Medical Research v. Medical Insurance

I found the New Republic's article on Medical Innovation to be a hard slog, but here's the important bit:

The single biggest source of medical research funding, not just in the United States but in the entire world, is the National Institutes of Health (NIH): Last year, it spent more than $28 billion on research, accounting for about one-third of the total dollars spent on medical research and development in this country (and half the money spent at universities). The majority of that money pays for the kind of basic research that might someday unlock cures for killer diseases like Alzheimer's, aids, and cancer. No other country has an institution that matches the NIH in scale. And that is probably the primary explanation for why so many of the intellectual breakthroughs in medical science happen here.

There's no reason why this has to change under universal health insurance.

In other words, it isn't our convoluted system of employment-dependent private insurance that gives Americans access to brilliant new devices and techniques. It's research funding from things like the NIH. (Or, as Krugman would have it, a triumph of Liberal policy, not the private sector).

Fat Gets Pwned

Just what everyone needs to hear (assuming you needed to hear something depressing and WTF). According to an article in New York, exercise, while healthy, doesn't actually help you lose weight:

If we’re fat or fatter than ideal, we work out. Burn calories. Expend energy. Still fat? Burn more. The dietary guidelines of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for instance, now recommend that we engage in up to 60 minutes daily of “moderate to vigorous intensity” physical activity just to maintain weight—that is, keep us from fattening further. Considering the ubiquity of the message, the hold it has on our lives, and the elegant simplicity of the notion—burn calories, lose weight—wouldn’t it be nice to believe it were true? The catch is that science suggests it’s not, and so the answer to all of the above quiz questions is “no.”

Arrgh! This can't really be true can it? Is this sound science or just an insidious way to get everyone back on Atkins:

To be sure, this is the same logic that leads to other unconventional ideas. As it turns out, it’s carbohydrates—particularly easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars—that primarily stimulate insulin secretion. “Carbohydrates is driving insulin is driving fat,” as George Cahill Jr., a retired Harvard professor of medicine and expert on insulin, recently phrased it for me. So maybe if we eat fewer carbohydrates—in particular the easily digestible simple carbohydrates and sugars—we might lose considerable fat or at least not gain any more, whether we exercise or not.

Round and round we go.

Either way I'm still happier with my regime of yoga in the morning and running in the afternoon than I was when I was sitting around all day.

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Listening to: Oasis - She's Electric
via FoxyTunes