Health - Senate Passes Overhaul of Food Safety Regulations |
- Senate Passes Overhaul of Food Safety Regulations
- Report Questions Need for 2 Diet Supplements
- A Conversation With Julian L. Seifter: A Nephrologist and Patient
- An Odyssey Through the Brain
- Drug Maker Wrote Book Under 2 Doctors’ Names, Documents Say
- Recipes for Health: Turkey and Rice Casserole With Yogurt Topping
- Well: Beauty Discrimination During a Job Search
- The New Old Age: The Graying Work Force
- Prescriptions: Merck Appoints a New Chief Executive
- Letters: Sit. Fetch. Heal. (1 Letter)
- Letters: Regulating Marijuana Use (1 Letter)
- Recipes for Health: Risotto With Turkey, Mushrooms and Peas
| Senate Passes Overhaul of Food Safety Regulations Posted: 30 Nov 2010 11:12 AM PST WASHINGTON — The Senate on Tuesday passed a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s food-safety system, after recalls of tainted eggs, peanut butter and spinach that sickened thousands and led major food makers to join consumer advocates in demanding stronger government oversight. MultimediaThe legislation, which passed by a vote of 73 to 25, would greatly strengthen the Food and Drug Administration, an agency that in recent decades focused more on policing medical products than ensuring the safety of foods. The bill is intended to get the government to crack down on unsafe foods before they harm people rather than after outbreaks occur. Despite unusual bipartisan support on Capitol Hill and a strong push from the Obama administration, the bill could still die because there might not be enough time for the usual haggling between the Senate and House of Representatives, which passed its own version last year. Top House Democrats said that they would consider simply passing the Senate version to speed approval. Both versions of the bill would grant the F.D.A. new powers to recall tainted foods, increase inspections, demand accountability from food companies and oversee farming. But neither version would consolidate overlapping functions at the Department of Agriculture and nearly a dozen other federal agencies that oversee various aspects of food safety, making coordination among the agencies a continuing challenge. While food-safety advocates and many industry groups preferred the House version because it includes more money for inspections and fewer exceptions from the rules it sets out, most said the Senate bill was far better than nothing. “This is an historic moment,” said Erik Olson, deputy director of the Pew Health Group, an advocacy group. “For the first time in over 70 years, the Senate has approved an overhaul of F.D.A.’s food safety law that will help ensure that the food we put on our kitchen tables will be safer.” Among the Senate bill’s last major sticking points was how it would affect small farmers and food producers. Some small-farm and organic food advocates warned that the legislation would destroy their industry under a mountain of paperwork, and Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat of Montana, pushed for a recent addition to the bill that exempts producers with less than $500,000 a year in sales who sell most of their food locally. That provision led the United Fresh Produce Association, a trade group, to announce recently that it would oppose the legislation since small food operations have been the source of some food recalls in recent years. But Randy Napier of Medina, Ohio, said the Senate bill was better than nothing. Mr. Napier’s 80-year-old mother, Nellie Napier, died in January 2009 after the nursing home in which she lived continued to feed her contaminated peanut butter even after she got sick. “I am appalled at what I have found out since my mother’s death about how poorly food is regulated and how these companies cut corners to save money,” Mr. Napier said. The staunch opposition of Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, forced months of delay and eventually required Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada to call a series of time-consuming procedural votes to end debate. Mr. Coburn offered his own version of the legislation eliminating many of its requirements because he said less regulation was needed, not more, but that version failed. Despite Mr. Coburn’s opposition, the bill is one of the only major pieces of bipartisan legislation to emerge from this Congress. Some Republican and Democratic Senate staff members — who in previous terms would have seen each other routinely — met for the first time during the food negotiations. The group bonded over snacks: specifically, Starburst candies from a staff member of Senator Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, and jelly beans from a staff member of Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat. And in the midst of negotiations, the negotiators — nearly all women — took a field trip to a nearby food market so that a Republican staff member could teach the Democrats how to buy high-quality steaks. “This legislation means that parents who tell their kids to eat their spinach can be assured that it won’t make them sick,” said Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa who, as chairman of the Senate health committee, shepherded the legislation through months of negotiations. Health advocates are hoping the legislation will rekindle the progress — now stalled — that the nation once enjoyed in reducing the tens of millions of food contamination illnesses that occur each year. In the case of toxic salmonella, infections may be creeping upward. Part of the problem is the growing industrialization and globalization of the nation’s food supply. Nearly a fifth of the nation’s food supply and as much as three-quarters of its seafood are imported, but the F.D.A. inspects less than one pound in a million of such imported foods. The bill gives the F.D.A. more control over food imports, including increased inspection of foreign processing plants and the ability to set standards for how fruits and vegetables are grown abroad. And as food suppliers grow in size, problems at one facility can sicken thousands all over the country. The Peanut Corporation of America’s contaminated paste was included in scores of cookies and snacks made by big and small companies. The legislation would raise standards at such plants by demanding that food companies write plans to manufacture foods safely and conduct routine tests to ensure that the plans are adequate.
