dietary sins by going on strict plans.  The problem is that it simply doesn’t work.
  • 4. It makes me feel WONDERFUL!
  • these feelings are both short-lived and deceptive.  I would first contend that people who feel “energized” and “happy” are falling victim to the power of suggestion and the placebo effect.
  • Psychology aside, there may be some short-lived physiological effects of cleansing.  If we think about how most people eat on a day-to-day basis (read: highly processed, empty calorie), ANY half-way drastic eating changes could trigger warm-and-fuzzy, high energy feelings.  The reality, however is that consuming very low calories and/or protein for any extended period will sooner or later bring your energy levels to a grinding halt.
  • How to “detox” without really “detoxing”. 
  • anonymous on 19 Nov 13
     
    "One of the most nonsensical (not to mention irritating) trends in health is "cleansing" or "detox" programs.  They exist in abundance in health circles and can be found everywhere - usually touted as a panacea for any given health problem.  From bookshelves to yoga studios to multi-level marketing campaigns, "cleanses" remain the most prominent socially accepted eating disorder of today."
anonymous

Would Tort Reform Lower Costs? - 0 views

prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/...reform-lower-health-care-costs

politics healthcare

shared by anonymous on 17 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Q. But critics of the current system say that 10 to 15 percent of medical costs are due to medical malpractice. A. That’s wildly exaggerated. According to the actuarial consulting firm Towers Perrin, medical malpractice tort costs were $30.4 billion in 2007, the last year for which data are available. We have a more than a $2 trillion health care system. That puts litigation costs and malpractice insurance at 1 to 1.5 percent of total medical costs. That’s a rounding error. Liability isn’t even the tail on the cost dog. It’s the hair on the end of the tail.
  • Q. What about Senator John Kerry’s assertion that it’s “doable” to rid the system of frivolous lawsuits? A. I guess it’s doable because there aren’t very many frivolous suits.
  • anonymous on 17 Oct 10
     
    "On "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," Senators Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, and John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, seemed to agree that medical malpractice lawsuits are driving up health care costs and should be limited in some way. "We've got to find some way of getting rid of the frivolous cases, and most of them are," Mr. Hatch said. "And that's doable, most definitely," Mr. Kerry replied. But some academics who study the system are less certain. One critic is Tom Baker, a professor of law and health sciences at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law and author of "The Medical Malpractice Myth," who believes that making the legal system less receptive to medical malpractice lawsuits will not significantly affect the costs of medical care. He spoke with the freelance writer Anne Underwood." By Anne Underwood at The New York Times on August 13, 2009.
anonymous

Debunking the Hunter-Gatherer Workout - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-hunter-gatherer-workout.html

health fitness nytimes

shared by anonymous on 28 Aug 12 - Cached
  • Many in public health believe that a major culprit is our sedentary lifestyle. Faced with relatively few physical demands today, our bodies burn fewer calories than they evolved to consume — and those unspent calories pile up over time as fat.
  • This is a nice theory. But is it true? To find out, my colleagues and I recently measured daily energy expenditure among the Hadza people of Tanzania, one of the few remaining populations of traditional hunter-gatherers. Would the Hadza, whose basic way of life is so similar to that of our distant ancestors, expend more energy than we do?
  • Our findings, published last month in the journal PLoS ONE, indicate that they don’t, suggesting that inactivity is not the source of modern obesity.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • We found that despite all this physical activity, the number of calories that the Hadza burned per day was indistinguishable from that of typical adults in Europe and the United States. We ran a number of statistical tests, accounting for body mass, lean body mass, age, sex and fat mass, and still found no difference in daily energy expenditure between the Hadza and their Western counterparts.
  • How can the Hadza be more active than we are without burning more calories? It’s not that their bodies are more efficient, allowing them to do more with less: separate measurements showed that the Hadza burn just as many calories while walking or resting as Westerners do.
  • We think that the Hadzas’ bodies have adjusted to the higher activity levels required for hunting and gathering by spending less energy elsewhere. Even for very active people, physical activity accounts for only a small portion of daily energy expenditure; most energy is spent behind the scenes on the myriad unseen tasks that keep our cells humming and our support systems working.
  • Our findings add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that energy expenditure is consistent across a broad range of lifestyles and cultures. Of course, if we push our bodies hard enough, we can increase our energy expenditure, at least in the short term. But our bodies are complex, dynamic machines, shaped over millions of years of evolution in environments where resources were usually limited; our bodies adapt to our daily routines and find ways to keep overall energy expenditure in check.
  • All of this means that if we want to end obesity, we need to focus on our diet and reduce the number of calories we eat, particularly the sugars our primate brains have evolved to love. We’re getting fat because we eat too much, not because we’re sedentary. Physical activity is very important for maintaining physical and mental health, but we aren’t going to Jazzercise our way out of the obesity epidemic.
  • anonymous on 28 Aug 12
     
