Integrating screening and interventions for unhealthy behaviors into primary care practices.

Background: Four unhealthy behaviors (tobacco use, unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, and risky alcohol use) contribute to almost 37% of deaths in the U.S. However, routine screening and interventions targeting these behaviors are not consistently provided in primary care practices.

An update on breast cancer in Oklahoma and the dietary changes women make after diagnosis.

Context: The breast cancer (BC) death rate in Oklahoma exceeds that of the United States. Women commonly experience weight gain after diagnosis and soy isoflavones may interfere with effect of tamoxifen.

Objective: To assess dietary changes of BC survivors and to determine if the women desire information about diet from physicians.

The Food Stamp Program: history, nutrition education, and impact.

The Food Stamp Program has grown from a modest effort to distribute excess farm commodities during the Great Depression to the nation's largest food assistance and nutrition program, serving almost 27 million persons in fiscal year 2006, at a cost of more than 30 billion dollars to federal taxpayers. In 1990 Congress authorized cost sharing for food stamp nutrition education. Since 1992-when only seven states had approved food stamp nutrition education plans totaling 661,076 dollars in federal dollars-the nutrition education program has grown exponentially.

Survival analysis of dropout patterns in dieting clinical trials.

Subjects who withdraw from diet clinical trials are a drain on limited resources and reduce statistical power. Dropout pattern data, collected during a clinical trial for which the primary findings compared weight loss from three dieting protocols, are examined using survival analysis and found to be exponentially distributed. The predicted probability of remaining in the study is 83% for 30 days and 60% for 84 days.