Monthly Archives: January 2014

data saving lives, healthy habits, research methodology

The Quantified Diet Project

  • These guys are using some new approach to test the efficacy of popular diets – something that’s casual, natural, low-key, low-touch but statistically powered up – again, aligned with Riot’s ambitions
  • I’ve signed up and been allocated the mindfulness eating diet
  • Will see how we go… what could possibly go wrong?

https://lift.do/quantified-diet

The Quantified Diet Project

Make a healthier you. Contribute to a healthier world.

The Quantified Diet Project aims for two things:

#1. Help one million people make a healthy diet change leading to: weight loss, overall health, and/or more energy. We’re providing 10 popular diets with expert advice.

#2. Perform the largest-ever measurement of popular diets. What works? How do popular diets compare? How can we all be more successful? We’re working with UC Berkeley on the science and the analysis.

The official launch is January 1st, but you can start contributing to our science right now by filling out this survey.

How it works

You’ll follow one of the following diets for four weeks:

  1. Slow-Carb Diet®: Meat, legumes/beans, and veggies; abstain from white foods like sugar, pasta, bread, cheese; epic “cheat day” once per week. Advised by Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Body.
  2. Paleo: eat like a caveman, mostly veggies, meats, nuts. Advised byPaleohacks and Nerd Fitness.
  3. Vegetarian: vegetables, but no meat. Cheese and eggs are optional. Advised by No Meat Athlete.
  4. Whole foods: eat only recognizable foods and avoid processed ones. Advised by Summer Tomato.
  5. Gluten-free: no wheat, rye, barley or wheat-based foods. Advised by Tania Mercer.
  6. No sweets: a simple diet change that affects your insulin swings. Advised by Sarah Stanley.
  7. DASH: USDA’s current recomendation.
  8. Calorie counting: the old standard.
  9. Sleep more: the science says this should work. Advised by: Swan Sleep Solutions.
  10. Mindful eating: learn mindfulness to recognize when you’re full. Advised by ZenHabits.

During the diet, you’ll use the Lift app to receive daily prompts and to track your progress.

When you need help, you’ll have access to our hand-picked experts and to tips from the rest of the community.

Science aside, the first goal is for you to make a healthy diet change. This is our specialty.

Also, there will be prizes available at important milestones.

The Science

In order to do this in a scientific way we’re working with nutritionists and statisticians from UC Berkeley.

During the sign-up process, you’ll have the option to be given a diet that we’ve selected for you. The scientific process calls this part of the experiment randomization. The intent is to remove bias—perhaps fans of the4-Hour Body diet are inherently more motivated than fans of the USDA.

I was skeptical about people accepting our diet recommendation for them, but early joiners have voted 3 to 4 to participate in the randomized trial. (There will also be an opt-out of the randomization step, for those 1 in 4 people who want complete control.)

After we get you going on your new diet, we’ll measure via Lift and occasional surveys:

  • Are some diets easier than others? The scientific term is adherence.
  • Weight change. Of course, this is a goal for many of us.
  • Happiness via mood, energy and enjoyment.
  • Demographic factors.
  • Success tips for each diet. In our single-diet trial of the 4-Hour Body last year, we were able to verify the effects of simple meal planning, eggs for breakfast, cold showers, cheat days, and alcohol consumption.

Of course, we’re going to be careful to respect your privacy. All data will be aggregated and anonymized. That’s really important to us.

You know what else is important? Your feedback. Email me or comment right here. I’m tony@lift.do.

business, management and leadership

Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility

Great HBR article on  HR as it should be… agreed with nearly every point, save the brutal culling of people if their jobs became superfluous.

  • The best thing you can do for employees is hire only “A” players to work alongside them. Excellent colleagues trump everything else.
  • If we wanted only “A” players on our team, we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit, no matter how valuable their contributions had once been. Out of fairness to such people—and, frankly, to help us overcome our discomfort with discharging them—we learned to offer rich severance packages.
  • Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults and then rely on common sense instead of HR policies
  • Salaried employees were told to take whatever time they felt was appropriate.
  • Expenses policy: “Act in Netflix’s best interests.”
  • asked managers and employees to have conversations about performance as an organic part of their work
  • Managers Own the Job of Creating Great Teams
  •  let employees choose how much (if any) of their compensation would be in the form of equity
  • Leaders Own the Job of Creating the Company Culture
  • Good Talent Managers Think Like Businesspeople and Innovators First, and Like HR People Last

