Public Health

In Hollywood period pieces, ancient Egypt is disturbingly western-looking actresses rolling out of carpets in magnificent palaces. The reality seems to be different, even for the elites. Governors and commoners alike suffered from hunger and malnutrition, a whole range of infectious diseases and an extremely high infant mortality rate, according to the Qubbet el-Hawa research project carried out by the University of Jaen, in which anthropologists from the Supreme Council of Antiquities of the Arab Republic of Egypt and the University of Granada sought to separate truth from legend. It…

Being an overweight, lazy person is bad in lots of ways: Epidemiologists estimate that about 80 percent of the most common diseases are linked to being severely overweight and leading a sedentary lifestyle. Obese people are at an increased risk for cardiovascular diseases, vascular diseases, hypertension, diabetes and cancer. Al this lowers their life expectancy.  Weight loss and physical activity help to counteract this. Women who lose weight lower their breast cancer risk while regular physical activity lowers the risk of developing breast, colorectal and cervical cancers.  The…

Deleting a specific gene in mice prevents them from becoming obese  - even on a high fat diet, according to a  two-year study funded by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture and published in the Journal of Lipid Research. The research team created a strain of mice without the Plin2 gene which produces a protein that regulates fat storage and metabolism. They immediately found that the mice were resistant to obesity. Usually, mice fed a high fat diet will eat voraciously, yet these showed an unusual restraint. Not only did they eat less, they were…

If your children stump you with 'cite your data' claims on why they need to eat leafy green vegetables, even though we got to the top of the food chain so we wouldn't have to do that, here is good news; a new study found that that an immune cell population essential for intestinal health could be controlled by leafy greens in your diet. The immune cells, named innate lymphoid cells (ILCs), are found in the lining of the digestive system and produce a hormone called interleukin-22 (IL-22), which can protect the body from invading bacteria and play an important role in controlling food…

And the obesity wars drone on: it’s the sugar, it’s the fat, it’s the paucity of playgrounds, it’s the prevalence of too-thin models and TV and gaming and chips and texting. It’s the lack of parental discipline and self-restraint. But wait: what if we accepted that “the environment”--the catch-all phrase for the above--just can’t be changed, or at least not fast enough to make a difference? And what if we just accepted that people will, by and large, continue to do as their genetic backgrounds direct them: eat as much as they can, and move as little as they must? Slowly that heretical notion…

Obesity rates across Canada are at alarming levels and continuing to climb, according to a new paper in the Canadian Journal of Public Health, which provides the first comprehensive look at adult obesity rates across Canada since 1998 - complete with "obesity maps." The Maritimes and the two Territories had the highest obesity rates from 2000 to 2011 – more than 30 percent of the population in those regions is estimated to be obese. British Columbia had the lowest overall rates, but obesity still increased from less than 20 percent to almost 25 percent. Rates in Quebec remained below 24…

The English know they drink too much alcohol, but they all think it is someone else doing it. In actuality, as many as 75% of people in England are drinking in excess of the recommended daily alcohol limit, according to a new paper in the European Journal of Public Health. The scholars investigated the potential public health implications related to the under-reporting of alcohol consumption. International surveys have shown that self-reported alcohol consumption only accounts for between 40 and 60 per cent of alcohol sales- that discrepancy reveasl the potential impact of this 'missing'…

I'm generally critical of raw milk, along with just about every microbiologist and all of the scientists in the CDC and FDA. The reason is simple; it has no beneficial value and foodborne illness plummeted once we started pasteurizing milk and other things. I drank raw milk as a kid. I lived on a farm. As a result there were lots of things I was exposed to that would make a city dweller sick. For that reason, and because my anecdote is not evidence, I think raw milk is a bad idea, especially in the hands of those weird fad food people, who are putting kids at risk. We won't let parents harm…

Living against our biological clock, working late-night shifts or eating at inappropriate times, can has been linked to health risks like metabolic syndrome, obesity, and diabetes in Current Biology - at least for mice.  Insulin action rises and falls according to a 24-hour, circadian rhythm, the researchers write. Mice unable to keep the biological time for one reason or another get stuck in an insulin-resistant and obesity-prone mode.  They took measurements of insulin in mice at different hours to reveal a regular pattern. Normal mice become insulin resistant during the day, when…

In some Chinese cities, breathing has recently become demonstrably hazardous to your health.  According to the US embassy's monitoring station, air pollution has skipped over unhealthy, exceeded hazardous, and gone straight to " crazy bad".  No, literally.   A "crazy bad" category was programmed into the system's automated twitter feed, presumably assuming it would never be triggered.  "Crazy bad" has now been rebranded as the more reassuring "beyond index".  Whatever you call it, the extreme smog is not only crazy bad for Chinese, it's hurting those across the…