Block 2

New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn unveils her goals for food

Hannah Rosenzweig, MPH is a documentary filmmaker,

Health Media African Style

Martin Lucas is the Director of the

The defeat of the DREAM Act—a setback for all of us

Photo Credit/The San Francisco Chronicle

David M. Keepnews, PhD, JD, RN, FAAN is an Associate Professor in the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing. Dr. Keepnews, an expert on health care systems and health policy, currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Policy, Politics & Nursing Practice, a quarterly journal.

Immigration policy remains a hot-button issue in the United States, with no apparent progress toward resolution, particularly on the status of undocumented immigrants. However, despite broadly divergent views on immigration policy, one might hope that a degree of national consensus could be achieved on the status of some undocumented immigrants. Common sense and a spirit of fairness should drive agreement that people who came to the U.S. as children—who generally had no say in their parents’ decisions on whether and how to come here—and who have led productive lives here should be entitled to a straightforward path to resolve their own legal status and achieve U.S. citizenship.

Unfortunately, common sense and fairness have not ruled the day on this issue so far. On December 18, the Senate failed to end a filibuster of the Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. The DREAM Act would have provided conditional status and a path to citizenship to young immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before age 16, who have been here for at least 5 years, and who completed at least two years of college or military service.

BEHAVIOR IS HEALTH/ALL HEALTH IS PUBLIC

photo credit/monografias.com

Meg Daley Olmert is a Senior Fellow at the Center and the author of, Made For Each Other, The Biology of the Human Animal Bond. This is the first book to explain the brain chemistry that flows through—and between—all mammals forging powerful social bonds between the species.

A couple of weeks ago the NIH launched a new public symposium series called OPPNET that will bring together NIH-funded researchers from a wide variety of disciplines to explore a new and long-overdue holistic perspective on basic scientific research.   It was highly appropriate that the first seminar would examine the subject of the mother-infant bond, because we now know what happens to mother affects her baby in ways that not only decide its fate, but can leave a genetic imprint that can last for generations to come.  This nature-nurture effect is called “epi-gentics” and it is a game-changer for science and public health policy too.

“It’s not just a vote. This is my life,” Stacey Vasquez on DADT Vote in the Senate

[caption id="attachment_10597" align="alignleft" width="300"] Lady Gaga, center,

Health, Media, Policy…and Poetry, Part 2

[caption id="attachment_10599" align="alignleft" width="300"] Danielle DeCosmo, an

Season 10’s “Biggest Loser” Finale: The Fix and The Fixers (Part Two of Two)

Sarah, a contestant on upcoming Season 11Wait a minute.

Read Part One of this post here:

Wait a minute.

People who are overweight and/or obese have a problem controlling how much they eat. That’s bad for their health.

However, the inability to exercise complete, rational control over your behavior at all times is the hallmark of being a living, sentient, human being.

Fat people are not more damaged than other people. They’re not less stable.

Fat people are just really, really unlucky. Everyone has issues, imperfections, foibles, big and small. Heavy people wear a personal shortcoming externally, for anyone to see and judge. And pay them less.

Lisa didn’t become a better mom when she became a thinner mom. The fact that Lisa was not able to stop overeating, and even her admission that, as a working, single mom she frequently fed her kids cheap, take-out, fatty pizza (shocking!) doesn’t mean that she ever failed to meet their emotional or material needs.

Weight is not a moral or character issue. It’s a health issue. But the Biggest Loser is relentless in characterizing contestants as initially weak, childlike, and even, in trainer Bob’s words, “broken” people.

Season 10’s “Biggest Loser” Finale: The Fix and The Fixers (Part One of Two)

This season’s final four contestants, with winner Patrick on far left

This week, 11 million Americans watched unemployed Mississippian Patrick walk away with the title of “The Biggest Loser” and $250,000 on the tenth season’s live finale.

Patrick’s win, like the $100,000 at-home prize for Mark, felt canned and dull.

The only spicy note in the unveiling of the victors was the tension between the two champs. Mark was one of two players this season, along with Jessie, who felt betrayed by Patrick’s cash-rules-everything-around-me vote to send them home. However, viewers were assured that they all love each other now. Phew!

Surprise! Both winning men were the final contestant weighed in their categories.

Generation Rx: A Review

Generation Rx

This disturbing tale begins with a question: are children taking psycho-stimulants like Prozac and Ritalin because of scientific information or commercial use? Shockingly, all the evidence favors the latter.  After several doctors and a Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist began investigating, it was found that no valid studies have been conducted illustrating the benefits of these drugs. What was found was that the research was mostly anecdotal.

But how did these drugs then become so pervasive in our lives, especially in the lives of children? The answer lies in the clever marketing strategy of pharmaceutical companies. Children were the last “untapped” market, and once targeted for consumption, this industry enlisted the help of doctors. Suddenly psychiatrists received grants and were sent to conferences, all which drummed in the same information: some brains were chemically imbalanced and our drugs can help them. Through this system, psycho-stimulants became the method of calming restless children; all the while the perverse side effects were kept secret. It is through the use of these medications that normal human brains become chemically imbalanced and these medications can even cause brain atrophy.

Last Night’s Biggest Loser; The Long And Winding Road

Ada “The Termin-ada” crushes the marathon

On last night’s Biggest Loser, Patrick, a sweet, aw-shucks unemployed 27 year-old husband and dad of two from Vicksburg, MS, was crossing the finish line of a marathon on the California coast. Weighing in somewhere in the mid 200s (the show’s official weigh-in had not yet happened), he made a respectable time of 5 hours and 45 minutes.

But there was another man talking to him. It was …. also Patrick, taped back when he weighed 400 pounds, just three months prior. Disconcertingly referring to himself as “we,” meaning, “the fat me and the skinny me,” he also commented:

“I don’t believe there’s any way that I could run a marathon. I’m not sure that I could even finish it. It would take all day. That’s like climbing Mt. Everest or somethin’….”

Moments later as viewers continued to watch our heroic final four dieters run, jog and walk to the marathon finish, they heard from Fonzie-like Staten Islander Frado, a family man and financial trader: “You can do this. If I can do this, anybody can do this.”

It was marathon night on Biggest Loser, where the four remaining dieters each completed a 26.2 mile course. Ada ran it in a competitive burst with a final time of 4.5 hours while Elizabeth surely walked most of her 7.5 hours. Regardless, for the series’ penultimate episode, it was the perfect, symbolic choice. Nothing could be a clearer demarcation of how far the losers have come, or a more perfect representation of how many missed opportunities America’s biggest health-related TV show has seen this season.

After all, a two-hour diet and exercise show which regularly pulls in between 7 and 12 million viewers has a pretty strong platform for disseminating encouraging information, right?

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