Signs of Life

With the presidential election coming up, I’m struck by how little I know about official health policy in the US. Take the Farm Bill, which, many experts have noted, should rightly be called the Food Bill for the manifold ways it affects the food available to us.

Very few people (save for a few legislators from farm-heavy states) know much about the Farm Bill. But we should, say the pros. Prominent food writer and journalist, Michael Pollan, writes in the forward to Daniel Imhoff’s Farm Bill primer, Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to the Food and Farm Bill: “Nothing could do more to reform America’s food system, and by doing so, improve the condition of America’s environment and public health, than if the rest of us were to weigh in [on the Farm Bill].”

So I’ve decided it’s about time to do my part and learn about the Farm Bill — and drag you along for the ride. Here’s the thing, though: I fear learning about the Farm Bill is going to be a wonky drag. So I think we should create some rules. First, we should break our lesson up into installments. Next, we should keep the installments short. And, finally, we should put the information we talk about in lists (who doesn’t love lists? They’re cute and friendly, and they make the information contained in them seem real important-like. Ahem.).

So let’s get started with some facts about what the Farm Bill is (I’m summarizing this info from Food Fight):

1.    The Farm Bill dates back to the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, and it has been renewed every five to seven years since.
2.    It is, perhaps, the single most significant piece of legislation effecting land use in the United States.
3.    It addresses many issues, but the two biggest are: (1) food stamps and nutrition programs and (2) crop subsidies.
4.    The other issues it addresses are many — and they vary widely, from trade policy to foreign aid to forestry (to name only a very few). And Congress prefers it that way because the more they stuff into one single bill, the more incomprehensible the bill becomes — and the less apt the general public is to understand, and try to influence, the bill. (How shameless! I feel so used!)
5.    The Farm Bill’s original goals were noble indeed: they sought to provide a safety net for a fickle profession (farming) and for a vulnerable public (impoverished children and adults who did not otherwise have access to enough calories to sustain themselves). But…
6.    Something happened along the way and now, instead of bolstering the health of family farms and meeting the nutritional needs of underprivileged children, the Farm Bill subsidizes the richest 5 percent of corporate farms and promotes the creation of surplus commodity crops, which, more often than not, get turned into cheap, processed foods that contribute to our collective, national weight gain and ill-health.

Okay, that’s a good start. Tune in for our next exciting installment: Why the Farm Bill matters. (I know you’re holding your breath in anticipation!!)

This October EL is doing it’s first ever issue on the politics of health. What’s political about health, you say?

The better question is: what isn’t?

The thing is: we don’t stay healthy (or unhealthy) in a vacuum. We are influenced by the world around us and the laws and regulations that help shape it. Take government nutrition guidelines. They attempt to establish how much of certain things we should eat or not, and whether to classify certain foods as healthy or unhealthy. And most of us (having been forced to memorize the now-abandoned food pyramid as children) have a vague sense of these guidelines and try, almost by reflex, to follow them.

But come to find out (on page 22 of the October issue of EL) that many government-backed dietary recommendations have been influenced by food-industry lobbyists. In 2007 alone, food-industry interests spent more than 70 million dollars to ensure that government recommendations were “friendly” to the processed-food industry. And, sure enough, just a few weeks after an industry “grant” to the American Diabetics Association, the organization’s chief medical and scientific officer claimed that sugar has no influence on weight or diabetes. (Gasp!)

But politics doesn’t just content itself with food. Another interesting fact: our economic system is based primarily on consumption — by design. The rise of the rabid consumer was planned by the folks who wanted to usher in a period of unparalleled economic growth after World War II. They saw constant consumption of goods and services as the only way to sustain large-scale economic growth. Some devilishly clever marketing here, a bit of planned obsolescence there, and, voila, fifty years later consumption has become the single sustaining force in our economy as well as our national identity.

(One of the troubles with this paradigm, of course, is that consumption has been shown not to promote lasting happiness or life satisfaction. It can also lead to money troubles. In fact, therapists are now starting to classify and treat “money disorders.”)