Source: http://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr/ar/1

PDF of article: How Netflix Reinvented HR – Harvard Business Review

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

PDF version of deck: netflix_culture

 

netflix culture

management and leadership

The importance of social skills vs results focus in leadership

  • chance of a results focused leader being seen as a great leader: 14%
  • chance of a leader with strong social skills being seen as a great leader: 12%
  • chance of a leader with strong social skills and results focus being seen as a great leader: 72%
  • percentage of leaders with both social skills and results focus: 1%

http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/12/should-leaders-focus-on-results-or-on-people/

Should Leaders Focus on Results, or on People?

by Matthew Lieberman  |   8:00 AM December 27, 2013

A lot of ink has been spilled on people’s opinions of what makes for a great leader. As a scientist, I like to turn to the data.  In 2009, James Zenger published a fascinating survey of 60,000 employees to identify how different characteristics of a leader combine to affect employee perceptions of whether the boss is a “great” leader or not. Two of the characteristics that Zenger examined wereresults focus and social skills. Results focus combines strong analytical skills with an intense motivation to move forward and solve problems.  But if a leader was seen as being very strong on results focus, the chance of that leader being seen as a great leader was only 14%. Social skills combine attributes like communication and empathy. If a leader was strong on social skills, he or she was seen as a great leader even less of the time — a paltry 12%.

However, for leaders who were strong in both results focus and in social skills, the likelihood of being seen as a great leader skyrocketed to 72%.

Social skills are a great multiplier.  A leader with strong social skills can leverage the analytical abilities of team members far more efficiently. Having the social intelligence to predict how team members will work together will promote better pairings.  Often what initially appear to be task-related difficulties turn out to be interpersonal problems in disguise.  One employee may feel devalued by another or think that she is doing all the work while her partner loafs – leading both partners putting in less effort to solve otherwise solvable problems. Socially skilled leaders are better at diagnosing and treating these common workplace dilemmas.

So how many leaders are rated high on both results focus and social skills?  If this pairing produces especially effective leaders, companies should have figured this out and promoted people to leadership positions accordingly, right?  Not hardly.  David Rock, director of the Neuroleadership Institute, and Management Research Group recently conducted a survey to find out the answer.  They asked thousands of employees to rate their bosses on goal focus (similar to results focus) and social skills to examine how often a leader scored high on both.  The results are astonishing.  Less than 1% of leaders were rated high on both goal focus and social skills.

Why would this be?  As I describe in my book, Social: Why our brains are wired to connect, our brains have made it difficult to be both socially and analytically focused at the same time.  Even though thinking social and analytically don’t feel radically different, evolution built our brain with different networks for handling these two ways of thinking.  In the frontal lobe, regions on the outer surface, closer to the skull, are responsible for analytical thinking and are highly related to IQ.  In contrast, regions in the middle of the brain, where the two hemispheres touch, support social thinking.  These regions allow us to piece together a person’s thoughts, feelings, and goals based on what we see from their actions, words, and context.

Here’s the really surprising thing about the brain. These two networks function like a neural seesaw. In countless neuroimaging studies, the more one of these networks got more active, the more the other one got quieter.  Although there are some exceptions, in general, engaging in one of the kinds of thinking makes it harder to engage in the other kind.  Its safe to say that in business, analytical thinking has historically been the coin of the realm — making it harder to recognize the social issues that significantly affect productivity and profits.  Moreover, employees are much more likely to be promoted to leadership positions because of their technical prowess.  We are thus promoting people who may lack the social skills to make the most of their teams and not giving them the training they need to thrive once promoted.

How can we do better?  For one, we should give greater weight to social skills in the hiring and promotion process.  Second, we need to create a culture that rewards using both sides of the neural seesaw.  We may not be able to easily use them in tandem, but knowing that there is another angle to problem solving and productivity will create better balance in our leaders.

Finally, it may be possible to train our social thinking so that it becomes stronger over time. Social psychologists are just at the beginning stages of examining whether this kind of training will bear fruit.  One exciting prospect, one that would make the training fun, is the recent finding that reading fiction seems to temporarily strengthen these mental muscles.  Wouldn’t that be great — if readingCatcher in the Rye or the latest Grisham novel were the key to larger profits?