    "DARWIN isn't required reading for public health officials, but he should be. One reason that heart disease, diabetes and obesity have reached epidemic levels in the developed world is that our modern way of life is radically different from the hunter-gatherer environments in which our bodies evolved. But which modern changes are causing the most harm?"
anonymous

BPA Receipts Bombshell: Paper Slips Contain High Levels of Bisphenol A - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/763_162-20011903-10391704.html

health layscience

shared by anonymous on 28 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Animal tests have linked BPA exposure to a range of health problems, including cancer, obesity, diabetes, and early puberty. The studies are controversial though, and how they related to human health is not fully clear, according to WebMD.
  • If you're worried about being exposed to the cancer-causing compound BPA, you may already know to be wary of some water bottles and food cans. But you'll never guess where BPA, a.k.a. bisphenol A, is showing up now:Cash register receipts.
  • anonymous on 28 Jul 10
     
    "...you'll never guess where BPA, a.k.a. bisphenol A, is showing up now: Cash register receipts." By Aina Hunter at CBS News Health Blog on July 28, 2010.
anonymous

Despite highest health spending, Americans' life expectancy falls behind other countries' - 0 views

www.labspaces.net/..._falls_behind_other_countries_

layscience nutrition

shared by anonymous on 07 Oct 10 - Cached
  • While the U.S. has achieved gains in 15-year survival rates decade by decade between 1975 and 2005, the researchers discovered that other countries have experienced even greater gains, leading the U.S. to slip in country ranking, even as per capita health care spending in the U.S. increased at more than twice the rate of the comparison countries.
  • When the researchers compared risk factors among the 13 countries, they found very little difference in smoking habits between the U.S. and the comparison countries—in fact, the U.S. had faster declines in smoking between 1975 and 2005 than almost all of the other countries.
  • In terms of obesity, researchers found that, while people in the U.S. are more likely to be obese, this was also the case in 1975, when the U.S. was not so far behind in life expectancy.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "But what really surprised us was that all of the usual suspects—smoking, obesity, traffic accidents, homicides, and racial and ethnic diversity are not the culprits. The U.S. doesn't stand out as doing any worse in these areas than any of the other countries we studied, leading us to believe that failings in the U.S. health care system, such as costly specialized and fragmented care, are likely playing a large role in this relatively poor performance on improvements in life expectancy."
  • anonymous on 07 Oct 10
     
    "America continues to lag behind other nations when it comes to gains in life expectancy, and commonly cited causes for our poor performance-obesity, smoking, traffic fatalities and homicide-are not to blame, according to a study by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. " At Lab Spaces on October 7, 2010.
anonymous

