Eat Fruits -- Oh, Wait, Not Those Fruits
By Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D.
Publication Date : Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Be afraid, be very afraid, if you love to eat prunes or dried pears -- at least if you believe the hype about naturally occurring acrylamide in foods being a real risk to human health. Swiss scientists reported at a symposium held by the American Chemical Society that acrylamide can be found in some dried fruits. Since 2002, when Swedish scientists discovered that acrylamide is formed in carbohydrate-containing food cooked at high temperatures, there has been a concerted effort to scare   Read Full >>

Obesity Link to Cancers Substantiated
By Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D.
Publication Date : Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Scare after scare appears in the popular press -- with news blaming traces of all sorts of chemicals and "toxins" for causing cancer. But it is becoming ever more apparent that many types of cancer are in fact linked more to lifestyle-related choices such as smoking and, now, obesity.It is widely recognized that obesity (defined as a Body Mass Index or BMI of 30 or more) is linked to a number of health risks -- e.g., heart   Read Full >>

Reminder: People Are Not Rats
By Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D.
Publication Date : Wednesday, February 13, 2008
It's rather obvious that people are not rats, but there must be some confusion as many news outlets are trumpeting the results of a rat feeding study as though they could be applied directly to humans. Major newspapers and TV stations, as well as various Internet outlets have posted headlines stating or suggesting that the non-caloric sweetener saccharin can lead to weight gain. What gives? Are there really data substantiating such a conclusion, or was it just a slow news day?The research   Read Full >>

Mississippians vs. Lard
By Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D.
Publication Date : Monday, February 4, 2008
Legislators all over the country are rightfully concerned that more and more citizens are becoming obese, and they're not sitting still for it! New York City, for one, has demanded that chain restaurants post the calorie content of their foods on menu boards. But Mississippi legislators are going even further. They are rightfully concerned that residents of their state have about the highest proportion of obesity in the whole country. So, what do they want to do about it? Prevent the   Read Full >>

A Strange Lawsuit Revealed
By Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D.
Publication Date : Thursday, January 17, 2008
A Denver man, Wayne Watson, is suing the grocery store where he bought microwave popcorn which he ate daily -- about two bags per day. The popcorn was flavored with diacetyl -- naturally found in butter and some other dairy products. Diacetyl, when inhaled in large amounts, is thought to be responsible for a rare lung disease -- bronchilitis obliterans. It has been diagnosed at unusually high rates in workers in a factory that produced the butter-flavored snack.It's easy to understand why   Read Full >>

Information We Didn’t Really Need About Calcium, Women, and Heart Attacks
By Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D.
Publication Date : Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Reuters' wire service does a good job of finding and reporting on health stories -- perhaps too good. This morning, for example, I received a short story about a New Zealand study on older women, which found that those who took calcium supplements for five years were more likely to experience a heart attack than those who did not. What the story didn't say, though, is where this study was published -- or even if it was. Perhaps it was just a report presented at a scientific meeting --   Read Full >>

Nora Ephron -- Epidemiologist?
By Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D.
Publication Date : Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Nora Ephron's many-faceted career includes acclaim as a film director, producer, screenwriter, and novelist. Now she may also claim fame as an intuitive epidemiologist -- thanks to her recent column in the New York Times ("The Chicken Soup Chronicles" ).Ephron is acutely observant of certain health and cultural correlations -- the type of links   Read Full >>

Chew on This -- But Stop If It Causes Sudden Weight Loss!
By Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D.
Publication Date : Friday, January 11, 2008
Along the lines of "you can have too much of a good thing," a recent report in the British Medical Journal describes the result of over-consumption of sugarless gum sweetened with sorbitol, a sugar alcohol.Two patients were seen at a Berlin hospital with perplexing symptoms -- chronic diarrhea and other bowel problems, and substantial unexplained weight loss (about 20% of normal body weight). Both patients had   Read Full >>

More California Dreamin': Proposition 65 and Caffeine
By Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D.
Publication Date : Tuesday, December 11, 2007
California may once again target innocuous beverages -- caffeine-containing sodas and energy drinks -- for labeling with the dreaded Proposition 65 warning label. According to an Associated Press article, a California advisory board is calling for a study to determine if such beverages pose a risk to pregnant women.While very high levels of   Read Full >>

Fit and Fat Can Go Together: New Study
By Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D.
Publication Date : Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Obesity isn’t good for you -- it can lead to myriad health problems and can shorten life -- but not always. Recent research reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Sui, et al. 2007;298:2507-2516) indicates that even obese older people, if they also are physically fit, have a reduced risk of death compared to similarly fat but less fit folks.The researchers assessed the cardiovascular   Read Full >>