More blog posts by 
More on: Leadership
80-matthew-lieberman

 

Matthew Lieberman PhD is a Professor and Director of the UCLA Social Cognitive Neuroscience laboratory. He is author of Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connectand a TEDx speaker. He also consults with companies to leverage neuroscience techniques in industry. Follow him on Twitter @social_brains.

data saving lives, quantified self

Electronic temporary tattoo bio-tracker

Between this and Google’s contact lens, there won’t be many places for glucose in your blood to hide…

This Electronic Temporary Tattoo Will Soon Be Tracking Your Health

The silicon electronic apparatus, glued to a forearm, after one week’s use. Photo: Courtesy of Hong Yeo and John Rogers

 

FitBit too bulky? Why not glue a sensor array to your skin?

The quantified self goes nanoscale with a stick-on silicon electrode network that could not only change the way we measure health metrics, but could enable a new form of user interface. And the researchers behind it aim to have the device available in the next few weeks through a spinoff company, MC10.

The development takes wearable technology to the extreme, designed as a non-invasive diagnostic sensor that could be used to measure hydration, activity, and even infant temperature. It bonds to the skin, somewhat like a temporary tattoo, flexing and bending in sync with your skin the way you wish a Band-Aid would. How? Researchers at the University of Illinois, Dalian University of Technology in China, and the University of California at San Diego made it really, really small.

With a thickness of 0.8 micrometers at the widest — around one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair — the thin mesh of silicon actually nestles in to the grooves and creases in your skin, even the ones too small to see. Being small helps, but it’s also important that the silicon is laid out in a serpentine pattern and bonded to a soft rubber substrate, allowing the stiff material to flex, a little bit like an accordion.

“Although electronics, over the years, has developed into an extremely sophisticated form of technology, all existing commercial devices in electronics involve silicon wafers as the supporting substrate,” says John Rogers, who led the study published this week in Advanced Materials.

Those wafers are mismatched to the body’s mechanics and geometry, he says. The goal here was to develop a system that matches the body more naturally.

“By doing that, you can much more easily integrate electronics, either onto the surface of the skin, or on internal organs like the heart and the brain,” he says.

The epidermal electric system is either stamped onto the skin using a silicon wafer, or glued there with a water-soluble polyvinyl alcohol layer. Then it’s covered with spray-on bandage to keep it protected and watertight. After a couple of weeks, the layer will peel off as the underlying skin particles naturally exfoliate.

But aside from natural skin shedding, it’s actually quite robust, says Rogers. To test its durability, they stretched and compressed subjects’ skin, over and over, to see how much the device could take. It lasted easily through 500 cycles, and through washings.

It’s a lot more convenient than the electrodes that scientists used to connect to skin via a conducting gel. And it can offer more data, too, from high-resolution electric biopotential measurements, like electrocardiograms.

“We try to design not just point-contact electrodes, but full integrated circuits on platforms that have physical properties matched to the skin,” says Rogers. “They really can laminate on the surface of the skin, conform to all the microscale roughness that’s kind of intrinsic and natural to the surface of the skin, to provide a completely different class of interface between electrodes and electronics and the skin.”

Such a technology has many potential uses, from continual electrocardiogram readings, to precise measurements of temperature and hydration, to many other health and wellness readings.

“That could be relevant for advanced surgical procedures, implantable devices, or even systems that are designed to do continuous health and wellness monitoring or to track the progress or accelerate the wound healing process,” Rogers says.

“We’re interested not only in demonstrating concepts and an underlying scientific foundation around new measurement modalities through the skin, but also in their ultimate commercial realization,” he says.

But the tool could offer more than self-measurement. Because of the detail in the signal received, it could be used as a human-machine interface — for example, a videogame or drone controller — based on signals from the user’s muscles. It’s really marrying fully integrated electronics to the skin, a non-permanent bionic interface.

A magnified view of the epidermal electric system. Photo: Courtesy of Hong Yeo and John Rogers

Nathan Hurst

Nathan Hurst is learning how to make some things, knows how to fix some others, and is already pretty good at breaking everything else. He has written for Outside and Wired, traveled in Africa, and tweets as @NathanBHurst.

Read more by Nathan Hurst

Follow @NathanBHurst on Twitter.

data saving lives, entrepreneurship, healthcare, healthy habits, nutrition, policy, politics, quantified self, rapid learning health systems, research methodology

HICCUP: Health Initiative Coordinating Council

This manifesto aligns tightly with my own vision of how preventive health funding should be financed – data-driven and in a for-profit context.

