People hate it when the doctors and medical reporters give them conflicting signals on what they should or shouldn’t eat. The press certainly met the public’s low expectations this week, with Healthday admonishing us that “Most Americans Should Eat Less Salt,” The New York Times...
Category: health
People hate it when the doctors and medical reporters give them conflicting signals on what they should or shouldn’t eat. The press certainly met the public’s low expectations this week, with Healthday admonishing us that “Most Americans Should Eat Less Salt,” The New York Times reporting that there’s "No Benefit Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet,” and The New York Daily News advising us to “Go Ahead and Order that Side of Fries.” All these, remarkably, stemmed from the very same Institute of Medicine report.
Many stories quoted “experts” saying they stand by old recommendations that we should aim for no more than 1500 mg a day, but the Times actually quotes the chair of the IOM report saying that some people may suffer risks if they get less than 2,300 mg a day. Those risks include “...
In a previous post, I criticized coverage of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to ban the sale of sugared sodas larger than 16 ounces. None of the stories that I saw told me whether this was...
In a previous post, I criticized coverage of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to ban the sale of sugared sodas larger than 16 ounces. None of the stories that I saw told me whether this was likely to work. Surely, I thought, somebody has done research on this; most coverage dealt with whether it was appropriate for the government to meddle with food choices.
This morning, The New York Times has a front-page story by Winnie Hu discussing Bloomberg's efforts to promote the plan. It makes a minor nod to research by asking Kelly Brownell, the director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University and a prominent obesity researcher, what he thinks of the policy...
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