|
| Report Questions Need for 2 Diet Supplements Posted: 30 Nov 2010 08:25 AM PST The very high levels of vitamin D that are often recommended by doctors and testing laboratories — and can be achieved only by taking supplements — are unnecessary and could be harmful, an expert committee says. It also concludes that calcium supplements are not needed.  Lawrence Lool/European Pressphoto AgencyA vitamin D pill. The group said most people have adequate amounts of vitamin D in their blood supplied by their diets and natural sources like sunshine, the committee says in a report that is to be released on Tuesday. “For most people, taking extra calcium and vitamin D supplements is not indicated,” said Dr. Clifford J. Rosen, a member of the panel and an osteoporosis expert at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute. Dr. J. Christopher Gallagher, director of the bone metabolism unit at the Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, Neb., agreed, adding, “The onus is on the people who propose extra calcium and vitamin D to show it is safe before they push it on people.” Over the past few years, the idea that nearly everyone needs extra calcium and vitamin D — especially vitamin D — has swept the nation. With calcium, adolescent girls may be the only group that is getting too little, the panel found. Older women, on the other hand, may take too much, putting themselves at risk for kidney stones. And there is evidence that excess calcium can increase the risk of heart disease, the group wrote. As for vitamin D, some prominent doctors have said that most people need supplements or they will be at increased risk for a wide variety of illnesses, including heart disease, cancer and autoimmune diseases. And these days more and more people know their vitamin D levels because they are being tested for it as part of routine physical exams. “The number of vitamin D tests has exploded,” said Dennis Black, a reviewer of the report who is a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. At the same time, vitamin D sales have soared, growing faster than those of any supplement, according to The Nutrition Business Journal. Sales rose 82 percent from 2008 to 2009, reaching $430 million. “Everyone was hoping vitamin D would be kind of a panacea,” Dr. Black said. The report, he added, might quell the craze. “I think this will have an impact on a lot of primary care providers,” he said. The 14-member expert committee was convened by the Institute of Medicine, an independent nonprofit scientific body, at the request of the United States and Canadian governments. It was asked to examine the available data — nearly 1,000 publications — to determine how much vitamin D and calcium people were getting, how much was needed for optimal health and how much was too much. The two nutrients work together for bone health. Bone health, though, is only one of the benefits that have been attributed to vitamin D, and there is not enough good evidence to support most other claims, the committee said. Some labs have started reporting levels of less than 30 nanograms of vitamin D per milliliter of blood as a deficiency. With that as a standard, 80 percent of the population would be deemed deficient of vitamin D, Dr. Rosen said. Most people need to take supplements to reach levels above 30 nanograms per milliliter, he added. But, the committee concluded, a level of 20 to 30 nanograms is all that is needed for bone health, and nearly everyone is in that range. Vitamin D is being added to more and more foods, said Paul R. Thomas of the Office of Dietary Supplements at the National Institutes of Health. Not only is it in orange juice and milk, but more is being added to breakfast cereals, and it now can be found in very high doses in supplement pills. Most vitamin D pills, he said, used to contain no more than 1,000 international units of it. Now it is easy to find pills, even in places like Wal-Mart, with 5,000 international units. The committee, though, said people need only 600 international units a day. To assess the amounts of vitamin D and calcium people are getting, the panel looked at national data on diets. Most people, they concluded, get enough calcium from the foods they eat, about 1,000 milligrams a day for most adults (1,200 for women ages 51 to 70). Vitamin D is more complicated, the group said. In general, most people are not getting enough vitamin D from their diets, but they have enough of the vitamin in their blood, probably because they are also making it naturally after being out in the sun and storing it in their bodies. The American Society for Bone and Mineral Research and other groups applauded the report. It is “a very balanced set of recommendations,” said Dr. Sundeep Khosla, a Mayo Clinic endocrinologist and the society’s president. But Andrew Shao, an executive vice president at the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade group, said the panel was being overly cautious, especially in its recommendations about vitamin D. He said there was no convincing evidence that people were being