Food Allergy and Intolerance - 0 views

www.patient.co.uk/...food-allergy-and-intolerance

shared by anonymous on 17 Jul 14 - Cached
  • With a food allergy, there is an abnormal reaction of the body's immune system to a particular food.
  • Food intolerance happens because the body has difficulty digesting certain substances in food, or because certain substances have a direct effect on the body in some way.
  • Some allergic reactions are mild and harmless, but others are severe and potentially life-threatening (anaphylaxis).
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • (See separate leaflets called Allergy - General Overview and Anaphylaxis for more information.)
  • A food allergy is an abnormal reaction of the body's immune system to a particular food.
  • The acute, sudden-onset reactions tend to be caused by antibodies called immunoglobulin E (IgE).
  • A food intolerance is NOT the same as a food allergy. Many people incorrectly use the words interchangeably. A food allergy is when the body's immune system reacts abnormally to specific foods. No allergic reaction takes place with a food intolerance.
  • People with a food intolerance may get digestive symptoms such as diarrhoea, bloating and stomach cramps.
  • Lactose intolerance This causes diarrhoea and abdominal symptoms (bloating and pain) after milk is drunk or dairy products are eaten.
  • Direct effects of foods and additives Certain foods and chemicals in foods may directly affect the body and cause symptoms.
  • Food avoidance Some people, especially children, may develop physical symptoms such as feeling sick and diarrhoea if they eat, or are offered, foods they have come to dislike.
  • Also, many people incorrectly assume symptoms they have are due to food intolerances when in fact their symptoms are not due to food. Consequently, people commonly cut things out of their diet that they believe to be the cause of their problems. In itself this can lead to further problems. In summary, food intolerance often ends up being a rather vague term which is sometimes difficult to clarify.
  • The symptoms of food intolerance occur usually a few hours after eating the food. Allergic reactions happen much more quickly.
  • Food intolerances are never life-threatening. Some allergies are as they can cause anaphylaxis.
  • In the western world, 6-8 children in 100 and 3-4 adults in 100 are thought to have a food allergy. In the UK, 2 babies in 100 develop an allergy to protein in cow's milk (cow's milk protein allergy). The number of people with food allergies seems to be rising.
  • Symptoms
  • Symptoms of an allergic reaction can include: Atopic eczema (classical eczema) that is seen in allergy-prone (atopic) families - often those with hay fever and asthma too. Gastro-oesophageal reflux which is vomiting that is generally effortless. Loose and/or frequent stools (poo). Constipation. Blood or mucus in the stools. Redness around the anus. Tiredness. Pallor. Poor growth. This is often seen in children with a non-IgE food allergy. Young children, particularly those with digestive symptoms, should be regularly weighed. Weight should be plotted on a growth chart. This allows medical professionals such as GPs and health visitors to see if growth is slow.
  • Symptoms of a food intolerance vary widely and can include: Bloating and abdominal pain. Diarrhoea or loose stools (poo). Skin rashes and itching. Some of these symptoms are the same as those that can be caused by a non-IgE food allergy. So this shows how complicated it can be to determine whether you have an allergy or an intolerance.
  • Keeping a diary of what is eaten is a simple activity that can be helpful in some cases. You need to write down everything that is eaten, and any reaction to them. A food diary does not provide a diagnosis, but it does suggest which food(s) could be the culprit(s), allowing further tests.
  • Skin prick test. This is usually done in a specialist hospital allergy clinic. Because an anaphylactic reaction is possible, there needs to be access to resuscitation equipment including adrenaline.
  • Blood tests. Blood tests can detect if your blood contains specific IgE antibodies. So, if you had allergic reactions to peanuts, your blood might contain antibodies to peanuts.
  • If a non-IgE food allergy is suspected, elimination and challenge can be used to try to confirm the diagnosis of allergy. This is only really appropriate when it seems clear which foodstuff is causing the problem.
  • You may see many commercial companies offering allergy testing, particularly on the internet. Be very wary of these. The following tests have no medical evidence behind them - that is, they cannot be relied upon to give any accurate results.
  • The only real treatment for food allergy and intolerance is to avoid that food. This is very important if an anaphylactic reaction has occurred.
  • Dieticians are qualified health professionals. They can assess, diagnose and treat diet and nutrition problems.
  • Nutritionists and therapists are voluntarily registered and anyone can use the title.
  • f you have a food allergy or intolerance, after seeking medical advice, a dietician can be a useful person to see for further help and advice.
  • Coeliac disease is NOT a food allergy, nor is it a food intolerance. It is an autoimmune disease which means that the immune system (which normally protects the body from infections) mistakenly attacks itself.
  • anonymous on 17 Jul 14
     
