The Equalizer/Frances Cerra Whittelsey

The Imaginary Threat from Sharia Law

2012-01-02T08:57:00.000-08:00

I was at a party recently where the guests weren't afraid of discussing politics--a refreshing contrast from dull conversations where people studiously avoid any possibly controversial topic. A woman friend I don't know particularly well suddenly asserted that Sharia law--Islamic law based on the Koran and interpretations of it--was being used to decide cases in U.S. courts.

She startled me. I immediately envisioned American women slipping down a road toward the wearing of veils, prohibitions on our driving and participation in public life, and to subservience to men backed up by law enforcement. I am a passionate feminist and I have long asserted that as long as any woman anywhere in the world is subject to such discrimination, no woman anywhere is truly safe.

So I challenged this friend. I told her I simply didn't believe it, and I asked her to please send me any evidence she had that Sharia law is being used in U.S. court cases.

Well, she didn't contact me, but her claim bothered me like a bad tooth. It wasn't long before I had to do what I've now spent 40 years doing: practicing some journalism to find out the truth.

Now, I don't claim to have done days of research or original interviews with sources of information. But I did go beyond TV reports on Fox News, and I did have a look at the web site of the leader of the anti-Sharia movement, David Yerushalmi of the Society of Americans for National Existence. You have to register to be a member to see the whole site, but even without that you can amuse yourself by reading Yerushalmi's attempt to prove he is not a racist and misogynist. He's had to defend himself against the charge because he wrote: "There is a reason the Founding Fathers did not give women or black slaves the vote."

He insists he is only asking the question, why? To wit, if the founders were such great men, revered to this day, why would they take such a position? He says he knows how people like me, whom he immediately labels as "fellow travelers" will answer. He says I believe that the reason is that American was founded on evil. Not!

If I needed immediate proof that Yershalmi exists in a paranoid world of his own making, that's it. Apparently he never, for example, read the letters from Abigail Adams to John Adams while he was at the constitutional convention. John made it clear in answering his wife's plea not to forget the women, that the men there saw no reason to give up their power over women and property. But they founded a country on the principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They were imperfect products of the times they lived in, and it would take and did take centuries and many generations to change the status of women and blacks in the U.S., and will probably take many more before women have equal rights everywhere.

But I digress. So what did I find when I looked for evidence that Sharia law was undermining American law, particularly in ways that might erode the civil rights of women and others?

I found lots of discussion of a Florida case involving a lawsuit against a mosque and control of $2.2 million. Several men who said they were improperly ousted as trustees of the mosque sought an arbitration decision from an Islamic scholar. The mosque itself then challenged this use of Sharia law in a Florida court. Major threat? I don't think so. And, I learned, in cases involving Orthodox Jews in dispute with each other, it is not uncommon for U.S. judges to refer to Judaic law.

I found another case about guiding Muslim investors toward investments that are ethical under Sharia law. The Thomas More Law Center had mounted a lawsuit with--yes, he turns up again--co-counsel David Yerushalmi against the U.S. government's bailout of giant insurance and investment corporation AIG. Some of the bailout money was used for two AIG subsidiaries that practice Sharia-compliant financing.

Sharia-compliant investing is another flavor of social investing, the widespread practice of investing according to beliefs beyond the supremacy of the bottom line. Some people won't invest in companies in the tobacco or weapons businesses. Sharia investing guidelines include prohibitions against charging interest (who knew that?) and I assume would also counsel against buying into companies that make alcoholic beverages, for example. AIG was simply going after Islamic investors, not forcing anyone to do anything.

No surprise, the court ruled against the claim that the bailout of AIG was unconstitutional, finding there was no evidence of religious indoctrination.

That didn't stop the Law Center from putting out this headline:

Sharia Law Gains Foothold in US--Federal Judge Upholds Government Funding of Islam

So what's going on? Why was my friend so concerned about the threat of Sharia Law? Why are so many state governments convinced there is a threat that they are working on--and passing-- legislation to outlaw the use of Sharia law in the U.S.?

You can find the answers here, in the report "Fear, Inc.," published last August by the Center for American Progress." This report pins responsibility on "a small group of conservative foundations and wealthy donors (who) are the lifeblood of the Islamophobia network in America, supporting a central nervous system consisting of a clutch of misinformation experts." One of the five, of course, is David Yerushalm.

It goes on to describe "a well-developed right-wing media echo chamber" that amplifies this small group. It consists of "a loosely aligned, ideologically-akin group of right-wing blogs, magazines, radio stations, newspapers, and television news shows," most prominently Fox.

I never ascribe motives to people I have never met nor thoroughly investigated. But there's no doubt about the impact of their misinformation activities. Their fear-mongering clearly has the effect of scaring a significant number of Americans into supporting and therefore justifying our monster-sized military, our continued role as the world's largest arms dealer, our continual sabre-rattling, our continual wars. And all of that is in service of maintaining the power status quo in Washington and the world that ensures that the 1% get richer and richer while the rest of us argue about and tremble at overblown threats.

New Year's Resolution: 12 Steps to Going Green in 2012

2011-12-27T14:21:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I despair that enough people have the will to make the changes to prevent ruinous global warming; to change our habits so that future generations will not have to settle for pictures of wild polar bears and tigers and living coral reefs but will be able to see the real thing; and have clean drinking water and places to swim and healthy air to breathe. It is so discouraging to see our political leaders trying to push through the Keystone Pipeline, for example.

But then I remember all the people I know who have changed, or are trying to make changes, and all the organizations small and large who are doing the work that will lead to the consensus that's necessary. One of these is the Worldwatch Institute, a research organization based in Washington D.C.

Their good work includes a 12-step program for going green in 2012. Here are the steps, with their explanations and suggestions for what you can do, plus some additions from my own green tips.

1. Recycle
In 2009, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to require all homes and businesses to use recycling and composting collection programs. As a result, more than 75 percent of all material collected is being recycled, diverting 1.6 million tons from the landfills annually----double the weight of the Golden Gate Bridge.

What you can do:
Put a separate container next to your trash can or printer, making it easier to recycle your bottles, cans, and paper. Keep a reusable shopping bag near the door and fill it with plastic bags that you can recycle at your supermarket.
(2) Turn off the lights

On the last Saturday in March----March 31 in 2012----hundreds of people, businesses, and governments around the world turn off their lights for an hour as part of Earth Hour, a movement to address climate change.

What you can do:
Earth Hour happens only once a year, but you can make an impact every day by turning off lights during bright daylight, or whenever you will be away for an extended period of time. In rooms that are too brightly lighted, remove some of the bulbs; use task lighting instead of filling a whole room with light. Install sensors that will turn off lights when you leave a room.
(3) Make the switch

In 2007, Australia became the first country to "ban the bulb," drastically reducing domestic usage of incandescent light bulbs. By late 2010, incandescent bulbs had been totally phased out, and, according to the country's environment minister, this simple move has made a big difference, cutting an estimated 4 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2012. China also recently pledged to replace the 1 billion incandescent bulbs used in its government offices with more energy efficient models within five years.

What you can do:
A bill in Congress to eliminate incandescent in the United States failed in 2011, but you can still make the switch at home. Compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) use only 20-30 percent of the energy required by incandescents to create the same amount of light, and now come in many versions for indoor, outdoor and decorative uses. LEDs use only 10 percent, helping reduce both electric bills and carbon emissions.
(4) Turn on the tap

The bottled water industry sold 8.8 billion gallons of water in 2010, generating nearly $11 billion in profits. Yet plastic water bottles create huge environmental problems. The energy required to produce and transport these bottles could fuel an estimated 1.5 million cars for a year, yet approximately 75 percent of water bottles are not recycled----they end up in landfills, litter roadsides, and pollute waterways and oceans. And while public tap water is subject to strict safety regulations, the bottled water industry is not required to report testing results for its products. According to a study, 10 of the most popular brands of bottled water contain a wide range of pollutants, including pharmaceuticals, fertilizer residue, and arsenic.

What you can do:
This one is pretty simple: Fill up your glasses and reusable water bottles with water from the taps in your home.
(5) Turn down the heat

The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that consumers can save up to 15 percent on heating and cooling bills just by adjusting their thermostats.

What you can do:
Turn down your thermostat when you leave for work, or use a programmable thermostat to control your heating settings. Plant shade trees on the sunny side of your house, turn off the central air completely, open the windows and enjoy fresh air! Install solar panels to heat your hot water (the payback on your investment is quick) or an on-demand gas hot water heater.

(6) Support food recovery programs

Each year, roughly a third of all food produced for human consumption----approximately 1.3 billion tons----gets lost or wasted, including 34 million tons in the United States, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Grocery stores, bakeries, and other food providers throw away tons of food daily that is perfectly edible but is cosmetically imperfect or has passed its expiration date. In response, food recovery programs run by homeless shelters or food banks collect this food and use it to provide meals for the hungry, helping to divert food away from landfills and into the bellies of people who need it most.

What you can do:
Encourage your local restaurants and grocery stores to partner with food rescue organizations, like City Harvest in New York City, Food Not Bombs on Long Island, or Second Harvest Heartland in Minnesota.
Go through your cabinets and shelves and donate any non-perishable canned and dried foods that you won't be using to your nearest food bank or shelter.
(7) Buy local

"Small Business Saturday," falling between "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday," was established in 2010 as a way to support small businesses during the busiest shopping time of the year. Author and consumer advocate Michael Shuman argues that local small businesses are more sustainable because they are often more accountable for their actions, have smaller environmental footprints, and innovate to meet local conditions----providing models for others to learn from.

What you can do:
Instead of relying exclusively on large supermarkets, shop at farmers markets, Consumer Supported Agriculture Coops (CSAs) and local farms for your produce, eggs, dairy, and meat. Food from these sources is usually fresher and more flavorful, and your money will help support local farmers. Take the Slow Money pledge and invest 1% of your assets in food growers and processors who work locally in place of a stock fund invested in who knows what, who knows where.
(8) Get out and ride

We all know that carpooling and using public transportation helps cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, as well as our gas bills. Now, cities across the country are investing in new mobility options. Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C. have major bike sharing programs that allow people to rent bikes for short-term use. Similar programs exist in other cities, and more are planned for places from Miami, Florida, to Madison, Wisconsin.

What you can do:
If available, use your city's bike share program to run short errands or commute to work. Memberships are generally inexpensive (only $75 for the year in Washington, D.C.), and by eliminating transportation costs, as well as a gym membership, you can save quite a bit of money!
Even if without bike share programs, many cities and towns are incorporating bike lanes and trails, making it easier and safer to use your bike for transportation and recreation.
(9) Share a car

Car sharing programs spread from Europe to the United States nearly 13 years ago and are increasingly popular, with U.S. membership jumping 117 percent between 2007 and 2009. According to the University of California Transportation Center, each shared car replaces 15 personally owned vehicles, and roughly 80 percent of more than 6,000 car-sharing households surveyed across North America got rid of their cars after joining a sharing service. In 2009, car-sharing was credited with reducing U.S. carbon emissions by more than 482,000 tons. Innovative programs such as Chicago's I-GO are even introducing solar-powered cars to their fleets, making the impact of these programs even more eco-friendly.

What you can do:
Join a car share program! As of July 2011, there were 26 such programs in the U.S., with more than 560,000 people sharing over 10,000 vehicles. Even if you don't want to get rid of your own car, using a shared car when traveling in a city can greatly reduce the challenges of finding parking (car share programs have their own designated spots), as well as your environmental impact as you run errands or commute to work.
(10) Plant a garden

Wherever you live, growing your own vegetables is a simple but revolutionary way to bring fresh and nutritious food literally to your doorstep.
What you can do:
Plant something--even just some lettuce in a window box. Lettuce seeds are cheap and easy to find, and when planted in full sun, one window box can provide enough to make several salads worth throughout a season. If you don't have a sunny spot or a lot of know-how, sign up for, or help start a community garden where growing conditions are excellent and other gardeners can provide help. One example of an organization doing this is the Long Island Community Agriculture Network that I co-founded two years ago.

(11) Compost

And what better way to fertilize your garden than using your own composted organic waste. You will not only reduce costs by buying less fertilizer, but you will also help to cut down on food and other organic waste.

What you can do:
If you are unsure about the right ways to compost, check out HowToCompost and the U.S. Composting Council. And, stop letting landscape companies remove all the leaves from your flower and shrub beds! The leaves keep the ground warm--that's good for the plants in cold climates--and add organic matter to the soil when they decompose. The leaves taken off your lawn should go into your compost pile, not a landfill.
(12) Reduce your meat consumption

Livestock production accounts for about 18 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions and accounts for about 23 percent of all global water used in agriculture. Yet thanks to concerted PR efforts that suggest a meal isn't a meal without meat, global meat production has been going up exponentially. Another important reason to eat less meat is compassion: cows, pigs and other food animals these days endure miserable lives in factories, not on farms, and are kept from succumbing to diseases with antibiotics.

What you can do:
You don't have to become a vegetarian or vegan. Simply cut down on the amount of meat you consume. As a start, consider substituting one meat meal a day with a vegetarian option.

Worldwatch points out that the most successful and lasting New Year's resolutions are those that are practiced regularly and have an important goal. With faith in each other and in the future, we can bring about the changes necessary to save our world.

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Student Loans Abet High Law School tuitions

2011-12-19T12:28:00.000-08:00

An eye-opening look at the cost of getting a law degree blames student loans for the ability of law schools to charge about $50,000 per year, when you include living and other expenses along with tuition. David Segal wrote in The New York Times yesterday that when combined with the prestige race pumped up by U.S. News & World Report's rankings, student loans have allowed law schools to disregard affordability.

The focus of the article, however, was the accreditation standards imposed by the American Bar Association. Segal writes that the standards have pretty much guaranteed that graduating lawyers have no choice but to charge high fees for their services.

If you've ever wanted to sue someone, you already know that unless you're after a minimum of $25,000, you should abandon the idea. It's just not worth it after you calculate what your lawyer will get.

The ABA's stranglehold on legal services prevents the U.S. from having categories of legal professionals who can charge less than lawyers who've passed the bar. In Britain there are other less expensive alternatives like legal executives who can appear before courts and represent clients in different sorts of matters. Without having done any exhaustive research on the subject, it sounds like they are something like the legal version of physician assistants.

The bottom line is that although we all joke about lawyers and lament that there are too many of them, consumers could definitely benefit from access to less expensive legal help. Instead, anyone who dispenses legal advice without having gone to an ABA-accredited school (except in a few states like Tennessee) is breaking--you guessed it--the law.

Their stories: Slaves to Student Loans

2011-12-13T08:58:00.000-08:00

They tell their stories with anguish, with anger, with hopelessness and with numbers. They are the victims of a student loan system designed to guarantee big profits to lenders for years to come while enslaving borrowers with outrageous terms of repayment.

You can see their pictures and read their words at a new Occupy Student Debt website. There's the 27-year old woman with $100,000 in debt who can't find a job paying more than about $12/hour. She wants to send her useless diploma to Sallie Mae.

There's the widow who went back to school at the age of 48 to get a Master's Degree and the chance at a better job as a school teacher. She's now 55. She figures that she'll be 77 before she pays off her loan.

There's the 63-year old father of 3, a physician no less, who even pre-paid tuition to lock in lower rates. But college for 2 of his children ended up costing more anyway, and he's now stuck with $42,000 in loans that carry interest rates of more than 8%, with payments in the early years going only for interest, not to pay down principle. He compares that to the terms of his home mortgage and home equity loan, both with interest rates under 4% and terms that make prepayment a smart idea.

These stories show how the banks succeeded in getting the U.S. Congress to make student loans immensely profitable for lenders and uniquely onerous for borrowers.

With interest rates so low now, refinancing a home mortgage, for example, can save a home owner lots of money, as long as they have a good enough credit rating to convince a bank to do the refinancing. You can also declare bankruptcy if you fall behind. You'll lose most of what you own, but at least you'll be able to start fresh.

But no, there are no opportunities to refinance a student loan at lower rates. Lenders have no reason to offer them. Nor can you go bankrupt. The law doesn't allow it. There is no escape.

Read their stories. 400 of them so far. Each one proof that our elected representatives care much more about banking industry campaign contributions than the plight of their constituents.

College Presidents' Pay Up Despite Economy

2011-12-05T09:37:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education, we have just learned that the pay of private college presidents continued up in 2009 despite the economy. As reported in The New York Times, 36 presidents had an average increase of 2.2 percent. Most interesting to me is the chart showing their compensation as a percentage of university expenditures, ranging from 1% to a high of 3.5% for a school I'd never heard of: Mountain State University in West Virginia.

This president, Charles H. Polk, pulled in $1, 843, 746 in 2009.

In defense of his and other million dollar plus pay packages, David L. Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, told The Times: "There is just a small pool of candidates who possess the skill set that is required and are willing to take on the stressful 24/7 nature of the position."

The Times reporter didn't bother to quote anyone critical of these pay scales, much less anyone from the Occupy movement.

So Mountain State must be an excellent school, right? Wrong. Instead, the school may lose its accreditation early in 2012. A show-cause order by the Higher Learning Commission cited problems of monitoring of student progress, governance, and--get ready for it-- availability of resources. Seems to me that with a performance like that, everybody at Mountain State should be questioning his "skill set."

The other interesting chart shows the presidents' compensation as a multiple of average pay for professors--not adjuncts, of course, but the full-time profs. That ranges from a high of 16.1 for Stevenson University in Maryland to a low of about twice for the president of Wabash College in Indiana. Five other presidents earned at least 10 times as much as their full professors.

Stevenson has been undergoing rapid expansion in the last several years so that may be why its board of trustees thinks president Kevin J. Manning deserves to be paid so much more than the professors, a rich package worth $1,493,655. If I were a student there with student loans, I'd sure want to ask them.

The Equalizer/Frances Cerra Whittelsey: Student Loans Enable Sky-High Tuitions

2011-11-30T13:40:00.000-08:00

The Equalizer/Frances Cerra Whittelsey: Student Loans Enable Sky-High Tuitions

Student Loans Enable Sky-High Tuitions

2011-11-30T12:54:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, the chiropractor who was working on my back confided in me that she'd never be able to own a home because she had racked up a massive amount of student debt. She explained that she had taken out student loans to pay for chiropractic school expecting a big payoff, but then health insurance companies had essentially stopped paying for chiropractic visits. So she had gone back to school to become a licensed acupuncturist. That additional skill had not paid off either.

Now she had debt approaching $100,000 and saw no possibility of ever paying it off.

So I naively suggested that she declare bankruptcy to get out from under. I was incredulous when she told me that bankruptcy was not allowed under the laws regulating student loans.

But I quickly learned she was right.

Now, as Occupy Wall Street has morphed on campuses into the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, students facing a bleak job future are demanding relief from tuition increases. Meanwhile, an on-line effort to start a boycott of making debt payments has begun, and everyone involved in higher education is talking about ways to contain costs and give graduates some measure of relief from their debts--although not through bankruptcy.

Left out of this discussion is the elephant in the room: the role that the student loan program itself has played as colleges and universities ratcheted up the price of tuition by 50 percent in the past decade. Patrick M. Callan, president of the Higher Education Policy Institute, indirectly pointed it out recently when he said that huge federal funding increases in Pell grants under Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama had "been absorbed by tuition increases."

He went on: "And with all that we've invested, we have a less affordable system than we had a decade ago. We're on a national treadmill."

Imagine how different the situation would have been if prospective college students and their parents had had to pay tuition out of current income or from loans whose repayment was not deferred until after graduation. Top administrators at colleges and universities wouldn't have been able to raise their salaries to astronomic heights. They couldn't have engaged in a luxuries arms race with other institutions, building campuses gilded with state-of-the art fitness centers, elaborate theaters and stadiums, ski areas, golf courses, arboretums and dorms that, in the case of Princeton, have been described as "a billionaire's mansion in the form of a dorm."

They were able to raise their prices knowing that students would simply borrow more to compensate. No one questioned whether the pay the students should expect after graduation had gone up enough to cover the added amounts. It's not substantially different from giving new home buyers mortgages that could never be supported by their income, except that with student loans the banks don't even have to repossess anything. In fact, they face virtually no risks. Thanks to laws passed by Congress, student debtors become indentured servants, obligated to a lifetime of payments--or maybe 20 years of them under new proposals--since they can't relieve themselves of the debt by going bankrupt. Worse still, students who miss payments can easily end up in a cycle of punitive fees that makes their debt balloon even bigger.

The high pay of university administrators and the luxury facilities, of course, have little or nothing to do with education. Most colleges and universities save on the actual cost of teaching by making heavy use of adjunct professors instead of hiring more full-time. As one myself, I can tell you that they haven't invested those tuition increases in higher adjunct pay although adjuncts teach so many of the required courses at the core of a college education. In fact, anyone who wants to live on the pay of an adjunct becomes an itinerant, driving from one campus to another trying to cobble together a big enough load to make a meager income.

Seen from this perspective, student loans have enabled spending sprees by the administrators of our colleges and universities who didn't have to worry--until very recently--about making their schools unaffordable.

Now, with so much money sunk into facilities, administrations have little room to maneuver. Perhaps it's time to take a hard look at cutting those top salaries, as some have done, at eliminating top-heavy staffs, and pulling back to a focus on the core mission of education. In 2008, 23 university presidents earned more than $1 million. The NY Times reported that the median pay for presidents of the 419 private colleges and universities surveyed by the Chronicle of Higher Education was $358,746, a 6.5 percent increase over 2007. Over the five years previous years, the median presidential pay grew by 14 percent, and that is adjusted for inflation.

And lest you think this applies only to private institutions, consider that the median total compensation for public college presidents in 2009-10 was $375,442, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. E. Gordon Gee, the president of football power house, Ohio State, topped the list, earning more than $1.3-million in total compensation.

Not incidentally, sports programs at public and private schools more often lose money than make it. Overall, only 12% of college athletic programs are profitable, according to the NCAA. Even most football programs--57%--lose money.

Funneling more money into loan programs won't help stop spiraling tuition prices. Unfortunately, that will just continue to enable the spending sprees that have created the crisis we're in. NYU professor Andrew Ross, who has started the campaign for a boycott of loan payments, is, among other things, calling for private and for-profit colleges to open their books so the public can see just where all that tuition is going. The books of public colleges should be open, and citizens should demand to know which aspects of spending have priority.

Ross has also recognized, as he told the NYU student newspaper blog, "that my own salary is debt-financed. … There’s an element of complicity. It’s an incredible burden for faculty to bear.”

Now we need to hear that same sentiment coming from university presidents, along with some serious rethinking of spending priorities. When we do, we might begin getting back to a realistic balance between the cost of a higher education and the income students can expect after graduation.

Love Your Body/Love Your Uterus

2011-10-12T08:12:00.000-07:00

Say what? Love your uterus? You'd better. We need to love our bodies, inside and out.

This post is part of the 2011 Love Your Body Day Blog Carnival sponsored by the NOW Foundation. The focus of this campaign is fighting self-hatred because we’re too fat, too old, too flat, too wrinkled, too unfashionable. But we need to look inside our bodies as well and love the "sacred" organs, as one enlightened doctor described them, that make us female.

The fact is that there is an ongoing epidemic of unnecessary hysterectomies in the U.S. In no other country in the world, developed or otherwise, do one out of three women end up without their uterus by the time they are 60, a toll of about 600,000 women a year. And about half lose their healthy ovaries at the same time.

The unnecessary loss of one's sexual/reproductive organs can cause a profound loss of self-esteem tied to real physical and sexual changes that can't be fixed with a diet, cosmetic surgery, a change in attitude or replacement hormones.

For far too long, American women, including myself, have been agreeing to let doctors cut out our organs because we didn't know the consequences and because the doctors told us we really didn't need them any more if we'd already had our babies. This attitude by doctors was born of ignorance but reinforced by sexism. Why would women past 40 need to worry about sex anyway? With replacement estrogen, after all, they could still have intercourse!

Sadly, this attitude is still prevalent, even among women gynecologists trained by a male-dominated medical establishment. Women with bleeding or pain problems too seldom learn about alternatives to hysterectomy, and even less often about the importance of our organ to our lifelong health and our view of ourselves.

I first realized this when I heard a gynecologist speaking reverently about the uterus and ovaries. He actually called them “sacred!” I had never understood that the uterus is a powerful muscle even though it has to be. That’s how women push their babies out. Nor did I understand that the uterus is central to the structural integrity of a woman’s body, like the keystone in an arch that keeps everything together. Here’s a structural description, taken from the text of an informative video on the HERS Foundation website:

The uterus is attached to broad bands of ligaments, bundles of nerves, and networks of arteries and veins…The severing of the ligaments (done for hysterectomy) permits the pelvic bones to move and widen, affecting the hips, lower back, and skeletal structure.

The displacement of the pelvic bones results in compression of the spine.

Women report that as the spine compresses, the rib cage gradually drifts down until it sits directly on the hip bones. This compression is the reason why hysterectomized women have protruding bellies and little or no waist.

The bladder sits in front of the uterus, and the bowel sits behind it. The uterus separates them and helps keep the bladder in its natural position above the pubic bone and the bowel in its natural configuration behind the uterus.

Recent research shows that significant numbers of women are alarmingly ignorant about their reproductive/sex organs. A survey of 1,273 adult women this year found that 30% didn’t even know that removing the uterus would stop menstrual activity, and 13% didn’t know they couldn’t get pregnant without a uterus.

Dr. Oz Harmanli, the Springfield, Massachusetts urogynecologist who led the study, said in an interview that “younger women are almost clueless” about the functions of the uterus, cervix and ovaries. The purpose of the study, he said, was to highlight the need to give women more information so that they can make a well-informed choice about having a hysterectomy.

Dr. Harmanli, who is director of urogynecology and pelvic surgery at Baystate Medical Center and an Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Tufts University School of Medicine, is refreshingly candid about the penchant of American gynecologists to cut out women’s organs.

“I come from Turkey, been here over 20 years, trained here, started practicing here,” he told me. “When I go back to Turkey (for meetings), when I suggest hysterectomy for certain conditions, they look at me like I came from Mars.”

He continued: “The climate here created by practitioners, and by tradition in families (successive generations having hysterectomies) is that loss of the uterus has not been considered such a major loss compared to other cultures and countries.” He added that there are many complex factors behind the uniquely high rate of hysterectomies in the U.S. I believe that money is one of them: hysterectomies bring in enormous income to both doctors and hospitals; hysterectomies are the second most common women's surgery, behind only Caesarians.

Elsewhere on this blog I have described the serious health problems, shortened life span and sexual problems that result from hysterectomy and removal of the ovaries. There is simply no good medical reason why one-third of American women end up without a uterus compared to, for example, one-fifth of British women. The situation is outrageous, full of long-term implications for the general health of American women and the price women pay for health care via insurance premiums and out-of-pocket.

We’ve allowed gynecologists to define our organs as reproductive and therefore unnecessary once we’ve had all the children we want. But our organs are as central to our identity, our energy, our joy in life, as surely as men’s testicles are to theirs.

So learn more about these vital organs. Love your uterus and your ovaries even though you can’t see them in the mirror!