HICCup

 

The HICCup experiment: Manifesto

Just imagine:

It’s 2019 and the mayor is having a bad day.  She wants to spearhead a new community program for bike-sharing, but she’s not sure the town can afford it.  Meanwhile, one of the new council members is pushing for an overhaul of the school lunch program.  She sighs as the assistant deputy mayor walks in.  “What now, Henry?” she asks with a slight edge in her voice.  But Henry is cheerful: “Mayor, I think we may have a way to fix this. I was just reading about the HICCup Experiment in a town just like ours…. It seems that if we did both the bike program and the school lunches, and made some other changes..”

“But what about our rising health care costs?” asks the mayor.

“That’s the point,” says Henry.  “HICCup showed that we can actually reduce those costs if we do multiple interventions simultaneously…even though none of them by itself would make a difference. And there’s an investment banker who just called us that’s eager to work with us to finance the project.  They’re asking us to set up a meeting with the big employers and Mercy Saints Health. Using the HICCup data, they think they can finance it all out of the health-care cost savings that would result, as long as we commit to following certain protocols.”

And the vision:

Now it’s 2040.  The mayor’s teen-aged son, also called Henry, is discussing his history project on the HICCup Experiment with other members of his MOOC.  “Of course,” he concludes, “the HICCup Experiment proved that multiple interventions can dramatically include the overall health of a community.  But the Experiment itself wouldn’t work anymore, as a funding vehicle.”

“Why not?” asks Susan, who clearly hasn’t done her homework.

Henry responds patiently with the obvious answer: “Because there are very few places with inflated, unnecessary health care costs anymore.”

The background

It is hard to find anyone in health care who does not believe that spending an extra $100 now on healthy behavior – exercise and proper nutrition, counseling for pre-diabetics, risk monitoring, and so on – could yield more than $120 in lowered costs and improved outcomes later. The numbers are fuzzy, of course, and there are plenty of methodological caveats, but there is little dispute about the plausibility and desirability of such an approach.

Yet neither individuals nor communities seem to act on the basis of this knowledge. Moreover, it’s likely that spending $110 now has no impact, as other factors dissipate any gain, but spending $110 million now (vs. a health-care budget of $100 million) should indeed return savings of $20 million annually over time.  Individuals often lack willpower or access to healthy food or convenient exercise facilities, and are surrounded by poor examples that encourage instant gratification rather than effort and restraint. And, on a broader, institutional scale, the money spent and the money to be gained do not belong to the same pocket.

Enter HICCup!

The goal of HICCup, the Health Initiative* Coordinating Council, is to facilitate the launch of five to eight community-wide experiments dedicated to proving that this can work, and to learning from both successful and unsuccessful efforts.  HICCup is a self-appointed counseling service and will persuade and guide local institutions to embrace a long-term perspective and launch a full-scale intervention experiment in their communities. For practical reasons, there are a few guidelines – but anyone who wants to do this without following our rules is welcome to do so.   (*Yes, it used to be “health intervention…” but initiative is more friendly and positive, and still let us keep the logo!)

For starters, HICCup will focus on communities of 100,000 people or fewer. The majority of each community and its institutions must be enthusiastic for the initiative to gain traction. If the community members mostly work for just a few employers and obtain health care from just a few providers, that makes the effort of corralling the players easier. And, of course, you need community leaders – mayor, city council, and others – who will work together rather than undermine one another.

So, how will this be funded? Not by HICCup, which is only a coordinating body.  The trick is for an investor in each community to capture some of what is being spent already on health care. As a rough calculation, assume $10,000 in annual per capita health-care costs, or $1 billion per year in a community of 100,000. (There are also all the separate costs of bad health, which are much harder to count or capture.)  That money ultimately comes from individuals and employers who pay it in taxes, insurance premiums or direct payments; the place to intercept it is somewhere between the payers and the health-care delivery system.

Instead of spending $1 billion a year, imagine spending $1.1 billion the first two years, but, say, only $900 million in the fifth year (possibly a $300 million savings off projected costs of $1.2 billion by then). That sounds like an attractive proposition – but only if someone else will make that initial investment in return for a claim to those presumed later savings.  These numbers are just for illustration; figuring out actual and predicted numbers for each community will be a key task.

