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Surgery: Speed healing with nature's help

noreply@blogger.com (HODAD26) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:57:00 +0000

Big disclaimer: In this article, my intention is to help you weather surgery as successfully as my patients who have had to or chosen to undergo surgery have come out doing well. My patients on the following protocol have healed remarkably fast and well. However, the Food and Drug Administration, acting as a trade association and totalitarian strong arm of the drug industry, doesn't particularly like any freedom of speech that is used to impart information about the helpfulness of natural products. And they don't like very specific recommendations. So for their sake, I am forced to say that you do not have to follow any of these recommendations, that you should take all specific products and recommended doses with a grain of salt - not that it would improve the taste - and that even though I am a licensed physician, I am not supposed to diagnose and treat by way of the internet. With the last part I am in through agreement. There is of course no substitute for going to consult in person with your local naturopathic physician. The largest directory of naturopathic doctors in the United States is this one: www.naturopathic.org.

Although none of us go into it with enthusiasm, sometimes surgery is just unavoidable. Regardless of what part of the body will be operated on, you can approach your upcoming surgery with some natural strategies for preparing yourself both before surgery, as well as a stronger, faster recuperation afterward. This is particularly important for older people because of more delicate health and slow, difficult recuperation. But young people also can really go down hard from a surgery, and bounce back quickly with some of the strategies below, or take your chances with an otherwise laborious and slow recovery.

First, you will want to head into surgery with the strongest immune system possible. This is because microbes will have access to otherwise normally deep, protected tissues. And this is despite the absolute best and state-of-the-art sterilization procedures and techniques in contemporary surgical practice. Even with the best and best-intentioned precautions, there is some risk of infection resulting from any surgical access to deep and vulnerable areas of the body.

So before surgery you should build up your immune system with:

Vitamin C: Try to get not just Vitamin C tablets, but the packets of fizzing Vitamin C mixed in water such as Electrolyte Stamina or Emergen-C. Drink these right away after mixing with water so they don't oxidize before they benefit you. A packet should be taken three times a day. If these are not available look for a mineral-protected Vitamin C or an Ester-C or C or something with bioflavonoids, which will offer some protection against oxidation of the Vitamin C. The equivalent of 3000 mg a day is a good dose to aim for with adults, okay for kids too, and best in divided doses, because Vitamin C is water-soluble and doesn't hang around too long in the body at this dosing level.
Vitamin A: This is trickier to obtain in sufficient quantity to be helpful, but is massively helpful when you can get it. The problem is that vitamin A can be toxic to a fetus. This is why young ladies on the Retin-A prescription for acne are also given an Rx simultaneously for oral contraceptives, whether they are sexually active or not. Aside from all moral and political implications, vitamin A should definitely not be taken in large doses without this awareness of its abortive potential and the necessary dose precautions. For this reason, you are not going to find huge doses of Vitamin A in a health food store. A pregnant woman should not take more than 30,000 units a day for more than three days, and some rare pregnancies can tolerate even less. You have to consult your personal physician on this. But anyone else, any non-pregnant person can easily take 100,000 units per day for several days and get a significant boost to immune function. Beyond that dose for that time, anyone is subject to possible liver toxicity from build-up of this fat-soluble vitamin. It should be noted that there are individuals who have taken 1,000,000 (one million) units of Vitamin A for several years without any problem. Just make sure that you are also getting a variety of nutrients along with Vitamin A. Also, please be aware that beta-carotene is not the equivalent of Vitamin A. Actually, mixed carotenoids, (alpha, beta, gamma) are better for converting to Vitamin A. A physician can provide you with higher doses of Vitamin A than in a health food store. To find a naturopathic physician in your area please visit www.naturopathic.org.
Sleep: Sleep is an often forgotten component of good immune health. Try to allow enough time for sleep or at least equivalent time of bed rest during the several days prior to surgery.

Eliminating stress is crucial to good immune function. You may have noticed how often you or others have come down with a cold after a particularly stressful period. It is important to be able to separate external stressors (anything or any person driving you crazy) from your internal response to stress. The first we only have a certain amount of control over, and the second can be affected quite strongly. Two excellent books for this are: Deepak Chopra, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, an old but good book, as well as one of his newer books, Power, Grace and Freedom. Both of these are great guides for releasing the stress that you feel. Another fascinating and more scientifically oriented approach to the same subject is Robert Sapolsky's excellent book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. Sapolosky explains how and why we feel stressed, then shows the physical effects of that stress on the body.

After surgery you have a massive wound that you need to repair. Surgeons are often great, even heroic and life-saving at what they do. But after they sew you up they usually offer nothing to help you heal.

Here is what you need to help rebuild the cut edges of your internal and external wounds:

Arnica or Arnica Montana: This is a homeopathic remedy available at almost any health food store. Take 4 pillules under the tongue as soon as you are able to after surgery, then about three more times over the next 36 hours (more often if desired or in pain during the first two days). Arnica, like any homeopathic remedy, does not act directly on your body's needs so much as it alerts the hypothalamus in your brain that there is a problem, in this case a big wound and that healing has to begin right now. Homeopathy works completely differently than any conventional system of medicine. For an explanation of how it works, please see my discussion of it at http://www.naturopathyworks.com/pages/homeopathy.php.
Glutamine powder: This is sold in all health food stores and there are many different brands. Any one will do, but ignore the instructions on the jar. You will need to take 1 rounded tablespoon in water, 2-3 times per day for two weeks. Don't worry about the taste. It's bland, but somewhat chalky in texture. Then, if you're feeling 70-80% better in a couple weeks, reduce the dose to half that for another month. This will rebuild and re-knit your tissues faster than anything. This dosing is a general recommendation for the average person having most any kind of surgery. See your naturopathic physician for more specific dosing in your case. Please don't confuse glutamine with gluten, monosodium glutamate or glucose. It is none of those things. Glutamine is one of the most common amino acids in proteins, meaning that you already consume it everyday in healthy foods. But you have a huge repair job to do now, and you would have to eat mountains of food to get enough glutamine. So it will help you a lot more and be more efficient to get the Glutamine (also called L-glutamine) powder at the health food store. Don't get the capsules; you would have to swallow dozens.
"Muscle Milk": A product by the Cytosport Company that provides a way to rebuild torn muscles. Muscle fiber is almost always damaged by the surgeon's scalpel, cut across or even with its grain, and needing repair, even more than an athlete's muscles need repair. Although Muscle Milk is marketed to athletes, you need it more as you have more repair to accomplish. Muscle milk works by putting elements in the bloodstream that are similar to human mother's milk and muscle breakdown products, which nourish and keep muscle from further breaking down. The body likes "homeostasis," which means constant levels of its biochemicals, so this products works quite well in that regard. This is not a paid endorsement by the way. I don't do that, for the simple reason that most of the nutraceutical (nutritional supplement) companies have a lot of okay products and then a smaller number of really outstanding helpful products, so I want to be free to recommend the ones that seem to work best regardless of which company they are from, rather than recommend the whole product line of the companies who want me to sign some kind of exclusivity contract.
N Acetyl Cysteine: This is an amino acid, meaning it is a building block of a protein, and you have consumed it before, mostly in chicken. You will see it in any health food store as NAC or N-Acetyl Cysteine, and in 500 or 600 mg tablets or capsules. You should take two to four of those a day, with more dosing guidelines from your doctor of course, for about a week after surgery. Its role is to thin bile, which makes it easier for bile to do its job of rinsing your liver of stored toxins. This will help get the anesthesia and other pharmaceuticals out of your body. NAC is a wonderful detox for any of us living in a polluted environment, which is just about everybody. No need to stop after one week.
Bromelain: Last but not least, you don't want to over-react to the surgery with a build-up of scar tissue. Some of us are keloid formers and scar tissue formers, more so than others. Bromelain is a common enzyme that you have eaten in pineapple, and is in supplement form in the health food store. Another helpful item in this regard is the herb Gotu kola, especially if you have a known tendency to form keloids.

