The problem is that agribusiness is grossly unbalanced, flooding Capitol Hill with $1 billion of lobbying efforts the last 11 years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, reaping $177 billion in subsidies the last 12, according to the Environmental Working Group. There is so little accountability in farm payment programs that the Government Accountability Office reported in October that the United States Department of Agriculture paid out a total of $49 million to 2,702 potentially ineligible people whose adjusted gross income was more than $2.5 million and derived less than 75 percent of their income from farming, ranching, or forestry.
The result is government waste and grossly unbalanced supermarket shelves, full of sugars, starches, and fats that are cheap to produce but costly to our bodies and our healthcare system. Can a community organizer from Chicago support community supported agriculture? First, he must display the courage to defend what the likes of Michael Pollan have to say, without apology.
If this is going to happen, Obama is going to have to bring some serious 'tough love' to Americans.
I don't think we realize how addicted to sugar we all are.
The Economist has an article about all of the resources that go into constructing the supermarket experience.
I've touched on this in the past, but it continues to amaze me how much information is behind the presentation of products in a supermarket.
Now Big Brother might be watching what you do:
Technology is making the process of monitoring shopper behaviour easier—which is why the security cameras in a store may be doing a lot more than simply watching out for theft. Rajeev Sharma, of Pennsylvania State University, founded a company called VideoMining to automate the process. It uses image-recognition software to scan the pictures from security cameras of shoppers while they are making their selections. It is capable of looking at the actions of hundreds of thousands of people. It can measure how many went straight to one brand, the number that dithered and those that compared several, at the same time as sorting shoppers by age, gender and ethnicity.
VideoMining analysed people in convenience stores buying beer. Typically it would take them two minutes, with the majority going straight to one brand. “This shows their mind was already made up; they were on autopilot,” says Dr Sharma. So brewers should spend their marketing money outside, not inside, the store. The analysis can also help establish the return on investment to a new advertising campaign by showing what proportion of beer-buyers can be persuaded to consider rival brands. Another study in a supermarket some 12% of people spent 90 seconds looking at juices, studying the labels but not selecting any. In supermarket decision-making time, that is forever. This implies that shoppers are very interested in juices as a healthy alternative to carbonated drinks, but are not sure which to buy. So there is a lot of scope for persuasion.
A growing number of Baltimore residents are being treated in hospitals for illnesses that could be prevented with routine medical care, a new study has found. The health commissioner says the data show "a fundamental failure" of the city's health system.
City residents are being hospitalized or treated in emergency rooms for such conditions as asthma and high blood pressure at rates that are roughly twice those in surrounding counties and statewide, according to the Rand Corp. study.
I could see how the psychology of an Emergency Room staff could shift when there is a high volume of bodies in the room that are not true emergencies.
This also puts extra honus on the staff to figure out which people are real emergencies, which was previously left to the discretion of the people seeking help.
On all kinds of levels, it seems like this would be problematic.
I found out my friend from high school works in the fresh produce industry and she's gonna let me interview her for the blog.
Let me know if you have any question suggestions...
Here are the questions I'm working with:
-Has working in the produce industry changed how you think about food. Has it changed how you eat?
-What do you think the most interesting aspects of the produce industry are?
-Would you say that people in the produce industry are health conscious in general?
-What do people think of industrial agriculture - monocultures, heavy pesticide usage, GMOs, farmer subsidies, and processed food?
-Do you get the sense that there is chatter about what an Obama administration might mean for the industry?
-You mentioned the size and scope of the produce being interesting. Are there things you've seen or heard that have really surprised you and changed your views on produce?
I had the opportunity to talk with a dietitian this weekend at a client's holiday party.
I peppered her with questions and she was very knowledgeable. She has worked as a dietitian in the Army and spent a year in Iraq. Now she is studying to become a physician's assistant.
We talked about everything from fish oil supplements to where troops in Iraq get their fresh produce to food marketing practices.
One idea I will take away: she talked about for weight loss programs, research has shown that diet is crucial in the initial stages for losing weight but that exercise is what really helps keep weight off.
This made me wonder if exercise and nutrition somehow reinforce each other in terms of keeping individuals on the right track for the long term, possibly even on a hormonal level.
I've definitely found that it's easier to keep up with one when I am actively focusing on both.
