Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.

Paragraph: Older adults who underwent a brief course of brain exercises saw improvements in reasoning skills and processing speed that could be detected as long as 10 years after the course ended, according to results from the largest study ever on cognitive training. The findings, published on Monday in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, offer welcome news in the search for ways to keep the mind sharp as 76 million baby boomers in the United States advance into old age. The federally sponsored trial of almost 3,000 older adults, called the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly study, or ACTIVE, looked at how three brain training programs - focusing on processing speed, memory and reasoning ability - affected cognitively normal adults as they aged. People in the study had an average age of 74 when they started the training, which involved 10 to 12 sessions lasting 60 to 75 minutes each. After five years, researchers found, those with the training performed better than their untrained counterparts in all three measures. Although gains in memory seen at the study’s five-year mark appeared to drop off over the next five years, gains in reasoning ability and processing speed persisted 10 years after the training. “What we found was pretty astounding. Ten years after the training, there was evidence the effects were durable for the reasoning and the speed training,” said George Rebok, an expert on aging and a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who led the study. Participants in all three training groups also reported that they had an easier time with daily activities such as managing their medications, cooking meals or handling their finances than did participants who did not get the training. But standard tests of these activities showed no differences between the groups. “The speed-of-processing results are very encouraging,” said study co-author Jonathan King, program director for cognitive aging in the Division of Behavioral and Social Research at the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health, which helped fund the research. King said the self-reported improvements in daily function were interesting, but added, “We do not yet know whether they would truly allow older people to live independently longer.”  However, researchers said even a small gain would be likely to ease the burden on caregivers and healthcare providers. “If we delay the onset of difficulties in daily activities even by a small amount, that can have major public health implications in terms of helping to curb healthcare costs, delaying entry into institutions and hospitals,” Rebok said. The training course was designed to bolster specific cognitive abilities that begin to slip as people age. It does not aim to prevent dementia caused by underlying disease such as Alzheimer’s. At the start of the study, all 2,832 participants were cognitively normal. The study included four groups: three training groups plus a control group of volunteers who came in for regular testing to see how they were faring with age. People were trained in small groups over a period of several weeks and then were tested immediately after the training and again one, two, three, five and 10 years later. About 60 percent of the volunteers who underwent training also got booster training sessions, which enhanced the initial benefits. At the end of the trial, all groups showed declines compared with their initial baseline tests in memory, reasoning and processing speed, but those who got training in reasoning and processing speed experienced less decline. Among those given training in reasoning strategies, 73.6 percent were still performing above their pre-trial baseline level, compared with 61.7 percent of those who received no training and were only benefiting from practice on the test. The effect was even greater in processing speed. Among the training group, 70.7 percent of participants were performing at or above their baseline level, compared with 48.8 percent of those in the control group. There was no difference in memory performance between the memory group and the control group after 10 years. Two of the three training programs - the memory and the reasoning strategies - were done with paper and pencil, while the processing speed training was done on a computer. The programs, developed by the researchers, were focused largely on teaching strategies to improve cognitive performance. For example, the memory training taught people how to remember word lists, sequences and main ideas, while the reasoning training focused on things like recognizing number patterns. In the processing speed training, people were asked to focus on the main object in a computer screen while also trying to quickly recognize and identify objects on the periphery of the screen. Such training can help older drivers with things like recognizing road signs while driving. A version of the speed training program developed for this trial is now commercially available through the brain fitness company Posit Science, but the researchers are working on making other types of training available as well. Rebok’s team just got a grant from the National Institute on Aging to make a computerized version of the memory test, with the hope that repeated training can improve the results. The study was not designed to explain why cognitive training can have such a lasting effect. Rebok said it may be that people take the strategies they learn and practice them over time. As they age, trained individuals can rely on these strategies to compensate for their declines. Whether this training actually strengthened the brain in the way that exercising builds muscle is not clear, but the government intends to study this, too. Last week, NIA put out a request for proposals that would study whether cognitive training causes physical changes in the brain. Claim: Brain training helped older adults stay sharp for years: study.
A brief course of brain exercises helped older adults hold on to improvements in reasoning skills and processing speed for 10 years after the course ended, according to results from the largest study ever done on cognitive training.