Doctors' Group Ignores Hysterectomy as a Cause of Incontinence; Urinary Problems Cost U.S. Women $13 Billion/Year

2011-09-21T15:47:00.000-07:00

They call themselves Urogynecologists, women's doctors who do not deal with pregnancies or infertility or hysterectomies, only what they refer to as "pelvic floor disorders" including urinary incontinence. So you'd like to think they'd be upfront about the fact that hysterectomy is one of the major reasons why 40% of all U.S. women find themselves leaking urine by the time they hit the age of 60. (Interesting coincidence: that's the same percentage of women who undergo a hysterectomy by the time they are 60.)

In fact, a very large and long study of Swedish women found that a woman's chance of incontinence at least doubled after a hysterectomy.

This group of doctors has even put a price tag on what it costs women to deal with incontinence: an average of $15 a week for pads, laundry and dry cleaning. If you multiply that by the 17 million women--a low estimate--who have this embarrassing problem, and then by 52 weeks, you find out that incontinence is costing American women at least $13 billion a year. This calculation does not include the cost of the various prescription medications now being promoted by drug companies to relieve incontinence.

Yet, you can search the website of the American Urogynecologic Society (AUG) or their new information website, Voices for PFD, and you won't find a mention of hysterectomy. The closest you get is this statement with its vague reference to surgery: "Sometimes, very clear-cut events such as pregnancy, vaginal delivery, surgery, radiation or accidental injury can lead to these kinds of problems..." Notice that all of these causes of incontinence are essentially unavoidable--except surgery for hysterectomy, which is avoidable with other treatments in 70 to 90% of cases.

But wait, these doctors have a solution to incontinence, once you've got it: More surgery! Last year, the AUG released results of a study showing that two years after women had surgery to try to cure stress urinary incontinence, their cost per week had dropped to $4 from $15 while their episodes of incontinence dropped from 23 per week to 3. Hooray.

The final irony is that just a few days ago, the AUG released its own study of information about incontinence on various web sites and found them "inadequate." Two physician reviewers evaluated more than 50 websites and found them "not comprehensive, relevant or accurate."

I tried to reach Dr. Steven Minaglia, a Hawaii-based physician whose team reviewed the websites, but he had left for a trip to China. Perhaps when he gets back he can ask them to review why AUG's own website doesn't bother to tell women about the connection between hysterectomy and incontinence.

Perhaps he could start by having them review the Swedish study.

Hysterectomy is a Feminist Issue: 1 in 3

2011-09-13T12:25:00.000-07:00

The Ms. Magazine Blog now features an article I wrote that gives some of the shocking information about the epidemic of hysterectomy. I have been amazed for a long time that this most feminist of issues is not on the radar of feminist organizations despite the huge impact of these surgeries on women's health, well-being and relationships. I've struggled to understand why. Partly, I think, it's because the surgery is simply so common. Breast cancer advocates have made women very aware that their life-time risk is 1 in 8. But consider: 1 in 3 women 60 and older no longer has a uterus!

That's right, 1 in 3. It's just about a right of passage for older women.

But as I say in the Ms. blog, we who are the 1 in 3 have got to speak up. We can't let this continue. Keeping our condition a secret because we're embarrassed, afraid of being regarded as less of a woman, or as being too unaware to prevent our doctors from doing this to us--well, we've just got to get over that the same way women who've lost a breast have done so bravely.

Summarizing the Risks of Hysterectomy

2011-09-06T15:05:00.000-07:00

When a women has surgery to remove her uterus, and way too often her healthy ovaries at the same time, she increases her risk of dying prematurely, diminishing her sex life, and suffering from a host of other health problems.

Here's a quick summary of the Risk Increase shown by some of the research, with sources:

Hysterectomy Alone

Incontinence: 60% greater risk by age 60 than an intact woman ("Vital Signs: Consequences; Hysterectomy and Risk of Incontinence." The New York Times, Aug. 22, 2000. By Eric Nagourney
Coronary Heart Disease: 3 times grater risk if hysterectomy done before menopause (American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Jan. 1981; 139 (1):58-61)

Oophorectomy (removal of ovaries)

Early Death: twice the risk if ovaries removed before age 45 and no estrogen replacement given ("Survival patterns after oophorectomy in premenopausal women: a population-based cohort study." Lancet Oncology Volume 7, Issue 10, 2006, pp.821-828; by W.A. Rocca, MD, and others.)
Dementia: 33% higher over all than women who keep their ovaries through menopause; 74% higher if her ovaries are removed on or before age 43 ("Increased risk of cognitive impairment or dementia in women who underwent oophorectomy before menopause." Neurology 2007; 69:1074-1083; by W.A. Rocca, MD, and others)
Heart Attack: double the risk if a woman loses her ovaries between the ages of 40 and 44; 40% higher if ovaries removed after age 50 ("Ovarian Conservation at the Time of Hysterectomy for Benign Disease." Obstetrics & Gynecology, Vol. 106, No.2, Aug. 2005
Bone fractures from osteoporosis: 54% more fractures when ovaries removed after menopause (same study, Ovarian Conservation, etc., cited above)

This is not a list you will find in any of the literature given out by gynecologists. Nor, when they try to talk women into letting them take out their ovaries while doing the hysterectomy, will they reveal that the average woman's risk of ovarian cancer is 1 in 72 (or 1.39% over her lifetime). By comparison, the lifetime risk of breast cncer is 1 in 8 (or 12.15% over her lifetime).

Of course, some women have genetic and family risk factors for ovarian cancer that make their decision much more difficult. I feel for them. But for other women, a gynecologist who uses the fear of ovarian cancer to convince her to consent to ovary removal is nothing less than unethical. Such a doctor should do women the favor of finding some other line of work.

Encouraging News About UAE, An Alternative to Hysterectomy

2010-11-19T08:04:00.000-08:00

Recently published research on Uterine Artery Embolization has shown that it is a good alternative to hysterectomy for women suffering heavy menstrual bleeding or pain from uterine fibroid--benign--tumors.

A 5-year follow-up study of women who agreed to be randomly picked for either a hysterectomy or Uterine Artery Embolization (UAE) showed that 7 of 10 women who underwent the organ-sparing procedure had relief of their symptoms that was good enough to have been able to avoid further surgery after five years.

This is important news because 40% of all hysterectomies--275,000 of them--are done each year because of symptoms caused by fibroids. According to best estimates, another 250,000 women a year undergo myomectomies, in which the fibroids are cut out of the uterus but the uterus is spared. Both surgeries usually involve a stay in the hospital and, depending on the technique used for the hysterectomy, recovery periods of up to six weeks. With UAE, women report returning to normal activity, including sex, within two weeks.

In addition, a UAE poses much less risk to a woman's ovaries if she is under 45. Dr. Bruce McLucas, a Los Angeles gynecologist who performed the first UAE in the United States in the early 90s, said in an interview that the incidence of ovarian failure "in my hands is 3%" in women in that age group and about 5% when done by other surgeons. McLucas recently performed his thousandth UAE. However, ovarian failure occurs in about half of all women older than 45 who undergo UAE.

About half of all women who undergo hysterectomies end up without their ovaries--often healthy ovaries-- because gynecologists continue to scare them into consenting to their removal (or yank them out even with no consent) with talk of ovarian cancer. They minimize the adverse impact on women's health that will result from the loss of their ovaries. Most gynecologists still view the low risk of developing ovarian cancer as outweighing the much greater risks of developing heart disease, osteoporosis, loss of sexual pleasure, etc. from castration (the proper word for amputation of women's sex/reproductive organs.)

McLucas, who practices at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and is Clinical Professor in the medical school there, is now engaged in a campaign to publicize the benefits of the procedure. He will be appearing December 1 on the TV show, The Doctors.

I've long wondered why so many women in their early 40s experience such heavy bleeding. McLucas explained that, "In the years running up to the menopause, we have a domination of estrogen in the menstrual cycle," and estrogen fuels the growth of fibroids, which are present in 40% of women over 40. Many women, however, do not experience heavy bleeding or pain from them; only 10 to 20% of women who have fibroids need treatment.

But those who do must deal with monthly hemorrhaging that can last two weeks and require frequent changing of even the most absorbent tampons. Many become anemic.

"The first major myth about fibroids is that waiting for menopause is necessarily a good option," said McLucas. He explained that because fatty tissue produces a substance that mimics estrogen, fibroids in some women will not shrink after menopause. And, if a woman is taking replacement hormones, the fibroids also tend to grow. Waiting for menopause therefore, may or may not be a good idea depending on the individual woman.

So what is UAE? It's an outpatient procedure done under local anesthetic in which a small cut is made in the upper thigh and then in the femoral artery. From there, guided by X-rays, the surgeon plugs the uterine artery with inert particles.

Starved of blood, the fibroids usually--but not always--shrivel to about half their size, calcify and cause no further problems.

But doesn't the uterus then die as well?

Fortunately, the uterus is fed blood by the ovarian artery as well, and will "resupply the uterus within an hour of surgery," according to Dr. McLucas.

He has also published research showing that among women who still wanted to have children after the procedure, about 1/3 had successful pregnancies.

I had a hysterectomy in my early 40s because of heavy menstrual bleeding, and after viewing this new research, I would have tried a UAE if it had been available to me. Maybe it would not have worked, as is the case with a friend of mine, but given the information I now have, it would have been worth a try to keep my uterus.

Even now, many years later, women who want to try this alternative will very likely need to look beyond their usual gynecologist. McLucas thinks he is the only gynecologist doing UAE in the United States. But interventional radiologists--the same doctors who insert cardiac stents--do them, and so do, oddly enough, some cardiologists.

Ideally, women should find a gynecologist who can refer them to a radiologist who will perform the procedure. After that, the gynecologist will oversee their recovery.

Dr. McLucas predicts that within 10 years there will be at least one gynecologist in each major city who performs UAEs. Until then, women are still on their own in their efforts to keep their precious organs. A good starting place for information is the Fibroid Treatment Collective website, which features Dr. McLucas.

An "Essential" Guide to Hysterectomy That Isn't

2010-11-02T09:13:00.000-07:00

The title, Women's Hysterectomy Stories: The Essential Guide," gave me great expectations. Here, available on line for $17, was an e-book that I thought might help to enlighten women about the perils to their long-term health and sexuality from hysterectomies.

So, I sprung for the $17. And was sorry that I did.

This book, written by Ruth Steeves and promoted on her website, Hysterectomyresources.com, is only for you if you've already made up your mind that you really need a hysterectomy. It will advise you about making arrangements in advance of your surgery for child care, and meals, and what to expect in the hospital, and once you get home.

But just like HysterSisters, which is promoting the daVinci robotic system for the surgery, this book and Steeves' website see the epidemic of hysterectomies through rose-colored glasses. The goal is to eliminate your anxiety about having a hysterectomy. The furthest they go in bucking the medical establishment is to encourage women to get a second opinion.

HysterSisters has actually launched a "Give Me a Second" campaign whose purpose is "to strengthen the doctor-patient relationship, to improve women's quality of care through awareness of minimally invasive surgical procedures (italics mine) and to increase confidence in their healthcare decisions."

Once again, it's all about finding a doctor who will use laparoscopy or robots for a less traumatic hysterectomy. Not to avoid one altogether and survive with your organs intact.

The problem with the generic advice to get a second opinion is that too many gynecologists disregard all the evidence about the serious after-effects of hysterectomy and removal of the ovaries and won't volunteer any information about them. These are not side-effects--like an infection due to the surgery--but long-term adverse impacts on health and sexual pleasure.

Without a uterus, a woman can not experience what some refer to as a full-body orgasm in which the uterus pulses rthymically. That is not an opinion. It's an incontrovertible fact, but the gynecologist who will warn you about that is a rare individual. You also won't hear about your increased risk of future bladder and back problems, or about your much higher risk of heart attack if your ovaries are removed. There's no controversy at all about these after-effects of hysterectomy. The evidence has been reported in medical journal articles repeatedly over the last several decades.

Yet, to justify the supposed joy of hysterectomy, The Essential Guide tells one anonymous woman's tale of painful periods ever since she had her first, and her gloriously wonderful life after hysterectomy.

Other than that one, there are only three other stories included as MP3 downloads or PDFs. One of the women had uterine cancer (an absolutely valid and unavoidable reason for a hysterectomy); another had to be on blood thinners for another condition and this had serious effects on her periods (how common is that one? and who knows what alternatives she had?); and the third said she had "passed out" every time she got her period. Again, thankfully, not a common experience. All end up as testimonials for Steeves' book.

That said, yes indeed, women should get second opinions. And third and fourth, if need be, until they find a doctor whose practice is focused on avoiding hysterectomies, not doing them. Some medical centers now have specific hysterectomy alternatives centers. Search for them. But first, arm yourself for these discussions by learning about the anatomy of our reproductive organs and the essential role they play in our health and pleasure for as long as we are alive.

To get that information, I once again recommend the HERS Foundation website where you can watch a plain vanilla explanation, with diagrams but not any sort of bloody video, of the functions of your uterus and organs. You'll be grateful for investing 10 minutes of your time to save your future health and pleasure.

Websites Exploit Women Worried About Hysterectomy

2010-10-27T08:06:00.000-07:00

There they are on the home page of Hystersisters.com: five attractive women, all dressed in white and smiling broadly. Why are these women so happy? They've had a hysterectomy--and obviously enjoyed it!

Yes, if you believe the claims on both Hystersisters and Hysterectomyresources.com, having your uterus removed--and likely your ovaries as well--can not only be anxiety-free but also a happy, happy experience.

If you do believe that, as we say in New York, there's a bridge in Brooklyn we'd like to sell you.

Selling, of course, is what both these websites are about. Selling you not on the idea that most hysterectomies--as many as 90%--can and should be avoided because they are so damaging to women's health. No, not that. Instead, both websites are trying to sell you on a different type of hysterectomy, and preferably, in the case of Hystersisters, one done with the daVinci robotic system.

The convenient Find-a-Doctor feature on that website is sponsored by...you guessed it, daVinci!

Intuitive Surgical, Inc., the company that makes the daVinci systems, is bullish on its future. The company's investor relations website reports that for the first half of 2010 revenue was up 49% from the first half of last year to $679 million.

This company's intensive public relations and advertising campaign--I've seen their press releases turned into glowing news stories by naive reporters in several newspapers--is all about getting hospitals to buy the robotic systems for a sweet $1 million to $2.3 million each.

And the revenue stream just goes on from there. Annual service agreement: between $100,000 and $180,000. Disposable instruments and accessories for each procedure: between $1,300 and $2,200.

Is it any wonder that medical costs in this country are impoverishing us?

The websites are a fabulously clever way of putting pressure on doctors and hospitals to buy the systems.

Women who've been told they need/should have a hysterectomy run to their computers for information.

And what they find at Hystersisters is designed to prompt them to ask their doctors--themselves getting pitched by Intuitive sales people--if they use the robotic systems. It's push-pull marketing at its best.

But pushing daVinci isn't the only thing wrong with these two websites, as I'll explain in my next blog in a few days.

In the meantime, any women who's considering a hysterectomy should go to the HERS Foundation website to get the cold, hard facts about the serious health problems and loss of sexuality that the surgery too often brings about.

Post Reporter Right to Challenge Paladino

2010-10-05T07:11:00.000-07:00

I have to admit I got a good laugh out of the confrontation between a NY Post reporter and Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for governor of NY State. But it was not just great entertainment. It also offered a good look at a reporter trying to do the job right.

Fred Dicker pressed Paladino for evidence to back up his charge that Andrew Cuomo is an adulterer, just like Paladino himself, who has admitted not only an affair but that he fathered a girl who is now 10. Paladino's admission, of course, was tactical. Rather than wait for someone to out him, he tried to neutralize the situation by openly discussing it. But apparently not satisfied with the public reaction, he accused Cuomo of the same sin.

Too often, reporters respond to this type of situation with what journalists refer to as "he said, she said" stories. That is they report the allegation and then the denial, making no attempt to tell the public who is right. This is what sometimes passes as "objective" reporting, when instead it should be called "stenographic" reporting--just take down what everyone says and put it into some grammatical sentences.

Fred Dicker, on the other hand, was doing what good journalists do: demanding verification of Paladino's charge. He wasn't content to just offer an assist to the mud-slinging unless Paladino showed him the evidence.

His reward was to be called "biased" and a "stalking horse" for the Cuomo campaign. Paladino sounded like a mobster when he told Dicker, "I'll take you out." But one of Paladino's aides caught on the video trying to separate Dicker from the candidate made another threat, one that usually cows journalists into being stenographers. He told Dicker, "You're off our campaign list. You get nothing more from us."

To a reporter, that's a threat with teeth. It means no access to the candidate, no easy way to get comments or advance word about upcoming appearances or policy papers. Ready access to powerful people makes a reporter important to his or her news organization. In Washington, D.C., it makes reporters powerful, virtually guaranteeing front-page or top-of-the-broadcast position.

It also can make reporters dupes for politicians' lies, tools for efforts to sell a war or advance legislation harmful to the public. As we sadly learned about the selling of the Iraq war with a heavy assist from New York Times reporter Judith Miller, a buddy of Dick Cheney.

So it was refreshing to see veteran Albany reporter Fred Dicker get in Paladino's face and demand the evidence.

I showed the video to my Media Ethics class at Hofstra University as an example of a reporter with ethics trying to do his job. Ethical reporting starts with seeking the truth, and Fred Dicker modeled that for everyone to see.

I hope Dicker's career thrives after this episode and that he gets the credit he deserves for doing the job the way it should be done. Washington reporters could well take a lesson from him.

In Honor of Ovarian Cancer Month: Hold On To Your Ovaries!

2010-09-07T13:49:00.000-07:00

Shame on The New York Times for printing a one-sided article touting the benefits of female castration as a way of preventing ovarian cancer. The article reported on a study of women who had inherited the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations that increase the risk for breast and ovarian cancer. Of the women who kept their ovaries, 6 percent developed ovarian cancer, compared with 1 percent of those who gave permission to remove their ovaries.

Ovarian cancer is deadly serious: 15,000 women a year die from it, and the Ovarian Cancer Alliance has marked September for observance of Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month. Fear of ovarian cancer is the major reason why about 300,000 women a year permit doctors to remove their ovaries, usually at the same time as a hysterectomy. However, only a small percentage of those women have the BRCA mutations; they face a lifetime risk of only 1.39% of developing ovarian cancer (or 1 in 72), while the risk of breast cancer over her lifetime is 12.15% (or 1 in 8), according to the National Cancer Institute. So using fear of ovarian cancer to convince a woman who does not have the mutations to have a hysterectomy, is clearly unwarranted.

Now the question is, how warranted is such a recommendation for women who do have the mutation? Well, if all we were talking about was removing some non-essential or at least less-essential body part--even a breast--then trading a 5% risk for a 1% risk of a deadly cancer, for which there is no good treatment, might indeed be a sensible option.

But no woman should make that choice until she understands all that she will be sacrificing along with her ovaries, and the added health risks that accompany this drastic decision.

As I've blogged about before, losing your ovaries is literally castration and brings on not only a sudden, intense menopause, with severe hot flashes, mood swings, loss of energy, etc., but also drastically raises the odds that a women will suffer other serious problems as a result. A study published in the journal The Lancet in October, 2006, found that women castrated before the age of 45 double their risk of death from heart attack. Some previous studies put the increased risk of heart disease at 5.5 times, regardless of age at time of operation.

And then there are the increased risks for osteoporosis and bone fractures and Parkinson's disease and other forms of dementia.

As for women who have enjoyed sex--well, they can say good-bye to their former selves. Our ovaries continue to function long after menopause, still producing some estrogen and other hormones. Without them, welcome to the world of dry. Libido--gone or dramatically reduced. Ability to feel and enjoy--women can't even remember what it felt like. Impact on your relationships--depends on how understanding and tolerant is your partner.

The Ovarian Cancer National Alliance is pushing for an increase in funding for research for a test that would detect ovarian cancer at an early stage, and for a cure. Amen to that.

But the next time The New York Times or anyone else publishes an article about ovarian cancer prevention through castration, they ought to be sure to tell women about the increased risks and poor quality of life that they will be endure as a result.

Feeling Un-Sexy in America

2010-07-28T09:05:00.000-07:00

The market is huge and tantalizing: in the midst of a culture drenched in sex, one in three American women say they have about as much interest in sex as Monday Night Football.

That's why the recent rejection by the Food and Drug Administration of flibanserin, the latest drug intended to boost female libido, was such a disappointment to the pharmaceutical industry intent on hitting the jackpot with a female Viagra.

Trials of the drug showed it did too little to warrant approval, and that finding, in turn, sparked the latest debate on why it's so much harder to find a sex drug for women than men. After the usual chatter about sexual desire being so much more dependent on women's emotions then men's came the theories that essentially blame women's drive for equality.

For example, after chalking up some of the apathy to a resurgence of 19th century "bourgeois propriety, " Camille Paglia, writing in a New York Times op-ed, blamed Super Moms who've turned men into "cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women." She also slapped at workplaces where women are finally enjoying some modicum of equality with men as leading to a suppression of physicality and then to boredom with each other.

The sad part of this commentary is that is is so ill informed by facts. Take a look at the recent medical literature on women's sexuality, as I have recently in researching a book on the subject, and you find the authors still quoting 1960s work by Masters & Johnson. Our culture glorifies sex but when it comes to doing actual research on the subject we're stuck in old-fashioned prudery.

The best evidence, however, points to far-different culprits than those plucked out of the air by Paglia: the 600,000 hysterectomies a year performed on women plus women's use of birth control pills and medications like Prozac.

By the time a woman in America reaches the age of 60, the chances are one in three that she will have had a hysterectomy. Afterward, it is common for women to report loss of sexual desire, less sexual activity, decreased genital sensation and difficulty achieving orgasm. This is a reality that the surgeons don't want women to know, and that hysterectomized women most often keep to themselves out of shame and fear.

Why does hysterectomy adversely affect sexuality? Part of the answer is that about 300,000 of the women who undergo hysterectomies also lose their ovaries at the same time. Perhaps half the others also suffer a loss of ovarian function as a result of damage from the surgery done to remove their uterus. That means about 450,000 women will lose ovarian function this year, and every year.

When ovaries are removed or cease functioning, that is castration. Castration is an ugly word, but when you cut out someone's reproductive/sex organs, it is the proper medical word. Shrinking from it just allows doctors to continue to recommend the removal of healthy organs as no big deal, and in fact a benefit to women, a way of reducing their chances of ovarian cancer. Not calling it castration helps conceal the fact that without her ovaries, a woman loses not only estrogen--the main concern of men because it enables vaginal lubrication--but also most of her testosterone, often called the "hormone of desire."

For men, the equivalent would be recommending routine removal of healthy testicles to prevent testicular or prostate cancer. Of course, I've never heard of a man willingly giving up healthy testicles unless he's deliberately changing gender. I once knew a man who consented to surgical castration because he had prostate cancer. Afterward, he told me how indifferent he had become to things like sexy movie scenes that before had turned him on.

Women I've interviewed who have been castrated say there is no artificial cocktail of replacement hormones that comes close to making them feel like their old selves. And believe me, they've tried to find one. Before the surgery, they had ample desire. Afterward, zip. This change had nothing to do with their emotional state, only the very drastic loss of the hormones produced by their sex organs.

When it comes to the birth control pill, the manufacturers have long been coy about the effect on women's sex lives, listing as a side effect "sexual changes." Translation: less desire. Loss of desire is also a side effect of anti-depressants including Prozac.

Now, I'm not saying that over-worked women don't have less interest in sex than women who get enough sleep, or that deeply entrenched negative attitudes toward women's sexuality don't still exist. Of course they do. And women suffering from serious depression may have a need for medication that outweighs any worry about the impact on their sex lives.

But it's certainly anti-woman to suggest, as Paglia did, that the culprit is women's desire for equality in the workplace. Or that our excellent organization skills, which make it possible for us to bring in a critical paycheck while raising children and keeping a home, should be criticized as de-masculinizing our partners.

Women are being castrated by the hundreds of thousands every year. That's a fact, and that's where the focus and the outrage should be because there are organ-sparing alternatives as much as 90 percent of the time.

Let the Gynecologists Hear from You

2010-06-10T08:43:00.000-07:00

I've been receiving comments from women who are outraged about the continuing epidemic of avoidable hysterectomies, and it's time the doctors took the heat directly.

The place to voice your feelings is the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, ACOG for short. This is, essentially, the governing body for the doctors, and when they change their standards of practice to say that no healthy ovaries should be removed; that there are organ-conserving alternatives to the vast majority of hysterectomies; then the epidemic will stop.

That's because once the standard is changed, the doctors and hospitals become vulnerable to lawsuits they win now because they always fall back on the defense that, hey, this is the accepted way to deal with women's problems.

So, let them hear from you.

You can call them at 202-638-5577. Either voice your feelings to the person who answers the phone, or ask for the press office and see if you can get through.

You can also send email to: communications@acog.org

Gynocologist's Professional Org Ignores Heart Attack Risk

2010-06-04T12:38:00.000-07:00

The professional organization that sets the standards of care followed by gynecologists has just released a new patient education booklet on hysterectomy. While this new version from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is something of an improvement (I'll get to that later), it leaves out completely the most serious risk facing women who are hysterectomized and/or lose their ovaries: heart attack.

I brought that very subject up with my cardiologist recently (yes, I have heart problems), and this is what he said:

"If they're taking out their ovaries, they're giving these women heart attacks. And you can quote me." Dr. Pavel Romano, Huntington, New York.

The "they," of course, is gynecologists. It's brave of Dr. Romano to put his name on a quote like this, but he's really not going out on a limb on the science. As I blogged about recently, solid research has now established that losing your ovaries greatly increases a woman's risk of heart attack; losing your uterus alone also increases that risk, but not by as much.

So I carefully read ACOG's new patient education booklet, expecting to find mention of this risk. Remember, heart attack is the leading cause of death of American women.

And is that risk mentioned? No, it is not.

I asked the spokesperson for ACOG just who is responsible for the contents of the pamphlet, and she ascribed it to "ACOG Fellows" who base the content on the College's Practice Bulletins and Committee opinions.

I've asked to interview one or more of these Fellows, but in the meantime I've now had the pleasure of reading ACOGs "Guidelines for Women's Health Care," published in 2007. Nowhere in that very long description of how doctors should respond to women's various gynecological problems is any mention of the increased heart attack risk brought about by hysterectomy and oopherectomy.

Absent any other explanation, this seems to be a case of a medical truth that's inconvenient for business. Acknowledging the heart attack risk might force the gynos to confront their tendency to just yank out a woman's organs, and that would leave many of them unable to earn their usual fees. It takes a lot more skill than many gynecologists have, and a lot more time, for apparently no bigger reimbursement from Medicaid, for example, to remove only a woman's fibroids instead of her entire uterus. Fibroids are the most common reason for hysterctomizing a woman, and they are never a good reason for a hysterectomy, much less removal of ovaries. Apparently, learning to do the more difficulty surgery is a problem for many gynecologists, who prefer instead the quicker, more lucrative and simpler job of just cutting out entire organs.

