Hits & Misses – 2009/9/21
Medicare will pay $8,000 for a computer that will turn typed words into speech for the speech-impaired. It will not pay $450 for an iPhone that will do the same thing.
The pancreas. Gone awry, it is the source of diabetes, affecting 23 million people and it is at the front lines of our expanding waist lines.
Sixty percent of adults can’t digest milk, including most of Asia, half of Africa and 3/4 of Mediterranean.
One FDA bureaucrat is holding up many new cancer treatments.
Like the spleen, I think the pancreas gets no respect.
The RAND study needs to be taken with a big grain of salt. NHANES salt intake estimates are derived from a 24 hour dietary recall interview. It then uses nutrient composition of foods from USDA to estimate sodium intake.
As anyone who has had a middle school child that is forced to fill out one of those daily food diaries by a health class teacher, the sodium estimate can be wildly different depending on whether the soup the kid eats is canned, home made, canned low sodium, etc.
Then there is a whole raft of studies that suggest sodium isn’t a problem unless you already have one and that too little salt in one’s diet also has risks. See Sandy Szwarc’s round-up of sodium results at Junkfood Science. [http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2009/01/who-decides-what-you-can-eat-sating-on.html]
Sodium. The next reason government needs to control what you eat for your own good.
There is obviously waste in Madicare. However, the health care “czar” Obama has chosen to get rid of the waste is the very same person who was running the program under Clinton.