Health - Connecticut Dining | Hospital Food: Defying a Stereotype With Gourmet Dishes |
- Connecticut Dining | Hospital Food: Defying a Stereotype With Gourmet Dishes
- Vital Signs: Risks: Women’s Cancer Risk Increases With Height, Study Finds
- Vital Signs: Nutrition: Stealthy Vegetables: Getting Children to Eat More
- N.R.C. Lowers Estimate of How Many Would Die in Meltdown
- Robert C. W. Ettinger, 92, Dies; Proponent of Life After (Deep-Frozen) Death
- David Servan-Schreiber, Exponent of Cancer Treatments, Dies at 50
| Connecticut Dining | Hospital Food: Defying a Stereotype With Gourmet Dishes Posted: 30 Jul 2011 07:50 PM PDT NEW MILFORD, Conn. Related
Wendy Carlson for The New York TimesDoctors often use take-away containers at the salad bar. IT’S lunchtime in New Milford and Mayor Patricia Murphy is dining in the most unlikely place: the hospital cafe. The pecan-crusted chicken tucked beneath a fresh sage velouté did not pique Ms. Murphy’s interest, nor did the celery root bisque with its subtle essence of fennel. Instead, she made a beeline for the chicken salad with tart cranberries, fresh herbs and toasted almonds. “Sometimes I find myself sitting at my desk thinking I’ve just got to have some of that chicken salad; it’s the best,” Ms. Murphy said. The mayor is one of a growing number of diners making pilgrimages to the hospital’s bistrolike cafe, drawn by the affordable, gourmet entrees, prepared with ingredients from local farms or from the hospital’s own rooftop garden. Haute cuisine, or even chicken salad jazzed up with cranberries, is a radical departure from bland, unappetizing hospital fare. Mystery meat doused in murky gravy, those soggy vegetables, the acid green Jell-O and the congealed tapioca pudding soon may be on the wane. This spring, the Culinary Institute of America began offering its first cooking course geared to the health care industry, a sign that the movement for local food, or at least more palatable food, is making inroads. Several hospitals in Connecticut — including Danbury Hospital, which merged with New Milford Hospital in October to form Western Connecticut Health Network — are affiliated with Planetree, a nonprofit organization in Derby that espouses a health care model based on healing mind, body and spirit. And better-tasting, more nutritious food is an important part of the group’s philosophy. John Turenne, former executive chef of Yale University’s Sustainable Foods Project, is a consultant to these and other institutions seeking sustainable food services. Among health care facilities, he said, New Milford Hospital’s cuisine is an anomaly because it is so comprehensive, using fresh, local food, serving gourmet recipes and attracting diners from the community. The hospital revamped its food service operation more than two years ago in the wake of dismal patient food ratings and an aggressive healthy-food initiative. Out went the deep fryer, and the hospital hired an outside food service vendor, Unidine, that agreed to adhere to the hospital’s directive against canned or processed foods. Food is prepared largely from scratch, using locally grown ingredients when available and antibiotic- and hormone-free poultry and meats. Patients’ meals are served on regular plates; drop-in diners use paper dishes, but that’s the only difference, said the hospital’s dining services director, Kerry Gold. The hospital’s food service rating soared, said Marydale Debor, a former vice president of external affairs at New Milford Hospital and a co-founder of Plow to Plate, a grass-roots effort to bring local food and agriculture to the hospital and the community. Ms. Debor also established the cafe’s daily Senior Suppers, which became so popular with senior citizens that a second sitting was added. “We started off changing the hospital food to set an example for our patients,” Ms. Debor said. “But the cafe has become a real fixture in the community.” “I never anticipated we’d wind up faxing our menu to Home Depot, the post office or the mayor’s office,” Ms. Debor said. Word got out that Mr. Gold — a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America trained in classic French cuisine — was cooking up lunch menus featuring specials like grilled pork topped with polenta and accompanied by garlic mashed potatoes and sautéed kale at the bargain price of $5. Diners began trickling into the hospital, which is just opposite the Village Green, and near a catering business and a few restaurants. “Of course, people look at you a little funny when you tell them you are going to the hospital for lunch,” said Paula Burns, a dance studio manager. Ms. Burns is a loyal patron, largely because of the hospital’s farm-to-table cuisine. “The idea they use produce that’s very fresh and prepared in a healthy way and is affordable is appealing,” she said. The hospital receives deliveries from five local farms, but cooking what comes in is sometimes challenging, even to the most seasoned chef. Mr. Gold has figured out ways to prepare nontraditional vegetables: roasting eight-ball squash, sautéing dinosaur kale, ramps and fiddleheads. A bumper crop of butternut squash gave rise to the cafe’s popular squash risotto with local corn, sage and honey. An unexpected delivery of tulsi basil, long used in India for its healing properties, yielded herbal tea. “We have real culinary experts in our kitchen; these are not just people opening bags of frozen foods and dumping them into a fryer,” Ms. Debor explained. “These are chefs who know how to work with herbs and a wide range of ingredients.” Rafael Walters, the executive chef, recalled the time he wrangled with a bag of stinging nettles. “That was a first for me,” he said. “I thought I better put on some gloves.” After soaking the nettles in water (to remove the stinging chemicals), Mr. Walters sautéed them with onions and garlic and made soup.
