Published at: 09:07 am - Thursday July 08 2010
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s directive from April is being implemented and small business owners on city property are starting to feel the effect. Soy milk in; Coca-Cola out. The San Francicso Chronicle reports the story of Chong Park, who has managed the City Hall Café for nine years and now worries about the future of her business.
“[Park] says she averages less than $100 a month on her cut from two gleaming red Coca-Cola machines at the doors to her cafe. But with the future lease on the space up for grabs, she’s trying to bring the stock in her refrigerator cases in line with Newsom’s directive, and that’s going to impact her bottom line, Park said.”
Dr. Michael G. Kaplan, Attending Physician at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, wrote a letter to the editor a couple months ago in regards to the soda tax debate :
“Proponents point to studies that correlate soda consumption with obesity. Scientists know, however, that correlation itself does not imply causation. The gold standard in medicine to prove causation is the prospective randomized controlled trial, and presently, four such studies were unsuccessful.”
Published at: 02:06 pm - Monday June 21 2010
Expert Says Nationwide Salt Reduction to Reduce Hypertension Is Short on Evidence
By Todd Zwillich
WebMD Health News
May 19, 2010 — Government and industry efforts to cut the amount of salt in the American diet amount to a giant “national experiment” with no guarantee of success, one scientist is warning.
…
“We do not have evidence that reducing sodium is going to increase the quality or the duration of our lives,” he [Dr. Michael Alderman] said at a symposium on salt reductions sponsored by the American Society for Nutrition in Washington.
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Published at: 12:06 pm - Thursday June 17 2010
The data suggest what the experts have never considered: Salt intake is regulated within a relatively narrow range by highly sophisticated internal circuits. These communications between the brain and multiple critical organs cannot be modified by public health policies; they respond only to our bodies’ internal signals such that actual salt consumption varies little regardless of the sodium content of the food supply. In the case of our data it was true across multiple cultures, each with a unique food environment.
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Published at: 10:06 am - Thursday June 17 2010
An article in today’s LA Times announced the release of the USDA’s preliminary 2010Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
The latest guidelines are basically the same recommendations issued 30 years ago: cutting back on salt, sugar and saturated fats, and consuming more fruits and vegetables.
The guidelines are available to read or download at the USDA’s website.
Government nutritional guidelines would not be of so much concern if they were just guidelines, offered to a population that was then free to choose their individual diets according to personal needs and values. If this were the case, your only objection may be that your tax dollars were wasted.
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Published at: 09:06 am - Thursday June 17 2010
The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee is revamping the government’s popular food pyramid, with new recommendations emphasizing plant-based diets with plenty of whole grains, fruits and vegetables, low-fat milk products and a reduction in daily sodium intake. The committee now recommends consuming no more than 1,500 mg of sodium; the current standard is 2,300 mg.
ACSH’s nostalgic Dr. Gilbert Ross reminisces about the days of medicine when “we used to put only patients with heart failure and fluid retention states on low-sodium diets, which at that time was considered 2,000 mg per day — still 500 mg higher than the committee’s new recommendation for all Americans.”
The advisory panel noted that it will be “challenging to achieve the lower level,” and ACSH’s Jeff Stier agrees. “If manufacturers follow these guidelines, the salt shaker will attain an ever greater presence at the dinner table.”
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