January 2009

In spite of the devastating health consequences resulting from eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, young women continue to support anorexic behavior in order to lose weight quickly. A recent article in Newsweek magazine uncovers the rise of "pro-ana" groups on social networking sites like Facebook. In the article, Stanford professor Rebecka Peebles, M.D. cites a 2006 study that she cowrote which found "that 96 percent of teens diagnosed with eating disorders who visited pro-eating disorder Web sites learned new dieting and purging ...

USA Today ran an article this week with statistics revealing that teen pregnancies are on the rise in 26 states. A portion of the article reads as follows: "To see 26 states with statistically significant increases is fairly remarkable," says Paul Sutton, a demographer with the National Center for Health Statistics, which released the data Wednesday. "We're seeing increases in both the number of teens having births and also the rate at which they are having births. Both of them are going up." This is certainly a devastating trend for ...