Best wishes for an easy surgery and a comfortable recovery!

Earthship Enterprise: The Ultimate Eco-House

noreply@blogger.com (HODAD26) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:23:00 +0000

by Rob Sharp

They are eco-friendly, bizarre-looking bolt holes, and have earned the name “earth ships” for the simple reason that they appear to have landed from the future. But these homes are more than just wacky props. They are a blueprint for our future living habits.

The ziggurats - constructed from refuse such as beer cans - are the brainchild of Michael Reynolds, an eco-architect who has spent most of his professional life perfecting the concept, which derives its name from the earth-filled tyres that make up the walls. He built the first example in Taos, New Mexico, in 1988 and, 20 years later, still lives there.

Due to his hard work, there are more than 1,000 “earth ships” across New Mexico, and the word has spread; hundreds more are springing up in the US, in Scotland, Normandy, Spain and even Siberia, and in April 2007, permission was granted to build 16 in Brighton. Now, Reynolds’ life and work are celebrated in Garbage Warrior, a documentary screening in cinemas around the UK.

“Imagine a home that heats itself, that provides its own water, and grows its own food,” says Reynolds. “Imagine that it needs no expensive technology, it recycles its own waste, and it has its own power source. And now imagine that it can be built anywhere, by anyone, out of the things that society throws away.”

The documentary was the idea of Oliver Hodge, a Brighton-based director who met Reynolds in May 2003. The architect and his “crew” had come on a two-week visit to build a prototype earth ship in Brighton. “When I met Mike I was so inspired and I could see that he would be able to create a strong story. I realised that he had won and lost all these battles: that he is a frontline activist for social change.”

In November that year, the filmmaker took a team to Reynolds’ US base. Soon, he realised he had arrived “in the middle of something massive”, so spent the next three years jetting between the UK and New Mexico, following his man around. Reynolds was a perfect subject, says Hodge: “He would do anything for me. Sometimes I even got him up at five o’clock in the morning.”

The film is the latest chapter in Reynolds’ colourful life. He graduated from architecture school in 1968, and soon produced a house made from beer containers, which upset the national bricklayers’ union so much, he had to can it.

Inspired by the nascent green movement, Reynolds came up with a building that promoted several tenets: it should be “off-the-electricity-grid” (which could be achieved by solar power); it should be made from used car-tyres (common landfill material) and incorporate rainwater-recycling facilities, too.

To achieve this vision, he moved in the early Seventies to the desert near Taos, where tolerant planning laws and sympathetic local government enabled him to experiment: some houses looked like castles, others like pyramids. Over the next 25 years, he created an energy-independent community, but his flouting of regulations landed him in hot water: and, in 1997, his communities were shut down.

The documentary joins the architect soon after, and charts his long battle with planners. “In my opinion, the planet situation is so critical we need to be doing anything we can,” he explains. “My rationale is that any little roof leak or system glitch in one of my single family homes, compared to the alternatives, is nothing. To me it’s important to go for it and make a few mistakes.”

Frustrated by his lack of progress, in early 2005 Reynolds heads to the Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean, which had been devastated by the Asian tsunami. His hope? That the lack of infrastructure would render the “bureaucratic niceties” irrelevant. “We shoot from the hip,” Reynolds says of the excursion. “We are always out of our depth whenever we go abroad, which happens three or four times a year. It may not be to local codes or ready to sell to a millionaire, but it will be shelter which will keep people comfortable. We have a method.”

Now, back in Taos, the architect is focusing on his latest project, “the Phoenix”. He says it will house a family of four, will keep them alive in “every way”, with its sewage treatment facilities as well as sustainable water, electricity, and food supplies. “There’s no question that after you’ve gone down a trail you might find a better way of going down it,” he concludes. “I would make alterations in my path, but it wouldn’t be that much different. I don’t think it’s possible to do anything without getting into a little trouble.”

‘Garbage Warrior’ is showing now at selected cinemas; www.garbagewarrior.com

How to Make Croissants

noreply@blogger.com (HODAD26) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:44:00 +0000

This is a Must for here in Latinolandia

Encyclopedia Smithsonian

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Free PDF eBooks Archive

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The 20 Healthiest Foods for Under $1

noreply@blogger.com (HODAD26) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 03:03:00 +0000

The 20 Healthiest Foods for Under $1

By: Brie Cadman (View Profile)

Food prices are climbing, and some might be looking to fast foods and packaged foods for their cheap bites. But low cost doesn’t have to mean low quality. In fact, some of the most inexpensive things you can buy are the best things for you. At the grocery store, getting the most nutrition for the least amount of money means hanging out on the peripheries—near the fruits and veggies, the meat and dairy, and the bulk grains—while avoiding the expensive packaged interior. By doing so, not only will your kitchen be stocked with excellent foods, your wallet won’t be empty.

1. Oats
High in fiber and complex carbohydrates, oats have also been shown to lower cholesterol. And they sure are cheap—a dollar will buy you more than a week’s worth of hearty breakfasts.

Serving suggestions: Sprinkle with nuts and fruit in the morning, make oatmeal cookies for dessert.

2. Eggs
You can get about a half dozen of eggs for a dollar, making them one of the cheapest and most versatile sources of protein. They are also a good source of the antioxidants lutein and zeaxanthin, which may ward off age-related eye problems.

Serving suggestions: Huevos rancheros for breakfast, egg salad sandwiches for lunch, and frittatas for dinner.

3. Kale
This dark, leafy green is loaded with vitamin C, carotenoids, and calcium. Like most greens, it is usually a dollar a bunch.

Serving suggestions: Chop up some kale and add to your favorite stir-fry; try German-Style Kale or traditional Irish Colcannon.

4. Potatoes
Because we often see potatoes at their unhealthiest—as fries or chips—we don’t think of them as nutritious, but they definitely are. Eaten with the skin on, potatoes contain almost half a day’s worth of Vitamin C, and are a good source of potassium. If you opt for sweet potatoes or yams, you’ll also get a good wallop of beta carotene. Plus, they’re dirt cheap and have almost endless culinary possibilities.

