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NEW YORK - New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg offered a full-throated defense of his proposed ban on large-size sugary sodas on Friday, calling criticism of the proposal "ridiculous" and saying his city is again leading the way in taking on critical health issues. Coca-Cola, the world's largest soft-drink maker, assailed the proposal in a statement on Thursday. "New Yorkers expect and deserve better than this,' the Coca-Cola statement said. "They can make their own choices about beverages they purchase." Meanwhile, New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, told The New York Post on Thursday that he was...

Last month, New York Mayor Bloomberg proposed a ban on outdoor smoking in and on 1,700 parks, plazas, and beaches. The City Council in Cambridge, Massachusetts recently followed New York's lead (Chronicle 10/4/10), joining a number of college campuses and California cities. This radical intrusion into private lives is rationalized as a public health measure to protect citizens from secondhand smoke. It's therefore worth reviewing the debate from the past decade when it became the accepted view that secondhand smoke is a public health risk. Anti-smoking activists state with assurance that "the science is settled"; secondhand smoke murders 3,000 or...

Huckabee Tells DHMC to Emphasize Preventive Care By Mark Davis Valley News Staff Writer Lebanon -- Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee yesterday told employees at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center that the health care industry needs to emphasize preventive care and abandon its reactionary approach. Huckabee's talk, part of DHMC's Health Policy Grand Rounds, was the latest stop on the campaign trail for a candidate whose stock has been on the rise in recent weeks. The former Arkansas governor told the crowd that simple steps he took in his home-state, such as mandating all public school students have their body mass index...

Stomach aches, sore throats, and hacking coughs are standard excuses for calling in sick, but a recent report released by the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts hints that employees' obesity may soon make the list. Using data from only a handful of companies in Texas, the study claims that obese employees cost state businesses billions, mostly in the form of health care bills, decreased productivity, and absenteeism. As a means of addressing the issue, the report concludes: "Ultimately, of course, only the individual can be held accountable for the lifestyle choices he or she makes." But take this lip-service statement...

Fewer than a third of American adults eat the amount of fruits and vegetables the government recommends, a trend that's remained steady for more than a decade, health officials said Thursday. That's "well below" the government's goal of getting 75 percent of Americans to eat two servings of fruits and having half of the population consume three servings of vegetables each day by 2010, said Dr. Larry Cohen of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The diet survey, part of a huge federal health survey of every state, is based on responses from 305,000 adults in 2005. It...

LONDON - The Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) has said that young people are unaware of the fact that smoking could lead to blindness. The charity says that if the government were to fund a national campaign, then young people could give up smoking. For evidence, it cites an article in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, which found that the fear of blindness was more of a deterrent than anything else. The study surveyed around 250 clubbers in Winchester, Manchester and Southampton. All responders were aged between 16 to 18 years. On a scale of 5, most rated...

Virtually everything American society has done for the past 100 years has made it easier for us to be fatter, said James Sallis, a San Diego State University psychology professor, and others who gathered recently at the American College of Sports Medicine's annual meeting. "We've built an unhealthy world in a lot of different ways," said Sallis, who was once dubbed an "obesity warrior" by Time magazine. Sallis contends change will come only when the public demands walkable development, more federal money for parks and bike paths and even a tax on industries that promote sedentary lifestyles (he pointed to...

Senators Plan Bill to Combat Child Obesity29 Jul 2002 20:45 GMT By Niala BoodhooWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lawmakers on Tuesday plan to introduce a bill that tries to tackle America's weight problem with a host of health measures, especially aimed at helping obese children.The World Health Organization has declared obesity a global epidemic -- in the United States, 61 percent of adults aged 20 to 74 are considered overweight or obese. About a quarter of American youth are overweight or obese."There's a lot of evidence that the lifestyles we have adopted in this country have gotten us into an epidemic of...

“For years I ate fast food because it was efficient and cheap,” says Caesar Barber, 56, a maintenance worker with heart disease and the lead plaintiff in an anti-fast-food lawsuit filed in New York last week. “I had no idea I could be damaging my health.”This fall, Northeastern University law professor Richard Daynard is holding a closed-door strategy session for nearly 100 lawyers interested in pressing similar claims against Big Fat,“What changes have you made?” booms Ludwig, as a 226-pound 10-year-old squeezes into his small examining room. The boy proudly describes how he’s stopped eating cookies and slowed down on...