    "Food allergy and food intolerance are NOT the same thing. With a food allergy, there is an abnormal reaction of the body's immune system to a particular food. This can range from a mild reaction to one that is severe and life-threatening (anaphylaxis). Food intolerance happens because the body has difficulty digesting certain substances in food, or because certain substances have a direct effect on the body in some way. Food intolerance can cause symptoms such as diarrhoea, bloating and stomach cramps. However, with food intolerance there is no allergic reaction and the immune system is not involved."
anonymous

Why you should starve yourself a little bit each day - 0 views

io9.com/...yourself-a-little-bit-each-day

shared by anonymous on 28 Jan 13 - Cached
  • While some might be inclined to cynically dismiss intermittent fasting as just another fad diet, the scientific evidence in support of daily fasting (or any fasting for that matter) is compelling.
  • anonymous on 28 Jan 13
     
    "We've been told since we were children that we need to eat three square meals a day. But new research shows that we don't need to be eating throughout the course of the day. And in fact, it might even be undermining our health. These insights have given rise to what's known as "intermittent fasting" - the daily restriction of meals and caloric intake. Here's why some health experts believe you should starve yourself just a little bit each day."
anonymous

Is Organic Food Really The Same As Conventional? - 0 views

summertomato.com/ganic-versus-conventional-food

shared by anonymous on 10 Sep 12 - Cached
  • Despite what organic zealots are telling you, this wasn’t a bad study. It was a meta-analysis that examined a number of relevant health measures comparing organic versus conventionally grown foods over the last several decades.
  • One problem is that the word “organic” is a huge umbrella that includes sustainable, biodynamic farming practices as well as huge-scale industrial operations that barely squeeze under the “certified organic” labeling standards. As a result there is a tremendous amount of heterogeneity (a scientific word for a wide range of differences) between the organic foods being tested, as well as the types of studies that are performed. As a result, it is difficult to measure consistent differences (aka statistical significance) between organic and conventional foods in this kind of study. Unfortunately, this doesn’t do much to further our understanding of how growing practices affect health.
  • The huge variance among farming practices that fit under the organic umbrella is not trivial.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Large organic farms are typically monoculture fields just like large conventional farms, though more crop rotation is required. Industrial organic poultry and beef farms also look oddly similar to conventional industrial feedlots, even if the animals are eating organic feed. In fact, both organic and conventional industrial farms are often owned by the same mega-corporations, and share the same bottom line of profit. There’s no reason to suspect that these industrial organic foods would be markedly more nutritious than conventionally grown foods.
  • Interestingly, despite the wide range in the quality of foods that qualify as organic, the Stanford study did find some significant differences. Organic produce contained significantly more phenols, the cancer fighting chemicals found in red wine, green tea, chocolate and many fruits and vegetables. However, this finding was glossed over in favor of the non-significant differences found between vitamin C, betacarotene and vitamin E levels in organic versus conventional foods.
  • Soil quality and weather (the raw ingredients) are by far the biggest factors in the nutrient levels of produce, with freshness and storage methods being next in line.
  • Indeed, organic agriculture typically has more minerals and the Stanford team confirmed they contain significantly more phosphorus. But there is so much variety among plants, and from season to season, that you shouldn’t necessarily expect large, consistent differences in the levels of common vitamins like C and E from genetically identical plants.
  • The Stanford study confirms organic agriculture has substantially fewer pesticide contaminations, but for some reason this finding was also glossed over since the conventional produce levels “didn’t exceed maximum allowed limits.” Logically, however, if limiting pesticide exposure is important to you (as it should be) organic produce is the better option.
  • The animal studies were even more encouraging. Small but significant improvements in fatty acid profiles were found for organic milk and chickens, which contained more healthy omega-3 fatty acids. More importantly, antibiotic resistant bacteria, the kind that are becoming more common (and deadly) in our own hospitals, were 33% more likely to be found on conventional meat products than on organic meat.
  • From this study it seems reasonable to conclude that organics, even industrial organics, are superior to conventional foods in some ways.
  • anonymous on 10 Sep 12
     
    "On Monday a study from scientists at Stanford made headlines by concluding that there isn't much health value in choosing organic food over conventional food. The headline didn't surprise me in the least, I've seen similar ones at least a dozen times before, but there is still so much confusion among the general public around this topic that it's worth revisiting in the wake of this new data."
anonymous