harmed by taking supplements, and he said higher levels of vitamin D, in particular, could be beneficial. Such claims “are not supported by the available evidence,” the committee wrote. They were based on studies that observed populations and concluded that people with lower levels of the vitamin had more of various diseases. Such studies have been misleading and most scientists agree that they cannot determine cause and effect. It is not clear how or why the claims for high vitamin D levels started, medical experts say. First there were two studies, which turned out to be incorrect, that said people needed 30 nanograms of vitamin D per milliliter of blood, the upper end of what the committee says is a normal range. They were followed by articles and claims and books saying much higher levels — 40 to 50 nanograms or even higher — were needed. After reviewing the data, the committee concluded that the evidence for the benefits of high levels of vitamin D was “inconsistent and/or conflicting and did not demonstrate causality.” Evidence also suggests that high levels of vitamin D can increase the risks for fractures and the overall death rate and can raise the risk for other diseases. While those studies are not conclusive, any risk looms large when there is no demonstrable benefit. Those hints of risk are “challenging the concept that ‘more is better,’ ” the committee wrote. That is what surprised Dr. Black. “We thought that probably higher is better,” he said. He has changed his mind, and expects others will too: “I think this report will make people more cautious.” |
| A Conversation With Julian L. Seifter: A Nephrologist and Patient Posted: 30 Nov 2010 12:45 AM PST Dr. Julian L. Seifter, 61, a nephrologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a Harvard Medical School professor, specializes in treating patients who have chronic kidney disease. We spoke at his Harvard office for three hours about his new book, “After the Diagnosis: Transcending Chronic Illness,” which was written with his wife, Betsy Seifter. It’s about living with diabetes, heart disease, lupus, even AIDS. An edited version of that conversation and subsequent e-mails follows. Q. You are a doctor who treats people with chronic diseases. But you have one — diabetes. Are you a good patient? A. Mixed. When I was diagnosed — 30 years ago — my first response was to run away from the illness. I was just at the beginning of my career, I had a young family and I didn’t want to be held back by my metabolic problems. Yes, I took insulin. But staying on a restrictive diet and monitoring my blood sugar levels was harder. I pretended to myself and others that I wasn’t sick. I’ve had complications associated with three decades of diabetes — an eye hemorrhage, neuropathies. Over time I’ve tried for better control of my blood sugar levels, but I’ve never been perfectly successful. Good control means trying to duplicate what the pancreas does, and I never really wanted to become my pancreas. Q. Has being a patient helped you be a doctor? A. I’ve certainly learned things I’ve brought back to the clinic. I have a retinopathy, for instance, which can be a complication of diabetes. I don’t have good vision in my right eye, as a result. When this first happened, I said to my ophthalmologist, “I can’t lose vision. I need to read.” And he said, “Any vision is better than no vision.” That was important. I started thinking, “Concentrate on things you still can do and develop some new things.” I’ve since started gardening, which doesn’t require the most acute vision. It’s something I probably wouldn’t have done otherwise. I counsel my patients to replace what they’ve lost with something new. Q. Can you give an example? A. I had one patient who was a scuba diver and who loved discovery. I had to tell him that with his condition scuba diving isn’t safe for him. So I’ve encouraged him to prospect for Native American relics in the Southwest desert, which he’s also interested in. It’s a way he can still be an explorer, but not risk his kidney. Q. You write that a chronic disease can provide an opportunity for growth and personal development. That’s hard to imagine. A. It can shake you out of old habits and routines. It takes away the “taken for granted.” You’re invited, almost forced, to find new directions and pursue unexplored potentials. I had a patient, Cassandra, an opera singer, who first came to me because it was thought she had a kidney problem. It turned out she had a severe inflammatory condition in the head and neck — in the larynx, her instrument. She could no longer sing professionally. With no science background, she began reading the papers on her treatment and cultivated an interest in the illness. Eventually, she went back to college, took science courses and got accepted to medical school. She’s about to become a nephrologist. Q. So a chronic disease diagnosis doesn’t have to be seen as The End? A. It doesn’t have to be. Sometimes it is, though. I had another patient, a policeman, very overweight, with diabetes. He could drink a case of beer at