“Sweet temptation” By Dr. Patrick Dümmler, courtesy of Avenir Suisse Something consumed by lots of people every day should never be in short supply, even in a crisis — or so the thinking goes. The Swiss Confederation therefore requires selected sectors to engage in stockpiling, in order to be able to ensure continued […]
Tag: public health
Putting calories on menus influences how much people eat
Courtesy of ESRI (Ireland) Where calorie information is placed on menus influences how much people order and eat, according to new research by the ESRI’s Behavioural Research Unit. The researchers conducted a carefully controlled behavioural experiment in which consumers were initially unaware that their […]
Greater price transparency will reduce medical costs
Price transparency is an obvious driver of effective market dynamics: the more buyers and sellers know about the actual cost factors underlying the prices of competing products and services, the better equipped they will be to compare their relative value (or lack thereof) and make […]
Ban eating on public transit to fight obesity?
Obesity is clearly weighing on everyone’s mind (eh?) with a flurry of opinion and commentary, all of it predictably anti-. At issue is how far the government should go in curtailing individual liberty to combat fast-expanding waistlines, which in turn raises the […]
TES Weekly Update: Science Delivers, Politics Withers
Diabetes breakthrough shows there’s hope! Brexit mess shows… something else Our world remains a study in contrasts, and that’s about the most that can be said for it. On the one hand, a breakthrough in the clinical understanding of diabetes promises to quietly revolutionize the way we treat one of the world’s deadliest […]
Women dying needlessly from heart attacks due to disparities in diagnosis, treatment
Thousands of British women are dying needlessly from heart attacks because women often receive a different standard of care than men, according to a new report from the British Heart Foundation. The difference seems to be due to the mistaken belief, still prevalent among […]
UK needs to keep its sugar tax to save lives
The Big Nudge, er, a sugar tax on sweetened drinks is a recent arrival in the UK, but the country needs to resist opposition to the tax in order to combat obesity and diabetes, argues Nina Renshaw in The Telegraph, noting that it […]
Eastern Europe, Central Asia need harm reduction strategies to fight HIV, Hep C
Eastern Europe and Central Asia have lagged behind Western Europe and elsewhere in adopting harm reduction strategies to combat diseases spread by intravenous drug users who share dirty needles, with predictably unfortunate results. It’s time for governments in both regions to implement harm reduction strategies […]
Fatty liver disease, the next public health crisis?
Just in case we don’t have enough public health crises threatening to push national healthcare systems to their breaking points, here’s another chronic, non-communicable epidemic to obsess about: fatty liver disease (FLD). The specter of FLD unrelated to alcoholism (historically the main cause of the […]
TES Weekly Update: Diabetes breakthrough promises healthier lives for millions
Editor’s Note: And undermining IP laws promises opposite Have you ever noticed that “fake news” almost always means bad news? Of course it’s taken for granted that “real news” usually means the same. Well, here’s that rarest of treasures, a piece of news that is both real and good, which frankly everyone should be […]