What We Learned in Critical Media Studies of Health & Medicine
My students learned a lot in our course on deconstructing health and reimagining health media and communication.
All posts tagged: public health
Celebrating Earth Day with Andrew Ross’ Parable of a Sustainable Phoenix
This year’s Earth Day theme is green cities, a topic that could not relate more directly to today’s post on Phoenix, a city arguably deserving of the title “World’s Least Sustainable City.” A desert vision of unrestrained growth, the history of Phoenix and the surrounding Sunbelt region provides a nationally instructive case study on sustainability. Invited by Future Arts Research, an Arizona State University institute, to “come and do research of [his] choosing in Phoenix” (19), Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, spent two years in the Valley of the Sun. The result of extensive historical research and 200 interviews with the region’s “more thoughtful, influential, and active citizens” (17), Ross’ recent book, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City (2011), makes manifest his aim “to take the social and political temperature of Metro Phoenix” (17). From its early days of Anglo settlement to today, the Sunbelt proves a feverish place, whose post-war metropolitan growth tells a uniquely American story. In the Valley of the Sun, an ideology of excess reigns, one which …
Interdisciplinarity & Health: 10 Posts to Celebrate National Public Health Week
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 …
Typhoid Mary: Public Health Menace or Plucky Bad Ass?
While many may have heard of “Typhoid Mary” (I’m speaking here of the public health historical figure not either of the hard rock bands that bear her name nor the mutant Marvel villain inspired by her plight), fewer know the complete story of Mary Mallon, the immigrant cook incarcerated in isolation for a quarter century for unknowingly spreading typhoid through her cooking. When one hears the name “Typhoid Mary,” the mind often conjures images of some untamable shrew dishing out ladles full of infected slop, a mental picture not unlike the one that the press created in 1909, in which Mallon is depicted cracking skulls into a skillet, while venomous vapors drift downward from her mouth. Often told with a reductionist focus in science textbooks, Judith Walzer Leavitt’s social history, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public Health (1997), sets Mallon’s story straight. While viewed as a menace by the New York public health department, the legal system, media, and general public, Mary Mallon was also a powerfully plucky bad ass, who despite institutional entities against her, little …
‘Graduate School Will Kill You’ and Other 18th Century Health Advice for the Studious
Before I began my doctoral studies, I worked for five years in the field of worksite wellness, an experience that made me painfully aware of the growing evidence that sedentarism—spending too many hours sitting on one’s glorious behind—has deleterious health effects. Unfortunately, as a striving academic, I often find myself seated squarely on my rear for what sometimes feels like endless amounts of time. While many a modern day inforgraphic can summarize how sitting may be killing us, William Buchan, MD’s domestic medicine manual, Domestic Medicine Or, a Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases By Regimen and Simple Medicines (1772, second edition) provides period recommendations for the studious, which I found entertaining, enlightening, affirming, and worrisome in equal measure.[1] Many of Buchan’s recommendations ring as true today as they did nearly 250 years ago. Buchan writes: Intense thinking is so destructive to health, that few instances can be produced of studious persons who are strong and healthy, or live to an extremely old age. Hard study always implies a sedentary life; and, when intense thinking is joined to …
The Ins & Outs, Highs & Lows of Public Health Nutrition
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.
Forecasting a Bright Future from the 2013 Future of Food and Nutrition Graduate Conference
This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of attending the 7th annual Future of Food and Nutrition Graduate Research Conference at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Organized and run by Friedman graduate students, the conference was as engaging and polished as any put on by a professional organization. Graduate student research dealt with a host of topics both international and domestic, ranging from food access, food prices, and property values near grocery stores to behavior change and breastfeeding. Presentations that I attended also explored childhood obesity in Indonesia, regional U.S. food systems, and the latest in molecular nutrition. Students came from diverse backgrounds, including not only nutrition policy, biochemical and molecular nutrition, public health, and medicine, but also environmental science, agriculture, economics, urban and environmental planning; not to mention food studies and gastronomy as well. Collectively, presenters brought valuable multidisciplinary perspectives to the topics of food, nutrition, and food systems. Beyond attending thought provoking panels, I participated in the poster presentation, giving two-minute power pitches on the paper I …
Meat is Bad & The World is Flat: Thoughts from the Critical Nutrition Symposium
On March 8, 2013, I had the pleasure of attending the Critical Nutrition Symposium at UC Santa Cruz, organized by Julie Guthman, author of Weighing In. The event was spawned from a roundtable discussion at last year’s Association for the Study of Food and Society conference. The symposium brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to critically examine what is missing from conventional nutrition science research and practice, discuss why it matters, and brainstorm how to move forward in an informed and balanced way. What follows are a few of my favorite key ideas from the day’s discussions. Adele Hite, a registered dietitian and public health advocate who is not afraid to ask big and delightfully confrontational questions regarding nutrition science, began the day by dissecting Michael Pollan’s now famous aphorism—Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Step by step, she revealed the decades of revisionist myth and shaky science on which the diet most often considered healthy (one that is plant-based) is built. For example, she argued that the recommendation to eat like our grandparents is …
Talk to Me Baby! Encouraging Dialogue between Nutrition Science and Food Studies
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”
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?
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 …
Emily Contois 