Public Health

It is just about impossible to find any written entity that is essentially 100% incorrect. Yet, Vani Hari, formerly known "The Food Babe," (and henceforth as "The Food Boob") manages to come pretty damn close. It was a Herculean effort, and should be acknowledged as such. I have written about her before, concerning her infallible solution to maintaining a healthy diet—don't eat anything you can't spell. I thought at the time that this was about as bad as it gets, but her 2012 post "Are You Getting Conned By Cheap  &  Toxic Chocolate?" is making the rounds just in time for…

More than 20 million US adults have chronic kidney disease but a new study found that a Mediterranean-style diet may significantly reduce the risk of developing it.  Every one-point increase in a Mediterranean diet score was associated with a 17% decreased likelihood of developing chronic kidney disease and dietary patterns that closely resembled the Mediterranean diet were linked with a 50% reduced risk of developing chronic kidney disease and a 42% reduced risk of experiencing rapid kidney function decline.   There has been significant progress in protecting against kidney…

Measles is one of the most contagious of vaccine-preventable diseases, with the average person with measles capable of infecting 12-18 people if susceptible, and the contagiousness of measles infection highlights gaps in vaccination in the United States that have appeared over the last decade, because of skepticism about childhood vaccination in coastal states like California and Oregon and Washington. In those states, otherwise educated people worry that vaccines may cause autism and would prefer that other children provide herd immunity for theirs. Although indigenous circulation of…

It's great to insist that people should just accept science and medicine but it isn't really practical. The nature of coastal California is that they don't trust vaccines the way religious people in the American south do, Asians are going to believe in acupucture, and the French will think they can be allergic to Bt genetically modified plants but not Bt organic pesticide spray. Historically, culture has been considered an impediment to health rather than a central determining feature of it. However, a new paper in The Lancet makes the case that culture not only determines health – for…

Regular meditation along with a mindful lifestyle path can help individuals control and recover from many mental health disorders. Meditation is a practice of training the mind to induce another state of consciousness or bring attention to a particular point. Mindfulness refers to a psychological quality that involves bringing one’s complete attention to present experience on a moment-to-moment basis, in a specific way and nonjudgmentally. A recent study examined associations of mindfulness with mental health and the mechanisms of mindfulness in experienced meditators practicing…

It's not easy to blame childhood obesity on sunsets but scholars at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Bristol say that later daylight couldn't hurt - and they even defend daylight savings time, which most people can't find much good to say about. The scholars analyzed the lifestyles of over 23,000 children aged 5-16 years in nine countries; England, Australia, USA, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Switzerland, Brazil and Madeira and Portugal. They looked for associations between the time of sunset and physical activity levels, measured via waist-worn…

 Credit: Yamanaka Tamaki/Flickr By Meredith Knight, Genetic Literacy Project What’s the fastest expanding section at your local grocery store? Here in Austin, Texas, gluten-free foods, once relegated to a stand-alone display at the health food store, now take up half of an aisle at the big box store and are healthily represented in the frozen foods section. Companies are exponentially expanding their product selection to fill a rapidly increasing demand. Millions of people have adopted a gluten-free diet in the last fifteen years. This far exceeds the number of people that the healthcare…

Though the Centers for Disease Control has been a little confused about dealing with Ebola, Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness has guidelines for volunteers who want to help.  Some are obvious. If you deal with Ebola patients, quarantine yourself for a little while. People in the bowling alley don't need to know right now that you were with Doctors Without Borders and that you just got back from helping overseas. Common sense is needed, though The World Health Organization has asked for more volunteers to aid in the outbreak. More is not better if they are not trained and…

When obese children with asthma run out of breath it could be due to poor physical health related to weight, yet it is considered asthma often enough that there could be high and unnecessary use of rescue medications, finds a paper in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.  The researchers reviewed the lung function, treatment uses, symptom patterns, healthcare utilization, quality of life and caregiver perceptions of asthma-related quality of life in overweight/obese children with asthma (BMI ≥ 85th percentile) and lean counterparts (BMI 20-65th percentile). In total 58…

In a new study, researchers have shown that shutting off the blood supply to an arm or leg before cardiac surgery protects the heart during the operation. The research group wanted to see how the muscle of the left chamber of the heart was affected by a technique, called RIPC (remote ischemic preconditioning), during cardiac surgery. RIPC works by shutting off the blood supply to an arm or a leg before heart surgery. The goal is to reduce risk during cardiac surgery in the future. The technique is not new, but its effects have never before been tested directly on the left chamber of the…