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Every year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports on state obesity rankings, and every year, a number of Southern states top the list.

If you re at all familiar with the nutritional value of what you eat, you probably know that milk is a nutrient-dense beverage. As Ruth Frenchman, a registered dietitian and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, points out, the ubiquitous beverage contains calcium, vitamin D, phosphorus, potassium, vitamin B12, and other vitamins and minerals. In fact, of the four nutrients most commonly insufficient in our diets calcium, potassium, vitamin D, and fiber milk is a good source of the first three.

Recently, the Ministry of Health in New Zealand moved to ban Hydro, a popular brand of electronic cigarette. In response, Dr. Murray Laugesen, founder of Health New Zealand, called for the Ministry to review its policy on electronic cigarettes, as such a ban is against the public s particularly smokers best interests.
In his open letter, Dr. Laugesen draws attention to a number of key points. As he points out,

Compared to their normal-weight counterparts, overweight and obese women who were previously diagnosed with breast cancer are more likely to have their disease return or to die of cancer. Those are the results of a new observational study, published in the journal Cancer, which investigates the link between weight and breast cancer.

As breast cancer research continues to make news, take a moment to catch up on the latest in a two-part series of op-eds by our very own Dr. Ross, featured on Examiner.com.
You can read them both in their entirety here and here.

In a unanimous ruling on Friday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit upheld an earlier court decision permitting the use of federal funding for research involving already-derived embryonic stem cells. Since no human embryos are destroyed in such research, the court ruled that these studies may continue receiving grants from the National Institutes of Health and other federal sources.

Imagine a sensor about the size of a grain of salt that, once swallowed, can transmit details about your heart rate and physical activity levels and track your adherence to a drug regimen. This technology, imagined by Proteus Digital Health, Inc., is now a reality that was approved just last month by the FDA.

As the summer season draws to a close, students and parents are making their annual back-to-school shopping trips, stocking up on pencils, notebooks, and backpacks. But before you pick up that Dora the Explorer backpack, the Center for Health, Environment & Justice (CHEJ) wants the public to know that the popular Disney, Spiderman, and Dora branded children s products (among others) are actually quite dangerous. Why? Because they re laced with toxic phthalates, of course.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported on the rising rates of melanoma, noting that this often deadly disease now most commonly affects young women. These statistics may not be so surprising after a study by IBISWorld revealed that white women between the ages of 18 and 21 are in the lead when it comes to using indoor tanning beds. In fact, an amazing 32 percent of white women admit to having done so, and the total number of tanners in the U.S. has been estimated at 28 million!

The link between soda and obesity has attracted a hailstorm of media attention recently, not least of which in New York City, where Mayor Bloomberg is attempting to restrict the sale of sweetened beverages exceeding 16 ounces. Yet, amidst the soda melee, it s surprising how little attention diet soda has received.

New research from Denmark, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, gives further support to the long held notion that having a family member die from heart disease at a young age increases an individual s own risk of a similar condition.

With apologies to my attorney friends, the saying "95 percent of lawyers make the rest of them look bad" remains one of my favorites.
And a story in yesterday's New York Times did little to change this. The lawyers who were involved with negotiating the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) of 1999 (and made obscene amounts of money in the process) are now going after food manufacturers using a similar strategy. This is almost funny.

Earlier in the week we discussed the spate of lawsuits against the food industry filed by many of the same lawyers who negotiated the 1999 Master Settlement Agreement with Big Tobacco. Unfortunately, while the claims against the tobacco industry were entirely justified, the allegations in these latest suits can only be described as spurious. (Something about the absence of real berries in Cap n Crunch Crunch Berry cereal, we believe.)

Primary prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) relies on classifying patients based on their global cardiovascular risk the probability of developing CVD within a set period of time, taking into account a number of risk factors at once. A person is found to be either high, intermediate, or low risk based on several risk models, among which the best known is the Framingham Risk Score (FRS). It has become increasingly apparent, however, that the intermediate risk group is actually a composite of individuals of various predicted risk levels.

There is little more disheartening than scientists who pursue unscientific ideological agendas when public health is at risk. Yet that s what happened at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society this week, where a group of scientists reported finding the first strong oral carcinogen in smokeless tobacco such as chewing tobacco, snuff, and other products.

We were pleased to hear that chemoprevention as a means of breast cancer risk reduction is being seriously discussed. In a recent internal medicine meeting, Dr. Jennifer R. Diamond, a medical oncologist from the University of Colorado at Denver, spoke about the importance of chemoprevention as a primary means of reducing a woman s risk of breast cancer.

Over a decade ago, major cigarette manufacturers were forced to take responsibility for their role in tobacco-related health care costs, in the form of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. The court case set right numerous cigarette marketing practices that were misleading and harmful. Yet the ruling was a mixed bag for public health: Some marketing restrictions and increased taxes contributed to a decline in smoking rates, but Big Tobacco was ultimately granted immunity from individual lawsuits.

In 2006, the CDC recommended that everyone between the ages of 13 and 64 be tested for HIV at least once. Yet only a year before, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) had not found enough evidence in favor of routine testing and instead stated that such decisions should be made by doctors on a case-by-case basis.

In July, the CDC reported that the U.S. was on track for the worst whooping cough (pertussis) outbreak since 1959. And so far this year, an estimated 18,000 cases of whooping cough have already been reported about half of which occurred in infants younger than three months. Because such young children can t yet be vaccinated, they must rely on herd immunity, which occurs when there are high immunity rates within the whole community.

Vitamin D-deficient kids may benefit from supplementation, according to the results of a new study published in the journalPediatrics. The new report found that such children had fewer colds during the winter.

Clostridium difficile, commonly known as C. diff, is a potentially deadly infection of the colon, most often affecting hospital patients. But many now question whether hospitals are doing everything they can to prevent the infection from occurring.

Good news: U.S. cases of chickenpox have fallen by nearly 80 percent between 2000 and 2010, the CDC reports. And much of that decline can be attributed to vaccination.

A recent study published in Current Biology finds that researchers are now able to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to determine a person s age with about 92 percent accuracy at least if they re between the ages of 3 and 20. But aside from simply being a neat trick, the technology can be used to detect abnormal brain development within that age range a key period of brain development.

Scientific investigation relies on the publication of peer-reviewed studies to communicate advances in research, including medical research. Over the course of the last decade, however, several important paradigms have been found baseless.

We still have a long way to go when it comes to curtailing tobacco use worldwide, new research just published in The Lancet confirms. According to the latest estimates, nearly half of adult men in developing countries use tobacco products, while women increasingly take up smoking at younger ages, and the quit rate in most countries is far too low.