Policies like this one in New York seem to be gaining more traction on a city and state level.
Inefficiencies are expensive for the body as well as for the body politic:
Gov. Paterson, as part of a $121 billion budget to be unveiled Tuesday, will propose an "obesity tax" of about 15% on nondiet drinks.
This means a Diet Coke might sell for a $1 - even as the same size bottle of its calorie-rich alter ego would go for $1.15.
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The so-called obesity tax would generate an estimated $404 million a year. Milk, juice, diet soda and bottled water would be exempt from the tax.
"I'll just buy less," said Victor Lopez, 55, of Manhattan, as he drank a Coke at a midtown Subway store.
"I don't like to buy Diet Coke," said Amaury Garcia, 16, who works at a flower shop in Penn Station. "I'll just not buy any sodas if it goes up."
Public health advocates welcomed news of the tax, saying it would help the fight against childhood obesity.
"Raising the price of this liquid candy will put children and teens on a path to a healthier diet," said Elie Ward of the American Academy of Pediatrics of New York State.
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This is a move in the right direction.
The incongruence between industrial agriculture policy and health policy in this country is currently staggering.
The healthcare costs nested within consumer choices based on easy access to over-processed food are huge and need to be addressed.
I think that cities and state governments are well positioned to help reprogram consumer choices in this space.
Eventually access to healthy foods, fresh produce needs to be viewed as a societal utility, just like electricity and gas and street lights.
New Princeton study shows some interesting behavior by sugar-eating rats:
The rats drank more alcohol than normal after their sugar supply was cut off, showing that the bingeing behavior had forged changes in brain function. These functions served as "gateways" to other paths of destructive behavior, such as increased alcohol intake. And, after receiving a dose of amphetamine normally so minimal it has no effect, they became significantly hyperactive. The increased sensitivity to the psychostimulant is a long-lasting brain effect that can be a component of addiction, Hoebel said.
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Hoebel has shown that rats eating large amounts of sugar when hungry, a phenomenon he describes as sugar-bingeing, undergo neurochemical changes in the brain that appear to mimic those produced by substances of abuse, including cocaine, morphine and nicotine. Sugar induces behavioral changes, too. "In certain models, sugar-bingeing causes long-lasting effects in the brain and increases the inclination to take other drugs of abuse, such as alcohol," Hoebel said.
Hoebel and his team also have found that a chemical known as dopamine is released in a region of the brain known as the nucleus accumbens when hungry rats drink a sugar solution. This chemical signal is thought to trigger motivation and, eventually with repetition, addiction.
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Hungry rats that binge on sugar provoke a surge of dopamine in their brains. After a month, the structure of the brains of these rats adapts to increased dopamine levels, showing fewer of a certain type of dopamine receptor than they used to have and more opioid receptors. These dopamine and opioid systems are involved in motivation and reward, systems that control wanting and liking something. Similar changes also are seen in the brains of rats on cocaine and heroin.
In experiments, the researchers have been able to induce signs of withdrawal in the lab animals by taking away their sugar supply. The rats' brain levels of dopamine dropped and, as a result, they exhibited anxiety as a sign of withdrawal. The rats' teeth chattered, and the creatures were unwilling to venture forth into the open arm of their maze, preferring to stay in a tunnel area. Normally rats like to explore their environment, but the rats in sugar withdrawal were too anxious to explore.
Some of the research on mind body connections that's coming out is amazing.
Here is some copy about a study on visual perception of the body and its effect on pain intensity (via Mindblog):
Here we report that, in patients with chronic hand pain, magnifying their view of their own limb during movement significantly increases the pain and swelling evoked by movement. By contrast, minifying their view of the limb significantly decreases the pain and swelling evoked by movement. These results show a top-down effect of body image on body tissues, thus demonstrating that the link between body image and the tissues is bi-directional.
This bidirectional link between mind and body is pretty rich territory for research. It puts more science behind the idea that all disease starts in the mind.
Taken literally as dis-ease, the lack of ease, I think this research is even more salient. The effects of an unquiet mind on the body are very much an unknown variable that hopefully will continue to get attention from researchers.
I've read a little about intermittent fasting and it makes sense in terms of evolutionary biology but it's been a challenge to implement in a knowledgeable way.
