New York City has launched an advertising campaign against soft drinks and sugar, which brings to mind a time when the Senate was considering a nationwide tax on all sugared drinks.
Here is their first video from the campaign of a man eating sugar packets.
Here’s what we’re checking out today:
HuffPo Health: Orac of the Respectful Insolence blog opines on the new Huffington Post health section, and it’s not pretty: “A soon-to-be one-stop shop for quackery.”
I’ve spent years covering health and medicine, and because I teach kids, I’m especially aware of the public health gospel: Control your diet, exercise, and if you smoke, stop.
But the person who’s really taught me about healthy living is my Aunt Nicole.
They are neighborhoods where a wilting head of lettuce costs two or three times as much as a dollar meal. Where fast-food spots litter the landscape but the nearest supermarket is miles away. "Shopping local" in these communities means buying food at a convenience store or a gas station where limited shelf life restricts choices to calorie-dense, highly processed foods with little nutritional value. Fried food abounds; fresh food is near impossible to find.
Elizabeth Forer is the chief executive officer and executive director of the Venice Family Clinic, the largest free clinic in the nation, which provides services to 23,000 patients a year at seven locations. Before joining the Venice Family Clinic in 1994, she served for five years as executive director of Settlement Health and Medical Services, a nonprofit community health center in East Harlem, New York. She also directed a department at Metropolitan Hospital in New York City. Ms. Forer is a California HealthCare Foundation Health Leadership Fellow.
Health authorities have declared the United States on alert, in response to increasing cases of type 2 diabetes in the country. Official reports refer to a threat of major proportions that makes a state of emergency public health, so much so that there is already talk of an emerging epidemic. The most affected are children and members of minorities, particularly Hispanics.
Have you ever gone in for an oil change and left with the suspicion that the mechanics didn’t do anything beyond opening your hood?
Anemona Hartocollis at The New York Times has exposed this same type of behavior in a much more critical venue: a local hospital. She wrote:
Melvin Baron has spent his career educating the public about health and medicine, first as a pharmacist and then as a USC Associate Professor of Clinical Pharmacy. He’s 77 now, and he confesses to some frustration with the handouts that pharmacists and doctors use to inform patients about health and medicine.
“Much of what we give you is lousy,” he told me. “It’s a lot of words. Most of it is way above the audience. It doesn’t resonate and it’s boring.”
There are several ways to secure one’s genetic line for at least another generation.
One can court another person, marry (or not), mate and bask in the many joys of parenthood.
Folks born without the proper equipment or in relationships that don’t allow for simple reproduction can arrange for an egg donor, sperm donor or surrogate mother to help carry one’s genes to a daughter or a son. Parenthood is just as fun.
And then there is what someday may be dubbed the Ramaley method.
