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Got a Big Belly? (Why Big Sugar Is to Blame)
Photo Credit: LOIC VENANCE/AFP/Getty Images Growing up Republican, I have long believed in personal responsibility. In junior high school, when I observed close relatives who struggled with obesity, I vowed to never let myself get out of shape. (“Junior high” is what we called middle school back in the day.) When hip surgery gone wrong…
To Promote Children’s Health, We Need to Address Childhood Poverty
Poverty wreaks havoc on children’s lives, stunting their intellectual development and harming their health. Children raised in poverty experience declines in growth and development, becoming susceptible to numerous otherwise preventable illnesses in the process. Tragically, almost 1 in 5 American children live in poverty: Republicans and Democrats must agree on the importance of helping American…
Bias in Scientific Citation
Here is a figure reproduced in Fortune, showing that when researchers publish articles raising questions about the harms of salt, they cite other researchers who raised similar questions. By contrast, when they definitively argue in favor of the harms, they cite other definitive colleagues. Some of this makes scientific sense. If you show a particular…
Is the Government Trying to Make Us Fat?
The FDA has proposed new labels on grocery store food products, that adjust serving sizes to more accurately capture what Americans eat. Research I conducted with Steven Dallas and Peggy Liu suggests these labels could be a problem. Here is a great media story on our findings: Last year, the Food and Drug Administration announced…
The USA Is Number One… In Healthcare Prices!
The folks at Vox media put together a series of pictures, illustrating how much more expensive medical care is in United States compared to other developed countries. Today, and in the next few days, I’m going to circulate some of those pictures. Prepare yourself for horror! Take medications, for example. (Please!) Pills for rheumatoid arthritis…
Are You Smarter than a Radiologist?
Notice anything unusual about this CT scan? On the upper right side is an image of a gorilla. According to a new study, 83% of radiologists missed this image. They had been looking through a series of scans, looking for “pulmonary nodules”—growths in the lung, in other words. The early scans included such nodes, and…