Closer Look
'Leave the chocolate milk out of this': How making school lunches healthier turned into a food fight
Alex Hogan/STAT
The kids are mad. And so are parents, school cooks, and local administrators stretching limited dollars to offer nutritious lunches to elementary and high school students. The food fight kicked up after the Biden administration proposed new guidelines limiting added sugar and sodium in school lunches and breakfast. USDA reimburses schools for some of the food kids get, so it matters to their budgets.
Chocolate milk might be the third rail in this dispute — which looks a lot like the 2010 battle the last time guidelines changed — because its 20 grams of sugar per carton come close to the recommended daily ceiling of 25 grams in added sugar. Parents, teachers, and school officials are saying no. "Leave the chocolate milk out of this," Michelle Wickstrom, a teacher from Green River, Wyo., said. And kids agree, complaining they're getting dehydrated, according to one fourth-grader. STAT's Nicholas Florko has more.
health inequity
Cardiac arrest during delivery more common among older, Black, and low-income pregnant patients
Cardiac arrest in pregnant women hospitalized to deliver their babies is relatively rare, at 1 in 9,000 cases, but it's part of a larger story of poor outcomes in childbirth that are much worse for Black women in the U.S. The new study, in Annals of Internal Medicine, found that compared with other hospitalized patients, those who had a cardiac arrest were more likely to be older, Black, insured by Medicare or Medicaid, and have underlying health problems such as chronic hypertension, mental health disorders, substance use disorder, and acquired heart disease.
The new study, conducted from 2017 through 2019, found that two-thirds of these patients survived cardiac arrest. But as the Commonwealth Fund reported last year, U.S. women have the highest rate of maternal deaths among high-income countries, and Black women are nearly three times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related complications.
health
Getting a good night's sleep could strengthen your vaccine response
As Covid vaccines rolled out beginning in December 2020, their effectiveness appeared to wane faster among men, older adults, people with obesity, smokers, and people with high blood pressure because they developed fewer antibodies. A new study in Current Biology identifies another possible risk factor for vaccines more broadly, one people might be able to more easily change: how much sleep they get. The researchers reached that hypothesis after analyzing seven studies measuring how much sleep people got and how they responded to flu or hepatitis B or C vaccines.
Those who slept fewer than six hours around vaccination had fewer antibodies than those who got seven or more hours, which translates into two more months of protection. Caveat: The difference was statistically significant only for men, with much variation among women (the studies didn't account for sex hormones), and it was stronger for adults under 60, who tend to sleep better.
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