As part of the new healthcare legislation (Affordable Care Act), the FDA has now published its guidelines for restaurants to inform consumers of the calorie counts of food. It establishes requirements for nutrition labeling of standard menu items for chain restaurants and chain vending machine operators.
This is important because Americans now consume an estimated one-third of their total calories from foods prepared outside the home. Consumers are generally unaware of the number of calories they consume from these foods, and being overweight or obese increases the risk of a number of diseases including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and cancer.
Here’s what the guidelines say:
— Restaurants with 20 or more locations must disclose the number of calories in each standard menu item on menus and menu boards (have 19 chain locations? You get a pass. Daily specials also get a pass.)
— Additional written nutrition information must be available to consumers upon request (total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium sugars, carbs, fiber, protein, etc.)
— The menu must say that the additional nutritional information is available. Read more »
It seems that for every established science there is an ideological group who is motivated to deny it. Denialism is a thriving pseudoscience and affects any issue with the slightest political or social implications. Sometimes, even easily verifiable facts can be denied, as people seem willing to make up their own facts as needed.
Denialists have an easy job — to spread doubt and confusion. It is far easier to muddy the waters with subtle distortions and logical fallacies than it is to set the record straight. Even when every bit of misinformation is countered, the general public is often left with the sense that the topic is controversial or uncertain. If denial is in line with a group’s ideology, then even the suggestion of doubt may be enough to reject solid science.
We see this when it comes to the effectiveness of vaccines, the evolution of life on earth, and anthropogenic global warming. A recent Pew poll shows that the campaign of global warming denial has been fairly successful — while the science becomes more solid around the consensus that the earth is warming and humans are contributing to this, the public is becoming less convinced.
I often encounter denial even when it comes to simple things, like body weight. You would think that the question of how many Americans are overweight or obese would be fairly straightforward, but no data is so straightforward that it cannot be distorted by dedicated ideologues. Read more »
The FDA has been tough on diet drugs of late. Three years ago it scuttled an attempt to get the European diet drug rimonabant approved for use in the U.S. More recently it rejected, at least temporarily, applications for Qnexa and Lorcaserin.
But that trend may have been reversed last week, when an advisory committee set the stage for possible FDA approval of Orexigen’s investigational diet drug, Contrave. By a 13-7 vote, the committee said in essence that the somewhat modest beneficial effects of the drug outweighed its tendency to increase blood pressure.
The FDA will make final decision on the matter by the end of January. It is not required to follow the advice of its advisory committees, but as was the case for the three diet drugs mentioned above, it usually does. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Pizaazz*
Probably the most common New Year’s resolution I hear year after year is the one to lose weight. I mean, hey — even I tell myself that I’ll feel better when I’m able to drop some pounds. But how is that done? I get asked all the time what is the best diet out there and what piece of exercise equipment should be purchases to get the job done. And, oh yeah — how soon can I see results?
Losing weight is not easy (duh) — a doctor doesn’t need to tell you that. But in this video, I talked with our local TV station about some practical “dos and don’ts” when it comes to trying to lose some weight as your New Year’s resolution. As a rule, I tell people to start off your plan slowly when it comes to eating better and incorporating some exercise.
If you find this video helpful, I invite you to check out others at MikeSevilla.TV. Enjoy!
Q. What’s the difference between a public health expert and an incompetent doctor?
A. An incompetent doctor tends to kill only one person at a time.
The deep recession and jobless “recovery” which we have enjoyed in the U.S. for going on three years now was triggered by the bursting of the housing bubble. The housing bubble was created by lending practices that awarded “subprime” mortgages to people with bad credit ratings, and offered to people with good credit ratings adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) that enticed them to purchase more expensive homes than they could afford.
Traditionally, banks were always reluctant to award mortgages, of any flavor, to people who obviously could not afford them, since doing so would wreck their businesses. The reason the banks began making bad loans in the 1990s is that new government policies, chiefly the Community Reinvestment Act, strongly “encouraged” them to.
The banks, being businesses, reacted logically to the new regulatory climate, to threats by ACORN and other activist groups, and to the escape hatch opened for them by the government which allowed them to turn over their toxic mortgages immediately to Fanny and Freddie. Banks quickly began turning out as many questionable mortgages as they could write, to as many uncreditworthy individuals as they could find. Read more »
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I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…
As part of the new healthcare legislation (Affordable Care Act), the FDA has now published its guidelines for restaurants to inform consumers of the calorie counts of food. It establishes requirements for nutrition labeling of standard menu items for chain restaurants and chain vending machine operators.
I often encounter denial even when it comes to simple things, like body weight. You would think that the question of how many Americans are overweight or obese would be fairly straightforward, but no data is so straightforward that it cannot be distorted by dedicated ideologues. 
