Online Voting Ends July 10

 

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has committed to awarding “$500 million in grants to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015″.

To get a better idea about what programs should be supported they looked at the research on the causes of obesity. From this they picked “20 recently published articles ” that looked promising.

Now the Foundation is asking the public to vote.

“This summer, we want to know what you think. Below are 20 articles that we believe had a major policy impact, affected our work and thinking, or warranted our attention, due to our effort to advance the research and knowledge base for childhood obesity prevention. Please choose up to five (5) articles you think best meet those criteria. We will publish the voting results in mid-July. Voting ends July 10, so vote now.”

My 5 picks are (note articles are listed in random order):

 

“A Randomized Trial of the Effects of Reducing Television Viewing and Computer Use on Body Mass Index in Young Children”

 

“Fast-Food Restaurant Advertising on Television and its Influence on Childhood Obesity”

 

“Child Care as an Untapped Setting for Obesity Prevention: State Child Care Licensing Regulations Related to Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Media Use for Preschool-Aged Children in the United States”

 

“The Context for Choice: Health Implications of Targeted Food and Beverage Marketing to African Americans”

 

“Is Support for Traditionally Designed Communities Growing? Evidence from Two National Surveys”

 

I hope everyone takes a few minutes to vote, especially for the article “A Randomized Trial of the Effects of Reducing Television Viewing and Computer Use on Body Mass Index in Young Children”

 

Does TV Help Cause Alzheimer’s ?

 

Big thanks to Chris for emailing me this link:

 

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7896441.stm

 

 

that study along with this one:

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1204894.stm

 

both found a link between excessive TV watching and Alzheimer’s. But does TV watching directly contribute to Alzheimer’s, or is the association more complicated?

 

This is an important question, as Chris pointed out in his email:

 

“One other important aspect that this article did not touch on was the immense social economic cost to providing care to the segment of our society that deals with geriatric health care in regards to dementia.”

 

 

Safe-Sex and Product Placement

 Product Placement (Snopes.com) 

M&Ms passed up the chance to be the candy used to lure the shy little alien from his hiding place in the 1982 blockbuster E.T., thereby letting one of the most successful instances of movie product placement fall into the hands of a competitor who benefitted mightily from it.

   …

 

Hershey did not pay to have Reese’s Pieces used in E.T., but it did agree to do a tie-in between the movie and the candy after the film was released. A deal was inked wherein Hershey Foods agreed to promote E.T. with $1 million of advertising; in return, Hershey could use E.T. in its own ads.  

 

Within two weeks of the movie’s premiere, Reese’s Pieces sales went through the roof. (Disagreement exists as to how far through the roof they went: Sales were variously   described as having tripled, experienced an 85% jump, or increased by 65%). Whatever the numbers, though, Reese’s Pieces — up until then an underdog confection only faintly known by the U.S. candy-consuming public — were suddenly being consumed in great handfuls. And all thanks to a shy little alien lured from the bushes and into America’s hearts by a trail of peanut-butter-in-a-candy-coated-shell confections.  

 

Thus is the potential power of product placement. When it’s done right, it can make a product.  

 

Paid product placement in films has come to be one of the ordinary ways of things in Hollywood. Exxon paid $300,000 for its name to appear in Days of Thunder, Pampers paid $50,000 to be featured in Three Men and a Baby, and Cuervo Gold spent $150,000 for placement in Tequila Sunrise, according to Danny Thompson, president of Creative Entertainment Services, in a 1993 New York magazine interview. As for how effective the practice of product placement is, that same article quotes Joel Henrie, a partner at Motion Picture Placement, as saying: “Look what happened to Hermes scarves after Basic Instinct, Ray-Ban sunglasses after Risky Business, and suspenders after Michael Douglas wore them in Wall Street.”

But is turns out corporations aren’t the only ones using the power of product placement.  In the third-world, Governments and non-profits are using the power of TV and radio (namely soap-operas) to encourage:

 

Study First to Link TV Sex To Real Teen Pregnancies

 

From the Washington Post (November 3, 2008):

 

The study, which tracked more than 700 12-to-17-year-olds for three years, found that those who viewed the most sexual content on TV were about twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy as those who saw the least.

 

…

 

Studies have found a link between watching television shows with sexual content and becoming sexually active earlier, and between sexually explicit music videos and an increased risk of sexually transmitted diseases. And many studies have shown that TV violence seems to make children more aggressive. But the new research is the first to show an association between TV watching and pregnancy among teens.

 

 

The Power of Normal

You’ve probably already read about this new study
that found that Obesity can spread from friend
to friend.

According to the New York Times article:

The answer, the researchers report, was that people were most likely to become obese when a friend became obese. That increased a person’s chances of becoming obese by 57 percent. There was no effect when a neighbor gained or lost weight, however, and family members had less influence than friends.

It did not even matter if the friend was hundreds of miles away, the influence remained. And the greatest influence of all was between close mutual friends. There, if one became obese, the other had a 171 percent increased chance of becoming obese, too.

The same effect seemed to occur for weight loss, the investigators say. But since most people were gaining, not losing, over the 32 years, the result was, on average, that people grew fatter.

But how does obesity (or weight loss) spread
from person to person?