01 Feb 2009
Throwing the Book at Salt

I've blogged about the "salt obsession" before, but wasn't sure it was still on the radar. Apparently, I was wrong. The most telling item in this piece:

But public health officials say there is a strong consensus that salt leads to higher rates of heart attacks and strokes.

That consensus alarms Dr. Michael Alderman, editor in chief of the American Journal of Hypertension, who thinks more clinical studies need to be done. And, he says, wild swings in dietary regulation haven’t always worked out.

We've replaced science with political consensus ... which kinda explains a whole lot of what's wrong with this society, if you think about it.

The last two times Dr. Frieden stepped into the nutrition wars, he gave muscle to nationwide moves to ban trans fats and post calorie counts on restaurant menus. That means you could soon be hearing more about salt than you have in a long time.

(link) [New York Times]

14:09 /Politics | 1 comment | permanent link

Thor to the Rescue!

God of Thunder Maybe it was the Hammer ...

It has to be the best story of 2009 so far. Six-foot-tall Torvald Alexander was dressed as the Scandinavian god Thor as he came home in the early hours of the morning after a Hogmanay party. When he entered the house, dressed in a red cape and a silver-winged helmet, he saw a burglar opening drawers in his desk.

(link) [Aberdeen Press and Journal]

13:33 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

Children's lives 'harder today'

This is the kind of tale that makes me wish for a time machine: so I could send these boneheads back 1000 years, when half of all live births were dead by age 5. Or back 100 years, when my grandmother got her children oranges for Christmas. Or even back 45 years, when measles killed 4 of my first grade classmates.

Absent a time machine, an airliner would do. They could take a look around Darfur, Gaza, Haiti or any number of other places. Kids in some of those places do have a harder time growing up now than their parents did: because they have a harder time staying alive.

Kids People in the West seem to have forgotten what hardship means.

The lives of British children are more difficult now than they were in the past, a large-scale report into childhood claims.

(link) [BBC News]

08:37 /Home | 1 comment | permanent link