As I said earlier, there is some new information in the pamphlet that is helpful to women deciding whether to consent to a hysterectomy. The pamphlet now admits that the menopausal symptoms caused by ovary removal "may be more intense" (oh, yeah, make that will be horrendous) than if a woman went through menopause naturally. And that there is an increased risk of bone fracture due to osteoporosis.

But most of the pamphlet is still devoted to explaining the different ways surgeons can cut out a woman's organs and the details of how a woman is prepped for surgery.

A woman reading this pamphlet would still come away with only a partial understanding of the functions of her organs and of the consequences of surgery that may very well shorten her life.

It's an outrage that complete information is still absent from this booklet, and no woman agreeing to the surgery based on it is giving truly informed consent.

Maloney Supports Hysterectomy Study, Not Pre-Consent Video

2010-05-20T10:58:00.000-07:00

In response to a story I wrote for womensenews, U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat from Manhattan, issued a statement today clarifying her position on a video consent requirement.

The story appeared first with a headline saying she would "mull" introducing a law, when she had said only--as the story read--that she would ask the General Accountability Office to look into the matter. The headline caused something of a stir because, as I wrote in my last blog, gruesome pre-consent videos are being used by anti-choice advocates to persuade women not to have abortions.

For that reason, some pro-choice women's groups are just reflexively rejecting the concept of a hysterectomy video.

The headline has now been corrected, and here, for the record, is the statement issued by Maloney's press aide:

Congresswoman Maloney is not contemplating introducing a bill and, in fact, in response to a question from an audience member during the forum, made clear that she is considering looking into if GAO can do a study, not legislation. Indeed, she doesn’t like the idea of Congress mandating that a particular video should be shown prior to any medical procedure. Nonetheless, in 1978 and 1993, Congressional hearings highlighted the issue of unnecessary hysterectomies, and Congress does have a role to play in investigating the reasons why so many women are being encouraged to undergo hysterectomies when less invasive alternatives are often available, particularly since they can have a negative impact on women’s health.

I think that pro-choice women's groups should stop and consider the damage done by hysterectomies and removal of ovaries before they take a position on the video.

One reason avoidable hysterectomies are still being done in the hundreds of thousands every year is because malpractice lawsuits are ineffective against them in all but the most egregious cases. It's a classic catch-22: because so many doctors do them, it's considered standard practice, and juries won't find against doctors when they plead that all they did was what so many other doctors do. So on we go. It seems to me that unless women somehow get the information they need about the health risks of these procedures, surgeons will continue to do these operations despite the evidence against them.

As Rep. Maloney rightly asked, "Where's the outrage?"

Video Consent Requirement May Be the Only Way to Stop Hysterectomy Epidemic

2010-05-03T12:06:00.000-07:00

In this second report on the HERS conference, I want to focus on the push to require that women see an informative video before consenting to a hysterectomy.

The HERS Foundation has produced such a video and is hoping for legislative action. But even a proposal to require women to read more about the effects of the procedure before consenting, introduced this year by Indiana legislator, Bruce Borders, (seen here outside the conference room with keynote speaker, U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney) has prompted surprising opposition. Of course gynecologists objected, but so did the Indiana chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The women who attended the conference were perplexed by this opposition. Many had told stories all day long of being victimized by doctors who not only failed to inform them about alternatives to losing their uteruses and ovaries, but lied about the benefits of the surgery. Why, the women wondered, would a civil liberties organization oppose an effort to truly empower women with enough information to make an informed decision?

After all, it's not as if it's news that too many women are losing their organs unnecessarily. This effort has been going on for decades. As I've pointed out in earlier blogs, the toll on women's sex lives and health is major, and for many, devastating. Women whose fibroids or bleeding or endometriosis could be treated without removing any of their organs get talked into a hysterectomy. Believing they have no other option, they consent to surgery to remove their uterus--which itself diminishes their sex lives and has other adverse effects--and often wake up to find that their doctor has gratuitously taken out their ovaries, too.

How can this be stopped? With about 600,000 women undergoing hysterectomies every year, what will it take to bring that number down significantly? After 28 years of counseling women, Nora Coffey, who founded HERS, believes required viewing of a video before consent may be the only way.

At the conference, Coffey said she had tried to have a conversation with a woman at the Indiana ACLU about her objections to the Indiana proposal, but had instead been on the receiving end of a loud scolding.

So, I decided to see if I could make sense of the objection, and found this explanation, written by VP, Legislation, Joan Laskowski, in the Spring, 2010 newsletter of the Indiana ACLU:

"Although civil liberty requires informed consent for medical procedures, this bill mandates ideologically inspired information that a woman must certify having read and understood, including risks, discomforts, irreversibility and resulting infertility...This simply parallels for conception the 'informed consent' requirements for abortion and compromises dignity and autonomy protected by reproductive liberty." (Bold face mine.)

Get it? What's disturbing the folks at the Indiana ACLU is the similarity of requiring women seeking abortions to view a video (or jump other hurdles) with efforts to prevent avoidable hysterectomies.

Laskowski, who did not return phone calls seeking comment, seems to be mistakenly assuming that the intent of hysterectomy information is to ensure that women stay fertile, to make sure they can still get pregnant. Note the word "conception" in her commentary.

This argument, of course, first of all ignores the reality that the only real concern most gynecologists have about cutting out a woman's organs is whether she still wants to have babies.

But the fundamental flaw in Laskowski's thinking is that she seems to have reflexively decided that because the form of these consent laws is the same for abortion and hysterectomy that both violate women's dignity and civil rights.

She fails to understand--or perhaps believe--that women are not fully informed by their doctors about the consequences of hysterectomy. This despite testimony at a hearing on the Indiana bill from women who said their doctors lead them to believe they had no choice but hysterectomy. They were coerced by misinformation, incomplete information, and fear-mongering--references to overblown risks of cancer.

It's also worth remembering that this is not the first time that women's health advocates have acted to intervene in the patient-doctor relationship on the grounds that women were not being told the whole story. In 1978, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration mandated that women be given informative information about birth control pills when they picked up prescriptions at the drug store. The FDA had tried years earlier to have doctors give women an informative handout, but the doctors had ignored the material or refused to hand it out.

In an ideal world, physicians' ethics would obligate them to provide women with complete information. But they haven't. The hysterectomy machine grinds on. Doctors and hospitals have financial incentives to keep it up--forever, unless there is a major intervention, yes, between them and their patients.

I teach ethics, with a focus on the media, but the principles for deciding if an action is ethical are the same regardless of the subject. Ethical dilemmas arise when all the means you have of dealing with a problem result in some kind of harm. In the case of the required showing of a video to a patient before consent, you are intruding on the doctor-patient relationship. You are turning an "I trust my doctor" simple decision into a more complex calculation that forces women to question their doctors.

On the other hand, there's the huge evil of avoidable hysterectomies. Since the goal is to protect women's health--not to force a woman to continue a pregnancy or to ensure she remains fertile-- you can ethically justify the intrusion of the video as less harmful than the surgery itself. The contents and tone of the video--or the text a woman must read--however, should be as inoffensive as possible.

This isn't the case with abortion consent laws. Abortion videos show gruesome pictures of actual abortions in what amounts to emotional blackmail. Oklahoma's new abortion consent law--stayed by the courts at the moment--requires women to undergo an ultrasound exam and hear a detailed description of the fetus before having an abortion.

The HERS video shows no gruesome pictures. Using drawings and a calm voice-over, the HERS video attempts to give a non-ideological picture of the functions of a woman's sex organs and their life-long importance to her health. A friend of mine who has spent decades working in the field of doctor and patient education finds some of the wording biased, so I'm sure it's possible to make it even more neutral.

If all women considering a hysterectomy had to view the video, tens of thousands every year might avoid losing their sex organs. Seems to me it's more than worth it to intrude on the doctor-patient relationship.

But if anyone has a better idea of how to stop the hysterectomy epidemic, please speak up. That includes you, Joan Laskowski.

The HERS Conference: Dr. Levine Delivers the Truth

2010-04-27T08:41:00.000-07:00

The HERS conference last Saturday delivered a mountain of information in an atmosphere charged with sadness. Much of the audience was in tears listening to women tell about how they had become victims of doctors who continue to ignore the facts about avoidable hysterectomies.

In this first report on the conference, I'm focusing on Dr. Mitchell Levine, a remarkable, Boston-based gynecologist whom we would clone if we could. Here's my report:

Dr. Mitchell Levine, who teaches at the Tufts and Harvard Schools of Medicine, doesn't look much different from other tanned and fit 57-year old male doctors. But when he talks about women and their fate as victims of hysterectomy and removal of their ovaries, his tone because so respectful, even reverential, that it is unexpected, almost shocking.

"It's too sacred, it's too complex, to just take things out," he is saying as he sweeps a laser pointer over a full-color diagram of a woman's internal organs. But, he continues, taking a uterus out is so easy to do: "Clamp, clamp, clamp, clamp. Done." He demonstrates with four quick clenches of his hands.

Levine is speaking at the 28th conference of the HERS Foundation in a Manhattan hotel. He's telling the truth about the consequences of this surgery and why he believes that "at least" 90 percent of the 600,000 done each year could be avoided with other treatments, some as simple and cost-free as waiting.

It's a huge contrast to the paternalistic advice most women get: Your uterus is just a cradle. Done having children? Then you don't need it any more. But you'll still have the playpen! Wink. Wink.

And: You'll love life after your hysterectomy. No more periods!

And: If I end up taking out your ovaries, just think, no more risk of ovarian cancer!

"It's part of their training," Dr. Levine explains to me. "That these (the ovaries) are ticking time bombs. Instead, you end up shortening (a woman's) life because you've increased her risk of heart disease." Yes, that's right, a woman 40 to 44 whose ovaries are removed or which stop functioning as a result of a hysterectomy (that happens in better than one in 10 cases) faces twice the risk of heart disease as a woman with intact ovaries. This added risk more than outweighs the possibility of ovarian cancer, according to medical studies.

"Can you imagine if a man went to a doctor for a benign condition and the doctor said, 'I can fix that by cutting your nuts off?'" Levine asked with a laugh.

"He'd turn right around and walk away."

Indeed. Men would never voluntarily give up their virility, their joy in sex, to cure a non-life-threatening problem. They have no confusion about the fact that their organs are sex organs, not just baby-makers. Yet, women's organs have been labeled by the medical profession as "reproductive" instead of sexual, and the medical professions is more interested in us as baby factories than as sexual beings. So they talk us into castration for non-life-threatening fibroids and bleeding that can be managed in other ways. And we enjoy sex less as a result, some of us losing most if not all of our libido and some or most of our ability to feel sexual stimulation.

The situation has become more perilous for women as new surgical techniques make it possible to do hysterectomies on an outpatient basis.

Levine goes into detail about this. There's the traditional way, via a long abdominal incision; and then there are the newer ways, via the vagina or laparoscopically through small, abdominal incisions. For the small percentage of women who truly need their organs removed, these techniques are better, shortening recovery time from the surgery.

But regardless of how the surgery is done, there are the same consequences for women who could have avoided it. No matter how it's done, says Levine, removing the uterus "is still cutting the ligaments and the blood supply" to not just the uterus but to other organs as well.

As a result, 10 to 15 percent of women who have only their uterus removed lose the function of their ovaries anyway, apparently because of the loss of blood supply. This plunges them, whether they are 25 or 45, into an immediate and crushing menopause.

Furthermore, the ligaments that are cut are critical to the support of the bladder and bowel. When the uterus is removed, it leaves an empty space, and lacking their previous support, the other organs can sag and lean on each other. Urinary and bowel problems become much more likely.

The most common reason for hysterectomy is fibroids. But when Dr. Levine sees women with fibroids, hysterectomy is the last thing on his mind.

"For example, if a routine exam shows a fibroid, but the woman has no symptoms, I reassure her and say, 'See me in a year.'

"Or, if she's bleeding a lot but it's manageable, I just tell her to take some iron and wait" if she is near menopause. Estrogen, he explained, makes fibroids grow, and because estrogen levels drop at menopause, fibroids will then shrink.

If the bleeding is severe and menopause too far off, Dr. Levine may do surgery to remove them, leaving the uterus and ovaries intact.

Women at the conference asked what Dr. Levine would do if a woman had multiple fibroids--30 or even 50--or if some of them were very large. He answered that it didn't matter. He could still remove them, explaining that they are usually in a sort of capsule, like a hard boiled egg, and pop out when the capsule is cut.

But here's the kicker: Even though it takes longer to cut out fibroids and stitch the uterus back together than to do a hysterectomy--clamp, clamp, clamp, clamp--Dr. Levine gets paid less money to do the conserving surgery than to hollow out a woman's insides.

As U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney said at the conference, "Where is the outrage?"

Evidence Ignored by Doctors Removing Women's Ovaries

2010-04-19T06:52:00.000-07:00

I have been deeply affected by the comments of women in response to my last blog about hysterectomy. Their lives have been devastated by--what should I call them? Ignorant? Arrogant? Unethical? Unprofessional? All of these?--doctors who continue to remove healthy ovaries from women in the face of evidence that they are causing irreparable harm to their patients.

Spurred by these comments, and by my need to prepare to attend the HERS Hysterectomy Conference this coming Saturday, I did some research and found a smoking gun right on the website of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. It's an August, 2005 article (scroll down the search page to the 7th article) that appeared in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology. Apparently, it's not required reading for the practicing physicians who continue to castrate women.

Called "Ovarian Conservation at the Time of Hysterectomy for Benign Disease," it takes a comprehensive look at the risks and benefits of removing a woman's ovaries at the same time that she has a hysterectomy for non-cancerous problems like fibroids and heavy bleeding. As far as I can tell at this point, it appears to be one of the latest investigations of the issue, which, despite its importance to women, has not been the subject of much research at all.

Here are some of the conclusions:

At no age is there any clear benefit to women from removal of the ovaries (oophorectomy).
"For women younger than 65 at the time of surgery, oophorectomy increases the risk of dying from coronary heart disease."
Evidence from the Nurses' Health Study says that the risk of heart attack was doubled if the women in question were between 40 and 44 years old; and up 40% if the women were older than 50.
After losing their ovaries, women have higher bad cholesterol levels, higher blood pressure and more hardening of the arteries.
Women who were past menopause when they had an oophorectomy ended up with 54% more bone fractures due to osteporosis than women with intact ovaries.
The fractures often were of the hip, and having a hip fracture between ages 60 and 64 meant dying early--a loss of 11 years of life!
It also means that many of those women could never leave their homes again on their own. One study found that before breaking a hip, 28 percent of the women were housebound; after the fracture, 46 percent were housebound.

So why do doctors continue to castrate women?

I certainly have no satisfactory answer to that.

But some, apparently, believe that the overriding benefit is to reduce a woman's chance of getting ovarian cancer. But this study notes that removal of the uterus alone lowers the risk of ovarian cancer by 40% below the level of women who retain their uterus.

So, let's see: since men have a risk of testicular cancer, should doctors be removing their testicles just in case? Or treating them with female hormones to reduce the risk of prostate cancer?

We women know that would never happen. Men prize their virility and do everything to keep it. Women prize their sexuality, too, but consent to hysterectomy and oopherectomy too often without realizing what they will be giving up. Thus the need for the HERS Foundation video and consent only after seeing it.

So, is it ignorance of the facts that keeps doctors castrating women? Or what? Theories--and certainly facts--welcome.

Tell the Truth About Hysterectomy!

2010-04-13T08:35:00.000-07:00

Do women really get the whole truth about hysterectomy before consenting to this all-too common procedure? I know I didn't.

Nora Coffey, head of the HERS foundation, has been convinced for years that women do not realize that they will certainly lose some sexual feeling; will likely have problems with their bladders and bowels; that they may suffer back pain and see their waists enlarge as their internal organs and bones shift in place because where their uterus used to be is now an empty space. In the years since I underwent a hysterectomy in my mid-40s, I have suffered all of these symptoms, and my doctor never mentioned a single one. (It was a woman, by the way.)

On Friday, April 24, the foundation will hold its 28th Hysterectomy Conference at the Hilton New York Hotel in Manhattan to focus attention on an effort to require that women learn about all the possible consequences of hysterectomy before consenting to the procedure. The conference will feature an Indiana state legislator who is the first to introduce legislation requiring such disclosure.

And, the keynote address will be given by U.S. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney of New York who will reportedly raise the issue of unnecessary hysterectomies in the House-Senate Joint Economic Committee, which she chairs. Experts estimate the cost of unnecessary hysterectomies at $17 billion a year.

I'll be covering the meeting for womensenews, a non-profit that specializes in news of particular interest to women.

But in this case, I certainly think that men would like to know about a medical procedure that will most definitely affect their sex lives along with their female partners!

The HERS foundation is advocating that women be required to view an 11-minute video it produced before consenting to hystserectomy. The video shows in a very matter-of-fact manner, using only color diagrams and voice-over-text, the story of female anatomy that somehow got left out of all our high school health classes.

"Women who watch that get it: they understand this is very serious surgery," says Coffey, who believes requiring the video is the only way to bring down the number of women who lose their uterus every year. As I've blogged about before, an astounding one out of every three American women have had surgery to remove their uterus by the time they are 60, and of those, 75% also lose their ovaries, the equivalent of male castration.

There is precedent for requiring the showing of videos: Utah, for example, requires women who are seeking an abortion to see one. Drug companies are required to put informative inserts into packages of medication, for example in birth control pills, thanks to the historic efforts of women's advocates including Barbara Seaman.

Losing your uterus is not like losing a tooth. Lose a tooth, and you can still chew with the others or get a false one to take its place. Each woman get's only one uterus, and it's so much an integral part of our bodies that you don't even realize you'll miss it until it's gone. And then, it's too late.

Use Your Elected Officials to Cut Through the Bureaucracy

2010-03-15T07:17:00.000-07:00

Friends of mine recently told me they were having problems getting to talk to an actual person at Social Security and Medicare. Both programs have so many complicated aspects to them that you need an advanced degree to just figure out your choices. I really don't know how people with limited literacy manage at all.

In any event, I advised my friends to contact their member of Congress if the problems continued.

Sure enough, I got an email from them saying, "Thank you, thank you!"

I was gratified, but not surprised that the strategy had worked to equalize their relationship with the agency in question. Using your elected officials to get help with consumer problems that involve government programs and bureaucrats is almost a sure-fire way to move your problem to the top of the pile. Politicians rely on serving their constituents to build good will that will get them re-elected. At all levels, local to national, they employ staff members whose main job is to provide assistance to people who live in their district.

So, for example, at the state level you might be having trouble with an insurance company. Insurance companies are regulated by the states, so you should contact your state representatives. Maybe your local roads are in bad shape, or you see a really dangerous hazard. Just determine if it's a state, county or town road, and call the appropriate politician.

This works a lot better than contacting the bureaucrat at a highway department who will likely just throw your complaint into the pile. When such a person gets a call from a state elected official or a town council member, their attitude changes; suddenly your problem rises to the top.

But if you're not sure if your problem is related to the federal government, state, or some locality, don't let that stop you. Contact any of your elected politicians, and if the problem isn't in their jurisdiction, they'll refer you to the correct one.

Most of us constantly complain about how much we pay in taxes. Well, this is one sure-fire way to get some bang for your buck and equalize your power. Use your elected officials. Trust me, they're happy to hear from you.

Free To Buy Ineffective, Dangerous Supplements

2010-02-19T06:49:00.000-08:00

As they did back in the 90s, the manufacturers of dietary supplements are revving up to protect their multi-billion dollar market from regulation, and they're getting help from liberals and libertarians who seem blind to how they are being manipulated.

It's sad. Clinging to the idea that government regulation is bad, bad, bad, champions of freedom are actually arguing that the public should continue to have the right to waste money on ineffective and possibly dangerous dietary supplements. In a response to my inquiry, the folks behind The Pen--who didn't bother to sign their names--actually equated Americans' right to privacy from government spying on our phone calls, etc., with the freedom to buy dietary supplements that have never been tested for effectiveness or safety.

Hello? Can't you tell when you're being used? Why should for-profit manufacturers be free to put anything on the market without first testing it for safety and effectiveness? Why should we trust these manufacturers any more than we trust auto manufacturers, or for that matter, drug manufacturers? Why do you trust them, you unnamed folks at The Pen? Because you believe, in the absence of any reliable reporting system, that no one died from using a supplement in 2008? (That is their primary argument.) Manufacturers right now aren't even required to register their existence, provide information on exactly what is in their products, or adhere to specific formulations for products so buyers can be sure about what's in those pills.

As I pointed out in my last blog, just because something is natural doesn't mean it's safe. Dr. Sidney Wolfe of the Health Research Group, offers the example of St. John's Wort. This plant, he says is pharmacologically active, just like a drug, and interacts with hundreds of other substances.

Under the 1994 legislation that unleashed the supplement industry from almost all regulation, the FDA has such weak authority that it has been able to ban only one supplement--ephedra--and instead has issued only warnings about comfrey and kava kava, both associated with liver toxicity, for example.

Sen. John McCain, ironically, is being vilified for proposing a bill that would only slightly improve regulation of supplements. This is all part of the right-wing effort to whip up opposition to someone who is not considered conservative enough. Read it yourself. You'll see there's nothing there to warrant the conclusion that anyone's trying to take away your vitamins.

Dr. Wolfe calls the proposal "a step forward" but adds that "80% of what's wrong with supplement regulation will still be wrong even if this bill passes."

What's wrong is that manufacturers, under this bill, would only have to prove the safety of new ingredients. All the ones already out there get "grandfathered" in. And, they need not prove effectiveness. As long as they don't make an actual claim of curing disease--which would then tip the product into the category of a drug--they can just imply it, saying things like "promotes prostate health" or "supports cardiovascular health."

So folks worried about their prostate or heart spend hundreds and thousands of dollars a year on these products, with no proof at all that they'll make any difference at all to their health.

We're babes in the woods when we approach the crowded shelves of supplements. We need help to figure out how to wisely spend our hard-earned money. Sure, the FDA has proven itself susceptible to political and corporate pressure. But let's focus on improving their performance instead of inflaming people with the false notion that someone is trying to take away their vitamins.

Shame on anyone who promotes that point of view.

Liberal Group "The Pen" Wrong on Supplement Bill

2010-02-17T10:00:00.000-08:00

I'm on the mailing list for the liberal-leaning organization, The Pen, which also uses the name "The Peace Team" on a web page devoted to causes like impeaching George Bush. I usually find I agree with their stance, so I was quite surprised to see their attack on legislation that would require proof of safety before manufacturers could add a new ingredient to a dietary supplement.

The Pen's email starts with this alarmist and outrageous subject line: Big Pharma Is Trying To Kill Us By Trying To Outlaw Natural Food Supplements.

The message then opens with this far-fetched comparison: "It wasn't enough for Congress to kill off the public option. Now they want to kill us directly by trying to outlaw nutritious food supplements."

Wow. First blame Big Pharma, and then link the failure to legislate a public health insurance option with outlawing DANGEROUS food supplements.

Because that's what the bill would do: first, by requiring supplement manufacturers to have evidence that a new dietary ingredient "will reasonably be expected to be safe," and second, by giving the FDA power to recall supplements that "would cause serious, adverse health consequences or death."

The people behind The Pen seem to have forgotten about ephedra. That's the supplement that was a real favorite of athletes. In 2004, the RAND Corporation's Southern California Evidence-Based Practice Center reviewed 16,000 reports of adverse reactions to ephedra. It blamed the supplement for 2 deaths, 4 heart attacks, 9 strokes, 1 seizure and 5 cases of adverse psychiatric episodes.

Don't trust RAND? How about the Public Citizen Health Research Group, which is hated by Big Pharma, Big Insurance and corporate America in general. Director Sidney Wolfe, M.D. says 155 people died from using ephedra, and he castigated the FDA for not acting sooner to ban sales of the substance.

Remember, just because something is "natural" doesn't mean it's safe. The active ingredient in ephedra is ephedrine, which when chemically synthesized is regulated as a drug--and therefore can't be sold unless it is safe and effective for the specified use.

I emailed The Pen to find out if they had any facts to back up their accusations about this legislation. Let's see if they respond.

Right now, everyone should be supporting this proposal, even if one of the two main sponsors is Senator John McCain. Nobody's wrong all the time! And liberals aren't necessarily right--not if they ignore the facts!

We Need a Consumer Finance Protection Agency!

2010-01-19T11:49:00.000-08:00

So far, we've seen precious little reform of the financial system which enriched the big shot bankers and brought the rest of us to our knees.

One piece of reform that we desperately need--and which the bankers are lobbying mightily against--is a new Consumer Finance Protection Agency.

Unless legislation creating this agency or something similar is passed, regulation of the various players in the finance industry will continue to be split among six different agencies. And, unless you do some research to figure out which one applies to the banking institution that's behind your credit card or your mortgage, you can't tell which one has jurisdiction.

This, of course, makes it really hard for consumers to even make a complaint, much less get any help with it, as I wrote here a while back.

So now's the time to weigh in on this issue, and the easiest way is to sign the petition being circulated by The Campaign for America's Future.

You might also call your Senator in Washington (202 224-3121 is the Capitol Switchboard).

Now's not the time to feel fatigued about fighting the mighty lobbyists. We can prevail if we keep up the pressure.

Ammoniated Fat Now Standard Ingredient in McDonald's, Burger King

2010-01-05T13:17:00.000-08:00

I've been recovering from shoulder surgery for the past few weeks, so I couldn't react immediately to the latest revelation about the trash that now gets added to hamburgers without any notice to the public.

The New York Times reported a few days ago that fat trimmings from the outer surfaces of beef carcasses are now getting mixed into McDonald's and Burger King burgers as well as the frozen prepared patties sold in supermarkets, and, best of all, to our children as part of the school lunch program. These trimming used to be considered unfit for human consumption because they are so contaminated with bacteria. They used to go only into dog food and cooking oil.

But by treating this garbage with ammonia, an enterprising company was able to kill the bacteria and then got approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to sell it to burger makers who are permitted to mix it into the patties--without any labeling! The incentive, of course, was money. The huge agribusinesses that produce pre-made patties save 3 cents a pound by mixing it in.

The news stories that followed the Times's expose focused only on whether the ammonia process is really effective in killing the bacteria. Apparently, the process doesn't work as well as initially expected because the lovely taste of ammonia was detectable. So the manufacturer seems to have cut back on the ammonia.

But this begs the more important question: is junk like this fit for human consumption? When do we decide that the magic of food processing has gone too far? Shouldn't use of such trash at least have to be revealed on the label?

When are we going to stop letting agribusinesses put whatever they want in our food supply so they can increase their profits and put producers of wholesome food at a disadvantage?

FDA Considering New Food Labels

2009-12-10T11:39:00.000-08:00

Thanks to John Donohue, whose blog is Stay At Stove Dad, I've learned that the Center for Science in the Public Interest is urging the Food & Drug Administration to re-do food labels.

Donohue thinks it's ridiculous to let the food companies express the amount of calories and other nutrients in terms of portion sizes that are not realistic. Like a 20-ounce Coke: who stops after drinking the so-called "usual" portion of 8 ounces? So, lots of folks may think they're drinking less than half the sugar than they actually are.

As I pointed out in an earlier blog, there's also a basic problem with the disclosure of the sugar content in the first place. Real people don't measure sugar in grams, but that's the standard of measure used on the labels. It's time to get real and start showing it in teaspoons. Tell me that there are 67 grams of sugar in a 20-ounce Coke, and I have no idea if that's a lot. Tell me it's 16 teaspoons, and the thought of all that sugar makes me gag!

So, let's all make our feelings known to the FDA and hope that under the Obama Administration someone in Washington might actually listen.

The Risks of Mammography for Under-50 Women

2009-11-19T13:50:00.000-08:00

Need another reason to be happy about not getting mammogram from age 40 on?

Skipping them will reduce your risk of breast cancer by reducing your exposure to radiation. Here's the explanation for how that happens, from the Cancer Prevention Coalition:

Thus, premenopausal women undergoing annual screening over a ten-year period are exposed to a total of about 10 rads for each breast. As emphasized some three decades ago, the premenopausal breast is highly sensitive to radiation, each rad of exposure increasing breast cancer risk by 1 percent, resulting in a cumulative 10 percent increased risk over ten years of premenopausal screening, usually from ages 40 to 50 (4); risks are even greater for "baseline" screening at younger ages, for which there is no evidence of any future relevance.

If that's not enough to give you pause, look a little further at the Coalition's web site and you'll see that compressing a breast in which cancer is already growing can actually cause cancerous cells to spread.

There are all sorts of other issues with mammography, like poor quality control and the mystery of why the risk factors for breast cancer apply to white women but don't work well to predict the disease in black women.

These are the kinds of questions we should be making noise about instead of rejecting sound scientific advice about when--and whether--to have mammograms.

The Good News about Mammograms That No One Wants to Hear

2009-11-19T11:23:00.000-08:00

Here's the bottom line, folks. The uproar over the "new" recommendation that women under 50 should not get regular mammograms is all about money not women's health.

In fact, since 1971 the science has been clear that women under 50 get no benefit from regular mammograms. That is, they die just as often from breast cancer as women who haven't gotten regular mammograms. But despite getting no benefit, all too many undergo unnecessary biopsies that leave scars both physical and mental.

That was the very clear message that just came from the expert panel that finally had the guts to tell the unvarnished truth to the public. You'd think this new clarification about the lack of benefits from an unnecessary test would be greeted with cheers.

Instead, it's been treated like an assault on women motivated by a dastardly effort--by those "death panel" advocates in the Obama Administration--to cut health care costs.

So rabid has the mammography industry become about protecting its profits that it has literally become "un-American" to tell the truth about mammography.

OK. You need proof. So let's talk.

First, why should you believe me? Because I've been writing about various aspects of women's health for 30 plus years, and I spent a year as an editor at MAMM, the women's magazine whose sole topic is women's cancers. I have a shelf-full of books about women's health including one that every woman should have: The Secret History of the War on Cancer, by Devra Lee Davis, the Director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. (Look here for more about her.)

Second, even though someone is not a doctor, some facts about human breasts are easy for all of us to understand and go a long way to explaining the situation.

For instance, you might ask, what are they actually looking for on the X-ray film from a mammogram? Dr. Davis explains that they are looking for tiny white dots or other white shapes. This white "stuff," if you'll excuse the lack of scientific language, is calcium that can be left behind by cancerous cells as they grow. The breasts of women who have stopped menstruating and who are generally over 50, are fatty, and the fat shows up as black, a great background against which to see the white dots.

But the breasts of women under 50 are not fatty; they are dense, and are "riddled with lots of white spots, making it really hard to make out any tumor within," Davis writes in her book. So radiologists can only use their best guess to diagnose a particular white spot as suspicious, and most of the time--that's most of the time--they are wrong.

How wrong? In any given year, 70 of every 1,000 women under age 50 who have a mammogram will be told something suspicious has been found, meaning that over the decade between the age of 40 and 50, 700 women out of 1,000 will be told to undergo a biopsy.

Now a biopsy is no small thing. A friend of mine who underwent two of them--no cancer was found--described "excruciating pain." She was left with significant scars. And the mental anguish as women wait for the biopsy and then the result is similarly painful. Davis calls it "terror."

So if there's no benefit in terms of extending life, and all this downside of pain and anxiety--plus the expense--women under 50 should be cheering, not filled with new anxiety because of the recent announcement.

I find it shameful that most of the media coverage about the recommendations has sounded almost hysterical. You can just see the hand-wringing. The moaning about what women should do now? How will they cope? Etc. Etc.

Let's get over it, ladies. This is a step forward, not back. The advice is clear: if you're under 50, you will get no benefit from regular mammograms unless you are in a high-risk category. Over 50, you'll only have to get one every other year. That means less radiation, fewer trips to the imaging center, less humiliation as you have your boobs squished between two plates, fewer unnecessary biopsies, less mental anguish.

And is it a bad thing if we save some money besides?

Disturbing Product of the Month: The Trailer Hitch Toilet Seat

2009-11-17T08:02:00.000-08:00

Back in the day, there was a website I co-founded called "SIS." It was a mix of serious news for women and a jaundiced look at some of the fantastically improbable products out there for sale.

Every month we selected a "disturbing product." We featured testicular implants for dogs, road kill jerky and other winners.

So I'm pleased to announce a revival of the Disturbing Product, and invite your nominations.

I'm starting things off with: The Trailer Hitch Toilet Seat.

Yes, this 1 5/16" steel tube, covered with soft padded camouflage material, fits right on to the trailer hitch of your car or truck, and you can own it for only $39.99!

This innovative item comes from Kotula's, whose catalog aims to please the macho man with other items like Rustic Barnboard Coolers, visors with glued-on hair , and a beer can cozy that "unleashes a satisfying burp and flashing lights" when you hit a remote so you can find where you left it.

We always awarded Bonus Points for product features or user tips that added zest to the products.

So Bonus Points to Kotulas for including these warnings for using the Trailer Hitch Toilet Seat:

"Not for use when vehicle is in motion (you moron)." And: "Can Get Slippery When Wet (you moron)." I added the moron part.

Kotula's has even created a video about the toilet seat that stars hunters in the woods stinking up the place so badly that the deer run away! A butler prepares the tailgate throne, toilet paper at the ready. Thanks, guys.

So please, when in your travels you come across a product as worthy as this, please leave a comment and a link, and I'll put it out there for everyone to enjoy.

Shale Gas: A Cautionary Tale from DISH, Texas

2009-10-14T11:25:00.000-07:00

Natural gas is a cleaner fuel than oil, and much cleaner than coal. But it does carry an environmental price, as the little town of DISH, Texas, population 200, has just learned.

Reporting I've done over the past couple of years on natural gas has focused on the proposals by international energy companies to build liquid natural gas terminals along the East Coast of the United States, some in fragile areas like eastern Long Island Sound (see my posts here under the label "Broadwater") and others so close to populated areas that residents have gone to extraordinary lengths to stop them.

When I wrote about these proposals, it seemed so unnecesssary to me to invade our coastal waters to get natural gas supplies because natural gas production in the U.S. has been rising, thanks, in large part, to extraction of natural gas from shale formations. New domestic production seemed far more desirable--energy efficient and secure--than having huge ships cross the oceans from places like Qatar that would then offload the gas along our coasts, with the attendant sacrifice of fish, the health of the fishing industry, and the beauty of bays, estuaries and ocean.

But now along comes a cautionary tale from DISH, which recently spent 15% of its total budget to find out if the shale gas industry there was affecting community health. The town went to this extraordinary expense because the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality ignored the town's requests that it investigate pollution caused by the industry.

Dish's study turned up some disturbing results. It found benzene, a known carcinogen in all seven samples tested; three had levels exceeding the state's regulatory limit. In general

"The tests confirmed the presence of multiple recognized and suspected carcinogens...known to emanate from industrial processes of exploration drilling, flaring and compression" of natural gas.

In addition, the people of DISH have been complaining that their quality of life has suffered. The town is a bedroom community with rural surroundings, but now there's constant noise and vibration from the gas operations that literally shakes the homes to their foundations.

The news from DISH comes at a critical time. Other areas of the country with shale gas deposits, including Horseheads, in upstate New York, are looking at proposals for extracting natural gas. It's doubtful they can resist the lure of jobs and economic development, even though other suspected results of shale gas extraction may be earthquakes and water pollution. (Extracting the gas requires heavy use of water.)

All the more reason for passage of the so-called FRAC Act, now pending in both houses of Congress. It would close a loophole in the Safe Drinking Water Act so it would apply to natural gas extraction, and require full disclosure of all toxic substances released by drilling. Earthworks has documented the need for better regulation of shale gas extraction. It calls the loophole the "Halliburton Exemption," and yes, that leads directly to the leader of the dark side himself, Dick Cheney.

Our need for fuel of some kind is unavoidable, and natural gas is better than other fossil fuel choices. But we need to minimize the harm, and we can all thank the people of DISH for opening our eyes to the need to put good regulation in place before it's too late.

Your Hamburger Washed with Ammonia:Time to Boycott

2009-10-13T08:36:00.000-07:00

Kudos to The New York Times and reporter Michael Moss for an investigative report that laid bare the disgusting process of making frozen hamburger patties.

The article told the story of Stephanie Smith, a children's dance instructor, who ended up paralyzed from eating a hamburger contaminated with a particularly vicious form of E. coli bacteria.

This eye-opening story revealed that giant Cargill uses four different sources for the meat that it grinds into burgers including beef trimmings that are half fat, half meat and trimmings that come from "any small pieces of fat derived from the normal breakdown of the beef carcass" which are heated and put in a centrifuge. The "remaining product" gets treated "with ammonia to kill E. coli." Yummy!

Despite pressure from government officials, Cargill refuses to test each separate supply of "meat" before it grinds them all together; the only testing is of the final product. So when Smith became ill, it was impossible to track the bacteria back to its source.

Obviously, testing of each source of supply should be required.

But the hamburgers that come out of Cargill's grinders are essentially made of the wastes from the slaughtering process--trash that most of us wouldn't even feed to our dogs. Yet this garbage, some of which costs Cargill as little as 60 cents a pound, according to the article, is sold in supermarkets for, at minimum, $3 a pound.

Spread the word. Everyone should boycott frozen hamburger patties. (Perhaps with one exception: Costco. Costco tests each supply of meat for contamination before it grinds them together.)

If you want a safer hamburger, buy a package of ground beef and spend 5 minutes seasoning it and forming it into patties. Add some breadcrumbs, if you like--that's what Cargill does--for better texture. You'll be less likely to get sick and you won't be giving your business to a company that obviously puts profits ahead of the integrity of its products.

Credit danger at Bloomingdale's: 93.24% Interest!

2009-09-29T06:03:00.000-07:00

You've got to be kidding: 93.24% interest? Can't be.

I blinked a few times, read the statement again and yes, that's what it said.

If I were to pay less than the full balance on my Bloomingdale's charge card, the store would add a finance charge of $2 on top of the 23.99 percent interest charge on any outstanding balance.

And if that happens, read the small print, "the actual ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE (their caps) charged on that account is 93.24%."

But wait. There's more, as I read in the really fine, gray print on the reverse of the bill.

There I learned that even if I pay this current bill in full by the due date, should I make another purchase at Bloomingdale's during the current billing period, a finance charge will appear on my next bill. And that will be based on the current balance (even though my full payment is in the mail!) plus the value of my purchase.

These terms, folks, should be illegal.

Just like all the other usurious interest rates charged on bank credit cards, and all the late fees, etc., etc. The U.S. Congress has been tinkering around the edges of credit card abuses instead of moving directly against these outrageous, confiscatory interest rates.

What cracks me up is that some of the big banks are now proudly advertising that you can opt out of overdraft protection on a credit card. Proud of what? That they've been forced by public outrage to make the "protection" optional? People were shocked to discover they had spent beyond their credit limit without realizing it and were then hit with such outrageous interest rates and charges that they amount to nothing less than theft!

So, Bloomingdale's, I won't be using your charge card ever again.

And the lesson to us all is to remember that the discount you get on the day you agree to take a department store charge card is a weapon that might just wreck your finances.

Just say no!

Quit Whining, Soft Drink Manufacturers. You've Been On the Government Dole for Too Long!

2009-09-24T11:24:00.000-07:00

When you're out to buy a drink to go with take-out or fast food, the cheapest choice is always a Coke or a Pepsi or a Sprite. Plain bottled water usually costs more. A cup of coffee or a bottled tea costs more, and real juice, orange or apple for example, costs a lot more.

This fact should be at the heart of the growing debate about imposing a tax on sugared soft drinks rather than a false argument about individual freedom-of-choice or why Americans are getting so fat.

Advocates of the tax are focusing on the link between increased consumption of soft drinks and the rise in obesity. They say cheap soft drinks are helping to make us a nation of fattys, with all the bad health consequences that result from being obese. Placing a tax on soft drinks to raise the price, say proponents, will discourage consumption, and the money raised could be used to pay some of the cost of providing universal health care.

The opposition,led by the American Beverage Association, has framed its criticism as an objection to another form of government intrusion. It's recent quarter-page ad in The New York Times waved the flag of personal freedom:

"Our goal is to help Americans better understand the relationship between calories consumed and calories burned--as it should be their choice what to eat or drink and not the government's."

Before you swallow that appeal to your rights, consider that the government has had both feet planted in our food supply for decades.

Every year, for example, $10 billion of our taxes are handed out in subsidies to American corn farmers, which has had the effect since the effect of keeping corn prices below the cost of growing it. Our taxes then provide an indirect subsidy to soft-drink manufacturers in saving them about $243 million a year on high-fructose corn syrup, the sweetener used in almost all our soft drinks, according to a Tufts University study. (That study is called "Sweetening the Pot," and can be found at a Tufts' website with a series of fascinating reports on how U.S. government agriculture policies are affecting our food choices.)

That taxpayer-provided discount on the corn syrup is one reason--although not a big one-- for the low price of soft drinks; the cost of the syrup represents only 3.5% of the total cost of making a soft drink, according to the Tufts researchers.

Meanwhile, farmers who raise healthy food--fruits and vegetables--get no tax subsidies at all. That puts the healthiest food at a price disadvantage against all the food products, besides soft drinks, that benefit from the subsidies. Beneficiaries include the giant agribusinesses that concoct all manner of processed foods as well as beef, pork and chicken producers who feed corn to huge numbers of animals in confined and often cruel conditions.

Furthermore, we have a long tradition of using tax policies to push behavior in one direction or another, and whether you favor the push depends, quite naturally, on your self-interest rather than your conservative or liberal ideology.

You don't hear builders, for example, objecting to the tax deduction for mortgage interest that indirectly lowers the price of owning a house and puts renting at a disadvantage. Nor did General Motors object when Congress gave tax breaks to purchasers of Hummers.

So, the idea of using a tax to push consumers away from soft drinks is consistent with past policies. Making the drinks more expensive still leaves people free to buy and drink them, but might push some toward healthier choices.

And, the money that would be raised by the tax could be used not only to help pay for universal health care but also to provide support for vegetable and fruit farmers and help build regional food production networks.

So, beverage makers should quit their whining. It's time they had to face the competition without the advantage of subsidies from taxpayers, although ending the corn, soybean and wheat subsidies has proven politically impossible. But if free enterprise and free choice are really the beverage-makers' goal, then they should be lobbying for an end to the subsidies just as vigorously as they are opposing a tax on soft drinks.

But I won't be holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

What do you think?

Healthy Froot Loops? Not.

2009-09-10T07:34:00.000-07:00

When my sons were little and asked for cereals like Froot Loops, I used to say, "Honey, that's not real food. Real food doesn't come in those colors." I wasn't kidding. To get the rainbow of colors into this junk food, Kellogg has to add two artificial blue colorings, a red and a yellow.

Years of reporting on the harmful effects of artificial ingredients in food convinced me long ago that a healthy diet consists of food the way it comes from nature. If it takes lab scientists to create it, then I'm not interested in putting that so-called food in my body.

Now along comes a new food industry program meant to tap into Americans' increasing awareness that much of the food on supermarket shelves is just corn in different disguises, sweetened and salted to a fare-thee-well.

It's called the "Smart Choice Program," and its green check-mark label will soon be adorning Froot Loops and other foods that don't deserve that designation.

Message to consumers: ignore the label. Read the ingredients list.

The gall of Kellogg in using the label is to be expected. But supposedly respected nutritionists, like Eileen T. Kennedy, dean of Tufts University's school of nutrition science, gave their approval. The New York Times quoted her as saying that Froot Loops would be a better choice for a child's breakfast than a doughnut.

Wow. What an insult to every parent in America. Here are your choices, Mom & Dad. Serve those kids sugary fried food or sugary food made from corn, with fiber and a vitamin pill thrown in.

And, it's not only an insult to our health, it's an insult to our budgets at a time when everyone--except the bankers--are having to find ways to trim expenses.

If you take a look at the ingredients list you can see what a travesty this is. Sugar is listed as the first ingredient and actually accounts for 41% of the weight of the cereal. It amounts to 3 teaspoons of sugar, as much as in many cookies.

And the price for this combo of cheap corn, cheap fiber, and the equivalent of one vitamin pill? $6 for a 19-ounce box!

Here are some ideas of healthy breakfasts that will cost less or certainly no more. Some can be prepared the night before and grabbed right out of the fridge, others may take a few minutes to prepare and eat at home:

A hard-boiled egg and a banana
A peanut butter and jelly sandwich
Cinnamon toast: slices of whole wheat bread and butter with a sprinkle of cinnamon and sugar
A bowl of Quaker Quick Oatmeal (costs a shy more than $2 for an 18-ounce package) sprinkled with raisins. You can microwave it in the time it takes to find your keys.
A smoothie: milk and whatever fruit is on hand whipped in the blender.

Here's my bottom line: If Froot Loops were actually healthy, the name of this product wouldn't be a deliberate misspelling of "fruit." Had they spelled it right, the name itself would be a fraud. Just like the new "Smart Choice" label.

The Truth--and Myths--About Home Births

2009-08-19T08:32:00.000-07:00

When I told my women friends that my older son's first baby--and my first grandchild--would be born at home, most of them looked shocked. They immediately voiced fears, saying that they thought it was much safer to have the baby in a hospital because things can go wrong, and in that case, an operating room would be immediately accessible.

It didn't change their minds when I told them that this was a low-risk pregnancy, that my son's girlfriend had been healthy throughout, and that everything showed that the baby--a boy--was doing well. Nor were their minds changed when I said she would have a birth assistant (a certified doula) to help her through the labor, and then a highly experienced midwife to deliver him.

Well, he was born a week ago today, and came into the world with eyes open wide, pink and healthy and calm.

I know exactly how he looked because I saw him within moments of his birth. All four of his grandparents, his uncle and aunt, were there at home waiting. We suffered along with Nicole as we listened to her cry and yell during the last throes of childbirth. But once we heard his cry, we ran upstairs, applauded, cried, hugged and poured champagne. I'll never forget that morning.

Baby Henry began nursing like a champ immediately, and has been calm and content ever since. When he wakes up to nurse, his eyelids flutter and he frowns as if all that light is still a shock to him.

And then I remember the hospital nurseries with fluorescent lights glaring, 24 hours a day. No wonder the nurseries are usually ringing with the howls of the newborns!

So the outcome for my grandson was perfect. The midwives--a second one came at the end to help--called it a beautiful birth. They should know. For one of them it was the 251st. birth she had attended.

The birth assistant, by the way, was with Nicole throughout her labor, coaching her on changing positions, massaging her, using aroma therapy, accupressure, a birth chair, etc. to help her.

But what of my friends' fears? Justified or not?

Not.

Here's the evidence, culled from the best and most recent study of home births. It comes from a study of 7,600 births in the U.S. and Canada, published in the British Medical Journal in 2005, that were planned to occur at home with certified midwives attending. All of the births studied were low-risk, meaning that the mothers were healthy, with no chronic health problems, and that all pre-birth exams showed the babies in good health as well. The outcomes of the home births were compared to low-risk births that occurred in hospitals.

Infant mortality was 1.7 per 1,000 births, a rate as low as occurs in hospitals with low-risk births.
Medical interventions occurred at less than half the rate as in hospitals. For example, only 2.1% of the women at home suffered an episiotomy, compared to 33%--yes, one in three--in the hospital. Only 3.7% of the women at home ended up delivering by caesarean section, compared to 19% in the hospital.
None of the mothers died. Some of the women--12%--were transferred to a hospital when problems developed. If a woman is within 20 minutes of a hospital, she is likely to be under care in an operating room as quickly as a woman who labors in the hospital. That's because it takes some time to mobilize the equipment and staff needed, and that mobilization can get started just as quickly with a phone call from home.

The study concluded: "Planned home birth for low risk women in North America using certified professional midwives was associated with lower rates of medical intervention but similar (infant)...mortality to that of low risk hospital births in the United States."

The bonus, of course, in this era of soaring health costs, is that a home birth is far less expensive than one that takes place in a hospital.

Meanwhile, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists continues to oppose home births while infant and maternal mortality rates for the U.S. continue to be far worse than those in other western countries where medical interventions, like cesaereans, occur far less often.

Which leads me to believe that opposition to home births is rooted in the desire of the medical establishment to protect their income stream, and not out of concern about the safety of women and babies.

Yet, American women are so frightened of childbirth at home that less than 1% choose to stay out of the hospital. A pity. For them, their families and babies.##

Good News about Global Warming: Kleenex To Be Made From Sustainable Wood

2009-08-10T06:42:00.000-07:00

With good news about global warming in short supply, it's heartening to learn that Kimberly-Clarke has agreed to stop destroying forests to make Kleenex and its other disposable paper products.

This announcement came to me from Greenpeace which has been waging a long campaign they dubbed "Kleercut" to bring public pressure to bear against the manufacturer. Forests are major absorbers of carbon dioxide, and it's imperative that we harvest timber only in ways that sustain them. The success of Greenpeace reinforces my feeling that despite the continuing obstacles and nay-sayers, we now have a critical mass of people in the U.S. who understand the urgency of global warming.

Most people who know me would never call me Pollyanna, but it certainly is true that my view is affected by the people I work with and socialize with, my chosen people, if you will. And my people, along with millions like us in the U.S. and around the world, are engaged in all manner of personal life-style changes to live more gently on the earth, as well as being deeply involved in local, national and global efforts to preserve our beautiful green planet.

The changes range from people picking up after their dogs (helping to prevent bacterial contamination of the bays around here) to doing veggie barbecues instead of grilling that predictable steak (thereby helping to cut carbon dioxide emissions that come from raising so many cattle). All these changes come out of a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of all life.

In the case of Kleenex, good people, mobilized through Greenpeace and other organizations like the National Resources Defense Council, have brought public opinion to bear on Kimberly-Clarke, resulting in this announcement from Greenpeace:

"Kimberly-Clark has set a goal of obtaining 100 percent of the wood fiber for its products — including its flagship brand, Kleenex — from environmentally responsible sources. By the end of 2011, the company will no longer use any pulp from the Boreal Forest unless it is Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified. The policy also prevents the company from cutting endangered forests, and increases the company’s use of FSC-certified pulp and recycled fiber globally. (The statement continues:)

With this announcement, Kimberly-Clark, the largest tissue company in the world, becomes a sustainability leader. Now it’s time for Georgia-Pacific and Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark’s main competitors, to create their own policies to protect ancient forests."

Kudos to Kimberly-Clark!

But for a minimum of 18 months, if they are as good as their word, Kleenex and other Kimberly-Clark products may still be made from unsustainable cutting of the boreal forests, a term which refers to the evergreen forests of the northern hemisphere that lie between the tundra and the forests of trees that lose their leaves in winter.

Until then, and maybe after, I'll continue to buy Marcal toilet paper and tissues because they've been using only recycled paper for years to make their products . (For a list of sustainably produced paper products, go to the NRDC's web site.)

Of course, my optimism about the future won't stop me from writing letters to President Obama, calling members of Congress, and using my buying power to prod manufacturers to see the world green. But I do take heart from the Greenpeace success.

If we don't let ourselves be discouraged, we can pass on a beautiful world to our children and generations beyond.

Alert: Chilean Farmed Salmon Tainted with Dangerous Antibiotic

2009-07-27T06:35:00.000-07:00

Salmon that is farmed in Chile and widely sold in the U.S. is being fed hundreds of thousands of pounds of an antibiotic that is so dangerous that its use is prohibited in food producing animals--that includes fish--by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The antibiotic, chloramphenicol, is linked to a lethal human blood disorder and is a suspected cause of cancer. There is no known safe dose; It is only used to treat serious human infections.

The situation shows, once again, how our food inspection system is so inadequate. The FDA should be inspecting Chilean salmon and stopping shipments from entering the U.S. if they contain any trace of the antibiotic.

But according to Public Citizen the FDA inspects only 1 to 2% of all seafood entering the U.S.

What a pickle, to mix metaphors: I not only love the taste of salmon, but I know it's healthy for my heart. And farmed salmon is a whole lot cheaper than wild salmon.

But if you put this in context, and think about the fact that the federal government allows other kinds of antibiotics to be fed routinely to cattle whose flesh is supposedly safe, this chloramphenicol has to be so dangerous that we should do our best to avoid it.

Word about Chilean salmon came today in a New York Times article that reported that Chile used 718,000 pounds of antibiotics last year to keep farmed salmon from dying from infections; about one-third were from the most dangerous family of antibiotics, quinolones. Farmed ocean fish are vulnerable to infection because they are grown in pens that can be unsanitary and overcrowded.

By comparison, Norway used only 2,075 pounds last year for its farmed salmon. This info became public because the environmental group, Oceana, requested the information.

Chile is the biggest supplier of salmon to the U.S., and the fish are sold by giant retailers including Wal-Mart and Safeway who, according to the Times, have reduced their purchases from the company because of health concerns.

Indirectly, of course, that means they are still selling at least some Chilean salmon.

What's a health-conscious consumer to do?

This is truly a case of buyer beware. Supermarkets, as I've noted here before, are required to label their seafood as wild or farmed and with country of origin. Your local fish monger is not covered by the law, but be sure to ask if the information is not visible.

So, to the best of your ability, buy only wild Pacific salmon, and stay within your budget by eating less. Norwegian salmon farmers rely much less on antibiotics, so that is a healthier choice. Or, try farmed U.S. trout instead for a change, which is in the same family as salmon. Environmentalists say that fish like trout that are farmed inland, rather than in the ocean, are safe to eat.

"Traitor Joe's" Takes Heat for Sales of Endangered Fish

2009-07-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

Traitor Joe's: That's the nickname Greenpeace has pasted on Trader Joe's because the stores sell red-list fish: fish caught in ways that harm ocean habitats or other creatures or whose numbers are so low they may become extinct.

