Today, just over 100 years after the advent of trans fats, the FDA has announced that it's taking the first steps toward banning them outright, removing them from the "Generally Recognized As Safe" list and out of the American food supply. It's about time.
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FILE - In this Oct. 30, 2013, file photo, President Barack Obama speaks at Boston's historic Faneuil Hall about the federal health care law. Obama says he's sorry Americans are losing health insurance plans he repeatedly said they could keep under his signature health care law. But the president stopped short of apologizing for making those promises in the first place. "I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me," he said in an interview Thursday, Nov. 7 with NBC News. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia, File)
FILE - In this Oct. 30, 2013, file photo, President Barack Obama speaks at Boston's historic Faneuil Hall about the federal health care law. Obama says he's sorry Americans are losing health insurance plans he repeatedly said they could keep under his signature health care law. But the president stopped short of apologizing for making those promises in the first place. "I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me," he said in an interview Thursday, Nov. 7 with NBC News. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama says he's sorry Americans are losing health insurance plans he repeatedly said they could keep under his signature health care law. But the president stopped short of apologizing for making those promises in the first place.
"I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me," he said in an interview Thursday with NBC News.
He added: "We've got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them, and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this."
The president's apology comes as the White House tries to combat a cascade of troubles surrounding the rollout of the health care law often referred to as "Obamacare." The healthcare.gov website that was supposed to be an easy portal for Americans to purchase insurance has been riddled by technical issues. And with at least 3.5 million Americans receiving cancellation notices from their insurance companies, there's new scrutiny aimed at the way the president tried to sell the law to the public in the first place.
Much of the focus is on the president's promise that Americans who liked their insurance coverage would be able to keep it. He repeated the line often, both as the bill was debated in Congress and after it was signed into law.
But the measure itself made that promise almost impossible to keep. It mandated that insurance coverage must meet certain standards and that policies that fell short could no longer be sold except through a grandfathering process, meaning some policies were always expected to disappear.
The White House says under those guidelines, fewer than 5 percent of Americans will have to change their coverage. But in a nation of more than 300 million people, 5 percent is about 15 million people.
Officials argue that those people being forced to change plans will end up with better coverage and that subsidies offered by the government will help offset any increased costs.
"We weren't as clear as we needed to be in terms of the changes that were taking place," Obama told NBC. "And I want to do everything we can to make sure that people are finding themselves in a good position, a better position than they were before this law happened."
The president's critics have accused him of misleading the public about changes that were coming under the law, which remains unpopular with many Americans and a target for congressional Republicans.
Obama dismissed that criticism, saying "I meant what I said" and insisting that his administration was operating in "good faith." He acknowledged that the administration "didn't do a good enough job in terms of how we crafted the law" but did not specify what changes might be made.
Sign-ups for the new health care marketplaces opened Oct. 1. People have six months to enroll before facing a penalty.
Some lawmakers — including Democrats — have called on the White House to delay the penalty or extend the enrollment period because of the website woes that have prevented many used from signing up. Obama said he remains confident that anyone who wants to buy insurance will be able to do so.
"Keep in mind that the open enrollment period, the period during which you can buy health insurance is available all the way until March 31," he said. "And we're only five weeks into it."
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-11-07-Obama-Health%20Overhaul/id-b04d8aa89e6842cc87fcb77ae9982d78Sorry, Readability was unable to parse this page for content.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/07/star-wars-episode-vii-launch-date-december-2015/?ncid=rss_truncatedThis week's Time magazine features three articles on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose landslide re-election Tuesday "instantly christened him the GOP frontrunner for 2016." The issue includes an accompanying story by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, who compares Christie to Ronald Reagan and Bruce Springsteen.
"For a pro-life conservative running in a deep blue state, it was a performance every bit as dominant as the Boss ripping through a live version of 'Rosalita,'" Scarborough writes. "And like Springsteen himself, Christie made it all look easy."
But it's the cover that's likely to get the most attention.
It shows a shadowy silhouette of Christie's profile above the coverline "The Elephant in the Room," a reference to both the Republican Party's mascot and the GOP hopeful's weight.
Christie's weight has long been tied to his political ambitions, with some fearing it could be a health concern for voters.
According to "Double Down," a new book by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann about the 2012 presidential campaign, Republican nominee Mitt Romney passed on picking Christie as a vice presidential running mate in part because of his weight.
But the governor has since taken steps to shed pounds.
Christie underwent lap-band surgery in February. On Tuesday, he told the New York Times he is more than halfway to meeting his weight-loss goal, and that he's sleeping better as a result. "I didn’t realize how badly I was sleeping being that much overweight," Christie said. (His appetite is so small these days, he said, he "recently could not even finish a wrap sandwich.")
He's also long poked fun at his outsized frame. In February, he said his weight is "fair game" for comedians. In an appearance on "The Late Show with David Letterman" earlier this year, Christie consumed a doughnut during the interview.
And when asked by the Times if he would have trouble handling the rigors of a presidential campaign, Christie replied, “No more than any other 51-year-old person. I’m slower than I was when I was 40. But that’s the slow march of time."
The Nov. 18 issue with Christie on the cover is due on newsstands Friday.
Of course, it's not the first time Time has courted controversy.
Last year, the magazine sparked a firestorm with a cover featuring a 26-year-old woman breastfeeding her 3-year-old son.