Europe's public health disaster: How austerity kills - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...h-disaster-how-austerity-kills

shared by anonymous on 10 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 10 Sep 13
     
    "Editor's note: UK political economist and epidemiologist David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, a U.S. physician and epidemiologist, have analyzed the consequences of economic crashes and crises on human health. The results were recently published under the title 'The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills.'"
anonymous

Why You Might Want to Rethink Going Gluten-Free - 3 views

gizmodo.com/k-going-gluten-free-1475646469

shared by anonymous on 11 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Gluten is a sticky, stretchable protein found in grains like wheat, barley, oats, and rye. Formed during the kneading process, gluten chains create a matrix that trap carbon dioxide bubbles produced by the fermenting yeast. This gives bread its chewiness, pizza dough its stretchiness, and acts as a thickening agent in dozens of products from salad dressing to soy sauce. Even beer contains a fair amount.
  • Gluten is a relatively new addition to the human diet. For a large portion of our species' evolution, humans subsisted primarily on animal protein supplemented with fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. It wasn't until the start of the Neolithic era—around 9500 BCE—and the transition to agriculture that we began consuming carbohydrates and gluten in the form of grains.
  • for the one in seven Americans that suffers from a sensitivity to gluten, consuming it can lead to severe intestinal distress.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • And even that discomfort is a walk in the park compared to what happens when someone who suffers from celiac disease—full blown gluten intolerance—eats the stuff.
  • For them, any amount of the protein will trigger a massive autoimmune response within the gut as the body's defenses attack gliadin, a glycoprotein found in gluten.
  • Once regarded as an rare digestive malady afflicting maybe 1 in 10,000 people worldwide, celiac disease is now considered one of the most common genetic disorders in the western world by the Center for Celiac Disease Research at the University of Maryland.
  • celiac disease affects an estimated 1 in 133 people in America alone.
  • celiac disease is far less common for Americans of African, Hispanic, and Asian descent—just 1 in 236.
  • this disease has shown a marked propensity to occur in combination with lactose intolerance, as well as with type 1 diabetes.
  • an increasing number of people have begun self-diagnosing as gluten sensitive
  • It's also been touted as a new-age cure-all for a number of maladies including migraines and fibromyalgia, though there is little scientific data to support such claims.
  • "There's no scientific evidence that it's better for you if you don't have celiac disease," Shilson told the Journal Sentinel.
  • As Shelley Case, R.D., author of Gluten-Free Diet: A Comprehensive Resource Guide and a medical advisory board member for the Celiac Disease Foundation, explained to Women's Health, without gluten to hold baked goods together, food manufacturers will often use fats and sugar instead.
  • That means, Case continued, going gluten-free can potentially increase your risk of developing a micronutrient deficiency
  • While there is no reliable means of testing for a gluten sensitivity, a simple blood test can determine whether or not someone suffers from celiac disease by identifying specific anti-gluten antibodies.
  • anonymous on 11 Dec 13
     
    "Going gluten-free is all the rage these days. It's the diet of choice for Hollywood starlets and health nuts alike; supermarket aisles are packed full of products touting their lack of the stretchy protein. But for a lot of people, the gluten-free lifestyle may do more harm than good."
anonymous

Why Americans Hate the Media - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...5060

media politics america

shared by anonymous on 14 Oct 10 - Cached
  • But while Jennings and his crew were traveling with a North Kosanese unit, to visit the site of an alleged atrocity by U.S. and South Kosanese troops, they unexpectedly crossed the trail of a small group of American and South Kosanese soldiers. With Jennings in their midst the Northern soldiers set up an ambush that would let them gun down the Americans and Southerners. What would Jennings do? Would he tell his cameramen to "Roll tape!" as the North Kosanese opened fire? What would go through his mind as he watched the North Kosanese prepare to fire? Jennings sat silent for about fifteen seconds. "Well, I guess I wouldn't," he finally said. "I am going to tell you now what I am feeling, rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself. If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans." Even if it meant losing the story? Ogletree asked. Even though it would almost certainly mean losing my life, Jennings replied. "But I do not think that I could bring myself to participate in that act. That's purely personal, and other reporters might have a different reaction."
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Oct 10
       