Serving suggestions: In the a.m., try Easy Breakfast Potatoes; for lunch, make potato salad; for dinner, have them with sour cream and chives.

5. Apples
I’m fond of apples because they’re inexpensive, easy to find, come in portion-controlled packaging, and taste good. They are a good source of pectin—a fiber that may help reduce cholesterol—and they have the antioxidant Vitamin C, which keeps your blood vessels healthy.

Serving suggestions: Plain; as applesauce; or in baked goods like Pumpkin-Apple Breakfast Bread.

6. Nuts
Though nuts have a high fat content, they’re packed with the good-for-you fats—unsaturated and monounsaturated. They’re also good sources of essential fatty acids, Vitamin E, and protein. And because they’re so nutrient-dense, you only need to eat a little to get the nutritional benefits. Although some nuts, like pecans and macadamias, can be costly, peanuts, walnuts, and almonds, especially when bought in the shell, are low in cost.

Serving suggestions: Raw; roasted and salted; sprinkled in salads.

7. Bananas
At a local Trader Joe’s, I found bananas for about 19¢ apiece; a dollar gets you a banana a day for the workweek. High in potassium and fiber (9 grams for one), bananas are a no-brainer when it comes to eating your five a day quotient of fruits and veggies.

Serving suggestions: In smoothies, by themselves, in cereal and yogurt.

8. Garbanzo Beans
With beans, you’re getting your money’s worth and then some. Not only are they a great source of protein and fiber, but ’bonzos are also high in fiber, iron, folate, and manganese, and may help reduce cholesterol levels. And if you don’t like one type, try another—black, lima, lentils … the varieties are endless. Though they require soaking and cooking, the most inexpensive way to purchase these beans is in dried form; a precooked can will still only run you around a buck.

Serving suggestions: In salads, curries, and Orange Hummus.

9. Broccoli
Broccoli contains tons of nice nutrients—calcium, vitamins A and C, potassium, folate, and fiber. As if that isn’t enough, broccoli is also packed with phytonutrients, compounds that may help prevent heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers. Plus, it’s low in calories and cost.

Serving suggestions: Throw it in salads, stir fries, or served as an accompaniment to meat in this Steamed Ginger Chicken with Asian Greens recipe.

10. Watermelon
Though you may not be able to buy an entire watermelon for a dollar, your per serving cost isn’t more than a few dimes. This summertime fruit is over 90 percent water, making it an easy way to hydrate, and gives a healthy does of Vitamin C, potassium, and lycopene, an antioxidant that may ward off cancer.

Serving suggestions: Freeze chunks for popsicles; eat straight from the rind; squeeze to make watermelon margaritas (may negate the hydrating effect!).

11. Wild Rice
It won’t cost you much more than white rice, but wild rice is much better for you. Low in fat and high in protein and fiber, this gluten-free rice is a great source of complex carbohydrates. It packs a powerful potassium punch and is loaded with B vitamins. Plus, it has a nutty, robust flavor.

Serving suggestions: Mix with nuts and veggies for a cold rice salad; blend with brown rice for a side dish.

12. Beets
Beets are my kind of vegetable—their natural sugars make them sweet to the palate while their rich flavor and color make them nutritious for the body. They’re powerhouses of folate, iron, and antioxidants.

Serving suggestions: Shred into salads, slice with goat cheese. If you buy your beets with the greens on, you can braise them in olive oil like you would other greens.

13. Butternut Squash
This beautiful gourd swings both ways: sometimes savory, sometimes sweet. However you prepare the butternut, it will not only add color and texture, but also five grams of fiber per half cup and chunks and chunks of Vitamin A and C. When in season, butternut squash and related gourds are usually less than a dollar a pound.

Serving suggestions: Try Pear and Squash Bruschetta; cook and dot with butter and salt.

14. Whole Grain Pasta
In the days of Atkins, pasta was wrongly convicted, for there is nothing harmful about a complex carbohydrate source that is high in protein and B vitamins. Plus, it’s one of the cheapest staples you can buy.

Serving suggestions: Mix clams and white wine with linguine; top orzo with tomatoes and garlic; eat cold Farfalle Salad on a picnic.

15. Sardines
As a kid, I used to hate it when my dad would order sardines on our communal pizzas, but since then I’ve acquired a taste for them. Because not everyone has, you can still get a can of sardines for relatively cheap. And the little fish come with big benefits: calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc, and B vitamins. And, because they’re low on the food chain, they don’t accumulate mercury.

Serving suggestions: Mash them with parsley, lemon juice, and olive oil for a spread; eat them plain on crackers; enjoy as a pizza topping (adults only).

16. Spinach
Spinach is perhaps one of the best green leafies out there—it has lots of Vitamin C, iron, and trace minerals. Plus, you can usually find it year round for less than a dollar.

Serving suggestions: Sautéed with eggs, as a salad, or a Spinach Frittata.

17. Tofu
Not just for vegetarians anymore, tofu is an inexpensive protein source that can be used in both savory and sweet recipes. It’s high in B vitamins and iron, but low in fat and sodium, making it a healthful addition to many dishes.

Serving suggestions: Use silken varieties in Tofu Cheesecake; add to smoothies for a protein boost; cube and marinate for barbecue kebobs.

18. Lowfat Milk
Yes, the price of a gallon of milk is rising, but per serving, it’s still under a dollar; single serving milk products, like yogurt, are usually less than a dollar, too. Plus, you’ll get a lot of benefit for a small investment. Milk is rich in protein, vitamins A and D, potassium, and niacin, and is one of the easiest ways to get bone-strengthening calcium.

Serving suggestions: In smoothies, hot chocolate, or coffee; milk products like low fat cottage cheese and yogurt.

19. Pumpkin Seeds
When it’s time to carve your pumpkin this October, don’t shovel those seeds into the trash—they’re a goldmine of magnesium, protein, and trace minerals. Plus, they come free with the purchase of a pumpkin.

Serving suggestions: Salt, roast, and eat plain; toss in salads.

20. Coffee
The old cup-o-joe has been thrown on the stands for many a corporeal crime—heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis—but exonerated on all counts. In fact, coffee, which is derived from a bean, contains beneficial antioxidants that protect against free radicals and may actually help thwart heart disease and cancer. While it’s not going to fill you up like the other items on this list, it might make you a lot perkier. When made at home, coffee runs less than 50¢ cents a cup.

Serving suggestions: Just drink it.

Although that bag of 99¢ Cheetos may look like a bargain, knowing that you’re not getting much in the way of nutrition or sustenance makes it seem less like a deal and more like a dupe. Choosing one of these twenty items, or the countless number of similarly nutritious ones, might just stretch that dollar from a snack into a meal.

Back hurt? Walk, says surgeon and Sr Pescado...

noreply@blogger.com (HODAD26) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 03:34:00 +0000

Back pain? Most people reach for an aspirin or an Aleve, get a cortisone shot or a massage, take to bed or take a day off. Many turn to narcotic prescriptions.

But orthopedic surgeon and back expert Mark Brown says not to do any of the above. Instead: Get a sound diagnosis and then take a walk.

