Seasonal sugar study?
It’s the Christmas season. And everywhere we turn, someone is holding out a plate of cookies or a tin of fudge or a cup of eggnog.
Sugar, sugar, sugar.
So is it any wonder that a prominent medical journal chose Monday to publish a scathing attack on global health advice to eat less sugar?
The study, published in The Annals of Internal Medicine, argues that warnings to cut sugar are based on weak evidence and cannot be trusted, according to story about the study in The New York Times on Tuesday.
But the medical journal piece quickly drew detractors because the authors have ties to the food and sugar industries. The review was paid for by the International Life Sciences Institute, a Washington, D.C., science group funded by Coca-Cola, General Mills, Hershey’s Kellogg’s, Kraft Foods and Monsanto. One of the authors is on the scientific advisory board of Tate & Lyle, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of high-fructose corn syrup.
Well, of course these guys want us to think those who preach less sugar are the devil!
But critics of the piece would have nothing of it.
“This comes right out of the tobacco industry’s playbook: Cast doubt on the science,” Marion Nestle told the Times. Nestle is a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. She studies conflicts of interest in nutrition research.
The lead author of the piece, Bradley C. Johnston, a professor of clinical epidemiology at the University of Toronto and McMaster University, said he knew the piece would be criticized but he and the other writers hoped the review would be used to promote “improvement in the development of trustworthy guidelines on sugar intake.”
This comes against a backdrop of the Food and Drug Administration promising new labeling rules that require food companies to disclose added sugars. Recently at least six city or county governments have approved taxes on soft drinks.
Most of us don’t need guidelines or studies to know that the cookies, fudge, soft drinks and too-sweet eggnog distort our waistlines and our concentration.
Most of us also know when something seems too good to be true, we should beware. Clearly, even in health advice, it’s good to follow the money.
Gender understanding studies?
If male physicians were as adept as females in their profession, some 32,000 fewer Americans would die every year – among Medicare patients alone, according to a Harvard research study published this week in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
Researchers reviewed the records of 1,583,028 hospital visits among Medicare patients, and found that within 30 days of arriving at the hospital, rates of death and re-admission were significantly lower when the patient’s doctor was a woman.
This was true for patients with all sorts of medical conditions and severities.
The finding didn’t seem to surprise women, but the researchers looked for variables – vainly.
Ultimately, they were left with the finding that women are superior to men at treating the 65-and-older patients in the hospital, even the patients who were randomly assigned to a physician when they arrived.
People treated by a woman had a 4 percent lower risk of dying, and a 5 percent lower risk of being re-admitted to the hospital within 30 days.
Past studies may shed some light on the newest finding: Women doctors are more likely to provide preventive care and counseling. They are also more likely to follow clinical guidelines.
Most experts questioned about the newest study results suggested that at least one reason for the difference likely is that women tend to be more nurturing and tend to have better communication styles.
Kind of intuitive, huh?
And then there’s also that Cornell University research study released in August that found this: Men are often their own favorite experts on any given subject.
Yep. Women knew that already, too.