Public Health

Currently recommended daily allowances of vitamin D may be insufficient in children, according to researchers at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.  Vitamin D is present in a few foods, milk is usually fortified with it and with enough exposure to sunlight the body naturally produces it. The scholars noted that children with suboptimal vitamin D blood levels did not reach optimal levels after taking nearly twice the recommended amount of the nutrient daily for six months. Vitamin D is important for calcium metabolism and bone…

Any discussion of carbohydrates in the diet must deal with the Atkins conception of weight loss, because it is so commonly used and it rests in the middle of the debate about the causes of weight gain. Anyone trying to figure out why we've become obese needs to decide, at some point, whether Atkins had the cause and effect of obesity and diabetes correct. It's easy to dismiss Dr. Atkins. His books are self-promoting (he named the diet, which pre-existed him by 150 years, after himself) and full of hyperbole: "Atkins is the most successful weight loss - and weight maintenance - program of the…

When you are a weight loss doctor, your friends and colleagues cannot help but comment on your work. Many conversations contain the question, "Isn't it all just....(carbs, laziness, fast food, inactivity, genes, fructose - fill in speculation here). I began to avoid the subject of my job like it was my dirty secret, but it came up fairly regularly nonetheless. Of the many completely wrong-headed things that non-obese people wonder, the one that came up most often was, "how does a  person let themselves get that way?" To really respond to that question would have required a discussion as…

A study of nearly 1,000 teens found that sexually active obese adolescents were significantly less likely to use contraception than normal weight peers, putting them at higher risk of unintended pregnancy. Obese adolescents who did use contraception were also less likely to use it consistently, according to the paper.  Researchers analyzed 26,545 weekly journal surveys measuring sexual practices and contraceptive use from a longitudinal study of 900 women ages 18-19 in Michigan. They examined the association between weight and sexual behaviors. "The U.S. teen pregnancy rate is one of the…

Most Americans have never heard of it, but according to new federal data, sepsis is the most expensive cause of hospitalization in the US. Sepsis is a complication of infection that leads to organ failure. One million patients are hospitalized for sepsis each year (across all types of health insurance). This is more than the number of hospitalizations for heart attack and stroke combined. Sepsis can be a particular risk for older people. In 2013 alone, 400,000 Medicare beneficiaries were hospitalized because of sepsis at a cost of US$5.5 billion. And it is deadly. Between one in eight and…

A vegan diet remains controversial because it is in defiance of our evolutionary mandate - it is unnatural in humans to only eat meat the same way it is in cats. But diets are popular for lots of reasons that defy scientific explanation and regardless of the evidence basis, they work. People who eat all meat, for example, lose weight, and people who eat only animal products lose weight. In most cases, it is because people who go on any diet tend to live healthier in multiple ways but a new review of 12 studies determined that people on a vegan diet lose around two kilograms more in the…

If you ask some people why they would never want to get divorced, they joke that they would not want to have to 'get back down to dating weight', but do married people really give up and get heavier? It seems to be just the opposite. Marriage is correlated with a positive influence on health and life expectancy. Researchers at the University of Basel and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, in cooperation with the market research institute GfK, compared the body mass index of married couples with that of singles in nine European countries and show that married couples on average…

We can blame smartphone alerts, constant connectivity and a deluge of media for sleep deprivation but that is talking about the symptoms rather than the disease. The root cause is instead the thing that has led to cultural and social improvements for over 100 years - artificial light. It is no secret that cheap energy is one of the great enablers of advanced culture. WIth cheaper energy we get more education, more wealth, more culture, and lower populations. That is why efforts to make energy more expensive, chasing the dream of lower emissions with subsidies and mandates for alternatives,…

When it comes to educating the public about all matters chemical, there is no one better than Dr. Joe Schwarcz, a wildly popular professor at McGill University in Montreal. "Dr. Joe," as his students call him, is one sharp dude. He has written about 20 books, given countless lectures, been on TV and radio hundreds of times, and even hosts his own weekly radio show. Joe is not wildly popular for no reason. I have heard him speak, and read enough of his articles, etc. to see why this is perfectly obvious. He is simply great. He is entertaining, eloquent, and possesses an absolute command of not…

In 2011–2012, the most recent years for which finalized data were available, public health officials from 32 states and Puerto Rico reported 90 recreational water–associated outbreaks to CDC's Waterborne Disease and Outbreak Surveillance System (WBDOSS) via the National Outbreak Reporting System (NORS). The 90 outbreaks resulted in at least 1,788 cases, 95 hospitalizations, and one death. Among 69 (77%) outbreaks associated with treated recreational water, 36 (52%) were caused by Cryptosporidium. Among 21 (23%) outbreaks associated with untreated recreational water, seven (33%) were caused…