"Back pain is the most common reason for doctor visits today, and it is the most expensive disorder," he says. "Even though the cost of treating back pain has increased 65 percent, the results have decreased."

Dr. Brown is professor and chairman emeritus of the Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine. After 35 years of practice, he has written Conquer Back and Neck Pain: Walk It Off (Sunrise River, $11.95), advice he takes himself. He walks four miles several mornings a week.

Dr. Brown clearly explains the structure of the spine, with its 33 vertebrae and cushioning discs. The center of the disc soaks up water like a sponge. As it ages, or because it is genetically programmed to do so, the center deteriorates, deflates and loses its ability to cushion. It can do several things then, but most cause pain, often extending into arms and legs. Sometimes, the flattened disc squashes into the outer rim, narrowing the spinal channel and nerves. This is called spinal stenosis, a common cause of neck and back pain, as well as leg and arm pain.

When things get really bad, the vertebra will form bone spurs in an attempt to defend itself against sprains and more damage, and eventually cause even greater pain.

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Dr. Brown's solution is to have patients figure out what kind of back pain they have (there are seven types, he says) to determine treatment and prevention. He includes a questionnaire that will help readers determine the type and a short guide to determine when to walk it off and when to call for help.

Basically, most back pain will go away, he believes. Pills, surgery, manipulation and other remedies can make the pain worse.

"The theme is to get a diagnosis by a qualified doctor ... then go to a specialist. If they prescribe something, make sure you know the up and downsides and the alternatives," he says.

From Dr. Brown's perspective, the best things you can do when you know what is causing back pain are to give up smoking, lose weight and walk, or participate in some kind of aerobic exercise, such as walking on a treadmill or swimming.

"Narcotics are horrible for people with back, bone and joint pain," he says. "They don't relieve the pain, and they actually worsen the quality of life and make them more sensitive to pain."

Converting lawns to organic gardens—one garden at a time

noreply@blogger.com (HODAD26) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:21:00 +0000

Imagine community supported agriculture in the community. Based in Boulder, Colorado, Community Roots challenges the assumption that commercial-scale vegetable production requires the mass of land only available in rural settings, as it has successfully transformed a number of neighborhood yards into bountiful organic gardens.

Kipp Nash founded Community Roots as a way to foster connection within communities by weaving together traditional ways of rural life into an urban setting and utilizing valuable resources to produce local, sustainable models of food production.

Since its inception in 2005, Community Roots has grown to include eight production gardens, totaling just under a half acre, with more in the works. In exchange for use of the land, Community Roots, transforms the space into a highly productive mini-farm, plants and tends a variety of vegetables, and harvests the produce, which is enough to feed 25 families. The bounty is shared between the landowner and Community Roots who then markets their share a number of ways, including at the Boulder County Farmers Market and through community supported agriculture shares.

The donor of the first plot was one of Kipp’s neighbors, followed by another, and then another, with each successive donor inspired to participate by the transformation seen in the previous. Following on its success in establishing an urban multi-plot farm and neighborhood-based CSA in the Martin Acres neighborhood of Boulder, Community Roots is also extending its projects to include CSA Outreach, which will involve low-income, food insecure families in the CSA program; Community Fruits, which will work with homeowners to harvest and distribute under-utilized fruit from residential trees; and another Community Roots Food Project in the Newlands neighborhood of Boulder.

For more information, visit the Community Roots website: http://www.communityrootsboulder.com/.

CCFC Responds to FCC Procedure on Product Integration; Calls for Greater Protections for Children

noreply@blogger.com (HODAD26) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:19:00 +0000

In response to yesterday’s decision by the Federal Communications Commission to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on product integration in television programming, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has issued the following statement: “We are pleased that the FCC has begun to respond to the concerns of parents and advocates about the erosion of clear boundaries between programming and advertising. The rise of product placement and product integration is turning television shows – including those watched by millions of children – into program-length infomercials. As part of this new rulemaking process, it is essential that the FCC extend existing prohibitions on product placement in children’s programming to include programs watched by large numbers of children. We also support new rules that would require real time disclosure of embedded advertising in programs for adults so viewers can better understand when they are being targeted by marketers. We look forward to working with FCC on this important process.” The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is a national coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups and concerned parents who counter the harmful effects of marketing to children through action, advocacy, education, research, and collaboration among organizations and individuals who care about children. CCFC supports the rights of children to grow up – and the rights of parents to raise them – without being undermined by rampant commercialism. For more information, please visit: http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org.

ON-LINE Conversion Tool, Excelent Site

noreply@blogger.com (HODAD26) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:25:00 +0000

International Surfing Day

noreply@blogger.com (HODAD26) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:46:00 +0000

Mother Earth’s Triple Whammy

noreply@blogger.com (HODAD26) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:44:00 +0000

Published on Wednesday, June 18, 2008 by TomDispatch.com

Mother Earth’s Triple Whammy
Why North Korea Was a Global Crisis Canary

by John Feffer

Gas prices are above $4 a gallon; global food prices surged 39% last year; and an environmental disaster looms as carbon emissions continue to spiral upward. The global economy appears on the verge of a TKO, a triple whammy from energy, agriculture, and climate-change trends. Right now you may be grumbling about the extra bucks you’re shelling out at the pump and the grocery store; but, unless policymakers begin to address all three of these trends as one major crisis, it could get a whole lot worse.

Just ask the North Koreans.

In the 1990s, North Korea was the world’s canary. The famine that killed as much as 10% of the North Korean population in those years was, it turns out, a harbinger of the crisis that now grips the globe — though few saw it that way at the time.

That small Northeast Asian land, one of the last putatively communist countries on the planet, faced the same three converging factors as we do now — escalating energy prices, a reduction in food supplies, and impending environmental catastrophe. At the time, of course, all the knowing analysts and pundits dismissed what was happening in that country as the inevitable breakdown of an archaic economic system presided over by a crackpot dictator.

They were wrong. The collapse of North Korean agriculture in the 1990s was not the result of backwardness. In fact, North Korea boasted one of the most mechanized agricultures in Asia. Despite claims of self-sufficiency, the North Koreans were actually heavily dependent on cheap fuel imports. (Does that already ring a bell?) In their case, the heavily subsidized energy came from Russia and China, and it helped keep North Korea’s battalion of tractors operating. It also meant that North Korea was able to go through fertilizer, a petroleum product, at one of the world’s highest rates. When the Soviets and Chinese stopped subsidizing those energy imports in the late 1980s and international energy rates became the norm for them, too, the North Koreans had a rude awakening.

Like the globe as a whole, North Korea does not have a great deal of arable land — it can grow food on only about 14% of its territory. (The comparable global figure for arable land is about 13%.) With heavy applications of fertilizer and pesticides, North Koreans coaxed a lot of food out of a little land. By the 1980s, however, the soil was exhausted, and agricultural production was declining. So spiking energy prices hit an economy already in crisis. Desperate to grow more food, the North Korean government instructed farmers to cut down trees, stripping hillsides to bring more land into cultivation.

