(Podcast) Are you ordering a pound of heart attack at the deli?

So just in case you needed another reason to avoid processed meats along comes Harvard's Dr. Renata Micha and her colleagues who at a recent American Heart Association conference reported on their meta-analysis that looked at over 1.2 million adults and the risk of their developing heart disease and diabetes as a function of their consumption of red and processed meats.

While for red meat there was no found linkage, for processed meats the results were staggering. Every 50 grams (1.76oz) of processed meat consumed per day increased the risk of developing heart disease by 42% and diabetes by 19% and even a single weekly serving seemed to increase risk of heart disease by 3-5%.

What really struck me was the fact that she was presenting at an American Heart Association conference.

The AHA, like Canada's Heart and Stroke Foundation, runs a front-of-package labeling program with less than strict criteria. Currently there are 114 different processed meat products that carry the AHA's Heart Check. Here in Canada there are 44 different processed meat products carrying the Heart and Stroke Foundation's ignoble Health Check.

I asked Dr. Micha about her thoughts regarding public health organizations formally endorsing and promoting the consumption of processed meats as healthy and while she was very diplomatic with her answer, her hope that policies may change consequent to the research is not something I'd be holding my breath for here in Canada. Sadly the Heart and Stroke Foundation doesn't appear to care too much about research when it comes to administering their Health Check program.

Click below to download the audio file, or you can listen on the embedded player (won't work with email subscribers) and hear Dr. Micha discuss this latest salvo against highly processed foods.

Click here to download this podcast or click here to subscribe in iTunes!

(Podcast) You shouldn't need a PhD to go grocery shopping.

Regular readers of my blog will certainly already be aware of Health Canada's push to fortify the global food supply.

In researching the story I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Valerie Tarasuk from the University of Toronto. Dr. Tarasuk is a Professor of nutrition and a former member of Health Canada’s expert advisory committee on dietary reference intakes.

No thanks to me (I just ask the questions), the interview's fascinating and really a great tour of many of the issues surrounding discretionary fortification. Dr. Tarasuk is a clear and cogent speaker and is quite entertaining to boot - it was certainly one of the most enjoyable interviews I've ever conducted.

Click below to download the audio file, or you can listen on the embedded player (won't work with email subscribers) and hear Dr. Tarasuk rip apart Health Canada's proposed gift to Big Food the world over.

Click here to download this podcast or click here to subscribe in iTunes!

(Podcast) Obesity's dangerous. Period.

Why?

Not sure.

But Dr. Jennifer Kuk and Dr. Chris Arden from my undergraduate Alma mater York University in Toronto recently published a paper that looked at 6,011 adults and then subdivided them into those who were "metabolically normal" and obese and "metabolically abnormal" and obese and then followed those individuals' mortality rates over the course of 10 years.

The results?

Obesity doesn't generally occur in the absence of metabolic abnormalities (only about 6% of the obese folks fall into this slot), but when it does, it's still associated with the same increase in risk of all-cause mortality.

A little while ago I had the chance to interview Dr. Kuk about her study.

Click below to download the audio file, or you can listen on the embedded player (won't work with email subscribers) and hear Jen discuss her findings.

Click here to download this podcast or click here to subscribe in iTunes!




Kuk JL, & Ardern CI (2009). Are metabolically normal but obese individuals at lower risk for all-cause mortality? Diabetes care, 32 (12), 2297-9 PMID: 19729521

(Podcast) Milk, conflicts of interest, and med-school profs.

Readers of my blog may remember a few weeks ago when I posted regarding a University of British Columbia professor who in a milk advertisement dramatically overinflated dairy’s role in treating high blood pressure even ignoring her own research's negative results in the process. I wondered whether or not it was her strong ties to the milk industry that influenced her decisions therein. There was a very interesting comment left that day by an anonymous medical student at the University of British Columbia. He or she reported,

"Dr. Barr gave us a lecture recently in medical school. She did NOT declare ANY affiliation with the dairy industry. At one point she told us that lactose intolerance is exaggerated and everyone should drink a cup of milk. The lactose intolerant people in our class were not impressed..."

That made me wonder, should University professors disclose their potential conflicts of interest before lecturing students? I certainly don't remember any professors disclosing their ties to anyone during my medical school days at the University of Toronto yet it's an obligatory practice for those same professors to do so at conferences and in journal articles.