The research is compelling though...I thought this article was pretty thought-provoking.
Men who halve the amount they normally eat for a week or two once a month could markedly lower their chances of a tumour at a young age.
Animal studies carried out at the University of Minnesota showed wartime eating habits significantly delayed the onset of cancer.
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But the study showed going on a permanent low-calorie diet did not have the same powerful effect.
Scientists think occasional rationing may ward off cancer by constantly adjusting the balance of certain fat hormones.
I know that the body's hormones respond most beneficially to varied amounts/intensity of exercise.
So it makes sense that body's hormones could respond in the same way to varied amounts/intensity of food intake.
In the end, we are designed for lots of activity and lots of food intake as well as little activity and little food intake.
And it sounds like our bodies might need both to maintain it's most natural, disease-free state.
Some of the anecdotes in the article are really good:
In 2004, experts at Harvard Medical School in Boston, found women who regularly rationed their food were half as likely to get breast cancer as those who always ate until they were full.
More recently, researchers studying daughters of women caught in the Dutch famine of 1944-45 found they were more fertile and had a higher number of pregnancies than those born to mothers with better food supplies.
...
The health of Britain's population actually improved after rationing was introduced during World War Two in 1940, finally ending in 1954.
Most people ate less meat, fat, eggs and sugar as they were all in short supply.
Instead, consumption of home-grown vegetables rose dramatically. Infant mortality rates declined and the average age at which people died from natural causes increased.
And, as the Swedish medical school Karolinska Institutet so bluntly put it, exercise “cuts cancer death in men,” too. The Swedish researchers examined some forty thousand men of varying ages for seven years. Of that group, around 3700 developed cancer; 1,153 died from it. For those cancer patients who also walked or cycled for at least thirty minutes a day, the survival rate increased 33% against those who didn’t exercise at all. An extensive (60 to 90 minutes a day) exercise program was even shown to reduce the incidence of cancer by 16%.
These are real numbers and do not speak to the preventative abilities of exercise in keeping people healthy on a cellular level.
If you've never heard of her, check out the work of Esther Gokhale.
Here she is at Google:
She's done a lot of research into posture-related issues across societies and has a book out on back pain.
Check out this testimonial on her web site:
"I have had significant problems with low back pain and sciatica for more than two decades. At several points I was unable to walk more than fifty yards without squatting to relieve the pain, and required one back surgery for for a slipped disk. Back pain often kept me from sleeping. I tried excercises and pain-killers with mixed and generally poor results. The person who has helped me the most over the years has been Esther Gokhale. My back problem is now essentially under control. I no longer regularly wake up with a sore back and generally am able to walk five or more miles a day with little or no discomfort, and if I avoid cramped long-term sitting I can mostly forget about the back that plagued me for so long."
Paul R. Ehrlich, Ph.D. Bing Professor of Population Studies President, Center for Conservation Biology Department of Biological Sciences Stanford University, Stanford, CA
(If you've never heard of Paul R. Ehrlich, you should stick him in wikipedia.)
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I just finished watching her presentation. It's very interesting and I'm sold. In the end, it's about doing what other people are doing who don't have back pain...
The other piece to this is what issues might arise when your posture is off. She mentions circulation, which I imagine could have huge implications. I am wondering if there is other stuff.
That's what Jack Lalanne had to say about what not to eat.
When a dude can do over 1000 pushups in a row at the ripe old age of 42, I think you should listen to what they have to say...
Here are some other suggestions from Lalanne:
-Exercise 30 minutes a day, three to four times a week. Change your routine every two to three weeks.
-Set short-term fitness goals and follow through.
-Slowly change a few bad habits by starting good habits. For example, substitute white bread with whole-wheat bread or start eating fresh fruit for desserts instead of sweets.
-Eat foods in their natural states and in as many varieties as you can.
At a time when more and more children are getting diagnosed with disordered behavior (specifically bipolar disorder and ADHD) and getting prescribed meds, it's important to historically contextualize phramaceutical drugs and the medical establishment itself.
Once you dig into the progression of treatment for behavioral problems, you realize that pharmaceutical drugs picked up where lobotomies left off...and that members of the medical establishment - who once promoted lobotomies as a legitimate treatment - have profoundly failed the public in the very recent past.
