New York City Councilman Eric Gioia (D-Queens) has proposed a measure that would prevent fast food restaurants from opening new outlets within 0.1 miles, or about 500 feet, of schools.
Archive for category Nutrition and obesity
Disney’s practice of licensing its characters for placement on children’s food products is not new, but its strategy is. Whereas cereal boxes and fast-food bags used to be prime real estate for company-to-kid marketing, alarming rates of childhood obesity caused Disney to think twice about aligning its name with sugary or fatty foods. So over the past few years, Disney has gradually distanced itself from junk food. It ended its McDonald’s Happy Meal contract in 2006 and has been expanding its association with healthier foods since then. The result: an abundance of Disney-branded healthy stuff, including fruits, vegetables and dairy products. How about a Hannah Montana Banana?
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that consumers not eat raw alfalfa sprouts, including sprout blends containing alfalfa sprouts, until further notice because the product has been linked to Salmonella. Other types of sprouts have not been implicated at this time. See also: http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2009/NEW02001.html
The Swedish study lasted 18 months. It involved 120 obese and unfit women between the ages of 30 and 60 with a waist circumference of at least 88 centimetres. The subjects were randomly assigned to two groups, a control group that focused on walking and an intervention group that focused on cycling. The results show that a larger proportion of the women in the intervention group (39%) cycled two kilometres or more per day than the women in the control group (9%). And a positive side-effect was that car-driving dropped by 34 per cent.
The first results from the FLABEL project are now available as a webinar. Following 6 months of research, in 28 countries (27 EU Members States & Turkey), more than 37,000 products have been audited to determine the penetration of nutrition labelling in Europe today. Using a standardised analytical methodology, the number of products with nutrition information on pack (front and back), the main types of systems used in each country, the prevalence of nutrition and health claim usage, and the prevalence of nutrition information on products that are attractive to children, were assessed in these 5 product categories: bisquits, ready meals, carbonated soft drinks, breakfast cereals and yoghurts. Enjoy.
Hunger And Calorie Consumption Throughout Day Impacted By Breakfast Choices. Protein for Breakfast Helps Teens Control Appetite.
As if the obesity epidemic needed a stimulus package, Cold Stone Creamery, started selling a 1,920-calorie deposit of chocolate ice cream, milk, and fudge syrup into the bellies of those willing to pay $5.50 or more. To withdraw that from your daily calorie bank, you’d have to spend more than four hours on the step machine or nearly seven hours doing water aerobics.Or most people will need to avoid eating for an entire 24 hours to compensate for such a colorie bomb.
As people become more educated, studies have demonstrated that they tend to choose foods that are lower in calories but higher in nutrients. They also pay more. In a study published in the May 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, researchers from the University of Washington compared the eating habits and food costs of a sample of 164 adults in the Seattle, Washington area. Diets of low energy density and high nutrient content have been associated with less weight gain and with lower rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some forms of cancer.
Older people in Northern Ireland are eating on average four portions of fruit and vegetables per day. This is higher than levels in the rest of the UK, but remains below current government recommendations. A huge 22 per cent of respondents were not aware of the current government guidelines on eating five portions of fruit and vegetables per day. In fact, some respondents who were eating only two portions per day thought they were eating enough.
Two areas of the brain work together to give some people the self-control to reject unhealthy foods, a new study has found. California Institute of Technology researchers used MRI to scan the brains of volunteers as they looked at photos of dozens of types of foods and decided which ones they’d like to eat. They found significant differences in the brain activity between people who had self-control in terms of making food choices and those with no self-control.