Mark's Daily Apple

Taxing Sweet Drinks

Earlier this month, The New England Journal of Medicine featured an opinion piece about taxing nutritionally empty, sweetened beverage items. The article, entitled “Ounces of Prevention – The Public Case for Taxes on Sugared Beverages,” specifically highlighted the proposal considered but recently dropped in New York State. Governor Patterson of New York late last year proposed an 18% sales tax on soda and fruit beverages containing less than 70% juice. In Maine a wholesale tax on sodas and the sweetening syrups used for their production had been implemented by lawmakers but was recently overturned by voters. With these proposals and related studies in the spotlight, public officials and health experts have increasingly been pressing the beverage tax possibility.

Posted By: Worker Bee

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Lipoic Acid

Every day we run across research that further bolsters the logic of Primal living. However, once in a while we read something that just feels like a good pat on the back, the kind of news that makes us nod our heads smiling or do a little end zone dance if it’s Friday and we’re punchy enough….

The study in question (from the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University) highlights lipoic acid, brave biochemical antioxidant, free radical scavenging extraordinaire. Lipoic acid, little known champion of many a physiological process, has once again proven its value and valor, and its recent performance is just one in a long chain of impressive, promising displays.

Posted By: Worker Bee

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Real Age Quiz

So, you’re 56 – or 36. Maybe 27 or 42. Perhaps 68. (You get the idea.) Your driver’s license says it all (whether you want it to or not). But the buzz lately says there’s age and then there’s “Real Age.” Yes, your kitchen cabinets, weight set, medicine cabinet, diploma, car, even your speed dial apparently tell the real story your driver’s license (or dear mother) can’t.

The real story here is your “real” biological age as supposedly determined by your responses to approximately 150 questions. They run the gamut – from exercise routine to driving habits to nutrition to stress factors. At the end of the quiz, you receive a number as well as a rundown of practices that added to or reduced your biological age. According to the site, the quiz was based on “125 different factors that can influence the rate of aging” as determined by review of 25,000 medical studies. Some 27 million people have taken the quiz.

Posted By: Worker Bee

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Environmental Damage

Grok had a lean physique, pearly whites, sturdy bones, and generally fantastic health (aside from trauma and warfare-induced injury) because he was surrounded by the food his body was designed to eat. A new study by Johns Hopkins University has concluded that environment still plays an enormous role in people’s health and wellness.

Poorer people, they found, tend to live in areas with less access to healthy food, while wealthier people have far more access to fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole, real foods (note that although the researchers’ idea of “healthy” included “skim milk and whole wheat bread,” the foods used to determine whether a neighborhood had access to health food were generally superior to the processed carb-laden fast food fare available in poorer areas). Unsurprisingly, access to healthy food corresponds to quality of diet, so the lower-income kid who walks past ten fast food joints on his way home is more likely to eat fast food (and get fat, along with the laundry list of ailments that accompany poor diet: diabetes, heart disease, etc). “You are what you eat” still holds true, but to that we can add, “You eat what you can access.”

Posted By: Worker Bee

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Bitter Divisions and Murky Motives: Fibromyalgia Treatments

In yet another display of their unlimited zeal for the treatment (not prevention, mind you) of mysterious and “murky” illnesses (usually, believe it or not, with the aid of expensive pills), pharmaceutical companies last year spent hundreds of millions of dollars (including $6 million in grants to “non profit” medical conferences and “education campaigns”) to establish the controversial fibromyalgia as a legitimate, serious illness requiring the kind of treatment only Big Pharma could possibly provide. On the surface, this seems like a relatively selfless act of goodwill and honest research – just a couple of multinational pharmaceutical companies tossing their money around and savin’ lives… right?

Posted By: Worker Bee

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