All posts filed under: Public Health/Nutrition

Interdisciplinarity & Health: 10 Posts to Celebrate National Public Health Week

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During April’s first full week each year, the American Public Health Association celebrates National Public Health Week, a time to bring together communities from sea to shining sea to focus on the contributions and aspirations of public health. National Public Health Week 2014 focuses on the following themes: Be healthy from the start. From maternal health and school nutrition to emergency preparedness, public health starts at home. Don’t panic. Disaster preparedness starts with community-wide commitment and action. Get out ahead. Prevention is now a nationwide priority. Let us show you where you fit in. Eat well. The system that keeps our nation’s food safe and healthy is complex. Be the healthiest nation in one generation. Best practices for community health come from around the globe. In celebration of all that public health is, does, and can do, I offer up these ten previously published posts on the theme of health: 1. Typhoid Mary: Public Health Menace or Plucky Bad Ass? Commonly known as “Typhoid Mary,” Mary Mallon was incarcerated for a total of 26 years in isolation on North Brother Island for unknowingly spreading …

Presidential Obesity: Taft, Bathtubs, and the Medicalization of Corpulence

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Ask your average citizen what he or she knows about President William Howard Taft and you’ll most likely hear recanted the rumor that due to his girth, Taft once became stuck in the White House bathtub. In the article, “Corpulence and Correspondence: President William H. Taft and the Medical Management of Obesity,” Providence College’s Deborah Levine analyzes fascinating primary sources from the Library of Congress—letters in which the 27th president of the United States corresponded with Dr. Nathaniel E. Yorke-Davies, an English diet expert—that chronicle Taft’s efforts to lose weight while in the harsh spotlight of American politics and popular culture. [If you haven’t read Monday’s New York Times coverage or the original article in the most recent issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, they’re marvelous. Go read them now!] As Levine demonstrates, this correspondence reveals Taft’s own views of the relationship between obesity and personal character, as he aspired to lose weight not only “to combat uncomfortable symptoms” (565), but also to “become a better civil servant” (565), revealing the assumption that one’s weight informs both objectives. This perspective is reinforced …

The Ins & Outs, Highs & Lows of Public Health Nutrition

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A few weeks ago, I had a student email me to learn more about what it’s like to work in the field of public health nutrition. Since my last day with Kaiser Permanente is this Friday, I’ll soon be ending this stage of my professional public health career, moving toward a life in academia where I aspire to bridge the worlds of the liberal arts and public health. While my day-to-day life will focus less on applied public health practice, answering this student’s questions made me all the more proud of the work, perspective, and contributions of public health.  What follows is some of our Q&A.

Talk to Me Baby! Encouraging Dialogue between Nutrition Science and Food Studies

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I’m very excited to be heading to UC Santa Cruz for Friday’s Critical Nutrition Symposium, an event that will address questions that I’ve also been pondering for a while, such as:  What’s wrong or missing in conventional nutritional practice? What are its effects in terms of human health and social justice? What other approaches might work better? What follows are some thoughts I have at this point on the current connections and future opportunities between nutrition and food studies, which I’m sure will be greatly expanded by the end of Friday’s discussions. Unlike other disciplines that inform food studies, generally heralding from the liberal arts and social sciences, nutrition science is just that – a science, thus coming from a divergent academic tradition that tends to favor statistics over narrative detail and quantitative methods over qualitative (Faltermaier 1997). In addition, nutrition and food studies contribute to one another’s fields in a more complex way because their area of focus overlaps — they both study food. Up to our current point in history, each discipline has tended …

Blogging for Food Day 2012 – “No Room for Debate: The World of Food is Full of Women”

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Last week, I had the distinct pleasure to guest blog for Food Day 2012, a nationwide celebration and movement toward more healthy, affordable, and sustainable food, created by Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). The post appears on Food Day 2012’s blog and is republished below…  As the final Presidential debate concluded last week week, many issues occupied the minds of American voters, from the economy to foreign policy, education to job growth. Notably, women’s issues have been at the forefront throughout the campaign more than ever before. Most any reader of this post, however, likely works in a field in which women have long been a driving force—food. In fact, the situation is quite the opposite. In food-related professions from dietetics (a career field made up of 97 percent women) to public health nutrition, food activism to food studies, women are powerfully represented. While representation may not directly translate into equitable power and pay, women consistently fight on the frontlines in the battle for healthy, affordable, and sustainable food for all. As food producers, consumers, …

Which Came First: The Fear of Cholesterol or the Egg?

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One of the reasons I went to public health school was because the public tends to think that eating well is a complicated endeavor from a nutrition perspective. If one allows herself to be buffeted by the waves of new research studies with their ever-conflicting results, then yes, eating well does become a daunting task. New research on eggs has brought these thoughts to the forefront, yet again. Hence, I quip, which came first: the fear of cholesterol or the egg? If you’re not familiar with the flip-flopping advice to either abstain or enjoy eggs, here are a few (totally randomly selected) studies that demonstrate the ever-oscillating status of eggs in the American diet. 1958: First published in 1928, Nutrition: In Health and Disease, a reference collectively written by Lenna Cooper, Edith Barber, Helen Mitchell, and Henderika Rynbergen—which I bought at a used bookstore in Duncan, Oklahoma—imposes no limits on egg consumption, rather recommending, “The ideal standard is 1 egg a day if possible.” 1999: The International Task Force for the Prevention of Coronary Heart Disease recommended …