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| Vital Signs: Risks: Women’s Cancer Risk Increases With Height, Study Finds Posted: 29 Jul 2011 01:48 PM PDT The taller a woman is, the greater her risk for cancer, a large study has found. Related
Researchers at the University of Oxford in England analyzed data on more than 1.2 million British women followed for an average of 9.4 years. There were more than 97,000 cases of cancer among the women. The researchers found that for each four-inch increase in height over 5 feet 1 inch, the risk that a woman would develop cancer increased by about 16 percent. The study was published online July 21 in The Lancet Oncology. The analysis covered 17 types of cancer, but the relative risk increase was statistically significant for just 10 of them. The authors suggest that levels of growth hormone might be involved in the genesis of cancer, or that taller people are at greater risk for mutations simply because their bodies comprise more cells. The authors also reviewed previous studies showing that a similar link between height and an increased cancer risk has been observed in Asia, Australasia, Europe and North America. “The interest in this study is in giving us a clue about how cancers might develop,” said Jane Green, the lead author and an epidemiologist at Oxford. “It’s the similarity for many different kinds of cancers, in people with many different risk factors and in many different populations, that makes us think it’s something very fundamental in cancer development.” |
| Vital Signs: Nutrition: Stealthy Vegetables: Getting Children to Eat More Posted: 29 Jul 2011 01:47 PM PDT Good news for parents: You can get your children to eat zucchini, broccoli, tomatoes, cauliflower and squash — and like them. RelatedResearchers at Pennsylvania State University substituted those vegetables, puréed, in children’s meals, reducing each meal’s calories but keeping its weight the same. One day a week for three weeks, 40 children were randomly given regular meals, meals with three times as much vegetable content, or meals with four times as much vegetable content. The children were told to eat as much or as little as they wanted. The 3- to 6-year olds, attendees at a day care center, consumed the same amount of food by weight, regardless of whether the meals included puréed vegetables. But those who ate the meals with quadrupled vegetable content increased their total vegetable intake by 73 grams and reduced their calorie intake by about 12 percent during the study period. Asked to rate the taste as yucky, O.K. or yummy, more than 70 percent of the children rated the vegetable-adulterated meals as O.K. or yummy. The study was published online July 20 in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. “The controversial aspect of this is that it’s deceptive,” said Maureen K. Spill, the lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State. “But it’s just another way of making recipes healthier. It’s still important to get children to learn what vegetables look and taste like.” |
| N.R.C. Lowers Estimate of How Many Would Die in Meltdown Posted: 29 Jul 2011 10:30 PM PDT ROCKVILLE, Md. — The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is approaching completion of an ambitious study that concludes that a meltdown at a typical American reactor would lead to far fewer deaths than previously assumed. Related
Related in Opinion
The conclusion, to be published in April after six years of work, is based largely on a radical revision of projections of how much and how quickly cesium 137, a radioactive material that is created when uranium is split, could escape from a nuclear plant after a core meltdown. In past studies, researchers estimated that 60 percent of a reactor core’s cesium inventory could escape; the new estimate is only 1 to 2 percent. A draft version of the report was provided to The New York Times by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear watchdog group that has long been critical of the commission’s risk assessments and obtained it through a Freedom of Information Act request. Since the recent triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, such groups have been arguing that the commission urgently needs to tighten safeguards for new and aging plants in the United States. The report is a synthesis of 20 years of computer studies and engineering analyses, stated in complex mathematical terms. In essence, it states that if a prolonged loss of electric power caused a typical American reactor core to melt down, the great bulk of the radioactive material released would remain inside the building even when the reactor’s containment shell was breached. Big releases of radioactive material would not be immediate, and people within a 10-mile radius would have enough time to evacuate, the study found. The chance of a death from acute radiation exposure within 10 miles is therefore near zero, the study projects, although some people would receive doses high enough to cause fatal cancers in decades to come. One person in every 4,348 living within 10 miles would be expected to develop a “latent cancer” as a result of radiation exposure, compared with one in 167 in previous estimates. “Accidents progress more slowly, in some cases much more slowly, than previously assumed,” Charles G. Tinkler, a senior adviser for research on severe accidents and one of the study’s authors, said in an interview at a commission office