Kevin Klatt, PhD, RD

Disclaimer: I don't pretend to be an exert of health politics - as substantial as I think the year of undergraduate economics I took was (hint: it wasn't), issues surrounding health policy are quite interesting to me, but often riddled with many opinions, backed by many potential biases, that make it rather difficult to discern the clear benefit of specific policies. The current issue surrounds the issue of a SanFrancisco soda taxation - if this sound familiar, it's probably because you've heard of the failed efforts in NYC  and  Richmond , and the continuing efforts in  Berkley . For full access on data relating to total sugar-sweetened beverage consumption in the U.S., see here . There's a few perspectives I've been seeing on the issue: 1. Pro-Taxation - The pro-taxation side supports taxation to curb soda and sugar-sweetened beverage consumption, reducing overall caloric consumption. The soda tax money, which is estimated to generate about $31 million ...

I was in Whole paych...er Foods the other day and overheard a woman telling another woman to buy some supplements to help her allergies, naturally. I was trying not to creep too hard but they were standing in front of the wall of vitamin C options, which led me to be curious what actual evidence there was, seeing as I don't often hear about nutrition and allergic rhinitis/sinusitis. It's pretty common to hear complaints about seasonal allergies/hay fever at this time of year, and in my general google searches, I saw some potentially misleading reports about 'natural' tips for managing them, even on sites such as WebMD (1). The WebMD article talks about using 'nature-based' products, such as butterbur, herbs, quercertin and vitamin C. While some studies support it's effectiveness , Butterbur has liver safety issues related to its pyrrolizidine alkaloid (PA) content, and PA-free should always be recommended (WebMD's did not mention this); Butterbur has...

Media fact checking time - again. Two studies came out recently that looked at obesity rates, and reports on them are concluding that we have some discordant data on childhood obesity rates. I'm seeing articles going around saying that childhood obesity rates are dropping, while other reports pit studies against each other as if officials can't decide on what's happening to childhood obesity rates - see here , here . So what's up with Childhood Obesity? In reality, these studies aren't saying say too much that's different, in reference to childhood obesity. However, cherry-picking a few pieces of data can paint a pretty, share-able picture of conflict over where we're at with reducing Childhood Obesity rates. This is an important issue to clear up, as having good on data on this is pretty important, to understand the impact of public health efforts, and the relative funding that should be given to reducing/maintaining the current levels. Let's take a...

I had a reader ask "could you speak about how you integrate your nutrition knowledge into your own life without venturing into a disordered/obsessive mentality ?" I think this is a really pertinent question in the field of eating behavior at the moment. The health community is very focused on the idea of mindful eating; but when does mindful become manic? Health-minded communities, often focusing around what not to eat, have become quite zealous with their endeavors, leading to movements like "thinspo"/thigh gap glorification. There's the term, 'orthorexia', that I've seen thrown around a lot in reference to some of these restrictive health movements, although it is not considered a mental disorder in the DSM-V. However, it does get it's own page on nationaleatingdisorder.org (1). Concern over hyper-restriction of foods and its detrimental psychological outcomes has been talked about for a while in dietetics (2), though not researched as extens...

Horrible media coverage of science is back at it again. I feel less and less that I'm making an overarching generalization every time I tell my students to ignore every headline they hear. This time, the headlines are reading " vegetarians are less health and have a poorer quality of life ". Social media reports seem to have some level of rejoicing that finally meat isn't on the chopping block (pun  ✓).  So far I've seen comments like, "well obviously", "duh", "you need meat". I think to myself, oh, was there a longitudinal trial that closely tracked vegetarians, and all of their lifestyle factors, that I missed? Of course not. This report (1) comes from a cohort of Austrians, that is actually a subset of a larger study (2). The analysis of the larger study concluded "  Our results show that a vegetarian diet is associated with a better health-related behavior, a lower BMI, and a higher  SES"."  Of course, th...

berkley.edu With the ever growing emphasis on understanding how human nutrient needs evolved, I think it's pertinent to remember all of the forces of evolution -- I said back when I first started this blog that there's a strong chance that specific human populations likely have nutrition/metabolism variants related to the forces of evolution besides selection in a specific nutritope. Recent evidence suggests that gene flow may have played quite an important role in the evolution of metabolism. This evidence stems from the recent sequencing of a high quality Neanderthal genome by Svaante Paabo's group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, leading evolutionary biologists and anthropologists to suggest that ancestral populations interbred with Neanderthals. Neanderthals and humans likely diverged from their last common ancestor, which has eluded paleoanthropologists (1), about 1 mya; however, molecular clock data suggests a more recent LCA (2). Nea...