Tag Archives: physicians

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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3 Medical Conditions That Bacon Can Cure

by TrinaUccenoyuhd Posted on January 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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As we all know, the internet is obsessed with bacon. Physicians, however, are usually less bullish about the delicious yet notoriously artery-clogging treat. Until now: Over at the medical blog KevinMD, Dr. Jennifer Gunter combs the scientific literature and turns up three actual medical conditions that bacon can help treat:

  1. Nosebleeds. Last October, Stanford otolaryngologist Ian Humphreys developed a nasal tampon made out of bacon that cured a young girl’s bloody nose, an accomplishment for which he was awarded a 2014 Ig Nobel Prize in medicine. “Apparently the high salt content of bacon is believed to induce swelling which causes the blood vessels to constrict slowing the flow of blood and helping clotting,” writes Gunter. When Humphreys won the IgNobel, Robert Jackler, chair of Stanford’s otolaryngology department, told Stanford’s Scope medical blog, “We are squealing with pride.”
  2. An incredibly disgusting-sounding infection called furuncular myiasis in which the larvae of an insect called Dermatobia hominis nest in the human soft tissue or skin, resulting in boils and sometimes tissue destruction. Shudder. “The treatment largely consists of manually picking out the larvae with tweezers,” writes Gunter. “Apparently bacon fat can be used as bait to lure the larvae to the skin surface for faster and more effective removal.”
  3. Scabies. Apparently, bacon fat was once used in topical sulfur and salicylic acid creams used to treat this itchy and highly contagious skin infection. A 1991 study compared the bacon fat formulation to the more modern cold cream version and finds, Gunter writes, that “while the cold cream combination was 100% effective versus 88 percent for the bacon fat base the authors noted that the bacon fat concoction was 238 times less expensive than the cheapest scabicidal medication in the U.S.”

So there you have it: Bacon as medicine. Something to keep in mind if you have any left over after you make that gross bacon lattice thing for your Super Bowl party.

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3 Medical Conditions That Bacon Can Cure

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