The list of ways that health and policy intersect is endless. Flip through the October EL for a closer look at some of the key issues. Meanwhile, tune in for the presidential debates tonight. No matter what your political bent, the sparring should make great TV. In fact, I pre-emptively declare the upcoming series of debates the best new show of the year.

I spent a week on the North Shore in April. (Photo credit: Rambling Traveler; licensed under the Creative Commons)

Blogging is blogging because it’s casual, relevant and frequent. As in, it happens regularly. As in, twice a week. Or once a week. Or several times a day.

Recently I’ve fallen short in the frequency department. Here’s how I fell off the wagon: a holiday weekend (July 4th) hit, followed by a day or two of vacation, followed by a busy time in the production schedule when I was back at work, followed up by a dismaying few days of underinspiration and general lack of interesting things to say (one could argue that this period is not yet over… ahem).

So today, with a little more time in my schedule, my natural instinct was to start feeling guilty about my lapse. But lately I’ve been working to fight my natural propensity for guilt, so I began to look for a positive perspective on my long stretch of silence — and I found it in the importance of vacations.

Now, granted, I was not vacating the office the whole time I was asleep in the blogosphere. But the holiday weekend did kick off my extended stretch, and summer is one of the classic vacation times. So what better time to think about the necessity of vacations.

In March, we ran a story on the critical importance of vacations — and how our culture doesn’t recognize or support the regular taking of them (read No-Vacation Nation here). In short, the story recounted how vacations are necessary not just for health and happiness, but also for success and productivity. Yet we Americans take far too few of them.

Another seminal point in the story is that when many of us DO take vacation, we take some work — maybe a laptop or our blackberry — with us. We don’t ever truly vacate from our duties and responsibilities.

We’re always connected — dizzyingly so — with our work, our to-do lists, our daily tasks, our online audience, be it comprised of one reader (Hi, Aunt!) or 100,000. We rarely, if ever, fully step out of our daily routines.

Yes, it’s in our cultural DNA to work round the clock — our country was built on the idea of hard work and ritual sacrifice. But it’s in the best interest of our health to take a break now and then. And not just by turning off the phone for an evening. We need to really disconnect, get away, take more than a long weekend. These longer breaks give us the opportunity both to reconnect with our true selves (who we are as human beings as opposed to human doings) as well as with family, health, dreams, goals, sleep, leisure, and joy.

I stumbled across a recent New York Times article on the exhaustion (sometimes deadly) of round the clock blogging — and, indeed, it would seem that, as the author Matt Richtel suggests, 24/7 blogging and continual connectivity is the 21st Century sweatshop. The digital dawn has made our lives easier in many respects, but it also asks us to pay for that ease with our time and near constant attention.

And while I’m not in any way comparing myself to those fevered 24/7 bloggers — hardly! — I think with the completion of this post I’ll take a mini-vacation break for tea and a bowl of raspberries in whole milk. And you, having just read this post, should turn off the computer and do the same.

My dogs own my deck.

At my house, the arrival of summer means a spontaneous doubling of living space: my deck becomes the brightly-lit reading, dining and crafting room. My backyard fire pit becomes a second kitchen. My clothesline becomes my de facto dryer. My front steps become my phone booth (real classy like, I know). And on and on.

But I’m not the only one. My dogs are also outside with a vengeance, barking at defenseless older people as they walk by and scavenging for maple tree helicopters and rocks as the mood strikes. They’ve also claimed the deck chairs as their own (see photographic evidence, above).

But that brings me to the matter at hand: Sharing the backyard with Spot isn’t always a seamless endeavor, especially if the human family members want a garden and the canine family members treat the yard like an all-you-can-eat-buffet. There’s also the matter of safety for both pets and humans.

