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Showing posts with the label NYC

Now Buildings Will Make You Exercise

How about this?  Instead of forcing you to drink beverages in smaller-size cups, or count the calories on a menu, a new plan to build so that people have to walk around to get where they're going, is in the works. According to a story in The Wall Street Journal today, architects are being asked by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg to build, well, healthier buildings . His idea is to "combat obesity through building design."  And he'll do this by tapping into "the expertise of the city's design and construction, health, transportation, planning and budget departments," the WSJ reports. His plan?  Provide strategies for creating healthier buildings, streets and public spaces. Not much else is known at this point but this fits in with Bloomberg's penchant to combat obesity overall in the city, along with his order to limit the sizes of sugary beverages (since overturned) and promote biking as a way to get around. I guess the buildings could be built...

New Finding: Sugary Drinks Kill

OK.  So we know they're bad for us, NYC's Bloomberg's tried to put an end to them.  But did you know they can kill us? A Harvard s tudy has just found that 180,000 people a year die worldwide, and 25,000 in the U.S., from sugary drinks. "We know that sugar-sweetened beverages are linked to obesity, and that a large number of deaths are caused by obesity-related diseases. But until now, nobody had really put these pieces together," said Gitanjali Singh, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and lead author of the study presented today at the American Heart Association's annual meeting in New Orleans, Bay News 9 reports. The study adds to "mounting evidence that sugar-sweetened beverages, loaded with calories that carry little nutritional value, are a public health hazard," the story notes. You may want to argue the facts a little "but the team tied sugar-sweetened beverages to 133,000 deaths from...