Soft drinks make you depressed?
Fer Chrissake! Why is rubbish like this still being published? No hint of demographic controls. Poor people have worse health and drink more junk drinks. That is all that was going on in this "study". No causal link was shown
In a study recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers found that the risk of depression was directly and proportionally correlated with the amount and frequency of consuming sugar- sweetened carbonated beverages (SSCBs). This association was independent of age, sex, and the presence or absence of preexisting diabetes in the study participants.
SSCBs are drinks with high concentrations of added sugar. High intake of SSCBs is a key factor in the global obesity epidemic and has been linked to an increased risk for cardiometabolic disease.
The negative impacts of SSCBs have been attributed to the large quantities of high-fructose corn syrup and added sugar, which increase serum triglyceride levels and dietary glycemic load, leading to insulin resistance (IR). Epidemiological studies have potentially linked metabolic disorders, IR, and depression.
Other research has confirmed that individuals with a predisposition for obesity and diabetes have a higher prevalence of depression than those with normal glucose metabolism.
Small-scale cross-sectional studies have investigated the association between SSCBs and depression. However, these studies have focused on the combined effects of SSCBs, glycemic status, and IR, with mixed results.
For the present study, a team of researchers led by Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine in Korea used a longitudinal study approach to investigate the association between SSCB consumption and the risk of developing depressive symptoms. Their analyses were designed to eliminate the confounding impacts of glycemic status and IR, thereby elucidating the independent effects of SSBCs.
The researchers analyzed the risk of depression according to the consumption of SSCB in 87,115 working-aged Koreans who responded to Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) scale.
Clinical and biochemical data was collected from hospital records supplemented with a health-related behavior questionnaire. The questionnaire recorded physical activity levels, health behaviors (smoking, alcohol consumption), and educational status.
Fasting blood glucose was recorded at each follow-up session to evaluate subjects’ glycemic status, which was classified into normal glycemia, prediabetes, and diabetes mellitus (DM). This classification was based on the homeostasis model assessment-insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) model.
A semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) was used to evaluate and classify subjects’ SSCB consumption, both in terms of quantity (expressed in serving sizes where one serving = 200 mL) and frequency (per week).
The participants were categorized into 5 groups by SSCB consumption based on one serving dose. The categories were: never/almost never, < 1 serving/week, 1 ≤ serving/week < 3, 3 ≤ serving/week < 5, and 5 ≤ serving/week.
The CES-D questionnaire was used to evaluate depressive symptoms per week. The questionnaire comprised 20 questions about negative/depressive feelings, with answers ranging from 0 (seldom/never) to 3 (5-7 days a week). If the total score from the CES-D questionaries was 16 or higher, the individual was classified as having depressive symptoms.
Results revealed that 28.9% (25,246) of individuals had SSCB intakes higher than one serving per week. Of these, individuals consuming more than five servings per week depicted more elevated fasting glucose, HOMA-IR, BMI, alcohol consumption, smoking, total calorie intake, education, and hypertension prevalence than other groups.
Over almost six years of follow-up, 14.9% of participants developed depressive symptoms, predominantly from high SSCB intake groups. Statistical analyses adjusted from covariates revealed a repeating trend of proportionally increasing risk of DM with increasing SSCB consumption.
These results were mirrored across sex, BMI, and glycemic status, implying that SSCBs play an independent role in triggering depression, and are not just cofactors in the development of depression along with IR and obesity as suggested by prior studies.
The authors noted that, considering the young age of the study participants (39.5 ± 6.8 years), it is postulated that the adverse effect of SSCB consumption on mental health can begin at an early age. Thus, the results may be evidence to recommend abstaining from SSCB at a young age, they conclude.
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He was wrongly locked up for 17 years – but Andrew Malkinson is one of the lucky ones
Why did the authority that investigates miscarriages of justice ignore vital new DNA samples that would clear a man of rape? What excuse did they give for sitting on the evidence – handed over to them by the police – for four years? The answer is truly shocking
It might seem odd – offensive, even – to describe as “lucky” a man who was wrongly convicted of a heinous sexual offence, and who served 17 and a half years in prison before being released to attempt to rebuild his life whilst branded as a registered sex offender and subject to onerous licence conditions.
None of us can begin to contemplate the immense trauma that has been endured by Andrew Malkinson and his loved ones in the decades in which he described himself as having been “kidnapped” by the state before his conviction was finally quashed by the Court of Appeal last month.
