September 22, 2016
Speakers:
Children and Tobacco 2017: Who’s Winning?
Jonathan Klein, MD, MPH, FAAP
Associate Executive Director, American Academy of Pediatrics
“Rather wreck my gums than my lungs:" Smokeless tobacco and California rural adolescent males
Benjamin Chaffee, DDS, MPH, PhD
Assistant Professor, Preventive and Restorative Dentistry Sciences
Booze, Butts or Both? Combating young adult tobacco use in bars.
Pamela Ling, MD, MPH
Professor of Medicine
Closing Remarks
Talmadge E. King, Jr., MD
Dean, School of Medicine
University of California San Francisco
There will also be two presentations from UCSF postdoctoral fellows.
Time: 8:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Place: UCSF Parnassus Heights (room pending)
For information, contact Jonathan Leff at 415-502-6341or [email protected] or visit http://tobacco.ucsf.edu/about-a-billion-lives
September 14, 2016
All These Sleepless Nights — Rated R for language and smoking throughout, drug use and some sexuality/graphic nudity. Rating certificate #50675. Source: MPAA Rating Bulletin #2442 (14 September 2016)
What we know about this film
A Polish documentary film about art students in Warsaw. At Sundance, it won the Directing Award in the World Cinema - Documentary category. Produced by Endorfina (Warsaw) and Pulse (UK). The film's distributor, The Orchard, is an LA-based independent. Limited showings at film festivals, so far. First R-rated film identified with smoking as a reason.
What we know about smoking descriptors
In 2007, having promised state Attorneys General it would address on-screen smoking, the MPAA announced “smoking” descriptors might be added to the ratings of some films. Since 2007, the MPAA has included "smoking" descriptors on:
• 11 percent (40 of 349) of top-grossing, youth-rated films with smoking
Top-grossing youth-rated films have delivered nearly half (46%) of all tobacco impressions to theater audiences since 2007. The top-grossing films that MPAA tagged for smoking accounted for 9 percent.
• 24 percent (33 of 140) of lower-performing youth-rated films with smoking
September 13, 2016
Cristin Kearns, Laura Schmidt, and I published “Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents” in JAMA Internal Medicine. The full paper is available for free here.
Here is the UCSF press release on the paper.
Sugar Papers Reveal Industry Role in Shifting National Heart Disease Focus to Saturated Fat
A newly discovered cache of industry documents revealed that the sugar industry began working closely with nutrition scientists in the mid-1960s to single out fat and cholesterol as the dietary causes of coronary heart disease and to downplay evidence that sucrose consumption was also a risk factor.
An analysis of those papers by researchers at UC San Francisco appears September 12, 2016, in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The internal industry documents, which were found in public archives, showed that a sugar industry trade organization recognized as early as 1954 that if Americans adopted low-fat diets, then per-capita consumption of sucrose would increase by more than one-third. The trade organization represented 30 international members.
September 12, 2016
Elizabeth Cox, Rachel Barry, and I just published “E-Cigarette Policymaking by Local and State Governments: 2009-2014” in Milbank Quarterly. This paper showed that the nature of the political opposition to public health policies designed to protect the public against e-cigarettes fundamentally changed after the major cigarette companies entered the market, coming to look like historic battles to regulate cigarette use. It also shows that the big health groups missed an opportunity by, for the most part, delaying their entry into the debate until after the cigarette companies were there.
Here is the Millbank Quarterly press release:
September 12, 2016
Disney has a firm policy about on-screen smoking, except for DreamWorks movies carrying its Touchstone label.
The latest is The Light Between Oceans, a PG-13 drama that shows star Rachel Weisz, another credited actor, and four extras smoking fewer than ten times, but delivering millions of tobacco impressions to audiences.
Touchstone has been Disney's distribution channel for other PG-13 DreamWorks films with smoking such as The Help, Lincoln, and Bridge of Spies. Disney's distribution agreement with DreamWorks was supposed to end in May 2016, with The BFG. Universal is set to release DreamWorks' R-rated The Girl on the Train in October 2016.