ISSN exercise & sport nutrition review: research & recommendations

Sports nutrition is a constantly evolving field with hundreds of research papers published annually. For this reason, keeping up to date with the literature is often difficult. This paper is a five year update of the sports nutrition review article published as the lead paper to launch the JISSN in 2004 and presents a well-referenced overview of the current state of the science related to how to optimize training and athletic performance through nutrition. More specifically, this paper provides an overview of: 1.) The definitional category of ergogenic aids and dietary supplements; 2.) How dietary supplements are legally regulated; 3.) How to evaluate the scientific merit of nutritional supplements; 4.) General nutritional strategies to optimize performance and enhance recovery; and, 5.) An overview of our current understanding of the ergogenic value of nutrition and dietary supplementation in regards to weight gain, weight loss, and performance enhancement. Our hope is that ISSN members and individuals interested in sports nutrition find this review useful in their daily practice and consultation with their clients

The economic of health and health care

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Health Care in Small Areas of Three Command Economies: What Do the Data Tell Us?

Abstract Health systems data were collected and maintained by the Communist central governments of East Germany and Czechoslovakia and by the Voivodships in Poland during the command system era. The present project assembles the data for small areas in contiguous regions of these countries in 1988. Analyses of these regions are compared to contemporary data from U.S. regions. Instead of assuming a common goal for each region, the data are studied to ascertain whether they reflect an identifiable, de facto goal. The key findings are that 1) coefficients of variation of health care resource availability are somewhat larger in the command systems, 2) coefficients of variation in mortality rates are smaller in two of the command systems, suggesting a de facto emphasis on health status equality. The U.S. regions appear to be the more consistent with regional health status maximization. Discussions explain the relationships between the alternative goals and suggest which systems succeed in achieving a particular goal

Does "community social capital" contribute to population health?

Robert Putnam showed that a social capital index, created as a weighted sum of 14 variables chosen to describe the civic degree of sociability and community mindedness, is correlated with many community outcomes, such as education, child well-being, crime, and the total mortality rate. Although correlation does not establish causation, we can find that in a large number of studies this index, a selection of its elements, or similar measures register as significantly correlated with health variables, virtually always in a direction consistent with the hypothesis that social capital improves health. The potential benefit of this relationship is substantial, especially if it proves to be robust to differences in time and place, statistical contexts, and ultimately if the relation can be supported to be causal. This paper subjects the social capital and health hypothesis to an expanded set of rigorous tests, which, by surviving, it becomes stronger or, by failing, its weaknesses are better revealed. The paper seeks to extend this body of research by a combination of study characteristics that are each relatively unusual in social capital and health research. Though causality cannot be established by these tests, the work shows that the association of social capital with health is quite robust when challenged in the following ways: (1) seven different health measures are studied, including five mortality rates; (2) the 48 contiguous states are observed at six points in time covering the years from 1978 to 1998 over four year intervals, thus forming a panel; (3) the multivariate tests feature economic variables from the production of health literature; and (4) a statistical method (instrumental variables) is applied to account for the possibility that omitted variables are confounding the social capital estimates. The results and the discussion find cases for which the social capital and health hypothesis performs only weakly, but, on the whole, the hypothesis is remarkably robust to these variations.USA Social capital Community health

The Quality of Mercy: Social Health Insurance in the Charitable Liberal State

This paper has two, mutually supportive purposes: (1) to show that the modern economic rationale for universal social health insurance is consistent with the classical liberal understanding of property rights; (2) to show that the writings of the leading liberal sages—Locke, Smith, Mill, and Hayek—are congenial to programs economically similar to universal social health insurance, and, in Hayek’s cases, were specifically approving. It is hoped that these facts and reasonings, which are unlikely to be known in toto to those who do not normally study across the intersection of philosophy and economics, will encourage a dialogue that reasserts in a non-ideological way the neglected role of property rights in the health economic assessment of social health insurance alternatives. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2005social insurance, economic philosophy, History of Economic Thought,

Health Care in Small Areas of Three Command Economies: What Do the Data Tell Us?

The present project assembles and analyzes health systems data for small areas in contiguous regions of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in 1988. The data were collected and maintained by the Communist central governments of East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and by the voivodships in Poland during the command system era. Analyses of these regions are compared to contemporary data from U.S. regions. Instead of assuming a common goal for each region, the data are studied to ascertain whether they reflect an identifiable, de facto goal. The key findings are that coefficients of variation of health care resource availability are somewhat larger in the command systems; and coefficients of variation in mortality rates are smaller in two of the command systems, suggesting a de facto emphasis on health status equality. The U.S. regions' data appear to be more consistent with an implicit goal of regional health status maximization. Discussions explain the relationships between the alternative goals and suggest which systems succeed in achieving a particular goal.