To me this seems like a dangerous double standard as one might argue that students are far more vulnerable than full fledged physicians and researchers in critically appraising data. Given the incredible power differential between professor and student and the intrinsic trust one places in the purveyors of their education I wondered about the ethics of such a lack of disclosure and so I contacted Dr. Chris MacDonald to chat about this further. Chris teaches Philosophy, including business ethics, at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Canada, and is a non-resident Senior Fellow at Duke University's Kenan Institute for Ethics. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Business Ethics and in 2008 he was named one of the "100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics" by Ethisphere Magazine. Chris is also the author of the Business Ethics Blog.

Click below to download the file, or you can listen on the embedded player (won't work with email subscribers) and hear Chris discuss his take on lecture based conflict of interest disclosure.



Click here to download this podcast or click here to subscribe in iTunes!

(Podcast) Raise your finger for Chocolate Milk

The past few weeks this blog has seen its fair share of posts about chocolate milk.

Coincidentally the posting coincided with the launch of a new American Dairy Council sponsored chocolate milk campaign, "Raise your hand for chocolate milk" which has health professionals (dietitians, pediatricians etc.) recommending we raise our hands in support of chocolate milk.

Someone who's not raising his hand for chocolate milk is Dr. Barry Popkin.

Dr. Popkin is the Carla Smith Chamblee Distinguished Professor of Global Nutrition, has a Ph.D. in economics and is Professor of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill where he directs their Interdisciplinary Center for Obesity. Dr. Popkin has published hundreds of journal articles, book chapters, and books and much of his work has focused specifically on the impact beverages have had on the prevalence of obesity. That focus is certainly one of the subjects he covers in his most recent book, The World is Fat: The Fads, Trends, Policies, and Products that are Fattening the Human Race.

Dr. Popkin was kind enough to spend a few moments chatting with me last week about chocolate milk and the Raise your Hand for Chocolate Milk campaign. Click below to download the file, or you can listen on the embedded player (won't work with email subscribers) and hear Dr. Popkin discuss how among other things the bone health concerns we've got for our children are better treated through increased activity rather than increased dairy.

Me? While I'm certainly not about to raise my hand for chocolate milk, I'd be happy to raise for it one particular finger.

Click here to download this podcast or click here to subscribe in iTunes!

(Podcast) Coke and the AAFP on Weighty Mutters

You read that right - podcast.

I've been meaning to start podcasting for some time and finally I've got around to figuring it out (I hope).

The inaugural episode has me interviewing Dr. Lori Heim, the President-elect of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Just two weeks ago her organization partnered up with Coca Cola to collaborate on educational materials for their website www.familydoctor.org. In return for their involvement Coca Cola is paying the AAFP $600,000.

So what is Coca Cola getting in return? Credibility and trust by association.

In preparing for the interview I went through blog posts and tweets regarding the deal and with almost no exceptions the social media world was up in arms, finding the partnership perverse.

The medical world is no less unhappy and just last week some of the world's most prominent nutritional epidemiologists and advocates sent an open letter to the AAFP asking them to rethink their plans or at the very least lend their name to campaigns supporting soda taxes and the publication of warning labels on sugar sweetened beverages.

In my interview with her, Dr. Heim gave me the sense that indeed, it was all about money and that the partnership with Coca Cola stemmed at least in part due to pressure from AAFP members to sever or reduce AAFP's ties with drug companies.

Personally I think in this case it's one of those situations where the adage, "better the devil you know" holds true. Physicians have a long history of working with drug companies and have a far better understanding both of their products and the methods they use to promote them. As well, Big Pharma has very specific guidelines on what they are and are not allowed to do and say in terms of commercial partnerships and practice. One senior Big Pharma person I know tells me that there are in fact departments within her company to ensure she markets her brands appropriately and she has numerous rules about what she is and is not allowed to do or say in their promotion. Further, the brands themselves have tremendous amounts of research, development and safety testing before they're ever sold.

Contrast those checks and balances with Big Food who have no such testing or obligations to create safe foods and while I have no proof, looking at their advertising I would be very surprised were there any oversight committees worrying about what's being said with the exception of those cases where federal advertising laws mattered or when trying to pretend like they care about children in their hollow pledges not to advertise to them.

None of this is ideal. Ideal would be a situation where the AAFP could be financially self sustainable without external funding. That's not an option, but with this Coca Cola partnership, I think they've bet on the wrong horse.

To hear my interview with Dr. Heim I'm hoping all you'll have to do is click somewhere in this post (and I suspect email subscribers will likely have to visit the blog). If I'm really lucky I'll even figure out how to get it on iTunes.

Or you can click here to download this podcast