The first challenge is for each HICCup community to get the involvement of a benevolent but ultimately profit-driven billionaire or hedge fund, or a philanthropic fund that sees a way to do good while earning money for future goodness. There are a lot of billionaires out there, some with vision. There are health-care companies that might bite, hedge funds looking for large-scale projects, and so-called social-impact bonds. There also are large employers that might decide to work with other employers in certain communities.

The funder makes a deal with whoever is responsible for the health-care costs (buyers): The funder makes upfront investment in health interventions and pays the health-care costs, against continued payment from the health-care buyers of the $1-billion yearly baseline, with the funder to keep (most of) the savings against originally predicted rising costs in later years. The money may be paid by employers, private insurers (which collect it from individuals, who, in the United States, are now required to buy insurance) or from government health-care funds, which will be the trickiest source.

One way or another, the investor/experiment manager will need to figure out how to realign some of the sick-care facilities and workers to some other role, including prevention, serving outsiders or some other use entirely.  That’s the second challenge HICCup experimenters need to address – one that is being addressed in part by the creation of Accountable Care Organizations, but without community involvement in preventive health.

All together now!


All these entities will be taking a substantial leap of faith. But we believe they can succeed – especially if they work together through HICCup to figure out the numbers, study the effects of small-scale healthy-living/preventive health-care efforts, and encourage one another to move forward. Regardless, each investor must work with existing institutions – if only to get at the revenue stream initially and benefit from the lowered costs in later years.

Although grants are a nice source of funding for demonstration projects and research, the best way for HICCup’s vision to catch on and be widely copied is by adopting a for-profit approach that attracts broader investment once it is shown to work.  Indeed, if a benefactor makes a donation, they feel good when they send off the money. An investor feels good only after the investment actually pays off.

Community officials and voluntary organizations also need to sign on…or  they can drive the process and find the benefactor/investor. They will also contribute by implementing complementary changes in school meals and gym classes; enacting zoning and other changes to encourage cycling, walking, and the like; hiring health counselors and care workers; and perhaps working with local restaurants and food stores to subsidize healthy choices and discourage unhealthy ones.   Local media can report on the experiment’s progress, and each community will likely engage in healthy rivalry with other HICCup experimenters.

Though it won’t get to keep the direct health-care cost savings, each community will get all the ancillary benefits of a healthy population, including an enhanced reputation.  Indicators of population health include not just rates of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and diseases and related costs, but also whether the elderly can live (and be cared for) at home, absenteeism, school grades and graduation rates, employment statistics, accidents, and the like. Although the funder keeps the reduction in health-care costs, the community gets the benefit in the many payoffs from a healthier population over time.

Open enrollment

HICCup will not choose which communities participate. They will be choosing them selves. HICCup’s role will be to advise them and help them to communicate and learn from other communities going through the same process. We also want to be a clearinghouse for vendors of health-oriented tools, services, and programs. There are many bargains to be struck between communities and vendors offering discounts in exchange for wholesale adoption of their tools or programs.

However, there is one unbreakable rule: To work with HICCup, communities must collect and publish a lot of independently vetted data (without personal information, of course). For starters, they will need benchmarks of current conditions and projected costs, and then detailed statistics on the adoption of the measures, their impact and costs, and what happens over time.  HICCup will welcome input from lawyers and actuaries!

It is now time to try this on a broad scale. Five years from now, we will wonder what took us so long to get started. So, again, who will those investors be?

healthy habits, policy, politics

Education matters to health more than ever before

  • education matter more know because the economy has evolved to be more knowledge-based
  • white women are the key group affected by this change
  • whites as a group are no longer top of the heap
  • the graph below indicates that hispanic women of all educational levels are longer lived than most other groups of any educational exposure – interesting

 

education_health_rwjf

http://www.rwjf.org/en/research-publications/find-rwjf-research/2014/01/education–it-matters-more-to-health-than-ever-before.html

Brief (PDF): education_health_rwjf409883

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Education: It Matters More to Health than Ever Before

We know with greater certainty than ever before that Americans with fewer years of education have poorer health and shorter lives. In fact, since the 1990s, life expectancy has fallen for people without a high school education, a decrease that is especially pronounced among White women.

Why is the link between education and health more distinct today? In the current knowledge economy, education paves a clear path to good jobs and a steady income. Completing more years of education creates better access to health insurance, medical care, and the resources to live a healthier lifestyle.

This brief and video are products of the Virginia Commonwealth University Center on Society and Health’s Education and Health Initiative, a program to raise awareness about the links between education and health. This is the first in a series of four briefs that will explain these complex connections, discuss the role of health care reform, and demonstrate why investing in education can cut health care costs.

