NCHStats

There appears to have been a significant shift over the past decade in what young people are choosing as their “drink of choice” when it comes to caffeinated beverages. While it’s safe to say that soda  (or “Pop,” for those of us from the Upper Midwest) won’t become extinct on grocery shelves any time soon, there clearly appears to be a trend among young people towards energy drinks and the flavored coffees offered by Starbucks and any number of smaller coffee houses.

It doesn’t appear, however, that this apparent shift in what young people are drinking is resulting in any widespread increase (or decrease, for that matter) in caffeine intake.

That’s the bottom line of an article in the March edition of Pediatrics, “Trends in Caffeine Intake Among US Children and Adolescents,” authored by Amy M. Branum, Lauren M. Rossen, and Kenneth Schoendorf of the National Center for Health Statistics.

Branum et al set out to describe trends in caffeine intake over the past decade among US children, adolescents and young adults, using 24-hour dietary recall data from the 1999-2010 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).  The authors also looked at the proportion of caffeine consumption attributable to different beverages, including soda, energy drinks, and tea.

What they discovered was that approximately 73% of children and adolescents consumed caffeine on a given day. From 1999 to 2010, there were no significant trends in average caffeine intake overall; however, caffeine intake did decrease among 2- to 11-year-olds and among Mexican-American Children.  Soda accounted for the majority of caffeine intake, but this contribution declined sharply from 62% to 38% over this period.  Coffee accounted for 10% of  caffeine intake in 1999-2000 but more than doubled to nearly 24% of intake in 2009-2010.

Though energy drinks did not exist in 1999-2000, they accounted for nearly 6% of caffeine intake in 2009-2010.

As new data roll in, nutritionists and public health experts will be watching closely to see if these new trends have any impact on overall caffeine intake among American youth.

While seafood generally is considered part of a healthy diet, it can also
contain methyl mercury—a neurotoxin. However, there is little to no scientific consensus on what level of mercury in the blood is considered a health hazard (ATSDR, EPA).

A group of NCHS researchers – Samara Joy Nielsen, Brian K Kit, Yutaka Aoki, and Cynthia L Ogden – used data from the 2007-2010 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to describe seafood consumption in US adults and to explore the relationship between seafood consumption and blood mercury. The article, “Seafood consumption and blood mercury concentrations in adults over age 20 years, 2007–2010,” was posted online in the February 12 edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The authors conclude that most US adults consume seafood (approximately 83%), and that blood mercury concentration is associated with the consumption of tuna, salmon, high-mercury fish, and other seafood. However, due to the lack of consensus on what levels of mercury pose a significant health risk, they do not draw any other further conclusions about what proportion of the adult population may be at risk due to seafood consumption.

LINK: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2014/02/12/ajcn.113.077081.full.pdf+html

The death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has sparked a great
deal of interest in heroin overdose deaths in the U.S. The number of heroin-related deaths are available from the multiple cause of death option on the CDC WONDER database using the T40.1 ICD
Code,“Poisoning by and adverse effect of heroin.”

However, this may not mean that the person died of heroin overdose because this code only picks up whether heroin is mentioned in the death certificate. In other words, someone may have died of a cocaine overdose or something else but had heroin in the system. With that said, here are our latest national numbers on heroin-related deaths in the U.S.:

1999       2,103

2000       1,999

2001       1,906

2002       2,219

2003       2,205

2004       2,009

2005       2,154

2006       2,192

2007       2,443

2008       3,086

2009       3,343

2010       3,094

Total: 28,753

A recent press release from the CDC also features some statistics on drug overdose deaths.