Elaine's Place

FDA Finds Manure Piles at Egg Farms

Elaine — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:07:03 +0000

If you haven’t visited your local Farmer’s Market already this season then the massive egg recall should be motivation enough to check it out. The latest report out today regarding condition at these farms.

U.S. health investigators on Monday detailed a slew of violations that included the presence of manure pits, rodents and dead flies at two Iowa farms implicated in the recent egg recall due to salmonella infection.

At Wright County Egg, infractions included manure piles seeping into hen houses.

"In some cases, the manure piles were four-to-eight feet high," Elder said.

Rodents and wildlife, including wild birds, also had easy access to poultry houses, and investigators observed "dead flies too numerous to count" and dead flies which were "crushed underfoot" when employees traversed the poultry houses, Elder said.

Dead maggots were even observed in the manure at one farm.

Also, "employees failed to change protective clothing when moving from one house to another," Elder said, and they weren’t sanitizing equipment.

Similar violations were logged at Hillandale, with rodents having convenient entryways into the poultry houses. Standing water was found near manure piles and "uncaged hens were tracking manure from the manure pit into the caged areas," Elder said.

Source:

Supporting Your Local Farmer’s Market

Elaine — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 01:57:39 +0000

You know what I love about summer? It’s the abundance of fresh produce locally grown by our farmers. Be it a grocery store, Farmer’s Market, or vegetable stand down the street there is healthy fresh food all summer. Even the major grocery stores have a section set aside for ‘locally grown.’

The benefits to your community and health are reason enough to shop and buy local. You have superior taste and freshness compared to a product that traveled 1500 miles to reach your table. Locally grown is sold within hours, still full of nutrients and there’s no comparison in taste. It hasn’t been altered by irradiation in order to prolong shelf life. You’re supporting your local economy by keeping funds within your community. Given a choice why would anyone not buy local? Why would anyone buy fake food over real food unless it’s not available to them? The definition of fake food…if it wasn’t around when your Great Grandmother was alive it’s fake food.

Today on my way home stopped at Sofia’s Produce to pick up corn on the cob for dinner tonight. The corn had been picked less than an hour before. Of course I ended up buying more than corn, mouth watering tomatoes, peppers, blueberries, well you get the idea.

Snapped a few pictures with my iPhone, big thanks to Jodi and her collage maker program for combining my pictures into one.

Recommended viewing: Food Inc., nominated for an Academy Award in documentaries.

Be kind to your body – feed it real food. Move more, eat less, read labels.

Obesity Contributes to Cesarean Section

Elaine — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 13:28:55 +0000

The larger a pregnant woman is when she checks in on delivery day, the greater her risk of having a cesarean section, suggests a large new study.

Nearly one of every three births in the U.S. is now delivered by cesarean, a surgery that has been linked to complications for both mom and baby such as infection, bleeding and hysterectomy. This rate is about 50 percent higher than it was in the mid-1990s, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For every unit increase in BMI, as measured on arrival for delivery, a woman’s risk of cesarean delivery rose by 4 percent.

Continue reading:

Fructose Fuels Pancreatic Cancer

Elaine — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 12:42:39 +0000

Pancreatic cancers use the sugar fructose, very common in the Western diet, to activate a key cellular pathway that drives cell division, helping the cancer to grow more quickly, a study by researchers at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has found.

Although it’s widely known that cancers use glucose, a simple sugar, to fuel their growth, this is the first time a link has been shown between fructose and cancer proliferation, said Dr. Anthony Heaney, an associate professor of medicine and neurosurgery, a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher and senior author of the study.

"The bottom line is the modern diet contains a lot of refined sugar including fructose and it’s a hidden danger implicated in a lot of modern diseases, such as obesity, diabetes and fatty liver," said Heaney, who also serves as director of the Pituitary Tumor and Neuroendocrine Program at UCLA. "In this study, we show that cancers can use fructose just as readily as glucose to fuel their growth."

The study appeared in the Aug. 1 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Cancer Research.

Sources of fructose in the Western diet include cane sugar (sucrose) and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a corn-based sweetener that has been on the market since about 1970. HFCS accounts for more than 40 percent of the caloric sweeteners added to foods and beverages, and it is the sole sweetener used in American soft drinks.

Keep Reading

University of California – Los Angeles (2010, August 2). Pancreatic cancers use fructose, common in the Western diet, to fuel their growth. ScienceDaily. Retrieved August 5, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2010/08/100803092150.htm

Fat or Obese?

Elaine — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:31:33 +0000

What do you think about this? England’s public health minister is telling physicians and other health professionals to tell people they are fat rather than obese. Some believe the term obese is just another medical term and makes the condition a third party issue. Where using the term fat is brutally honest and encourages personal responsibility. I don’t know how this will go over in the UK but here in the states I would think many patients would be offended, then again has the medical community been tip toeing around the issue afraid to be brutally honest?

FYI: The term obesity comes from the Latin word obesus, which roughly translated means intensive eating.

Source

Oil Spill In Michigan

Elaine — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:35:45 +0000

Southern Michigan residents are learning that devastating oil spills aren’t limited to the Gulf Coast.

Crews were working Wednesday to contain and clean up an estimated 3,319,708 litres of oil that coated birds and fish as it poured into a creek and flowed into the Kalamazoo River, one of the state’s major waterways.

Continue reading:

Photos by Jonathon Gruenke – Associated Press

Ten States With Slowest Internet Speed

Elaine — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:25:39 +0000

Do you live in one of the bottom ten states? Each quarter, Akamai publishes a quarterly “State of the Internet” report. This report includes data gathered across Akamai’s global server network about attack traffic, average & maximum connection speeds, Internet penetration and broadband adoption, and mobile usage, as well as trends seen in this data over time. Listed below the bottom ten states with the slowest internet connections in the U.S.

10. Ohio

9. Texas

8. Iowa

7. Illinois

6. Missouri

5. Washington

4. Georgia

3. District of Columbia

2. New Jersey

1. Alaska

Source:

Some Staggering Statistics

Elaine — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 13:10:44 +0000

•    83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
•    61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
•    66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
•    36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.
•    A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
•    24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
•    Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
•    Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
•    For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
•    In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
•    As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
•    The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
•    Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
•    In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
•    The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
•    In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
•    More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
•    For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
•    This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
•    Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years.
•    Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
•    The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.

Source: Yahoo Finance

Caribbean Hit Hard by Dengue Fever

Elaine — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 12:54:41 +0000

Dozens of deaths have been reported as mosquito-borne dengue fever reaches epidemic levels in the Caribbean.

Warm weather and an unusually early rainy season that led to an explosion in mosquito populations are being blamed for the situation, which is straining the capacity of hospitals in some countries, the Associated Press reported.

There have been 27 deaths reported in the Dominican Republic and at least five have died and another 6,300 cases have been reported in Puerto Rico, which faces what may be its worst dengue outbreak in more than a decade, according to officials.

“We are having a really large epidemic,” Kay Tomashek, epidemiology section chief of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s dengue branch in Puerto Rico, told the AP

Canada To Coordinate HIV Research

Elaine — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:25:41 +0000

The Canadian government announced the launch of a new initiative on Tuesday intended to spearhead the fight against AIDS and make Canada a leader in the development of a safe, effective, affordable and globally accessible HIV vaccine.

Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq announced that the Research and Development Alliance – a plan to harness the expertise of researchers, private industry, social scientists and international organizations – will become the revamped design of the Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative.

The initiative is a $139-million joint venture between Canada and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.