Yet it has become increasingly clear that Mr Malkinson was extremely lucky to have managed to overturn his wrongful conviction at all due to serious failings from every part of the criminal justice system, including the public body which was established with statutory authority to investigate miscarriages of justice, the Criminal Cases Review Commission. The CCRC was established in the wake of a series of serious miscarriages of justice – notably the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six – which had raised serious questions about the weaknesses of the criminal justice system and the ability of the system to recognise and remedy wrongful convictions.
Major questions have been asked about their ability to fulfil their mandate, particularly in light of savage financial cuts to their budget in recent years. The Westminster Commission on Miscarriages of Justice released a report in 2021 following a rigorous investigation into the workings of the CCRC. The report highlighted some of the significant roadblocks that currently exist to prevent miscarriages of justice from being effectively identified and remedied in a timely manner.
One of the chairs of the Westminster Commission, Lord Garnier KC, is one of two former solicitors general, alongside the former justice secretary Robert Buckland, who have now called for a public inquiry to be launched into the Malkinson case, so serious are their concerns over its failings.
The Westminster Commission had drawn a clear conclusion that the structure of the CCRC requires reform, including recommending the strengthening of the investigative capability of the organisation through an increase in their budget, and a reinforcement of their available sanctions for non-compliance with disclosure requests, both of which are viewed by most campaigners as long overdue. These recommendations have yet to be taken forward, although the Law Commission has recently published an issues paper as a part of a wide-ranging review of the criminal appeals system, meaning the current attention on this issue could be timely indeed if the lessons of the Malkinson case can be swiftly learned.
Mr Malkinson’s plight perfectly illustrates that many of the fears expressed by the Westminster Commission as to the potential failings of the CCRC are clearly well founded. The impact of budget cuts had an explicitly negative impact on the decision making of the CCRC on the two previous occasions when they considered Mr Malkinson’s applications and failed to uncover the crucial evidence which fatally undermined the safety of his conviction. The internal case logs from the CCRC reveal that when discussing Mr Malkinson’s application for them to conduct the DNA testing which eventually cleared his name, the CCRC dismissed his request, commenting “the cost cannot be ignored” and “further work would be extremely costly”.
It must be noted that the CCRC were declining to carry out this work some four years after the CPS and Greater Manchester Police had first been told in 2009 that a searchable DNA profile which was not Mr Malkinson’s had been recovered from a “crime specific area” of the victim’s clothing. Had the CCRC taken the basic step of obtaining and reviewing the police files, it is they and not the charity APPEAL who would have uncovered the many flaws in the case, including evidence hidden in the police files which was not disclosed to Mr Malkinson’s defence team, and which the Court of Appeal found to be an additional ground on which the conviction was unsafe.
The current system is built around the premise that the CCRC are the safety net in uncovering miscarriages of justice. They alone have the legal powers to access all necessary police and prosecution files for review, should they choose to do so. Appellate lawyers acting for victims of miscarriages of justice like Mr Malkinson face untold hurdles in trying to gain access to such material; in Mr Malkinson’s case, his lawyers had to take Greater Manchester Police to court twice to gain access to the relevant material.
This brings us back to consider in what way Andrew Malkinson could possibly be described as lucky. He was repeatedly failed by every element of the criminal justice system which not only saw him convicted for a crime of which he was innocent, but which repeatedly ignored his pleas of innocence, unnecessarily prolonging his detention more than a decade beyond his initial tariff period because of his failure to admit guilt and to reduce his risk of reoffending by carrying out offending behaviour courses.
He was “lucky” because some other people did hear his pleas and took action. His friends and family remained steadfast in their support through his years of incarceration, and they were joined in their fight for his freedom by notable supporters including the investigative journalist Bob Woffinden, who in 2016 wrote a chapter on the Andrew Malkinson case in his book The Nicholas Cases: Casualties of Justice. He, unlike the CCRC, appreciated the glaring flaws in the conviction.
Suzanne Gower, then the managing director of the legal charity APPEAL and now a lecturer in Miscarriages of Justice at the University of Manchester, recalls having read the chapter a short time before receiving a letter on behalf of Mr Malkinson, which was a crucial factor in his being one of the tiny proportion of cases which the small charity is able to take on for further investigation and eventual representation. This was a key moment in his long fight for justice as it was only due to the dogged and persistent efforts of the lawyers and investigators at APPEAL that the key evidence which led to the quashing of the conviction was finally uncovered.