a time. And he totally enjoyed his social life. By the time he was 60, he needed amputation and dialysis. He said, “I don’t want that.” I wasn’t going to talk him out of it. He had hospice care and he died peacefully. If someone rejects dialysis, I want to make sure they’re not doing that because of depression. If a patient is wavering, I’ll say: “At least try it. You can always come off.” I had a patient who, at first, rejected dialysis, but who agreed to a trial and then found that the treatments made him feel so much better that he then wanted to stay on. It was a three-times-a-week commitment, but he came to see how he could fit it into his life — which he’d still have. Q. Is it difficult to get patients to agree to a treatment as difficult as dialysis? A. The alternative is death. I try to meet my patients wherever they are so that they will do it. I had one who wanted to go to Florida a last time before starting dialysis. I worried about him. His condition was such that he might have heart failure. But I also knew he’d never go onto dialysis without doing this. I said, “O.K., call me when you land in Miami.” He said, “Doctor, you don’t understand, I’m driving down.” Now, this was really dangerous. So I said, “Call me from each state and I’ll have the address of someone you can check in with in case there’s an emergency.” The phone calls came in regularly until the last day of his trip. I was worried and I called his home in South Florida, and there was such an incredible noise in the background that I could hardly hear his wife. “What’s going on?” I asked. “That’s the rescue helicopter on the front lawn,” she said. He’d made it there, but then needed to be airlifted to the hospital! Q. Do you regret enabling this journey? A. No. From my own experiences, I understood why patients sometimes resist doing what’s best. The idea of sticking yourself with a needle every day for life: that wasn’t easy for me to accept. I hated the thought that every morning I was going to wake up knowing, “I have diabetes.” So I’m not a puritan with my patients. You have to do what is possible. Q. In your book, you suggest a heretical idea: that chronic disease patients deny their situation, a little. You’d better explain. A. They should do that, within reason. Everyone needs the opportunity to forget their disease for a while and think of other things. Otherwise, they can become their disease. So: I’m not a diabetic. I’m a doctor who has diabetes. Of course, they should do everything that modern medicine offers. I always tell them that it is serious, but it’s not the end of all possibilities — you’re alive till you are dead. “It’s not over till it’s over.” Yogi Berra, he could have been a great clinician! This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Posted: 30 Nov 2010 09:44 AM PST Who has seen the mind? Neither you nor I — nor any of the legions of neuroscientists bent on opening the secrets of that invisible force, as powerful and erratic as the wind. MultimediaFROM PRIMITIVE TO NEON It is only fitting that the story of the brain should be a visual one, for the visuals had the ancients fooled for millenniums. The brain was so irredeemably ugly that they assumed the mind must lie elsewhere. Today those same skeletal silhouettes grow plump and brightly colored, courtesy of a variety of inserted genes encoding fluorescent molecules. More Photos » The experts are definitely getting closer: the last few decades have produced an explosion of new techniques for probing the blobby, unprepossessing brain in search of the thinking, feeling, suffering, scheming mind. But the field remains technologically complicated, out of reach for the average nonscientist, and still defined by research so basic that the human connection, the usual “hook” by which abstruse science captures general interest, is often missing. Carl Schoonover took this all as a challenge. Mr. Schoonover, 27, is midway through a Ph.D. program in neuroscience at Columbia, and thought he would try to find a different hook. He decided to draw the general reader into his subject with the sheer beauty of its images. So he has compiled them into a glossy new art book. “Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain From Antiquity to the 21st Century,” newly published by Abrams, includes short essays by prominent neuroscientists and long captions by Mr. Schoonover — but its words take second place to the gorgeous imagery, from the first delicate depictions of neurons sketched in prim Victorian black and white to the giant Technicolor splashes the same structures make across 21st-century LED screens. Scientists are routinely seduced by beauty. Mr. Schoonover knows this firsthand, as he acknowledged in an interview: for a while his wallet held snapshots not of friends or family, but of particularly attractive neurons. Sometimes the aesthetics of the image itself captivate. Sometimes the thrill is the magic of a dead-on fabulous technique for getting at elusive data. Consider, for instance, a blurry little black-and-white photograph of a smiley-face icon, so