So here’s some advice on how to have a beautiful backyard/extra summer living space that’s also fido-friendly — and safe for all:

1. Say NO to pesticides — Cancer risk is much higher for pets in homes where pesticides are regularly applied to the lawn. Remember, they are putting all four paws and often their noses directly into whatever goes on the grass. They’re also bringing the toxins inside with them (and so are you if you step in the lawn) where the toxins become dangerous indoor dust that everyone in the family breathes in (and even more is getting tracked onto furniture or the bed if you let your dogs lounge in those spots). Avoid chemical lawn treatments and embrace natural weed control instead, including:

• Corn gluten meal — inhibits seed germination and is a pre-emergent weed killer. Apply in early spring before weeds come up.
• Mulch — mulches help control weeds naturally, but avoid using cocoa bean mulch in any area where dogs have free rein. Cocoa is toxic for dogs when ingested.
• Rock gardens — Rocks as mulch are also pretty, and are generally safe for Spot. But if your dog is a serious backyard grazer, avoid them — especially if the rocks are small and your dog is small (big things happen fast in small intestinal tracks). Eating too many rocks can cause intestinal blockage and, in some cases, death.
• Let your yard go natural — this is perhaps the healthiest (and simplest and cheapest) option for your personal health, for your pet’s health and for the environment.

2. Un-treat your lumber — Treated lumber is loaded with nasty chemicals, including arsenic, that can leach into the dirt where Fido digs and sometimes snacks. Stick with untreated cedar for garden borders or fencing.

3. Fix-up burned grass naturally — The backyard doubles as your dog’s bathroom and you can often tell exactly where they go #1 because of the burned grass. Apply Gypsum to the to the affected areas to help minimize burns. You can also try putting a little brown sugar on the affected area and watering. This is said to help attract worms, who in turn help aerate the soil and improve drainage. (Note of caution: dogs may want to snack on lawn care additives that smell like, or are, food. So apply before a big rain or water well to keep them from grazing on your soil amendments.)

4. Plant dense — Dogs have bad depth perception and can’t always see single plantings (which means they are more likely to tear through them). Plant dense to help Spot see what’s coming as he tears around the yard. (Note, this will not help if your dog is simply naughty.) Another bonus: dense plantings naturally inhibit weeds.

5. Get a motion activated sprinkler — Most dogs hate getting wet, so a great way to keep dogs out of backyard gardens is to put a motion activated sprinkler in the bed and wait for Spot to saunter over and lift his leg. He’ll get soaked and saunter off and your garden will get a nice mist. Kill two birds with one stone!

Baking soda will bring world peace.

The economy’s crummy. Money’s tight. Here are some healthy ways to spread your dollars:

1. Use Baking Soda for Everything. Seriously. — It wasn’t long ago that people used baking soda for everything around the house. And I mean everything. Then devilish marketers arrived on the scene and sold us on supposedly higher power, often highly toxic, and way more expensive substitutes. But baking soda has all the power you need — and best of all, it’s natural, nontoxic and cheap, cheap, cheap! Here are a small fraction of the many uses for baking soda:

Clean countertops, sinks, bathtubs, and crusty dishes — Baking soda is mildly abrasive and, with a bit of water, dissolves grease and dirt. Keep a cup filled with baking soda by the kitchen and bathroom sinks so it’s always handy. (Consider buying aluminum-free baking soda for the hot bath and for baking.)

Clean yourself — Baking soda cleans hands and nails and softens cuticles. Again put a dish filled with baking soda near the sink and use as hand soap. Or dip a nail brush into the bowl and scrub away that post-gardening grit. Add a cup of baking soda to your next bath, too. It softens the skin and helps detoxify.

Get Beautiful — Mix 3 parts baking soda with one part water and it becomes an exfoliating face scrub. Also use on elbows to remove rough skin.

Wash the Dog — Sprinkle some on Fido, rub in with your hands, then brush well. He’ll have that new dog smell all over again.

Remove Little Sally’s permanent marker art mural — mix baking soda with toothpaste and watch the magic. Check out this real life test run captured on video.

2. Discover Borax — A mineral compound, borax is a natural, nontoxic every powder (much like baking soda). It works as a water softener when added to the laundry; its great for hand-washing delicates; it’s safe for washing cloth diapers; it’s the best toilet bowl cleaner I’ve stumbled across; it keeps the garbage pail smelling fresh (add a couple tablespoosn to the bottom of the pail); and it makes a great carpet stain remover: blot up whatever’s spilled, sprinkle Borax over the remaining stain, let dry and then vacuum up. The stain — and smell — disappears. A big box of borax retails at Target for around $2.69, give or take a dime.