Andrew Malkinson was one of the tiny number of applicants able to secure legal representation from charities like APPEAL, or Innocence Projects such as the one we run at the University of Manchester, where I am the chancellor. The proportion of applicants to the CCRC able to secure legal representation has plummeted in recent years, and yet it is widely acknowledged that unrepresented applicants have a much lower prospect of having their cases referred back to the Court of Appeal. Such applicants are entirely dependent upon the CCRC case review managers having the resources and desire to conduct all necessary inquiries. Critics of the CCRC fear that for both financial and cultural reasons, this simply is not happening.
Lord Garnier KC summed up this lack of investigative vigour on the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:
“The word bystander or spectator was going through my mind. What’s the point of the CCRC if, presented with questions which need answering and which they have the constitutional duty to investigate, they do nothing?
Andrew Malkinson’s wrongful conviction has been uncovered in spite of the mechanisms set up to carry out this task, not because of them. It is an indisputable fact that juries can and do make errors and sometimes the wrong person will be convicted.
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The Evil Of The Democrat Party
The city of Chicago might as well not exist to Democrats on the national stage. Yes, that party has ruled the city with an iron fist since 1931, and the dead there has a remarkable turnout rate for elections, but in Washington, DC, the city doesn’t exist. Joe Biden and the swamp gang don’t mention it because they’d have to acknowledge the piles of dead bodies the city racks up annually. While they’ll show up occasionally in the region for a photo-op, they won’t talk about the murders, the drugs, or the terror citizens there feel on a daily basis. It is, for lack of a more perfect word, evil.
Republicans have zero say over what happens in Chicago; everything terrible there is directly a result of liberal policies. All the blood spilled drips off the hands of Democrats. They know it; they don’t care.
Why would they? What consequences have Democrats faced for their failure? In the last 92 years, there hasn’t been a blip on the radar of a threat to Democrats winning elections there, so why would anyone give a damn? The city had a chance to pull up, just a little, from its nosedive when they tossed out the incompetent Lori Lightfoot in the mayoral primary last year. But rather than go with a more sane option, they voted for someone even worse. The new Mayor gets more upset when someone refers to murderous goons as a mob than he does any of the murders in the city.
Why is anyone supposed to care if the people who live there don’t? If you continually vote for people who beat the hell out of you, why would people care that you’re regularly getting the hell beat out of you?
Still, it’s an embarrassment to Democrats to see what Chicago has become. The same goes for Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and every other city controlled by Democrats for generations. Not all the crime, not all the death, the pointing out of the crime and the death by Republicans. That’s what Democrats are concerned with – the extent to which the white, suburban chardonnay-swilling soccer mom who votes blindly for Democrats become aware of the indifference with which the progressive power structure views human life and how those dots are connected in their heads between the violence and their “safe” lives. If those voters realize they aren’t more than a few election cycles away from their quiet slice of life being overrun by the same mentality, they might not slavishly vote and donate to Democrats.
These Democrats in power only care about anything to the extent that it can harm their electoral prospects. In these killing fields called cities, those electoral prospects are unburdened by responsibility – Democrats will continue to mine the votes of people who’d elected the morons they’ve elected to mayor’s offices in perpetuity. It’s the suburbs they’re afraid of losing.
It tells you something that the left doesn’t care about all the murders. From “Black Lives Matter” to “Shut up about all the black people getting murdered by black people,” people don’t look to politicians for intellectual consistency. It’s one thing when the neighborhood liquor store or downtown shoe shop gets looted by a group of “teens,” it’s something else entirely when it hits their suburban salon or boutique of choice.
The thought of that keeps Democrats up at night. The thought of that makes Democrats believers in walls, at least metaphorical ones enforced by culture and police. If that wall is breached… lookout.
In the meantime, Democrats have to do something, usually, the bare minimum, to pretend to care about the carnage they really only seek to contain. Which brings us back to Chicago.
In their latest attempt to put a Band-Aid on a bullet wound, the Democrats in the city are calling for a ceasefire…between the hours of 9 am and 9 pm. This, presumably, means it’s game on from dusk till dawn. It’s like holding “The Purge” every night, just as long a suburban Karen can make it home safely from her early dinner downtown. The people who live there…screw them.
