CNN
September 29, 2009

"Parents can check out growth charts -- a nifty graph that tells them where their child falls in relation to peers in terms of height and weight -- just about everywhere, from a child's vaccination records to the doctor's office.

But there's a problem: A new study suggests that most parents don't know how to read the charts and may think a child's weight is perfectly fine, when, in fact, the child is obese or overweight compared to peers.

More than 12.5 million children and adolescents are overweight, and these numbers are on the rise, according to the U.S. surgeon general. If most parents don't realize that their child is overweight, the new study, which appears in the October 4 issue of the journal Pediatrics, has implications in the war against childhood obesity."

The New York Times
September 29, 2009

"When the label tells you the food you are buying “contains probiotics,” are you getting health benefits or just marketing hype? Perhaps a bit of both.

Probiotics are live micro-organisms that work by restoring the balance of intestinal bacteria and raising resistance to harmful germs. Taken in sufficient amounts, they can promote digestive health and help shorten the duration of colds. But while there are thousands of different probiotics, only a handful have been proved effective in clinical trials. Which strain of bacteria a given product includes is often difficult to figure out."

USA Today
September 23, 2009

"WASHINGTON — Federal agencies that supply food for 31 million schoolchildren fail to ensure that tainted products are pulled quickly from cafeterias, a federal audit obtained by USA TODAY finds.

The delays raise the risk of children being sickened by contaminated food, according to the audit by Congress' Government Accountability Office.

In recent recalls, including one this year in which salmonella-infected peanut butter sickened almost 700 people, the government failed to disseminate "timely and complete notification about suspect food products provided to schools through the federal commodities program," the audit says.

Such alerts sometimes took more than a week to reach schools, "during which time (schools) unknowingly served affected products.""

The Washington Post
September 21, 2009

"Let's say you're preparing dinner and you realize with dismay that you don't have any certified organic Tuscan kale. What to do?

Here's how Michelle Obama handled this very predicament Thursday afternoon:

The Secret Service and the D.C. police brought in three dozen vehicles and shut down H Street, Vermont Avenue, two lanes of I Street and an entrance to the McPherson Square Metro station. They swept the area, in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs, with bomb-sniffing dogs and installed magnetometers in the middle of the street, put up barricades to keep pedestrians out, and took positions with binoculars atop trucks. Though the produce stand was only a block or so from the White House, the first lady hopped into her armored limousine and pulled into the market amid the wail of sirens.

Then, and only then, could Obama purchase her leafy greens. "Now it's time to buy some food," she told several hundred people who came to watch. "Let's shop!"

Reuters
July 30, 2009

"Organic food has no nutritional or health benefits over conventionally produced food, according to a major study published on Wednesday.

Its conclusions were challenged by organic food campaigners.

Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers paid higher prices for organic food in part because of its perceived health benefits, creating a global organic market worth an estimated $48 billion in 2007.

A systematic review of 162 scientific papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years, however, found there was no significant difference."

The Los Angeles Times
July 23, 2009

"Ever since a study in England reported that a mix of six food colorings and one food preservative made kids hyperactive, the "Southampton Six" -- as these substances are rather sinisterly termed -- are being slowly, voluntarily phased out of use in the UK.

Not every manufacturer is playing the game over there, however -- tsk! According to an article at foodnavigator.com, a purveyor of a kind of seaside candy known as "rock" has just been caught with higher-than-even-legal levels of one of the six, Ponceau 4R, and fined 180 pounds sterling (about $295), plus 212 pounds sterling (about $348) in costs.

(In case you don't know what rock is, it's tubular candy that has a gaudy external color and the name of the seaside town it's bought at running all the way through it. Brighton Rock, by novelist Graham Greene, is named for candy rock, not geological rock.)

But the rock infraction is small-fry stuff. Other, larger food manufacturers -- Mars and Cadbury, for example -- have been criticized for being behind on their pledge to remove the colorants. As of March, sunset yellow (E110) was still showing up in Cadbury's creme eggs, for example. (You know: the dye that makes that delicious yolk center so ... intensely yellow.)"

USA Today
July 22, 2009

"Jerri Gray was doing all she could to help her son lose weight, her attorney says. But something had gone terribly wrong for the boy to hit the 555-pound mark by age 14.