3. Try vinegar — Another nontoxic household cleaner, vinegar removes mold from grout and plastic shower curtains. Mix it with water to make glass cleaner and then use crumpled newspapers to wash the windows (though don’t use the newspaper on, say, the TV screen). Newspaper is the best cloth you’ll ever use on your windows — no streaks, perfect shine. I know it seems counterintuitive at first, but you will be blown away by the difference. I guarantee.

4. Buy in bulk — At most supermarkets these days, you can buy food such as beans, seeds, rice, oatmeal, flour, grains, pasta and much, much more in bulk. Buying in bulk saves money and packaging. With bulk, you can buy only as many almonds as the recipe calls for and/or as much quinoa as you want so when you want to whip some up for under a stir-fry, you always have some on hand.

5. Improvise — Craft the things you need on your own, MacGyver-style. I’ve been collecting past-dated socks, stuffing them with table scraps, tying them in knots and, voila! Insta-dog toy! Or take an old, needs-to-be-recycled t-shirt, cut it into strips, braid it, and you’ve got another couple hours of doggy entertainment at the low, low price of zero dollars (dog toys at the store can cost up to $20 or more). Dog toys aren’t the only things that can be improvised. Look around at what you have, assess what you need, and see what you can devise!

6. Shop for local food and wares — Products that travel less distance to reach you are less dependent on the skyrocketing price of gas. See the recent EL article on how to shop for all things local.

7. Wash your clothes on cold, and lay off your dryer — I feel like it’s my god-given right as an American to use my dryer. Ahem. But that’s just the magic that marketing has worked on my poor, susceptible brain. Not only is the dryer really harsh on all my clothes, it costs A LOT to run. You’ll save on electricity by using an old-fashioned drying rack or an outdoor clothesline. Running the washing machine on hot is also a huge energy gobbler. Wash on cold and you’ll notice the difference when you get your electricity bill.

It seems like everywhere I turn these days health is for sale.

Take Airborne, the self-described “effervescent health formula” that purports to “boost your immune system to help your body combat germs.” The product’s claims (though recently outed as overblown) are all about the preservation of pristine health: Every time you’re about to get on a plane or go to show-and-tell at your daughter’s germ-infested kindergarten, goes the message, Bam!, down some Airborne and you’ll be immune to colds, the flu, and, implicitly, every other manner of illness and disease.

Then, of course, there are the “probiotic” yogurts, which are said to boost the immune system and aid digestion, about a billion other fortified foods, and still other “edible food-like substances” as Michael Pollan describes them.

Now welcome the rise of immunity-boosting restaurants (?!), toss in a feng-shui styled McDonalds (meant, I guess, to promote serenity and better digestion while you slurp down fries), supersize yourself a fortified soda that millions of lobbying dollars fought to get into your (and your elementary school children’s) hand, and you’ve practically got picture-perfect health being handed to you in a bag at the Drive-Thru window.

It’s as though a critical mass of companies finally caught on that more and more consumers are concerned about health, so they’re packaging up the promise of it, slapping on a shiny label, and selling it back to us at 100-times the price of the exponentially healthier experience of, say, walking through the woods while drinking filtered tap water with a slice of lime. (Cost of entire adventure? Around $.15 for the lime slice.)

Even some of the sacred territory in the legitimate health-food matrix — the idea that whole, real, organic, local, foods are the true best friend of good health — is quickly, if silently, eroding. Large corporations are waking up to the power of the “local, organic” brand to sell products and are buying up small farms [Check out this amazing and scary interactive graphic (courtesy of a professor at Michigan State University) that shows the corporate buyout of organic products. For more specific info on which dots mean what, click here]. What these giant companies are destroying in the process are the very real health, environmental, cultural, social and economic benefits inherent in locally-produced food.

Who am I to say that “fortified soda” isn’t a health panacea? (Okay, well, I AM a health editor so I think I do get to comment. And my comment is: “Of course they’re not!” followed closely by, “Blech!” And if you aren’t willing to take my editorializing as evidence, check out this recent study on the link between diet sodas and metabolic disease.) But the packaging up of health seems a phony and misguided endeavor because health, by it’s nature, can’t be sold. It isn’t a thing you can buy, it is a pursuit, a way of living, a set of choices and conscious decisions. It runs deeper and wider than eating yogurt that supposedly helps you poop.