It truly is evil. But to not practice evil, you have to view the people being harmed as, well, people. Then you’d have to care about them on top of it. Since the days of slavery, Democrats haven’t viewed black people as people. That’s an “I’m better than you" attitude, not one based on skin color, so the black leadership in the city carries it with them as well.
As long as the violence can be maintained as a “made for TV event,” specifically made for Fox News, nothing will change because there’s no threat to Democrats. Scores of people will continue to die, children will continue to have their future set on fire by a failed education system, and Karen will still get her suburban mani-pedi with her morally superior future cirrhosis circle of friends while watching Bravo, utterly oblivious to the destruction in the wake of her voting habits. And Democrats will laugh all the way to the end.
https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2023/08/20/column-n2627260
*****************************************************Florida Becomes First State to Sanction Medicaid Providers for Covering Minor Transitions
Florida has become the first state to sanction Medicaid providers for covering the attempted gender transitions of minors.
The state is fining five Medicaid health care insurers for violating Florida’s new rule banning taxpayer funds from going to transgender treatments, such as performing a double mastectomy or administering puberty blockers, Jason Weida, secretary of the Agency for Health Care Administration, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.
A year ago, in August 2022, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration had promulgated a rule that Florida Medicaid would not cover puberty blockers, hormones, sex-reassignment surgeries, or “any other procedures that alter primary or secondary sexual characteristics.”
“Given the notice that they are on now, with the rule being passed last year, and now that we have this audit and the letters and this discipline, any type of violation going forward would be deemed an intentional violation and would be subject to very severe consequences,” Weida promised.
The Daily Wire’s news podcast, “Morning Wire,” first reported the news on Friday.
Weida emphasized to The Daily Signal that transgender surgeries are irreversible and “mutilate children at a very young age when they can’t consent to these types of procedures” with serious long-term consequences. He also praised Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is currently vying for the Republican presidential nomination, for taking “concrete steps” within Florida to protect “the innocence of our children.”
“A lot of people are talking about this on the news right now, about gender issues and other things,” Weida said. “But none of them have done as much as Gov. DeSantis and his team has done over the last year … He really believes in protecting the innocence of our children.”
The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration initiated legal action against the five Medicaid health plans that included issuing cease and desist letters as well as liquidated damages for the transgender procedures that these plans had covered for providers.
Letters from Florida’s Medicaid Plan Management to Simply Healthcare Plans Inc.; Sunshine State Health Plan Inc.; Humana Medical Plan Inc.; Molina Healthcare of Florida Inc.; and Children’s Medical Services Health Plan warn these health care insurers that they inappropriately paid for treatments related to gender dysphoria and transgender treatments.
Following an agency audit that took place between December 2022 and February 2023, the agency discovered that the five health insurers (Simply, Sunshine, Children’s Medical Services, Molina, and Humana) had covered puberty blockers or hormones, as well as one instance where Sunshine covered a young girl’s double mastectomy, though she was a minor.
One of the letters, to Simply Healthcare Plans Inc., specifically names a Dr. Sara Danker and states that Simply Healthcare Plans Inc. paid for “services related to the treatment of gender dysphoria for a minor” that Danker performed.
Danker, who performs plastic surgery procedures in Miami, did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Daily Signal.
These letters remind the Medicaid health plans that “effective August 21, 2022, Florida Medicaid does not cover the following services for the treatment of gender dysphoria: puberty blockers, hormones and hormone antagonists, sex reassignment surgeries, and any other procedures that alter primary or secondary sexual characteristics.”
DeSantis had also signed SB 245, Treatments for Sex Reassignment, in May. That legislation banned “mutilation” of minors through attempted gender-transition surgeries, but a federal judge temporarily blocked portions of the new law in June.
“In Florida, we follow the science and the law,” Weida said in a statement this week.
“Simply Healthcare failed to comply with Florida law, rules, and regulations by covering the costs for a double mastectomy of a minor performed in December 2022,” he said. “Therefore, the agency is imposing a sanction for the plan’s violation of Florida Rule 59G-1.010. We appreciate Simply’s recent action to replace their leadership team.”
“We are also issuing fines against four other Medicaid plans that used public dollars to support prescription drugs used for gender dysphoria,” he added. “These plans recklessly continued to cover these services with permanent, harmful effects, after the rule was adopted. These Health Plans will not stand in the way of our fight to protect the innocence of Florida’s kids.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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