Public Health

With organic food a $105 billion industry juggernaut, various groups are looking to don that health halo. Even frozen food. If you don't think food can be "fresh" and "healthy" while still being frozen, you probably also do not believe organic food has more antioxidants and uses fewer pesticides and therefore are not the target market and you can stop reading. The Packaged Facts market research group wants to make sure its customers are not left behind as wealthy elites care more about food, so they have a silver lining in the otherwise stormy-for-regular-food organic movement and write it up…

Fear, Inc. is having a very big day on the New York Stock Exchange. It is up 45 percent on heavy volume. How could it not be? After all, the plastic component BPS (bis-(4-hydroxyphenyl) sulfone) — supposedly a safe replacement for bisphenol A (BPA) — isn’t looking so great after all.  BPA (bisphenol A) is a chemical so “deadly” that New York Times columnist Nick Kristof — presumably the most accomplished toxicological expert never to take a chemistry class — refuses to touch cash register receipts because they contain small amounts of the chemical. Kind of makes you wonder…

Most vitamin supplements have little value to most people - if you can afford them your diet is probably already fine - but they have even less value in energy drinks and vitamin waters, despite how aggressively companies promote belief that they boost immune support and have antioxidant properties and whatever else. A new paper in investigated the nutritional benefits of beverages  such as vitamin waters, energy drinks, and novel juices sold in Canadian supermarkets by assessing their micronutrient compositions. The claims about nutrient enrichment are extensive. On-…

An affordable vaccine that has all but rid the 'meningitis belt' of a major cause of deadly epidemics is now going to be available for infants all across sub-Saharan Africa.  One of the most devastating outbreaks ever recorded was in 1996-1997, when meningitis A epidemics infected more than 250,000 people and killed over 25,000 in just a few months. The only existing vaccine was insufficient to break the cycle. In the four years since its introduction in Africa, MenAfriVac has broken that cycle, and now it has been endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO) through its…

Making sure school-aged kids get to sleep at a regular hour is often a struggle for parents but it’s well worth the effort. The researchers behind a new paper say that a good night’s sleep is linked to better performance in math and languages – subjects that are powerful predictors of later learning and academic success. In findings published recently, the researchers reported that “sleep efficiency” is associated with higher academic performance in those key subjects. Sleep efficiency is a gauge of sleep quality that compares the amount of actual sleep time with the total time spent in bed.…

The face of addiction treatment is changing, and not for the better. Betty Ford and Hazelden have long been beacons of hope in the addiction treatment community, two well-known and respected centers that used 12-step treatment and abstinence based recovery to help thousands of people recover from addiction for decades. The Betty Ford Center and the Hazelden Foundation announced in 2013 that they were pursuing a “formal alliance” to become the nation’s largest nonprofit addiction treatment provider. Mainstream media outlets noticed the story but in general, the news did not gain the…

The obesity paradox - where obese people remain quite healthy - defies convenient epidemiological and nutritional thinking. But age catches up to us all. Everyone gets less healthy over time - age is the biggest risk factor for cancer, heart disease and just about everything else - but a new study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology tracked the health of more than 2,521 men and women for 20 years, aged between the ages of 39 and 62, and found that more than 51 percent of the healthy obese participants became unhealthy obese over the 20-year study period, while only…

A  study that  followed participants in a study of nurses established in 1989, which surveyed more than 116,000 participants about their diets and other health habits every two years, resulted in 69,247 women being followed for two decades and concluded that three-quarters of heart attacks in young women could be prevented if women closely followed six healthy lifestyle practices. Those ealthy habits were defined as not smoking, a normal body mass index, physical activity of at least 2.5 hours per week, watching seven or fewer hours of television a week, consumption of a maximum of…

It's never too late to start balancing the calorie ledger. rangizzz By Lee Hamilton, University of Stirling Like many high school students I completely misunderstood the philosopher Herbert Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest.” I interpreted it to mean that those animals of a species that were the most physically fit were most likely to survive and reproduce. What Spencer was actually proposing when he first coined the phrase in 1864 to explain Darwin’s theory of natural selection was that those organisms that best “fit” their environment are the most likely to survive and reproduce.…

Cardiovascular disease and the rather more vaguely-defined metabolic syndrome are major public health concerns throughout the developed world. A new paper in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology finds that Yoga, a popular mind-body practice, has value in improving cardio-metabolic health. The conclusion in their review of other papers makes sense. Doing any exercise for an hour a day will improve cardio-metabolic health. Yet some people are not going to get on a treadmill or go for walk so if the Eastern mysticism aspect gets their blood pumping, it can be considered as a…