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Walter Freeman was an Ivy League educated, DC-based doctor who came from a family of doctors. His father was a doctor as was his grandfather, who was also a president of the American Medical Association.
Without a background in surgery, Freeman leveraged his credentials as a medical professional and performed lobotomies across the country. He promoted "ice pick" lobotomies, which were initially performed with actual ice picks.
Freeman achieved a significant amount of notoriety and eventually lobotomized JFK's younger sister Rosemary Kennedy.
PBS recently did a really good piece on Freeman. Here is an excerpt (the video is a little graphic):
It wasn't until the 1950s that lobotomies began to lose traction as an effective treatment.
And guess what displaced lobotomies...
Pharmaceutical drugs.
Here is Elliot Valenstein, a neuroscience professor who wrote a book about lobotomies, talking about what caused the lobotomy's demise:
STAY FREE!: Why did lobotomy go into decline?
VALENSTEIN: It started in the middle to late ’50s, at the time of the introduction of neuroleptic drugs--Thorazine and some of the antidepressants. There was a whole group of them that came out in the late 1950s. They were often given in massive doses, and they seemed to be producing the same kind of effects as a lobotomy. If you’ve seen anybody on drugs like Thorazine, their face is expressionless and the saliva’s dripping out of the corner of their mouth. People referred to Thorazine as a chemical lobotomy, and it was much more convenient than performing surgery. It was more cost-efficient because it didn’t require a neurosurgeon and it didn’t require intensive postoperative care. So it very quickly replaced the operations.
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At the end of the day, I'm pretty sure that there are not checks in place to keep the drug industry - which funds a growing number of the drug studies, directly employs doctors, and funds political campaigns - from creating a situation where drugs could be promoted just like lobotomies were.
I think you could argue the climate could be worse than when Freeman set off on his national campaign with his 'lobotomobile.'
As more and more kids are placed on drugs that haven't been clinically tested for children, I can't help but think that these drugs are the equivalent of a chemical lobotomy.
STAY FREE!: What are the parallels between the lobotomy period and what’s going on today? There’s a lot of enthusiasm for what used to be called somatic treatment, going after mental disease as a physical set of symptoms. You wrote about this in your latest book, Blaming the Brain.
VALENSTEIN: The influence of the pharmaceutical companies is so great these days because of the resources they have at their disposal. There are tremendous economic factors distorting the practice of medicine, just as there were in the lobotomy period. It is hard to find any clinicians or researchers who don’t have vested interests in the development of procedures or drugs. I mean that. Of course, they will deny that funding from drug companies has an influence, but it is so subtle that they’re unaware of it themselves. Studies have shown that if you look at reports on drugs that are competing to treat the same patient population, and if you look at the connection that the people doing the studies have with the companies involved, the results that they find--not only the opinions they express but the actual data--clearly reflect their own vested interest. I don’t think people really lie, but it happens in very subtle ways, like disqualifying patients because they are ill with something else. Those same patients would not be omitted if their outcome supported the conclusions the researcher wanted. And there are professional interests as well: psychiatrists have to compete with social workers, clinical psychologists, counselors of all sorts. Most people who seek help for a mental problem do not go to a psychiatrist. So there’s a strong economic reason why psychiatrists are very supportive of drugs: protecting their own turf. That’s not the only reason, but it certainly has an influence.
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If you're still interested:
NPR did a story on one of Freeman's lobotomy patients here.
Frontline did a really good piece on medicating kids you can watch online here.
So...if you like this blog and you want to be part of an online community concerned with fitness, nutrition and healthier lifestyles, join the Against Routine Social Network.
So far it's me and my girlfriend but we'll see what happens.
ABC news did this piece a while back on the policy landscape that has led to industrial agriculture and the resultant over-production of nutrient-poor, corn-sweetened food.
The video does a good job at pointing out the profound discrepency between agricultural policy and health policy.
A while back NPR did a piece on a non-profit in the Detroit area that was creating farm plots in run down parts of the city that had been hit hard with foreclosures.
The NPR piece talked about urban farming as a tool for community rejuvenation:
Wojtowicz says the biggest benefit, though, is less blight in the neighborhood. And residents say that, unlike abandoned houses, the gardens aren't targeted by vandals.
Detroit resident Eric Parrish says that those who live around the gardens respect the farming projects. "They see we're doing something to help the community," he says.
