Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 29, 1995 TAG: 9508290007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SUZANNE HAMLIN THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
More than 30 of these health and nutrition by-subscription-only newsletters are flooding mailboxes across the nation every month, up from 5 or 6 a decade ago. A wildly diverse group of pricey broadsheets, they cover almost anything that can happen to the human body, from warts to cancer, from gene therapy to jet lag.
Several have circulations of 400,000 or more, larger than many metropolitan newspapers. Some are written by well-known medical or consumer institutions. Others are the single voices of provocative renegades. But they all purport to guide the consumer through a labyrinth of often-contradictory health-related information.
``Health is the biggest news in America today - it's what makes TV headlines night after night,'' said Michael Jacobson, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest and executive editor of its Nutrition Action Health Letter, which critically reviews brand-name foods.
It is clear that the newsletters have found a niche as the baby-boom generation ages: health - now broadened to include mental as well as physical stability - has become a major concern for a growing sector of adults obsessed with remaining young, vigorous, thin and disease free. According to interviews with 30 health newsletter publishers and editors, readers are spread equally across the country, with somewhat more women than men interested enough to subscribe to a newsletter. Several editors said that women are generally much more open to health information.
The majority of health-letter subscribers are affluent, well educated and older, ``starting at about 50, when we all begin to fall apart,'' said Lawrence Lindner, executive editor of the Tufts University Diet & Nutrition Letter, which began with a focus on nutrition but now includes comprehensive information on exercise.
All health letters - some of which do not cite sources for their information - include a disclaimer of responsibility, stating that their information should not be taken as personal advice, which should be obtained from a physician.
Medical information from studies reported in the news media can often be contradictory, resulting in frustration and confusion. That's where health newsletters come in.
Can government studies, Congress and health care programs be trusted as sources? Emphatically not, writes Dr. Robert C. Atkins, a diet-guru-turned-health-revolution-guru. ``You must now learn to take control of your own health care,'' he exhorts in his new alternative-medicine newsletter, Health Revelations. ``This is urgent, and will not wait.''
And as greater numbers of research studies are reported, consumers are often bewildered about how to incorporate the information into their own lives.
``Even doctors have a hard time keeping up,'' said Dr. C. Everett Koop, the former U.S. surgeon general who now heads his own health foundation in Hanover, N.H. ``If a practicing physician reads two medical journals a day, at the end of a year he would still be 800 journals behind.'' Membership in the C. Everett Koop Foundation includes six issues a year of a health letter, a glossy paean to what good nutrition, a smoke-free environment and exercise can do.
Twenty years ago, long before the idea of nutrition as preventive medicine, the Harvard Health Letter began to provide monthly medical information for lay readers. Compiled by staff members at the Harvard University Medical School, it tried to cut through the medical jargon and to involve a patient in his or her own care. It was so successful (the present circulation is 250,000) that Harvard has also started publishing newsletters on women's health, mental health and the heart.
In 1977, two years after the first Harvard newsletter, the Center for Science in the Public Interest's Nutrition Action Health Letter began. That same year, a group of nutritionists began Environmental Nutrition, a food-as-health publication.
The Tufts University Diet and Nutrition Letter, started in 1983, is still considered a leader in the field, as is the Mayo Clinic Health Letter and the University of California at Berkeley Wellness Letter, both first published in 1984.
Five years ago, alternative-medicine health letters began to appear, promoting approaches that are often in direct opposition to traditional medical views. In addition to those produced by august institutions, newsletters are now offered by holistic practitioners, herbalists, the founder of a woman's health clinic and at least one chiropractor.
``We have about 500,000 subscribers now,'' said Glynnis Mileikowsky, the managing editor of Dr. Julian Whitaker's Health and Healing, a five-year-old newsletter written by an iconoclastic M.D. who advocates things like shark cartilage for cancer patients and chromium picolinate for weight loss.
Whitaker, who conducts seminars, cruises and nationwide walkathons, ``provides an answer for many, many desperate people,'' Mileikowsky said.
by CNB