Key Findings

  • People with less education are living shorter, sicker lives than ever before.Americans with less education face higher rates of illness, higher rates of disability, and shorter life expectancies. In the U.S., 25-year-olds without a high school diploma can expect to die 9 years sooner than college graduates.
  • These health disparities are even more prominent among White women.While overall life expectancy has generally increased, it has decreased for Whites with fewer than 12 years of education—especially White women. White women without a high school diploma are living shorter lives than they did in 1990.
  • Investing in education saves lives and dollars. More education leads to higher earnings that can provide access to healthy food, safer homes, and better health care. In contrast, people with fewer years of education generate higher medical costs and are less productive at work.
healthy habits, nutrition, policy, politics

Big food go lite for the First Lady

  • Included only in the interests of balance, US big food exceeded a target to reduce calories – likely a modest, meaningless target, easily gamed? due to the GFC?
  • the denominator for the 6.4 trillion calories is 60.4 trillion calories
  • between 2007 and 2011, better-for-you, lower-calorie foods and beverages also drove financial performance for many of these same companies. Companies with a higher percentage of their sales coming from such products recorded stronger sales growth, higher operating profits, superior shareholder returns, and better company reputations.

http://www.rwjf.org/en/about-rwjf/newsroom/newsroom-content/2014/01/major-food–beverage-companies-remove-6-4-trillion-calories–fro.html

Major Food, Beverage Companies Remove 6.4 Trillion Calories from U.S. Marketplace

Independent evaluation finds industry exceeded Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation pledge to remove 1.5 trillion calories by more than 400 percent.

January 9, 2014thumbnail

 

Princeton, N.J.—Sixteen of the nation’s leading food and beverage companies sold 6.4 trillion fewer calories in the United States in 2012 than they did in 2007, according to the findings of an independent evaluation funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and announced today. The companies, acting together as part of the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation (HWCF), pledged to remove 1 trillion calories from the marketplace by 2012, and 1.5 trillion by 2015. The evaluation found that, thus far, the companies have exceeded their 2015 pledge by more than 400 percent.

The participating companies sold 60.4 trillion calories in 2007, the year defined as the baseline measurement for the pledge. In 2012, they sold 54 trillion calories. This 6.4 trillion calorie decline translates into a reduction of 78 calories per person in the United States per day. This is the first effort to track all the calories sold by such major companies in the American marketplace.

“It’s extremely encouraging to hear that these leading companies appear to have substantially exceeded their calorie-reduction pledge,” said James S. Marks, MD, senior vice president and director of the Health Group at RWJF. “They must sustain that reduction, as they’ve pledged to do, and other food companies should follow their lead to give Americans the lower-calorie foods and beverages they want.”

In October 2009, more than 40 of the nation’s largest retailers, non-profit organizations, food and beverage manufacturers and trade associations launched HWCF, with the goal of helping to reduce obesity, especially childhood obesity, by 2015. Sixteen companies participated in the calorie-reduction pledge, announced in May 2010 as one pillar of the work of HWCF. The pledge was part of an agreement between HWCF and the Partnership for a Healthier America, an independent, non-partisan organization dedicated to advancing the goals of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative by working with the private sector to end childhood obesity.

Together the 16 companies produced 36 percent of the calories from all packaged foods and beverages, items such as cereals, snacks, canned soups, and bottled beverages, sold in the United States in 2007. In 2010 the companies noted that, in order to meet the pledge, they likely would develop new lower-calorie options, change existing products so that they had fewer calories, and change portion sizes to introduce more lower-calorie packaging.

In order to evaluate the impact of the pledge, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) combined data on foods and beverages sold by participating companies with nutritional information for those products. They then determined which individual products were included as part of the pledge and tracked sales of those products over time. All data used were publicly or commercially available. The full, peer-reviewed study is expected to be published later this year.

“The companies whose sales we analyzed have a big influence over the foods and beverages almost every American eats and drinks every day,” said Barry Popkin, PhD, the W.R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor in the School of Public Health at UNC, who is leading the evaluation team. “The evaluation system we’ve created will enable to us to determine how changes to what’s sold influences what people consume.”

Other research has shown that, between 2007 and 2011, better-for-you, lower-calorie foods and beverages also drove financial performance for many of these same companies. Companies with a higher percentage of their sales coming from such products recorded stronger sales growth, higher operating profits, superior shareholder returns, and better company reputations.