Big mistake. When heavy rains hit in 1995, this dragooning of marginal lands into agricultural production only amplified the national disaster. The resulting flooding damaged more than 40% of the country’s rice paddy fields. Torrential rains washed away topsoil, while rocks and sand, dislodged from hillsides, ruined low-lying fields. The rigid economic structures in North Korea were unable to cope with the triple assault of bad weather, soaring energy, and declining food production. Nor did dictator Kim Jong Il’s political decisions make things any better.

But the peculiarities of North Korea’s political economy did not cause the devastating famine that followed. Highly centralized planning and pretensions to self-reliance only made the country prematurely vulnerable to trends now affecting the rest of the planet.

As with the North Koreans, our dependency on relatively cheap energy to run our industrialized agriculture and our smokestack industries is now mixing lethally with food shortages and the beginnings of climate overload, pushing us all toward the precipice. In the short term, we face a food crisis and an energy crisis. Over the longer term, this is certain to expand into a much larger climate crisis. No magic wand, whether biofuels, genetically modified organisms (GMO), or geoengineering, can make the ogres disappear.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, “We are all Americans” briefly became a popular expression of solidarity around the world. If we don’t devise policy choices that address energy, agriculture, and climate, while replacing the idolatry of unrestrained growth at the heart of both capitalist and communist economies, the tagline for the 21st century may be: “We are all North Koreans.”

Through a Glass Darkly

For years, development experts have bemoaned the declining terms of trade that have kept some developing countries, and most poor farmers, mired in poverty. With the exception of the first energy crisis era in the 1970s, between the end of World War II and 2006, food prices never stopped sinking in relation to manufactured goods. Lower food prices are generally a boon for consumers. But they are devastating for the subsistence farmers who make up the vast majority of the world’s poor.

However, over the past three years, according to the World Bank, food prices have increased 83%. That may be only an annoyance for wealthy shoppers, but for the poor, who often devote more than 50% of their incomes to feeding their families, such staggering rises can be the difference between life and death.

There are a number of reasons for this recent spike. The price of oil, now near $140 a barrel, has certainly played a crucial role in this, both by driving inflation generally and because of its importance to modern, large-scale agriculture. So has the recent allocation of ever more agricultural land to biofuel production. U.S. farmers, responsible for 70% of all world corn exports, now dispatch one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, which has had the effect of nearly doubling the price of corn.

Global warming, too, has had an impact. Drought in Australia and the eastern United States, severe flooding in China and Bangladesh, rising ocean levels and fresh water shortages throughout the world are all thought to be related to climate change, though climate scientists cannot prove that any given weather anomaly is caused by global warming.

Climate scientists can be fuzzy this way about causality in the short term. Paradoxically, however, they often see the future more clearly. For instance, the top global food policy think-tank, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), predicts that global warming will be responsible for a 16% decrease in agricultural gross domestic product globally by 2020. The Center for Global Development argues that developing countries, in particular, will be hit hard by climate change: By 2080, India, its report argues, will see a staggering 30-40% drop in agricultural production and Senegal will plummet 50%.

In the United States, a much-anticipated, Bush-administration-delayed federal study foresees water shortages, more herbicide-resistant weeds, and more insect infestations as a result of climbing temperatures. The present food crisis, concludes Joachim von Braun of the IFPRI, “foreshadows what climate change will bring us.”

The other major driver of food price increases is certainly rising income levels in key developing countries. With more income, people can, of course, eat more, and eat higher off the hog — or, put another way, they can eat hog in the first place, rather than the lentils or cassava on which they were subsisting.

Over a decade ago, Lester Brown, the founder of World Watch, suggested that just such a crisis was on the way. He asked whether the world could possibly produce enough grain to feed a more prosperous China. Now, growing middle classes in China and India, the world’s most populous countries, are, just as he predicted, changing their eating habits and consuming more meat (and so, indirectly, a great deal more grain, which is used to feed the animals they are now cooking).

Lester Brown was ahead of the curve, but there were ample warning signs of an impending food crisis for those ready to see them. Oil prices have been steadily increasing since 2004 as a result of rising demand. They have been helped along greatly by growing chaos in the Middle East, fed by the Bush administration’s foolhardy invasion of Iraq.

Like the North Koreans, we, too, have been trying to squeeze more food out of a limited amount of land: arable land per capita is declining at a steady rate. Falling water tables and dry rivers - think climate change again — have no less surely pointed to a coming crunch for farmers dependent on irrigation. And don’t forget: Critics of biofuels warned time and again that there wasn’t enough elasticity in the food supply to take food out of the mouths of people in the Global South in order to fill the gas tanks of the Global North.

Back in the early 1990s, the North Korean leadership failed to grasp the correlation between rising oil prices, declining food stocks, and environmental stresses — and the political pundits and politicians of the planet conveniently wrote off the resulting catastrophe as uniquely the fault of the world’s weirdest country. Instead of taking a timely hint, wealthier governments simply shrugged off the warnings of scientists, development professionals, and energy specialists about future crises.

Responding to Riots

There’s nothing like a food riot, however, to get wealthy governments to sit up and take notice. Humanitarian organizations and aid officials may be concerned about people quietly starving to death in remote locations, but only when world security suddenly seems threatened and governments totter do rising food prices translate into a full-blown crisis. Washington, for example, woke up when riots broke out in Egypt, Haiti, and Indonesia, and the militaries in Pakistan and Thailand intervened to protect crops and storage facilities.

In response to the sudden crisis splatting on the global windshield, the United Nations food aid agency, the World Food Program, called for $755 million in emergency contributions. Saudi Arabia, its coffers flooded with oil profits, promptly promised $500 million. The World Bank then announced that it was increasing its overall support of global agriculture by $2 billion in 2009, while Washington offered $5 billion in food aid over the next two years.

Such an emergency response may, indeed, be necessary, but it is also distinctly inadequate. The Director-General of the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization, Jacques Diouf, has called for a minimum of $30 billion a year for a global agricultural restructuring. It’s not at all clear who will pony up such sums, which, in any case, will be too late for countries like Haiti whose subsistence farmers needed help before their most recent growing seasons started. Most importantly, though, as an approach, it’s too conventional and, in the long run, bound to fail.

After all, the wealthiest countries continue to show little or no interest in altering the policies that have contributed so decisively to the food crisis in the first place. Take the United States. It “ties” — places restrictions on — about 70% of its aid. That means recipient countries must use that aid to buy U.S. products, which, of course, will do little to strengthen local economies. Washington has also cut its international agricultural research by as much as 75% at a time when agricultural production is no longer keeping pace with population increases. Add in the $280 billion farm bill that Congress has just passed which, unbelievably enough, provides continued subsidies to “farmers” (read: agribusiness) already benefiting enormously from high food prices. And the European Union, like the United States, is refusing to backtrack on its commitment to boost biofuels produced from grain.

Nor is there much hope for a new Green Revolution. While the campaign to disseminate modern, industrial agricultural techniques that began in the 1960s did increase food production, rural poverty in the developing world remained endemic (which is why the current food crisis is so devastating to subsistence farmers). Today, a repetition of that Revolution’s combo of hybrid seeds, intensive irrigation, and the heavy application of petroleum-based fertilizers holds little promise.

