Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of healthcare:
“Too fat to fight”: A group of retired U.S. military officers, in a bid to bring attention to the obesity epidemic plaguing America, have identified what they believe is one of the looming threats to national security: school lunches. Those lunches have helped make the nation’s young people so fat that fewer and fewer of them can meet the military’s physical fitness standards, and recruitment is in jeopardy, the officers say. For example, a new report says that 27 percent of all Americans aged 17 to 24 are too overweight to join the military. Indeed, obesity is the biggest medical reason military recruits are rejected.
“When over a quarter of young adults are too fat to fight, we need to take notice,” said one of the organizers of the group, called Mission: Readiness. He noted that national security in the year 2030 is “absolutely dependent” on reversing child obesity rates, the AP reports.
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Mission: Readiness is urging Congress to eliminate junk food and high-calorie beverages from schools and develop new strategies that help children develop healthier habits. The group is also urging passage of a pending Senate bill that would spend $4.5 billion more over 10 years for nutrition programs. While referring to lunches as a “national security threat” may be a bit of a rhetorical stretch, anything that helps people focus on the enormous economic and social costs that obesity will impose on the U.S. in the coming decades is OK by me.
The new salt police? If the restaurant and prepared foods industries won’t cut the amount of salt in their products, the federal government should force them to. (Cue the complaints about the U.S. becoming a “nanny state.”) The Institute of Medicine said that said the food industry hasn’t done enough to voluntarily cut back, so the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should to set maximum sodium levels for different foods in a “stepwise rollback,” so people have time to adjust to the change, the AP reports.
Americans eat about 1.5 teaspoons of salt daily, more than double what they need for good health. Too much salt can lead to high blood pressure, kidney failure and strokes. The IOM, which is an independent agency chartered by Congress to advise the federal government, has joined a number of prominent groups, including the American Medical Association and the city of New York, in urging for a decrease in the amount of salt in processed foods. The FDA will review the IOM’s recommendations, but that it “is not currently working on regulations nor have they made a decision to regulate sodium content in foods at this time.”
Strange bedfellows: KFC and the breast-cancer fighting Susan G. Komen for the Cure have teamed up, and the blog Weighty Matters is not happy about it. KFC franchise locations will be selling pink buckets of chicken, and the fast food company has pledged 50 cents to Komen for every pink bucket ordered by its restaurant operators. The fried chicken purveyor, which recently brought us the abomination to humanity that is the Double Down, has pledged a minimum donation of $1 million, with a goal of raising more than $8 million. That prompted this response from Weighty Matters, a blog maintained by a Canadian family doctor.
So in effect Susan G. Komen for the Cure is helping to sell deep fried fast food and in so doing, helping to fuel unhealthy diets and obesity across America, an odd plan given that diet and obesity certainly impact on both the incidence and recurrence of breast cancer. … Shame on you Susan G. Komen for the Cure, surely you know better and yet you’ve chosen greed over responsibility.
The latest addiction: Tanning–whether inside or outside–activates the same parts of the brain triggered by drug dependence, and nearly a third of the young people who tan indoors might be addicted to it. (Insert obligatory John Boehner reference, minus the young part, here.) The tanners were aware that repeated exposure to ultraviolet light is bad for them, but they did it anyway, according to the study’s author, a researcher at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. People who met the criteria for addiction had an average of 40 visits to a tanning salon in the past year, but some people made as many as 100 visits, according to the study published in the Archives of Dermatology.
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