This is a concern that a new meta-analysis should lay it to rest. From a news release today from Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. A recent meta-analysis that will be published in the journal Fertility and Sterility showed that neither soy foods nor isoflavone supplements from soy affect testosterone levels in men. Researchers looked at more than [...]
Archive for June, 2009
Soy Has No Effect on Men’s Testosterone Levels
Posted in Uncategorized on June 30, 2009 |
Military Advised to Ban Tobacco Slowly
Posted in Uncategorized on June 30, 2009 |
The Institute of Medicine suggests beginning at the service academies, with the eventual goal of a smoke-free military. Tobacco use reduces soldiers’ physical fitness and endurance and is linked to higher rates of absenteeism and lost productivity, the report said. In 2005, 32 percent of active-duty personnel and 22 percent of veterans were smokers. Rates [...]
USDA Fails to Follow Gov’t. Nutrition Guidelines for School Lunches
Posted in Uncategorized on June 29, 2009 |
Not exactly what the good doctor ordered. The government wants kids to eat more fruits and vegetables but doesn’t seem to be putting its money where its advice is. For every dollar that the U.S. Department of Agriculture spent buying commodities for school lunches last year, 55 cents went to beef, chicken and cheese vs. [...]
Fatty Diet Linked to Pancreatic Cancer
Posted in Uncategorized on June 29, 2009 |
No surprise here, just a further addition to the mounting evidence that animal fats (which generally contain a high percentage of saturated fat, the kind that is solid at room temperature) are something to avoid or, at the very least, keep to a minimum. From MedPage Today: “We observed positive associations between pancreatic cancer and [...]
Meditation May Increase Grey Matter
Posted in Uncategorized on June 28, 2009 |
From a UCLA study on long-term meditators: In a study published in the journal NeuroImage and currently available online (by subscription), the researchers report that certain regions in the brains of long-term meditators were larger than in a similar control group.Specifically, meditators showed significantly larger volumes of the hippocampus and areas within the orbito-frontal cortex, [...]
Insurance Industry’s Efforts to Kill Health Reform
Posted in Uncategorized on June 27, 2009 |
Wendell Potter, the former Cigna public relations man who testified in Congress this week against the industry he long served, was interviewed by Trudy Lieberman for the Columbia Journalism Review. It’s worth reading in full. Some excerpts: WP: A couple of years ago I was in Tennessee and saw an ad for a health expedition in [...]
Why More Young People Are Uninsured
Posted in Uncategorized on June 27, 2009 |
From the health blog at The New Republic: Twentysomethings are disproportionately uninsured more than other age groups. (This Health Access fact sheet offers some statistics.) For too long, this has been attributed as a matter of choice–the so-called “young invincibles.” But my review of the data suggests that young people take up employer-based coverage at [...]
Drug Industry Spends Far More on Marketing Than Research
Posted in Uncategorized on June 27, 2009 |
A key line from Maggie Mahar’s excellent Healthbeat blog from the Century Foundation: Why does Pharma charge U.S patients sky-high prices? Because it can. No one is pushing back. In other countries governments negotiate to protect dying patients from being gouged. Meanwhile, Pharma is spending twice as much on marketing and advertising as it does [...]
Chiropractic Summit White Paper on Health Reform
Posted in Uncategorized on June 26, 2009 |
This is the profession’s unified response to all major issues in health reform. I’ll have more comments later. Here’s the link.
Why Americans Don’t Trust the Health Insurance Industry
Posted in Uncategorized on June 25, 2009 |
Testimony from a former insider at a Congressional hearing yesterday. Truly devastating.
