DC Lecture April 25: Decoding Messages About Health, Fitness, and Happiness

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For Washington, DC readers, please join us and spread the word about the Wed. April 25 presentation at American University by Timothy Caulfield, among Canada’s leading experts in the area of public health, law, and bioethics. His lecture marks the U.S. release of his first popular book, “The Cure for Everything: Untangling Twisted Messages about Health, Fitness, and Happiness.”

The event is part of the School of Communication’s Science in Society Film and Lecture series. Details are below with a link to a YouTube interview with Caulfield.

THE CURE FOR EVERYTHING

Untangling Twisted Messages about Health, Fitness, and Happiness

Timothy Caulfield

University of Alberta Faculty of Law and Public Health

Wed. April 25

2-4pm American University, Ward 2, Campus Map

Lecture and book signing

Caulfield explains how our decisions about health and happiness are shaped by companies and marketers ranging from Big Food to Big Pharma. Caulfield spent a year going on a “quest to find the truth about the things that make us healthy,” wading through a mass of misinformation, testing health crazes scientifically and personally.

From a summary of his book at the Edmonton Journal:

Caulfield signed up with a Hollywood personal trainer, went on a diet, had his genes tested, tried various naturopathic and homeopathic remedies, and consulted with health experts all over the world. The take-away lessons of his journey, he says, are that basically nothing — not diets, not fitness, nor remedy industries — actually do what they promise to do.

You can’t lose weight through exercise alone — 80 to 90 per cent of weight loss depends on eating healthful things and in small portions, in other words, you must take in fewer calories than you burn.

Muscle may burn more calories than fat, but only six calories per pound. So if you’re fortunate enough to be able to put on 10 pounds of pure muscle you can consume approximately 60, that’s 6-0 more calories a day.

Most alternative remedies work no better than placebos.

And some new research, around genetics, for example, is hyped making it difficult to tell what information you can trust.

Caulfield lost 25 pounds while researching his book and has kept almost all of it off, by resistance training (the single best exercise is the deadlift, he says) done as a circuit (moving from one exercise to another without stopping), substituting fruits and vegetables for crap foods like cookies and his once beloved M&M candies, and eating smaller portions.

Also watch an interview with Caulfield about his book below.

BIO:

Timothy Caulfield is Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy and a Professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, Caulfield has published over 200 academic articles and book chapters. His research has examined the social challenges associated with genomic technologies, stem cell research, and the application of ethics in health sciences.

Among his current projects, he is Health Senior Scholar with the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research, the Principal Investigator for a Genome Canada project on the regulation of genomic technologies, and an AllerGen (National Centres of Excellence) project on ethics, evidence and health policy research, the Ethical, Legal and Social Issues theme leader for the Stem Cell Network and has several other projects funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

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