Water is scarcer. Oil (and thus fertilizer) is considerably more expensive. The promised next stage of the Green Revolution, the application of biotech advances through genetically modified organisms to produce new, high-yield, insect-resistant crops, generally hasn’t lived up to its hype in the developing world.

Yet Western seed companies are taking advantage of the crisis to tout this particular high-tech solution. Oddly enough, all this is depressingly reminiscent of the North Korean leadership’s fascination with quick fixes in the 1990s. North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, for instance, touted potatoes as a miracle crop, but the True Potato Seed project sponsored by the U.S. government never panned out. Giant rabbits produced by a German breeder as a newfangled North Korean livestock were a dead-end, probably because the animals themselves consumed as much food as they ultimately yielded. A variety of high-yield “supercorn” hasn’t yet revolutionized North Korean agriculture. Neither in North Korea nor in the world at large has anyone yet figured out a technical shortcut to permanent cornucopia.

Markets to the Rescue?

Perhaps the most conventional approach to the crisis has been to rely on market mechanisms. Consider the International Food Policy Research Institute, a product of the Green Revolution and its leading booster, and its eight-point plan for solving the crisis. Several of the steps are eminently sensible, such as expanding humanitarian assistance to food-challenged countries, reversing biofuel policies, and investing in social programs such as school feeding programs and health care. In the mix, however, are more of the same old market mantras. IFPRI recommends, for instance, the elimination of the export bans which 40 countries, including India and Indonesia, recently implemented to keep food from flowing out of the country through trade. And it has tried to revive a dead horse by urging further World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations to reduce barriers to global trade in agricultural products.

Pundits and policymakers addressing food problems have called for the elimination of government regulations and tariffs ever since England repealed its Corn Laws in the 1840s. In the last quarter century, the removal of trade restrictions of every sort facilitated greater agricultural production globally. Free trade helped large producers grow more and sell it cheaper abroad. But free trade hasn’t helped the rural poor — or poor countries.

Quite the opposite. The increased concentration of corporate farming and the dismantling of state programs that sustained the agricultural sector have driven small farmers out of business all over the planet, while making many of those who remain ever more dependent on expensive chemical pesticides, fertilizer, and seeds. For instance, as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico lost 1.3 million agricultural jobs, forcing many desperate small farmers to cross into the United States as migrant workers. Even more strikingly, the continent of Africa went from a net exporter of food in the late 1960s to a net importer today — thanks to the World Bank and the WTO riding roughshod through the continent in the same cavalry unit as the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The Bank’s “structural adjustment programs” and the WTO’s “tariff reductions” don’t quite have the ring of war, pestilence, famine, and death, but they have been just as devastating.

The quest for perfect markets usually conceals a global shell game in which wealth is redistributed from the many to the few. To even the playing field that markets constantly tilt in favor of the powerful, and to direct funds toward environmental sustainability, governments need to intervene in the economy.

After all, private enterprise is not going to invest in the large-scale improvement of rural infrastructure — the capital costs are high and profit margins far too low. More controversially, developing countries may need to maintain, or even reestablish, tariffs and subsidies to protect local producers. Since it is both sold and consumed, food should be considered a strategic resource, a matter of national security. It should be left out of trade negotiations in the same way that the “national security exception” allows governments to subsidize and protect their military industries as they please.

On Being Canaries

Any response that doesn’t address all three converging trends — rising energy costs, stagnant per-capita agricultural production, and climate change — will ultimately fail, just as it did in North Korea in the early 1990s.

Land, energy, and the biosphere are limited resources. And it’s not only a peak in oil that we may be approaching. The depletion of oil resources and the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions from their current levels have at least entered mainstream discussion. Less well known, however, are the problems of peak land and peak water.

The last time food prices shot up, in the 1970s, the U.S. response was to put more land into agricultural production. This was the infamous “fencerow-to-fencerow” policy of Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz that Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has linked to the glut of corn — and corn syrup — that has so profoundly affected global diets. But re-Butzing American agriculture is no longer an option. “For the first time in our history, we’re pushing up against the edge in terms of quality land,” says Otto Doering, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University. “We’re in a somewhat fixed box.”

The same applies to the world at large. Although rainforests are still being transformed into farming plots and pasture — only increasing carbon emissions into the atmosphere — humanity is reaching the limits of arable land. Chalk it up to urbanization, climate change-caused drought, and a loss of soil fertility through the application of too much fertilizer. Whether forest or farmland, we are losing productive land at a rate of one hectare every 7.67 seconds. Sure, there’s some wiggle room in Africa and Latin America, but bringing this additional land into cultivation will buy us only a little time — at the expense of the overall environment.

The water situation is even more precarious. The world is facing a declining reserve of fresh water with the depletion of underground reserves in India, China, Africa, and even the United States. (Say goodbye to the Midwest’s mighty Ogallala aquifer, which nourishes America’s breadbasket). Aside from the 1.1 billion people who already lack safe drinking water, according to the U.N., this crisis threatens farming, which monopolizes 70% of all fresh water.

Global temperature increases will only aggravate the situation. Rising oceans will inflict death-by-salt on increasing amounts of low-lying farmland, while drought dries up once fertile farming regions. Any intensification of the Green Revolution, dependent as it is on chemical fertilizer and irrigation, is only likely to add to the problem. And don’t count on the oceans to offset the food that will no longer be grown on land. The catch of wild fish has remained pretty much the same since the mid-1980s, and fish farming, too, requires land, water, and energy.

In the long run, the only realistic response is a comprehensive program to address, in tandem, the triple crises of energy, climate, and land and water resource exhaustion. If policymakers take into consideration only one, or even two, of the components of this trinity, they may well end up doing more harm than good. The making of biofuels from corn, for instance, was an attempt to address the problems of the cost of energy and the dangers of climate change, but it neglected to consider the effect on agricultural production — hence, the disastrously soaring price of corn. Calls for the next phase of a Green Revolution, which address agricultural production, are guaranteed to play havoc with the energy and water crises.

Such partial approaches don’t work largely because they assume unlimited resources. The original sin of unrestrained growth can be found in the economic theologies of both communism and capitalism. In these systems, neither the state nor the market has ever operated according to ecological principles. Now, we must quickly explore ways of boosting agricultural production in fundamentally sustainable ways without, somehow, expanding our carbon footprint.

Certainly organic farming will play a role here. Although Green Revolution guru Norman Borlaug has dismissed organic agriculture as incapable of feeding the world, an important new study published by Cambridge University Press shows that organic systems in developing countries can produce 80% more than conventional farms.

Integrated farming systems that rely on sustainable energy — solar, wind, tidal — will also be critical. No-till agriculture can cut down on energy use and soil erosion.

While properly wary of snake-oil salesmen, neither can we afford to be Luddites. New technologies will play a role as well, as long as they reduce fertilizer and pesticide use, don’t shackle debt-ridden farmers to major seed companies, and meet strict consumer safety requirements.

