Tag Archives: medicine

When Schools Serve Pizza and Corn Dogs for Lunch, These Companies Make Bank

by MauriciDoherty Posted on July 17, 2015

Mother Jones

It’s no secret that school lunch isn’t exactly healthy—Cheetos, Domino’s, and funnel cake are still fair game to serve to the millions of kids that receive free food under federal breakfast and lunch programs.

A report released this week by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine reveals which companies are profiting off of school meals. Schools buy a lot of their food, at very cheap rates, from the US Department of Agriculture—which in turn buys ingredients from private companies.

The report found that in 2013, the USDA bought over $500 million worth of food from 62 meat and dairy companies—and just six large companies accounted over half of those sales.

In addition to buying food from the USDA, schools can buy directly from private companies—and the meals have to comply with a set of regulations that went into effect last summer and require the meals to contain a certain amount of whole grains, fruits and veggies. Since then, a number of companies have reformulated their products to meet the minimum requirements, marketing supposedly nutritious options like corn dogs made with whole grain flour and antibiotic-free chicken tenders.

When the Physicians Committee reviewed ads targeting the School Nutrition Association (SNA), a professional organization representing the 55,000 school food service employees that decide which food to buy, they found that the ads were dominated by these faux-healthy foods. As they put it,

Of 106 ads for unhealthful meat and dairy products, 23 were full-page ads for Domino’s or Pizza Hut pepperoni pizza. Pizza is the number-two source of calories for children and adolescents ages 2-18, according to the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. It is also the second-leading source of saturated fat and the third-leading source of sodium.

A Domino’s ad in one issue of the magazine even urges “Help us take a slice out of cancer,” despite the fact that a daily serving of pepperoni or other processed meat is linked to colorectal cancer risk. Similarly, women who consume the most red meat during childhood are at higher risk for developing breast cancer.

Here are a few examples of ads for “healthy” foods—pizza, mozzarella sticks, and corn dogs—from SNA’s School Nutrition magazine, which came out in advance of the organization’s annual conference.

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When Schools Serve Pizza and Corn Dogs for Lunch, These Companies Make Bank

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Actually, It Turns Out That November Is the Cruelest Month

by ZWMKlarazzttn Posted on June 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve been wondering why my health collapsed so badly when I turned 55, and now Science™ has provided the answer. It’s because I was born in October, which lags only November for being the net riskiest birth month. Here’s the Washington Post:

Mary Regina Boland, Nicholas Tatonetti and other researchers at the Columbia University Department of Medicine examined records for an incredible 1.75 million patients born between 1900 and 2000 who had been treated at Columbia University Medical Center. Using statistical analysis, they combed through 1,688 different diseases and found 55 that had a correlation with birth month, including ADHD, reproductive performance, asthma, eye sight and ear infections.

The researchers emphasize that other environmental factors, like diet, medical care and exercise, are more likely to influence whether you get a disease. And since these numbers are culled from New York City, they may not be applicable to babies born in other places.

Culled only from New York City, huh? And it was just a massive data mining operation looking for correlations at the 95 percent level? This suggests you’d get 84 correlations just by chance. They got 55.

So….maybe not so impressive. Then again, this is all addressed in the paper, and it’s far too complicated for me to understand. I mean, what the hell is a “multiplicity correction using FDR (α_0.05, n_1688 conditions)”? Beats me. But everything in this paper is “FDR adjusted.” So maybe that means the correlations are legit. Perhaps someone who knows what this means can weigh in in comments.

In any case, if we believe this, it explains why my sister, brother, and mother are all healthy, while I’m a basket case. I was born in the wrong month. But on the plus side, I apparently have a lower than normal risk of cardiovascular diseases, including heart failure. Good to know.

POSTSCRIPT: Everyone gets that I’m just having fun here, right? Honestly, I haven’t the slightest idea of whether this stuff holds water. Still, everyone loves simple charts that put them and their friends in buckets, right?

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Actually, It Turns Out That November Is the Cruelest Month

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Younger You – Eric R. Braverman

by Myrna Posted on June 4, 2015

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Younger You

Unlock The Hidden Power Of Your Brain To Look And Feel 15 Years Younger

Eric R. Braverman

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: October 7, 2008

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education

Seller: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.