fuzzy and ill-defined it looks like a parody of the Shroud of Turin. The picture is actually a miracle in its own right: the high-speed video camera that shot it was trained on the exposed brain of a monkey staring at a yellow smiley face. As the monkey looked at the face, blood vessels supplying nerve cells in the visual part of the monkey’s brain transiently swelled in exactly the same pattern. We can tell what was on the monkey’s mind by inspecting its brain. The picture forms a link, primitive but palpable, between corporeal and evanescent, between the body and the spirit. And behind the photo stretches a long history of inspired neuroscientific deductions and equally inspired mistakes, all aiming to illuminate just that link. It’s only fitting that the story should be a visual one, for the visuals had the ancients fooled for millenniums. The brain was so irredeemably ugly that they assumed the mind was elsewhere. Aristotle, for example, concluded that the brain’s moist coils served only to cool the heart, the obvious home of the rational soul. The anatomist Galen pointed out that all nerves led to the brain, but medieval philosophers figured that most of the important things happened within the elegantly curved fluid-filled ventricles deep inside. Only when the long ban on dissection petered out in the Renaissance did the ventricles prove to be so much empty space — poke the brain around a little, and they collapse and disappear. The gelatinous brain moved into the spotlight, as resistant to study as a giant mass of tightly packed cold spaghetti. The challenge was twofold: what did that neural pasta really look like, and how did it do what it did? In 1873 the Italian scientist Camillo Golgi developed a black stain to highlight the micron-thin neural strands. Fifteen years later the Spanish scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, deploying the stain with virtuoso dexterity, presented the world for the first time with visible populations of individual neurons, looking for all the world like burnt scrub brush in a postapocalyptic Dalí landscape. The roots, or dendrites, of these elongated nerve cells gather information. The trunks, or axons, transmit it.
This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Drug Maker Wrote Book Under 2 Doctors’ Names, Documents Say Posted: 30 Nov 2010 09:58 AM PST Two prominent authors of a 1999 book teaching family doctors how to treat psychiatric disorders provided acknowledgment in the preface for an “unrestricted educational grant” from a major pharmaceutical company. From the book “Recognition and Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders: A Psychopharmacology Handbook for Primary Care.†RelatedA 1997 Letter From Scientific Therapeutics Information (pdf)But the drug maker, then known as SmithKline Beecham, actually had much more involvement than the book described, newly disclosed documents show. The grant paid for a writing company to develop the outline and text for the two named authors, the documents show, and then the writing company said it planned to show three drafts directly to the pharmaceutical company for comments and “sign-off” and page proofs for “final approval.” “That doesn’t sound unrestricted to me,” Dr. Bernard Lo, a medical ethicist and chairman of an Institute of Medicine group that wrote a 2009 report on conflicts of interest, said after reviewing the documents. “That sounds like they have ultimate control.” The 269-page book, “Recognition and Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders: A Psychopharmacology Handbook for Primary Care,” is so far the first book among publications, namely medical journal articles, that have been criticized in recent years for hidden drug industry influence, colloquially known as ghostwriting. “To ghostwrite an entire textbook is a new level of chutzpah,” said Dr. David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, after reviewing the documents. “I’ve never heard of that before. It takes your breath away.” The book has never been in wide circulation and has not been sold for a few years. Guidelines restricting the use of industry money to support medical journal articles or doctors’ research have come into wide acceptance within the last several years, to try to minimize the influence of companies’ marketing on medical practices. The book’s listed co-authors were Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff, chairman of psychiatry at the University of Miami medical school since 2009 and Emory University before that, and Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg, who was chairman of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine from 1991 until last year. The letter documenting the relationship between Dr. Nemeroff, a writing company and SmithKline was dated Feb. 4, 1997. It and a “preliminary draft” of the book, dated Feb. 21, 1997, and adding Dr. Schatzberg’s name were released Monday by the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington advocacy group. They were attached to a letter of complaint to Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. In the letter, Danielle Brian, executive director of the project, and Paul Thacker, an investigator, formerly with the staff of Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, also cited other examples of what they termed ghostwriting and asked the N.I.H. for better policing of such practices. The documents were separately obtained by The New York Times from the Los Angeles law firm of Baum Hedlund, which received them as part of discovery in lawsuits against the drug company, now known as GlaxoSmithKline, involving Paxil. Leemon B. McHenry, a bioethicist with California State University, Northridge, who consults for the law firm, said many similar documents remain sealed. “This is only the tip of the iceberg,” he said. Responding to questions by e-mail last week, Dr. Nemeroff and Dr. Schatzberg emphasized the “unrestricted” nature of the grant from the drug maker to develop the book and said they did most of the work. SmithKline “had no involvement in content,” Dr. Schatzberg said, adding, “An unrestricted grant does not give the company any right of sign-off on content and in fact they had no sign-off in content.” Dr. Nemeroff said he and Dr. Schatzberg “conceptualized this book, wrote the original outline and worked on all of the content.” But the writing company, Scientific Therapeutics Information of Springfield, N.J., had developed “a complete content outline” for Dr. Nemeroff’s comment, according to the 1997 letter from one of the company’s officials. The company also said it had “begun development of the text.” The writing company did not respond to requests for comment. Kevin G. Colgan, a spokesman for GlaxoSmithKline, said the company’s role in the book was described in its preface. In recent years, he added, the company has tightened its internal guidelines for medical writers. Ron McMillen, chief executive of American Psychiatric Publishing, which published the book, said he reviewed files on it Monday and found no evidence of influence by the writing company or GlaxoSmithKline. But Mr. McMillen also said he had been unaware of the plan outlined in the two-page letter to Dr. Nemeroff. “This would show more involvement than we would accept,” he said after reviewing it. The book sold about 26,000 copies, including 10,000 bought by SmithKline Beecham for American family doctors and 10,000 purchased by the Dutch pharmaceutical company Organon, Mr. McMillen said. The authors together received a 15 percent royalty of the $120,000 sales, or about $18,000, he said. Since there are about 100,000 family physicians in the United States, the book reached only a small percentage of them and has probably declined in usage since 1999. Dr. Howard A. Brody, an author, blogger and professor of family medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, speculated that family doctors may have had some resistance to a book from a psychiatric press. Mr. McMillen said the book was co-published with the American Medical Association. He said it was distributed until a few years ago. Dr. Nemeroff said the book was written to fill an unmet need in educating family doctors and primary care physicians on how to provide adequate treatment for people with mental illness. “Remarkably, the book remains quite accurate and relevant to clinical practice today,” he said. Dr. Nemeroff said he and Dr. Schatzberg “scrutinized every page and rewrote and edited as we deemed necessary,” keeping control of the final draft. Dr. Schatzberg said he had not seen the 1997 letter to Dr. Nemeroff. He termed it “a theoretical proposal that bears little, if any relationship to what actually happened.” Dr. Lo, who is a professor of medicine and director of the medical ethics program at the University of California, San Francisco, said that medical textbooks and handbooks should make it clear — as peer-reviewed journals now do — whose idea it was, who wrote the first draft, and who edited. Dr. Lo and other experts said ghostwriting has receded in recent years with tougher journal standards. Dr. Nemeroff and Dr. Schatzberg have been listed on other titles, including co-editors of the Textbook of Psychopharmacology, a book for psychiatrists and medical students, whose third edition appeared in 2003. In 2008, Emory University imposed a two-year ban on Dr. Nemeroff receiving N.I.H. grants after a Senate inquiry found that he had failed to disclose at least $1.2 million in industry financing over seven years from pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Recipes for Health: Turkey and Rice Casserole With Yogurt Topping Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:32 AM PST This Middle Eastern dish can also include fried stale pita bread that you douse with chicken or turkey stock before topping with the casserole. In the days after Thanksgiving, I’m likely to have all of these ingredients on hand — but not pita, so here I’ve done without it.  Recipes for HealthMartha Rose Shulman presents food that is vibrant and light, full of nutrients but by no means ascetic, fun to cook and to eat.
