Humans' beef with livestock: a warmer planet csmonitor.com
American meat eaters are responsible for 1.5 more tons of carbon dioxide per person than vegetarians every year.
By Brad Knickerbocker Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
February 20, 2007, The Christian Science Monitor
As Congress begins to tackle the causes and cures of global warming, the action focuses on gas-guzzling vehicles and coal-fired power plants, not on lowly bovines.
Yet livestock are a major emitter of greenhouse gases that cause climate change. And as meat becomes a growing mainstay of human diet around the world, changing what we eat may prove as hard as changing what we drive.
It's not just the well-known and frequently joked-about flatulence and manure of grass-chewing cattle that's the problem, according to a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Land-use changes, especially deforestation to expand pastures and to create arable land for feed crops, is a big part. So is the use of energy to produce fertilizers, to run the slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants, and to pump water.
"Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems," Henning Steinfeld, senior author of the report, said when the FAO findings were released in November.
Livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, reports the FAO. This includes 9 percent of all CO2 emissions, 37 percent of methane, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide. Altogether, that's more than the emissions caused by transportation.
The latter two gases are particularly troubling – even though they represent far smaller concentrations in atmosphere than CO2, which remains the main global warming culprit. But methane has 23 times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2 and nitrous oxide has 296 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide.
Methane could become a greater problem if the permafrost in northern latitudes thaws with increasing temperatures, releasing the gas now trapped below decaying vegetation. What's more certain is that emissions of these gases can spike as humans consume more livestock products.
As prosperity increased around the world in recent decades, the number of people eating meat (and the amount one eats every year) has risen steadily. Between 1970 and 2002, annual per capita meat consumption in developing countries rose from 11 kilograms (24 lbs.) to 29 kilograms (64 lbs.), according to the FAO. (In developed countries, the comparable figures were 65 kilos and 80 kilos.) As population increased, total meat consumption in the developing world grew nearly five-fold over that period.
Beyond that, annual global meat production is projected to more than double from 229 million tons at the beginning of the decade to 465 million tons in 2050. This makes livestock the fastest growing sector of global agriculture.
Animal-rights activists and those advocating vegetarianism have been quick to pick up on the implications of the FAO report.
"Arguably the best way to reduce global warming in our lifetimes is to reduce or eliminate our consumption of animal products," writes Noam Mohr in a report for EarthSave International.
Changing one's diet can lower greenhouse gas emissions quicker than shifts away from fossil fuel burning technologies, Mr. Mohr writes, because the turnover rate for farm animals is shorter than that for cars and power plants.
"Even if cheap, zero-emission fuel sources were available today, they would take many years to build and slowly replace the massive infrastructure our economy depends upon today," he writes. "Similarly, unlike carbon dioxide which can remain in the air for more than a century, methane cycles out of the atmosphere in just eight years, so that lower methane emissions quickly translate to cooling of the earth."
Researchers at the University of Chicago compared the global warming impact of meat eaters with that of vegetarians and found that the average American diet – including all food processing steps – results in the annual production of an extra 1.5 tons of CO2-equivalent (in the form of all greenhouse gases) compared to a no-meat diet. Researchers Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin concluded that dietary changes could make more difference than trading in a standard sedan for a more efficient hybrid car, which reduces annual CO2 emissions by roughly one ton a year.
"It doesn't have to be all the way to the extreme end of vegan," says Dr. Eshel, whose family raised beef cattle in Israel. "If you simply cut down from two burgers a week to one, you've already made a substantial difference."
• Staff writer Peter Spotts contributed to this report.
Read the entire article at the original source csmonitor.com
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Saturday, February 10, 2007
What’s Making Us Sick Is an Epidemic of Diagnoses
What’s Making Us Sick Is an Epidemic of Diagnoses - New York Times
New York Times, January 2, 2007
Essay
What’s Making Us Sick Is an Epidemic of Diagnoses
By H. GILBERT WELCH, LISA SCHWARTZ and STEVEN WOLOSHIN
For most Americans, the biggest health threat is not avian flu, West Nile or mad cow disease. It’s our health-care system.