Break the aging code and feel 15 years younger—from the inside out.In the constant battle to stay young and feel fit, we will try any of the quick fixes that come on the market, including so-called miracle products, fad diets, trendy exercise programs, and untested supplements. Many even risk elective surgical procedures just to look young again. But you don&apos;t need surgery, pricey cosmetics, or starvation to look and feel 15 years younger. The secret to living a longer, more vibrant life has at last been discovered, and the proverbial fountain of youth is right in your hands. Discover how you can: Get a restful, restorative night&apos;s sleep and have energy that lasts all day long Lift your mood by increasing your natural hormone levels Improve your heart health with natural supplements, herbs, and spices Increase your muscle mass, boost your memory, build your bones, save your skin, and much more! Younger You has doctors talking …&quot;Younger You is an interesting and logical approach to preventing, diagnosing, and modifying the aging process. … Baby boomers will find much in these pages to protect and reassure them.” –Isadore Rosenfeld, M.D.Rossi Distinguished Professor of Clinical Medicine, New York Hospital Weil Cornell Medical Center, and author of Live Now, Age Later, Power to the Patient, and Doctor, What Should I Eat?&quot;Focusing on the critical role of hormones produced by the brain, Dr. Braver man outlines a totally integrative program to restore hormonal balance and thereby restore readers to a younger, healthier, and more vital self, regardless of chronological age.&quot;–Nicholas Perricone, M.D., FACN Bestselling author of 7 Secrets to Beauty, Health, and Longevity, The Perricone Weight-Loss Diet, The Perricone Promise, The Perricone Prescription, and The Wrinkle Cure &quot;Just as Dr. Braverman says, we are only as young as our oldest part. This book is not just for us, but for our children, who can make changes to their diet and lifestyle now and reap the rewards later.&quot;–David Perlmutter, M.D.Director, Perlmutter Health Center and author of The Better Brain Book.

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Younger You – Eric R. Braverman

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If Black People Lived As Long As White People, Election Results Would Be Very Different

by DaniellSpringer Posted on May 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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With the mortality rate for black Americans about 18 percent higher than it is for white Americans, premature black deaths have affected the results of US elections, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Oxford.

The study, published in Social Science & Medicine and highlighted on Friday by the UK-based New Scientist, shows how the outcomes of elections between 1970 and 2004—including the presidential race between John Kerry and George W. Bush—might have been affected if there hadn’t been such a disparity in the death rate. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 8.5 million black people died during that 35-year period. But if the mortality rates had been comparable, an additional 2.7 million black people would have been alive, and of those, an estimated 1 million would have cast votes in the 2004 election. Bush likely still would have won that race. But some state-level races might have turned out differently: The results would have been reversed in an estimated seven US Senate elections and 11 gubernatorial elections during the 35-year period, the researchers found, assuming that the hypothetical additional voters had cast their ballots in line with actual black voters, who tend to overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates.

And that’s before even getting to incarceration. Additional elections potentially would have turned out differently if voting-age black Americans who were previously convicted of felonies had been able to cast a ballot. As New Scientist explains:

Accounting for people disenfranchised by felony convictions would have likely reversed three other senate seats. In at least one state, Missouri, accounting for just excess deaths or felony disenfranchisement would not have been sufficient to reverse the senate election – but both sources of lost votes taken together would have.

While everyone’s attention right now is on racial injustice in the context of policing, one of the study’s authors, Arline Geronimus, noted that most premature black deaths were linked to chronic health conditions that afflict black people more than white people. “If you’re losing a voting population, you’re losing the support for the policies that would help that population,” she told New Scientist. “As long as there’s this huge inequality in health and mortality, there’s a diminished voice to speak out against the problem.”