      This was a powerful moment that I *still* remember to this day.
  • Jennings was made to feel embarrassed about his natural, decent human impulse. Wallace seemed unembarrassed about feeling no connection to the soldiers in his country's army or considering their deaths before his eyes "simply a story."
  • Meet the Press, moderated by Tim Russert, is probably the meatiest of these programs. High-powered guests discuss serious topics with Russert, who worked for years in politics, and with veteran reporters. Yet the pressure to keep things lively means that squabbling replaces dialogue.
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • In the 1992 presidential campaign candidates spent more time answering questions from "ordinary people"—citizens in town-hall forums, callers on radio and TV talk shows—than they had in previous years. The citizens asked overwhelmingly about the what of politics: What are you going to do about the health-care system? What can you do to reduce the cost of welfare? The reporters asked almost exclusively about the how: How are you going to try to take away Perot's constituency? How do you answer charges that you have flip-flopped?
  • Earlier in the month the President's performance had been assessed by the three network-news anchors: Peter Jennings, of ABC; Dan Rather, of CBS; and Tom Brokaw, of NBC. There was no overlap whatsoever between the questions the students asked and those raised by the anchors. None of the questions from these news professionals concerned the impact of legislation or politics on people's lives. Nearly all concerned the struggle for individual advancement among candidates.
  • The CBS Evening News profile of Clinton, which was narrated by Rather and was presented as part of the series Eye on America, contained no mention of Clinton's economic policy, his tax or budget plans, his failed attempt to pass a health-care proposal, his successful attempt to ratify NAFTA, his efforts to "reinvent government," or any substantive aspect of his proposals or plans in office. Its subject was exclusively Clinton's handling of his office—his "difficulty making decisions," his "waffling" at crucial moments. If Rather or his colleagues had any interest in the content of Clinton's speech as opposed to its political effect, neither the questions they asked nor the reports they aired revealed such a concern.
  • When ordinary citizens have a chance to pose questions to political leaders, they rarely ask about the game of politics. They want to know how the reality of politics will affect them—through taxes, programs, scholarship funds, wars. Journalists justify their intrusiveness and excesses by claiming that they are the public's representatives, asking the questions their fellow citizens would ask if they had the privilege of meeting with Presidents and senators. In fact they ask questions that only their fellow political professionals care about. And they often do so—as at the typical White House news conference—with a discourtesy and rancor that represent the public's views much less than they reflect the modern journalist's belief that being independent boils down to acting hostile.
  • The subtle but sure result is a stream of daily messages that the real meaning of public life is the struggle of Bob Dole against Newt Gingrich against Bill Clinton, rather than our collective efforts to solve collective problems.
  • The natural instinct of newspapers and TV is to present every public issue as if its "real" meaning were political in the meanest and narrowest sense of that term—the attempt by parties and candidates to gain an advantage over their rivals.
  • when there is a chance to use these issues as props or raw material for a story about political tactics, most reporters leap at it. It is more fun—and easier—to write about Bill Clinton's "positioning" on the Vietnam issue, or how Newt Gingrich is "handling" the need to cut Medicare, than it is to look into the issues themselves.
  • Whether or not that was Clinton's real motive, nothing in the broadcast gave the slightest hint of where the extra policemen would go, how much they might cost, whether there was reason to think they'd do any good. Everything in the story suggested that the crime bill mattered only as a chapter in the real saga, which was the struggle between Bill and Newt.
  • "In some ways it's not even the point," she replied. What mattered was that Clinton "looked good" taking the tough side of the issue. No one expects Cokie Roberts or other political correspondents to be experts on controlling terrorism, negotiating with the Syrians, or the other specific measures on which Presidents make stands. But all issues are shoehorned into the area of expertise the most-prominent correspondents do have:the struggle for one-upmanship among a handful of political leaders.
  • When the Clinton Administration declared defeat in 1994 and there were no more battles to be fought, health-care news coverage virtually stopped too—even though the medical system still represented one seventh of the economy, even though HMOs and corporations and hospitals and pharmaceutical companies were rapidly changing policies in the face of ever-rising costs.
  • Health care was no longer political news, and therefore it was no longer interesting news.
  • In interviews and at the news conferences he conducted afterward Bradley did his best to talk about the deep problems of public life and economic adjustment that had left him frustrated with the political process. Each of the parties had locked itself into rigid positions that kept it from dealing with the realistic concerns of ordinary people, he said.
