Money and Finance
- Big Sugar's Sweet Little Lies: How The Industry Kept Scientists From Asking: Does Sugar Kill? – By Gary Taubes And Cristin Kearns Couzens
ON A BRISK SPRING Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvil award for excellence in "the forging of public opinion."...
- The Obesity Epidemic: Is The Metabolic Syndrome A Nutritional Deficiency Disease? - By Stephanie Seneff
Found via Art De Vany. The United States is currently facing an obesity epidemic across its population, affecting children and adults alike. It is now estimated that 30% of Americans are overweight, and the problem has been worsening over time. Why does...
- La Times Article: A Reversal On Carbs
Most people can count calories. Many have a clue about where fat lurks in their diets. However, fewer give carbohydrates much thought, or know why they should.But a growing number of top nutritional scientists blame excessive carbohydrates — not fat...
- Fish And No Chips
The wonders of docosahexaenoic acid TO PIN one big evolutionary shift on a particular molecule is ambitious. To pin two on it is truly audacious. Yet doing so was just one of the ideas floating around at “A Celebration of DHA” in London this week....
- Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin - By John Cloud
Self-Control Is like a Muscle Many people assume that weight is mostly a matter of willpower — that we can learn both to exercise and to avoid muffins and Gatorade. A few of us can, but evolution did not build us to do this for very long. In 2000 the...
Money and Finance
Warnings From a Flabby Mouse – By Nicholas Kristof
ONE of the puzzles of the modern world is why we humans are growing so tubby. Maybe these two mice offer a clue.
They’re genetically the same, raised in the same lab and given the same food and chance to exercise. Yet the bottom one is svelte, while the other looks like, well, an American.
The only difference is that the top one was exposed at birth to just one part per billion of an endocrine-disrupting chemical. The brief exposure programmed the mouse to put on fat, and although there were no significant differences in caloric intake or expenditure, it continued to put on flab long after the chemical was gone.
That experiment is one of a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific studies suggesting that one factor in the industrialized world’s obesity epidemic (along with Twinkies, soda and television) may be endocrine-disrupting chemicals. These chemicals are largely unregulated — they are in food, couches, machine receipts and shampoos — and a raft of new studies suggest that they can lead to the formation of more and larger fat cells.
Before I describe some of this research, a more basic issue: Why should an op-ed columnist write about scholarship published in scientific journals? Don’t pundits have better things to fret about, like the feuding between Democrats and Republicans?
One answer is that obesity is an important national problem, partly responsible for soaring health care costs. Yet the chemical lobby, just like the tobacco industry before it, has impeded serious regulation and is even trying to block research.
A second is that journalists historically have done a poor job covering public health issues — we were slow on the dangers of tobacco and painfully delinquent in calling attention to the perils of lead — but these are central to our national well-being. Our lives are threatened less by the Taliban in Afghanistan than by unregulated contaminants at home.
- Big Sugar's Sweet Little Lies: How The Industry Kept Scientists From Asking: Does Sugar Kill? – By Gary Taubes And Cristin Kearns Couzens
ON A BRISK SPRING Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvil award for excellence in "the forging of public opinion."...
- The Obesity Epidemic: Is The Metabolic Syndrome A Nutritional Deficiency Disease? - By Stephanie Seneff
Found via Art De Vany. The United States is currently facing an obesity epidemic across its population, affecting children and adults alike. It is now estimated that 30% of Americans are overweight, and the problem has been worsening over time. Why does...
- La Times Article: A Reversal On Carbs
Most people can count calories. Many have a clue about where fat lurks in their diets. However, fewer give carbohydrates much thought, or know why they should.But a growing number of top nutritional scientists blame excessive carbohydrates — not fat...
- Fish And No Chips
The wonders of docosahexaenoic acid TO PIN one big evolutionary shift on a particular molecule is ambitious. To pin two on it is truly audacious. Yet doing so was just one of the ideas floating around at “A Celebration of DHA” in London this week....
- Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin - By John Cloud
Self-Control Is like a Muscle Many people assume that weight is mostly a matter of willpower — that we can learn both to exercise and to avoid muffins and Gatorade. A few of us can, but evolution did not build us to do this for very long. In 2000 the...