health - Taryn . on Diigo

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Tags: Google, map, data_visualization, health, virus on 2008-11-12 and saved by30 people -All Annotations (1) -About

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The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief - Michael Pollan - NYTimes.com

...Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change.

Tags: food, diet, meat, health, healthcare, agriculture, pollution, climate_crisis, energy, homeland_security, government, regulation, reform, technology, information, infrastructure on 2008-10-12 -All Annotations (17) -About

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several steps the government can take to nurture this market and make local foods more affordable. Here are a few:
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- four season farmers' markets, agricultural enterprise zones, local meat-inspection corps, establish a strategic grain reserve, regionalize federal food procurement, create a federal definition of "food", benefit programs that provide incentive to support farmers' markets and CSAs
  posted by taryn930 on 2008-10-12
the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one’s family and community.
When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.)
The F.D.A. should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they’re eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals’ diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another.
the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.
The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of new “green jobs,” which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy.
in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food
The U.S.D.A. estimates that Americans throw out 14 percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions.
Argentina. There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world’s best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer.
First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.
ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides.
It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage — indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.
It must be recognized that the current food system — characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table — is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.
Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor’s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers
While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.
Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer.
chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food.

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Plastics in Our Diet: The Need for BPA Regulation

Tags: plastic, bisphenolA, endocrine, regulation, health on 2008-10-03 -All Annotations (3) -About

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Bisphenol-A is a demonstrated endocrine disruptor: it interferes with the hormone systems of animals, including humans. Evidence dates back to the 1930s. In recent tests, when pregnant mice were exposed to very small quantities (two parts per billion), the male offspring had dramatically enlarged and hypersensitized prostates when they reached adulthood. Prenatal exposure of lab rats to extremely low doses of BPA makes them more susceptible to cancer, too. BPA can also inhibit the treatment of human prostate cancer, and babies born to women with elevated phthalate levels are demasculinized. These links have prompted scientists to hypothesize that these and other endocrine-disrupting compounds may be key factors in certain reproductive and developmental disorders, such as early onset of puberty in girls, decline in semen quality, genital abnormalities, and even neurobehavioral problems such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
People opposed to removing BPA from consumer goods argue that mice are not humans, and until we have definitive evidence (whatever that might be) that it harms humans, there is no reason to prohibit its use. Ethically, we cannot test humans by exposing them to BPA, and because the chemical is ubiquitous, we cannot perform a credible case-controlled study by separating people who are exposed to it from those who are not.
We need a similar standard for the tens of thousands of synthetic chemicals like BPA that have entered our world without proper testing. First, the federal government should have the National Academy of Sciences, a presidential panel or a similarly august group convene scientists and charge them with reaching a consensus about how much evidence is enough to declare, “Yes, the X group of chemicals is dangerous.” Once that is done, a screening process must be devised and the many chemicals out there in that class should undergo the test. The EPA could perform the screening.

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Mediterranean Diet Declines, and Weights Rise - NYTimes.com

Tags: map, audio, food, diet, health, disease, italy, children on 2008-09-24 -All Annotations (1) -About

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Obama's new ad is very serious, very somber, and very long - Ezra Klein

Note: Obama again attempts to distance himself from "the left" at end, calls for "unity", ugh; helpful contrast with earlier ad from Bill Clinton's first-term run

Tags: video, obama, clinton, election, economy, wall_street, taxes, health, insurance on 2008-09-17 -All Annotations (1) -About

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JAMA -- Bisphenol A and Risk of Metabolic Disorders, September 17, 2008, vom Saal and Myers 300 (11): 1353

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The biphasic or nonmonotonicdose-response curves observed in this and many other studiesof BPA follow an inverted U shape, which is a common findingfor endocrine-active chemicals and drugs, for which high dosesinhibit (down-regulate) the low-dose response system while initiatinga wide array of other adverse effects via different responsemechanisms.¹⁰
A fundamental problem is that the current ADI forBPA is based on experiments conducted in the early 1980s usingoutdated methods (only very high doses were tested) and insensitiveassays. More recent findings from independent scientists wererejected by the FDA, apparently because those investigatorsdid not follow the outdated testing guidelines for environmentalchemicals, whereas studies using the outdated, insensitive assays(predominantly involving studies funded by the chemical industry)are given more weight in arriving at the conclusion that BPAis not harmful at current exposure levels.
causalrole for BPA in these trends is plausible because BPA can alterthe programming of genes during critical periods in cell differentiationduring fetal and neonatal development. This process, referredto as "epigenetic programming," can result in the expressionof metabolic disease and cancers during later life.
worldwide BPA production has now reachedapproximately 7 billion pounds per year

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6 Food Mistakes Parents Make - NYTimes.com

Tags: food, health, diet, parenting, children, women on 2008-09-16 -All Annotations (6) -About

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When children are involved in meal preparation, “they come to at least try the food,”
put the food on the table and encourage a child to try it. But don’t complain if she refuses, and don’t offer praise if she tastes it.
Don’t bring foods that you feel the need to restrict into the house. Instead, buy healthful snacks and give children free access to the food cabinets.
Sibling dynamics and friendships can also change a child’s eating habits.
Adding a little butter, ranch dressing, cheese sauce or brown sugar to a vegetable dish can significantly improve its kid appeal. And adding a little fat to vegetables helps unlock their fat-soluble nutrients.
By exposing young children to erratic dieting habits, parents may be putting them at risk for eating disorders or a lifetime of chronic dieting. “Most mothers don’t think their kids are soaking up this information, but they are,” Dr. Birch said. “They’re teaching it to their daughters even though it doesn’t work for them.”

