Effects of the Heartbeat Wales programme

Abstract

Advice should now be to increase intake of vegetable oils and fishEditor-The systematic review by Tang et al analysed the effect of various diets, particularly the American Heart Association step 1 and step 2 diets, on reducing total blood cholesterol concentration.

The news on tobacco control: time to bring the background into the foreground

“…Compared with typical community health promotion initiatives which operate on token budgets, all of these interventions were large scale, although still were funded with petty cash when compared with the promotional budgets used by the tobacco industry. Favourable improvements in the secular trend for risk factors such as smoking, and programme contamination of control groups have generally been cited as putative explanations of the lack of difference between intervention and control groups, with media leakage—being the most uncontrollable factor—deemed responsible 6. Doubtless, some of this leakage involved news coverage of specific interventions intended only for the eyes and ears of the experimental populations.…”