Might I Also Suggest Subsidized Crack For Crackheads Perhaps?
by ilene - August 14th, 2010 5:24 am
Might I Also Suggest Subsidized Crack For Crackheads Perhaps?
Courtesy of Jr. Deputy Accountant
Oh Big Pharma, your marketing talents never cease to amaze me. As if Crestor and the like haven’t gotten enough of a push lately with drug companies now able to market statins to those with lifestyles that might lead to higher cholesterol, British researchers have actually suggested that statins should be offered as condiments to balance the unhealthy effects of fast food.
You have got to be kidding me. Why not try keeping the Big Mac out of your mouth, fat a*s?
Patrons of fast-food restaurants may see packets containing statins next to the ketchup and salt at the self-serve counter if the suggestion of British researchers becomes reality.
Emily Ferenczi, BMBCh, of Imperial College London, and colleagues calculated that most daily statin regimens would be enough to neutralize the increased cardiovascular risk associated with eating a quarter-pounder with cheese and small milkshake every day.
Because statins are cheap, relatively safe even at high doses, and effective for reducing cardiovascular risk across patient subgroups, offering them to individuals who choose to eat an unhealthy diet against best medical advice might make sense, they argued in an editorial in the American Journal of Cardiology.
"It cannot … be reasonably argued on safety grounds that individuals should be free to choose to eat lipid-rich food but not be free to supplement it with a statin," they wrote.
A recent LA Times article wonders just how effective statins can be - it appears to me they are quite effective… at making money, that is.
As the world’s most-prescribed class of medications, statins indisputably qualify for the commercial distinction of "blockbuster." About 24 million Americans take the drugs — marketed under such commercial names as Pravachol, Mevacor, Lipitor, Zocor and Crestor — largely to stave off heart attacks and strokes.
At the zenith of their profitability, these medications raked in $26.2 billion a year for their manufacturers. The introduction in recent years of cheaper generic versions may have begun to cut into sales revenues for the brand-name drugs that came first to the market, but better prices have only fueled the medications’ use: In 2009, U.S. patients filled 201.4 million prescriptions for statins, according to IMS Health, which tracks prescription drug trends. That’s nearly double the number of prescriptions written for
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What if You Ate Only What Was Advertised on TV?
by ilene - June 3rd, 2010 2:59 pm
Hint: perfect recipe for a coronary.
What if You Ate Only What Was Advertised on TV?
Courtesy of TIME, by Alice Park
Ragnar Schmuck / Getty Images
It should come as no surprise that the typical American diet isn’t exactly brimming with healthy goodness — rather, it’s laden with fat, sugar and salt. And now new research published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association points to a troubling reason: TV ads for food may be skewing our decisions on what we eat in powerful ways.
To figure out exactly how unhealthy a TV-guided diet would be, researchers studied food commercials that appeared during 84 hours of prime-time programming and 12 hours of Saturday-morning cartoons broadcast over the major U.S. networks during one month in 2004. When the research team calculated the nutritional content of a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet containing only foods that were advertised on television, they found that it exceeded the government’s recommended daily amount of fat by 20 times and had 25 times the recommended daily intake of sugar. "That’s almost a month’s worth of sugar in one day," notes study leader Michael Mink at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Ga.
In addition, the TV-marketed diet provided less than half the recommended daily servings of fruit, vegetables and dairy.
In fact, the sources of nutrition in the TV-ad diet were almost the exact opposite of what the government’s food pyramid recommends. Instead of making up the smallest proportion of a day’s calories, as nutritionists advise, fats and sugars accounted for the largest portion of calories in a diet based on television advertising. Couple this nutritional inversion with the fact that marketing campaigns are notoriously effective in influencing people’s behavior and the result is what many nutrition experts call a toxic environment — one that dissuades Americans from making healthy food choices and encourages inactivity.
In the year the study took place, the authors point out that foodmakers…
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IHOP’s Newest Dish is a War Crime
by ilene - April 28th, 2010 8:11 pm
The good news is that this sugar and fat-loaded delight should readily pass future salt prohibitions with flying colors (strawberry red, cream and cheesecake yellow). - Ilene
IHOP’s Newest Dish is a War Crime
Courtesy of Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker
What you’re seeing below is the latest innovation from the laboratory of Dine Equity ($DIN), the parent company of IHOP.