Related
1 teaspoon ground allspice 3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon ground pepper 1 medium onion, chopped 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 1 cup basmati rice, rinsed in several changes of water 2 1/2 cups chicken or turkey stock Salt to taste 3 garlic cloves 2 cups shredded turkey 2 cups drained yogurt or thick Greek-style yogurt 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice 1/4 cup crushed or finely chopped walnuts 1. Mix together the allspice, cinnamon and pepper, and divide into 2 equal portions (1 teaspoon each). Set aside. 2. Heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil over medium heat in a heavy 2- or 3-quart saucepan. Add the onion and a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring, until tender, about five minutes. Add the rice and 1 teaspoon of the spice mixture, and stir until the grains begin to crackle. Add 2 cups chicken stock and salt to taste (1/2 to 3/4 teaspoon). Bring to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer 15 minutes until the liquid has been absorbed by the rice. Remove the lid, and place a kitchen towel over the pot, then return the lid. Allow to sit undisturbed for 10 minutes. 3. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Oil a 2-quart baking dish. Heat the remaining tablespoon of oil over medium heat in a large, heavy skillet, and add the garlic. As soon as it begins to smell fragrant, in a few seconds, add the remaining spices and the turkey. Stir together for about a minute until the turkey is coated with the mixture. Remove from the heat. Season to taste with salt. 4. Spread the rice in the casserole in an even layer. Top with the turkey. Douse with the remaining stock. 5. Place the garlic in a mortar and pestle with a pinch of salt and purée. Stir into the yogurt along with the lemon juice. Spread over the turkey in an even layer, making sure to completely cover the turkey so that it doesn’t dry out in the oven. Sprinkle on the nuts. Place in the oven and bake 15 to 20 minutes, just until warmed through. Do not allow the yogurt to bubble. Serve hot or warm. Yield: Serves six. Advance preparation: You can make this through Step 4 a day before you warm and serve it. Nutritional information per serving: 331 calories; 12 grams fat; 3 grams saturated fat; 40 milligrams cholesterol; 33 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams dietary fiber; 84 milligrams sodium (does not include salt added during preparation); 24 grams protein Martha Rose Shulman is the author of "The Very Best of Recipes for Health." |
| Well: Beauty Discrimination During a Job Search Posted: 30 Nov 2010 12:52 PM PST |
| The New Old Age: The Graying Work Force Posted: 30 Nov 2010 09:02 AM PST |
| Prescriptions: Merck Appoints a New Chief Executive Posted: 30 Nov 2010 11:28 AM PST |
| Letters: Sit. Fetch. Heal. (1 Letter) Posted: 29 Nov 2010 09:21 PM PST To the Editor: “Beyond the Facade, Post-Traumatic Stress” (Patient Voices, Nov. 23) called attention to an important part of the healing process for mental health patients: emotional support animals. At Community Access — a 36-year-old nonprofit group dedicated to restoring the lives of people recovering from mental illness, homelessness and institutional confinement — we operate a pet-adoption and pet-therapy program. What we have seen is nothing short of a transformation. Often, having a pet gives people a reason to get out of bed; a relationship based on unconditional love; a way to meet friends; and new responsibilities that can help lead to recovery. Carla Rabinowitz New York The writer is an organizer with Community Access. |
| Letters: Regulating Marijuana Use (1 Letter) Posted: 29 Nov 2010 09:25 PM PST To the Editor: Re “Young Marijuana Users Pay a Cognitive Price” (Vital Signs, Nov. 23): The experience in the Netherlands offers a useful lesson. The Dutch government has not legalized cannabis, and large-scale distributors have been jailed. But because of its policy of “harm reduction,” small amounts of marijuana can be bought in designated coffee shops. Therefore, when the cognitive deficits and brain damage (including “schizophrenia-like symptoms”) linked to marijuana became known via scientific papers, the government was in a position to reduce access and to offer early treatment for adolescent cannabis abuse. Fiona McGregor San Francisco |
| Recipes for Health: Risotto With Turkey, Mushrooms and Peas Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:30 AM PST Turkey makes an unexpected but welcome addition to this traditional risotto. Recipes for HealthMartha Rose Shulman presents food that is vibrant and light, full of nutrients but by no means ascetic, fun to cook and to eat.
