Finally! Starting to Study Food Waste
In developed countries, upwards of 65% of food is wasted, meaning that somewhere from farm to table it ends up in the trash. Fortunately, researchers are finally beginning to study the problem:

In developed countries, upwards of 65% of food is wasted, meaning that somewhere from farm to table it ends up in the trash. Fortunately, researchers are finally beginning to study the problem:

Hepatitis C has been in the news lately, because of amazing (and amazingly expensive) new treatments that promise to cure their life-threatening illness. While we ought to debate the expense of these treatments, we should also remind ourselves of how much we’ve been spending caring for patients with advanced disease. Here’s a picture showing the…
Shutterstock When it comes to wreaking havoc on people’s bodies, diabetes isn’t picky, wreaking havoc upon people’s hearts, brains, eyes, kidneys, and peripheral nerves. To forestall such damage, many people with diabetes withstand another kind of bodily harm—they prick blood from their fingers each day to test their blood sugar. For many people with Type…
It is notoriously difficult to change physician behavior. When it’s discovered that primary care physicians are, say, prescribing too few cholesterol pills or too many antibiotics, it will not be easy to change those behaviors. Physicians are strong-willed people, with lots of things competing for their attention and with many well ingrained habits. That’s why…
Here is an article in the Duke University student newspaper, summarizing a public forum I led last night. Really nice summary—almost makes me sound coherent! In the midst of an ongoing debate about the future of the nation’s health care system, Duke professor Peter Ubel discussed the limitations of the current system and encouraged bipartisan solutions at a…
A bicycle helmet prevented me from experiencing a major head injury. But did it promote the very behavior that caused me to crash my bike? It was autumn in Michigan, and I was riding my mountain bike along a lakeside pathway. I was heading towards a twisty boardwalk that led up to a bridge arching…
We think of political parties as being ideological homes. If you embrace conservative ideas, you gravitate to the Republican party, and so on. But probably just as often, people have party homes (“My dad was a Dem, and so am I”), in which whatever the party embraces magically fits their ideology. Consider the following picture…