Parrish says he recently started gardening with Urban Farming because it helps turn things around in his city.
"You can tell people are struggling. So when I do see these plots of land it makes me say, 'I want to garden there,' " he says.
Parrish says most people are grateful for the gardens, although at first a few were concerned they would attract pests.
Turns out that urban farms do attract people, says Gail Carr, one of Detroit's city managers. She has houses boarded up nearly every day and sees what a dramatic difference the gardens have on communities.
"People are coming out of their homes who wouldn't come out under other circumstances because they didn't think there was still a community or a neighbor or a friendly person nearby," she says.
Localizing food production will help eat into the carbon footprint of industrial agriculture and also has the side benefits of building community, pumping healthier food into low-income urban regions, and getting people working together on a common project.
The above mentioned organization - Urban Farming - has the following video on their web site. It's worth a look:
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If you live in DC and would like to get involved with a local farm, DC has a local garden that takes volunteers. It is actually relocating but Prince of Petworth has the info on it.
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Here's one more video of an urban farm in Chicago...conditions sound a lot like parts of DC with little to no access to fresh produce:
PE4Life is the physical education program mentioned in John Ratey's book Spark.
And check out this quote from Dr. Alan Lies, the School District Superintendent:
I think the other thing that we're learning is as important as reading and mathematics and the basic core subject areas are, PE - daily physical activity - can really enhance students' learning overall in those basic skills...
I don't think many of us as Superintendants have thought about PE as a door to improving reading and math instruction, but I think it really is.
If school administrators, parents, and politicians could figure this out, we'd be able to improve the education system and drastically benefit the healthcare system in one fell swoop.
The research is there, the overmedicated and overweightt kids are there, the crappy test scores are there, and now the organizational model is there.
Why aren't we doing this?
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If you live in DC and wanna contact Michelle Rhee, click here.
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Here's the message I just left:
Dear Chancellor Rhee,
I'm a Certified Personal Trainer and have been following the child obesity epidemic nationwide and the increasing physical and emotional issues that plague young people around the country.
I have also been following your accomplishments in the District and I am very supportive of your campaign to make DC public schools the best in the country.
I recently came across the PE4Life program out of Illinois and wanted to throw it out as a possible model for DC public schools.
Here are some links with some more information. The second links to a video that is really good.
Also, a new book called Spark has come out looking at the relationship between exercise and brain development. The book examines PE4life and how it has dramatically improved academic achievement for the kids involved.
The evidence is incontrovertible: Aerobic exercise physically remodels our brains for peak performance.
In SPARK, John J. Ratey, M.D., embarks upon a fascinating and entertaining journey through the mind-body connection, presenting startling research to prove that exercise is truly our best defense against everything from depression to ADD to addiction to aggression to menopause to Alzheimer's. Filled with amazing case studies (such as the revolutionary fitness program in Naperville, Illinois, which has put this school district of 19,000 kids first in the world of science test scores), SPARK is the first book to explore comprehensively the connection between exercise and the brain. It will change forever the way you think about your morning run---or, for that matter, simply the way you think.
Dr. Lynn E. O'Connor writes a review of Spark that goes into more detail on the forementioned program in Illinois:
It describes a pilot program in a school district in Naperville Illinois. They discovered that strenuous physical exercise led to participating schools raising their scores in all the national tests measuring children and adolescent’s academic achievement. One year they had 97% of their 8th graders take the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), an international test of science knowledge/skills. Their young adolescents scored first, just ahead of Singapore. They have found that kids who participate in the program (they changed the name from PE to Fitness) end up with dramatic changes in their learning, concentration, memorization skills, cognitive flexibility, etc.
The kids are all given heart rate monitors and instead of competing with each other as they do in more traditional sports, they each are expected to keep their heart rates at 80% of capacity for an hour –therefore they are going for their own personal best. The effect on learning is remarkable. They found that the kids who arrive at school at 6:30AM to do their exercise are more able to learn in the classes that follow. Other research (on mice for example) is described, demonstrating the mechanics of this, with physical exercise leading to significant increases in BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) and other growth hormones which directly lead to neurogenesis –making new neurons affecting the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus (maybe other brain areas also, I don’t know yet, still reading the book).
