Viruses can make you fat — and your dirty-fingered friends can give these viruses to you. That is the punch line — a known truth about the world. The set-up, though, is longer in the telling. It begins with a boy named Nikhil living in India. When Nikhil Dhurandhar was young, his father directed a large obesity clinic in Bombay. Throughout his childhood, Nikhil saw thousands of his father's obese patients. They came in for some cure, whether salve or salvation. Instead, they received, again and again, the same advice: "Move more. Eat less." It is what doctors around the world tell ... Read More
Dietary Guidelines Include a Helping of Politics
February 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services this week released the latest edition of the "Dietary Guidelines for Americans," a collection of largely common-sense nutrition advice (drink more water, switch to fat-free milk, eat more fruits and vegetables) that every five years produces cackles from the food industry. This year, the Peanut Institute is pleased. The Salt Institute is not. The American Meat Institute — well, it's spinning the latest emphasis on "lean" meat and poultry as a positive. In the middle of all this, the USDA in particular is ... Read More
High-Fructose Corn Syrup’s Health Risks Remain Sticky
January 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
High-fructose corn syrup generally gets a bad rap by the health community. The sweetener has been blamed for everything from obesity to diabetes, heart attack to stroke. But what do we really know about it? During the 1970s, the American food industry introduced high-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS, as a sweet substitute for sucrose (which we recognize as table sugar). Processed from corn — it gets its “high-fructose” name because its fructose content is higher than the corn from which it originates — the syrup contains about the same number of calories as sucrose or honey but has a ... Read More
Sticking to Your Resolutions, With Uncle Sam
December 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Government has been getting a bum rap this year for trying to help us be our better selves. Eat less salt. Drink less soda. Turn off the lights. Exercise more. Be better parents. Don't text while driving. The goals are admirable, although, to some, the government nudging is not. "Instead of a government thinking that they need to take over and make decisions for us according to some politician or politician's wife's priorities, just leave us alone," Sarah Palin recently snapped, "get off our back, and allow us as individuals to exercise our own God-given rights to make our own ... Read More
Don’t Expect Soda Tax to Curb Obesity
December 21, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Opponents of so-called soda taxes often argue that they would disproportionately punish low-income people. The poor buy more pop than the rich, who you'd more likely find in line at a fresh-fruit smoothie bar than in the carbonated beverage aisle at the grocery store, the thinking goes. But a new study examining the potential effects of hefty taxes on sugary beverages — such as those that have been considered in New York, Colorado and California — specifically looked at different income classes and found a pair of surprising results. Low-income groups aren't financially hit much harder ... Read More
Do School Lunches Plump Up Poor Kids?
September 1, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Students who participate in the National School Lunch Program are more likely to come from lower-income families or families with two working parents who don't have time to pack a brown-bag lunch the night before. Those same students, as a quick glance around many school cafeterias this fall will show, are also more likely to be overweight. The challenge for researchers and policymakers has been to sort out the relationship between the two. "When you just look at those groups [who participate in school lunch], those are groups also more likely to not be the healthiest kids," said Daniel ... Read More
What We Miss When We Obsess Over Obesity
August 11, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Just as Congress was concluding a contentious year of debate by passing legislation to overhaul the health care system, a revealing look at lifestyle, income and mortality was published in the journal Social Science & Medicine. It followed a cross-section of American adults to determine precisely which factors drive us to an early death. Some of the answers were expected. Cigarette smoking. A sedentary lifestyle. Being poor. One well-publicized issue did not make the list: Obesity. For all the breathless media coverage of our collective weight gain over the past few decades, it turns ... Read More
Tomorrow’s GI Joe May Be Too Fat to Fight
June 29, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
Back in 1946, the original National School Lunch Act was passed in part with prodding from the military. Many American men, especially those who had grown up during the Depression, simply weren't well-fed enough to fight. As a result of their stunted growth, soldiers who served in World War II were on average more than an inch-and-a-half shorter than young men serving in Afghanistan today. The problem tied for the first time the seemingly unrelated policy arenas of national security and nutrition. That link has largely been lost to history textbooks. But now, more than three generations ... Read More
School Lunches Even the Lunch Lady Wouldn’t Eat
May 21, 2010 • By • 6 Comments
An anonymous Midwestern elementary school teacher has been filing daily dispatches from the cafeteria, posting to her blog each day cell phone-snapped photos of popcorn chicken and prepackaged meatloaf. She has been documenting, every day, what the kids in her school are fed for lunch. As Mrs. Q’s several thousand followers have found, however, the grub fed American schoolchildren looks pretty disgusting when you put it up on the Internet. (In fact, the images and accompanying commentary are so unappetizing, Mrs. Q has to explain on her site that she stays anonymous to protect her ... Read More