Here’s Pollan again in an interview with Tara Parker-Pope on the better way to think about food and health:

“I think health should be a byproduct of eating well, for reasons that have nothing to do with health, such as cooking meals, eating together and eating real food. You are probably going to be healthy, but that is not the goal. The goal should just be eating well for pleasure, for community, and all the other reasons people eat. What I’m trying to do is bring a man-from-Mars view to the American way of thinking about food. This is so second nature to us — food is either advancing your health or ruining your health. That is a very limited way to think about food, and its’s a very limited way to think about health. The health of our bodies is tied to the health of the community and the health of the earth. Health is indivisible.”

So while we’re free to buy all the “health in a bottle” we want, its not likely to do us any significant health favors in any real and lasting way. What good WILL buying all these products do? Make this guy rich.

My everyday routines are so deeply ingrained that I almost never think of them as choices.

For example, I don’t always put a slice of lime in my water glass, then fill the glass approximately 1/3 the way with star-shaped ice cubes, then top the glass off with filtered water, then chomp down all the ice, and only then drink the water because it’s what I choose to do. No, no. I do it because that’s how water is drunk, of course!

The severity of my “routine blindness” caught up with me the other day in the grocery store. I’d been watching a podcast of the irrepressible Michael Pollan (a food journalist and one of my personal heroes) lecture at Stanford about his new book In Defense of Food and about the reductive nature of “nutritionism,” the notion that individual nutrients and vitamins are the healthiest part of a food and, hence, can be isolated and repackaged in bottles as “Vitamin A” or “Beta Carotene” or what-have-you with the same healthy effets.

As EL has covered (“The Whole Thing” from the March 2008 issue), and Pollan and others continue to report, nutrients in isolation don’t appear to do our bodies any health favors.

Tara Parker-Pope writing in The New York Times (“The Case for Real Food,” November 5, 2007) summarizes the research findings of David R. Jacobs, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health on the failings of nutritionism.

“Dr. Jacobs believes that nutrition science needs to consider the effects of “food synergy,” the notion that the health benefits of certain foods aren’t likely to come from a single nutrient but rather combinations of compounds that work better together than apart.”

So, anyway, with all this on my mind, I was cruising the aisles at The Wedge and thinking “Gosh, I need to eat more fruits and vegetables.” Yet my next actual thought was: “Well, crap! Now how in the world am I going to do that?!”

I’m so set in my ways — even at the grocery store — that it didn’t even dawn on me that the answer to eating more vegetables was, ahem, buying more vegetables.

Instead of moving through the produce section and grabbing what I always grab (bananas, apples, limes, mandarins, garlic, onions, cauliflower, carrots and parsley), I could grab — gasp! — anything else I wanted. Lettuce? Sure! Cabbage? Of course! Broccoli? Yes! Fennel? Why not! I could even grab more of what I already grab. (Sometimes big discount stores put limits on that week’s specials — No more than six supercheap and really sugary juice packs per customer, please! But no one’s going to stop me from buying 10 bunches of carrots if I want to!)

So mechanized was I at the grocery store that I’d stopped even seeing other fruits, veggies and foods. I’ve been going to the same co-op three times a week for 6 years and last week I had to ask where the scallions were (pretty embarrassing).

So now I’m trying to go to the grocery store at least once a week at a time when I’m not in a hurry. I make sure the dogs have been walked and I’ve gotten a handle on household chores and any other pesky life detritus, and then when I go to the store I’m able to just order the world’s best chai from the deli and then leisurely stroll around and really, really SEE the foods I’d been ignoring in my zombie-like state and everyday haste.

It’s actually made grocery shopping fun, and I’ve made some marvelous-tasting discoveries — crisp new varieties of olives (not just the Kalamatas I always get), tangy Miso, brisk pink and gray sea salts with delightfully nuanced flavors. And the bonus? It’s healthier, too.

Frida fuels up for healing.

Reliable studies continue to show the significant role pets play in healing.

(Blogger’s note/rhetorical question: With three dogs and one cat, why am I not the healthiest person on earth?)