Even if global food prices stabilize this year and projections of a record grain harvest hold, the underlying problems will remain.

So it was with North Korea. With emergency assistance, the country pulled back from the brink by 2000. In 2008, however, it is again in a serious food crisis, thanks to high energy prices, flooding, and a shortfall in last year’s grain harvest. Once again, North Korea is the world’s canary. As we sit in the dark in the deep hole that we’ve dug for ourselves, will we finally heed its warning?

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is the author of numerous articles on food policy and on North Korea.

US warns Sandinista diplomat against dividing UN

noreply@blogger.com (HODAD26) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:02:00 +0000

The United States on Wednesday warned a former Sandinista foreign minister from Nicaragua, who was just elected the next UN General assembly president, to remain within his responsibility as a UN official.

Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, a Roman Catholic priest, was elected without a vote by the 192-nation assembly to preside over the body when it opens its 63rd session in September.

He said in an acceptance speech that the UN should end all wars and called the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan 'acts of aggression.'

The US plays the major role in both wars.

US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad called the remarks 'unacceptable.'

'His role is to bring the assembly together, he's not representing his government in any partisan aspect of policy,' Khalilzad told reporters in reaction to d'Escoto's speech.

'We have been led to believe that he understands that, we'll wait and see,' the US envoy said.

D'Escoto, whose speech sounded much like a sermon of love, said that the assembly's nations must be united to democratize the world organization and emulate the non-violence philosophy of India's Mahatma Gandhi.

'The unity which the world requires of us is one born out of love and a desire to make each of ourselves instruments of peace, justice and solidarity,' he said.

D'Escoto will take over the assembly's one-year presidency on September 16 when it opens its annual session.

'Therefore we cannot allow hatred, rancor, or a desire for revenge into our struggle,' he said. 'On the contrary, this is what we must firmly fight against, with unbending love and respect. Gandhi must be our paradigm in this struggle for a better world.'

D'Escoto, 75, is himself a controversial personality in Latin American politics. He was born in Los Angeles in 1933 into a family of diplomats and studied at Columbia University in New York before his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest in 1961 as a member of the Maryknoll Missionary Congregation.

He returned to Nicaragua to join the Sandinista National Liberation Front in its struggle against the US-backed government in Managua, and was appointed foreign minister in 1979 when it overthrew the US-backed Samoza government.

He stepped down as foreign minister in 1990 with the end of the Sandinista regime, voted out of office in multi-party elections.

D'Escoto and other priests were publicly scolded by Pope John Paul II during a visit in Central America for their participation in politics. But d'Escoto went on to win praises for his humanitarian works. He received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1985 and the Thomas Merton Award in 1987.

D'Escoto told a press conference at UN headquarters in New York following his election that he will not change the position he had adopted when fighting for the Sandinistas.

'I love the United States and the US is much larger than its political figures,' he said. 'I will continue to be the same person and won't change.'

He urged people to call him 'father' or simply Miguel.

He acknowledged his acceptance speech to the assembly sounded like a sermon.

'They elected a priest and I hope no one was offended,' he said. 'Love is what the world needs the most.'

D'Escoto said he will spend his time as assembly president to 'democratize' the United Nations.

New York - The United States on Wednesday warned a former Sandinista foreign minister from Nicaragua, who was just elected the next UN General assembly president, to remain within his responsibility as a UN official. Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, a Roman Catholic priest, was elected without a vote by the 192-nation assembly to preside over the body when it opens its 63rd session in September. He said in an acceptance speech that the UN should end all wars and called the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan 'acts of aggression.' The US plays the major role in both wars. US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad called the remarks 'unacceptable.' 'His role is to bring the assembly together, he's not representing his government in any partisan aspect of policy,' Khalilzad told reporters in reaction to d'Escoto's speech. 'We have been led to believe that he understands that, we'll wait and see,' the US envoy said. D'Escoto, whose speech sounded much like a sermon of love, said that the assembly's nations must be united to democratize the world organization and emulate the non-violence philosophy of India's Mahatma Gandhi. 'The unity which the world requires of us is one born out of love and a desire to make each of ourselves instruments of peace, justice and solidarity,' he said. D'Escoto will take over the assembly's one-year presidency on September 16 when it opens its annual session. 'Therefore we cannot allow hatred, rancor, or a desire for revenge into our struggle,' he said. 'On the contrary, this is what we must firmly fight against, with unbending love and respect. Gandhi must be our paradigm in this struggle for a better world.' D'Escoto, 75, is himself a controversial personality in Latin American politics. He was born in Los Angeles in 1933 into a family of diplomats and studied at Columbia University in New York before his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest in 1961 as a member of the Maryknoll Missionary Congregation. He returned to Nicaragua to join the Sandinista National Liberation Front in its struggle against the US-backed government in Managua, and was appointed foreign minister in 1979 when it overthrew the US-backed Samoza government. He stepped down as foreign minister in 1990 with the end of the Sandinista regime, voted out of office in multi-party elections. D'Escoto and other priests were publicly scolded by Pope John Paul II during a visit in Central America for their participation in politics. But d'Escoto went on to win praises for his humanitarian works. He received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1985 and the Thomas Merton Award in 1987. D'Escoto told a press conference at UN headquarters in New York following his election that he will not change the position he had adopted when fighting for the Sandinistas. 'I love the United States and the US is much larger than its political figures,' he said. 'I will continue to be the same person and won't change.' He urged people to call him 'father' or simply Miguel. He acknowledged his acceptance speech to the assembly sounded like a sermon. 'They elected a priest and I hope no one was offended,' he said. 'Love is what the world needs the most.' D'Escoto said he will spend his time as assembly president to 'democratize' the United Nations.

View blog reactions

Met this man in Managua, '84 a very humble blessed man,

congrats for his appointment,

what this planet needs,

hey US mouth piece spokesman, eat shit and die, real simple....

Cuba's urban farming program a stunning success

noreply@blogger.com (HODAD26) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:21:00 +0000

HAVANA - For Miladis Bouza, the global food crisis arrived two decades ago. Now, her efforts to climb out of it could serve as a model for people around the world struggling to feed their families.

Bouza was a research biologist, living a solidly middle-class existence, when the collapse of the Soviet Union — and the halt of its subsidized food shipments to Cuba — effectively cut her government salary to $3 a month. Suddenly, a trip to the grocery store was out of reach.

So she quit her job, and under a program championed by then-Defense Minister Raul Castro, asked the government for the right to farm an overgrown, half-acre lot near her Havana home. Now, her husband tends rows of tomatoes, sweet potatoes and spinach, while Bouza, 48, sells the produce at a stall on a busy street.

Neighbors are happy with cheap vegetables fresh from the field. Bouza never lacks for fresh produce, and she pulls in between $100 to $250 a month — many times the average government salary of $19.

"All that money is mine," she said. "The only thing I have to buy is protein" — meat.