building here. “Releases are smaller, and in some cases much smaller, of certain key radioactive materials.” The N.R.C. did not intend to release the report until next spring and said its conclusions were still being adjusted after a peer review. The health effects of a catastrophic meltdown were hypothetical until the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. That destroyed a billion-dollar reactor but caused no apparent physical harm to nearby residents, immediately or over time. Debate has persisted over whether the United States skirted a disaster or whether that accident was about as bad as it could get. Edwin Lyman, a nuclear physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, contends that the nuclear commission has consistently painted an overly rosy picture and that its latest study does as well. He noted that the study assumed a successful evacuation of 99.5 percent of the people within 10 miles, for example. The report also assumes “average” weather conditions, he noted. But if a rainstorm were under way during a release of radioactive materials, he said, it could wash contaminants out of the air into a small area, producing a high dose there. Jennifer L. Uhle, the deputy director of the commission’s office of nuclear regulatory research, said the report was intended to present the “best estimate” and not the worst case. Dr. Lyman said the earlier estimate was of a different accident, a major pipe break. The new study considered that accident too unlikely to analyze. Dr. Lyman suggested that in projections of fatal cancer cases, the focus should be on people who live within 50 miles. The average population within 10 miles of an American nuclear plant is 62,000; within 50 miles, it is about five million. The commission’s old projection of eventual cancer deaths was one for every 2,128 people exposed within 50 miles; the new study projects one cancer death for every 6,250 people exposed, which still comes to hundreds of cancer deaths within the 50-mile circle, in addition to the hundreds of thousands who would be expected to die of cancer from other causes. Dr. Lyman countered that when dealing with estimates based on so many variables — including more than 100 reactors of different designs and vintage, in areas with disparate population densities — a difference of a factor of three is not important. In his view, the study reconfirms that reactors pose serious risks. The commission’s shift in thinking about how much radioactive cesium 137 would escape after a core meltdown is based on a conclusion that most of it would either dissolve in water that stays put or adhere to surfaces within the plant. The authors said previous analyses had made “conservative assumptions” that most of the cesium and other materials would escape. But laboratory studies and computer modeling have not borne out that hypothesis, they said. Commission experts have said that a total blackout would be extremely rare at an American plant and that backup generators and other machinery would fill the breach until grid power was restored. Nonetheless, the study focused on what would happen in the event of a nuclear station blackout, meaning a complete loss of power from the grid and from backup diesel generators, and then an exhaustion of batteries that supply power, leading to a meltdown. That is what happened at Fukushima. The study focused on two common reactor types in this country: boiling-water reactors at the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, similar to those at Fukushima, and pressurized-water reactors at the Surry Power Station in Virginia. The study gives a highly detailed prediction of which equipment would stop operating; what temperatures, steam pressures and flows of water and steam would result; and where and when leaks would begin after a meltdown. It concluded that Peach Bottom would not release enough radioactive material to kill anyone immediately, although it could increase the rate of cancer deaths over future decades. At Surry, the probability was so low and the number of people living within 10 miles so small that the death toll would be a fraction of a person. The report was prepared by staff members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Sandia National Laboratories, a Department of Energy lab. Beyond the revisions to be made as a result of the peer review, the report could undergo further changes after public comments are received next year. Once completed, it might be used by the commission when it analyzes proposed safety improvements in terms of costs and benefits, or decides where reactors should be located. “Once we think we know what the best estimate is, we think we can start thinking about applications,” said Jason H. Schaperow, a senior reactor systems engineer and one of the authors. |
