They’re kidding right? The companies can’t possibly trying to tempt young people by  using images of young adults having a lot of fun and they just all happen to be holding on to a glass or bottle filled with alcohol. (Sarcasm doesn’t translate well to the Internet, does it?)

Researchers decided to do a study about magazine ads and teens to determine if the Wine Institute, the Beer Institute, and the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States were being truthful with their claims of not targeting young people with their advertising. What they found was this was not true. The study was published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

After comparing 118 print ads,

The researchers found that in magazines with the highest levels of youth readership, youth alcoholic beverage types (e.g., premium beer, low calorie beer, rum, vodka, and flavored alcohol beverages) were more than four times more likely to be advertised than non-youth types (e.g., gin, brandy, whiskey, and scotch). As youth readership increased in a magazine, so did the number of youth alcoholic beverage advertisements.

Despite the claims of the institutes, 42.9% of ads for drinks that appeal to youth were placed in magazines popular with that age group. Only 23.1% of alcohol ads were for drinks that aren’t usually associated with youth.

Underage drinking is something that can cause serious problems, from accidents to binge drinking to alcoholism, so it is a serious issue. However, the “duh” factor was in the finding. It’s very obvious to anyone who the target market is for those younger-style alcoholic beverages – and it’s not grannie.

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Post from: Healthbolt

First, we need to decide on what is a drink – what drinks are equivalent to each other. Generally, in North America, a standard drink is one that has about 0.6 fluid ounces of pure alcohol. But how much that is in your drink depends on what it is you are drinking. Generally, standard drinks are:

•   12 oz beer
•    5 oz wine
•    3-4 oz of fortified wine (such as port)
•    2-3 oz liqueur or aperatif
•    1.5 oz brandy or hard liquor

Does any of that surprise you?

If you drink mixed drinks and would like to figure out how much alcohol is in them, the National Institutes of Health site has these alcohol calculators that allow you to check out:

•    Drink sizes
•    Cocktail content
•    Alcohol calories
•    Alcohol spending
•    Blood alcohol concentration (BAC)

After reading how much alcohol is in your drink, do you think your drinking pattern may be risky? If you’re wondering, the NIH site has a quiz for you: What’s Your Pattern?

How do you rank? Do you think you need to make some changes?

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1. Farmers, who want to earn a living, grow tobacco for big tobacco companies.
2. Big tobacco companies buy the tobacco to turn into cigarettes and chewing tobacco.
3. Big tobacco companies spend millions and millions of dollars on salaries, production, advertising, and sales.
4. Government rakes in millions and millions of dollars on income tax from tobacco company employees, sales (and other) tax on equipment purchased, gas employees use to get to work, and so on.
5. Big tobacco companies rake in millions and millions of dollars in profit.
6. Smokers get sick from using big tobacco company’s products.
7. Smokers get very expensive medical treatment paid for by insurance companies or government programs (United States) or the government (Canada).
8. Government says “hey, that’s not fair! You big tobacco companies are costing us money because of your product so you should have to cover the cost of medical care.”
9. Government sues Big Tobacco Industry.

Do you see anything wrong with this picture at all? And, the best part of this is, who gets rich? Not the smoker, not the government, not really the tobacco company. The ones who get rich are the lawyers who are working on these lawsuits.

So, tell me again, what’s wrong with this picture?

This comes up every so often and has now come up again in the Canadian province of Quebec. Medical care in Canada is taken care of by the provinces, not the federal government.

According to an article over at CBC news earlier this month, the Quebec government is gearing up to file a $30 billion lawsuit against the tobacco interest to recoup some of the almost %1 billion dollars annually that the government must spend on smoking-related illnesses.

I don’t smoke and I don’t like smoking. The smell of the cigarette smoke makes me ill. But I also believe that since tobacco is a legal product, the government can’t be ticked off that it’s causing problems with people’s health. Does the government sue car manufacturers for making cars go faster than they should? Do they sue swimming pool manufacturers because some people drown? Are gun-makers sued because someone shoots someone?