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If Black People Lived As Long As White People, Election Results Would Be Very Different

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Pharma Marketing: Pretty Much the Same As Every Other Kind of Marketing

by LucasBrune Posted on January 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Charles Ornstein and Ryann Grochowski Jones published a story yesterday that’s gotten a lot of attention. It’s an examination of where pharmaceutical companies spend most of their marketing budgets:

The drugs most aggressively promoted to doctors typically aren’t cures or even big medical breakthroughs. Some are top sellers, but most are not. Instead, they are newer drugs that manufacturers hope will gain a foothold, sometimes after failing to meet Wall Street’s early expectations.

“They may have some unique niche in the market, but they are fairly redundant with other therapies that are already available,” said Dr. Joseph Ross, an associate professor of medicine and public health at Yale University School of Medicine. “Many of these, you could call me-too drugs.”

Maybe this is just my marketing background blinding me to an obvious outrage, but….what else would you expect? This is what every company does. If you’re in marketing, you spend a lot of money on new product launches and you spend a lot of money where you most need to differentiate yourself. This is nothing unique to pharma. It’s just the common-sense way that marketing works.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with pharmaceutical R&D priorities, and there’s also a lot that’s wrong with pharmaceutical marketing strategies. But spending a lot of money on new products that have entrenched competitors? If that’s wrong, then every consumer products company on the planet is doing something wrong. I’m a bit at a loss to figure out what the story is supposed to be here.

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Pharma Marketing: Pretty Much the Same As Every Other Kind of Marketing

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How Many People Aren’t Vaccinating Their Kids in Your State?

by y32nmet Posted on February 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s easy to find bad information about the safety of vaccines on the internet. That’s, well, the internet. But what’s scarier is that in many states, parents who buy into those myths can easily opt out of immunizing their children. In some cases, it’s no harder than checking a box on a school form saying that vaccines are against their “personal beliefs.”

In a 2012 study of vaccine exemption policies across the country, a team of researchers led by Saad Omer, a professor of public health at Emory University, found that of the 20 states that allowed personal belief exemptions for enrollment in a public school or child-care program, less than a third made it “difficult” to do so (for instance, by making parents re-apply for one each year, explain their beliefs in writing, or get a notarized letter of approval from a health care provider). In the nine “easy” states identified in the study, the rules required only signing a form. Indeed, Omer suspects that some parents sign vaccine exemption forms not because they actually hold anti-vaccine beliefs, but simply because it’s easier than juggling the doctors’ appointments, missed work, and other inconveniences of getting kids vaccinated. (More about that here.)

Personal belief exemptions aren’t the only option available to vaccine-averse parents. Every state allows for medical exemptions for reasons such as an anaphylactic allergic response to a previous vaccine. Forty-eight states (all but West Virginia and Mississippi) allow exemptions on religious grounds. In many states, obtaining a religious exemption isn’t any harder than getting a personal belief exemption. But according to Omer, religious exemptions aren’t as popular as personal belief exemptions. He’s found that opt-out rates in states that allow personal belief exemptions are 2.5 times as high as rates in states that only permit religious exemptions. In one analysis he found that whooping cough rates in states with personal belief exemptions are more than double those in states that allow only religious exemptions.

Unsurprisingly, Omer’s research also shows that states that make it easy to get a non-medical exemption see a corresponding dip in numbers of schoolchildren who get their shots. Rates of non-medical exemptions in the “easy” states were 2.3 times higher than rates in states with difficult exemption policies. Not only that, but that rate is climbing faster in easy states than it is in difficult states.

Rates of Nonmedical Exemptions from School Immunization, According to Type of Exemption and Ease of Obtaining One, 2006–2011 Saad Omer et al, The New England Journal of Medicine

Non-medical vaccine exemptions are dangerous because they threaten what’s known as “herd immunity:” Diseases simply can’t spread in a community where a high enough percentage of the population is vaccinated against them. The required percentage of vaccinations to ensure herd immunity varies by disease; for pertussis (whooping cough), it’s between 93 and 95 percent, according to Johns Hopkins’ Jessica Atwell, lead author of a study on pertussis and vaccines published last year in the journal Pediatrics. So if even a seemingly small number of kids across the state aren’t getting their shots, the immunity rate of the entire community can drop below safe levels. When that happens, lots of people are put at risk: infants who are too young to get shots, children who haven’t had their full series of shots yet, and those who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons such as pregnancy or immune-system problems. And, of course, the exempted, unvaccinated children are also at risk.