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We Fought Cancer…And Cancer Won. | Print Article | Newsweek.com

this is really excellent - (1) limitation of animal studies (2) structure of funding discourages great leaps (3) for-profit structure undermines research into prevention. Note opportunity for collaborative research, use of complexity paradigm

Tags: health, healthcare, laboratory, cancer, immuno, genetics, biology, brain_tumor, disease, politics on 2008-09-11 -All Annotations (3) -About

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Loss Of Sleep, Even For A Single Night, Increases Inflammation In The Body

Tags: sleep, health, cancer, obesity, heart, disease, women on 2008-09-04 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Neurophilosophy : Socializing promotes survival of new nerve cells & may preserve memory

Tags: bird, zebra_finch, brain, neuro, neurogenesis, memory, aging, behavior, exercise, health on 2008-09-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Three Treatments Shown to Work Against Wrinkles - NYTimes.com

Tags: health, medicine, skin, sun, radiation, aging on 2008-08-28 -All Annotations (0) -About

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NEJM -- Health and Economic Implications of HPV Vaccination in the United States

Tags: health, disease, vaccine, cancer, women on 2008-08-28 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Early ear infections may pack on pounds later - Kids and parenting- msnbc.com

premature conclusions

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Charlie Rose Science Series: Human Sexuality - Charlie Rose

Tags: video, sexuality, health, brain, endocrine, obesity, diabetes, depression on 2008-08-25 -All Annotations (0) -About

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JAMA -- Abstract: Arsenic Exposure and Prevalence of Type 2 Diabetes in US Adults

Tags: health, pollution, arsenic, water, diabetes on 2008-08-20 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Well - Weight as Main Measure of Health May Be Misguided - NYTimes.com

how difficult it is to study these things

Tags: health, obesity, exercise on 2008-08-19 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Six Killers - A Series From The New York Times - Health - News

They are the leading causes of illness and death in the United States today: heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes and Alzheimer's disease, in that order. And they have a lot in common.

Tags: health, healthcare, disease, heart, cancer, stroke, copd, diabetes, alzheimer's on 2008-08-19 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Despite Olympic Gold, Swimming Statistics Are Grim - Well - Tara Parker-Pope - Health - New York Times Blog

Tags: swimming, athletics, health on 2008-08-11 -All Annotations (0) -About

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As Swimming Records Fall, Value Is Questioned - NYTimes.com

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Olympic Games: Researchers Explore What Makes Better Athletes, The Physiology Of Performance, And More

Tags: athletics, olympics, health, exercise, drugs, human_body on 2008-08-08 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Lactate is not synonymous with muscle hypoxia
Lactate is gone from the muscle in the 15 to 30 minutes after exercise and does not make you sore
When you look at this small pool of elite athletes of runners, cyclists and rowers, all of them have a high VO2, all have a large engine and all of them have skeletal muscles that are designed not to produce a lot of lactic acid. So the question then becomes who is the most efficient,
Torres is not the first to compete into her 40s. Carlos Lopes was in his late 30s when he won the Olympic marathon in 1984. Jack Foster of New Zealand was in his 40s and he placed highly in the marathon in the 1972 and 1976 Olympic Games.
"Your VO2 max typically starts to decline in your 30s, but a highly trained athlete can delay that decline until they are in their later 30s or even early 40s. An average sedentary person loses about 10 percent per decade starting at about age 30
"Nobody becomes a great athlete without prolonged intense training," Dr. Joyner says. "As scientists search for genes and the determinants of performance, they keep drawing a blank.
Dr. Joyner points to cultural influences in sports. "I think what the Kenyans and Ethiopians have shown is the value of altitude training. They are physically active their entire lives, they live at high altitude, they run to and from school, they play soccer after school - all at high altitude (6,000 to 8,000 feet). There are not a lot of economic opportunities, so there is a tremendous incentive for people to run and train hard," he says.

Taryn .'s Bookmarks tagged health → View Popular

Google Flu Trends

The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief - Michael Pollan - NYTimes.com

Plastics in Our Diet: The Need for BPA Regulation

Mediterranean Diet Declines, and Weights Rise - NYTimes.com

Obama's new ad is very serious, very somber, and very long - Ezra Klein

JAMA -- Bisphenol A and Risk of Metabolic Disorders, September 17, 2008, vom Saal and Myers 300 (11): 1353

6 Food Mistakes Parents Make - NYTimes.com

We Fought Cancer…And Cancer Won. | Print Article | Newsweek.com

Loss Of Sleep, Even For A Single Night, Increases Inflammation In The Body

Neurophilosophy : Socializing promotes survival of new nerve cells & may preserve memory

Three Treatments Shown to Work Against Wrinkles - NYTimes.com

NEJM -- Health and Economic Implications of HPV Vaccination in the United States

Early ear infections may pack on pounds later - Kids and parenting- msnbc.com

Charlie Rose Science Series: Human Sexuality - Charlie Rose

JAMA -- Abstract: Arsenic Exposure and Prevalence of Type 2 Diabetes in US Adults

Well - Weight as Main Measure of Health May Be Misguided - NYTimes.com

Six Killers - A Series From The New York Times - Health - News

Despite Olympic Gold, Swimming Statistics Are Grim - Well - Tara Parker-Pope - Health - New York Times Blog

As Swimming Records Fall, Value Is Questioned - NYTimes.com

Olympic Games: Researchers Explore What Makes Better Athletes, The Physiology Of Performance, And More

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