Posts Tagged ‘schools’

Do school-based obesity interventions really work?

By Julia Belluz - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - 20 Comments

Alan Cleaver/Flickr

We’re fatter than ever and efforts to reduce our ever-expanding waistlines are failing, according to a new report by the Community Foundations of Canada.

Between 1981 and 2009, obesity roughly doubled across all age groups and tripled for youth (age 12 to 17) in Canada. This translates to a rate of obesity that’s close to 25%.

Our padded figures have left governments scrambling to address the chronic condition. Carrying extra weight increases the risk of a range of health conditions (from Type 2 diabetes to high total cholesterol and several cancers), meaning health-care costs balloon with our waistlines. (The Community Foundations of Canada put the price tag on health spending related to obesity at between $4.6 and $7.1 billion each year.) Continue…

  • The best universities to work at

    By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 10:17 AM - 5 Comments

    Dalhousie, Alberta crack the Top 10 list

    The Scientist magazine polled more than 2,000 researchers and academics with permanent jobs at academic institutions, hospitals, government bodies, or research organizations, to find out the best places to work. Two Canadian schools cracked their Top 10 list for universities outside the U.S.—and both might come as something of a surprise. The most prestigious schools—Montreal’s McGill, University of Toronto, University of British
    Columbia—didn’t make it. Instead, Edmonton’s University of Alberta holds down sixth place and Halifax’s Dalhousie University ranked tenth. The survey was paid close attention to the sorts of things that scientists, rather than say, their students, care most about—job satisfaction, research resources and pay were among the factors probed in the survey.

    The Scientist

  • They're drinking what?

    By Alex Shimo - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 11:17 AM - 45 Comments

    Kids seeking a quick high are downing hand sanitizer

    They're drinking what?The best way to drink hand sanitizer is straight, like whisky, and down it “like a shot,” explains Tyler, a Grade 10 student who lives in Toronto. Undiluted, the alcohol-based liquid tastes a little like “vodka and bug spray,” he adds.

    The alarming comment from the 15-year-old mirrors a growing number of news reports about teenagers and children drinking the antiseptic hand-cleaning products. Most hand sanitizers have an alcoholic content between 60 and 90 per cent, which means that even small amounts have led to a number of cases of alcohol poisoning in younger children. That percentage is much higher than even that of most hard liquors, giving it an appeal to kids looking for a quick high, explains Jane Wells, a drama teacher at Toronto’s after-school Care Program. Wells has come to know a lot about this subject: she discovered that a group of eight- and nine-year-olds drank hand sanitizer at school just before she took them on a school walk. When she noticed them acting strange and giggling, they first told her they had been drinking alcohol, but after some probing, confessed it was really the hand cleaner. They told her they’d been enticed by the promise of alcohol “right on the bottle,” she says. Continue…

From Macleans