The Importance of the Right to Food for Achieving Global Health

This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Global Health Governance via http://blogs.shu.edu/ghg/2016/01/21/the-importance-of-the-right-to-food-for-achieving-global-health/The Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH) represents a significant opportunity to realize the right to health globally. However, in order to succeed the FCGH must be carefully considered: it must take a new evidence-based approach that departs meaningfully from past shortcomings in realizing the right to health. Central to this approach is recognizing, formally incorporating, and operationalizing the right to adequate food. This right should be correctly interpreted as a right to a standard of nutritional quality and not as a right to a minimum number of calories. Because nutrition is critical to the achievement and maintenance of good health, particularly for the most deprived populations, this right is an indispensable substantive condition of achieving the right to health. In addition to helping the FCGH to be effective, the right to adequate food will help it achieve comprehensiveness, legitimacy, and efficiency. There are several ways the right to adequate food can be operationalized in tandem with the right to health, including through formal enshrinement in health and other policies, and through the enactment of several types of measures to improve dietary behaviors and health outcomes. Incorporating a broadly conceived right to adequate food into the FCGH acknowledges and formally takes steps to address nutrition’s critical role in realizing the right to health, particularly for the most deprived populations. It will strengthen the FCGH and improve its chances of success

Sickeningly Sweet: Analysis and Solutions for Adverse Dietary Consequences of European Agricultural Law

Sixty-nine percent of adults in the United States, sixty-four percent in the United Kingdom, and over one-third worldwide are overweight or obese. These staggering figures continue to grow, with accompanying emotional, physical, and economic consequences, both for individuals and society as a whole. The role law plays in facilitating this global trend is significant, and yet puzzlingly, little recognized or understood. The current food system is profoundly structurally flawed: it establishes unhealthy dietary behaviors as the default option for consumers. This Article is the first to examine how agricultural law has facilitated these unhealthier diets for the past fifty years, analyzing these issues through the lens of the European Union\u27s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The Article is particularly timely, examining how the most recent 2013 sugar reforms may worsen diet and health over the next decade in Europe and globally, especially in developing and emerging economies. Recognizing the centrality of the law in fostering poor diet and obesity; the inadequacy of individually targeted anti-obesity interventions to date; and the significance of obesity to public health, this Article calls for a new paradigm for addressing diet, obesity, and health. This paradigm combines legal and public health analysis. It shifts away from downstream interventions targeting individual choice, which have thus far proven unsuccessful and inefficient, and shifts focus upstream to structural changes in agricultural law, which can help recalibrate production and improve the food supply. The Article then offers policy solutions to the problems agricultural law poses for health, including re-conceptualizing agricultural law to integrate dietary public health objectives and most importantly, explicitly financially incentivizing healthier production through subsidies, special program funds, and improved agricultural research. Pairing such structural interventions with a legal-public health paradigm will address these issues in a novel way with a potentially much more successful and efficient impact on diet and health

Sickeningly Sweet: Analysis and Solutions for the Adverse Dietary Consequences of European Agricultural Law

Sixty-nine percent of adults in the United States, sixty-four percent in the United Kingdom, and over one-third worldwide are overweight or obese. These staggering figures continue to grow, with accompanying emotional, physical, and economic consequences, both for individuals and society as a whole. The role law plays in facilitating this global trend is significant, and yet puzzlingly, little recognized or understood The current food system is profoundly structurally flawed: it establishes unhealthy dietary behaviors as the default option for consumers. This Article is the first to examine how agricultural law has facilitated these unhealthier diets for the past fifty years, analyzing these issues through the lens of the European Union\u27s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The Article is particularly timely, examining how the most recent 2013 sugar reforms may worsen diet and health over the next decade in Europe and globally, especially in developing and emerging economies

Functional Neuroimaging: Technical, Logical, and Social Perspectives

Neuroscientists have long sought to study the dynamic activity of the human brain—what\u27s happening in the brain, that is, while people are thinking, feeling, and acting. Ideally, an inside look at brain function would simultaneously and continuously measure the biochemical state of every cell in the central nervous system. While such a miraculous method is science fiction, a century of progress in neuroimaging technologies has made such simultaneous and continuous measurement a plausible fiction. Despite this progress, practitioners of modern neuroimaging struggle with two kinds of limitations: those that attend the particular neuroimaging methods we have today and those that would limit any method of imaging neural activity, no matter how powerful. In this essay, I consider the liabilities and potential of techniques that measure human brain activity. I am concerned here only with methods that measure relevant physiologic states of the central nervous system and relate those measures to particular mental states. I will consider in particular the preeminent method of functional neuroimaging: BOLD fMRI. While there are several practical limits on the biological information that current technologies can measure, these limits—as important as they are—are minor in comparison to the fundamental logical restraints on the conclusions that can be drawn from brain imaging studies

Spin Seebeck effect in Y-type hexagonal ferrite thin films

Spin Seebeck effect (SSE) has been investigated in thin films of two Y-hexagonal ferrites Ba$_2$Zn$_{2}$Fe$_{12}$O$_{22}$ (Zn2Y) and Ba$_2$Co$_{2}$Fe$_{12}$O$_{22}$ (Co2Y) deposited by a spin-coating method on SrTiO$_3$(111) substrate. The selected hexagonal ferrites are both ferrimagnetic with similar magnetic moments at room temperature and both exhibit easy magnetization plane normal to $c$-axis. Despite that, SSE signal was only observed for Zn2Y, whereas no significant SSE signal was detected for Co2Y. We tentatively explain this different behavior by a presence of two different magnetic ions in Co2Y, whose random distribution over octahedral sites interferes the long range ordering and enhances the Gilbert damping constant. The temperature dependence of SSE for Zn2Y was measured and analyzed with regard to the heat flux and temperature gradient relevant to the SSE signal.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figure

Liberalising agricultural policy for sugar in Europe risks damaging public health.

Concerns about the health effects of dietary sugars have recently taken centre stage, reflecting an emerging understanding of the importance of sugars, and particularly sugary drinks, in the development of obesity and diabetes.1-4 Recent research estimates consumption of sugar sweetened beverages will cause about 80,000 excess cases of type 2 diabetes in the UK over 10 years. In early 2015, the World Health Organization recommended intake of free sugars should be less than 10% of daily calories, and preferably below 5%. In July, the UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition halved its recommendation for free sugars to no more than 5% of daily caloriesThis work was undertaken by the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR, MR/K023187/1), a UKCRC Public Health Research Centre of Excellence. Funding from the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Economic and Social Research Council, Medical Research Council, the National Institute for Health Research, and the Wellcome Trust, under the auspices of the UK Clinical Research Collaboration, is gratefully acknowledged. EKA was also supported by Fulbright-Schuman grant and a Harvard Knox Fellowship from Harvard University

Cognitive Stimulation Therapy

Abstract. Cognitive stimulation therapy (CST) is a manualized psychosocial group intervention for people with mild to moderate dementia. Because of its broad scientific evidence and cost effectiveness, CST is now used globally. To ensure replicability and quality standards of the intervention in other cultures, Aguirre et al. (2014) developed guidelines for cultural adaptation of CST based on the formative method for adapting psychotherapy (FMAP). Following this community-based approach, we adapted and translated the English CST manual into German, including multiprofessional focus groups, two adaptation cycles, and two pilot CST groups ( n = 13) in different settings representative of the German healthcare system. Effectiveness in both groups was assessed by pre-post comparison of standard scales on cognition, depression, quality of life, and self-efficacy. We were able to replicate previous findings of improved cognition as measured by the ADAS-Cog, with effect sizes in the same range as in previous randomized controlled trials. Additionally, self-efficacy increased in post-test compared to the pre-test, indicating that CST might trigger cognition through positive, self-rewarding activation

Determining the Optimal Number of Clusters with the Clustergram

Cluster analysis aids research in many different fields, from business to biology to aerospace. It consists of using statistical techniques to group objects in large sets of data into meaningful classes. However, this process of ordering data points presents much uncertainty because it involves several steps, many of which are subject to researcher judgment as well as inconsistencies depending on the specific data type and research goals. These steps include the method used to cluster the data, the variables on which the cluster analysis will be operating, the number of resulting clusters, and parts of the interpretation process. In most cases, the number of clusters must be guessed or estimated before employing the clustering method. Many remedies have been proposed, but none is unassailable and certainly not for all data types. Thus, the aim of current research for better techniques of determining the number of clusters is generally confined to demonstrating that the new technique excels other methods in performance for several disparate data types. Our research makes use of a new cluster-number-determination technique based on the clustergram: a graph that shows how the number of objects in the cluster and the cluster mean (the ordinate) change with the number of clusters (the abscissa). We use the features of the clustergram to make the best determination of the cluster-number