By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Citing his own history of addiction and asserting that todays marijuana is not your Woodstock weed, Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, launched a new national public health battle against pot legalization in Denver Thursday. The new group is called Project SAM, Smart Approaches to Marijuana. The founders are trying to appeal to both the left and the right with Kennedy attracting progressives and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum appealing to conservatives and libertarians. The group aims to disseminate the latest research on health impacts of marijuana, to speed access and…
Category: News - Part 15
By Mary Winter Many Americans are turning to new meat-like foods made of soy and other plant proteins but with the approximate taste and appearance of traditional chicken, burgers, bacon and ground beef as alternatives to animal flesh. Some do it for environmental and ethical reasons as a protest against factory-farm methods commonly used to raise poultry and livestock, which they consider inhumane. But many are also incorporating the so-called meat analogues into their diets for health reasons. Soy alternatives generally are free of fat and cholesterol or contain low levels of them. Soy products also can provide essential fatty…
By Mary Winter Few foods say good times like a sizzling 16-ounce rib eye. For generations, Americans have celebrated milestones, successes and summer get-togethers with a juicy slab of fat-marbled beef, and for most of us, a trip to a pricey steak house is still an occasion. If that occasional steak were the only red meat we ate, many health experts would be thrilled. But today, Americans consume an average of 74 pounds of red meat (beef, veal, pork and lamb) per person each year much of it in the form of fast-food burgers and processed meats such as bacon,…
By Moe Keller The staff and board of directors of Mental Health America of Colorado (MHAC) send our most profound condolences to those who lost their loved ones in the tragic shooting in Newtown, Conn. No words can justly describe the loss they have suffered. We can never know what was happening in the mind of the young man who committed the shooting in Newtown. What we can and must do is remember that our collective response to atrocities like these defines us. At MHAC we believe the key to keeping our children—and all of us—safe from acts of mass…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Gov. John Hickenlooper has tipped his hand that he’s likely to push for Medicaid expansion. In documents presented Wednesday to the Legislature’s Joint Budget Committee, the governor’s staff wrote: “we are likely to opt in to the expansion.” The governor insisted that the decision to expand rests solely with his office, a contention that lawmakers challenged. “Whether they can expand without additional legislation from the General Assembly is a little ambiguous,” said Eric Kurtz, a Joint Budget Committee analyst who briefed lawmakers. “I think they’re planning to work with the General Assembly. I think they’re just being cautious about…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Sen. Irene Aguilar, D-Denver, unveiled legislation on Wednesday that would establish universal health care in Colorado. Aguilar designed her bill as an amendment to the Colorado Constitution. That means she would need to get support from two-thirds of members in the state Senate and House along with the governor’s signature. Then, at the soonest, Coloradans would weigh in on the referendum next November. “I want to put something on our ballot in front of our voters. We can try to do it in a different way in Colorado,” Aguilar said. “Here’s the conundrum…when people come to…
By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon Gov. John Hickenlooper is calling for an $18.5 million increase in state funding to strengthen mental health in Colorado with instant mental health updates available for gun background checks, a statewide 24-hour phone crisis hotline, walk-in mental health centers and a new streamlined commitment law to make Colorado communities safer. Acknowledging that emotions are still raw over the mass killing Friday of 20 first-graders and six educators in Connecticut, Hickenlooper said the mental health overhaul which will require legislative approval has been in the works since two days after the Aurora theater shootings last July. Related…
By Diane Carman For organizations and individuals working to address the epidemic of childhood obesity, the biggest challenge is to make it fun. Or at the very least to avoid making it humiliating, frustrating, boring and punitive. We need to bring back creativity. Creativity is crucial to solving the obesity crisis, said Chris Waugh, director and co-founder of the design innovation consultancy IDEO. Waugh spoke Friday at an event called Symposium Unplugged, sponsored by the Colorado Health Foundation. Waugh presented 10 steps to designing effective approaches to solving problems and offered vivid examples of how they have been employed in…
Dr. Bill Mandell Colorado ranks among the best in nation when it comes to overall health. However the state has some opportunities for improvement, according to the 23nd annual Americas Health Rankings from United Health Foundation. The report, the longest running of its kind in the country, placed Colorado No. 11 among all 50 states for overall heath, up three spots from last year. Heres a snapshot of how Colorado fared: Colorados Strengths Low prevalence of diabetes and obesity: Colorado has the lowest obesity rate in the U.S. at 20.7 percent of the population with 805,000 obese adults. Colorado also…
By Diane Carman The crisis in access to dental health care in Colorado is growing more severe even as the effort by the state Department of Health and Environment this year continues to highlight improved oral care as one of its 10 winnable battles. A new analysis released Monday by The Colorado Trust found that the number of Coloradans without dental insurance grew 17 percent between 2009 and 2011, and that even people with dental insurance failed to receive care due to cost or a lack of available dental providers. Coloradans need to speak up for the care they need…