We are what we eat
As many of you know, I have maintained that we should create regulations to enforce against the production and advertising of the sort of food products that cause far more harm than good to our population. I have done this repeatedly and have been in a minority of just about one around here on this issue.
This means I've already received the many dozens of predictable responses that have as their source the attitude that people should take personal responsibility for their lives, their intake, etc. So I'm certain there will be the same sort of general response to this news. Nevertheless, I'll restate my position on mass-media mind control succinctly.
It is the height of absurdity to believe that average and normative individuals have the power or ability to withstand the onslaught of billions of dollars of research, and megadollar initiatives regarding how humans can be manipulated into consuming anything that is advertised heavily in the mass media. Therefore, government needs to take responsibility for deflecting the most deleterious messages that private industry is capable of wreaking on our population. This current change in policy is a beginning to the process of reclaiming the territory of diet and human health for the vast majority of our citizens.
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Policy shift energizes obesity field
The New York Times
The new policy announced by the federal government last week that enables Medicare to consider paying for obesity treatments may transform the weight loss field, obesity experts say.
For the first time, reliable data on methods for losing weight will be gathered, they say.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson announced Thursday that Medicare was abandoning a long-held policy that said obesity was not a disease, opening the way for the government to pay for a range of possible treatments, from surgery and diets to psychotherapy.
The government also said that to be eligible for coverage, treatments must be proved effective. To determine whether an obesity treatment works, Medicare says, it could end up paying for large studies of the treatment's effectiveness.
That could finally put hard data behind a notoriously fuzzy field and perhaps help millions of overweight Americans decide what to do, obesity experts said.
Mark McClellan, administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said he was expecting a deluge of requests that Medicare pay for treatments such as surgery, diets, behavioral therapy and exercise therapy. The agency does not pay for drug treatments.
An estimated 18 percent of the Medicare population meets the official definition of obese: a body mass index above 30, as would occur, for example, in a woman who was 5 feet 5 and weighed more than 180 pounds, or a 6-foot man weighing more than 221 pounds. With weight loss surgery costing $30,000 to $40,000 if there are no complications, the cost to Medicare of obesity treatments could be astronomical.
That depends on whether the agency decides that obesity treatments are effective.
One question is how to define success. Obese people want to look thinner. But academic obesity programs define success as losing 5 percent to 10 percent of your weight, said Gary Foster, clinical director of the weight and eating disorder program at the University of Pennsylvania. That, he says, is the amount of weight loss needed to improve blood pressure, glucose levels and cholesterol levels. People may still be fat, but healthier.
Other experts, such as Jules Hirsch, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller University in New York, say there is another definition of success: getting rid of the weight problem for good.
“At the end of the treatment, are they now like all kinds of other people who never had the problem of obesity?” Hirsch said. “By that definition, there has been nothing that works.”
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create evolution
Last edited by ARTelevision; 07-19-2004 at 10:47 AM..
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