| Robert C. W. Ettinger, 92, Dies; Proponent of Life After (Deep-Frozen) Death Posted: 30 Jul 2011 01:10 AM PDT Robert C. W. Ettinger, a science fiction writer and physics instructor whose idea of freezing the dead for future reanimation repelled most scientists, inspired Woody Allen and Mike Myers to some of their best work and persuaded at least 105 game humans to pay $28,000 each to have their bodies preserved in liquid nitrogen at his Cryonics Institute in suburban Detroit, died on July 23 at his home in Clinton Township, Mich. He was 92. Cryonics InstituteRobert C.W. Ettinger, a leading advocate of cryonics, next to an antique cryostat. The cause was respiratory failure, said his son, David, who added that Mr. Ettinger’s body was placed in a cryonic capsule and frozen at minus 371 degrees Fahrenheit, after several days of cooling preparation. Mr. Ettinger was the institute’s 106th client, David Ettinger said. Mr. Ettinger’s ideas, which he popularized in a 1963 book, “The Prospect of Immortality,” spawned what some refer to as the cryonics movement, though by most accounts it is a small endeavor: a scattering of enterprises around the country with dues-paying customers totaling a few thousand, a few hundred of whom have actually been deep-frozen. The baseball legend Ted Williams, whose freezing at an unrelated Arizona facility in 2002 set off a well-publicized family feud, is probably the most notable cryonics adherent. But Mr. Ettinger’s earnest vision of future scientists cracking the secret of immortality and bringing back to life the deep-frozen dead — curing them and making them young again — struck that sweet spot between kooky and quasi-scientific that television talk-show hosts loved in the early 1960s. He was on Johnny Carson’s couch a half-dozen times, and also submitted to interviews with Steve Allen, David Frost, Merv Griffin and William F. Buckley Jr. “Most of them didn’t take my dad seriously,” said David Ettinger, a lawyer in Detroit, “but that never really bothered him. He was an iconoclast. Being treated like a nut just went with the territory.” Mr. Ettinger’s ideas were widely considered the set-up for the joke at the center of Woody Allen’s 1973 movie, “Sleeper,” in which the hero emerges from “cryostasis” to learn that all his friends are long dead — “But they all ate organic rice!” — and Mike Myers’s Austin Powers series, based on basically the same idea. While working as a math and physics instructor at a number of local colleges, Mr. Ettinger wrote a second book, published in 1972: “Man Into Superman,” a utopian sci-fi rendering of how the world might look when the cryonic dead are revived. (Among other things, scientists will equip humans with wings and body armor made of hair.) In 1976, after retiring from teaching, he founded the Cryonics Institute, adopting the word “cryonics” from cryogenics, a field of physics that studies how materials behave at very low temperatures. His mother, Rhea, who died in 1977 at 78, was his first so-called patient. The bodies of his first wife, Elaine, and his second wife, Mae, were also preserved at the institute’s facility, a large warehouse in an industrial park in Clinton Township, about 20 miles northeast of Detroit. Besides 106 humans, the plant holds about 80 pets, mostly dogs and cats, according to the institute’s Web site. The institute claims 900 dues-paying members. In interviews, Mr. Ettinger traced his earliest interest in the possibility of immortality to a story he read when he was 12 in the popular science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. It was about a professor who launched himself in a rocket into deep-frozen outer space, where he remained entombed for 40 million years until an advanced species of men discovered him and revived him. His interest was confirmed during long stays in various hospitals after World War II, while he was recovering from near-fatal wounds suffered during the Battle of the Bulge. His legs were saved by bone-graft surgery, which was considered experimental at the time. The miraculous surgery convinced him that there might be a way someday to fix anything, even death. “Life is better than death, healthy is better than sick,” he told the author Ed Regis in a 1990 interview, “and immortality might be worth the trouble.” While recovering, he wrote a number of science fiction stories on that theme, several of which were published in popular magazines of the 1950s. Robert Chester Wilson Ettinger was born Dec. 4, 1918, in Atlantic City, one of two children of Rhea and Alfred Ettinger. The family moved in the 1920s to Detroit, where Alfred Ettinger operated a furniture store. After the war, Mr. Ettinger received master’s degrees in math and physics at Wayne State University, and began teaching. Besides his son, he is survived by a daughter, Shelley, of New York City. In the last months of his life, Mr. Ettinger and his son arranged for procedures that would have to be done in the first few hours after he died, to maximize the benefits of cryonic freezing. They notified the funeral home where he would be embalmed with a kind of medical antifreeze to protect tissue from damage. They arranged for 24-hour nursing care, mainly so they would know the exact moment to begin the procedures. At one point, his son said, Mr. Ettinger allowed himself to think past the technicalities of the freezing to what his life might be like if he were ever unfrozen. Since the war, with one leg shorter than the other, he had not been one for sports. “So when I come back,” he told his son, “I’d like to try skiing.” |
