Vitamin B12 helps maintain healthy blood and aids in making important proteins. People who don’t get enough can have memory problems or confusion, and are at greater risk of developing anemia, Children’s Hospital Boston says.
The hospital mentions these dietary sources of vitamin B12:
Poultry.
Seafood and fish.
Meat.
Eggs.
Cheese, yogurt and milk.
Foods that are fortified with vitamin B12, such as certain breakfast cereals.
New York City, which has banned smoking and artificial trans fats in restaurants under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is taking on another enemy of healthy living: salt.
The city’s Health Department announced on Monday that it is coordinating a nationwide effort to reduce salt in restaurant and packaged foods by 25 percent over five years.
The National Salt Reduction Initiative, a coalition of cities and health organizations, hopes the food industry will back its campaign to combat high blood pressure, heart attacks and strokes by voluntarily reducing the sodium in the U.S. food supply.
The announcement met with mixed reaction. Many food makers have already begun to cut salt content and said the reduction targets were reasonable, but some critics called it another attempt to regulate what should be a free choice.
Bloomberg, who has just begun his third term as mayor, has crusaded for healthy living. Apart from the smoking and trans fat bans, the city required chain restaurants to post calorie counts of their menu items and started ad advertising campaign against sugary drinks.
Companies are aware of the push to reduce salt and the New York initiative represents a challenge, said Tom Forte, an analyst at Telsey Advisory Group, an equity research firm.
The restaurant industry will change its offerings if demand is there, but there is “not a lot of proof” previous measures in New York caused any major shifts in consumer behavior, Forte said.
The effort targets restaurants and packaged food because only 11 percent of the sodium in Americans’ diets comes from their saltshakers. Nearly 80 percent is added to foods before they are sold, the Health Department said.
High blood pressure, heart attacks and stroke kill 23,000 New Yorkers and 800,000 Americans per year, costing untold billions in healthcare expenses, the Health Department said. Salt intake has been increasing steadily since the 1970s, with Americans consuming about twice the recommended limit of salt each day.
“Consumers can always add salt to food, but they can’t take it out,” said New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Farley.
But J. Justin Wilson of the Center for Consumer Freedom, an industry-funded group that lobbies against restrictions on smoking, alcohol and the restaurant and food industries, called the initiative “paternalistic” and warned that if the City doesn’t get its way, it may try to make the proposals obligatory.
“First it was trans fats, then it was mandatory labeling. The City’s Board of Health knows best.”
Food manufacturers said the proposals are reasonable and have been a part of their strategy for some time.
“Kraft Foods is supportive of the overall goal of New York City’s sodium reduction initiative,” said Susan Davidson of Kraft Foods Inc.
The New York City Health Department’s Dr. Sonia Angell said the sodium cuts are “not about banning any single product” but making sure the mix of high and low sodium products is balanced so that it packs “a lower wallop of sodium for all of us.”
The city vowed to solicit additional comments from the food industry and consumer organizations until February 1. For the proposed salt reduction targets, click on: http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/cardio/cardio-salt-initiative.shtml
(Reporting by Basil Katz; editing by Daniel Trotta and Anthony Boadle)
As a major organization of pediatricians considers revising its recommendations on circumcision of newborn boys, two new reviews of existing research offer conflicting conclusions about the bitterly debated procedure.
One review, from Australia, says there’s no evidence that infant circumcision will reduce the risk of sexually transmitted disease later in life, and it warns of significant psychological harm. But another from the United States gives more weight to findings from Africa that show the procedure, when it’s performed on adult men, makes a major difference in preventing such diseases as AIDS.
The findings come as the American Academy of Pediatrics debates updating its recommendations regarding circumcision among newborns. The academy now takes a neutral stance.
In general, “there is still a lot of uncertainty surrounding the risks and benefits of circumcision,” said Dr. Douglas S. Diekema, a pediatrician at the University of Washington who’s familiar with both reviews and serves on a task force working on the academy’s recommendations.
“There are some clear benefits to circumcision,” he said. “There are some risks to circumcision, although the significant ones appear to be rare.”
Not so, write the Australian researchers, who examined eight studies for a review in the latest issue of the Annals of Family Medicine. Two studies involved neonatal circumcision, and six involved older males, roughly 14 to 49 years old.
The review’s lead author, researcher Caryn Perera of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, said the risk of major complications ranges from 2 percent to 10 percent. “These may be considered unacceptable for an elective procedure,” she said.
Parents who think circumcision has medical benefits should be aware that there’s “a lack of consensus and robust evidence” on that, she added.
Though African studies have linked circumcision in adult men to lower rates of sexually transmitted diseases, including the virus that causes AIDS, Perera said that only future studies will tell if those findings are applicable to the Western world, where AIDS is much less prevalent.
And there’s more to consider, Perera said. She said that circumcision poses problems from a mental point of view, potentially causing “significant anger or feeling incomplete, hurt, frustrated, abnormal or violated.”
As to whether circumcision reduces sexual sensitivity, Perera said there’s no evidence that it affects sensation when performed on adults. The highest-quality studies, known as randomized controlled trials, don’t report whether infant circumcision affects sensation, she said.
A review in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics & and Adolescent Medicine, which examined three studies, took a different tack. It says that risks of complications from circumcision are less than 1 percent, and “serious long-term complications are extremely rare.”
Dr. Matthew Golden, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington Center for AIDS and STD, said the ideal study would randomly assign thousands of infants to either get circumcised or not get circumcised and then follow them for decades. But “that trial is never getting done, nor should it be done,” Golden said.
For now, he said, when it comes to circumcision, “we know it’s pretty safe, and we have a lot of evidence for some benefit.”
SOURCES: Douglas S. Diekema, M.D., pediatrician, University of Washington, Seattle; Caryn Perera, B.A., researcher, Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, Adelaide, South Australia; Matthew Golden, M.D., M.P.H., associate professor, medicine, University of Washington Center for AIDS and STD, Seattle; January/February 2010 Annals of Family Medicine; January 2010 Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine