Science Daily reports:
A new study by researchers at Rhode Island Hospital have found a substantial link between increased levels of nitrates in our environment and food with increased deaths from diseases, including Alzheimer's, diabetes mellitus and Parkinson's. The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.
Led by Suzanne de la Monte, MD, MPH, of Rhode Island Hospital, researchers studied the trends in mortality rates due to diseases that are associated with aging, such as diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes and cerebrovascular disease, as well as HIV. They found strong parallels between age adjusted increases in death rate from Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and diabetes and the progressive increases in human exposure to nitrates, nitrites and nitrosamines through processed and preserved foods as well as fertilizers.
Other diseases including HIV-AIDS, cerebrovascular disease, and leukemia did not exhibit those trends. De la Monte and the authors propose that the increase in exposure plays a critical role in the cause, development and effects of the pandemic of these insulin-resistant diseases.
De la Monte, who is also a professor of pathology and lab medicine at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, says, "We have become a 'nitrosamine generation.' In essence, we have moved to a diet that is rich in amines and nitrates, which lead to increased nitrosamine production. We receive increased exposure through the abundant use of nitrate-containing fertilizers for agriculture." She continues, "Not only do we consume them in processed foods, but they get into our food supply by leeching from the soil and contaminating water supplies used for crop irrigation, food processing and drinking."
Reference De la Monte, Suzanne M., Alexander Neusner, Jennifer Chu and Margot Lawton. "Epidemilogical Trends Strongly Suggest Exposures as Etiologic Agents in the Pathogenesis of Sporadic Alzheimer's Disease, Diabetes Mellitus, and Non-Alcoholic Steatohepatitis." Journal of Alzheimer's Disease 17:3 (July 2009) pp 519-529 |
= = =
The diary rescue begins below and continues in the jump.
= = =
Land of Enchantment who joined with Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse to put together last week’s extremely successful DK GreenRoots Eco Week, wrote about the bad straits of Climate Refugees: "Floods and famines have forced people to abandon their homes for greener pastures throughout recorded history, and presumably before that. But nowadays we've got a new kind of climate refugee: Rising sea levels are driving people from their homes, even from whole islands and entire nations, in many corners of the planet. A case in point is the Carteret Islands of Papua New Guinea, a low lying coral atoll, home to 2500 people."
DK GreenRoots
Turkana interviewed Oregon Wild's Regna Merritt: "Merritt is Executive Director of Oregon Wild, the most important environmental advocacy group in Oregon. As described on their website: ...Nobody in the Pacific Northwest is a better resource for learning about environmental issues, and about the political complexities of addressing them; and she was gracious enough to answer a series of emailed questions."
DK GreenRoots
= = =
The Overnight News Digest is posted. Included is the story Iranian clerical group says vote result "invalid."
dgil decided that Waxman Malarky should fail: "There's a need for a good clean clean energy bill that will move us forward, but HR2454 does not accomplish that goal. ... It provides for more coal plants that use the dirtier eastern coal. As reported and diaried all over everywhere the EPA, at the direction of the WH, is approving at least 24 new MTM, itself an ecological disaster for the Appalachians. Got to green light blasting open mountain tops to have the dirtiest coal to clean up the air? That part is an unprecedented huge piece of pork for the eastern coal/power industry. ... Up front, I am not a supporter of expanding civilian NP. This bill green lights nuclear power plants with no added regulations to stiffen monitoring radioactive pollution in the tailings left to blow in the wind at the mining site, nor word one on safely storing the radioactive waste produced. It doesn't require, doesn't even ask the nuclear power industry to use new safer designs, just full speed ahead."
RLMiller isn’t happy with the legislation, but wrote We Must Dare to Hope: Support ACES in the Senate: "The perfect must not become the enemy of the mediocre. The American Clean Energy & Security Act -- aka Waxman-Markey, HR 2454 -- is mediocre. It doesn't rise to the level of "good." I've labeled it as "diluted to homeopathic proportions." Polls here run neck & neck as between grudgingly passing it and scrapping it and starting over. Nevertheless, it's what we have, and I'm going to support it. I'm going to call Senators, and I'm going to ask you to do the same...for political reasons, not scientific reasons."
The economics of wind power is a subject about which Jerome a Paris knows plenty: "The cost of wind is, simply enough, what you actually need to spend to generate the electricity. The graph below shows how these costs have changed over the past decade: a long, slow decline as technology improved, followed, over the past 3 years, by an increase as the cost of commodities (in the case of wind, mainly steel) increased, and as strong demand for turbines allowed the manufacturers (or their subcontractors) to push up their prices.The most recent Energy Outlook by the International Energy Agency suggests that wind power currently costs €60/$80 per MWh, which makes it, today, pretty close to what the traditional generation sources (nuclear, coal, gas) cost."
Source: Economics of wind by the European Wind Energy Association
DK GreenRoots
In Morning Feature, NCrissieB pondered Nature's Values: "When I began researching this week's series, I was surprised to find I'd stumbled upon stories of hope rather than gloom. Thanks to the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and reintroduction programs begun in the 1980s and 90s, the grey wolf population has rebounded. And we are discovering benefits we did not envision in 1973, or even in the 1990s. Science now shows that the grey wolf is to its habitat as the Everglades are to south Florida: the essential link in a complex ecosystem. Forests, fisheries, and other species are recovering in surprising ways now that the grey wolf has returned to its home. There are challenges, to be sure. Ranchers face wolf predation, and we can and must take steps to mitigate those challenges. But to my mind, they are good challenges, inevitable when humans live and raise livestock in wolf country, much like the challenges we Floridians face living and raising families and pets in alligator country. We must accept the challenges as part of life, avoiding harms when we can and mitigating the rest."