Authorities in South Carolina say that what went wrong was Gray's care and feeding of her son, Alexander Draper. Gray, 49, of Travelers Rest, S.C., was arrested in June and charged with criminal neglect. Alexander is now in foster care.

The case has attracted national attention. With childhood obesity on the rise across the USA, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Gray's attorney says it could open the door to more criminal action against parents whose children have become dangerously overweight.

"If she's found guilty on those criminal charges, you have set a precedent that opens Pandora's box," Grant Varner says. "Where do you go next?"

Discuss it! Should raising a morbidly obese child be considered criminal abuse? Share your opinion at Urban Baby.

The Boston Globe
July 20, 2009

"As if it wasn’t hard enough to lose weight, along comes this relentless recession to make it even more challenging.

Fattening foods are cheaper and easier to find than healthier fare. People are working longer hours for less pay, taking second jobs to make up lost earnings, and struggling to maintain a gym membership - or all three. Worrying about work translates into wider waistlines, it turns out, mostly for people who are already overweight. Oh, and losing sleep, too? That’ll add on the pounds, as well.

While it’s giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “the weight of the recession,’’ it has also presented doctors and health officials with an opportunity to remind people that healthy choices can be made in boom times and in bad times.

State and national health experts say it’s too soon to tell if the anemic economy is boosting obesity. But healthcare providers and exercise experts are seeing changes they tie to tighter times, for better or worse. Whether people turn to fast food because it’s what they can afford or skip exercise because they’re starved for time, the result can be unhealthy weight gain."

The New Yorker
July 17, 2009

"One of the most comprehensive data sets available about Americans--how tall they are, when they last visited a dentist, what sort of cereal they eat for breakfast, whether they have to pee during the night, and, if so, how often--comes from a series of studies conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Participants are chosen at random, interviewed at length, and subjected to a battery of tests in special trailers that the C.D.C. hauls around the country. The studies, known as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, began during the Eisenhower Administration and have been carried out periodically ever since.

In the early nineteen-nineties, a researcher at the C.D.C. named Katherine Flegal was reviewing the results of the survey then under way when she came across figures that seemed incredible. According to the first National Health study, which was done in the early nineteen-sixties, 24.3 per cent of American adults were overweight--roughly defined as having a body-mass index greater than twenty-seven. (The metrics are slightly different for men and women; by the study’s definition, a woman who is five feet tall would count as overweight if she was more than a hundred and forty pounds, and a man who is six feet tall if he weighed more than two hundred and four pounds.) By the time of the second survey, conducted in the early nineteen-seventies, the proportion of overweight adults had increased by three-quarters of a per cent, to twenty-five per cent, and, by the third survey, in the late seventies, it had edged up to 25.4 per cent. The results that Flegal found so surprising came from the fourth survey. During the nineteen-eighties, the American gut, instead of expanding very gradually, had ballooned: 33.3 per cent of adults now qualified as overweight. Flegal began asking around at professional meetings. Had other researchers noticed a change in Americans’ waistlines? They had not. This left her feeling even more perplexed. She knew that errors could have sneaked into the data in a variety of ways, so she and her colleagues checked and rechecked the figures. There was no problem that they could identify. Finally, in 1994, they published their findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In just ten years, they showed, Americans had collectively gained more than a billion pounds. "If this was about tuberculosis, it would be called an epidemic," another researcher wrote in an editorial accompanying the report."

The New York Times
July 17, 2009

"I have neither a therapist's diagnosis nor any scientific literature to support the following claim, and I can't back it up with more than a cursory level of detail. So you're just going to have to go with me on this: I was a baby bulimic.

Maybe not baby -- toddler bulimic is more like it, though I didn't so much toddle as wobble, given the roundness of my expanding form. I was a plump infant and was on my way to becoming an even plumper child, a ravenous machine determined to devour anything in its sights. My parents would later tell me, my friends and anyone else willing to listen that they'd never seen a kid eat the way I ate or react the way I reacted whenever I was denied more food. What I did in those circumstances was throw up.

I have no independent memory of this. But according to my mother, it began when I was about 18 months old. It went on for no more than a year. And I'd congratulate myself here for stopping such an evidently compulsive behavior without the benefit of an intervention or the ability to read a self-help book except that I wasn’t so much stopping as pausing. But I'm getting ahead of the story."