You might think this is because doctors make mistakes (we do make mistakes). But you can’t be a victim of medical error if you are not in the system. The larger threat posed by American medicine is that more and more of us are being drawn into the system not because of an epidemic of disease, but because of an epidemic of diagnoses.
Americans live longer than ever, yet more of us are told we are sick.
How can this be? One reason is that we devote more resources to medical care than any other country. Some of this investment is productive, curing disease and alleviating suffering. But it also leads to more diagnoses, a trend that has become an epidemic.
This epidemic is a threat to your health. It has two distinct sources. One is the medicalization of everyday life. Most of us experience physical or emotional sensations we don’t like, and in the past, this was considered a part of life. Increasingly, however, such sensations are considered symptoms of disease. Everyday experiences like insomnia, sadness, twitchy legs and impaired sex drive now become diagnoses: sleep disorder, depression, restless leg syndrome and sexual dysfunction.
Perhaps most worrisome is the medicalization of childhood. If children cough after exercising, they have asthma; if they have trouble reading, they are dyslexic; if they are unhappy, they are depressed; and if they alternate between unhappiness and liveliness, they have bipolar disorder. While these diagnoses may benefit the few with severe symptoms, one has to wonder about the effect on the many whose symptoms are mild, intermittent or transient.
The other source is the drive to find disease early. While diagnoses used to be reserved for serious illness, we now diagnose illness in people who have no symptoms at all, those with so-called predisease or those “at risk.”
Two developments accelerate this process. First, advanced technology allows doctors to look really hard for things to be wrong. We can detect trace molecules in the blood. We can direct fiber-optic devices into every orifice. And CT scans, ultrasounds, M.R.I. and PET scans let doctors define subtle structural defects deep inside the body. These technologies make it possible to give a diagnosis to just about everybody: arthritis in people without joint pain, stomach damage in people without heartburn and prostate cancer in over a million people who, but for testing, would have lived as long without being a cancer patient.
Second, the rules are changing. Expert panels constantly expand what constitutes disease: thresholds for diagnosing diabetes, hypertension, osteoporosis and obesity have all fallen in the last few years. The criterion for normal cholesterol has dropped multiple times. With these changes, disease can now be diagnosed in more than half the population.
Most of us assume that all this additional diagnosis can only be beneficial. And some of it is. But at the extreme, the logic of early detection is absurd. If more than half of us are sick, what does it mean to be normal? Many more of us harbor “pre-disease” than will ever get disease, and all of us are “at risk.” The medicalization of everyday life is no less problematic. Exactly what are we doing to our children when 40 percent of summer campers are on one or more chronic prescription medications?
No one should take the process of making people into patients lightly. There are real drawbacks. Simply labeling people as diseased can make them feel anxious and vulnerable — a particular concern in children.
But the real problem with the epidemic of diagnoses is that it leads to an epidemic of treatments. Not all treatments have important benefits, but almost all can have harms. Sometimes the harms are known, but often the harms of new therapies take years to emerge — after many have been exposed. For the severely ill, these harms generally pale relative to the potential benefits. But for those experiencing mild symptoms, the harms become much more relevant. And for the many labeled as having predisease or as being “at risk” but destined to remain healthy, treatment can only cause harm.
The epidemic of diagnoses has many causes. More diagnoses mean more money for drug manufacturers, hospitals, physicians and disease advocacy groups. Researchers, and even the disease-based organization of the National Institutes of Health, secure their stature (and financing) by promoting the detection of “their” disease. Medico-legal concerns also drive the epidemic. While failing to make a diagnosis can result in lawsuits, there are no corresponding penalties for overdiagnosis. Thus, the path of least resistance for clinicians is to diagnose liberally — even when we wonder if doing so really helps our patients.
