Health Insurers Investing in Fast Food

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Sunday April 18, 2010 · 8:17 AM PDT

2010/04/18 · 08:17

When I first saw the banner, "Insurance Companies Invest in Fast Food for Easy Profit, Despite Public Health Concern" (see here, here and here), I had to search within myself for the emotional tone appropriate to the finding, because this doesn't affect me personally (I don't eat fast food, I can afford to buy olive oil and vegetables and a gym membership, and I have health insurance through my employer). Outrage? The outrage button has been pushed so many times that it's worn out. Another set of corporations are acting not in the public interest? Who knew?

JLowe

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Monday July 27, 2009 · 6:42 AM PDT

2009/07/27 · 06:42

And no beating yourself up either, because that's not what it's about. WHEE is a lifelong change. Progress is not going to happen overnight, and there will be stumbles, bad days, busy days, vacations, cheat days, and periods of time when you simply take a break and step away from your program.

JLowe

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Friday April 18, 2008 · 10:09 AM PDT

2008/04/18 · 10:09

No, that’s not what I’m talking about, you kinky people. . . .

JLowe

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Saturday February 23, 2008 · 8:33 AM PST

2008/02/23 · 08:33

Natural resources and ecosystems underpin all our hopes for a better world.

These words, from the recently-issued UNEP Global Environmental Outlook GEO 4 report, should be tattooed mirror-wise on the foreheads of every politician and on every officer of suitably large corporations, so they can see them when they get up and look in the mirror every morning.

JLowe

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Monday February 11, 2008 · 2:18 AM PST

2008/02/11 · 02:18

The lefty blogs are talking about this study of hazardous substances and adverse health effects around the Great Lakes, alleging that the federal government has suppressed a study linking exposures to contaminants such as PCBs, dioxins and mercury to increased rates of cancer and infant mortality. As is typical in these cases, the rhetoric gets overheated, causing us to focus on the wrong things. Care of Public Integrity, some pages of the draft study are available, and I’ve taken the opportunity to skim through them, something I sense a lot of commentators haven’t gotten around to doing yet. Thanks to the Patriot Daily News Clearninghouse for the initial report.

JLowe

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Sunday January 27, 2008 · 6:51 PM PST

2008/01/27 · 18:51

I was driving around a last week performing an errand, and I had NPR on the car radio as background noise because I wasn't in the mood for music (NPR is mostly background noise to me these days, particularly the news and analysis). I had the opportunity to hear a snippet of a public affairs program which was profiling Dr. Paul Lindroth at the University of Wisconsin, professor of entomology, an Evangelical and a promoter of the Christian environmental stewardship movement. Environmental stewardship by Christians is underpinned by the idea that man's dominion over the earth as articulated in the Bible actually means stewardship. One of the roots of this idea was an essay published in 1967 by Lynn White, professor of history at Princeton and UCLA.

JLowe

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Saturday December 29, 2007 · 2:49 AM PST

2007/12/29 · 02:49

One of the hottest topics in public health is MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus, a strain of Staph aureus that has become resistant to commonly used antibiotics. A handy fact sheet on MSRA is available from the state of Michigan. Factors contributing to the spread of MSRA include inappropropriate antibiotic use, including over-reliance on antibiotics by physicians and failure to use prescriptions properly by patients, the overuse of antibiotics for livestock production in agriculture, and the failure of the pharmaceutical industry to keep new antiobiotics in the pipeline. In addition, to Staph aureus, there is now evidence that poultry workers are acquiring antibiotic resistant E. coli bacteria. Bacteria evolve rapidly through rapid cell division, mutations and genetic recombination. Antiobiotic resistant bacteria are the result of natural selection.

JLowe

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Sunday September 02, 2007 · 10:54 AM PDT

2007/09/02 · 10:54

A longer version of this post can be found at Impact Analysis

The other day, Revere was discussing John Edwards’s presidential platform on cancer, and expressing disappointment that Senator Edwards gives virtually no attention to prevention, including regulatory approaches for reducing carcinogenic exposures and incentives for promoting "green chemistry" in manufacturing. I checked over at Hillary Clinton’s web site, which has a bit more meat on this topic: smoking prevention in young people, getting junk food out of schools, and improving biomonitoring of exposure to toxic substances. However, it’s only a slight improvement over what John Edwards would provide for us. To the credit of both of them, they appeared at Lance Armstrong’s cancer forum earlier this week (most of the Republican candidates bailed on it).

JLowe

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Thursday August 30, 2007 · 3:10 AM PDT

2007/08/30 · 03:10

This falls in the category of "something I wish I had written first". It's a brilliant takedown of a dead horse that conservatives just love to keep flogging - the myth that the environmentalist conspiracy to ban the pesticide DDT in 1972 led to a worldwide malaria epidemic that killed millions throughout the tropics.

JLowe

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Saturday April 28, 2007 · 5:34 PM PDT

2007/04/28 · 17:34

A paper published last year by Resources for the Future made the point that our oil vulnerability has less to do with the amount we import than simply with the staggering amounts we consume period. In addition, energy independence, a favorite rallying cry of politicians, is an unachievable myth.

Energy independence has been a rhetorical and political rallying cry for nearly 40 years—President Nixon presided over the massive 1974 Project Independence Report—and it is as flaccid a concept today as it has been over the decades.

JLowe

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Saturday April 14, 2007 · 6:25 AM PDT

2007/04/14 · 06:25

The Republican war on science is systematic and multi-faceted and very difficult to keep up with. One episode which recently came to my attention involves my favorite technical journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP), which is published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and best of all, is open access. Now, more than ever, we need research on the risks from toxic substances in the environment, global climate change and other environmental health problems. EHP is a high-quality provider of peer-reviewed research papers and articles for the general public on environmental health topics. Yet, the Bush Administration is trying to neuter this important source for environmental health information through privatization, outsourcing and budget cuts (the funding level is being cut to the same amount that the NIEHS director spent remodeling his office). They don't like the news, so they're killing the messenger.

JLowe

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Thursday April 05, 2007 · 5:26 PM PDT

2007/04/05 · 17:26

The company I work for - an international infrastructure and environment firm (fancy term for a large engineering company) is constantly challenging each of us "who's your replacement"; the implication is that as you grow in your career, who's going to fill the empty slot you leave behind? I read an article which, for me, took that concept to a new place.

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Health Insurers Investing in Fast Food

WHEE - No Excuses

Vegetables and Sex

GEOblogging – an Introduction to the Global Environmental Outlook report

CDC Great Lakes Health Risk Study - A Follow-Up

Christianity's Role in Our Ecological Crisis - Lynn White's Essay Revisited

Antibiotic Resistance, Creationism and Why Mike Huckabee is Scary

The Sad State of Environmental Health Policy Today

Debunking the Conservative Myth of "Environmentalists Killed Millions Banning DDT"

Addicted to Oil: U.S. Oil Policy Simulation

The Republican War on Science and Environmental Health Perspectives

Who's Seymour Hersh's Offload?