Sarah Kavanaugh, a 15-year-old Mississippi high school student, is making headlines with a petition she began that calls on PepsiCo. to stop using brominated vegetable oil in its Gatorade brand of sports drinks.

Teen pregnancy is a hot topic in the media and pop culture these days, as attested to by movies including "Juno" to "Teen Mom 2" to "16 and Pregnant." Events of recent weeks may indicate this concern is finally cracking the shell around our public health leaders as well better late than never.

Reading the mainstream media s coverage of the health and nutrition issue, you d be forgiven if you thought eating everything from red meat to burnt toast could cause cancer. But a new study shows many of these reports are nothing more than bogus sensationalism just as we ve been saying for years.

The evidence is mounting that routine hits during contact sports especially football and hockey can cause long-term brain injury, but somehow that news hasn t made it into the heads of hockey coaches, who continue to put young athletes at risk, according to a pair of new studies.

Last week, the respected scientific journal Nature published a superb editorial castigating the Breast Cancer Coalition, a nonprofit ostensibly devoted to reducing the toll of breast cancer. The editorial pointed out that the goal put forward by the BCC, to cure breast cancer by 2020 was irresponsible, given the complexity of cancer in general and breast cancer specifically.

Weight loss surgery may not be a long-term solution for many patients with type II diabetes, as was once thought. A study published in the journal Obesity Surgery found that many of the obese type II diabetics who had gastric bypass surgery did not go into remission and of those who did, a third redeveloped diabetes within five years. This is a stark contrast from what has been publicized in the past.

Are the prices of brand-name drugs really increasing, as claimed in a report published by the pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts? According to the report, which tracked commonly used drugs from September 2011 until September 2012, the price of brand-name medications increased 13 percent and the price of generic drugs decreased by 22 percent. Express Scripts chief medical officer, Dr.

Childhood obesity is a serious problem in the United States, affecting almost 18 percent of boys and 16 percent of girls aged between 2 and 19.

The European Food Safety Authority has joined us and scientists around the world in rejecting as junk a study purporting to link genetically modified corn to cancer in rats. The study by French researcher Gilles-Eric Séralini was clearly a deeply-flawed, politically motivated effort to derail the vote against California s Proposition 37, which thankfully did indeed fail.

It is hardly surprising that The New York Times comes out with an anti-pharmaceutical screed on a regular basis. I usually just ignore them, but Thursday's article in Business Day was so slanted and amateurish that I couldn't pass up the opportunity to call them out.
The headline itself was the worst offender: "Brand-Name Drug Prices Rise Sharply, Report Says."