Health
BPA: What it Is & Why We Should Ban It
Published June 03, 2009 @ 02:46PM PT
BPA stands for Bisphenol A. You'll find it in everything from baby bottles to canned foods. Particularly canned tomatoes. And it's an endocrine disruptor. There's a bill in Congress to ban it right now.
Back in February, news came out that BPA remains in our bodies for longer than previously thought. According to blogger JayinPortland:
BPA is a known endocrine disruptor commonly used in the production of many household items, from baby bottles to plastic food containers to soup cans to dental fillings; and exposure via tap water and house dust is now also thought possible. Many studies have linked long term, low-level BPA exposure to everything from increased risks for obesity by triggering fat-cell activity, to diabetes, heart disease and an increased risk of developing breast cancer later in life from fetal exposure.
Not good, huh? Jay's been reporting on this issue regularly, writing about a study of how major companies are addressing the issue (the grades the companies got ranged from C's to F's) and about how the government has failed to protect us from it. In the latter article, he quotes the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as saying:
In one instance, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's deputy director sought information from the BPA industry's chief lobbyist to discredit a Japanese study that found it caused miscarriages in workers who were exposed to it. This was before government scientists even had a chance to review the study.
So what's the latest? The BPA industry is banding together to fight the possibility of a ban on BPA. Major companies like Pepsi, Nestle, and Bayer have also been lobbying the U.S. government about the bills that would ban BPA. Meanwhile, food safety advocates hope that the BPA ban can be added as an amendment to a food safety bill so that they can be passed together. Please write your legislators and ask them to ban BPA!
Photo credit: eyeliam on Flickr.com
Bisphenolic A, Man!
Published June 03, 2009 @ 11:13AM PT
LaVidaLocavore got to this before I did, but you've got to read this from the report on a meeting bisphenol A manufacturing groups. Emphasis mine:
... The committee will spend approximately $500,000 to develop a survey on consumer BPA perceptions and messaging and eventually content and outreach materials. Overall, the committee seemed disorganized, and its members frustrated. Lack of direction from the committee and these associations could continue to allow other associations and environmental groups to push BPA out.
Other Points: Attendees suggested using fear tactics (e.g. “Do you want to have access to baby food anymore?”) as well as giving control back to consumers (e.g. you have a choice between the more expensive product that is frozen or fresh or foods packaged in cans) as ways to dissuade people from choosing BPA-free packaging. Attendees noted, in the past, the different associations have had a reactive strategy with the media, with very limited proactive outreach in reaching out to journalists. The committee agrees they need to promote new, relevant content to get the BPA perspective into the media mix. The committee believes industry studies are tainted from the public perspective.
The committee doubts social media outlets, such as Facebook or Twitter, will work for positive BPA outreach. The committee wants to focus on quality instead of quantity in disseminating messages (e.g. a young kid or pregnant mother providing a positive quote about BPA, a testimonial from an outside expert, providing positive video, advice from third party experts, and relevant messaging on the GMA website). Members noted traditional media outreach has become too expensive (they have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars) and the media is starting to ignore their side. The committee doubts obtaining a scientific spokesperson is attainable. Their “holy grail” spokesperson would be a “pregnant young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits of BPA.” ...
Consider it a real life object lesson in corporate PR. Can we say it's safe? Can we get a sympathetic spokesperson to say that they don't care about the risks? Can we get sympathetic regulators to ignore the mounting scientific evidence of harm? Can we throw a few hundred thousand more dollars in the mix and protect our investment in this crappy thing that's making people sick?
It's a time-tested strategy. It often works.
Will it work on a chemical shown to promote cardiovascular disease and diabetes, which two diseases that have been blamed by industry entirely on the poor lifestyle choices of their customers? Will it work for a chemical that feminizes infant male monkeys, stifles thyroid in frogs, reduces the effectiveness of prostate cancer treatment and is more potentially damaging to young infants?
We'll find out.
(Photo credit: pfly on Flickr.)
Sustainability
Published May 29, 2009 @ 11:42AM PT
A refresher for the interested:
... Since the 1980s, the idea of sustainable human well-being has become increasingly associated with the integration of economic, social and environmental spheres. In 1989, the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) articulated what has now become a widely accepted definition of sustainability: "[to meet] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” ...
What does this mean for food? At its simplest, that we should feed ourselves today without compromising the ability of future generations to feed themselves, or otherwise meet their basic needs.
As I wrote yesterday, it also seems a very contrary to the basic human instinct to create a better future for one's children to leave future generations with a diminished ability to care for themselves. In political terms, to leave them with a worse standard of living than we now enjoy. It seems worth drawing attention again to Lakoff's point about the dominant corporate perspective:
... Finally, for those in the business world: Corporate interests are constantly putting forth arguments based on cost-benefit analysis. But the very mathematics of cost-benefit analysis is anti-ecological; the equations themselves are destructive of the earth.
