Natasha Richardson’s terrible skiing accident has the public safety world buzzing about ski helmets. Read about here in The Lede in the New York Times.

But a helmet may not have made a difference. Dr. Ron Tarrel, a neurologist with the Noran Clinic in Minneapolis, says that it sounds like she may have had a shear injury. That’s when the brain is damaged inside the skull by rapid acceleration and de accleration. It happens in car accidents, and it could happen when someone on skis takes a bad fall.

“It’s about the movement of the brain within the skull,” he said. “Boxers suffer shear injuries frequently.”

It could cause death. And it can happen even with a helmet on, he said.

Still, wearing a helmot while skiing is still the best protection against brain injury, he said. “It’s the best you can do. I wear one myself,” he said. “Now they’re even stylish.”

I’ve been a skier and snowboarder all my life and I have never worn a helmet. I wear one biking. I wear my seat belt without fail. But never on the slopes.

Maybe it’s time to change.   

According to the National Ski Area Association, I’m in the majority. But it looks like the next generation might be different.

• 43 percent of U.S. skiers and boarders overall wear helmets, up from 40 percent from the year before; in comparison, only 25 percent of skiers and boarders wore helmets during the 2002/03 season.
•  70 percent of children 9 years old or younger wear ski helmets.
•  60 percent of children between 10 and 14 wear ski helmet.

For more on this check the National Ski Area Association web site.

The take home message in the diet study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine is that diets don’t work.

Real news flash, huh? It’s the calories that count no matter where they come from –fat, protein or carbohydrates. Eat more than you burn, you get fat.

I thought the editorial in the NEJM, written by Martijn Katan, Phd., from the Institute of Health Sciences at VU University in Amesterdam, clearly outlined the only solution to the obesity epidemic. And it’s not weight-loss surgery for all.

 The inability of the volunteers to maintain their diets must give us pause. The study was led by seasoned investigators who were experienced in the performance of diet and drug trials. The participants were highly educated, enthusiastic, and carefully selected. They were offered 59 group and 13 individual training sessions over the course of 2 years. Nonetheless, their body-mass index (the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters) after 2 years averaged 31 to 32 and was moving up again. Thus, even these highly motivated, intelligent participants who were coached by expert professionals could not achieve the weight losses needed to reverse the obesity epidemic. The results would probably have been worse among poor, uneducated subjects. Evidently, individual treatment is powerless against an environment that offers so many high-calorie foods and labor-saving devices. (My emphasis)

In other words, it’s the environment stupid. Obesity experts have been pounding this drum for a long time. Overeating and obesity is not a matter of self control — we can’t defeat our biology. We are programmed to over eat. The only way to halt the obesity epidemic is to change our environment. Katan offers a case in point. She describes a little noticed study in France. Starting in 2002 two small towns in France built a community-wide effort to prevent overweight schoolchildren.

   Everyone from the mayor to shop owners, schoolteachers, doctors, pharmacists, caterers, restaurant owners, sports associations, the media, scientists, and various branches of town government joined in an effort to encourage children to eat better and move around more. The towns built sporting facilities and playgrounds, mapped out walking itineraries, and hired sports instructors. Families were offered cooking workshops, and families at risk were offered individual counseling.

The results were remarkable. By 2005 the rate of overweight in children had fallen to 8.8%, while in neighboring towns it rose to 17.8%, in line with the national trend. That community approach is now being extended to 200 towns in Europe, under the name EPODE (Ensemble, prévenons l’obésité des enfants [Together, let’s prevent obesity in children]).

Could we do that here? What would it take? Banning food advertisements on TV? Is it worth the investment up front to give kids healthier lives and to prevent higher costs later on?

Did you know that paper shredding can be good for your health? Really.  Staples, the office supply retail chain, says it’s proved that with a survey of people who own home shredding machines. They asked 523 consumers about their “beliefs and emotions associated with shredding.”

According to Staples (which sells shredders. Did I forget to mention that?) 47 percent of respondents felt their stress level diminish after “the simple act of shredding.” In addition to experiencing “Post-Shredding Stress Reduction,” people felt smarter (85 percent), more organized (83 percent) and in control of their lives (80 percent).

I just had to test this out. So I looked for a committed shredder right here in the office, and he wasn’t hard to find  — Tony Kennedy, an investigative reporter here at the Star Tribune. Here’s a condensed version of our email exchange:

BodyTalk: So when did you first start shredding?

TK: I started shredding bank statements etc. at home about 10 years ago. Those were my earliest shredding memories. before that, I saved stuff like that and then burned it when we had fires in the yard.  Shredding is a better deal.

BodyTalk: I see. Do you shred in secret or when you are with other people?

TK:  I’ll shred in the open. My favorite shredder of all time is the one that sits… in the (manager area) so you know it’s a super-duty shredder – capable of confusing a newsroom full of reporters who could easily grab the shreddings of top-secret  documents and try to reassemble them.  I love the way it attacks the pages. It’s an intimidating machine if you haven’t stepped up to it before.

BodyTalk: Do you feel driven to shred?

TK:  Yes. I think its prehistoric, really. You want to cover your tracks to keep your the predators away.

BodyTalk: Does shredding make you feel happy?

TK: I get a sense of tidiness,  like I just swept out the garage, even the corners. No place for mice to hide. No fuss, no muss. So there is satisfaction… which I guess is happiness at some level.

So there you have it. And even if shredding does not make you happy, satisfied and relaxed, think of what you could do for a couple of guinea pigs.

The debate on sex education and birth control has changed, and if you need proof, here it is on — of all places — Fox News, from the lips of Bristol Palin herself. See her interview on Fox News where she says abstinence only education “is not realistic.”

Well.

Bristol Palin with her baby, courtesy of Fox News

Cristina Page, who blogs on reproductive health policy for Birth Control Watch put it like this:

 In a stroke of media mastery, Bristol Palin harnessed the Palin family-doting Fox News last night to announce a powerful (and decidedly non-Fox News) message for policy makers: abstinence only is “not realistic.” The new teen mom also told Great Van Susteren that she would “love to be an advocate to prevent teen pregnancy.” Making this announcement on one of the most watched, and most conservative, news stations in the nation is already a pretty good display of her ability to reach a large swath of Americans (particularly the most difficult to reach on this issue.)
What the interview reveals is that Bristol is lovely, humble, honest, no doubt still a teenager and refreshingly free of any political agenda–except to use her experience to steer teens away from the same fate. In startling candidness, Bristol expresses the conflicting emotions that come packaged with teen parenthood; her love for her child and of motherhood and her belief that waiting ten years before becoming a parent would have been a better path.

With rates of teen pregnancy and STD’s rising, especially in Minnesota, her voice and her message could not come at a better time.

Someone pointed out his local health web site — My Health Minnesota - Go Local – which is a comprehensive list of doctors and services organized by disease or condition, everything from alcohol treatment to wrist injuries. It’s also organized by region. It’s a joint project of  the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Libraries, the Mayo Clinic Libraries and MINITEX Library Information Network jointly,  in cooperation with the US National Library of Medicine and the NIH.