  • What turned up in the press was almost exclusively speculation about what the move meant for this year's presidential race and the party lineup on Capitol Hill. Might Bradley challenge Bill Clinton in the Democratic primaries? If not, was he preparing for an independent run? Could the Democrats come up with any other candidate capable of holding on to Bradley's seat? Wasn't this a slap in the face for Bill Clinton and the party he purported to lead? In the aftermath of Bradley's announcement prominent TV and newspaper reporters competed to come up with the shrewdest analysis of the political impact of the move. None of the country's major papers or networks used Bradley's announcement as a news peg for an analysis of the real issues he had raised.
  • Every one of Woodruff's responses or questions was about short-term political tactics. Woodruff asked about the political implications of his move for Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. Bradley replied that it was more important to concentrate on the difficulties both parties had in dealing with real national problems.
  • As soon as he finished, Woodruff asked her next question: "Do you want to be President?" It was as if she had not heard a word he had been saying—or couldn't hear it, because the media's language of political analysis is utterly separate from the terms in which people describe real problems in their lives.
  • Regardless of the tone of coverage, medical research will go on. But a relentless emphasis on the cynical game of politics threatens public life itself, by implying day after day that the political sphere is nothing more than an arena in which ambitious politicians struggle for dominance, rather than a structure in which citizens can deal with worrisome collective problems.
  • Fourteen prominent journalists, pollsters, and all-around analysts made their predictions
  • One week later many of these same experts would be saying on their talk shows that the Republican landslide was "inevitable" and "a long time coming" and "a sign of deep discontent in the heartland."
  • But before the returns were in, how many of the fourteen experts predicted that the Republicans would win both houses of Congress and that Newt Gingrich would be speaker? Exactly three.
  • As with medieval doctors who applied leeches and trepanned skulls, the practitioners cannot be blamed for the limits of their profession. But we can ask why reporters spend so much time directing our attention toward what is not much more than guesswork on their part.
  • useless distractions have become a specialty of the political press. They are easy to produce, they allow reporters to act as if they possessed special inside knowledge, and there are no consequences for being wrong.
  • The deadpan restraint with which Kurtz told this story is admirable. But the question many readers would want to scream at the idle correspondents is Why don't you go out and do some work?
  • Why not imagine, just for a moment, that your journalistic duty might involve something more varied and constructive than doing standups from the White House lawn and sounding skeptical about whatever announcement the President's spokesman put out that day?
  • The list could go on for pages. With a few minutes' effort—about as long as it takes to do a crossword puzzle—the correspondents could have drawn up lists of other subjects they had never before "had time" to investigate. They had the time now. What they lacked was a sense that their responsibility involved something more than standing up to rehash the day's announcements when there was room for them on the news.
  • How different the "Better safe than sorry" calculation seems when journalists are involved! Reporters and pundits hold no elected office, but they are obviously public figures. The most prominent TV-talk-show personalities are better known than all but a handful of congressmen.
  • If an interest group had the choice of buying the favor of one prominent media figure or of two junior congressmen, it wouldn't even have to think about the decision. The pundit is obviously more valuable.
  • Had Donaldson as a journalist been pursuing a politician or even a corporate executive, he would have felt justified in using the most aggressive reportorial techniques. When these techniques were turned on him, he complained that the reporters were going too far.
  • Few of his readers would leap to the conclusion that Will was serving as a mouthpiece for his wife's employers. But surely most would have preferred to learn that information from Will himself.
  • ABC News found that eight out of 10 approved of the president's speech. CBS News said that 74 percent of those surveyed said they had a "clear idea" of what Clinton stands for, compared with just 41 percent before the speech. A Gallup Poll for USA Today and Cable News Network found that eight in 10 said Clinton is leading the country in the right direction. Nielsen ratings reported in the same day's paper showed that the longer the speech went on, the larger the number of people who tuned in to watch.
  • The point is not that the pundits are necessarily wrong and the public necessarily right. The point is the gulf between the two groups' reactions. The very aspects of the speech that had seemed so ridiculous to the professional commentators—its detail, its inclusiveness, the hyperearnestness of Clinton's conclusion about the "common good"—seemed attractive and worthwhile to most viewers.
  • The difference between the "welcoming committee" and the congressional committees headed by fallen Democratic titans like Tom Foley and Jack Brooks was that the congressmen can be booted out.
  • Movies do not necessarily capture reality, but they suggest a public mood—in this case, a contrast between the apparent self-satisfaction of the media celebrities and the contempt in which they are held by the public.
  • the fact that no one takes the shows seriously is precisely what's wrong with them, because they jeopardize the credibility of everything that journalists do.
  • when all the participants then dash off for the next plane, caring about none of it except the money—when these things happen, they send a message. The message is: We don't respect what we're doing. Why should anyone else?
  • anonymous on 14 Oct 10
     
    "Why has the media establishment become so unpopular? Perhaps the public has good reason to think that the media's self-aggrandizement gets in the way of solving the country's real problems" By James Fallows at The Atlantic on February, 1996
anonymous

Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking, Study Says | TIME - 0 views

time.com/...may-age-you-as-much-as-smoking

shared by anonymous on 21 Oct 14 - Cached
  • anonymous on 21 Oct 14
     
    "Nobody would mistake sugary soda for a health food, but a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health just found that a daily soda habit can age your immune cells almost two years."
anonymous

Things We Don't Know: The beast with a billion backs: Part 1 - 0 views

blog.thingswedontknow.com/...with-billion-backs-part-1.html

shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • We like to think of ourselves in the singular, but the reality is we are a swirling composite of thousands of species, more accurately thought of as an ecosystem than as an individual.
  • There is the core ‘us’, the cells that contain our DNA. But we are also like the land on which a rich forest might grow
  • Together they are our ‘microbiome’.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • in return for shelter and a share of the spoils from our meals, some make vitamins, liberate nutrients and energy from food, and protect us from their pathogenic cousins. Millions of years of co-evolution with our microbial horde have forged this relationship, shaping us both in ways whose significance we’re still trying to understand.
  • One of the biggest problems in unpicking the microbiome’s relationship with health is working out if the changes and differences are a cause, an intermediate step, or a consequence of developing a disease.
  • separating our environment from disease is proving hard.
  • Crohns disease is a good example
  • we know a disrupted microbiota is one of its features.
  • But we can’t yet say for sure if this is the cause or the effect.
  • If it starts with our own physiology, then we need to investigate treatments targeted at those changes, but if it starts with the microbiome our treatments will be different.
  • With so many branches it’s perhaps no surprise that so many other organisms can call us ‘home’.
  • In the past we’ve been well served by the one-pathogen-one-disease model for tracking, monitoring and avoiding infectious diseases. But do beneficial, or harmless, bugs in the microbiome spread like pathogens? If not, how?
  • It is important to understand this because of the number of links between the microbiome and a number of diseases like diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, food allergies, and even obesity.
  • An improved picture of how our communities of microbes – good and bad – come together and move through populations could help us to develop interventions to significantly reduce, or prevent, the numbers of people with these conditions. Or, at the least, find ways to hobble this trend.
  • Understanding both the flow of microbes and the factors which influence it may also be important for any treatments we produce.
  • We’ve been manipulating our microbial ecosystems for years, both naturally through our immune systems and, perhaps more worryingly, through a weapon of microbial mass destruction: antibiotics.
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 13
     
    "This post is by freelance science writer Gavin Hubbard. Gavin originally trained as a Medical Biochemist at the University of Surrey and spent over 10 years working in biotechnology, immunology and clincal trials. He writes both for industry and for a general audience, with a focus on health, immunology and pathology. He blogs at Sciencehubb.co.uk and can be found on twitter as @GavinHub"
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