DK GreenRoots
Returning from a four-week hiatus, lineatus returned to write Dawn Chorus Birdblog: They say...As birders, we have an interest in the health of the planet. From the dawn of recorded time, humans have looked to birds as a way to understanding the world around them, and our language shows that link. The ancients looked to the behavior of birds for sings of what was to come – the ‘auspices’ - rooted in the Latin words for ‘bird’ and ‘watch.’ Many expressions reflect those observations: The Early Bird Gets The Worm; Canary In A Coal Mine; One Swallow Does Not A Summer Make; A Bird In The Hand Is Worth Two In The Bush; Like Water Off a Duck’s Back; Birds Of A Feather Flock Together.
DK GreenRoots
Chaoslillith lamented Own a Fish or Reptile? You could be a criminal soon: "How would like feel having to give up your treasured pet due to someone passing a law stating your pet is now illegal? This has happened to Pit Bull owners and it is now happening to reptile and fish owners. The State of CT passed a bill giving one person, the Commissioner of the state the right to decide what animals are and are not legal to own. If you are caught with any of these animals it can be up to $1000 fee for each one. So if you have 3 fish tanks with 10 fish each..watch out. The Beardley Zoo is holding an Animal Amnesty Day in response to the final legislation that passed outlawing primates and some other exotics."
buhdydharma talked about The green, green roots of Home: "For four decades, life on earth hung in the balance, suspended between the will of two nation states that had the capacity to launch enough nuclear firepower (the very power that fires the suns themselves) to change the climate to make the earth uninhabitable. Somehow we overcame our self-destructive urges and resisted using that power. A dramatic crisis, barely averted, and more by luck than by plan. But leaving an undramatic crisis behind. We somehow managed not to blow ourselves and all life on the planet up in a great conflagration. Instead we have decided, it seems, to smother ourselves to death in the greenhouse gasses we produce. Or to be more accurate, a small subgroup of humans are attempting to smother the rest of us, and our children, and our grandchildren."
DK GreenRoots
boatgeek turned the Saturday Morning Home Repair Blogging 3.47 feature over to gardens and lawns: "If you do keep your lawn, water as little as possible and use a mulching mower to cut down on production of scraps. Please don't use herbicides or pesticides. They're meant to kill things. Even if they don't kill you, they're bad for everything downstream of your garden. Pull weeds by hand or with any of a variety of nifty tools. Done right, you can extract a dandelion from a lawn without anyone noticing the difference. If you use RoundUp, you'll see a brown patch there for a month. If you provide a dense ground cover, it's also harder for weeds to get a footing in your yard. Boiling water and/or a propane torch will also take care of weeds coming up through your pavement."
DK GreenRoots
Frankenoid’s Saturday Morning Garden Blogging Vol. 5.20 was spent discussing new legislation: "On Monday morning, as I drank my coffee and read The New York Times, I found an article headlined It’s Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado. I read the article carefully, with great interest, and noted in particular, this paragraph: Here in Colorado, the old law created a kind of wink-and-nod shadow economy. Rain equipment could be legally sold, but retailers said they knew better than to ask what the buyer intended to do with the product. ‘It’s like being able to sell things like smoking paraphernalia even though smoking pot is illegal,’ said Laurie E. Dickson, who for years sold barrel-and-hose systems from a shop in downtown Durango. State water officials acknowledged that they rarely enforced the old law. With the new laws, the state created a system of fines for rain catchers without a permit; previously the only option was to shut a collector down."
DK GreenRoots
The flaw in the global warming argument, hannah wrote is a "problem is the strategy. The atmospheric heating problem (‘global warming’ is a misnomer and the first sign that the argument is not straight) is being put forward as a threat to enforce behavior that should be promoted on its own. It isn’t just when you rely on environmental threats to influence people, who don’t give a fig for anyone other than themselves, that the effort to do something positive is bound to fail. Even empathetic people might respond by throwing up their hands at the prospect of disaster and just not doing anything at all. The threat of a negative consequence does not promote positive behavior–much as conservatives would like to think it does."
Eddie C popped in at The Lincoln Center Farmer's Market on the Fourth of July: "On this day of American Heritage, some people are preserving Heritage Foods. Foods that tell us who and where we are. Another American tradition is preserved at Farmer's Markets, the tradition of communication. Now that is something that is long gone at our corporate supermarkets. You can't even find a manager to complain to, so forget about actually finding out where the food came from. In Richard Tucker Square you can buy some morning donuts from the man who made them and for less that half the price of Starbucks across the street."
Getting To 350ppm With Renewable Ammonia took Stranded Wind back to his favorite topic: "The current production of ammonia is responsible for just under 2% of global CO2 emissions. About 70% of production is done with natural gas as the hydrogen source and the rest is almost entirely coal fired facilities. There isn’t a lot of demand elasticity here without wrenching dietary change for the western world; most of this is used for grain production and any cut back in this year flows right through to crop yield the next. There are a variety of what I believe to be non-starter ideas heard here regarding how to simply reduce our use of our current fertilizer regime. ‘We’ll just go organic!’ No, not if you expect to maintain yields, and one carefully manicured acre producing what one average fertilized acre produces annually if and only if it’s allowed to have a fallow crop of a nitrogen fixer such as hairy vetch does not prove that this idea will work."
DK GreenRoots
epjmcginley pondered the parameters of An Agrarian Nation: "From my perspective, the question is not why would one choose to live an agrarian lifestyle. I honestly believe that it is the most responsible and deeply human lifestyle one can lead. The question that concerns me is, how can we make it possible for more people to choose this lifestyle."
BeninSC put DK GreenRoots at the top of Top Comments.