I’ve been curious about the after effects of Obama’s Health Reform legislation. Drew Altman, Ph. D. from the Kraiser Family Foundation, provides a nice summary.

Health Reform’s Checkup

(source: The Kaiser Family Foundation)

Excerpt from the summary:

Since the bill’s passage, the Department of Health and Human Services has set up a program to help people with preexisting health conditions get coverage through state or federal high-risk pools; established a program to help employers provide health insurance to early retirees; issued rebates to help pay drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries stuck in the “doughnut hole”; provided tax credits to small businesses to provide insurance coverage; and created a consumer-friendly Web site, http://HealthCare.gov, that rivals anything coming out of Silicon Valley (where our organization is based).

Something I’ve always questioned….

From “Self” and Nutrition Data

By: Monica Reinagel, MS, LD/N

In this month’s Nutrition Journal, a consortium of scientists and nutrition researchers make the case for abandoning both the guidelines and the process by which they are generated. Instead of hide-bound conventional wisdom, they say, it’s time to starting basing these recommendations on the evidence.

The stakes are high

These guidelines have enormous influence on health and nutrition policies. They inform what we feed our kids in school lunch programs to what we teach them in health class. They shape health care policy and standards of care. They affect what gets reported in the media and what gets researched in universities.   They appear to be failing us.

Rather than gather the same group of agency insiders to polish the chrome on this Edsel every five years, the authors suggest “an impartial panel of…biochemists, anthropologists, geneticists, physicists, etc., who are not directly tied to nutritional policy….Recommendations issued by this group would be more likely to be…[based] on a complete and accurate assessment of available science rather than a narrow perspective of accepted nutritional practice.”

I suspect that many readers of the Nutrition Data Blog abandoned the Dietary Guidelines long ago. But I agree with my colleagues: It’s time to bring our national nutrition policy into the 21st century.

Your thoughts?

I recently watched a TED presentation given by David McCandless and decided to check out his website – InformationIsBeautiful.net. I found THIS great interactive tool that weighs the strength of scientific evidence for various supplements that we consume daily.  Check it out!

source: Everyday Citizen

A fellow reader and MPH student at UC Davis in California, Molly, got in contact with me sometime ago and recommended that I present current issues on a single-payer insurance system. A single-payer national health insurance is a system that finances costs associated with delivering universal health care to a population through a single insurance pool out of which costs are met. Contributors to the single pool can include the government, employers, etc. So I asked her recommendation on current single-payer policies so that I can become more informed. Here is what I found.

This first LINK provides an overview on what a single-payer system entails, the facts an myths, health economics and financing, etc. HERE you can find research reports related to a single-payer system. Lastly, I wanted to include a summary of what the current health care legislation entails as a comparison to a single-payer system.

Thanks Molly.

Hello readers! Yes, I’m back and excited to share news of more guest posts with you. I have been busy working on finding bloggers out there that have valuable and credible information to share with my readers.  This is an article I hope will benefit everyone curious about consuming multi-vitamins. I know I’ve been contemplating whether I need them.

By: Dr. Mercola

About half the country takes nutritional supplements, and I suspect the percentage is considerably higher for readers of this newsletter. Supplements can compensate for some of the damage we do to ourselves. However, my experience is that many people, if not most, take supplements to justify their poor food choices. This makes as much sense as building a boat with rotten wood and using the best screws in the world to fasten them together. The boat may hold together, but it will leak everywhere. The boards in the boat are like the macronutrients in our body – the protein, carbohydrates and fats that we consume. If we make poor choices there, the screws — the vitamin supplements — we use are irrelevant.

Most vitamins serve as catalysts for reactions to occur in our body. While we need catalysts, it is more important to obtain good fuel for the reactions to properly occur. Also, a funny thing happens when you start out with good fuel (raw organic food): it has most of the vitamins and minerals you need packed right inside and at no extra charge. Amazing.

Most of the new patients I see are spending more than $100 a month on supplements, with some significantly higher than that. But supplements will not compensate for improper eating. Use the right food as your supplement and you will be much healthier.

That said, there are certain clinical conditions that do warrant the use of nutrients and supplements as drug alternatives, and I use this approach frequently. My key, though, is to minimize the long-term use of supplements. And I really don’t think healthy patients should be on more than five supplements a day.

On supplement I do advise for most new patients is probiotics, to optimize their gut flora. While most people seem to benefit from this periodically, I generally don’t believe it is necessary to remain on it indefinitely.

Another supplement that is near critical for some patients, particularly those who avoid eating animal protein, is vitamin B12. I don’t advocate avoiding all meat, but it is, nevertheless, a common approach among patients. The human body is quite forgiving and can tolerate the associated abuse – highly insufficient B12 intake — for about 7 years, as it utilized the liver reserves of B12. But after those 7 years, the B12 deficiency frequently causes irreversible brain damage.