Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

How to Stay Healthy Even if You Can’t Avoid Stress on the Job

May 30, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Being under stress at work is tied to a higher risk of heart problems, new research confirms—but putting down the beer bottle and going for a walk may help. Researchers found that job strain—defined as having a lot of demands at work, but little control—was tied at a 25 percent higher chance of having a heart attack or dying of heart problems. But heart risks were cut in half among people—stressed or not—who maintained a healthy lifestyle compared to those who drank, smoked, or were obese. "For many people avoidance of work stress is unrealistic," lead researcher Mika Kivimaki, ... Read More

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Supermarkets: Enter Hungry, Exit With Chips and Chocolate

May 6, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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You know the cliché that it’s unwise to shop for food when you’re hungry? New research suggests it’s absolutely true. Two experiments—one in a lab, another that tracked actual supermarket purchases—provide evidence that famished food shoppers don’t necessarily buy more items, but the ones that end up in their carts are less likely to come from the health-food or produce aisles. “Even short-term food deprivation can lead to a shift in choices, such that people choose less low-calorie, and relatively more high-calorie food options,” write Cornell University food ... Read More

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Pound Foolish

May 2, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Fat is killing us, or so we're told. Americans’ sugar-saturated diets and couch-bound lifestyles have apparently produced an epidemic of heart disease and diabetes, cancer and infertility, depression and insomnia. Decades of historic public health advances are being wiped out by a tidal wave of blubber. A 2005 study by demographer and epidemiologist Jay Olshansky predicted that, after a century in which American life spans had lengthened by more than half, life expectancy is now on track to level off or even start to sink by 2050, thanks to obesity. A 2009 report from RTI International ... Read More

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Can We Expect to See the Dollar Menu Devalued?

April 23, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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"Value menus" increasingly seem a bad physical deal for consumers—and now perhaps a bum fiscal deal for fast-food purveyors. The cheap chow, long a target for nutrition-focused researchers and  locavoring  advocates, has been criticized for all manner of bad outcomes, mostly centered on obesity. Fast food in general is assailed by these same sources, of course—the book is Fast Food Nation, after all, and not Dollar Menu Dominion—but value menus (and their late cousin "supersize") are seen as particularly egregious in making fat-laden crappy food—despite all the menu labeling, soda ... Read More

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Watch America Become Obese and Engulfed by the Ocean

April 11, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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If we don't do anything, we will all be overweight and floating in water, pecked at by seagulls who've leveraged the new conditions to wrestle control of most major American cities from our decaying, decrepit species—or at least that's the takeaway from two things on the Internet today. Over at The Atlantic, James Hamblin put together this graphic of the country's obesity rates as they progressed—maybe regressed is the better word?—from 1990 to 2010. As you can see in the key, the darker-blue and then redder things get, the more obese an area has become. So, plummeting health! But ... Read More

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Is Sugar the Next Tobacco?

December 27, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Robert Lustig

Among the least likely viral megahits on YouTube is a 90-minute lecture by the food scold and pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig entitled “Sugar: The Bitter Truth.” He delivers it in a windowless room at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. The talk is simultaneously boring and powerful, combining the gravitas of a national health crisis, the thrill of conspiracy theory, and the tedium of PowerPoint slides. Midway through the talk he scans the hall for approval. “Am I debunking?” The UCSF extension students mutter ... Read More

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When Working Out Doesn’t Work

October 1, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

There’s a park near my house where I like to run just before dinner. Afterward, my favorite meal to cook—especially when my girlfriend is out of town—has a kind of simplicity that would make even a chef like Mario or Martha envious: Prepare one box of macaroni-and-cheese, with plenty of butter. Add one can of baked beans. Stir and serve. The Redmon Running Special is sweet, salty, and best eaten in bed, while watching back-to-back episodes of “The Wire.” I’ve been a dedicated runner for some time now, and my heart-rate monitor logs several hour-long sessions a week, yet ... Read More

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The Final Feast: Last Meals on Death Row

September 21, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

What would you eat if you knew it was your last meal? For some people—death-row inmates facing imminent execution—the question is not a hypothetical one. In one of the most morbidly fascinating academic studies to cross my desk in a long time, Brian Wansink of Cornell University compiled a catalog of final food requests from 247 Americans who were facing the death penalty. Among his findings, published in the journal Appetite: “The average last meal is calorically rich (2756 calories) and proportionately averages 2.5 times the daily recommended servings of protein and ... Read More

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Banded, Stapled, Saved

September 21, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Quitting smoking, the old saw goes, is easy to do—I’ve done it dozens of times. It’s staying clean that poses the real challenge. So, too, with losing weight: despite the pills, pedometers, hypnosis, and low-cal breakfast bars, pounds have a way of creeping back onto the hips. More than a third of Americans are now overweight, and another third obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with black and Hispanic women hit hardest. Among children, one in 10 pre-kindergarten students are obese; in elementary schools, that figure is one in five. Neither our bodies ... Read More

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High Calorie Diets Can Mean Memory Loss

September 19, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Yet another reason not to overeat: According to a recent study from the Mayo Clinic, there is a link between memory loss and a high calorie diet. People over 70 who consumed more than 2,143 calories a day doubled their risk of memory loss and mild cognitive impairment—a stage of decline beyond normal age-related changes when memory, language, and thinking start slipping. “We observed a dose-response pattern, which simply means the higher the amount of calories consumed each day, the higher the risk of mild cognitive impairment," explained study author Yonas E. Geda, a neurologist and ... Read More

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