FILE - In this Jan. 18, 2012, file photo, Alexes Garcia makes cinnamon rolls for student's lunch in the kitchen at Kepner Middle School in Denver. The rolls are made using apple sauce instead of trans fats. Heart-clogging trans fats have been slowly disappearing from grocery aisles and restaurant menus in the last decade as nutritionists have criticized them and local governments have banned them. The Food and Drug Administration is now finishing the job as they announce Nov. 7, 2013, that it will require the food industry to gradually phase out trans fats, saying they are a threat to the health of Americans.(AP Photo/Ed Andrieski, File)
FILE - In this Jan. 18, 2012, file photo, Alexes Garcia makes cinnamon rolls for student's lunch in the kitchen at Kepner Middle School in Denver. The rolls are made using apple sauce instead of trans fats. Heart-clogging trans fats have been slowly disappearing from grocery aisles and restaurant menus in the last decade as nutritionists have criticized them and local governments have banned them. The Food and Drug Administration is now finishing the job as they announce Nov. 7, 2013, that it will require the food industry to gradually phase out trans fats, saying they are a threat to the health of Americans.(AP Photo/Ed Andrieski, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Heart-clogging trans fats have been slowly disappearing from grocery aisles and restaurant menus in the last decade. Now, the Food and Drug Administration is finishing the job.
The FDA announced Thursday it will require the food industry to gradually phase out artificial trans fats, saying they are a threat to people's health. Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the move could prevent 20,000 heart attacks and 7,000 deaths each year.
Hamburg said that while the amount of trans fats in the country's diet has declined dramatically in the last decade, they "remain an area of significant public health concern." The trans fats have long been criticized by nutritionists, and New York City and other local governments have banned them.
The agency isn't yet setting a timeline for the phase-out, but it will collect comments for two months before officials determine how long it will take. Different foods may have different timelines, depending how easy it is to find a substitute.
"We want to do it in a way that doesn't unduly disrupt markets," said Michael Taylor, FDA's deputy commissioner for foods. Still, he says, the food "industry has demonstrated that it is, by and large, feasible to do."
Though they have been removed from many items, the fats are still found in processed foods, including in some microwave popcorns and frozen pizzas, refrigerated doughs, cookies, biscuits and ready-to-use frostings. They are also sometimes used by restaurants that use the fats for frying. Many larger chains have phased them out, but smaller restaurants may still get food containing trans fats from suppliers.
Trans fats are widely considered the worst kind for your heart, even worse than saturated fats, which also can contribute to heart disease. Trans fats are used both in processed food and in restaurants, often to improve the texture, shelf life or flavor of foods. Diners shouldn't be able to detect a taste difference if trans fats are replaced by other fats.
To phase them out, the FDA said it had made a preliminary determination that trans fats no longer fall in the agency's "generally recognized as safe" category, which is reserved for thousands of additives that manufacturers can add to foods without FDA review. Once trans fats are off the list, anyone who wants to use them would have to petition the agency for a regulation allowing it, and that would likely not be approved.
The fats are created when hydrogen is added to vegetable oil to make it more solid, which is why they are often called partially hydrogenated oils. The FDA is not targeting small amounts of trans fats that occur naturally in some meat and dairy products, because they would be too difficult to remove and aren't considered a major public health threat on their own.
Scientists say there are no health benefits to trans fats and say they can raise levels of so-called "bad" cholesterol, increasing the risk of heart disease — the leading cause of death in the United States.
Many companies have already phased out trans fats, prompted by new nutrition labels introduced by FDA in 2006 that list trans fats and an by an increasing number of local laws that have banned them. In 2011, Wal Mart pledged to remove all artificial trans fats from the foods the company sells by 2016.
As a result of the local and federal efforts and many companies' willingness to remove them, consumers have slowly eaten fewer of the fats. According to the FDA, trans fat intake among American consumers declined from 4.6 grams per day in 2003 to around one gram per day in 2012.
Dr. Leon Bruner, chief scientist at the Grocery Manufacturers Association, said in a statement his group estimates that food manufacturers have voluntarily lowered the amount of trans fats in food products by 73 percent.
The group, which represents the country's largest food companies, did not speculate on a reasonable timeline or speak to how difficult the move may be for some manufacturers. Bruner said in a statement that "consumers can be confident that their food is safe, and we look forward to working with the FDA to better understand their concerns and how our industry can better serve consumers."
FDA officials say they have been working on trans fat issues for around 15 years — the first goal was to label them — and have been collecting data to justify a possible phase-out since just after President Barack Obama came into office in 2009.
The advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest first petitioned FDA to ban trans fats nine years ago. The group's director, Michael Jacobson, says the move is "one of the most important lifesaving actions the FDA could take."
He says the agency should try to move quickly as it determines a timeline.
"Six months or a year should be more than enough time, especially considering that companies have had a decade to figure out what to do," Jacobson said.
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Follow Mary Clare Jalonick on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mcjalonick
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-11-07-FDA-Trans%20Fats/id-26773dba998a47c388bc1d3b1148cead
Apple has released an update that fixes some bugs with Gmail. The update fixes the following issues, according to an Apple support article:
- Fixes an issue that prevents deleting, moving, and archiving messages for users with custom Gmail settings
- Addresses an issue that may cause unread counts to be inaccurate
- Includes additional fixes that improve the compatibility and stability of Mail
You can download the update by going to the Mac App Store and navigating to the Updates section, then clicking Update.
Source: Apple Support article
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It costs a lot to live a long time.
If Americans start regularly living to 120 or more, we need to start preparing our economy, and individuals, now. At a recent Future Tense event on what longevity would mean for America, Lisa Mensah, who is the executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Initiative on Financial Security, discussed what that would mean: revamping Social Security, rethinking retirement, and much more.
Also in Future Tense’s special series on longevity:
“The Jetson Fallacy: Much longer lifespans could explode the nuclear family,” by Liza Mundy.
