Kids and Sugar

I took a little break around the holidays from posting here, and I'll be disappearing again until about mid-January until I return to Austin for the start of the spring semester. As I traveled for the last week or so I came across the same story 3-4 times in different podcasts and online articles, which I thought was quite interesting. It relates to the fact that sugar doesn't really make kids hyper. There's some good research going on there, including an experiment that indicated it's more parents' expectations about the sugar-hyperactivity "link" that leads to them thinking their kids are being hyper even when they're not.

Happy 2009 to all!

Amanda Peet on Vaccines

This popped up on NPR a little over a week ago, and I saved the article to write about at some point. For those interested in the debate over vaccinating children, here's a nice look at how Amanda Peet has become a spokesperson in favor of vaccines. Regarding conflicting opinions in the media and from some celebrities that vaccines are bad:

Peet says she was bewildered and frustrated by "the disparity between what I was hearing from other moms here in Hollywood and what I was hearing from the doctors."

Leaving the actual debate out of it, I think it's interesting to see how one celebrity opted to become involved in this issue after becoming confused about all the different things she was hearing, seeing online, etc. I'm sure plenty of "normal" people go through the same thing, but they don't necessarily end up with access to a leading expert on vaccines for education.

I'm sure that having Peet as a champion for vaccines is a good thing (for those on that side of the debate), but I also have to wonder how many average people are really going to be influenced by what Amanda Peet, Jenny McCarthy (anti-vaccines), or any other celebrity has to say about this. When I'm looking for information on a controversial and important health issue, celebrities are seldom a primary source of information... I'd have to guess that online blogs and advocacy sites managed my common people are more likely to have an effect on anyone looking online for health information - it'll have that extra "learning from someone just like me" impact.

That article on NPR also generated a lot of reaction, 116 comments as I'm posting this. If nothing else, it's a vigorous debate and worth keeping an eye on.

Now What?

The New York Times has a nice review of the Now What? campaign in New York for home health services. A primary goal of the campaign is to get people to visit the Visiting Nurse Service of New York website for answers to the "Now what?" question raised by the campaign.

A couple things jumped out at me about the campaign, especially the designers' recognition that the people they're targeting are the kinds of people who want to do this sort of research online - that's why all the media points people toward the website.

Examples of the campaign discussed in the article show the advertisers definitely had a firm grasp on what would prompt consumers' interest in home health services. It looks like a strong campaign, hopefully it'll achieve the desired effect.

Return to the Golden Age of Cigarette Advertising

The New York Public Library has a new exhibit of print advertising for cigarettes from the 1920s to the 1950s. Advertising Age has a short video story about this here. Even in the little clip, they discuss how clever the advertising companies were in selling cigarettes. I know in my classes there is always an interesting ethical debate around certain products - cigarettes, fast food, etc. - when we discuss personal responsibility vs. the role that the mass media plays in influencing people.

The more time I spend working with advertising students, the more I value having landed in an advertising department. In graduate school I never would have guessed this is where I would end up working, but it's been a great opportunity. This spring I'm going to be working with students to develop a couple new health campaigns, hopefully bringing some of the spice and creativity they learn in their classes to address public health problems. We'll see how it goes, but even in the planning stages they're looking pretty promising.

Cyberchondria

Scientific American had an interesting podcast a few days about cyberchondria - stress caused by the use of the Internet to search for information on symptoms that can lead to extreme conclusions. I thought this particular quote was extremely interesting:

Studying the search behavior of about a million users, Microsoft researchers found that a search for chest pain would more likely lead to a link for the worst-case scenario like heart attack, than to the more mundane, "indigestion." Because of the popularity of "heart attack" links, those are typically the ones that come up near the top of search results.

The authors apparently suggested that search engines be improved so that initial health searches are more accurate. That's a fine idea in some ways, but in this case it seems like the current situation might be a bit better than the alternative. If someone goes online searching for chest pain, it seems better to have the more extreme cases pop up (and someone go to the doctor when they might not need to) than have indigestion come up in the results and the person assume all is fine when they are actually having a heart attack. And given how many people aren't especially health literate, it seems unlikely that the real way to solve this problem is through improving the search engines - it seems like patient education is likely more important.

Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities Call for Proposals Released

For those looking for funding for research projects related to childhood obesity...

Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities is a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) whose primary goal is to implement healthy eating and active living initiatives that can support healthier communities for children and families across the United States. The program places special emphasis on reaching children who are at highest risk for obesity on the basis of race/ethnicity, income and/or geographic location. This initiative will advance RWJF’s efforts to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015.

For more information on applying, head to the RWJ website here.