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British Heart Foundation Urges People To Have Regular Heart Health Checks
In response to a study published online in the BMJ, comparing the performance of two cardiovascular risk assessment tools, British Heart Foundation (BHF) Medical Director, Professor Peter Weissberg, said:

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Red Cross Leader Describes First-Year Triumphs, Challenges
In a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Gail McGovern, President and CEO of the American Red Cross, described the challenges of running a nonprofit in the recession but also pointed to success in cutting the organization"s deficit by 75 percent and surpassing its goal of raising 100 million in nine months.
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Local Food Environments Can Lead To Obesity

Living in an area with more fast food outlets and convenience stores than supermarkets and grocers has been associated with obesity in a Canadian study. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Public Health have shown that your local food environment can affect your weight. John Spence from the University of Alberta, Canada, worked with a team of researchers to study associations between the "Retail Food Environment Index" (RFEI) and levels of obesity. He said, "The RFEI is based upon a ratio of the number of fast-food restaurants and convenience stores to supermarkets and specialty food stores in a given radius around a person"s house. We"ve shown that it correlates very well with the odds that that person may be obese". The availability of fast food and scarcity of outlets for natural ingredients within 800m of a person"s home was shown to be associated with weight, while the RFEI within a 1600m radius did not have the same effect. The researchers claim that this demonstrates that the proximity of the unhealthy environment is an important risk factor for obesity. According to Spence, "These findings may help explain the observation that geographic concentration of fast-food restaurants is associated with mortality and hospital admissions for acute coronary events in Canada". Fast-food is cheaper and more energy-dense per measure of weight than other healthier foods such as fruits and vegetables that are purchased in a grocery store. If governments want to reduce people"s intake of these energy-efficient, but ultimately unhealthy "meals", the authors recommend that they intervene to limit the creation of areas where tempting junk-food outlets are so much more prevalent than other shops. They write, "A plausible policy option for decreasing the prevalence of obesity among adults is improving the retail food environment, possibly through zoning by-laws". Notes: Relation between local food environments and obesity among adults John C Spence, Nicoleta Cutumisu, Joy Edwards, Kim D Raine and Karen Smoyer-Tomic BMC Public Health (in press) Article available at journal website. All articles are available free of charge, according to BioMed Central"s open access policy. BMC Public Health is an open access journal publishing original peer-reviewed research articles in all aspects of epidemiology and public health medicine. BMC Public Health (ISSN 1471-2458) is indexed/tracked/covered by PubMed, MEDLINE, CAS, Scopus, EMBASE, Thomson Scientific (ISI) and Google Scholar. Graeme Baldwin BioMed Central


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