Greenpeace decided to put on the pressure because the private owners behind the supermarket chain have not been willing to even disclose how and where they get their seafood. (According to a statement from Trader Joe's, company policy is never to participate in surveys.) So now you can go to a "Traitor Joe" website and send the chain a singing fish telegram or take other action in protest.

Greenpeace recently updated the scorecards that rate markets on their seafood practices, and Trader Joe's got an F.

That's because, says Greenpeace:

Trader Joe's has no sustainable seafood policy
Isn't working with fishing industry groups or others trying to promote sustainable practices
Doesn't label its products so consumers can understand what they're buying
And claims in its ads that it is buying in a sustainable fashion, even though it's selling orange roughy and other species whose survival is in question. (See my March blog about for more info on sustainable fish.)

A statement from Jon Basalone, Executive Vice President Marketing & Merchandising for Trader Joe's, says that "Hearing recent feedback, our goal is to offer seafood options that fit customer needs ranging from food safety and taste to concern over the environment." It goes on to say that the company will take into account in its purchasing decisions the fish recommendations of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The company further denies that it actually sells some of the "red-list" species that Greenpeace claims it does, although, in a backhanded attempt to say it is really doing a better job than its competitors, it admits to selling some : "Trader Joe's sells fewer items on that 'Red List' than the #1 ranked grocery retailer in their report." Nothing to be proud of, folks.

And if true, maybe Trader Joe's would have spared itself this public relations problem if it had cooperated with Greenpeace in the first place.

In the meantime, those of us who shop at Trader Joe's should take the chain at its word that it listens to its customers and speak up about the seafood on sale. Ditto for its competitors. Remember, as you shop, that federal law now requires supermarkets to label all seafood with its place of origin and method of catch. If you don't see that information, let the store manager know you've noticed and expect better of the store.

In today's world of growing scarcity, unfortunately, we now need to know which species have been over-fished and how others are caught. Otherwise, we'll come to the point where the fish we love to eat will have been loved out of existence. You can get educated quickly at the Monterey Bay Aquarium website.##

Proposed FDA Action To Cut Doses of Tylenol Shows Need for Disclosure in Ads of Active Ingredients

2009-07-01T07:17:00.000-07:00

Advertising for over-the-counter medicines should disclose the active ingredients in them.

That should be the take-home message today in response to the news that an FDA advisory panel has recommended that Tylenol be sold in doses of no more than 325 milligrams, and that Percocet and Vicodin be banned altogether.

The sad fact is that the need for disclosure has been apparent for years. Ten years ago, The Women's Consumer Foundation conducted a face-to-face survey of 181 inner-city women that found a dangerous lack of understanding of the most basic information about over-the-counter (OTC) drugs. Many of the women--almost half--were taking medicines like Tylenol without knowing what was in them, and many were taking more than the recommended doses without realizing the danger.

Fewer than half the women knew that acetaminophen is the active ingredient in Tylenol (they were given four possible answers from which to choose) despite the fact that Tylenol was the drug that the women said they bought most often.

And, most dangerous of all, 44 percent of the women said they knew people who very often, or somewhat often, took more than the recommended dosages; 25 percent admitted to doing so themselves.

At the time we first published these findings on our not-for-profit website, SIS (now defunct, as is the Women's Consumer Foundation), the drug manufacturers claimed that our findings were wrong, that people do read and understand labels and don't take more than the recommended doses.

This latest recommendation by the FDA panel puts the lie to those assertions because it was based on statistics showing that 400 people die every year, and 42,000 are hospitalized in the U.S. because they overdosed themselves. Percocet and Vicodin contain a narcotic and acetaminophen, which is a leading cause of liver damage.

The panel members agreed that consumers need to be better educated about OTC medicines, and I concur.

The simplest way to do that is via the ads for these drugs. The FDA should require that all advertising for OTC drugs disclose the generic names of their active ingredients.

This remedy was actually proposed by a Federal Trade Commission administrative law judge more than 20 years ago. Sadly, the commission decided not to follow the recommendation.

So in all the years since, consumers have been bombarded with billions of dollars of OTC drug ads that mis-educate them, that lead them to believe that Tylenol contains some unique ingredient. Ditto for Nyquil, TheraFlu, Alka-Seltzer, etc. In reality, these expensive brand name products contain inexpensive ingredients that can be bought generically for far less--often 50 percent less.

So hundreds of people are dying, thousands are ending up in hospitals and millions are wasting their money because of advertising that misinforms and fails to provide the most necessary, basic information: the active ingredients in the medications.

How Much Sugar in a 20-Ounce Coke? 16 Teaspoons!

2009-06-26T11:54:00.000-07:00

My husband will often drink a Coke while he is driving a long distance; the caffeine and sugar give him a jolt that helps him stay alert. But when I had a look at the nutrition label of a 20-ounce bottle he was drinking recently and told him how much sugar was in it, he was shocked.

It's not that he had never looked at the label before. But the label lists the amount of sugar in grams, and how many people know how much sugar weighs a gram? We use teaspoons to measure sugar into our coffee and tea, and it's in terms of teaspoons that the amount of sugar has some meaning.

I had recently looked up this question and found the answer: 4.2 grams of sugar equals 1 teaspoon.

Which means, I told him, that a 20-ounce bottle of Coke has 67.5 grams of sugar, equal to SIXTEEN teaspoons or 1/4 cup!

My husband drinks his coffee black, so thinking about someone pouring 16 teaspoons of sugar into that bottle was a powerful image.

He has never been obese and drinks very little soda, but many experts say soft drinks are a major contributor to the obesity epidemic.

It might be easier to convince people to cut back on soda pop if the nutrition labels on them (and on all other food as well) expressed the amount of sugar in terms people can understand--like teaspoons. Furthermore, as nutrition expert and author, Marion Nestle, points out, we also need to know how much of the sugar content of a food is there naturally--as in pure fruit juice--and how much was added by the food processor. She is hoping that the FDA under Obama will provide that information.

(By the way, many experts don't believe there's anything intrinsically more harmful about high fructose corn syrup than cane sugar. The problem is that government corn subsidies have made the syrup incredibly cheap, making it possible for manufacturers to super-size containers of soda and still keep the prices low enough to encourage consumption--which, by the way, is going down, despite their best efforts.)

Another peculiar aspect of sugar labeling is that there's no Recommended Daily Allowance. The amount of every other substance is given in grams or milligrams (for sodium) and then as a percentage of what the government believes is the desirable amount for an adult eating 2,000 calories a day.

But how much sugar should you eat? No guidance is given.

Absent that information, all you can do is first, look closely at the number of calories per serving, being careful to notice how many servings are in the package.

And, second, convert the grams of sugar into teaspoons that you can see with your mind's eye getting poured one after the other into your food: 4.2 grams of sugar = 1 teaspoon.

Doubt Evolution? See the Smithsonian's Ocean Exhibit

2009-06-08T09:01:00.000-07:00

Today is World Ocean Day, and I love the coincidence with my visit yesterday to the Smithsonian's fabulous new ocean exhibit. You could easily spend a couple of days taking it all in--there are 2 hours of video alone!--but we had two hours of explanation from fish scientist Carole Baldwin who I profiled for a boating magazine a couple of years ago.

Ninety-five percent of the ocean is still unexplored, and Carole is one of the scientists who consistently find new species every time they descend to the depths. You get a real sense of how other-worldly it is in the deeps thanks to a video showing the view from a submersible as it descends. Where no light can reach, all of a sudden you see points of light given off by an infinite number of bio-luminescent creatures. It's gorgeous and amazing.

One of the most striking parts of the exhibit--and there are so many--was the huge skeleton hanging from the ceiling of an ancient ancestor of today's whales.

If you doubt evolution, or just want new ammunition to refute doubters, come see this fossil, which is irrefutable evidence of an evolutionary twist that is nothing short of astonishing.

Here's information that will dazzle your friends: Dolphins and whales evolved from a mammal or mammals who left the land and climbed back into the water.

The theory about why this happened, Carole explained, is that there was too much competition for food on land, or perhaps that there was so much food available in the ocean. Over eons, these four-legged land mammals developed the ability to feed under water and their front limbs turned into fins. Their back legs, however, shrank as they became useless, and that's what you see overhead at the exhibit: tiny, vestigial legs hanging from the skeleton. The fossil is about 35 million years old.

Validating belief in evolution, of course, is only one reason to visit this exhibit, which cost nearly $49 million to build and consumed 5 1/2 years of Carole's life as part of the team that created it. Here you can also learn why jellyfish have become so much more numerous (we've fished their predators almost out of existence), why some beaches have powdery sand and others big pebbles or rocks (crashing waves and tides wash away finer grains) and why the melting of ice in the Arctic is even more alarming than you thought (krill, that are the very basis of the food chain, eat bacteria that grow on the underside of the ice. No ice, no bacteria, no krill, no...).

You can also see a life-size model of Phoenix, a living female North Atlantic Right Whale who is known to have had two babies. Yes, there are now so few Right Whales that scientists have given them names. They are identifiable thanks to crusty patches on their skin called callocites.

The exhibit is permanent, meaning it will be at the National Museum of Natural History, which is on the National Mall, for decades. But why wait? This exhibit will dazzle and delight you in ways you can't even imagine.

No Tears for Anti-Consumer General Motors

2009-06-03T06:48:00.000-07:00

I feel bad for the auto workers and the dealers who are losing their livelihoods in the bankruptcy of General Motors. Yes, the workers had a sweet deal, but why should only bosses enjoy a plush life style when profits are good? And when the company saw itself losing market share, it was up to the management to control labor costs. So spare me the union bashing.

The loss of so many dealers is also deplorable. It will leave big holes in towns and cities across the country. Shutting them means more job losses and also the disappearance of stalwart community leaders who could usually be counted on as generous supporters of local causes. Frankly, I really can't understand the economic necessity of closing so many.

But I'm not shedding any tears over the demise of General Motors the Corporation as we've known it..

In the late 60s and early 70s, when I was cutting my teeth as a consumer reporter, GM already had become notorious as the company that sent detectives out to investigate Ralph Nader. The young Nader had exposed the propensity of GM's Corvair to flip over and kill its drivers. The Corvair was GM's response to the popularity of the Volkswagen Beetle. The Corvair's defect, Nader documented, was designed in, and instead of fixing the problem, GM covered up and tried to discredit him. You can read all about this in Nader's book about the Corvair, Unsafe at Any Speed. Publicity about GM's attempt to smear Nader did have one good effect: it made Nader a hero.

But management's move against Nader typified its strategy for dealing with safety and quality issues: cover-up and denial.

These were the years when if you had a crash, you could be impaled by the steering column (now the columns collapse into themselves) or thrown around inside the car to smash your face or limbs on metal dashboards and protruding, sharp handles (everything is now padded and smooth), or get thrown through the windshield because there was no belt to hold you. GM (and the other American manufacturers) fought safety improvements including seat belt and air bag laws, protesting over and over that each change would unjustifiably and unnecessarily raise the price of their autos.

As for quality, improvements came only under pressure from foreign manufacturers who won over American consumers with better-built cars. GM might have been able to keep its mammoth market share if it had listened to consumer complaints. Instead, deaf and dumb, it kept pushing its cars as sexy, powerful, fantasy vehicles with chrome and fins--and recently, cup holders.

Years ago in the days when my family went skiing nearly every weekend in winter, we owned a GM Blazer. We liked its size, but the interior very quickly came apart. Knobs and handles fell off--it looked like we had battered it! Mechanically, it wasn't much better. Today, we have cars with bumper-to-bumper warranties, and they almost never break down. GM was a reluctant follower of that trend, forced into responding by foreign competitors.

But fall-apart interiors were nothing compared to the defective anti-lock brakes in our 1996 Chevrolet Tahoe. When the SUV was just two months old, the brakes failed when my husband tried to slow down for a car in front of him that was waiting to make a left turn. An excellent and experienced driver, he repeatedly pressed the brake pedal, only to have it repeatedly fall to the floor without slowing the car at all. My husband and son walked away from the slow-speed collision, but the driver of the other car was seriously injured and her car was totaled.

When I raced to the scene after getting a phone call from my husband, my years of consumer reporting told me there had to be a defect in the Tahoe's brakes. Sure enough, when I researched complaints filed with the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, I found more than 7,000 describing the exact same failure. I wrote an expose of the situation, but it ran only on my fledgling and now defunct Internet website, SIS, and on TV's Inside Edition, which picked up the story from me.

Of course, GM denied that anything was wrong with the brakes. It wasn't until 1999 that the dissemblers in Detroit admitted that all these accidents were not the fault of drivers who just didn't know how anti-lock brakes worked. The company announced one of the largest recalls ever, calling in 3.5 million vehicles to correct the brake problems. By that time, there were more than 10,000 complaints on record, and there had been thousands of crashes and hundreds of injuries, although no deaths. The recall barely made a ripple of news because GM timed the announcement so well: it released the news on the day before the funeral for JFK, Jr., whose death in a small-plane accident had swamped all other news. (Yes, car companies get to choose when they will release notice of a recall.)

We got the message after that. I vowed never again to buy another GM vehicle. I'd guess, from the fall in their market share, that lots of Americans quietly came to the same conclusion.

But there's more in GM's ugly history. Strike 1 was safety. Strike 2 was quality. Strike 3 was GM management's failure to respond to the energy crisis and global warming. In this, of course, they once again used their powerful friends in Congress to fight federal support for mass transit and to ensure that mileage standards would not be raised. Even more egregious was their success in giving tax breaks to buyers of the most notorious gas guzzlers, the humongous Hummers and Cadillac Escalades.

Yes, folks, our memories are short. It was only in 2007 that Congress decided there might be something wrong with giving a $25,000 tax credit to any business owner who bought a vehicle heavier than 6,000 pounds. The credit was intended for people like farmers who really need heavy vehicles, but the law had left a loophole, and GM happily walked through as the globe continued to warm. So anyone who owned any kind of business--an insurance agency, a mortgage company, an accountancy practice--could claim the credit. That's why the streets of our cities and suburbs became over-populated with these urban assault vehicles which were, and are, a danger to people in smaller, normal cars, and which suck down fuel like Kool-Aid. Naturally, GM lobbied against ending the tax credit.

More recently, they successfully fought giving California a waiver to impose its own standards for controlling greenhouse gases. The Bush Administration refused to give the waiver, but the Obama Administration is in the process, thankfully, of making the California standards the standards for the whole country.

So, a frank look back at the history of General Motors makes it clear that this company was a bad citizen that disregarded the dangers of its vehicles and worked always to maximize profit no matter what the consequences to the public. It survived for so long only because of its success in lobbying Congress and its decades as a monopoly that dominated the market.

Drivers today are safer than they would have been, cars are better made, and the air is clearer, because of consumer advocates like Ralph Nader and because of global competition that eventually made American consumers realize that better cars came from across the ocean.

So, no tears for the management, stock and bond holders of General Motors. They deserved bankruptcy long ago for their callous disregard of our safety and our planet.

Largest Organic Milk Producer Uses Small- Farmer Exemption To Cut Costs

2009-05-26T09:21:00.000-07:00

Aurora Organic Dairy is the largest organic milk and butter producer in the country, keeping thousands of cows at facilities mostly in Colorado. According to the company's web site, its
"new model" of organic production on a large scale meets "the fullest promise of (the) organic movement." Because of its nationwide distribution, Aurora produces private label and store brand organic dairy products for giant retailers including Wal-Mart, Costco, Target & Safeway.

But the company's self-congratulation has been met with boos and hisses from family-size organic milk farmers and organizations that represent them. These small-scale competitors charge that Aurora wants it both ways: produce on a large scale but claim a financial exemption meant to help small farmers.

The issue, however, is not the first controversy to blow through Aurora.

In April, 2007, the U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed to revoke Aurora's organic certifications. The U.S.D.A. said it had found 14 "willful violations" of organic regulations including such basics as not giving cows sufficient access to pasture.
Instead of filing an appeal, which would have created an open proceeding and a record of testimony and is the usual next step in such cases, Aurora immediately began negotiating with the Bush Administration officials then heading the agency.
In August, 2007, Aurora signed a consent agreement with the government in which it agreed to make changes in its operation, but admitted no wrong-doing. The government also gave Aurora cover against charges that some of the milk it had been selling had not actually met organic guidelines. It did this by saying that the company's certifications were valid, thus making is possible for Aurora CEO Marc Peperzak to proudly declare, "Our milk is and always has been organic."
Critics called the settlement a whitewash, and in October, 2007, class action lawsuits alleging fraud by Aurora were filed.

With those lawsuits still pending, Aurora had to defend itself again this May at new USDA hearings about the seemingly esoteric "producer-handler" exemption. Production of milk in the U.S. is governed by very old laws intended to protect family farmers. One aspect of these laws is to exempt small dairy farmers who bottle their own milk from paying into a national fund used to promote milk consumption.

Aurora has claimed this exemption. According to Mark Kastel, senior farm policy analyst for the Cornucopia Institute, an advocacy group, this has saved Aurora millions of dollars, enabling it to undercut prices and threaten the livelihood of family farmers.

I contacted Aurora to get their side of this story. I wanted to know why they think they deserve to use the exemption, just how much money it saves them, and basic information like how many cows they actually raise. I wanted to interview someone at the top, preferably CEO Peperzak or President Mark Retzloff, who both proclaim their dedication to creation of sustainable systems of food production and the principles of the organic movement.

They declined my request, instead having an outside public relations representative forward an email to me. "We have no interest in responding to the latest round of baseless claims by Cornucopia Institute," it read. "Cornucopia has made clear that it is trying to run Aurora Organic out of business in order to drive up the price of organic milk."

So the acrimony continues while the U.S.D.A.'s hearing officer contemplates the testimony he recently heard before rendering a decision.

If you're a buyer of organic milk, it's up to you make up your own mind about all this. If you don't like what Aurora is doing, or think it's just fine, let them know. Here's their phone #: 720-564-6296.

Sweet Diesels Few & Far Between

2009-05-21T12:27:00.000-07:00

I've been a fan of diesel cars ever since I wrote an article for Smithsonian magazine a few years ago about how people were making their own fuel out of waste grease or turning the grease into biodiesel at home. After doing the research, I became very optimistic about commercial biodiesel becoming available quickly, so I went out and bought a used 2002 Volkswagen Jetta diesel.

(Biodiesel can be used in existing diesel engines without modifying the engines. If you use strained grease, you need a dual fuel system so you can start and stop the engine with petroleum diesel. Otherwise, the gel in the grease creates clogs.)

I've been very happy with the Jetta: it rides like a much bigger car, even at fast highway speeds, and gets more than 40 mpg at the same time! Unlike pokey gasoline engine cars or hybrids that get similar mileage, the diesel has plenty of power--it's just plain fun to drive.

However, my hopes for commercial biodiesel have not turned into reality. There are all sorts of obstacles to getting the fuel distributed nationally, not least of them that regional fuel depots don't want to invest in necessary new facilities to handle it. Furthermore, we've been shipping most U.S. biodiesel to Europe where diesel cars dominate. And then, when the price of petroleum diesel finally dropped to more reasonable levels, it put biodiesel--made here mainly from soybeans--at a competitive disadvantage.

Even so, when we recently decided to get rid of our gas-powered family-sized car that we use for long trips, I thought I'd trade the Jetta for a new VW Passat diesel, which Volkswagen had promised to bring to the U.S. sometime this year. It's a bit larger and therefore a bit safer on highways where you dance with tractor-trailers, and yet would get excellent mileage.

But no. A spokesperson for VW says they've changed their minds, and there will be no Passat diesel anytime soon. Bummer.

Unfortunately, there are very few diesel cars yet available in the U.S. You can get an improved Jetta diesel or a diesel SUV in a luxury brand, but there are very few to choose from otherwise.

This despite the fact that diesels get 20 to 30% better mpg than comparable gas cars with all the torgue and durability you could want. And, thanks to new technology and ultra-low sulfur petro diesel, new models meet the strictest (California) air pollution standards.

Still, I was left with the reality that we needed another car, so I did the research, looking for a full-size gasoline vehicle with good mileage. So discouraging, because essentially there are none. Then I discovered the Mercedes Benz E320 diesel, introduced in 2008, with the new clean technology. It promised to get about 25 mpg in local driving, and in the 30s on the highway.

I located a used one with about 20,000 miles on it, trekking over the George Washington Bridge in New Jersey to see it. I got in for a test drive, and I hadn't gone 200 yards before a smile spread across my face: this is one sweet ride!

Quiet--no more loud diesel noise. Smoke-free--no more nasty tailpipe emissions. Smooth. Everything about this vehicle is smooth and powerful. I bought it.

It cost more than we'd expected to spend--although buying it used saved a lot--but we figure it will last a good 10 years. And I've been averaging close to 30 mpg in my combined stop-and-go and local highway driving.

Too bad the automakers are so slow about bringing more sweet diesels to U.S. car buyers.

Antioxident Vitamins C & E Can Have Negative Effects

2009-05-12T09:01:00.000-07:00

Put the word "antioxident" on a packaged food, and folks are a lot more likely to buy it, say market researchers. And, since food companies' goal is to entice you to buy their products, they've been busy taking advantage of that reaction.

The problem is, there's little proof that added antioxidents help us stay healthy; instead some new evidence suggests they actually interfere with some of the benefits of exercising and losing weight.

Nutritionist Marion Nestle, who monitors the sins of the food industry from her perch at New York University, says hundreds of products now tout the presence of antioxidents, but that we're being fooled. In her blog, she says there's a "lack of evidence" of the benefits of artificially adding antioxidents to your diet in the form, for example, of vitamins C & E.

(In case you've been living in a bubble, antioxidents appear to play a powerful role in fending off cancer and diabetes and fighting the effects of aging.)

Today came the news that if you're on a weight reduction program and/or exercise regularly, taking vitamin C & E for their antioxident effects may, in fact, work against your health.

The study, reported in The New York Times, found that our bodies' natural reaction to exercise and weight loss is not only to mobilize our built-in natural antioxident defenses from free oxygen, but also to make us more sensitive to insulin. When the two vitamins were added to the diets of study subjects who were exercising and losing weight, the study showed they short-circuited our natural responses.

There's no debate that unprocessed foods in their natural state--like berries, broccoli, garlic, tomatoes and spinach--contain potent antioxidents in combination with many other nutrients. This combination isn't replicated by supplements. Also, while our bodies have evolved to handle the amounts of antioxidents present in fruit and vegetables, ingesting large amounts via supplements changes our bodies' reaction.

The bottom line is the same old boring one: spend your money on eating more fruit and vegetables instead of buying expensive packaged products with added antioxidents of dubious value.

Kraft Defends "Lunchables"

2009-04-30T06:39:00.000-07:00

How do you defend a food product targeted to kids that's high in sugar and calories and low in nutrition? You don't. You try to confuse the issue by talking about other food products.

That summarizes Kraft's response to my questions about the bologna-and-cheese "Lunchable" I wrote about in my last post.

Sydney Lindner, associate director, corporate affairs for Kraft, called my attention in an email to a subset of this combination lunch product--and of other Kraft foods--that are labeled "Sensible Solution." More about how they define those in a minute. Here's what Lindner had to say, in part:

"With kid-favorite foods conveniently packed together, quality Oscar Mayer meats and Kraft cheeses, and prices comparable to other lunchtime options, Lunchables Lunch Combinations are an incredible value. Nutritionally, the majority (italics mine) of Lunchables products have less calories than the daily recommended intake per meal and many (my italics again) meet Kraft's Sensible Solutions guidelines."

Got that? First of all, calling a product an "incredible value" wheb its components can be purchased, at retail, for less than half the price of the combo, is truly "incredible:" incredibly profitable. As for the rest of that comment, Lindner is saying that the bologna-and-cheese Lunchable doesn't meet Kraft's so-called sensible guidelines. So what should it be labeled? Unreasonable food? Ridiculously non-nutritious food? Maybe with just a skull-and-crossbones to warn you off?

As for it's sensible guidelines, a Kraft "convenient meal product" earns the label "sensible" if it meets one of the following criteria:

Free of, low in, or at least 25% less, when compared to similar products in the category, in at least (or just) one of the following: calories, fat, saturated fat, sugar or sodium
Or, contain less than 35% calories from fat
Or, meets the definition of lean or extra lean

Translation: A "Lunchable" can be called "sensible" if it's less a junk food than other Lunchables.

A Lunchable can also get the sensible designation if Kraft supplements it with 10% of daily needs of a few vitamins or minerals, and the food does not exceed 600 calories/serving and 960 mg of sodium, among other sky-high limits.

Kraft also, by the way, pats itself on the back for advertising only Sensible Solution products to children between 6 and 12. Teenagers are obviously open season.

What's truly sad is that Kraft was actually honored in 2005 at a Nutrition & Obesity Summit convened by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for creating its Sensible Solution products.

What would truly be honorable for Kraft would be to totally overhaul the contents of all its Lunchables or ditch them completely. That might actually do some good.

"Lunchables" Should Carry a Health Warning

2009-04-22T13:25:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a book about food shopping, and that is taking me to parts of the supermarket I usually ignore. In particular, I focused on a section of the meat case set aside specifically for Oscar Mayer's kid-targeted "Lunchables."

These supposedly all-in-one lunches look cheap: only $2.99.

But after I read the labels and had a look at what was inside, I saw that these are actually expensive, high-profit combos whose ingredients are worth no more than $1.50. Plus, they are so empty of good nutrition and full of fat and sugar that they should carry a health alert to warn parents off.

Something like: Warning: Lunchables may make your children fat and add to their risk of diabetes and heart disease.

Judge for yourself. "Cracker Snackers, Bologna & American," consists of:

6 Ritz crackers
1.5 oz. processed American cheese
1.5 oz. bologna
1 "fun-size" Butterfinger--the size you give away at Halloween
a 6 oz. Capri Sun "Flavored Water Beverage"

This tiny lunch will leave almost any child hungry an hour later while jolting their body with 23 grams, or nearly 6 teaspoons, of sugar. (1 tsp. sugar = 4 grams)

Overall, there are 410 calories in that "lunch" because of the unconscionably high amount of fat and sugar it contains. Everything in the package except the cheese is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. The Capri Sun also contains the artificial sweetener, sucralose, just in case it wasn't already sweet enough. (The taste made me gag.)

The total fat content is 20 grams, 9 of them saturated, no surprise since these "foods" contain unhealthy oils including cottonseed and hydrogenated palm kernel oil. There's even half a gram of trans fat.

An adult eating this will take in 35% of their total recommended daily intake of salt. For a child, depending on age, it could be an even higher percentage, but the standard nutrition label is based only on an adult eating 2,000 calories a day.

Kraft, which owns Oscar Mayer, fully expects that kids will be eating this "lunch." The company shamelessly promotes it to kids by putting it in a box whose graphics tie into the x-box game, Banjo-Kazooie, and a chance to win a Banjo Bash party.

The only good thing kids will get out of this combo is 13 grams of protein, usually the one nutrient Americans never lack.

Dietary fiber? None. And if you recognize most of the names in the ingredients list you must be a chemist.

Parents, beware. The apparent convenience of a "Lunchable" carries an invisible price: your child's health.

I'll report soon on what Kraft has to say about this product.

Yogurt Not Required to Have Beneficial Bacteria

2009-04-15T06:12:00.000-07:00

In another move that forces consumers to work harder to get healthy food, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently proposed that food companies can continue to call a product "yogurt" even though it doesn't contain any live cultures of beneficial bacteria.

You can't make yogurt without adding active, live cultures to milk or cream, but you can then kill them off with heat in further processing.

It's the cultures that give yogurt its tart taste and creamy texture. Credible research has found that the bacteria benefit the human gut, helping people who have constipation, diarrhea, lactose intolerance, or other more serious conditions like colon cancer and inflammatory bowel disease. They also restore the good bacteria in your gut that get killed, along with the ones that are making you sick, when you take antibiotics.

The cultures also help cure vaginal yeast infections.

In its published response to a petition asking that yogurt, by definition, mean a product with live cultures, the FDA acknowledged that most people think of yogurt as a health food. But the bureaucrats went on to say they weren't convinced that consumers really understood about the connection to live cultures.

So, as before, they propose leaving the burden on shoppers to read each label to be sure they're getting live cultures.

Food companies will continue to be able to call their product yogurt even though the bacteria have been killed off in the making of the final product.

The National Yogurt Association--whose members include companies like Dannon--is attempting to make the shopping search easier with a special live culture logo.

But if you haven't read yogurt labels recently, take a few minutes to do so next time you buy some. Despite the healthy connotations, a lot of flavored yogurt is full of sugar--anywhere from 4 to 6 teaspoons per container, corn starch thickeners, coloring, etc.

Furthermore, the proposed new standard of identity for yogurt would remove the requirement that artifically sweetened yogurt declare that fact on the main label, saying for example, "Low-fat Yogurt Sweetened with Aspartame." Again, to find out what sweetener was used, you'll have to read the ingredients label.

The period for comments to the FDA technically ended at the end of March, but the FDA has been fiddling around with the yogurt standard for years and years. So, send them a comment anyway, either by fax at 301–827–6870, or via an Internet comment portal. If you use the portal, enter Docket No. FDA–2000–P–0126.

Here's a tip to save you money while eating the healthiest commerical yogurt possible: Buy plain yogurt with active cultures and add fruit, honey and other goodies yourself. You can also easily make your own and save even more.

But thanks again, FDA. We've got nothing better to do than stand in the supermarket aisles reading labels.

Beware Bank CDs Automatic Roll-Overs

2009-04-06T11:47:00.000-07:00

With lots of people, including me, feeling queasy about the stock market, conservative bank Certificates of Deposit are looking pretty good--or at least safe.

But banks have a sneaky way of bumping up their profits on CDs: when they mature, they roll them over into the lowest interest rate they offer. That is, unless you get in touch and demand the best rate.

A banking insider clued me in to this scam. You start off being smart, putting your money into the highest-interest CD you can find. Could be via the Internet, could be you walked into the bank. Great.

What you probably didn't realize was that to capture your money, the bank offered you their best possible rate.

But when the term is up, the bank hopes you'll forget about or just let it ride, assuming that because they had a good rate before, they'll give you a good rate now. That's when they get you.

Banks don't offer everyone the same interest rate for the same term. The've become like the airline industry, with prices changing constantly. Same thing with the banks. You don't know what interest a bank will pay, unless you ask and specifically for the highest rate possible.

I realized this recently when I checked on the maturity date of a 6-month CD I bought on line from HSBC. Fortunately, the banks are required to send you notice of maturity. But when I looked on the web site to see what the new interest rate would be, there was nothing--no information.

Turns out, that's standard operating procedure.

When I called customer service for HSBC, I learned that the best interest rate they would offer me on a new 6-month CD was 1.25%. That's almost 50% less than the top interest being offered by other banks! Wow! What's amazing is that when I bought the CD 6 months ago, HSBC had one of the highest rates available--4%. No longer.

You can find out who has the highest rates from listings that appear in most local newspapers, or via Bankrate.com.

So keep a careful schedule of when your CDs mature. Be prepared to demand the highest rate from the existing bank, and shop around to make sure they're offering you a good deal.

Supermarkets Selling Endangered Seafood

2009-03-17T14:34:00.001-07:00

U.S. consumers buy half their seafood at supermarkets, spending more than $16 billion every year on these purchases. But without the knowledge of most buyers, many of the fish species offered for sale are in danger of extinction because of massive over-fishing.

The environmental organization Greenpeace is waging a campaign to stop those sales and save some of the most popular fish from extincton.

Greenpeace rates supermarkets on the basis of their policies for acquiring fish and for their selection of what fish to sell.

The highest ranked chain is Whole Foods, and it would be great if other big supermarket chains followed their lead.

Whole Foods doesn't sell shark or bluefin tuna (sorry, sushi fans, but bluefin is one of the most endangered) or orange roughy. And, as I found out visiting one of their stores a few days ago, they are scrupulous about adhering to new legal requirements to reveal, on labels, the geographic origin of each species of fish and whether it's farmed or wild. (Seafood markets are not covered by the new law.) In the case of Chilean Sea Bass, another species that is under heavy survival pressure, Whole Food's label says that the Marine Stewardship Council has certified that the area from which it comes--near Antarctica--is being fished sustainably.

Most of these species whose survival is endangered share the characteristic that they take a long time to mature enough to be able to reproduce. Thus, if they are caught before they reach maturity, the species declines--and rapidly.

Efforts to control overfishing on the supply side have had limited success for lots of reasons, including the existence of pirates for whom fish is the booty of the 21st century.

So, the demand for these species needs to be cut, and that's where the supermarkets and we consumers come in. Greenpeace's ratings show that most supermarkets haven't yet even developed a policy on stocking endangered fish.

Consumers can help with this. You can conduct a survey of your local supermarket and send the results to be compiled by Greenpeace. A toolkit for this purpose can be downloaded from the Greenpeace site.

You can also get a handy pocket guide from the Monterey Bay Aquarium to take with you when you're out shopping. It lists which fish you should avoid and which you can serve up with a clear conscience.

If we all don't become mindful of the impact of our food choices, our children will never know the taste of so many of the fish we eat today. They will have vanished from the earth.

Decoding Food Labels: "Naturally Raised Beef" Isn't

2009-03-13T08:43:00.000-07:00

Once again, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has bowed down to agribusiness and decided to define "naturally raised beef" as anything but. The word "raise," you'd think, would have some relationship to how a steer spends its life, able to roam a pasture and eat grass, or confined to a filthy feedlot.

But this new definition says absolutely nothing about the conditions in which an animal is actually raised.

All this term will now mean is that the steer has not been treated with antibiotics, hormones or any substances that promote its growth, or fed byproducts of other animals. It's those byproducts--left over pieces of dead animals--that have lead to worries about mad cow disease, and caused European countries to rightly turn away most American beef.

This "naturally raised" definition, by the way, refers also to pork and chicken.

Critics have said that instead of calling it "naturally raised," the term should have been "naturally fed."

But the rule doesn't require that steers have access to pasture of even the outdoors, and there's nothing natural about feeding corn to cows, which is what they get in those feedlots. In fact, as Michael Pollan pointed out in a PBS radio interview, fattening beef on corn--made possible only because U.S. agricultural policy subsidizes corn production--does terrible things to the cow's intricate system of transforming what should be grass into wonderful milk.

If you want to eat beef from cows that have actually lived a decent life, eating grass on a pasture, the label to look for is "grass fed" with the logo of the American Grassfed Association. That logo means that the animal has eaten only mother's milk, grass or hay for its entire life.

What a concept. Unfortunately, it's hard to find such beef. Only four giant agribusinesses control the slaughtering of more than 80% of beef consumed in the U.S. Antitrust anyone?

What's the solution? Spend more for grass-fed beef, and consider that steak a luxury treat for once and a while. By eating less beef, you'll also be reducing your carbon footprint as effectively as if you bought a hybrid car. You'll be healthier, too.

Punishment To Fit the Crime

2009-02-16T07:17:00.000-08:00

I can't help but compare the eagerness to condemn and punish Michael Phelps for taking a hit from a bong to the utter lack of outrage from so many national leaders and media pundits about the corporate and political criminals who've wrecked the world economy and the lives of millions.

Take Bernie Madoff, inexplicably still allowed to live in his luxury apartment. The jail time he eventually will face seems an insufficient penalty. He--and the other Wall Street titans who ran what I now understand as legal Ponzi schemes--need to hear and see, close up, the consequences of their actions. Putting them in a pillory right next to the raging bull on the real Wall Street has occurred to me, but I doubt they'd survive with their skins intact. And I don't believe in the death penalty.

Better, it seems to me, would be to require them to engage in long-term, unpaid volunteer work at homeless shelters or social service offices,while they, themselves, are forced to live in those Homeland Security trailers--the ones that off-gas toxic pollutants--foisted on the displaced from New Orleans.

I'm not alone in having such fantasies. They are the natural consequence of the unwillingness, so far, of anyone in Washington, including Obama, to hold accountable the crew that bankrupted this country and the world, and who profited and continue to profit from the unjust, calamitous wars that continue to rage. Which of course includes Bush, Cheney & company.

The Nation magazine recently tapped into this public desire with a "Retire Bush" contest. The idea was that people should suggest what Bush should do in his retirement. The winner, Kristen Wack, would give George W. the job as host of a revised version of the reality show The Biggest Loser; the contestants would be corporate executives who would compete for instigating the most colossal management debacle.

I like it--as a start, particularly because it includes the element of public humiliation, a necessary humbling for the arrogance that is surely the hallmark of the era just ended.

But, it's only a start. A runner-up entrant in The Nation contest suggested that Bush spend his retirement "assembling a legal dream team to fight extradition to The Hague for war crimes."

I hope I live long enough to see that happen, or to see one brave district attorney somewhere in America indict Bush & Cheney right here at home.

That last idea is coming from Vince Bugliosi, the author and former Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney who prosecuted the lunatic murderer Charles Manson. In his latest book, "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder," Bugliosi presents what he says is more than sufficient evidence for any district attorney in America to indict W for the deaths of 4,000 American soldiers. He argues that by lying to the American public, by saying that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat, Bush was directly responsible for the deaths of our soldiers.

You can find out the name of your local DA, and urge him or her to take action and link to a You at http://www.peaceteam.net. There's also a link there to a YouTube video of Bugliosi testifying before Congress.

While we wait for accountability, here's an invitation: what do you think would be fitting punishment for Madoff, irresponsible bankers, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and company?

Phelps Getting Punished--for Nothing!

2009-02-06T12:59:00.000-08:00

The anti-drug moralists are in full cry after Michael Phelps, as predicted.

All hail the idiot sheriff of South Carolina's Richland County, who says he'll charge Phelps criminally if he can muster the evidence. Y'all know how it is down south there, where no crime goes unpunished, right? And Sheriff Leon Lott can't find anything more important to do, or at least nothing else that might make the national news.

Then there are undoubtedly the tee-totalers at USA Swimming who suspended Phelps from competition for three months. Not because smoking a bit of pot would enhance his performance--never a suggestion about pot, which of course, has been surrounded with a mythology that it makes recreational users, well, losers. Phelps a loser? Well, not exactly.

But there's some good news just now on the marijuana front. The Drug Policy Alliance asked folks to protest to the Obama Administration about the latest raids on medical marijuana providers in California, and a whole bunch of losers somehow managed to stay awake long enough to send so many emails and faxes that they got our new prez's attention.

According to the Drug Policy Alliance, this was the response:

"The President believes that federal resources should not be used to circumvent state laws, and as he continues to appoint senior leadership to fill out the ranks of the federal government, he expects them to review their policies with that in mind."

So it looks like some freedom from DEA hardball tactics may be on the way.

Now all we need is for the Obama Administration to stand up for rational discourse on the overall subject of marijuana. It's way past time.

Puritans Set To End Michael Phelps' Career

2009-02-02T06:58:00.000-08:00

Horrors! The greatest swimmer in the world took a hit from a bong at a party last November, someone snapped a picture that got published yesterday in a British tabloid, and the sheep in the media immediately began speculating that his career was over.

What a waste if that prediction comes true. But that's the way it is in the insane reality created by the War on Drugs.

I don't know if Michael Phelps smoked any marijuana during all the years that he trained for, and then won his record number of Olympic medals. I doubt it, because he has never tested positive for any banned substances.

But even if he had, marijuana has never been characterized as a performance-enhancing drug, and isn't that what should concern us about athletes using drugs? To the contrary, the official party line of the Drug War is that use of marijuana undermines athletic performance. Yet Phelps has won more swimming medals than anyone else. So where does that line of upside-down logic lead?

It leads, once again, to the conclusion that it is long past time to stop spending billions of dollars every year to stop people from using marijuana, and not just for medical purposes. Despite the uniformly idiotic depictions in Hollywood movies of marijuana users as wasted, useless drop-outs, the truth is that millions of Americans use the weed to relax, loosen social barriers, laugh a lot--and then get on with the serious business of living. In short, for the same purposes as alcohol, which was also once prohibited in this country by the Puritans among us, the hard-noses who think they have the right to tell us which social drugs are acceptable.

Tranquilizers and other mind-altering prescription drugs are fine. Ditto for alcohol. Americans learned from alcohol prohibition that it is a welcome social lubricant, safe to use as long as there are rules restricting it to adults and laws, for example, against driving under the influence.

The same kind of restrictions should apply to marijuana, and its use and controlled sale should also be legal just as it is for alcohol.

It's time for everyone who knows this is true to stop hiding and come out and say so. There's so many good reasons for doing so.

In this time of economic disaster, legalizing use of marijuana would cut taxpayers' costs for police, prisons and judges, money that could be shifted to education, mental health and social services. In 2007 alone, there were 830,000 arrests for violation of marijuana laws, 89% for possession for personal use. Talk about waste!

The Drug Policy Alliance, which is one of the organizations leading the fight for sanity on this issue, says, "The war on drugs has become a war on families, a war on public health and a war on our constitutional rights." It has resulted in a disproportionate impact on minorities, and stripped millions of people of their right to vote, because in many states, conviction on a drug felony means an end to voting rights. Blacks are 4 times more likely to get jail time for marijuana possession as whites; Latinos, 3 times more likely.

For an eloquent description of all that's wrong with the Drug War, go see what the Drug Policy Alliance has to say at their website.

I'd like to think Michael Phelps' exposure as a user of marijuana would cause people to stop and consider the need to legalize marijuana. Last year, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (Dem of Massachusetts) and Ron Paul (Republican from Texas) introduced a bill called the "Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act of 2008." It went nowhere, as expected. I hope it will be reintroduced, and that all the people who know the truth about marijuana will pick up their phones and let their reps in Congress know it's past time for this modest reform.

An even easier action is to go to a Change.org website set up specifically to urge President Obama to add marijuana law reform to his agenda.

I hope he has the courage to take this on, because of both its economic benefits and its horrible impact on minorities.

That's the horror the media should be writing about. Not the "gotcha" photo of splendid Michael Phelps having a harmless good time.

What If LIPA Had Spent $6 billion on Conservation?

2009-01-09T13:33:00.000-08:00

Showing once again the critical importance of having a functioning, professional news organization, Newsday revealed today that the Long Island Power Authority has spent $6 billion to feed our supposedly insatiable appetite for power.

LIPA, under one-time consumer advocate Richie Kessel, put all that money in on its bet that the residents of Long Island would never kick the power habit. So we'll be paying $1.49 billion for the privilege of buying power (fuel costs are separate and will be added) for the next 20 years generated by the new Caithness plant in Yaphank. Contracts giving us access to out-of-state power via new the new Neptune cable will cost us $2.7 billion. And so on.

Of course, the way consumer rates for electricty are set, LIPA had every incentive to go along with the never-ending growth scenario. Falling usage means falling revenue the way the game is rigged, and shrinking an organization on purpose--well, in your dreams.

But just think how much power, money and air pollution could have been saved if LIPA had invested even $1 billion in conservation and alternative power. Gordian Raacke, founder of Renewable Energy Long Island, lamented in an email to me that "we are investing these billions in technologies of the past rather than those of the future. What we need are investments in 21st Century state-of-the-art energy technologies like energy efficiency and renewable power like solar and wind."

Indeed, but the wind project was supposedly too expensive. Now we must ask, compared to what?

Raacke went on to write that LIPA plans to spend only about $32 million on its energy efficiency program and $14 million this year on its solar program. That's less than 1 % of its $3.845 billion operating budget.

In a different scenario, in which LIPA's leaders were really serious about conservation, they could have shoved some of that $6 billion into a program to give every Long Islander a half-dozen compact fluorescent bulbs. Just watch your bills drop with those! They could have lowered our school and town taxes by giving away bulbs to school districts and municipalities, enough of them to trade out every old-technology incandescent bulb.

LIPA could could have financed completely or heavily subsidized the installation of a huge number of solar panels on homes, as has occured in other countries like Germany. The solar incentive program LIPA has been running for several years puts the pay-off for the investment out at 10 years, too long for most people. A bigger subsidy could have brought that down to 5 years, or even 3, and then it would have been a no-brainer for most people. Solar panels would have sprouted almost as fast as crab grass, and on those scorching days of summer, all those panels could have been sending excess power back into the grid--at a cost so much less than Caithness, etc., it makes me want to cry $6 billion tears.

LIPA could have enlarged its program of rebates for purchases of the most efficient appliances on the market, giving people a good reason to ditch their old refrigerators and power-glutton air conditioners.

It could have funded extensive public education programs to teach people about the importance of conservation.

Instead, we'll all suffer for the next 20 years for decisions made in secret by this so-called "public" authority. this quasi-governmental creation that was designed and is used to hide their operations from the public. (Just think about other "Authorities" like the MTA, and you get the idea.)

Let's not forget that we have Newsday to thank for this revelation. Newsday, whose excellent reporters and editors have been bought out and laid off in droves, gutted by a succession of owners who saw it only as a money machine to pay off the huge debt they took on to build a media empire.

It's time, folks, to rise up, to lead our elected officials by the nose so that they get the idea: we really want conservation. We really want lower taxes and know there are ways to lower them. We really want to preserve our planet. We really get it.

For cost-effective ideas on how to conserve energy (the most cost effective is improving insulation) go to the website for Renewable Energy Long Island. And weep some $6 billion tears.

Diet Season: The Gimmicks Multiply

2009-01-07T08:55:00.000-08:00

I just received an email seeking publicity for a new book touting junk food as a way to help manage your weight. Sure. I want to believe that 100-calorie packs of cookies and Cheetos, mini-cheese burgers and such will melt those pounds away. I'd also like to believe that the drop in my 401k account was actually a mistake, and I'm richer, not poorer.

But it just ain't so. And so, I'm not going to name that new book here, partly because the author is a former executive of Coca Cola and Genera Mills.

The bigger reason is that believing you can lose weight by snacking is just another delusion, a way to keep people spending money on diets and gimmicks that just don't work.

I ought to know. I've been fighting this battle since I was a child, and I've done a fair amount of research over the years about nutrition and fad diets.

Here we are at the beginning of a New Year, and everyone who has made a resolution to lose weight--this year! for sure!--is looking for an easy way.

There isn't one. As the leader at my local Weight Watchers meeting repeats every week: there is no cure for obesity.

Weight Watchers isn't paying me to write this. But the truth is that their comprehensive approach to weight loss is the only one that gives you a real chance to feel comfortable in your body.

For example, in recent years their plan has focused on research indicating that people need to consume a relatively large quantity of food in order to feel satisfied and not give in to temptations to binge (one of my weaknesses). In fact, I've come to realize that I need to spend a good amount of time chewing, just raising that fork or spoon to my mouth, in order not to feel deprived.

The key to eating a lot but losing weight is to eat filling but low-calorie foods--like fruits, vegetables, soups, salads, whole grains, beans. Not 100-calorie snack packs, whose sugar content, in my case, seems to trigger a physiological desire for more sugar that can make it almost impossible for me to stop eating until the whole box of snack packs or a pint of Haagen-Dazs is gone.

Motivated by health problems, I lost 20 pounds in 2008 following the Weight Watchers method, and I believe if I work at it, I can lose more this year.

But the operative word here is "work." It takes planning, cooking, concentration, regular exercise and reinforcement that the weekly Weight Watcher meetings supply. A slim woman at a recent meeting said she had lost 85 pounds 14 years ago and has kept it off, in part by still attending meetings for support. That could be discouraging, if you want to dwell on the fact that she still needs help after all these years.

Or, you could, as I have, take inspiration from her example. It's possible to get thin and stay thin. But let's not kid ourselves. It's not easy, and believing in tooth fairy versions of diets won't get you there.

Message to Obama: Explain Ethics of Choosing Rick Warren

2008-12-19T14:01:00.000-08:00

I've been worrying to myself about Obama's choice of people he will rely on try to stitch our economy back together. I've been perplexed about his retention of Gates at the Pentagon. But I, like a lot of other people have been taking seriously Obama's statement that he will be the one setting policy and that he has good political and managerial reasons for his picks.

But selecting Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his Inauguration causes me to wonder if I, and others like me, have mistaken Barack Obama. I voted for this man because he seemed to be the moral antidote to George W. Bush, an individual of ethics and integrity with a vision of an all-inclusive America.

Instead we will have the sad spectacle of someone who fought against the civil rights of gay people filling a role of great honor when Obama swears his loyalty to the Constitution of the United States.

I can't but help feel that I, we, deserve an explanation of the ethical thinking that went into this choice. I don't mean a superficial answer, I mean one worthy of Obama's education, which is so broad that I have no doubt that it included reading the wisdom of philosophers from Plato on who have probed what it means to be ethical.

With ethical questions, there is not necessarily a single right or wrong answer as there is, for example, with the decision not to kill another human being. (War situations excepted, for most people.) Making an ethical decision most often involves assessing the harmful consequences a choice might cause. It involves imagining the reaction of those with a stake in your decision, and then weighing all these negatives against the positives of those choices.

Mike Madden in Salon writes that "cozying up to Warren has been one of Obama's favorite ways of showing evangelicals that he might not be so scary." Obama himself has offered the explanation that choosing Warren as his Inaugural Day preacher is about making the point "that we're not going to agree on every single issue, but what we have to do is to be able to create an atmosphere where we can disagree without being disagreeable."

This comment implies that Obama does not understand or perhaps empathize with the deep hurt that California's vote to ban gay marriage has caused. Because preacher Warren supported that effort, choosing him is like further opening the wound, an action far beyond a loss of civility. This offense to the gay community is ethical consequence that Obama should have weighed. Did he?

Did he consider his duty to those who supported him? Not just gays themselves, but all those others, like me, who consider expanding gay rights part of the change we expect from Obama. Don't all who have been oppressed rise and fall together?

A spokesperson for Obama claimed the decision was not political. Well, if that's true, then what did justify it? Are there not a sufficient number of clergy members who could appropriately, passionately, deliver words of spiritual transcendence in honor of his Inauguration?

Obama prides himself on being a straight talker; indeed, one of his favorite phrases is, "I want to be perfectly clear." Well, now's the time for a perfectly clear explanation of the ethical calculation that will put Rick Warren in the face of gay people on a day when they thought they would be celebrating.

$18 for a Bag Full of Prescription Meds--in Italy

2008-12-12T07:12:00.000-08:00

We visited an old friend of ours last year who has retired to Venice, Italy. Richard had a heart attack not long after he moved there, and had to be taken by boat-ambulance to the hospital in this magical city of canals.

He was most pleased by the care he received, and recovered very well. So well, in fact, that we had a hard time keeping up with him as he trotted us through the maze of alleys and up and over all the bridges as he showed us the city's fabulous sites. Then 79, Richard has just turned 80.

One morning he told us we were on our own because he had to see his doctor to get renewals of his prescriptions. A few hours later, when we were all back at his apartment, he showed us a plastic bag full of his medications. Laughing gleefully, he asked us how much we thought he had paid for them.

Not knowing how he paid for health care in his adopted country, I guessed $1,000.

Oh no, he said. $18.

$18! Which prompted me to ask what he had paid for his stay in the hospital, all his follow-up care, and his regular visits to the doctor since then? A big fat zero. Zilch.

To our amazement, as a permanent non-citizen resident who does not work, Richard pays only a few hundred dollars a year to be covered by Italy's system of universal health care. Wow.

I told this story the other night to a couple of acquaintances, and they both immediately raised the stereotypical objections to the U.S. switching to a similar system: So why do the Canadians all come here to the U.S. for surgery? Those systems make people wait for care. etc. etc. The government can't be trusted to run anything, and so on.

Now that Obama has appointed Tom Daschle to be his new Secretary of Health & Human Services, it's urgent that we re-open this discussion of how best to reform our unconscionably expensive and income-based health care system. Solving the inequities of our system and lowering its cost is fundamental to solving many of the persistent social problems we face as well as making our businesses more competitive.

While some doctors continue to see their self-interest in continuing our present system, the 60,000 members of Physicians for a National Health Program disagree. In a section on their website , they point out, for example, that "the government" wouldn't be running a single-payer system--doctors and patients would be.

As far as people having to wait for operations--a form of health care rationing--they point out that rationing of health care also occurs in the U.S. It's just done differently here. Instead of being based on the urgency of a person's need as in Canada and elsewhere, here we base it on ability to pay. Here, an estimated 18,000 Americans die every year because they can't afford care.

Besides providing coverage for everyone regardless of means, moving to a universal, single-payer health care system, would eliminate a big source of corruption in our society. The Boston Globe recently reported that AARP earned nearly $500 billionin 2007 alone by selling seniors 17 varieties of insurance policies, including Medicare supplemental insurance for drugs. Despite the opposition of consumer organizations, AARP worked against the interest of its own members in 2003 by backing a form of coverage of prescription drug costs that raised costs for seniors with low income. For all seniors, the new plan also increased the complexity of Medicare, which is now so complicated that even a careful reading of explanatory booklets leaves you scratching your head.

But the change was good for AARP: After its passage, AARP expanded its contract with the United Health Group to sell the new policies which, according to the Boston Globe article, are not the lowest cost choice available despite advertising to the contrary.

Health care system lobbyists, of course, are one of the largest special interest groups that have a big hold members of Congress--from both parties--thanks to campaign contributions and other perks they offer.

It's time to put this whole bunch out of business.

Of course, a lot of Americans currently have jobs in the huge bureaucracy that wastes so much of our health care dollars. Moving to a single payer system can't be accomplished over night.

But as the Obama Administration addresses this problem, it should be working to implement changes that in increments, over time, move us to a universal, single-payer system. Daschle understands the advantages of a single-payer system but, apparently, believes it is too radical an idea to promote since it's been smeared by opponents as socialized medicine..

But if not now, when change is in the air, when? I fear we'll have to wait a very long time for another opportunity to move toward a universal system.

"Hate Radio" Talkers Get a Free Pass

2008-12-04T07:27:00.000-08:00

When radio's Don Imus lost all sense of decency and called the Rutger's women's basketball team a name that revealed both his sexism and racism, we finally saw that there is a limit to public tolerance of radio's shock jocks.

But it's a preciously low limit, as a new report by Media Matters, a non-profit monitor of conservative misinformation, points out.

The report shows that there really is no boundary as long as these purveyors of prejudice aim at adult public figures or at large swaths of the population, like women in general rather than under-age, identifiable individuals--and athletes besides. Unless of course, they use a four-letter word. That, or baring a breast even for a tenth of a second, are about the only offenses that incur the wrath of the Federal Communications Commission these days.

The report, "RadioActiveSmears," lists some of the worst offenders plying their ugly trade at local and regional stations around the country. The report gives details of utter falsehoods, such as two jocks' claims that 5 million illegal aliens got subprime mortgages, (despite repeated denials by HUD) or wildly inflammatory predictions, such as KOA's "Gunny" Bob Newman saying that after gay marriage is legalized will come "legal human-animal marriage."

The report singles out KTLK radio host Chris Baker for special censure, describing him as "one of the most prolific purveyors of inflammatory rhetoric."

Baker apparently finds a big audience among men who hate women and respond well to comments like: "I'm not excited about women voting;" and, Sarah Palin "shoulda had a little cleavage going...I noticed a little panty line on her."

He added, "I'm a pig, and that's fine." At least he was right about the pig part.

The press secretary for Media Matters, J. Jioni Palmer, wonders why, if "we don't tolerate sexism on our local television station or local paper," why "should radio get a free pass?"

It's a good question. If the columnist for a local newspaper, or an anchor at a local television station made such comments, they would be censured by an outraged public and probably lose their jobs.

Is talk radio different?

Yes. First, newspaper columnists and TV anchors are journalists, and journalists are expected to adhere to a code of ethics.

Radio shock jocks are not journalists, and have no code of ethics. Apparently, they have no personal ethics, either.

Ethical theorists (I teach a course on media ethics at Hofstra University) speak of journalists' duty to the truth, to their audience and the community. To fulfill those duties requires an effort to find out the truth and to seek balance and fairness.

Radio shock jocks obviously see their duty only as one of increasing their ratings and their pay.

So what's the answer? As Palmer of Media Matters says, should these obnoxious talkers just get a free pass because of both their First Amendment rights and the ability of people to simply turn them off?

No, they shouldn't.

Parthiv Parekh, the editor of an Indian-American magazine based in Atlanta, argues that the mainstream media have a duty to take on the excesses of radio purveyors of prejudice and hate. He contends that by highlighting their excesses on a regular basis, ethical journalists can enlist the public in making advertisers and station owners uncomfortable in letting offenders keep their jobs.

In his essay, "The Unfairness of Talk Radio," Parekh says, "Just as talking heads use their medium to routinely knock the mainstream press, they in turn must frequently call to attention the irrationality of talk radio." So, when right-wing talkers, in particular, take every opportunity to criticize the "liberal" mainstream media, why shouldn't mainstream journalists give it right back to them when these amoral individuals repeatedly ignore the facts and promote disgusting stereotypes?

The motivation to do this is not competition or revenge. What's at stake here is the ability of people in our democracy to acquire good information on which to act as citizens: to vote, first of all, and to decide which public policies are best for themselves and the country.

Unfettered by any requirement or any personal sense of duty to be truthful or even-handed, right-wing talkers reinforce the worst stereotypes and fears of their audiences. This is why we had a significant percentage of the electorate believing before the election, and probably still believing, that President-elect Obama is a Muslim. Some shockers went as far as to label him "the Beast," meaning Satan. (Listen to a 1-minute recording of some of the worst comments compiled by Media Matters by clicking here.)

Newsweek's Joe Klein expressed the danger of media slicing and dicing audiences in 1992:

"The basic principle is centrifugal: market segmentation targets those qualities that distinguish people from each other rather than emphasizing those things we have in common. It is the developed world's equivalent of the retribalization taking place in Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia."

Klein was referring at the time to the rise of cable channels focused on particular ethnic and racial audiences, sports enthusiasts and other slices of the public. Far worse is to parse your audience based on their hatreds and fears, but that is exactly what the shock talkers do.

So did Media Matters' report on the shock jocks get covered by the mainstream media?

No. Not a word in The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, or even in newspapers or TV stations in the towns where these shock jocks ply their ugly trade.

Pity. Because that silence does give these hate talkers a free pass and the ability to avoid being tried where they should be, in the court of public opinion.

Nanny Nightmares: No More Bottled Water for You!

2008-11-25T13:07:00.000-08:00

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is mightily upset about a report by the Environmental Working Group(EWG) that points out what should be obvious: buying bottled water is usually a giant waste of money particularly because what's in the bottle could very well be just plain old tap water. Meanwhile, bottled water is a giant source of profit to Coca Cola, Pepsi and other members of the industry.

The folks at the Washington D.C.-based booster of corporate America (CEI) is trying to counter criticism of bottled water by suggesting that consumers' worst enemy is --shriek!--the Nanny State! You know, those government Nannies in their frumpy clothes, their lips tight in disapproval, who don't want you to have choices, choices, choices! In this case, the choice of drinking bottled water while leaving to the public at large the cost of disposing of the container and ignoring the oil used in making all that plastic and its impact on global warming. The CEI has even created a special website just to fight efforts to shrink use of bottled water.

Here's the bottom line from the EWG: "With bottled water, you don't know what you're getting." Laboratory tests found Walmart's Sam's Club bottled water contains traces of disinfection, a sign that it is simply bottled tap water. Other brands sampled contained traces of contaminants at levels higher than the bottled water industry's own purity standards allow.

"Given the industry's refusal to make available data to support their claims of superiority, consumer confidence in the purity of bottled water is simply not justified," the report continues.

Of course, what's given the bottlers and the CEI that sinking feeling is that the growth in sales of bottled water is slowing. Reports like this from EWG, combined with growing public concerns about the environmental damage from the bottles, surely won't help to revive industry growth. In 2002, consumers spent $11 billion on bottled water, and sales grew 12 percent. This year, the increase is expected to be under 2.5%. Uh, oh.

There's even an effort by some universities to ban bottled water sales on campus as a green initiative. That has particularly disturbed the folks at CEI, bothering their rest with Nanny Nightmares.

Angela Logomasini is the CEI's spokesperson on this subject, and she criticized the EWG report as "junk science" and misleading. She's a Ph.D, a press release points out, but the CEI's web site says her advanced degree is in political science not biology or chemistry. I gave her a call to ask her to explain her assessment of the report, and it turned out she had no criticism of the laboratory findings, just the conclusion that bottled water is no better than tap.

She asserts that even though some bottled water is drawn right from municipal supplies that it's still better because it is filtered further and thus may taste better.

Her political background is more to the point of the CEI's criticisms. Calling a ban on bottled water sales on campuses "ridiculous," she asserts, "We're against the Nanny state. It's a right for people to live in a free society and engage in voluntary exchange, free trade."

What I've always loved about this view of capitalism--and I have a background in economics--is that free enterprise champions never want to pay the real price of so-called free trade.

How about a tax or at least a deposit on water bottles to cover the costs of disposing of the bottles? Nope. In fact, Logomasini said CEI would like to do away with all bottle deposits.

What about a labeling requirement that would tell consumers the source of bottled water, so you'd know, for example, that you were paying $1.50 for 12 ounces of some municipality's public water supply? Nah. Most brands, she asserts, have a phone # on the label where you can get such information.

The CEI's bottom line is that an unfettered market is always the answer.

Here's my bottom line: Buy genuinely reusable water bottles and refill them. A good source is REI, a retailing cooperative with a strong sense of responsibility to the public and the environment. With all the money you save, you can buy something really worthwhile in a bottle to celebrate your newfound thrift. Champagne anyone?

They Didn't Get to Vote Nov. 4

2008-11-14T08:56:00.000-08:00

One of the least recognized penalties for committing any kind of felony in America is loss of the right to vote. And the biggest losers of that most basic aspect of citizenship are blacks and Latinos, most of them convicted of non-violent drug offenses.

The effect is unblushingly racist: the disproportionate enforcement of our failed drug laws and bans on voting by felons weakens the political power of minority communities.

And that's no accident, says Ira Glasser, president of the Drug Policy Alliance and former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Glasser, who woke me up to this issue when I heard him speak a couple of years ago, believes this is a deliberate policy to deprive minorities of power, an extension of the Jim Crow laws we thought we had left behind.

Here's the picture:

Although African Americans make up about 12% of the U.S. population and 13% of drug users, 38% of those arrested for drug offenses and 59% of those convicted are black.
Almost all states and the District of Columbia strip felony prisoners of their right to vote. Only 2 states--Maine & Vermont--allow voting by felony prisoners.
35 states prohibit voting while felons are on parole
30 states prohibit voting by felons on probation
2 states--Kentucky & Virginia--are completely non-forgiving. Even after you've done your time, you never again can vote.
A few other states delay restoration of voting rights for certain offenses for as long as 5 years.

An estimated 5.3 million Americans (1 in 40 adults) have currently or permanently lost their voting rights as a result of a felony conviction.

But of those people, 1.4 million are African-American men--13% of the total population of black men, or more than 1 in 10.

As bad as that is, here's a shocking look forward, according to the Sentencing Project:

If the current unfair enforcement of drug laws continues, three in 10 of the next generation of black men can expect to be disenfranchised at some point in their lifetime.

Not only is this situation racist, but it's costing us money we can ill afford.

Here we are trying to find money to support education and health care and other essential services as our economy goes into the tank, and we're still wasting billions of dollars nationally keeping people in prison for using the short list of drugs we call illegal. Not so for those who abuse prescription drugs or alcohol, as long as they don't drive or engage in other behavior that hurts other people. Shouldn't that be the standard for all drugs? What makes marijuana or cocaine or heroin so different, other than that they are illegal and therefore the cause of so much crime, here and abroad?

Alternatives to incarceration, community-based drug treatment--in short, treating drug use as a health problem--would be far less expensive, not to mention humane than locking people up and in the process destroying their families and communities.

This picture looks even worse when you consider that in some states, the prison population is counted for representation in the communities where the prisons are located---mostly rural areas--rather than the home towns of the prisoners. In some communities, this results in giving the votes of a small number of generally white voters more weight than those of others. That's a clear violation of one person, one vote.

It's a situation crying out for change.

Let's hope the new Obama Administration finds the time to dial down the drug war and put the drug problem in a new framework that delivers a healthier, more just America.

Obama's Win: Power to the People!

2008-11-05T07:54:00.000-08:00

We did it. We all did it. All of us who marched and protested over and over, in the bitter cold and the hot sun, who circulated and signed endless petitions, who wrote countless letters and emails, who went in person to beseech our elected representatives, only to have all of these actions fall on deaf ears in Washington--this election of Obama was our victory and our revenge.

This election wasn't decided by hockey moms or middle-aged white men.

This election was decided by the members of the PTA and the social justice committees in churches across America. It was decided by the veterans pleading for an end to war and health care for their injured comrades. It was decided by the women's groups determined to save our option for abortion and our access to birth control and emergency contraception. It was decided by the organizations of nurses outraged by a health care system that leaves many to die without needed treatment. It was decided by immigrant rights groups looking for justice and not exploitation. It was decided by environmental activists passionate about saving our planet from global warming, about preserving the life in our oceans and on our lands. It was decided by the organizers of small coops distributing garage-made biodiesel to members of their community.

In short, it was decided by all those millions of people who for the past 8 years have been looking for a voice in Washington. And who have been stunned and dismayed that no matter how they pleaded, they were ignored by an incompetent President proud of his ignorance, and by deluded Republicans who thought they had the power.

Most analysts are pointing to the implosion of our economy as the decisive factor in this election, and surely it made the need for change more urgent than ever.

But when the Republicans disparaged Obama's experience as a community organizer, they insulted just those people with the knowledge, the ability and the passion to take them down.

It was all those folks, with experience in a wide array of grassroots organizations, who saw in Obama the person who seemed willing and able to listen and be reasonable. And with faith in him, they put their organizing skills to work on his behalf, traveling to the embattled states, making phone calls on his behalf, contributing the massive amounts of money he needed to overcome the smears and the constant babble of right-wing bloviators on radio and TV.

So on this day, I'm celebrating because we the people, the people who work to make our communities, our country and the world better, we won yesterday. We won.

I, for one, will take this day to enjoy our victory. Power to the people!

Obama Plan to Bankrupt Coal Industry? Not.

2008-11-04T06:27:00.000-08:00

In my worst nightmares as the presidential campaign neared its end, I envisioned the Bush Administration bombing Iran as its "October surprise," a game-changing event designed to push the election to McCain.

Thankfully, this didn't happen. Instead, in the past couple of days Republicans dredged up a recording of an interview Obama gave earlier this year in which he talked about the future of the U.S. coal industry.

I was supposed to be shocked and dismayed by an email that landed in my inbox with the headline: "Obama Plan to 'Bankrupt' Clean Coal Would Cost Thousands of Jobs."

Just as with so many campaign ads this political season, the words in that headline are a gross distortion. Here's why.

First, Obama has no plan whose intent is to bankrupt the coal industry. What he did say was that he would put into place a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases that would, for the first time, put a dollar value emissions that contribute to global warming. Unless an electric utility were able to somehow contain the emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that come from burning coal, the utility would have to pay for each unit of gases it spews into the air.

The effect of that system would be to put coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, at a disadvantage against electricity made from cleaner fuels.

And, indeed, Obama said in that interview that under such a system, the marketplace would determine that coal is too expensive to compete, leading to the bankruptcy of coal system operators.

This, of course, would be a good thing. By making energy companies pay the real costs of their business activity, the market would function to favor the cleanest sources of energy, including, of course, solar, wind, biodiesel, etc.

This of course, is a horrible prospect to the Western Business Roundtable, the group that sounded the alarm in the final day before the election. Like so many Big Businesses who speak the praises of capitalism and free markets when they apply to someone else, they've gotten used to letting other people--read taxpayers--pay to clean up the environmental messes they leave behind. The Roundtable is an association of energy companies, oil, coal, & natural gas, active in western states. They and their brethren in the rest of the country, including the coal strip-mining companies engaged in taking the tops off mountains in West Virginia, want to be allowed to continue to despoil our beautiful land and warm our planet without paying the price for their action.

Mountaintop removal is something you have to see, at least in pictures, to understand the devastation it creates. To get at the coal underneath all those pesky trees, bushes and top soil these environmental vandals just blast away the mountain tops and dump hundreds of millions of tons of creation into nearby valleys. From the air, these huge strip mines look like lunar landscapes.

Second distortion: Always looking for the angle that can rouse ordinary folks to take their side, the Roundtable's alarmist email also raised the specter of the loss of "hundreds of thousands of jobs" if a cap-and-trade system made coal mining the market loser that it should be.

This would also be a good thing. The dirty, deadly job of underground coal mining might eventually become a bad memory. Certainly those workers will need help during the transition away from coal, and that must be one of the uses to which emission payments should be put. As for the folks who run the giant machines that eat mountains, let's find work for them building and repairing bridges and roads and other beneficial public works.

The last distortion in the headline of that email lies in the words "clean coal." There's just no such thing. The death toll and injuries, the environmental devastation involved in mining coal are so overwhelming that this is an industry that should become obsolete. For an excellent overview of all that, have a look at this article in the Washington Post.

Even if it does become possible to pump the greenhouse gases from electricity plants underground--an incredibly expensive idea--or, better, to feed the carbon dioxide to algae that can then be harvested to make biofuels--the production of coal itself is an insult to the earth. Using the adjective "clean" in relation to coal is, plain and simple, an oxymoron.

McCain Wrong on Head Start

2008-10-16T10:55:00.001-07:00

John McCain's nose grew a bit longer last night during the final presidential debate as he continued trying to tar Barack Obama with the same tired accusations. But he also managed to get in a new falsehood: that Head Start is a failure.

McCain asserted that by the third grade, the advantages bestowed by the pre-kindergarten program disappear, leaving the children with no long-term benefit. f

Well, that study was done in 1969, only four years after Head Start began. Since then, its methodology has been criticized as flawed, according to The National Head Start Association.

Newer studies since then have found solid evidence that Head Start is most worthwhile.

That doesn't surprise me. I worked as an assistant teacher back in the early days of Head Start while I was still in college. The children in my class had health problems that I or the teacher noticed; we reported them and the children got the care they needed. We read to the children, did crafts with them, played with them, and exposed them to the larger world. We gave them the kind of coaching and attention that their parents were either too overworked or under-educated to provide.

Studies in 2003 and 2007 that McCain didn't mention found that Head Start children have higher achievement test scores and higher graduation rates than children who did not take part. Furthermore, a 2004 study projected that for every $1 spent on Head Start, society received $9 in benefits including increased earnings for the graduates, decreased dependency on welfare, and fewer children repeating grades and needing special education services.

When I had my own children, I realized how much of a head start affluent children have. One of my sons began struggling with school in the second grade despite having a high IQ revealed by tests. The school seemed unable to deal with his situation, so I had him privately evaluated. It turned out he had a visual problem that made it very difficult for him to put down on paper what he saw on a blackboard.

Two months of occupational therapy changed him from an unhappy school child to an enthusiastic one who thereafter had consistently good grades. Among the simple tools that the therapist introduced were chunky pencils that he could hold more easily.

Every child should have not only a Head Start program if they need one, but also screening for learning problems such as my son had. Investing in early childhood programs and screening pays dividends later, and not only in dollars.

Imagine how much parental stress and childhood anguish would be avoided if all children received the help they need early in life.

What were you thinking, John McCain?

Outrageous! VP Debate Ignored Women's Issues

2008-10-03T08:27:00.000-07:00

I was outraged last night that moderator Gwen Ifill didn't ask a single question about women's issues, and particularly women's reproductive rights. Not one question of a woman making a historic run for vice-president who supposedly appeals to disappointed Hilary supporters.

Here was folksy Sarah Palin with a 17-year old pregnant daughter, all set up for a shot-gun wedding with a reluctant boyfriend, and Ifill didn't ask her one question about her stance on abortion, contraception, teenage pregnancy or teen marriage. I'm not suggesting that she should have asked her how she would handle her responsibilities as a mother if she becomes vice president. If she does get elected, she'll muddle through as a working Mom like the rest of us have or still do.

But didn't the American public deserve to hear her defend her extreme view that abortion should not be permitted even in cases of rape and incest? What about the fact that in Alaska, rape victims have to pay for the rape kits used to get evidence to prosecute rapists? (See Planned Parenthood's upcoming ad on this be clicking here. Disclosure: the page also asks for a donation.) Shouldn't Palin been asked about the crushing effect on young women of teen motherhood? Or the terrible odds of success of teen marriages?

I can only speculate that Ifill was afraid of appearing partisan, perhaps because she was criticized before the debate because of her book-in-progress. The coming book is about politics in the age of Obama, and critics had suggested it was complementary of him, thus making her partisan. By not touching on women's issues, Ifill avoided questioning Palin about views on these subjects that do not sit well with most Americans. So was she over-compensating in order to escape criticism?

(Once the criticism surfaced about her book, Ifill should have walked away from moderating the debate. There are so many other excellent journalists who could have been selected whose neutrality would not have been questioned. Another journalist might have had the guts to challenge Palin's views about women's control of their own reproduction. It was an ethical challenge, and Ifill chose to ignore it at the country's expense.)

So Palin got away without having to talk about views that are so out of step with the vast majority of American women. Shame on Gwen Ifill for giving her a pass.

Bravo! European Diesels impress Consumer Reports; Diesels for U.S. Market on the Way

2008-09-29T08:56:00.000-07:00

OK, car buffs. How would you like to drive a 2009 Audi A4 that has 236 horsepower, shove-you-back-in-your-seat acceleration of 369 lb-ft of torque and still get 36 miles per gallon? You would?

Better get on an airplane, then. This Audi isn't sold in the U.S. Neither is the 2008 Mini Cooper D, (the "D" stands for diesel), that gets 60 mpg, or a 2007 BMW 123d hatchback, another diesel, which gets 45 mpg. (These are European mpg ratings.)

In fact, in 2007, Europeans had a choice of 113 vehicles that got 40 mpg or better, according to a report from The Civil Society Institute's 40MPG.org. All were made either by U.S.-based manufacturers or those with substantial U.S. sales operations like Nissan and Toyota. Many, if not most of these were diesels; half the new cars sold in Europe these days are diesels.

The car wonks from Consumer Reports got to test-drive a sample of these European vehicles recently at the annual International Motor Press Association track days at Pocono Raceway, and t hey were mightily impressed. They gave the 2009 Audi the highest marks, and their only objection to the other diesels was that they weren't "quite as smooth as the best gas engines."

I've been driving a 2002 Jetta diesel since 2004, when I bought it used. The advantage of a diesel like mine over hybrids like the Toyota Prius is that it has better acceleration and handles like a big car on an Interstate, keeping up with the traffic, at 80 mph. And gets 43 mpg all the while. (No, I'm not being paid by Volkswagen!) Hybrids like the Prius, which I've test-driven, are best in stop-and-go city driving, especially where the terrain is flat and the gas engine doesn't have to go to work.

We've been languishing without new diesel car choices in the U.S. for years now, mainly because California's air resources board put human health over conservation, a position it's hard to argue with. In smoggy California, the pollution created by old-technology diesels, particularly emissions of tiny particles implicated as a cause of asthma, outweighed diesels' better mileage and lower emissions of carbon dioxide of about 20 percent. So they banned sales of new diesel cars in California, and when other big states like New York followed their example, the manufacturers stopped selling them even in states where they were not banned.

That's changing now as car manufacturers have finally met California's air quality standards. About a dozen new diesels are now available, according to the Diesel Technology Forum. Unfortunately, this group is heavily skewed toward high-priced luxury cars like the Mercedes E320 Bluetec, which will knock you back nearly $60,000 once you pay the taxes and other fees. And its fuel economy is only 23 mpg, city, and 32, highway.

The only reasonably priced model yet available is the 2009 Volkswagen Jetta, which gets 30 mpg, city, and 41, highway. (Compare that to 21 city, 29 highway for the gas version.) You also get a $1,300 fed tax credit if you are one of the first 60,000 people to buy the car. But wait a year or so, and there will be a lot more choices.

Of course, diesel car fuel is now more expensive than gasoline. But the difference in price, at least in my corner of Long Island, New York, is no more than 15 percent. (About $4.55 a gallon versus about $4, or a bit less, for regular gasoline) Diesels extract a lot more than 15 percent more miles from a gallon, so you're still way ahead. Beyond the dollars, however, you'd also be conserving a great deal of oil and cutting CO2 emissions 20%. The same model car with a diesel engine instead of gas gets between 20 and 40% better mileage. Furthermore, diesel engines just run and run and run, often to 200,000 or 300,000 miles.

Of course, it was my hope that I'd be filling my car with truly clean biodiesel now; that prospect is what tipped me into buying my used Jetta. That hasn't happened yet because this alternative fuel is still scarce in my part of the world. But that's another story...

Who said being a citizen is easy?

2008-09-19T12:35:00.000-07:00

I usually blog about newsworthy issues like liquid natural gas and offshore drilling. But not today. Here we are in the final weeks of what seems like the most important national election of my lifetime, and people in my circle of friends are complaining that the political competition is tiring them out, confusing, or boring.

Usually they finish their complaint by asserting that it doesn't matter anyway, that whoever wins, it won't make a difference.

I'm here to say, suck it up and stop copping out.

No one ever said it was easy being a citizen.

Of course, no one ever really instructs us in what's expected of citizens of this great country. We take for granted that we not only get to vote, but also to write, phone, email our representatives if we so choose. Likewise, our ability to run for office, or, unwilling to take on the job ourselves, to support candidates we favor with our money and time. We even get to engage in public demonstrations--sometimes, these days fenced in by hostile police, sometimes beaten or arrested, but at least there's always an outcry when that happens and some resolution of the matter later on.

For comparison, just ask the people of China what it's like not to have the freedoms we citizens of America take so lightly. Start with the Chinese citizens who applied for permits to protest during the Olympics, and got arrested for just asking. Or the people of Myanmar, better known to us as Burma, where even outside aide to tsunami victims was blocked by the military government. I could go on...and on, but you get my point.

With Wall Street collapsing while the top executives walk away unscathed, with health care out of reach for so many, with our infrastructure falling down, a ruinous war still in progress, now is the time to make being a citizen a top priority in our lives. Above watching our favorite sports teams, tuning in reality shows, getting our nails done, shining the car, and any of the other optional diversions on which we spend time.

Now is the time to bother to listen carefully to the competing claims, and anyone who does look at the platforms of the Republicans versus the Democrats , or at Obama's resume and positions versus McCain's, will find it impossible to claim both will bring about the same future. Who gets elected matters, and I don't just mean who gets to be president, but who gets into the Senate and House of Representatives.

Inform yourself and then use the tools we have as citizens. Donate money to your favored candidates. Could be the best investment you'll ever make, one that might actually protect your portfolio and the Social Security benefits you hope will be there when you need them. Stop avoiding political discussions with your friends (how many times have I heard people stop conversations with the flat assertion--I never talk politics? Well, why not?) Such discussions help us clarify our thinking.

If you feel strongly, go make phone calls to voters in other states or otherwise assist in the campaigns. Or, go help with a voter registration effort.

Give it a try. You just might discover that this reality show has all the others beat.

Oil Industry PR Campaign Uses Phony Bin Laden Quote to Promote Offshore, Alaska Drilling

2008-09-09T11:37:00.000-07:00

First they used a venerable civil rights organization, the Congress on Racial Equality, to attack efforts to reduce America's reliance on oil. Now they're using a phony quote from America's favorite terrorist, Osam bin Laden, to try to convince Americans that drilling off our coasts and in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge is patriotic.

"They" are the oil industry folks behind Americans for American Energy (AAE), and they've been poisoning the Internet with broadcast emails full of lies. The bin Laden one hit my inbox today with the catchy headline: "Osama bin Laden says 'America must not drill for its own oil. They must be kept dependent on ours.' "

Did bin Laden really say that, I wondered? So I phoned Greg Schnacke, who signed the email, and, by golly, he picked up the phone right away. Introducing myself as a journalist, I told him I'd received the email and would like to know the source of the quote.

"That's our view," he answered. But is it a quote, I asked? It's presented as one. "I'm very well aware of what we are doing," he said, finally adding, "It's not a quote."

Ahh. Ethics anyone? Obviously not at AAE which is funded by Pac/West Communications. Pac/West received a $3 million no-bid contract from the State of Alaska to campaign for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That bit of information comes from Source Watch, which monitors media frauds like this one.

This comes after another round of email publicity by AAE for a July rally in which the once proud civil rights organization, CORE, became a shill for the oil industry. Not caring that their action would actually hurt the people they supposedly represent, CORE's leaders attacked environmental groups as responsible for high energy prices.

Tell me, can these people sleep at night? I'm all for asking them directly, so here's Greg Schnacke's phone number so you can call him up and ask him: 866-416-0659. It's toll-free, so dial away, folks.