Paragraph: The announcement by the world’s largest fast-food chain comes as more companies respond to government and consumer pressure to address the global obesity epidemic. McDonald’s, which often bears the brunt of criticism over the restaurant industry’s penchant for tempting diners with indulgent and often high-calorie food, said it would offer the option in all of its 20 major global markets by 2020. McDonald’s also vowed to promote and market only water, milk and juice as the beverages in its popular Happy Meals for children as part of its announcement at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York on Thursday. Waist sizes around the world are increasing, setting off alarms in public health circles. In recent years, the U.S. food industry has begun yielding to pressure from government, parents and consumers seeking to slim down adults and children. Sugary sodas have been yanked from public schools; sugar, sodium and calorie levels have been reduced in products, and calorie counts have been posted on some restaurant menus. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit that has tangled with McDonald’s over everything from fattening food to the marketing of Happy Meals, approved of the company’s move to add more fruits and vegetables to the menu. Still, it says the company and its rivals have a long way to go in terms of offering healthier options. “McDonald’s slow march toward healthier meals made a major advance today, but a long road lies ahead for the company,” CSPI said in a statement. McDonald’s is seen as something of a trend setter among restaurant chains, but like many of its peers, it has tended to resist external efforts to force change. About one year ago McDonald’s said it would begin listing calorie information on menus in some 14,000 U.S. restaurants and drive-throughs — ahead of a national rule that would require larger restaurant chains to make such disclosures but months after other chains embraced the idea. In July 2011 it tweaked its popular Happy Meals for children - reducing the french fries portion by more than half and adding apples to every order. The move came after pressure from CSPI, parent groups and others. More than one-third of Americans are obese, and about 10 percent of the nation’s healthcare bill is tied to obesity-related illnesses, such as Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and hypertension, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. McDonald’s said its announcement is part of a plan developed with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, which was founded by the Clinton Foundation and American Heart Association, to increase customers’ access to fruit and vegetables and help families and children to make informed eating and lifestyle choices. Claim: Want fruit with your burger? McDonald's expands anti-obesity push.
Hold the fries, pass the salad. McDonald’s Corp on Thursday said it would offer healthy options as part of its popular value meals, letting customers choose a side salad, fruit or vegetables instead of french fries.

Paragraph: The article did not discuss costs. Screening mammograms impose a significant cost on the U.S. health care system and insurers, particularly Medicare. The story detailed the relative harms of earlier mammograms, but did not translate those percentages into absolute numbers. For instance, women who were diagnosed with breast cancer 25 months or more after their last mammogram were “50 percent more likely” to need chemotherapy, “32 percent more likely” to need mastectomy, and “66 percent more likely” to need lymph nodes removed. However, relative risk can be misleading, sometimes inflating numbers to sound scarier than when absolute numbers are used. Also, we don’t know what kind of risk these women had at baseline, so it’s hard to know if they were higher risk. The story made no mention of the harms of earlier or more frequent screening, which have been documented time and time again. More screening can mean more false positives or more finding of breast changes that lead to more testing, such as biopsies, more costs, and more worry. The story did make clear some of the weaknesses of the study: The study found an association but did not prove causality and the study population was limited to a single health care institution. The story also mentions that the findings were presented at a meeting, which means they have not undergone peer-review. The story does not directly engage in fear-mongering. However, some of the quotes advocating for earlier and more frequent screening play into a scenario that breast cancer is lurking in every woman. A discussion of what a woman’s average lifetime risk is would have been helpful. The story quotes the study author and an outside source. The story makes clear that different advisory groups have differing guidelines for what age to start getting mammograms (40 or 50 years old). It would have been nice if the story had included examples of what makes someone higher risk or not (personal cancer history, family history, history of radiation), but we think this was satisfactory. We believe that mammograms are well-known to be widely available. And the earlier and more frequent screening described here is not earlier or more frequent than what many guidelines recommend, so would not be expected to be denied by health insurers. The story makes clear the distinctive aspects of this study —using avoidance of more aggressive treatment regimens as a deciding factor, as opposed to the more extreme avoidance of cancer death. The story goes beyond what was contained in a news release on the presentation at the American Society of Breast Surgeons annual meeting. Claim: Earlier Mammograms May Mean Less Need for Aggressive Treatments

This HealthDay news story reports on findings among women diagnosed with breast cancer: those who had longer intervals between mammograms end up getting more aggressive treatments, including chemotherapy and surgery. The story would have been stronger had it described the findings using absolute rather than relative numbers. But, we were glad to see an independent source offer some reservations about the small observational study raised. A final note — the image accompanying the story was laughably unrealistic. Mammograms are the primary screening method for detecting breast cancer. However, when to start getting mammograms and how often to get screened have been subjects of controversy for the past decade. That’s because the data on how to balance risk of developing breast cancer and the risk of harms from screening (unnecessary tests and procedures) are interpreted differently by doctors and other experts. A story that adds new data to the field and that might tip current guidelines one way or the other is newsworthy.