Video
January 20, 2012
105 notes

jayparkinsonmd:

This looks great and it’s one of the most important health issues in our country. Glad to see there is more attention being given to why our cities and economy were designed to make health so hard.

A provocative new 4-hour series soon to air on public television, Designing Healthy Communities, examines the impact of our built environment on key public health indices, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, cancer and depression. The series documents the connection between bad community design and burgeoning health consequences, and discusses the remedies available to fix what has become an urgent crisis.

Retrofitting Suburbia (by MPC)

via

Oh my word. A miniseries about combating obesogenics? SIGN. ME. UP.

Tags: public health obesity designing healthy communities

Link
March 17, 2011
13 notes
The Poverty Clinic

This week’s New Yorker profiles Nadine Burke, MD, MPH; a primary care physician in San Francisco who observed that her patients’ early childhood experience of trauma (by way of poverty, physical/emotional/sexual abuse, segregation, deprivation) had a causal relationship to their current obesity, heart disease, and psychiatric conditions.  In response, Dr. Burke has overhauled her clinic to steer away from the traditional paradigm of solely treating disease, and instead to focus on mitigating the causal ecological and social factors (e.g. foster care, incarceration, the built environment) to improve her patients’ health outcomes.  

I’ve made reference to my thesis before, so I would like to reiterate that it’s about damn time more attention was paid to how our environment (be it physical or social) plays a role in our health status.  Populations who remain geographically mired, (e.g. inner city minorities, urban/rural poor) are born into a cycle of stress and health disparity that is perpetuated by their inability to relocate.  The widening economic gap further isolates those of lower socioeconomic status, relegating future generations to a life marked by chronic disease.

No amount of medication, psychotherapy, or behavioral interventions will ameliorate this growing disease burden until attention is paid to alleviating environmental stressors.  

Tags: public health obesity embodiment theory it's about damn time

Photo
September 16, 2010
8 notes
noraleah: philgraves (via dhk): “The Corn Refiners Association, a.k.a. the second biggest assholes in the world behind BP, want to change the name ‘high-fructose corn syrup’ to ‘corn sugar’.” What would be cool is if they hired D’Angelo as their spokesinger. Certainly looks like he’s been hittin’ the corn sugar lately…. In which we mourn the death of our nation at the hands of a starch…and the death of D’Angelo’s abs.

noraleah:

philgraves (via dhk): “The Corn Refiners Association, a.k.a. the second biggest assholes in the world behind BP, want to change the name ‘high-fructose corn syrup’ to ‘corn sugar’.”

What would be cool is if they hired D’Angelo as their spokesinger. Certainly looks like he’s been hittin’ the corn sugar lately….

In which we mourn the death of our nation at the hands of a starch…and the death of D’Angelo’s abs.

(Source: thephilter)

Tags: high fructose corn syrup corn sugar obesity

Video
July 08, 2010

Sugar: The Bitter Truth

Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin. 

Q: What do the Atkin’s diet and the Japanese Diet have in common?

A: They both eliminate the sugar fructose

This is one of the most clear-cut, fact-full, engaging lectures I’ve seen on our relationship with sugar and its effect on our quality of life.  Take 90 minutes of your day to watch this, you won’t regret it.

Tags: sugar obesity public health

Quote
April 19, 2010
44 notes
"If you go with the flow in America today, you will end up overweight or obese."

—

Thomas Frieden, head of CDC in The Atlantic :: Beating Obesity

This is a great article with many gems:

“The obese are more likely to be depressed, to miss school or work, to feel suicidal, to earn less, and to find it difficult to marry. And their health care costs a lot. Obese Americans spend about 42 percent more than healthy-weight people on medical care each year. Improper weight and diet strongly correlate with chronic diseases, which account for three-fourths of all health-care spending. Type 2 diabetes is one of the leading drivers of rising costs for Medicare patients, and 60 percent of cases result directly from weight gain. In short, even as the nation is convulsed by a political struggle to “reform” health care, no effort to contain its costs is likely to succeed if we can’t beat obesity.”

(via jayparkinsonmd)

Tags: obesity health care

Video
February 20, 2010
1 note

First Lady Michelle Obama talks childhood obesity and the Let’s Move initiative at the National Governors Association

“if we think our health care costs are high now, just wait until ten years from now…we can’t solve our health care problems unless we address our childhood obesity problem too.”

Let’s Move will give parents the support they need, provide healthier food in schools, help our kids to be more physically active, and make healthy, affordable food available in every part of our country. (via Let’s Move)

I would love to sit down (or go for a run!) and pick her brain.

Tags: michelle obama obesity let's move

Photo
December 16, 2009
1 note
Child Diabetes Blamed on Food Sweetener Just because fructose is a “natural” sugar, don’t think it’s safe: Fructose bypasses the digestive process that breaks down other forms of sugar. It arrives intact in the liver where it causes a variety of abnormal reactions, including the disruption of mechanisms that instruct the body whether to burn or store fat.

Child Diabetes Blamed on Food Sweetener

Just because fructose is a “natural” sugar, don’t think it’s safe:

Fructose bypasses the digestive process that breaks down other forms of sugar. It arrives intact in the liver where it causes a variety of abnormal reactions, including the disruption of mechanisms that instruct the body whether to burn or store fat.

Tags: obesity diabetes

Photoset
November 02, 2009
1 note

Excerpted slides from: Inside Our Brain:Obesity and Dopamine Deficiency

- dopamine is important in: movement, motivation, reward and well-being

- substance users & the obese have low dopamine brain activity which indicates an under-stimulated reward system —> perpetuating pathological behavior, i.e. binge eating & drug use because they need to compensate for a decreased reward circuit activation.

Dopamine article in NYTimes

Dopamine simply makes a relevant object almost impossible to ignore… Recreational drugs like cocaine tend to block that transporter, allowing dopamine to linger in the neuronal vestibule and keep punching its signal along.

So excited that Nora Volkow is the keynote speaker for Thursday’s Advances in Addiction Research and Practice seminar.

Tags: addiction obesity dopamine