How is smoking any different? If the government wants people to stop smoking, there’s only one way to start and that’s by making tobacco illegal. Sure, it wouldn’t stop smoking altogether – after all, people still do illicit drugs and alcohol was readily available during Prohibition. But it would be a start. With a ban on tobacco, teens couldn’t start lighting up at school. Office workers wouldn’t be huddled outside office buildings, blocking the doors, while they run outside for a puff.

But, suing the very people the government is making so much money from – the tobacco industry? That’s a little much, I think.

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Post from: Healthbolt

I live in Quebec where the legal age is 18, while our neighboring province Ontario’s legal age is 19. At the same time, an hour south of us, across the Canada/United States border, the age is 21. (One thing I can’t figure out is why you can allow an 18-year-old to own a gun, join the army, get married, vote, buy a house, etc, but he or she can’t have a drink?).

Anyway, since there are such differences in beliefs about teens and alcohol, there are on-going studies to see if there are ways to see what may be best overall.

Researchers in the United Kingdom surveyed 9833 teens in North Eastern England, aged 15 to 16 years, about their alcohol consumption. The researchers were looking for information consumption patterns (what they drank, where they drank it, how they got it) and the results of the drinking (violence, for example). The results of their study were published in the open access, on-line journal version of BMC Public Health.

Briefly, the results showed that when drunk:

• 28.8% experienced violence
• 12.5% regretted alcohol-related sexual encounters
• 45.3% reported forgetting things
• 35.8% drinking in public places

However, teens who said their parents supplied them with alcohol had fewer incidents such as those listed above.

If you read the study thoroughly, you’ll see the authors aren’t saying that parents should be offering their teens alcohol. What they are saying is that if teens are exposed to regulated amounts of alcohol once a week or so, the forbidden fruit is no longer that. While they may continue to drink outside the home, their risk of binge drinking and the risk of experiencing the harmful effects of binge drinking are lower than teens who are not allowed to have any alcohol at home.

If you’re a parent of teens, how do you handle alcohol? If your children are young, what do you think you will do? If you’re not a parent, what do you think parents should do?

I’m in the camp of moderate alcohol in the home – and my children are now 18, 20 and 22.

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Post from: Healthbolt

Between two and three million people in the United States are addicted to cocaine and about one-third of drug-related emergency room visits are the result of cocaine use.

Treating cocaine addiction is not easy. There aren’t any medicines that can help overcome the addiction; detoxification is the mainstay treatment. If a vaccine was available, researchers feel they could reach more than the approximately 800,000 addicts who receive treatment now.

The hope of researchers is that a cocaine vaccine will cause a high level of anticocaine antibodies, which will reduce the feelings of euphoria that cocaine causes. To test this, researchers in Connecticut undertook a 24-week study of 115 patients who used cocaine. The group was divided into two; 57 received placebo and the other 58 received the vaccination in five doses over 12 weeks.

The results showed that 38% of the patients who received the vaccine did get high enough levels of cocaine antibodies, making them less likely to react to the effects of cocaine. Fifty-three percent of the patients who had high antibodies (the 38%) used half as much cocaine as before.

What do you think about this?

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According to one psychologist, yes it does.

Dr. Tracy Alloway from University of Stirling in Scotland, who studies working memory, recently told an audience at the British Science Festival that some social-media behaviors are much more conducive to developing working memory than others.

In her opinion Facebook is good while twitter is not.

In fact, she sees microblogging activities such as twitter as reducing a person’s attention span.

On the other hand, Alloway sees participating in facebook as enhancing intelligence.

Interesting but I’m not buying it. To me, both social media behaviours can be as intelligence enhancing or intelligence numbing as you choose. It all depends on what you do with them and who you are following.

What do you think?

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Post from: Healthbolt

Not sure?