Yes, it’s a cheesecake-filled pancake.
My fellow Americans, you are all disgusting. General George Patton, Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen are rolling in their graves.
Read more (if you must):
IHOP Offers Cheesecake Filled Pancakes (MSNBC)
See also: FDA salt crackdown is in bad taste, Daily Bruin
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High-Fructose Corn Syrup Makes You Really Fat
by ilene - March 24th, 2010 6:26 pm
Do you eat a lot of high fructose corn syrup or other sources of fructose? Watch the excellent video "Sugar: The Bitter Truth." It was made by University of California, Television. In this hour+ long video, Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues and presents evidence that too much fructose and too little fiber are cornerstones of the obesity epidemic, and that fructose is essentially "a poison."
Note: Ordinary table sugar is sucrose, which is one molecule of glucose linked to one molecule of fructose. Fructose is sweeter than glucose, but for reasons discussed in the video, the increased sweetness does not lead to eating less of it. - Ilene
Sugar: The Bitter Truth, Series: UCSF Mini Medical School for the Public [7/2009] [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 16717]."
*****
Henry Blodget discusses a recent study of the effect of high fructose corn syrup on rats (below).
Oh, Crap: Scientists Discover That High-Fructose Corn Syrup Makes You Really Fat
Courtesy of Henry Blodget at Clusterstock
Princeton scientists have discovered something that will come as a blow to many food manufacturers: High-fructose corn syrup makes you a lot fatter than sugar.
How did the scientists discover this?
They fed rats high-fructose corn syrup. The rats blew up like balloons.
Sucks to be a high-in-high-fructose corn syrup food manufacturer right now…
A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.
In addition to causing significant weight gain in lab animals, long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup also led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides. The researchers say the work sheds light on the factors contributing to obesity trends in the United States.
"Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests,"
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Cereal … It’s What’s For Dinner
by ilene - December 20th, 2009 1:30 pm
Cereal … It’s What’s For Dinner
Courtesy of Mish
Move over beef, for a small but growing number of consumers, it’s Cereal For Dinner.
Cereal for dinner? It’s a tough reality for some cash-strapped people.
Rising popularity of cereal among those looking for a cheap meal combined with plunging ingredient costs to boost the second-quarter profit of Cheerios maker General Mills Inc. 50 percent.
The increase is a sign of the economic stress still facing families amid high unemployment who want to cut spending and save time, but don’t want to rely on fast food. Food banks are seeing rising demand for cereal as people try to find a nutritious meal that costs as little as possible. That’s blurring lines between traditional meals.
Kellie Hotz and her husband, Jeff, eat cereal for dinner three times a week as they struggle to stretch their budgets and care for a toddler. Hotz said cereal is less expensive than fast food, so she keeps a dozen boxes on hand. "It’s the fastest, easiest and at least somewhat half-nutritious thing to do during the weekdays," said Hotz, 29, of Arlington Heights, Ill.
Breakfast foods such as eggs are popular now all times of the day because they’re quick, nutritious and inexpensive, said Christopher Shanahan, a research analyst with Frost & Sullivan. "The lines of when to eat breakfast, when to eat dinner, when to eat lunch have been slightly blurring," he said.
Food banks across the country are clamoring for cereal to hand out to families, who are increasingly seeking out food assistance.
Cereal is the top priority for Gary Knuth, who coordinates food donations and purchases for the Northern Illinois Food Bank. On Thursday, he put in a bid for a truckload of Shredded Wheat in Iowa. "You can give one box to a family and feed a number of people," he said. "It goes a long way, and it fills a lot of bellies with good stuff."
Bacon, The Recessionary Version Of The Truffle
Justin Rohrlich writing for Minyanville expresses his thoughts about What Our Bacon Intake Says About the Economy.
Stop the presses, folks — your world is about to be rocked.
Take a look at this headline from Scott Hume’s BurgerBusiness.com: “Data Confirm Sharp Increase in Bacon on
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site