As more of us are being told we are sick, fewer of us are being told we are well. People need to think hard about the benefits and risks of increased diagnosis: the fundamental question they face is whether or not to become a patient. And doctors need to remember the value of reassuring people that they are not sick. Perhaps someone should start monitoring a new health metric: the proportion of the population not requiring medical care. And the National Institutes of Health could propose a new goal for medical researchers: reduce the need for medical services, not increase it.
Dr. Welch is the author of “Should I Be Tested for Cancer? Maybe Not and Here’s Why” (University of California Press). Dr. Schwartz and Dr. Woloshin are senior research associates at the VA Outcomes Group in White River Junction, Vt.
Read article at the original source
New York Times, January 2, 2007
Essay
What’s Making Us Sick Is an Epidemic of Diagnoses
By H. GILBERT WELCH, LISA SCHWARTZ and STEVEN WOLOSHIN
For most Americans, the biggest health threat is not avian flu, West Nile or mad cow disease. It’s our health-care system.
You might think this is because doctors make mistakes (we do make mistakes). But you can’t be a victim of medical error if you are not in the system. The larger threat posed by American medicine is that more and more of us are being drawn into the system not because of an epidemic of disease, but because of an epidemic of diagnoses.
Americans live longer than ever, yet more of us are told we are sick.
How can this be? One reason is that we devote more resources to medical care than any other country. Some of this investment is productive, curing disease and alleviating suffering. But it also leads to more diagnoses, a trend that has become an epidemic.
This epidemic is a threat to your health. It has two distinct sources. One is the medicalization of everyday life. Most of us experience physical or emotional sensations we don’t like, and in the past, this was considered a part of life. Increasingly, however, such sensations are considered symptoms of disease. Everyday experiences like insomnia, sadness, twitchy legs and impaired sex drive now become diagnoses: sleep disorder, depression, restless leg syndrome and sexual dysfunction.
Perhaps most worrisome is the medicalization of childhood. If children cough after exercising, they have asthma; if they have trouble reading, they are dyslexic; if they are unhappy, they are depressed; and if they alternate between unhappiness and liveliness, they have bipolar disorder. While these diagnoses may benefit the few with severe symptoms, one has to wonder about the effect on the many whose symptoms are mild, intermittent or transient.
The other source is the drive to find disease early. While diagnoses used to be reserved for serious illness, we now diagnose illness in people who have no symptoms at all, those with so-called predisease or those “at risk.”
Two developments accelerate this process. First, advanced technology allows doctors to look really hard for things to be wrong. We can detect trace molecules in the blood. We can direct fiber-optic devices into every orifice. And CT scans, ultrasounds, M.R.I. and PET scans let doctors define subtle structural defects deep inside the body. These technologies make it possible to give a diagnosis to just about everybody: arthritis in people without joint pain, stomach damage in people without heartburn and prostate cancer in over a million people who, but for testing, would have lived as long without being a cancer patient.
Second, the rules are changing. Expert panels constantly expand what constitutes disease: thresholds for diagnosing diabetes, hypertension, osteoporosis and obesity have all fallen in the last few years. The criterion for normal cholesterol has dropped multiple times. With these changes, disease can now be diagnosed in more than half the population.
Most of us assume that all this additional diagnosis can only be beneficial. And some of it is. But at the extreme, the logic of early detection is absurd. If more than half of us are sick, what does it mean to be normal? Many more of us harbor “pre-disease” than will ever get disease, and all of us are “at risk.” The medicalization of everyday life is no less problematic. Exactly what are we doing to our children when 40 percent of summer campers are on one or more chronic prescription medications?
No one should take the process of making people into patients lightly. There are real drawbacks. Simply labeling people as diseased can make them feel anxious and vulnerable — a particular concern in children.
