Citizens Medical Center is, by most measures, a respected and respectable hospital. A non-profit, their mission is to serve their community of South Texas. And in their mission, they’ve been mostly successful, appearing on Thomas Reuters’ list of top 100 American hospitals three times over the past decade.
And yet, the Victoria, Texas hospital has people across the country outraged. The reason: a hiring policy they instituted last year. In short, the policy requires potential employees to have a body mass index below 35. This means that a man who is 5-foot-10 and 245 pounds would not meet the hospital’s hiring requirements.
This week a Federal Drug Administration panel backed the approval of a weight loss drug called Qnexa. Strictly intended for use by clinically overweight people with BMIs over 27kg/m2, Qnexa is a combination of an already-existing weight loss drug and another drug not yet approved for weight loss. At present, many doctors use this particular combination of drugs to treat obese patients, but this approval would allow them not to go "off the label" with their prescriptions.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has decided to knock down the 20-year-old nutritional food pyramid and replace it with a simpler guide to healthy eating — a plate. Today the USDA will unveil how they think your dinner plate should look. But while the portion-divide plate might be a more digestible representation of a good diet, the question is will the message get through to people who really need to change their habits? Tony Geraci, former food service director for Baltimore City Schools and consultant for the Got Breakfast Foundation says that the USDA is addressing many health problems head on.
What does "healthy" mean in America today? From trendy diets to calorie-burning shoes, we get so many confusing messages about what we need to do to be healthy that we lose sight of the goal. Maybe it's time to reconsider how we define health.
What does healthy mean to you? When it comes to maintaining your health, what works for you?
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