What do you say when your patients ask whether low-calorie sweeteners help with weight management?

What do you say when your patients ask whether low-calorie sweeteners help with weight management?

Public health efforts around the world are aimed at reducing obesity. Currently, reducing sugar intake seems to be the most widely promoted strategy for reducing energy intake (1). In many countries, policy efforts are focused on sugar, and suggestions range from imposing taxes, to having it regulated by food regulatory agencies, to limiting portion sizes of beverages containing sugar. Reducing...

Ask Not What Your Text Can do For You. Ask What You Can do For Your Text (a Dictionary’s perspective)

Ask not what your REB can do for you; ask what you can do for your REB.

Research ethics boards (REBs) are perhaps the most unloved component of the research endeavour. In this issue of Canadian Family Physician, Kotecha and colleagues (page 1165)1 join a chorus of voices decrying current governance of research by institutional REBs. In their article they describe the experiences of the Canadian Primary Care Sentinel Surveillance Network in securing ethics approval....

Ask Not What Your SOA Can Do For You --- Ask What You Can Do For Your SOA!

Over the last few articles in JOT, I have focused on discussing the maturity of SOA, and the ever increasing need for a set of best practices to handle the complexities inherent in successfully implementing and realizing an enterprise architecture. As the enteprises' SOA matures, best practices are needed at many different levels encompassing a wide range of artifacts that need to target the ap...

Do you do what you say or do you do what you say others do?

We design a donations vs. own money choice experiment comparing three different treatments. In two of the treatments the pay-offs are hypothetical. In the first of these, a short cheap talk script was used, and subjects were required to state their own preferences in this scenario. In the second, subjects were asked to state how they believed an average student would respond to the choices. In ...