Well, according to reSTART, the first US rehab center for Internet Addiction,  if you have  5 or more of the following signs and symptoms, the answer is probably yes

So, go ahead and check it out. Think about your internet and computer use and then answer yes or no to the following:

•    Failed attempts to control behavior
•  Heightened sense of euphoria while involved in computer and internet activities
• Craving more time on the computer and internet
• Neglecting friends and family
• Feeling restless when not engaged in the activity
• Being dishonest with others
• Computer use interfering with job/school performance
• Feeling guilty, ashamed, anxious, or depressed as a result of behavior
•   Changes in sleep patterns
• Physical changes such as weight gain or loss, backaches, headaches, carpal tunnel syndrome
• Withdrawing from other pleasurable activities

How’d you score?

I’m hoping it was less than 5 and better still maybe only 1 or 2.

Anyone one with 5 or more, though, might want to reconsider their time in cyberspace and the computer. Just switch it off and walk away.

And if you can’t do that, there is always reSTART program at Heavensfield Retreat Center in Fall City, Washington, where for $14,500 you can spend 45 days of dis-connect

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Post from: Healthbolt

If so, you might be happy to know that you are not alone. A recent National Sleep Foundation poll has found that 1 in 4 Americans say that concerns and worries over personal finances, fear of job loss, and the economy is keeping them up at night. 

Instead of sleeping, we are spending more time tossing and turning and watching late night television shows.

We are also taking more drugs. 

Prescriptions for sleep medications has also grown, topping 56 million in 2008. Good news, I guess, for the pharmaceutical companies selling GABA-enhancing  ‘Z drugs’  (Ambien, Lunesta, Rozerem) that  promote sleep, decrease anxiety or relax muscles.

But while these pills may have their upside in that they help you sleep, there is also a  downside -  a whole list of adverse reactions ranging from next-day drowsiness to memory loss and drug dependence.

A National Institutes of Health-funded analysis,  published in 2005,  even indicates that the upside might not even be all that great. Their study reported that these ‘Z drugs’ only reduced the average time it took to fall asleep by around 18 minutes. Worse yet, the total increased sleeping time was only about 28 minutes.

Which should really make you ask, ‘are the adverse reactions worth it?’

So what’s the answer?

 What’s the best way to deal with insomnia?

Well, many sleep experts skipping the pills and trying to fall asleep on our own. But that might be easier said than done.

But a good place to start is by checking out these sleep tips from Gayle Greene, a bona fide insomniac and author of the book Insomniac.

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Post from: Healthbolt

A recent study by Nuffield Health, a non-profit organization, has found that on the whole, Britain has turned into a ‘couch potato nation’, too lazy to get up and change the television channel if the remote was broken and simply too tired for sex.

The results, which come from a poll conducted of more than 2000 adults throughout Britain, showed that…

• 36  percent would not run to catch a bus
• 52 percent of dog owners can’t be bothered walking the dog
• 73 percent have no energy for sex
• 64 percent are too tired to play with their children
• 59 percent took the lift instead of walking up even two flights of stairs

It’s almost as if all the Brits want to do is sit and vegetate.

With results like that, I guess it should be surprising that heart disease, obesity, joint problems, some cancers and type 2 diabetes is on the rise, with more than 2 million Brits suffering from mature onset diabetes. And that one in six children are already classified as obese before they even reach the classroom.

As for Britain’s most slothful city – according to the poll, that would be Glasgow which had a massive 75 percent indicating that they don’t get any or very little exercise. Birmingham and Southhampton were tied for second with 67 percent acknowledging their ‘couch potato’ status. London, by the way, came in fourth.

Wonder what a similar poll in the United States would reveal?

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Download this free e-book

As an ex-smoker I truly understand the ease in which smoking can change from a casual fling to a full blown addiction. And I know how very, very difficult it is to give it up.

But as a health professional, I have seen the damage that smoking can do.

Therefore, I’d like to recommend that everyone have a read of this free e-book Toward a Tobacco Free World, written by by Kaiser Permanente psychiatrist and UCLA researcher Dr. Michael Rabinoff.  It not only highlights the societal costs worldwide that stem from tobacco use but also outlines actions that can be taken immediately to help save lives worldwide.

Download it.

Read it.

And pass it on.

Let’s all work Toward a Tobacco Free World.

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