Diet and Nutrition. Natural Health, and Healthy Living

Health 2.0 is a trend accompanied by both buzz and buzzwords. That worries some advocates for the poor, underserved and just plain old and sick. Will those groups be left behind in the latest information revolution?

The potential positives of the Web-as-health-care platform for interactive health care services could be seen in two full days of presentations and discussions at a recent meeting in San Francisco, called the Health 2.0 Conference. Still, a certain Silicon Valley sensibility remained: widgets for weight control were much more likely to target the calorie count of cappuccinos than corn dogs.
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There's a consumer health fair called Health Etc in San Francisco on Sat 9/26 at 9AM-5PM. This event is being presented by the California Pacific Medical Center in conjunction with KCBS Radio.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta is the keynote speaker and there are plethora of panels, seminars, and interactive exhibits happening throughout the day ranging from nutrition to environmental sustainability. Other expert speakers are Cheryl Forberg, RD (Nutrition), Dr. Brian Feely (Orthopedic), Dr. David Larson (Oncology), Steve Demos (Digestion), Meg Soper (Menopause), Jeff Bell and Christine Carter (Mental Health), Great Macaire and Jane Clark (Nutrition), Dr. Christopher Clark (Orthopedic).

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I don’t use THCB much to point out what good we all can do—I keep that for my year-end letter—but my favorite charity (Saigon’s Childrens Charity) is at its financial year end and just sent me the reports for the kidsI support. I’ve asked people who want to talk to me in the past to “buy a kid a bike.” And as it’s late on a Friday and I’m about to go out and take my wife to dinner, I thought you might all think about alternate uses for the $100 I’m about to spend (Yes, she’s a cheap date). Here’s what $100 buys for a very, very poor kid in Vietnam (and because of the recession donations are off this year, so they need more help).

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At the heart of current health care reform discussions - which focus on expanding access to care and establishing mechanisms to finance broader coverage as well as reduce rapidly escalating costs - must be the promotion of good health and the prevention of disease.

Good health is essential to the economic prosperity and wellbeing of the American people. Individually, we are less productive when we become ill; collectively, our nation is less secure when burdened with the high cost of disease. Today, with 45 percent of Americans suffering from a chronic condition and a national fiscal crisis, both our nation’s health and economic security are in peril.
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Val Jones, M.D., is the President and CEO of Better Health, LLC. Most recently she was the Senior Medical Director of Revolution Health, a consumer health portal with over 120 million page views per month in its network. Prior to her work with Revolution Health, Dr. Jones served as the founding editor of Clinical Nutrition & Obesity, a peer-reviewed e-section of the online Medscape medical journal. She currently blogs at Get Better Health, where this post first appeared.

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Processing products, genetically modified products, preservatives and stabilizers … As we see, 21th century brings not only positive. What is dangerous for our health?

Why all this was done?

Traditional methods of food processing solved two major problems: firstly, food became better digested, and secondly, it could be kept for a while and not eaten immediately after capture, gathering, or finding. This category of products includes meat puddings, jerky and salty bacon, bread, cereals, which people subsequently boil porridge from, brine, sauerkraut and other vegetables, cheese, drinks - from wines to kefir.

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Pretty much everyone agrees that we need to improve the quality of healthcare delivered to patients. We’ve all heard the frightening statistics from the Institute of Medicine about medical error rates - that as many as 98,000 patients die each year as a result of them - and we also know that the US spends about 33% more than most industrialized country on healthcare, without substantial improvements in outcomes.

However, a large number of quality improvement initiatives rely on additional rules, regulations, and penalties to inspire change (for example, decreasing Medicare payments to hospitals with higher readmission rates, and decreasing provider compensation based on quality indicators). Not only am I skeptical about this stick vs. carrot strategy, but I think it will further demoralize providers, pit key stakeholders against one another, and cause people to spend their energy figuring out how to game the system than do the right thing for patients.

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In the grocery business, volume counts. Profit margins of mere pennies comprise the bottom line, and so health care costs rising at nearly double-digit inflation rates threaten to undermine the grocer’s business model.

Hence, one of the nation’s largest supermarket chief executive officers has his sights set on reducing rates of obesity among his 200,000 employees.

Safeway CEO Steve Burd looked at the numbers and concluded obesity is the root of a majority of his company’s health care costs. The way he sees it, chronic conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer, are his primary cost drivers. Obesity is behind them all.

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Maggie Mahar is an award winning journalist and author. A frequent contributor to THCB, she is fellow at the Century Foundation and the author of the increasingly influential HealthBeat blog, one of our favorite health care reads, where this piece first appeared.

I have to admit I often have found the language of health care “rights” off-putting. Yet the idea of health care as a “right” is usually pitted against the idea of health care as a “privilege.” Given that choice, I’ll circle “right” every time.

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The explosive growth of Facebook and MySpace illustrates the market for electronic tools to enhance communication and collaboration. Could there possibly be another workplace more in need of social networking tools than the modern hospital?

If you are not familiar with Facebook, find yourself a teenager and take a look over his shoulder while he is using it (mine are available for rent if you get desperate; the best time to catch them is when they should be doing homework). In one thrilling, chaotic electronic e-universe, the site allows users to exchange instant messages with dozens of friends, to post pictures and videos, and to link to virtually everything on the Web – all at the same time. John McCain would be flabbergasted.

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