Lifestyle « Weekly Gravy

Hope may help prevent you from doing things that aren’t good for you, a new study claims. The investigators wanted to find out why some people are more likely to fall into risky behaviors, such as gambling, drinking too much, taking drugs and overeating. To do this, the team at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom focused on something called relative deprivation, which is when a person feels that other people have things better in life. “I think most people have experienced relative deprivation at some point in their lives. It’s that feeling of being unhappy with your lot, the belief that your situation is worse than others, that other people are doing better than you, ” said researcher Shahriar Keshavarz, from East Anglia’s School of Psychology. “Relative deprivation can trigger negative emotions, like anger and resentment, and it has been associated with poor coping strategies, like risk taking, drinking, taking drugs or gambling,” he explained in a university news release. “But not everyone scoring high on measures of relative deprivation makes these poor life choices. We wanted to find out why some people seem to cope better, or even use the experience to their advantage to improve their own situation,” Keshavarz said. “There is a lot of evidence to show that remaining hopeful in the face of adversity can be advantageous,… read on > read on >

After a short-lived tax on sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened beverages was repealed, consumption of sugary drinks in an Illinois County escalated again, according to a new study. The tax was pitched to reduce Cook County budget deficits. It lasted four months — from Aug. 2 to Dec. 1, 2017, the researchers said. “We know that the tax worked to bring down demand for sweetened beverages significantly while it was in place,” said lead author Lisa Powell, director of health policy and administration at the University of Illinois Chicago, School of Public Health. “The repeal of the Cook County Sweetened Beverage Tax was a missed public health opportunity,” Powell said. “If it had stayed in place, we could have seen a lasting reduction in consumption of sweetened beverages, which are linked to obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, which, in turn, have recently been found to be associated with increased risk of severe illness from COVID-19.” For the study, the researchers compared the price and volume of sweetened beverages sold in the county while the tax was in place, for the two years prior to the tax and for the eight months after the tax was repealed, with sales in St. Louis, Mo., which did not have a similar tax. The price of the beverages increased by 1.13 cents per fluid ounce in the county… read on > read on >

One in four doctors has been personally attacked or sexually harassed on social media, a new study finds. Women are more likely to be sexually harassed, while both men and women are attacked based on religion, race or medical recommendations, researchers say. Doctors received negative reviews, coordinated harassment, threats at work, public exposure of their personal information and threats of rape and death. Distressingly, this was reported before the 2020 pandemic. The survey of 464 U.S. physicians was conducted before the COVID-19 outbreak and highlight the intensity of online harassment of doctors. The situation has only gotten worse since the spring, the authors noted. “If anything, our data is likely an underestimate of the true extent of attacks and harassment post-pandemic since so many doctors started to advocate for public health measures during the pandemic and have been met with an increasingly polarized populace emboldened by leadership that devalues science and fact,” said senior author Dr. Vineet Arora, assistant dean for scholarship and discovery at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. The study also reported that 1 in 6 women doctors said they had been sexually harassed on social media. Study co-author Tricia Pendergrast, a second-year medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, described the findings as worrisome. “We worry this emotionally distressing environment will drive women physicians off… read on > read on >

Research brings grim findings for these economically tough times: People who must move because they can’t make the rent often miss out on needed medical care. The study, of over 146,000 California residents, found a connection between unaffordable housing and health care use: Of people who’d moved in the past five years because they couldn’t afford the mortgage or rent, about 27% had skipped or delayed necessary medical care. That was higher than the rates among Californians who’d stayed put and those who’d moved for reasons other than housing costs. The findings do not necessarily mean that the moves, per se, led to difficulties in getting health care. But it makes sense that there’s a connection, the researchers said. “The findings are intuitive,” said Dr. Katherine Chen, a fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, who worked on the study. People who struggle to afford housing, she said, are likely to face other financial hardships. Housing is such an essential need that people will put rent or mortgage payments ahead of all else, said Corianne Scally. Scally, who was not involved in the new research, studies housing issues at the Urban Institute, in Washington, D.C. She said that resource-strapped families can be forced to choose which basics they can afford. Medical care may be far down on the list, behind housing, food and bills.… read on > read on >