The basic math uses subtraction: the benefits minus the costs summed over time indefinitely. Now those "benefits" and "costs" are seen in monetary terms, as if all values involving the future of the earth were monetary.
As any economist knows, future money is worth less than present money. How much less? The equation has a factor that tells you how much: e (2.781828...) to the power minus-d times t, where t is time and d is the discount rate. Now e to a negative power gets very small very fast. Just how fast depends on the exact discount rate (that is, interest rate), but any reasonable one is a disaster. The equation says that, in a fairly short time, any monetary benefits compared to costs will tend to zero. That says there are no long-term benefits to saving the earth! ...
The presumption that future people will be, in essence, infinitely richer than we are and capable of solving any problems we leave behind seems overly optimistic.
In regards, once again to agriculture, industrial agriculture promotes erosion and degradation of the soil. It promotes the rapid drawdown of fossil water and surface water supplies in regions where the overall trend is towards increasing droughts, as well as maintaining soil conditions such that water is more likely to immediately be drained to open waterways. It continues to put chemicals that we haven't evolved to metabolize or excrete into the food chain, where they circulate and bioaccumulate - chemicals and heavy metals whose lifetime burden for an adult human may only markedly decrease in women who breastfeed, as they pass their toxins on to their helpless infants. It's made farming such an unappealing profession that its median age has steadily climbed in the US, depriving us slowly but surely of the human capital needed to maintain a diverse food supply.
In the decades since the industrialization of agriculture, a system of practice relating as much to distribution and purchasing concentration as to means of production, US citizens' health has flatlined, then declined. We are already worse off than our parents, but there are those who want to stick with this disastrous present course and see how it goes. Maybe even more profits can be had by making the next generation sicker than the present.
The best that defenders of industrial agriculture can say is that people aren't always made worse off by it. Oh, only some people get cancer and diabetes from what we're doing. Only some ecosystems are ruined. We can't do any better, they say.
How sorry, unimaginative, uninspired, and morose a perspective.
I'd rather like to think that we could have a future where our food system was an aid to maximum attainable health, for ourselves as well as the habitat we depend on for clean air and water. I like to think that we could preserve our current biodiversity, with all its many beauties and benefits, and still eat well.
I like to think that we're creative and intelligent enough to overcome the obstacles in the way of achieving these goals. We did figure out how to land people on the Moon, build the Internet, map the genome, put up skyscrapers, maintain satellite broadcast and cell phone networks, etc. I think we're up to the challenge.
The industry responsible for Agent Orange and DDT thinks that this is an unserious and irresponsible view. They have shareholders to think of, after all.
(Photo credit: Brooke on Flickr.)
7 Years, 428 Percent Profits
Published May 29, 2009 @ 08:47AM PT
This week, Steph continues her series on a critical piece of social infrastructure necessary for growing the small-scale farming sector, or any other part of a more localized economy that depends on small businesses: making a public healthcare option available to everyone.
Farmers and ranchers know all too well about the problems that occur when a marketplace has too few competitors. When corporations consolidate, the resulting bigger business squeezes out the smaller businesses that compete against it. With less competition, there is nothing stopping the consolidated business from later raising retail prices for consumers or, in the case of farmers, lowering the price paid to farmers for livestock or grain.
A lack of competition is a problem for a functioning market, regardless of whether you're buying grain, livestock, thing-a-ma-jigs or ... health care (pdf).
With health insurance costs rising much higher than wages, Health Care for America Now! began a study to see whether lack of competition could be one of the reasons. They found that in the past 13 years, there have been more than 400 corporate mergers involving health insurers. These days a small number of companies dominate local markets, but the promises of increased efficiencies and lowered costs have not materialized.
The most staggering statistic for me was that from 2000 to 2007, profits at the top 10 publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428%. Talk about beating the stock market...
This lack of competition is especially bad for small non-profit organizations or people who are self-employed or own small businesses. In a consolidated market, an insurance company can set prices as high as they want, and small groups or individuals don't have the ability to purchase policies "in bulk", so it's like they're paying retail for something larger businesses and organizations can buy wholesale.
Small businesses, entrepreneurs and self-employed workers are the lifeblood of rural communities. Without health reform that works for them, the economies of our rural communities will continue to suffer. Yet our rural states are some of the most consolidated in the country.
In Vermont (pdf) for example, where 62% of the population lives in rural communities, two companies control 90% of the market share of health insurance. Montana's (pdf) rural population is 46% of its total population, and one insurance company has 75% of the market. Iowa (pdf) has 1.1 million people in rural areas, and 80% of the insurance market is controlled by the top 2 insurers.
Of the list of top 10 most consolidated health insurance states, only two - Hawaii and Rhode Island - have a rural population of less than 30% of their total population.
So who needs competition? Clearly it helps us all, but rural states look to be especially hurt by the consolidation of the health insurance industry. The next question must then be: What will you do about it?