In California, the percentage of kindergartners who get their full set of shots has been dropping since 2008, while the rate of personal belief exemptions jumped by nearly a percentage point in that time. Given that the national average exemption rate is 1.8 percent, that’s a big increase. During a California outbreak of pertussis in 2010, more than 9,000 cases were reported, and ten infants died. It was the worst outbreak of whooping cough in 60 years.

In the Pediatrics study, Atwell and her fellow researchers identified 39 geographic “clusters” across California—ranging in size from a few blocks to entire counties—where belief-driven opt-out rates are higher than the norm. The team found higher rates of whooping cough associated with these clusters. For example: Marin County, which had a personal belief exemption rate of 7.8 percent in 2012—nearly four times the national average—has the second-highest rate of whooping cough in the whole state. These results support the findings of a 2006 study led by Emory’s Omer which found higher rates of pertussis in states that allowed personal belief exemptions and had easy policies for doing so.

California is not the only state with high-exemption hotspots. On Vashon Island, Washington, 17 percent of kindergartners failed to receive their shots in 2013 due to a “personal/philosophical” exemption. That’s nine times the current national average. The year before, Vashon Islanders accounted for 16 percent of all whooping cough cases in Washington state’s King County, despite housing just one percent of its population. And a 2008 study of exemption rates in Michigan found 23 clusters within the state, and, you guessed it, a correlation with higher rates of whooping cough. Even individual schools and churches can serve as ground zero: After a measles outbreak broke out in north Texas in 2012, the state epidemiologist linked it t a local megachurch whose pastor had spread anti-vaccine myths in the past.

Now, some states are rethinking the personal belief loophole. Reeling from the 2010 outbreak, California passed a law making it harder to get a personal belief exemption. As of January 1, parents seeking a personal belief exemption have to obtain the signature of an authorized health care provider. (Finding such a doctor may not be easy; recent studies show that more pediatricians are choosing to drop patients who refuse to vaccinate their children.)

But not all states that currently allow personal belief exemptions are looking to tighten the rules for getting one. In a study released last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Omer and his colleagues surveyed the legislative landscape of vaccine exemptions, state by state. They found that of 36 bills introduced across the country last year, 31 sought to expand access to exemptions. While none of these passed, they far outweighed the number of restrictive bills; five were introduced, and three of these passed, in Washington, Vermont, and California.

There’s evidence that tightening exemption laws makes a difference. After reaching an exemption rate of 7.6 percent in 2009, Washington state passed a law requiring parents to get a doctor’s signature if they wanted to opt out of their children’s vaccinations. In just two years, the exemption rate plummeted by more than 40 percent. Pertussis vaccination rates climbed to 92.4 percent in the past school year, representing “the highest pertussis vaccine completion rate for kindergartners since the state began to collect this data in the 2006-2007 school year,” according to the Washington’s Department of Health.

Now Colorado wants to follow suit. The state is tied for ninth in the nation (with Maine) for the number of kindergartners who show up at school with vaccine exemptions—nearly 3,000 of Colorado kindergartners in the 2012-2013 school year, according to the CDC. To get a personal belief exemption, parents need only fill out a single form. Recently, a task force led by the state health department released a set of recommendations for lowering the state’s high opt-out rate. Among them: publicizing the percentage of immunized kids at every public school or child-care center in the state.

Additional research by AJ Vicens and Eric Wuestewald.

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How Many People Aren’t Vaccinating Their Kids in Your State?

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Lead and Crime: It’s a Brain Thing

by ZeldaMoritz Posted on February 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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When I wrote my big piece last year about the connection between childhood exposure to lead and rates of violent crime later in life, one of the big pushbacks came from folks who are skeptical of econometric studies. Sure, the level of lead exposure over time looks like an inverted U, and so does the national rate of violent crime. But hey: correlation is not causation.

I actually addressed this in my piece—twice, I think—but I always felt like I didn’t address it quite clearly enough. The article spent so much time up front explaining the statistical correlations that it made the subsequent points about other evidence seem a bit like hasty bolt-ons, put there mainly to check off a box against possible criticism. That’s not how I intended it,1 but that’s how it turned out.