Cuba's urban farming program has been a stunning, and surprising, success. The farms, many of them on tiny plots like Bouza's, now supply much of Cuba's vegetables. They also provide 350,000 jobs nationwide with relatively high pay and have transformed eating habits in a nation accustomed to a less-than-ideal diet of rice and beans and canned goods from Eastern Europe.

From 1989-93, Cubans went from eating an average of 3,004 calories a day to only 2,323, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, as shelves emptied of the Soviet goods that made up two-thirds of Cuba's food. Today, they eat 3,547 calories a day — more than what the U.S. government recommends for American citizens.

"It's a really interesting model looking at what's possible in a nation that's 80 percent urban," said Catherine Murphy, a California sociologist who spent a decade studying farms in Havana. "It shows that cities can produce huge amounts of their own food, and you get all kinds of social and ecological benefits."

Of course, urban farms might not be such a success in a healthy, competitive economy.

As it is, productivity is low at Cuba's large, state-run farms where workers lack incentives. Government-supplied rations — mostly imported from the U.S. — provide such staples as rice, beans and cooking oil, but not fresh produce. Importers bring in only what central planners want, so the market doesn't correct for gaps. And since most land is owned by the state, developers are not competing for the vacant lots that can become plots for vegetables.

Still, experts say the basic idea behind urban farming has a lot of promise.

"It's land that otherwise would be sitting idle. It requires little or no transportation to get (produce) to market," said Bill Messina, an agricultural economist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "It's good anyway you look at it."

And with fuel prices and food shortages causing unrest and hunger across the world, many say the Cuban model should spread.

"There are certain issues where we think Cuba has a lot to teach the world. Urban agriculture is one of them," said Beat Schmid, coordinator of Cuba programs for the charity Oxfam International.

Other countries have experimented with urban farming — Cuba's initial steps were modeled after a green belt surrounding Shanghai. But nowhere has urban farming been used so widely to transform the way a country feeds itself.

"As the global food crisis receives attention, this is something that we need to be looking at," Murphy said. "Havana is an unlikely, really successful model where no one would expect one to come from."

Now that Raul Castro is president, many expect him to expand the program he began as an experiment in the early 1990s.

One of the first plots he opened was the "organoponico" on Fifth Avenue and 44th Street in the ritzy Havana neighborhood of Miramar. The half-block farm — owned by a government agency — is surrounded by apartment buildings and houses, but also offices of foreign companies, a Spanish bank and the South African Embassy.

Long troughs brim with arugula, spinach, radishes and basil, and few of the 20,000 square feet are wasted.

One technician tends compost that serves as natural fertilizer, while another handles natural protection from pests, surrounding delicate spinach shoots with strong-smelling celery to ward off insects. Such measures have ecological benefits but were born of necessity: Neither commercial fertilizer nor herbicide is reliably available.

Three workers tend the crops and another three sell them from a brightly painted stall.

Key to the operation is something once unheard of in Cuba: 80 percent of the profits go straight to the workers' pockets, providing them an average of $71 a month.

"Those salaries are higher than doctors, than lawyers," said Roberto Perez, the 58-year-old agronomist who runs the farm. "The more they produce, the more they make. That's fundamental to get high productivity."

Customers say the farm has given them not only access to affordable food, but also a radical change in their cuisine.

"Nobody used to eat vegetables," said David Leon, 50, buying two pounds of Swiss chard. "People's nutrition has improved a lot. It's a lot healthier. And it tastes good."

___

Associated Press Writer Andrea Rodriguez contributed to this report.

5 Tips for Mom's Longevity

noreply@blogger.com (HODAD26) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:41:00 +0000

Dr. Mao's Secrets of Longevity

1. Exercise Every Day
As women age, they need more than ever to protect their bones and joints. Consider the benefits of a daily walk, at least 20 minutes every day. This will not only help your mother stay fit and build her bones, but it is also a wonderful way to reflect and clear the mind.

Swimming is a great form of cardiovascular exercise, and although it is not considered a weight-bearing activity, can also help fight osteoporosis. Better still, water acts as the perfect cushion for joints, great for those suffering from worn hips and knees. Additionally, gentle energy-boosting exercises like tai chi and yoga are essential for a flourishing anti-aging exercise program.

2. Frequent Fresh Water
Water is essential for everyone. Our body requires a certain amount to maintain our blood osmotic levels, provide the medium for circulating and excreting waste products, and cleansing our internal tissues. Centenarians around the world give credit to their native water sources for their health and long lives; the scientists agree!

What they all have in common is pure water sources located far from any city, free from chemicals and toxins. Choose filtered water; the best filtration process are the ones that use activated charcoal, which removes the impurities but leaves the water-soluble minerals. At least eight glasses of clean pure water should be consumed every day. Click here for my recommended water filters.

3. Treat Your Mother to Tea Time
In addition to being a delicious, low-calorie beverage, tea is the beverage most commonly enjoyed by centenarians around the world. Tea possesses free-radical inhibiting properties more potent than even vitamin E and also helps prevent and treat hardening of the arteries (atherosclerosis). The polyphenols in tea, especially the catechins, are powerful antioxidants that help protect against cancer and diabetes. Drink up!

For a masterful blend of healing herbal tea, especially beneficial to your mother's health and wellbeing, click here.

4. Rejuvenate with Anti-aging Foods
When your mother told you to always eat your greens, she was looking out for your health. Now let her know how much you care about her by sharing with her these top life-extending, anti-aging foods:

• Soy contains phytoestrogen, which is a plant form of estrogen that improves the body's hormonal balance and protects women from breast cancer. Soy is also rich in genistein, which protects against osteoporosis and other aging symptoms. Foods that are made with soy include tofu, bean curd, soymilk, soy yogurt, miso, tempeh, and the actual bean pod itself.

• Leafy green vegetables like spinach, collards, chard, kale, mustard greens, parsley and seaweed all contain much needed calcium and other trace minerals for bone health, as well as phytosterol activities that help balance and support the hormonal system.

• Yams and sweet potatoes are powerhouse foods that contain higher amounts of beta-carotene and vitamin C than carrots, more protein than wheat and rice, and more fiber than oat bran. They are also rich in DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone) - a precursor hormone that is essential for the body's anti-aging defenses to work.

• Nuts and seeds: just a handful every day can help improve circulation and muscle tone. Research indicates that many of these nuts and seeds are rich sources of vitamin E, lignans and omega-3 fatty acids, which can help prevent against heart disease and the ravages of aging.

• Deep-sea fish, such as salmon, sea bass, halibut, tuna, and mackeral are rich sources of omega-3 essential fatty acids (EFA), which are crucial to hormonal production and also protect the heart and blood vessels.

5. Laughter for a Long Life
And finally, protecting your mother's health can be fun! Recall a comical family story or a funny family joke. Research tells us that laughter and joy boost immune functions, especially the production of the natural killer cells that help protect the body from illness and cancer. Laughter will also increase your mother's release of endorphins-compounds in her brain that give her a warm and fuzzy sense of wellbeing.

I hope you celebrate your mother's long and healthy life! I invite you to visit often and share your own personal health and longevity tips with me.

May you stay healthy, live long, and live happy! And may your mother live to 100 in good health!

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