Yoni Freedhoff

Partnerships between health organizations and the food industry risk derailing public health nutrition.

Highly processed, nutritionally deprived and calorie-rich foods tend to be the profit drivers most heavily marketed by their manufacturers. Their promotion and consumption contradict government guidance on healthy food choices and the aims of health organizations fighting an epidemic of childhood

Frying up hospital cafeteria food

Would you like fries with that angioplasty?” Sadly, this is not as far fetched as you might imagine. Although hospitals are the front line for delivering medical treatment, health promotion and education, paradoxically, the foods they sell are frequently generic versions of fast food staples or,

Controversy surrounds new treatment for discogenic back pain

My back hurts Doc. It’s one of the most common complaints heard by family doctors. Various estimates have suggested that 80% of people will experience at least one episode of back pain over their lifetimes. Traditional treatments of discogenic back pain have ranged from conservative management

Celebrities’ impact on health-related knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and status outcomes: protocol for a systematic review, meta-analysis, and meta-regression analysis

BackgroundCelebrities are highly influential people whose actions and decisions are watched and often emulated by wide audiences. Many celebrities have used their prominent social standing to offer medical advice or endorse health products, a trend that is expected to increase. However, the extent of the impact that celebrities have in shaping the public’s health-related knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and status is unclear. This systematic review seeks to answer the following questions: (1) Which health-related outcomes are influenced by celebrities? (2) How large of an impact do celebrities actually have on these health-related outcomes? (3) Under what circumstances do celebrities produce either beneficial or harmful impacts?MethodsTen databases were searched, including MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, PubMed, CINAHL, Communication Complete, Sociological Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, Journals @ Scholars Portal, and ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I. Two reviewers conducted title and abstract screening and full-text screening to identify primary studies that employed empirical methods (either quantitative or qualitative) to examine celebrities’ impact on health-related knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, or status outcomes.DiscussionThe results of this review will contribute to our understanding of celebrity influences and how to design positive evidence-based celebrity health promotion activities. In addition, these findings can help inform the development of media reporting guidelines pertaining to celebrity health news and provide guidance to public health authorities on whether and how to respond to or work with celebrities.Systematic review registrationPROSPERO CRD42015019268

Advice to avoid low carbohydrate-high protein diets is not evidence based

Lagiou and colleagues’ paper bases all of its 15 years’ worth of conclusions on a single, solitary, and clearly inaccurate, baseline food frequency questionnaire; it didn’t control for clearly known …

The physician's role in cultivating healthful lifestyles.

Lifestyle counselling is not the strong suit of primary care. In a recent research article in CMAJ Open , Bourgeois and colleagues found that clinicians perceived lack of time, expertise and competence as main barriers for lifestyle counselling designed to address the primary and secondary

Fortified food loophole or natural health product

The juice aisle has a secret. Some of its juices are not just juices; they are also “natural health products” fortified with vitamins and minerals under licenses granted by Health Canada’s Natural Health Products Directorate. Also sporting licenses are such content-boosted products as vitamin

From plunger to Punkt-roller: a century of weight-loss quackery

“People trust the quack with their lives who would not trust him with the loan of a sixpence. They seem to believe advertised testimonials as if they were guaranteed by a prominent physician, forgetting that many obscure prints can be got to write any falsehoods and back up any quackery under the

Too heavy to save or be saved

Ian Patton was eager to donate some of his stem cells after reading about how a similar gift saved the life of a 15-month-old baby boy. He promptly contacted Canadian Blood Services’ OneMatch program and was shocked to discover that his weight, about 147.7 kg, made him ineligible to donate. “As

Canada leads charge to allow industry to fortify foods

Canada is leading an international charge to amend world food standards to allow industry more discretion in the fortification of foods through the addition of vitamins and minerals. Although critics say that the rationale for such a change hasn’t been established and that it could lead to