“Making the shift from traditional items to lower-calorie ones is not just the right thing for customers, it’s the right thing for these companies’ bottom lines,” said C. Tracy Orleans, PhD, senior scientist at RWJF. “The next big question is how these changes to what’s available on store shelves actually impact the health of children and families.”

The 16 companies committed to the HWCF calorie-reduction pledge include:

  • Bumble Bee Foods, LLC
  • Campbell Soup Company
  • ConAgra Foods (includes Ralston Foods)
  • General Mills, Inc.
  • Hillshire Brands (previously Sara Lee Corporation)
  • Kellogg Company
  • Kraft Foods Group/Mondelez
  • Mars, Incorporated
  • McCormick & Company, Inc.
  • Nestlé USA
  • PepsiCo, Inc.
  • Post Foods
  • The Coca-Cola Company
  • The Hershey Company
  • The J.M. Smucker Company
  • Unilever
quantified self, technology

Google moves into diabetes management

  • Noninvasive continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) are seen as a holy grail for the management of diabetes, and Google claims its prototypes are capable of continuous readings at a rate of once per second
  • working with the FDA
  • already completed clinical trials
  • wonder if they’re thinking about prevention rather than management?

Orignal Post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/introducing-our-smart-contact-lens.html

Medgadget Post: http://www.medgadget.com/2014/01/google-announces-eye-opener-glucose-sensing-contact-lenses.html

Google Announces Eye-Opener: Glucose-Sensing Contact Lenses

by BEN OUYANG on Jan 17, 2014 • 11:57 am

google contact lens Google Announces Eye Opener: Glucose Sensing Contact Lenses

Were you wondering why Google sent members of its mysterious Google X research group to meet with the FDA‘s eye department a few days ago? Wait no longer: Google will be entering into the medical device foray with a stunner.  It announced its plans for a new contact lens on its blog yesterday.  However, this won’t be a more compact Google Glass – the advanced wearable is a medical device aimed at the management of diabetes.

Google is preparing the contact lens to measure glucose levels from the wearer’s tears and to beam the data wirelessly to a receiver (presumably a smart phone).  Noninvasive continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) are seen as a holy grail for the management of diabetes, and Google claims its prototypes are capable of continuous readings at a rate of once per second, with less hassle and pain than current CGMs which are bulky and require needle sticks about once a week.  Furthermore, Google plans on integrating tiny LEDs as instantaneous early warning systems for the user if the glucose level is out of range.  The company is working with the FDA on this device, and has said that they will collaborate with experts that can bring the contact lens and its corresponding app to market for both patients and doctors to better manage diabetes together.  They have already done multiple clinical trials.

Research into this technology has been explored for over a decade now, and Google may finally have the power to bring it to market.  Diabetics – would you try these contacts?  Let us know what you think in the comments!

Google: Introducing our smart contact lens project

Flashbacks: New Blood Glucose Test Sensor Uses Tear Fluid…; Electronic Contact Lenses Promise Future of Advanced Augmented Vision…; Intra-Ocular Glucose Monitoring May Yet be Possible…; Oculir Glucose Measurement: The Eyes Have It…

cool, healthy habits, nutrition, policy, politics

Top piece… obesity and diabetes

This guy is an arts/law student at Sydney University and he does a terrific job of crystallizing the issue… recognised in him winning the Wentworth Prize. Good on him.

Obesity cannot be controlled through personal responsibility alone

Policymakers have invested in the exhausted, glib explanation that maintaining nutritional health is a matter of personal and parental responsibility. But is it?

Assuming collective responsibility for obesity and diabetes would likely require highly invasive disincentives like sugar or beverage taxes. Photograph: Foodfolio/Alamy

McDonald’s cookies have an energy density comparable to hydrazine. Hydrazine is a rocket fuel used to manoeuvre spacecraft in orbit. It was astonishing, then, to watch a small child graze through two boxes of the desiccated biscuits in one sitting. His parents watched on, preoccupied with their own colossal meals: a noxious amalgam of meat, grease and sugar.

The prime minister, once our federal health minister, has explained his attitude. “The only person responsible for what goes into my mouth is me,” he said, “and the only people who are responsible for what goes into kids’ mouths are the parents”. The Gillard government agreed, ignoring recommendations produced by its own preventative health taskforce to tax unhealthy foods and eliminate junk food advertising directed at children.