For that reason, I’m pleased to recommend Lauren Wolf’s “The Crimes Of Lead,” in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News. It doesn’t ignore the statistical evidence, but it focuses primarily on the physiological evidence that implicates lead with higher levels of violent crime:

Research has shown that lead exposure does indeed make lab animals—rodents, monkeys, even cats—more prone to aggression. But establishing biological plausibility for the lead-crime argument hasn’t been as clear-cut for molecular-level studies of the brain. Lead wreaks a lot of havoc on the central nervous system. So pinpointing one—or even a few—molecular switches by which the heavy metal turns on aggression has been challenging.

What scientists do know is that element 82 does most of its damage to the brain by mimicking calcium. Inside the brain, calcium runs the show: It triggers nerve firing by helping to release neurotransmitters, and it activates proteins important for brain development, memory formation, and learning. By pushing calcium out of these roles, lead can muck up brain cell communication and growth.

On the cell communication side of things, lead appears to interfere with a bunch of the neurotransmitters and neurotransmitter receptors in our brains. One of the systems that keeps popping up in exposure experiments is the dopamine system. It controls reward and impulse behavior, a big factor in aggression. Another is the glutamate system, responsible in part for learning and memory.

On the brain development side of things, lead interferes with, among other things, the process of synaptic pruning. Nerve cells grow and connect, sometimes forming 40,000 new junctions per second, until a baby reaches about two years of age. After that, the brain begins to prune back the myriad connections, called synapses, to make them more efficient. Lead disrupts this cleanup effort, leaving behind excess, poorly functioning nerve cells.

“If you have a brain that’s miswired, especially in areas involved in what psychologists call the executive functions—judgment, impulse control, anticipation of consequences—of course you might display aggressive behavior,” says Kim N. Dietrich, director of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine….“Overall, the evidence is sufficient that early exposure to lead triggers a higher risk for engaging in aggressive behavior,” says U of Cincinnati’s Dietrich. “The question now is, what is the lowest level of exposure where we might see this behavior?”

There’s more, including a number of items I didn’t include in my article. The whole thing is worth a read if you’d like to learn a bit more than my piece covered about the brain science behind lead and crime.

1So why did I write it the way I did? No good reason, really. Partly it’s because I told the story chronologically, and the really compelling parts of the brain science story are fairly recent. Partly it’s because it just seemed to be easier to explain things doing it in the sequence I did it.

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Lead and Crime: It’s a Brain Thing

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Quick Reads: "Extreme Medicine" by Kevin Fong

by ESGMarie Posted on February 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Extreme Medicine

By Kevin Fong

THE PENGUIN PRESS

The devil’s in the physiological details as physician, NASA adviser, and outdoor fanatic Kevin Fong explores how feats at the edge of possibility—from the first major Antarctica expedition a century ago to the first manned landing on Mars at some future date—rely upon and, in turn, inform an ever-greater understanding of our own biology. With clear, evocative prose, he takes readers to ocean depths and mountaintops, and also deep within our bodies, in this entertaining exploration of human limits.

This review originally appeared in our January/February 2014 issue of Mother Jones.

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Quick Reads: "Extreme Medicine" by Kevin Fong

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Should You Ask Your Doctor for Antibiotics Over the Phone?

by SherlynHa Posted on January 13, 2014

Mother Jones

I’ve written before about the scary rate of antibiotic overprescription—so when a friend mentioned that she knew someone who had been prescribed antibiotics after his doctor evaluated him via Google Hangout, I was alarmed. Curious as to how common this practice was, I decided to do an informal survey of friends and colleagues. Their responses surprised me: While no one reported a similar Hangout antibiotics experience, most recalled describing conditions to their doctors via email or over the phone—and receiving a speedy response back that a prescription for antibiotics was waiting for them at the pharmacy.

One friend told me that because of her recurring urinary tract infections, she was grateful that her doctor was willing to give her antibiotics without seeing her. I could see her point: Why should she schlep all the way to her doctor’s office every time she feels an infection starting, only to have her doctor tell her what she already knows?

