Public Health

Want to see social inequality and how it impacts obesity? Look at takeout food in your neighborhood - and in the halls of Cambridge. Yet the halls of Cambridgee are where a new paper claims takeout food is an indicator of social inequality. Obviously elites at Cambridge have a long and cherished history to gaze upon, including one in which a feudal system made sure poor people were never overweight. Today, there is more equality than ever, poor people can afford to be fat, but the Cambridge scholars believe that even cheap food is a way of promoting oppression. The Centre for Diet and…

Last week the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) released a consensus statement on criteria for identifying endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) that could input to the European Commission’s mandate to develop and implement criteria for EDC identification as required by both the EU Plant Protection Products Regulation (PPPR) and Biocidal Products Regulation (BPR). As described by BfR, the statement was the result of a meeting of scientists who were convened by BfR, and who had previously publicly disagreed about the topic. Such disagreement among the experts was apparently…

A review of six studies that evaluated the effects of meat and vegetarian diets on mortality involving more than 1.5 million people concluded all-cause mortality is higher for those who eat meat, particularly red or processed meat, on a daily basis. The work by physicians from Mayo Clinic in Arizona published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association helps to affirm claims by the United Nations International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) claim that meat is a carcinogen as dangerous as plutonium or cigarette smoking. Despite variability in the data, they still conclude…

Rice and rice products are typical first foods for infants in some countries and a new study found that infants who ate rice and rice products had higher urinary arsenic concentrations than those who did not consume any type of rice. Infant rice cereal may contain inorganic arsenic concentrations that exceed the recommendation from the Codex Alimentarius Commission of the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations of 200 ng/g for polished white rice, the new European Union regulations of 100 ng/g for products aimed at infants, and the proposed U.…

Seven top international tobacco control experts are prompting regulators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to have a broad "open-minded" perspective when it comes to regulating vaporized nicotine products, especially e-cigarettes.  Writing in the journal Addiction, published online April 25, the researchers synthesize much of the evidence published to date on e-cigarettes, and suggest that use of these products can lead to reduced cigarette smoking overall with a potential reduction in deaths from cigarette smoking. The investigators include lead author David T. Levy, PhD,…

A 20 percent tax on sugar-sweetened drinks would result in widespread, long-lasting public health benefits and significant health cost savings, an estimated $400 million a year and reduce annual health expenditure by up to $29 million, according to a computer model. "Our modeling scoped the effects over the lifetime of adult Australians alive in 2010," says University of Queensland School of Public Health researcher Dr. Lennert Veerman. "We found there would be 800 fewer new Type 2 diabetes cases each year once the tax was introduced. After 25 years, about 1600 fewer deaths would occur…

Public Health England (PHE), the UK governmental body the equivalent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), says that its review of the evidence has found that e-cigarettes are 95 percent less harmful to health than combustible cigarettes and they should be recommended for smoking cessation and harm reduction. This is the opposite stance taken by anti-smoking activists who have morphed into anti-nicotine activists, and demand that cigarette smokers engage in "abstinence only" when it comes to nicotine, an approach that works with almost nothing.  While there is…

Food should be labeled with the equivalent exercise to expend its calories to help people change their behavior, argues Shirley Cramer, Chief Executive at the Royal Society of Public Health, in The BMJ. Giving consumers an immediate link between foods' energy content and physical activity might help to reduce obesity, she believes. Two-thirds of the UK population either overweight or obese yet little evidence indicates that the current information on food and drink packaging, including traffic light labeling, actually changes behavior. No one obeys nutrition guidelines as dutifully as…

“What if you could cure all your health problems and lose 10 pounds in just 7 days? That’s an amazing claim, hard to believe for sure, but I have seen this miracle so many times in my practice that even I am starting to believe it!” Straight away, the words of Dr. Mark Hyman, sometime physician to Bill Clinton, talk-show regular and bestselling author, set off alarm bells. He’s promoting an “anti-inflammatory”, “detox” diet. Well, for two decades, I’ve been in the business of writing careful, evidence-based, often hype-busting stories about methods of improving health and treating disease,…

A new study has shown that people who reverse their Type 2 diabetes and then keep their weight down remain free of it - even if they have had it for up to 10 years. The study in Diabetes Care is part of a growing body of evidence showing that people with Type 2 diabetes who successfully lose weight can reverse their condition because fat is removed from their pancreas, returning insulin production to normal. Type II diabetes is something of a puzzle. Over 70 percent of severely obese people do not have diabetes at all while in the United States of America the American Diabetes…