Policymakers have invested in the exhausted, glib explanation that maintaining nutritional health is a matter of personal and parental responsibility – a corporate defence strategy adapted from the tobacco and alcohol industries. By implication, obesity is the result of individualirresponsibility: poor dietary choices, idle lifestyles, questionable parenting, or inadequate resolve.

Intuitively, it is easy to understand the political appeal of this doctrine. It conforms to cultural stereotypes, that “fat people” are slothful and indolent. Moreover, assuming collective responsibility for obesity and diabetes would likely require highly invasive disincentives like sugar or beverage taxes. Policymakers are eager to avoid the political liability associated with these proposals.

But this “personal responsibility” paradigm is troubling. First, it reflects popular indifference to the obesity epidemic. It is properly called an epidemic. Over 63% of Australian adults are overweight or obese. A fifthof all cancer deaths in the US are attributable to obesity. A quarter of the world population will likely acquire type 2 diabetes, while diabetes sufferers constitute two-thirds of all the deaths caused by cardiovascular disease. Globally, abnormal body mass index accounts for 23% of disability-adjusted life-years.

And if the number of sufferers continues to grow, children born today will enjoy shorter life expectancies than both their parents and grandparents.

Yet numbers make no sense unless they are properly communicated. Both obesity and type 2 diabetes are deeply human tragedies, but that is yet to register among the public and policymakers. They are tragedies that happen to “other people”, after a seemingly predictable descent into sedentary living and poor eating. Neither disease has the terrifying arbitrariness of cancer, nor the abruptness of a sudden heart attack – neither seems to warrant the same commitment to prevention.

Coca-Cola CEO: 'Obesity is a serious problem'.
Coca-Cola CEO: ‘Obesity is a serious problem’. Photograph: Geoff Abbott/Demotix/Corbis

Australians, for instance, remain acutely aware of the causal links between smoking and lung cancer or emphysema. Anti-smoking campaigns here are intensely visual and heavily funded. Comparable anti-obesity campaigns receive a third of the funding. Obesity is substantially lower as a preventative health priority.

Second, the personal responsibility doctrine allows government and industry to play an interminable game of pass-the-parcel with obesity control. At its most basic, obesity develops when a person’s energy consumption exceeds their energy expenditure. Commercial interests are best served by preserving the rate of consumption, and instead appealing to exercise and sport. “Think. Drink. Move.” intones Coca-Cola. “Confectionery is designed to be enjoyed,” writes Cadbury, “as part of a balanced diet and active lifestyle.”

Central, then, to the corporate responsibility mission is a selective emphasis on physical activity over diet, and a denial of the good food/bad food dichotomy. Blame is deflected instead onto the consumer. The CEO of Coca-Cola, Muhtar Kent, provides a typical illustration of this disingenuous, faux-conscientious marketing. “Obesity is a serious problem. We know that,” he silkily conceded. “And we agree that Americans need to be more active and take greater responsibility for their diets.”

So policymakers are stuck in a trap of industry’s design. Through the personal responsibility conceit, the debate over tackling obesity has been reduced to a simplistic binary: consumption control versus the promotion of sport and exercise.

It is a neat and digestible expression of the basic obesity problem, but it lazily defers some crucial questions. Consumption is the half of the obesity equation which has the greatest effect, and over which we have the most control. But governments have been caught up in the food politics of “energy-in-energy-out” without asking why 10% of the Australian population visits McDonald’s every day despite school curriculums saturated in dietary education, why Indigenous communities suffer disproportionately high rates of obesity and diabetes, or why ultra-processed foods are cheaper than healthy alternatives.

Clearly, understandings of personal responsibility will play an important role in any obesity control regime. Eliminating it entirely is unhelpful, and would only sustain the worn cliché that obesity is an exclusively genetic problem, to be cured rather than prevented.

Yet a country does not get fat for lack of responsibility. That cannot explain the rapid growth or severity of the obesity-diabetes epidemic. It is a caricature of the complex factors which influence the lifestyle patterns of individuals, and it fails to address the roots of overconsumption: cost of living, manipulative marketing, nutritional misinformation and – often overlooked – simple palatability.

Australia is the muffin top of Asia, and it is killing our citizens. Dispensing with the fiction of personal responsibility is the first step to a truly holistic solution – one which finds an appropriate balance between education, industry self-regulation, and firm government intervention.