Related
1 ounce dried porcini mushrooms (about 1 cup) 5 cups well-seasoned chicken or vegetable stock 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 1/2 cup minced onion 1 1/2 cups arborio rice 1 to 2 garlic cloves (to taste), minced Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste 1/2 cup dry white wine, such as pinot grigio or sauvignon blanc 1 1/2 cups diced turkey 1 cup thawed frozen peas or cooked fresh peas 2 tablespoons minced chives 1/4 to 1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (1 to 2 ounces) 1. Place the mushrooms in a large Pyrex measuring cup, and pour in 2 cups boiling water. Allow to sit for 30 minutes. Line a strainer with cheesecloth, place it over a bowl and strain the mushrooms. Squeeze the mushrooms over the strainer then rinse several times to rid them of sand. Set aside. Combine the mushroom soaking liquid with the stock in a saucepan. 2. Bring the stock to a simmer over low heat, with a ladle nearby or in the pot. Make sure that the stock is well seasoned. 3. Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a wide, heavy nonstick skillet or a wide, heavy saucepan. Add the onion and a generous pinch of salt, and cook gently until the onion is just tender, about three minutes. Do not brown. 4. Stir in the rice, porcinis and garlic. Stir until the grains separate and begin to crackle. Add the wine, and stir until it is no longer visible in the pan. Begin adding the simmering stock a couple of ladlefuls (about 1/2 cup) at a time. The stock should just cover the rice and should be bubbling neither too slowly nor too quickly. Cook, stirring often, until it is just about absorbed. Add another ladleful or two of the stock, and continue to cook in this fashion, adding more stock and stirring when the rice is almost dry. You do not have to stir constantly, but stir often. After 15 minutes, stir in the turkey and the peas, and continue to add stock as instructed above. The risotto is done in 20 to 25 minutes, when the rice is just tender all the way through but still chewy. Taste now and adjust seasoning. 5. Add another ladleful or two of stock to the rice. Stir in the chives and Parmesan, and remove from the heat. The mixture should be creamy (add more stock if it isn’t). Serve right away in wide soup bowls or on plates, spreading the risotto in a thin layer rather than a mound. Yield: Serves four to six. Advance preparation: You can begin up to several hours before serving. Proceed with the recipe and cook halfway through Step 3 — that is, for about 15 minutes. The rice should still be hard when you remove it from the heat, and there should not be any liquid in the pan. Spread it in an even layer in the pan and keep it away from the heat until you resume cooking. If the pan is not wide enough for you to spread the rice in a thin layer, transfer it to a sheet pan. Fifteen minutes before serving, bring the remaining stock back to a simmer, and reheat the rice. Resume cooking as instructed. Nutritional information per serving (four servings): 527 calories; 12 grams fat; 3 grams saturated fat; 44 milligrams cholesterol; 69 grams carbohydrates; 7 grams dietary fiber; 639 milligrams sodium (does not include salt added during preparation); 31 grams protein Nutritional information per serving (six servings): 352 calories; 8 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 30 milligrams cholesterol; 46 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams dietary fiber; 426 milligrams sodium (does not include salt added during preparation); 20 grams protein Martha Rose Shulman is the author of "The Very Best of Recipes for Health." |
Get Science News From The New York Times »
| You are subscribed to email updates from nytimes To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment