 In my weight management clinic, I’m always telling parents to remove the TV in their child’s bedroom, both to improve their sleep and decrease their sedentary time. However, this typically is accompanied by complaints about this request from their children. I’m often caught between allying with my patients and doing what’s right for their health. Researchers have found even more reasons for me to insist that they remove their TV from their bedroom – it is associated with higher sugary drink consumption.
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by Denise Simon, MPH Thanksgiving is a holiday filled with abundance, particularly of food. Usually there is a dish at the table for everyone, but this year, one young guest came up to me to share her critique of the meal. She said “I don’t like dinner, but I like these,” as she filled both fists with rolls. Her parents were quick to add some more vegetables to her plate to accompany the bread, and encouraged her “eat a rainbow,” meaning that she got a plate complete with squash, cranberry sauce, turkey, and peas. This just made her laugh as she promptly sat down and began to push the food around on her plate instead of into her mouth. This tiny guest demonstrated an age-old problem: how can parents encourage children, particularly those in “picky” phases, to try a variety of healthy foods?
 The FDA has finally taken an official stance against added sugar, recommending that consumers limit their total daily intake of added sugar to no more than 10 percent of their daily calories. “Added sugar” is simply sugar added to food during the production process; 10 percent amounts to an average of about 50 grams (12.5 teaspoons) per day, or about as much sugar as in a single can of Coke. But with over 60 forms of added sugar, it can easily be disguised on ingredient labels.
 In my practice as a weight management physician, I routinely see patients with medication lists that are a mile long. This is not entirely unexpected. With obesity comes comorbid disease, and with disease often comes pharmacotherapy. In fact, it’s not unusual to see people on 10 or more medications when they first walk into my office. As a result, one of the first questions I usually ask myself is not, “What new medication can I start this patient on?”, but rather, “What old medication(s) can I stop?”
 We’ve all heard why eating non-organic animal products is a bad idea: the animals may be raised in poor conditions, industrial agriculture produces large amounts of air and water pollution, it’s a leading cause of deforestation in the U.S., and the animals may be fed antibiotics.
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