TV News Misleads About Offshore Drilling

2008-09-05T12:34:00.000-07:00

Recent polls show that 51% of Americans believe that opening up coastal areas to offshore drilling would significantly lower gasoline prices. But the U.S. government agency that reports data on energy issues says it's not so, that the impact of new drilling would be minimal.

So how come so many Americans think otherwise? They heard it on TV, in the mouths of their favorite newscasters.

A study of transcripts of 267 news programs between June 16 and August 9 found that only one--that's right, just one-- bothered to mention that the Energy Information Agency (EIA) predicts that increased offshore drilling would have no significant effect on oil prices. At peak production in 20 years, the new wells would yield 200,000 barrels a day, two-tenths of one percent of world production.

The study of the newscasts was done by the Center for Economic & Policy Research, an independent, non-partisan think tank whose advisory board includes Nobel Laureate economists.

So what's going on here? Nothing less than an abdication of journalistic responsibility.

Reporting on the government prediction would have meant contradicting assertions by Republican presidential candidate John McCain that we urgently need to risk our coastal environment for the sake of more oil. CNN, for example, mentioned the proposed drilling 139 times, but only once also bothered to mention the EIA forecast. None of the other broadcasts studied--ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, etc.--ever referred to it at all.

Neither did Fox News, behind only CNN with 86 reports on the proposed drilling.

These newscasts treated the issue as simply open to opinion because the falsehood about the benefits of new drilling came out of the mouth of a man running for president. To have knocked him down would have incurred the wrath of Republican leaders with ready access to the owners of the major media. Rather than take any heat that might have come, the editors and anchors of these broadcasts simply sat on their microphones.

Remember that the EIA is like the Labor Department and the Federal Reserve, an agency that is non-partisan and whose mission is to gather information for everyone's benefit, including corporations. This is one of the legitimate reasons why we pay taxes, folks, so armies of bureaucrats can go out and collect data. We don't guess about the employment or inflation rates, and we certainly listen to the economic forecasts from agencies like the Federal Reserve. Energy forecasts are no different.

It bears repeating that the most important function of the media is to provide the public with the information we need to be engaged in the running of our democracy. That's why the founders of our country enshrined freedom of the press in the First Amendment. Shame on the TV newscasts for failing us so badly.

88 Years & Counting to Equality for Women

2008-08-26T08:53:00.000-07:00

Today is the 88th anniversary of the day U.S. women won the right to vote. For me, it is a day for mixed feelings of celebration on the one hand and disappointment on the other. It is also a reminder that for millions of women around the world the right to vote pales in importance to their continuing bondage in families, communities and countries controlled by men of brutality and warped thinking.

Years ago, before 9/11, before the U.S. government showed any concern for the enslavement of women by the Taliban, I realized that no woman, anywhere, should feel free as long as any woman had to accept enshrouding in a burka and gross limitations on her very freedom to move about in her own community.

I also can not wholeheartedly celebrate the status of women in America, despite the progress we have made. The United States is still one of only 8 countries that has not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (known as CEDAW). This is both a bill of rights for women and an agenda for action. It deals not only with civil and legal rights but also reproductive rights, and therein lies the rub for U.S. approval. Parties to this international treaty are supposed to guarantee that women have the right and the information "to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children."

Of course, signing is easy, and better that the U.S. not be hypocritical in signing and then , as is the case with other countries that have signed, including--and this blows my mind-- Afghanistan continue to discriminate against women.

There's another reason many American women can not celebrate today: Hilary Clinton will not be the one crowned as the Democratic nominee for president. As a life-long feminist, I share the feeling of opportunity missed, of not experiencing the thrill in the gut of seeing a woman at the pinnacle of power. But I was one of the feminists who could not support Clinton because she refused to acknowledge her mistake in supporting the Iraq War. For me, this ruinous, cruel war, made possible by deceit and deception, trumps women's rights. I believe that Hillary, not Obama, would be accepting that nomination if she could have admitted her failure to see through the Bush Administration lies and denounced them.

So what now? Should feminists who hoped to see a woman in the White House spite themselves by supporting McCain and the Republicans who disdain women's rights? Please, no. With Obama we have a chance at least of seeing the U.S. not only sign CEDAW but maintaining and perhaps--if we elect enough liberal members of Congress-- expanding our reproductive rights. With McCain, we'll go backwards.

As we watch Obama accept the nomination in the coming days, we should take a moment to meditate on the efforts of all the women who have struggled to give us the freedom we do enjoy today. And in that meditation, find the strength to continue that struggle, even if we must wait again to see a woman president.

Why is Biodiesel Still So Expensive?

2008-08-08T11:46:00.000-07:00

In my recent article for The Nation, I wrote that the U.S. biodiesel industry is operating at only 20% of capacity and focused on one of two main reasons for that: the lack of facilities at wholesale terminals for blending the biofuel with petroleum diesel.

The other big reason is the price of soybeans and soybean oil, the primary feedstock used to produce biodiesel in America. Even with petroleum diesel selling at even higher prices than gasoline--hovering around $5 a gallon where I live on Long Island, in New York--soybean biodiesel is still even more expensive.

And that, says Dr. Mark Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America, has a lot to do with speculation.

Many news reports in mainstream media keep quoting industry experts who deny that speculation has driven up the price of commodities including crude oil, corn and soybeans, but the fact is that they have no real evidence to prove their assertion. In testimony two months ago to the Senate Commerce Committee, Cooper pointed out that much of the trading in oil and commodities now takes place outside of regulated exchanges. Therefore, we really don't have the information we need to know who is trading and how much they are trading because these transactions are hidden from public view. That's why there's such disagreement about the role of speculation in driving up these prices.

But we do know that people like biodiesel producers--who actually want to use the physical commodities to make something real--have been priced out of the market. "Public policy has made speculation much more attractive than investment in genuinely productive enterprise," concludes Cooper.

His prescription is "vigorously enforced registering and reporting requirements(that) will chase the bad actors out of the commodity markets" and "margin and tax policies (that) will direct capital out of speculation and into productive long term uses."

That sounds eminently sensible, but will Congress listen and the President sign corrective legislation?

Seems to me we'll have to wait until we have a new President and a new Congress.

" Animal Welfare Approved:" A Gold Standard for Humane Animal Treatment

2008-08-04T13:22:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a comment from reader, Emily, I've learned about a really robust humane animal certification program that allows complying farmers to label their eggs and meats "Animal Welfare Approved."

The good news on the budget side is that you can find products with this label at Costco. You can also find them at Whole Foods, Wild Oats, Trader Joe's and Fairway.

The requirements are stringent. Under this program, laying hens must have access to the outdoors, must be able to engage in all kinds of natural behavior inside or outside, can't be starved to get them to produce more eggs, and get to keep the tips of their beaks--no beak cutting allowed. The standards are extensive, but this certification does not require organic feeding.

Thanks again, Emily.

Egg Labels: What do they really mean?

2008-08-01T12:56:00.000-07:00

If you have a dog, cat, any pet, or any empathy for animals in general, then you probably want to make sure that the food you buy didn't come with a side-dish of cruelty. The food industry knows this very well, and therefore uses food labels to lull you into thinking all is well.

Starting with this post, I'm going to tell you what some of those labels actually mean. Let's start with eggs.

The issues here are whether the laying hens are kept in so-called battery cages, unable to nest, perch and dust-bathe, and what kind of food they get to eat.

Cartons of standard eggs, of course the least expensive variety of eggs, make no statements about either question. But most producers follow the guidelines of United Egg Producers. This usually means that the hens spend their lives together inside wire cages. The point of their beaks is sliced off so they can not hurt each other. They can also be forced to produce more eggs by being starved periodically, or by having their food rations reduced, and then allowed to eat again. (This practice goes by the less shocking name of forced molting: they lose all their feathers because they are starving.) United Egg Producers claims the hens have enough room to spread their wings and are healthier because they can not catch diseases outdoors. (Maybe we should keep people inside too?) They can be fed antibiotics and their food may have been treated with pesticides.

The more expensive eggs have a variety of labels that are not defined on the packages, and which seem to be overlapping or very similar. Here's what they really mean:

Cage Free: No battery cages for these hens. They are uncaged inside barns or warehouses, but may not have access to the outdoors. So at least they can move around. Beak-cutting and starvation are permitted. This label implies nothing about what the hens eat. No one audits growers to make sure the hens are really kept this way.

Free Range: Essentially the same as Cage Free, but the hens are presumed to have some access to the outdoors. No auditing.

Certified Humane: The big difference here is that the egg farmers are audited by Certified Humane, a program of Humane Farm Animal Care. Surprisingly, however, the treatment of the hens is essentially the same as Cage Free--there's no requirement that the hens get to go outside. But there are standards for the number of hens kept inside the space and the number of perches and nesting boxes available to them. And, while beak-cutting is permitted, starvation is not. No guarantees about the quality of the diet they receive.

Certified Organic: They are uncaged, must have outdoor access, and eat an organic all-vegetarian diet free of antibiotics and pesticides. But beak-cutting and starvation are allowed. This is a program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and it is enforced through third-party auditing.

A word about another label claim that has nothing to do with animal cruelty: omega-3 enriched eggs. These come from hens that have been fed a diet rich in these fatty acids, often from flaxseed. The egg yolks from hens on this diet contain more of these healthful omega-3s.

The price of cage-free or organic eggs can be 50 percent or even more than for standard eggs. But consider the price the hens are paying! Wealthier folk should pony up the extra $ to push the industry in a more humane direction. Eventually, perhaps, the era of factory farming will be just a bad memory.

Next time: meat and dairy labels.

Is Confinement in Crates Animal Torture? California to Decide

2008-07-15T07:46:00.000-07:00

When I think about how most farm animals spend their lives confined in crates, never seeing the sun, having the ground under their feet or breathing open air, I can't help but compare the situation to the debate over torture of human beings.

When writing about water boarding or sleep deprivation for weeks at a time, news reporters feel constrained to add that some people regard these practices as torture. This is convenient for those who ordered their use--read Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush--because they otherwise would be unequivocally regarded as criminals. And I do hope some day to see all of them indicted by international courts for these and other crimes.

The same can be said of defenders of factory farming, although they face no such possible accountability for the suffering they have caused. Can anyone who has ever looked into the eyes of a calf, heard the squeals of a pig, or watched chickens pecking at each other, sincerely believe that they don't suffer when confined in crates?

On this, as on so many other issues these days, action to stop this suffering isn't coming from the federal government but from the states. Florida, Arizona, Oregon and Colorado have banned the use of gestation crates by pig producers, who confine pregnant sows to crates so small they can not move around normally. Arizona and Colorado also ban use of veal crates. These are tiny pens to which baby calves are tethered after they are taken from their mothers when only a few days old. Here they stay until they are slaughtered to be served up to Americans as high-priced veal.

Now, thanks to efforts of advocates for humane animal treatment, Californians will have the chance this November to vote on a measure that would require that farm animals be given sufficient room just to turn around and stretch their limbs!

No doubt the measure will be fought fiercely by agribusinesses who will raise alarms about the impact this would have on food prices and the poor. One pro-agribusiness group that masquerades as pro-consumer contends that such measures are designed to "cripple meat and dairy producers" and calls groups like the humane society radical. To the contrary, factory farming is a radical concept of the 20th century, designed to drive family farmers out of business and concentrate food profits in the hands of a small number of giant corporations. Concerns about humane raising of food animals has helped keep in business small, family farmers who actually care about their animals. Periodically I buy meat from one such farmer from upstate New York, who would otherwise be out of business, like so many other family farmers.

Furthermore, not many poor folks can afford veal these days, no matter how it's raised. More important, I think if most people actually saw or heard the distress of factory-farmed animals they would opt not to eat them--if they had a choice. And they do have a choice.

This, of course, is the crux of the problem: the disconnect between the food we eat and our awareness of the conditions under which it is raised or grown.

So what choices do we have? We can vote with our pocketbooks. Although I love veal, I think I've eaten it twice in the past 10 years. In states like my own, New York, which have not yet taken action against farm animal cruelty, we can find sources of humanely raised animals. Sure, there's a price to pay for an animal living a life without suffering. But the food budget can be kept under control by eating less meat, cutting out a meat meal or two every week and substituting grains, beans and vegetables.

Animals suffer when confined in factory buildings and handled like live but unfeeling objects on an assembly line. There's no more doubt about that than whether water boarding is, indeed, torture.

Help a Farmer, Help Yourself To Safe Veggies!

2008-07-10T07:48:00.000-07:00

Prompted, I guess, by the repeated fruit and vegetable scares, The NY Times finally got around today to reporting on Community Supported Agriculture, the awkward name for what is essentially a coop of consumers who band together in advance of the growing season to buy shares of a local farmer's produce. (Click here for more information and to locate one near you.)

I've belonged to one for at least 5 years now, and my reasons are both political and personal--and spiritual.

Political in that I don't want giant agribusinesses to ever gain control over all food production. They've got an iron grip around most of it, from controlling seed production to ownership of way too much land. Instead, I'm pleased to know that I'm helping keep in business Green Thumb farm, a family-owned enterprise on Long Island's gorgeous North Fork.

From a personal perspective, this means I don't have to worry about being poisoned by a vegetable. The folks at Green Thumb follow strict organic methods, and plant heirloom varieties of great-tasting fruits and vegetables. Agribusinesses grow varieties that lend themselves to mechanical picking and repeated handling. That's why, for example, you need a super-sharp knife to cut into a supermarket tomato grown for its tough skin, not taste.

Green Thumb picks my veggies the day before they deliver them to a local church, where we pick them up. As a result, even if I can't use them immediately, they stay fresh in my refrigerator for much longer than supermarket produce, which often travels thousands of miles before landing at the local market. Distribution of fruit and vegetables has become really insane, with tomatoes picked in Florida getting shipped to Mexico for sorting and boxing before being shipped back to the U.S.

Sometimes Green Thumb delivers veggies I've never seen before, like salsify, which looked to me like just a bunch of twigs. (Actually, it's a root that can be cooked and mashed.) Once I even had to go on line to try to identify some of the veggies I received. They had been labeled at the pick-up point, but they looked alike to me! But I appreciate having to stretch my culinary skills as I try to move away from meals centered around meat.

All this costs me about $20 a week for things like strawberries (in season only!) that are really sweet and free of pesticides; sugar snap peas; beets, various kinds of lettuce, arugula, etc.

The spiritual part has to do with being in rhythm with the earth and the seasons, knowing as the summer progresses that the lettuce has gone to seed, and won't be good again until the weather cools, but the tomatoes--ah, the tomatoes, will be wonderful--while in fall I'll see amazing varieties of cauliflower and other wonders. For me, this is all about the mystery of life and living on planet Earth.

What's In Those Bread Crumbs? Surprise: Corn Syrup

2008-07-08T06:51:00.000-07:00

I'm one of those people you see standing in the supermarket aisle reading ingredients lists. It's a habit born of my many years writing stories about dangerous food additives and sweeteners as well as concern about my own health and need to avoid too much sugar and salt.

But until recently I had never bothered to read the ingredients of packaged bread crumbs. Down the list--which is always arranged, by federal regulation, from most used ingredient to least--was high fructose corn syrup. Sweetener in my bread crumbs? Yes--and in the plain versions as well as the seasoned ones.

High fructose corn syrup is not a natural product. It's created in food labs, has supplanted cane sugar as the dominant sweetener in American food, and reportedly has adverse effects on the human body, while contributing to the epidemic of obesity. Now, I've not evaluated these reports, but I've long held a firm belief in the health benefits of natural foods on the grounds that our bodies have evolved to deal with them. Not so for high fructose corn syrup, which was invented in the early 70s. (Here's a link to one site that discusses its health effects.)

I found the presence of corn syrup in the bread crumbs surprising until my old friend, Arthur Schwartz, prolific cook book author and radio personality, reminded me that the crumbs are made from standard American bread, which itself is sweetened to cater to American palates. That includes "good" brands like Pepperidge Farm whole-grain breads.

But Arthur being Arthur, it got him to thinking about how that corn syrup affected recipes calling for bread crumbs. So when my husband and I visited him recently and sat down to an eggplant appetizer, he told me that he had breaded the thick-sliced eggplant with homemade crumbs made from unsweetened bread. This had made it possible to bake the eggplant long enough to be tender without over-browning the crumbs. Had there been sweetener in the crumbs, they would have caramelized quickly and been black by the time the eggplant was done.

It's a small matter compared to so many larger issues. But if you, like me, try to avoid sweeteners in food that shouldn't have any, and high fructose corn syrup in particular, you'll need to make your own crumbs from bread you're sure hasn't been sweetened or find a source of unsweetened crumbs. One choice is to get crumbs from a local bakery after asking whether they use sweetener in their bread.

Another is to make crumbs from crunchy-crusted long loaves of Italian or French bread that, if made according to traditional recipes, should be free of sweetener. But it's not always possible to be sure. The loaf of Italian bread in my kitchen right now came in a long paper bag that has no ingredients list. It should have one--again by federal regulation--but it doesn't.

This, unfortunately, is the result of lax enforcement of basic consumer protection laws. City and local consumer protection agencies used to enforce a host of laws intended to help food shoppers know what they are buying and to pick the most economical brands. It seems almost quaint now, as we mostly ignore the small, everyday ways we get cheated in the marketplace.

Coming back to the bread crumbs, they provide an example of how hard it is to avoid the ubiquitous presence of high fructose corn syrup in processed food. Our only defense is the ingredients list. So keep on reading!

Will Offshore Oil Be Exported?

2008-06-27T12:09:00.000-07:00

Here's a question for all those who favor drilling for new oil in Alaska and off the coasts of the U.S.: if we take the environmental risks, allow industrialization of our ocean coasts and pristine areas of Alaska, will we end up seeing that oil exported?

Here's why I ask: I've been researching the topic of gasoline and diesel prices, and I was surprised to find that U.S. oil companies are currently exporting both gasoline and diesel fuel out of the U.S. In the case of gasoline, 5,691,000 gallons were exported in March, 2008, the latest month for which statistics are available; for distillate fuels, which include diesel, 11,110,000 gallons in March.

Ron Planting, an economist at the American Petroleum Institute pooh-poohs the impact of these exports, noting that for gasoline they amount to only 2% of the U.S. market.

But gasoline use in the U.S. has been flat for the three years ending in 2007, and is declining this year. That trend should continue for the next 5 to 10 years, the time it would take for the new drilling to produce oil. Not only are Americans shunning gas guzzlers for more efficient vehicles, but biofuels are increasingly displacing petroleum. In fact, petroleum imports are already falling.

Planting says Americans shouldn't mind even if the newly drilled oil is exported because it will simply be adding to world supply and help keep the price of crude from going higher.

But I do mind. If the U.S. Congress is foolish enough to take the environmental risks of drilling offshore and in Alaska (remember the Exxon Valdez? The Supreme Court has just drastically lowered the punitive damage award against the company for the biggest spill in history--caused by human error.) they'd better include the requirement that the oil from those wells can not be exported. . Otherwise, the argument that the drilling would improve our energy security is entirely specious.

Furthermore, we need to reduce global consumption of oil and other fossil fuels if we are to arrest climate change. Keeping supplies tight will spur conservation and a shift to a new era of alternative fuels.

Which means that my grandchildren, should I be so lucky to have them some day, will be able to sail to the horizon without drilling platforms in their way.

Broadwater: Energy Security It Isn't

2008-06-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

When NY State Governor David Paterson announced the state's decision against Broadwater, I had the suspicion we were not done with this fight. Sure enough, thanks to the deep pockets of its owners, Shell Oil and TransCanada, Broadwater has filed an appeal to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. In addition to various other arguments, the company claims that building Broadwater would improve national security by diversifying and improving the reliability of our sources of energy here in the NY Metro area.

What's amazing about this argument is that it's such a fantasy. The LNG that would be brought to the Broadwater terminal would be coming across the oceans from some of our favorite Mid-East countries, including Qatar, Yemen, Iran and Algeria. If that scenario suggests an improvement in energy security, the folks at Broadwater should stop smoking whatever they're putting in their pipes.

Energy security will come to us when we have our own domestic supplies of renewable fuels. Period.

But thanks, Broadwater, for imposing a new expense on us taxpayers in New York. Now we'll have to pay all the legal fees in fighting off this appeal. Just what we need while the folks at Shell Oil are enjoying their profits from $4 a gallon gasoline and $5 a gallon diesel.

Organic Milk Offers Superior Nutrition, Natural conditions for Cows

2008-06-05T08:17:00.000-07:00

When you next see an ad for dairy products showing happy cows grazing peacefully in pastures, take a deep breath and realize that what you're seeing is mostly fantasy.

Sadly, most cows these days never get to set a foot on the grass, much less eat lovely clover or enjoy the shade of a tree. Mostly, they live in cow factories, which the industry calls "confined feeding operations." That means standing in a stall with just enough space to lie down, eating a diet designed to maximize their output of milk. It's a cruel fate for creatures that are rightly worshiped in India, because cows are able to transform plants that are indigestible to us into food we can eat. Indeed, human civilization could not exist without cows.

I've long suspected that cows who get to graze on pasture probably produced more nutritious milk, but now there's proof that this is true. As part of a cross-European study, researchers at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom have found that cows that graze on grass produce milk with healthier fatty acids and higher levels of fat soluble vitamins and antioxidents. Of course, they've also not been fed antibiotics or hormones that otherwise would get passed along to us.

How can you get your hands on milk from grazing cows? The surest way is to buy certified organic milk, if you can afford the premium price. According to Mark Kastel, codirector of The Cornucopia Institute, a farm and food policy research group, "the vast majority of brand name organic milk comes from cows that were given the opportunity to graze on fresh pasture whenver possible."

But "vast majority" doesn't mean all. Aurora Organic Dairy, which provides private-label organic milk for stores such as Wal-Mart and Target, has been found to be in violation of organic standards, including not putting them out to pasture sufficiently. Cornucopia also charges that Dean Foods' farms, which markets organic milk under the Horizon brand, also does not give its cows enough access to pasture.

The Cornucopia Institute has ranked producers of organic milk based on a 19-question survey it sent them. Its rating system is based on factors including whether the farm is run by a resident family and whether it gets all of its milk from its own herds or buys some of it on the open market, meaning the source of that milk could be a factory operation. Makers of cheese and other dairy products are included, so you will find, for example, that Ben & Jerry's ice cream gets a 3-cow rating (5 is the best).

Unfortunately, none of the grocery chains that sell private label organic milk thought fit to respond to the survey, so Cornucopia's researchers used enforcement records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and industry sources to get information.

If you find your local brand in this category of non-respondents, try telling your local store manager, filling in a comment form, or sending a letter to the corporate office. At stake here isn't just honesty: if factory farms are able to sell their product as organic, they will muscle out of business the families that really do care for and about their animals. For food security, we can't allow that to happen!

Gender Diffferences in Treatment of Heart Problems

2008-06-04T08:40:00.000-07:00

This is my first blog post in weeks due to emergency treatment for blockage of a coronary artery and then a hemorrhage that left me with untreated anemia for a week. After suffering with the symptoms that result from the loss of well over a quart of blood, I finally received a transfusion of two pints of blood. It's been a slow climb back, but I am now close to feeling my usual amount of energy.

The episode has once again turned my attention to gender differences in health care.

I first addressed this topic in my book, Women Pay More (New Press, 1995). At the time, women were still not being treated as early as men for symptoms of heart disease or coronary artery disease, although heart disease was, and still remains, the leading cause of death for women.

In my case, after a stress test showed the likelihood of a blockage in a coronary artery, a local cardiologist immediately told me I needed a cardiac catheterizataion, an amazing procedure in which instruments are inserted from a point in the groin through the femoral artery up to the heart. The doctors who do these procedures, interventional cardiologists, can then see an image of the coronary arteries, determine the extent of blockages, clear them and then insert one or more stents to hold them open. In my case, I needed one stent. I've since heard from one friend after another about people who have 3, 6, 9 stents holding open their arteries. Who knew?

All this went just fine until I began to hemorrhage internally, and suddenly realized there was a small crowd around my bed. Two doctors were pressing on my abdomen, working to stop the bleeding. My abdomen swelled up, my husband says, about an inch and a half. After some time, I can't say how long, they seemed to have stopped the bleeding.

The next morning, without further discussion of this bleeding episode, I was sent home. This was at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, New York, reputedly one of the very best hospitals for heart problems.

After a week of feeling absolutely horrible, I returned there to be subjected to a bunch of tests which finally ended with the conclusion that this bleeding had indeed made me anemic. The two pints of blood relieved my worst symptoms (shortness of breath, pounding heart, fever), and home again I went. I'm slowing getting back to my usual routine of swimming, long walks, golf, tennis, etc. A couch potato I'm not.

Now, here's the kicker: women are twice as likely as men to suffer complications after a cardiac catheterization, according to a comprehensive research study published in the Journal of Invasive Cardiology. Why? No one seems to know. A commentary on the article suggested that women may just react more strongly to the usual anti-coagulant drugs that are given before the catheterization. It is not clear that this is related to body size, hormonal differences, or other factors. Or if the vascular sealing device used by my surgeon and other surgeons--instead of manual pressure for a half hour, followed by putting weights on the site and forced immobility--fails more in women than men.

The surgeon who did my procedure probably does 50 of these per week, and the hospital itself has more than a half-dozen catheterization labs that are in constant use. So it seems reasonable to wonder if extra attention should be paid to complicatons in women. In my case, that surely did not happen.

Anyone with similar experiences?

1 in 3 American Women Castrated

2008-05-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

Castration is an ugly word, but it's the right word to use when talking about the 600,000 American women who have their uteruses removed every year! And of them, 438,000 simultaneously have their ovaries cut out also. One out of three American women over 60 lives on without her uterus or ovaries, and is never the same for their loss.

Never the same sexually: a woman who always had uterine contractions during orgasm can't have them ever again after a hysterectomy. Furthermore, even if her ovaries are not removed, sexual sensation is diminished because of the severing of nerves and lowered flow of blood to the vagina, labia and clitoris. If a woman consents to removal of her ovaries also, she is thrown into an immediate and crushing menopause.

As someone who underwent uterine removal in her 40s, I am speaking from personal experience, but to get a sense of how bad it is for women take a look at both the website of the HERS Foundation and its associated blog and comments. The foundation's mission is to stop this continuing assault on women by the medical profession. In their comments on the blog, young women, one only 16, others in their 30's and older describe not only devastated sex lives, but loss of energy, depression, memory loss, bone and joint pain.

Nora Coffey, president of the HERS Foundation, is campaigning for a law that would require that women receive complete information about hysterectomy before they consent. They aren't getting that now, with so-called patient education information limited primarily to talking about the uterus's function as a baby incubator. (You don't need it anymore, dear, do you? goes the spiel.) HERS has developed an 11-minute video that makes clear the uterus's other functions as a sexual organ and a muscle that supplies support to the bladder and bowel. The video should be required viewing before a woman gives her consent. In fact, there's a petition to sign to make that happen.

In no other country do so many women undergo hysterectomies, and the procedure is less necessary today than ever because there are now alternatives for treating bleeding from fibroids, for example, the single largest reason for hysterectomy. It's a scandal of which America's oby-gyns should be ashamed.