Here's something to do: Urge your Senators to stand up for rural voters in your state. If you live in Nebraska, Iowa, Montana, or western Wisconsin click on your state to see where to send a letter. If you don't live in one of those states, click here to find your members of Congress and be sure to send to their offices in your state to avoid security delays. When you write, consider including the following talking points:
- Health care coverage must be affordable, accessible, and available to everyone
- A public plan option - one that consumers can choose if they want to - is necessary to guarantee competition among insurers
- Reform that includes meaningful options for small business and the self-employed will bolster entrepreneurship
- Talk about your own experience with health care, or the importance of health care reform to your community
It's the role of government to protect citizens from abuse by big corporations. It's time we raise our voices and demand equality in health care.
Update: Over at DailyKos, McJoan writes about growing support for a public option in Montana, where the government describes the healthcare market as 'highly concentrated.' - Natasha
Light Supper by Hurricane Lamp
Published May 28, 2009 @ 03:59PM PT
Raiding the internet fridge for your intellectual delectation ...
- Why global warming means more killer storms.
- How gardeners can help food pantries with their surplus produce.
- The bisphenol A in polycarbonate containers "has been shown to interfere with reproductive development in animals and has been linked with cardiovascular disease and diabetes in humans."
- LaVidaLocavore: Dear The USDA, Wendell Berry is relatively harmless. As the food industry is now coming out in favor of safety regulations, it makes the effectiveness of those regulations immediately suspect.
- Civil Eats: Maybe cooptation of language doesn't have to be a one way street. A review of the diary of an urban farmer. Time vs. geography - a chef's meditation on local food.
- The Green Fork: An encouraging update on the success of Farm-To-School programs. The new movie, Fresh, by Ana Joanes, will hopefully make it vastly more difficult for the food industry to convince people that sustainable food advocates want to starve them.
The Dead Zone
Published May 28, 2009 @ 01:58PM PT
No, not the TV series. The fish kill:
... Wilma [Subra] explains, “Nitrogen and phosphorous from fertilizers travel down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico. This makes algae blossom like crazy. As the algae grow, they use up all the oxygen. When they die off, they sink to the bottom of the ocean and use up more oxygen there, too. So there’s this layer of water in the Gulf that is void of oxygen—that means nothing can live there.” ...
As they explain over at Twilight Earth, the fertilizer used to grow plants on land (including and especially the corn used for animal feed) is killing off ocean fisheries near the mouths of our rivers, pitting one food sector against another.
Fishing is particularly dependent on the health and vibrancy of wild ecosystems, and humans are very dependent on fishing. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, fish make up 15 percent of the world population's protein intake. That's a fairly sizable supply of food for which there isn't a ready replacement.
Nor is that the only threat to our fishy food supply. Along with overfishing, other agricultural chemicals threaten the continuity of safe seafood consumption, such as direct pesticide fish kills and the tissue accumulation of organochlorine pesticides (including those that have been banned in the US but are still used abroad,) and mercury from coal plants.
School Lunch: Bad On Purpose
Published May 27, 2009 @ 08:58AM PT
This Los Angeles Times article does a decent job laying out the hurdles schools face in providing healthy meals for students, but I've got a little quibble:
... The U.S. government spends about $11.7 billion a year on school programs that provide lunch for over 30 million children and breakfast for more than 10 million -- but has not updated nutritional standards and meal requirements since 1995.
States have tried to act without waiting for the federal government. As of last August, 18 states had adopted tougher nutritional standards than the U.S. government -- but most lack enforcement power and cannot punish noncompliance, says the Trust for America's Health, a nonprofit organization that works to raise community health standards. ...
When I wrote about the garbage in school lunches last week, I linked to a Mother Jones article that tells the story of that mid-1990s standards process, and the railroading of Ellen Haas, nutritional reformer appointed by President Clinton, by food service industry lobbyists and commodity groups:
... Haas soon found herself frozen out by legislators and abandoned by the Clinton administration. Says a key USDA staffer, "We were told by the White House, ‘You have to live with this.'"
Although Congress did set fat limits for school lunches, it created no effective mechanism for reaching those standards -- and no penalty for failing. ...
The crappy food that kids are served at school is not an accident. The crappy food that's advertised to them (and everyone) on television and any other waking moment by people with psychology and marketing PhDs, that's not an accident, either. The proliferation of cheap burgers and nachos, the banishment of carrots and leafy greens to the upscale neighborhoods, this is not an accident either.
Our food system is the way that it is on purpose and it can only get better the same way: on purpose.
As fellow Change.org blogger, Clay Burell, noted on the Education blog, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has a petition going to ask for more vegetarian and vegan options in school lunches.
They don't mean fries, cheese pizza and mushy, canned green beans, either. (Good grief, I hated the canned green beans when I was a kid.)
I'm not one to insist that people swear off meat and cheese, but the stuff they serve at most schools ... whatever people can eat, they need fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, food that very obviously came from a recently living plant. For kids, doubly so.
Please ask for more vegetarian and vegan options in school lunches, today.
(Photo credit: Marshall Astor on Flickr.
