Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed
The New York Times: Diets Make You Feel Bad. Try Training Your Brain For Healthy Eating Instead
Here’s a New Year’s resolution you can keep: Stop dieting and start savoring your food instead. That may seem like surprising advice, but there’s mounting scientific evidence to suggest that diets don’t work. Research shows that food restriction just makes you want to eat more. And over the long term, dieting can backfire, triggering your body’s survival defenses, slowing your metabolism and making it even harder to lose weight in the future. (Parker-Pope, 1/3)
CBS News: Why Sugar Is So Addicting And How You Can Remove It From Your Diet This Year, According To An Expert
Whether you're attempting a "dry January" or setting a new diet or workout goal, breaking old habits in the new year can be hard. For those who are looking to cut out added sugars, they may actually be addressing an addiction. "Physiologically, it's as addictive as cocaine — sugar is," author and health expert Susan Peirce Thompson told CBSN's Anne-Marie Green Wednesday. "So, people are literally trapped in a physiological addiction. The brain scans are very clear on that." While health officials urge Americans to limit their sugar intake, Thompson argues that giving up the highly processed and refined chemical can be for some one of the hardest addictions to battle. (Powell, 1/5)
The Wall Street Journal: The New Way To Maximize Your Workout? Weighted Spandex
WHY JUST LIFT heavy weights to get strong when you can improve your gains during cardio, or even build forearms of steel while simply washing the dishes? That’s the premise behind a new category of workout clothing that strategically disperses additional mass across your body through weights sewn into the fabric. (Mateo, 1/4)
The New York Times: Considering Bone Or Joint Surgery? You May Not Need It
Considering bone or joint surgery? In many cases, surgery may be no more effective than options like exercise, physical therapy and drug treatments. Hip and knee replacements, surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome and other orthopedic procedures are among the most common elective surgeries performed today, but they involve cost, risk and sometimes weeks or months of recovery. Many of these surgeries are not supported by evidence from randomized trials, a review found. Even when surgery has been shown to be effective, the review concluded, it may not be significantly better than nonsurgical care. (Bakalar, 1/4)
The Washington Post: Home Remedies Can Be Useful For Some Conditions, Experts Say
Maralyn Fisher, 76, a retired boutique owner who lives in Manhattan, suffers periodic bouts of nausea. Whenever she feels the queasiness coming on, she pops a ginger mint into her mouth and waits for it to ebb. It almost always does. “I don’t like taking a lot of standard medicines,” says Fisher, who keeps the candies in her purse and at her bedside. “I believe in it because it works.” Fisher is among millions of Americans who use what are known as home remedies, a description frequently used interchangeably with “complementary” or “alternative” medicines to distinguish them from Western practices, which often rely on doctor visits and conventional drugs. (Cimons, 1/2)
Also —
The Washington Post: Sci-Fi Types Of Medical Implants Will Soon Become Reality, Researchers Say
For decades, doctors have embedded pacemakers, cochlear implants and cardiac defibrillators into their patients’ bodies. More recently, consumers have started tracking their own heart rates and number of steps taken with watches, bracelets, cellphones and other wearable devices. Researchers and doctors are now dreaming up more ways to merge those technologies, to move consumer-driven monitors inside bodies. (Rosen, 1/1)
The Washington Post: What Is Aquamation, The Burial Practice Desmond Tutu Requested Instead Of Cremation?
The ashes of the revered anti-apartheid leader Desmond Tutu were interred Sunday in a private ceremony in St. George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, South Africa. The Anglican archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who died Dec. 26 at age 90, had requested that his funeral not be ostentatious and that his body not be cremated by flame. Instead, Tutu reportedly requested aquamation, or alkaline hydrolysis, a water-based process considered an eco-friendly alternative to traditional cremation. (Berger, 1/2)
The Washington Post: Citing Danger To Freshwater, Scientists Say We Need To Put Brakes On Road Salts
Every winter, de-icing salts — sodium chloride, calcium chloride and magnesium chloride — battle icy roads nationwide. The effort is epic in scope: Hundreds of millions of gallons of salty substances are sprayed on roads and billions of pounds of rock salt are spread on their surfaces each year. That may lead to safer roads, but it has a real effect on the planet. In a review in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, a group of environmental scientists looked at the hazards of salts that make driving safer. De-icing salts end up in bodies of fresh water, contaminating lakes and streams and building up in wetlands. (Blakemore, 1/2)
The Wall Street Journal: For Users With Disabilities, Paid Apps Lag Behind Free Ones In Accessibility, Report Shows
Many of the most popular paid smartphone apps are less accessible to people with certain disabilities than top apps that are free to download, according to a new report. The digital agency Diamond, which builds accessible products for its clients, conducted manual and automated testing of 20 leading paid apps and 20 popular free apps in Apple’s App Store and in the Google Play Store as of October 2021. (Alcantara, 12/20)
NPR: The Scientist Who Identified Omicron Was Saddened By The World's Reaction
When the Botswanan scientists saw the sequences, they were stunned. Four international travelers had tested positive for COVID-19 on Nov. 11, four days after entering the country. But when the cases were genetically sequenced, where the genetic code of the virus is analyzed to look for worrying changes, the scientists discovered a variant they had never encountered before. And soon, they alerted the world to what would become known as the omicron variant. (Schrieber, 12/16)