It’s hard to say how commonly doctors prescribe a patient antibiotics without an in-person visit; there isn’t much data on the practice, and there are no hard and fast rules governing it. In an email, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told me that the agency considers an examination necessary “to determine whether a patient likely has a bacterial infection to inform the provider whether an antibiotic is needed”—but CDC leaves it up to the individual physician how he or she determines whether to prescribe an antibiotic. A spokeswoman for HMO giant Kaiser Permanante said that company doesn’t have rules about the practice, either. “A physician will make an assessment about whether or not to administer antibiotics over the phone or by secure message by taking into account the personalized needs of that patient,” she wrote in an email.

A 2013 study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that doctors are more likely to prescribe antibiotics when they don’t perform a physical evaluation. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine found that people with symptoms of a urinary tract infection who had “e-visits”—where patients answer a series of questions about their conditions online instead of visiting their doctors’ office—were 50 percent more likely to get antibiotics than their counterparts who made office visits. E-visit patients with symptoms of sinusitis (which is usually caused by a virus, which antibiotics are ineffective against) were 5 percent more likely to get antibiotics than office visitors with the same symptoms.

Stuart Levy, a microbiologist at Tufts University’s School of Medicine and president of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, believes that over-the-phone prescribing is common, especially for conditions with distinctive symptoms, such as urinary tract infections and children’s ear infections. In some cases, he says, the practice makes sense—say, if a doctor has seen a patient in person a few days earlier, and the symptoms haven’t cleared up, or for certain chronic conditions. But he says people often abuse the system. “Parents will stay up until midnight or later and then call the doctor and convince him to give them a prescription without seeing the kid in person,” he says.

In most cases, Levy says, the trek into the office is worth the trouble. A physical examination gives doctors much more information than a phone call or email; in person, the doctor can, for example, assess a person’s coloring, check for swollen glands, and palpate the belly. For patients who really don’t want to (or can’t) come into the office, both Levy and the CDC recommend a compromise: the doctor can write a prescription that the patient can fill in a day or two if symptoms don’t improve.

This method is common in Europe, but Levy says that so far, few American doctors have embraced it. They should, Levy says. I’m inclined to agree: Considering the growing number of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs,” the dearth of new drugs in the pipeline, and the high cost to our healthcare system of prescribing unnecessary antibiotics, it’s safe to say that these powerful drugs should be used as sparingly as possible.

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Should You Ask Your Doctor for Antibiotics Over the Phone?

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The Mediterranean Diet – John Chatham

by Myrna Posted on December 17, 2013

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The Mediterranean Diet
Unlocking the Secrets to Health and Weight Loss the Mediterranean Way
John Chatham

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: July 2, 2012

Publisher: Rockridge University Press

Seller: Callisto Media, Inc.


The Mediterranean diet is a widely respected and highly acclaimed diet based on the food and lifestyles common to the people of Greece, Crete, and coastal Italy. The Mediterranean Diet from best-selling nutrition author John Chatham will introduce you to the famed diet that has garnered endorsements from the Mayo Clinic, The New England Journal of Medicine, and U.S. News &amp; World Report. With healthy Mediterranean diet recipes and easy-to-follow meal plans, you can lose weight permanently, and prevent or reverse deadly health issues from obesity, to diabetes and cardiovascular issues. The Mediterranean diet focuses on healthy ingredients and preparation, rather than reducing what you eat or counting calories. With hearty legumes, heart-healthy fats from foods like olive oil and seafood, and delicious, fresh ingredients, a Mediterranean diet will make weight loss easy and enjoyable. The Mediterranean Diet will show you how to improve your health and reverse disease with: • 60 flavorful Mediterranean diet recipes packed full of nutrients and flavorful ingredients • Step-by-step instructions for integrating Mediterranean diet foods into your everyday life • Simple guide to losing weight with the Mediterranean diet • Top tips for for cooking with healthy fats and getting the most out of your ingredients With The Mediterranean Diet, you can finally lose weight permanently while eating foods you actually enjoy.

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The Mediterranean Diet – John Chatham

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