| David Servan-Schreiber, Exponent of Cancer Treatments, Dies at 50 Posted: 30 Jul 2011 12:00 AM PDT PARIS — David Servan-Schreiber, a psychiatrist and best-selling author whose cancer diagnosis at the age of 31 compelled him to explore and then popularize the use of natural and holistic methods in dealing with cancer and depression, died on Sunday in a hospital near Fécamp, Normandy. He was 50. The cause was brain cancer, which had recurred last year, his brother Franklin said. Trained as a neuroscientist, Dr. Servan-Schreiber imbued his books with his own story of surviving cancer for almost 19 years, one of diagnosis, surgery, remission, relapse and redemption. At 31 he was enjoying a successful research career in psychiatry and neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh, spinning around the city on his motorcycle, when, by happenstance, he underwent an M.R.I. brain scan for a research project after the intended subject had failed to show up. The scan showed a tumor the size of a walnut. After successful surgery, the tumor recurred five years later, and he underwent a second operation as well as chemotherapy and radiotherapy. In the course of that treatment he became a convert to natural remedies. The experience formed the background to his book “Anticancer: A New Way of Life” (2007), in which he examined the benefits of a healthy diet and a balanced lifestyle — embracing nutrition, exercise, emotional well-being and environmental awareness — in preventing and combating cancer. Eating “anti-cancer products” like vegetables, olive oil, garlic and green tea was crucial in dealing with cancer, he maintained. “If we all have a potential cancer lying dormant in us,” he wrote in “Anticancer,” “each of us also has a body designed to fight the process of tumor development.” Some doctors and cancer experts called Dr. Servan-Schreiber’s methods simplistic and unsupported by scientific evidence. “Extracts of garlic, onions and leeks, for instance, will demolish all kinds of cancer cells in a culture,” the journalist and physician Abigail Zuger wrote in The New York Times in 2008 in an article about the book. “Whether these vegetables are still active in the busy metropolis of the body, with thousands of cellular processes going on at once, is another question: once the leek is chewed, swallowed, demolished by intestinal enzymes and absorbed into the blood, how likely are its molecules to brush up against a cancer cell, let alone engage it in armed combat? No one knows.” But Dr. Servan-Schrieber’s work met with phenomenal success, both in France and elsewhere. “Anticancer,” translated into 36 languages, was high on The Times’s best-seller list for several weeks in 2010. He promoted his ideas on Web sites, in blogs, in speaking appearances, in a column in Ode magazine (which calls itself a journal of optimism and positive news) and in television interviews, insisting that his approaches were not intended to replace traditional methods like chemotherapy and radiotherapy, which he believed were the most important weapons against cancer, but to supplement them. An earlier book, “Healing Without Freud or Prozac: Natural Approaches to Curing Stress, Anxiety and Depression” (2003), also sold well internationally in many translations. The book focuses on what Dr. Servan-Schreiber called the “emotional brain,” as distinct from the “cognitive brain” of rational thought. “The emotional brain controls the physiology of the body: heart rate, blood pressure, appetite, sleep, sexual drive, and even the immune system,” he wrote. In detailing his “natural approaches” to addressing anxiety and depression without drugs or psychoanalysis, he discussed heart rhythm, exposure to light, acupuncture, visualization, meditation, yoga, nutrition (including an emphasis on omega-3 fatty acids, found in fish and some vegetables), exercise, and “emotional communication” with people and pets. Born in the wealthy Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine on April 21, 1961, David Servan-Schreiber came from a well-known family of entrepreneurs with Prussian-Jewish roots. His father, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, was a prominent politician and journalist and the co-founder, with the feminist writer Françoise Giroud, of one of France’s major magazines, L’Express. Dr. Servan-Schreiber earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics at the Académie de Paris and studied medicine at a children’s hospital in Paris before finishing his medical education at Laval University in Quebec in 1984. He spent much of his professional life in the United States, working as a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, where he co-founded the Center for Complementary Medicine. In 1991 he began working with the French branch of the nongovernmental organization Doctors Without Borders, lending medical and psychiatric support in Iraqi Kurdistan after the first Persian Gulf war, as well as in Tajikistan, India and Kosovo. It was on a mission for the organization in Tibet, he wrote, that he became interested in healing practices involving meditation, acupuncture and nutrition. He was also a founding board member of the United States branch of Doctors Without Borders. The international group was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. In addition to his brother, his survivors include his wife, Gwenaëlle; two other brothers, Emile and Edouard; his mother, the former Sabine Becq de Fouquières; and three children. After he was told in 2010 that another brain tumor had been found — he called it the Big One — Dr. Servan-Schreiber wrote a third book, “On Peut Se Dire Au Revoir Plusieurs Fois,” or “We Can Tell Each Other Goodbye Several Times,” with Ursula Gauthier, a journalist. Many viewed it as a final testament. “Death is part of the life process; everyone goes through it,” he said in one of his last interviews. “It is very reassuring in itself.” |
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