But the real problem with the epidemic of diagnoses is that it leads to an epidemic of treatments. Not all treatments have important benefits, but almost all can have harms. Sometimes the harms are known, but often the harms of new therapies take years to emerge — after many have been exposed. For the severely ill, these harms generally pale relative to the potential benefits. But for those experiencing mild symptoms, the harms become much more relevant. And for the many labeled as having predisease or as being “at risk” but destined to remain healthy, treatment can only cause harm.
The epidemic of diagnoses has many causes. More diagnoses mean more money for drug manufacturers, hospitals, physicians and disease advocacy groups. Researchers, and even the disease-based organization of the National Institutes of Health, secure their stature (and financing) by promoting the detection of “their” disease. Medico-legal concerns also drive the epidemic. While failing to make a diagnosis can result in lawsuits, there are no corresponding penalties for overdiagnosis. Thus, the path of least resistance for clinicians is to diagnose liberally — even when we wonder if doing so really helps our patients.
As more of us are being told we are sick, fewer of us are being told we are well. People need to think hard about the benefits and risks of increased diagnosis: the fundamental question they face is whether or not to become a patient. And doctors need to remember the value of reassuring people that they are not sick. Perhaps someone should start monitoring a new health metric: the proportion of the population not requiring medical care. And the National Institutes of Health could propose a new goal for medical researchers: reduce the need for medical services, not increase it.
Dr. Welch is the author of “Should I Be Tested for Cancer? Maybe Not and Here’s Why” (University of California Press). Dr. Schwartz and Dr. Woloshin are senior research associates at the VA Outcomes Group in White River Junction, Vt.
Read article at the original source
Friday, February 02, 2007
Why Thinking You Got A Workout May Make Your Body Healthier
Why Thinking You Got A Workout May Make Your Body Healthier
By Sharon Begley, Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2007; Page B1
One month into 2007 -- and therefore just in time for when we officially admit defeat on the New Year's resolution front -- science is offering one last chance. That heavy-lifting of lattes you do? Excellent strength training. Running for the elevator? Aerobic. Tidying up around the house? Good for the cardiovascular system.
Keep telling yourself this, and you may reap some of the benefits of exercise even if you have never used your gym membership.
Everyday activities do count toward the 30 minutes of daily exercise the surgeon general recommends. But according to a new study, the mere belief that you are getting a workout affects physiology much as the workout itself does. That is, exercise may affect health in part through the placebo effect: You believe you are doing your body good, and that belief leads to some of the well-documented benefits of exercise.
Psychology researcher Ellen Langer of Harvard University has long been intrigued by mind-over-body effects. She and student Alia Crum therefore invited 84 women, ages 18 to 55 years old, who worked as housekeepers at seven Boston hotels, to participate in a study. Those in four hotels were told that their regular work was good exercise and met the guidelines for a healthy, active lifestyle. After all, the women cleaned about 15 rooms a day, taking 20 to 30 minutes for each, so they did get a bit of a workout. Those in the other three hotels were told nothing.
Questionnaires established that the actual amount of work the women did, at work as well as off duty, didn't change over the four weeks of the study. Yet the so-called informed group told the scientists that their life was healthier. They had taken to heart the information about the fitness value of stripping beds and scrubbing bathrooms.
More surprising, the women in the informed group lost an average of two pounds, saw their systolic blood pressure (the first number) drop 10%, lost about 0.5% of their body fat, and reduced their body-mass index by .35 of a point. The other women showed no such changes.
True, these weren't "I dropped 20 pounds in a month!!" results. But considering that the women made no changes in how they lived or ate (the informed group didn't start dieting, for instance), it was nothing to sneeze at. The only change for the women who reaped these benefits was in their heads: They now believed that their cleaning work was a fitness routine.
"If you can put the mind in a healthy place, you can have dramatic physiological consequences," says Prof. Langer, whose study will appear in the February issue of Psychological Science.
The findings would seem more outlandish were it not for the fact that the placebo effect is showing up in other unexpected places. The power of belief has long been known to play a role in ailments that have a strong mental component. A 1998 analysis of 2,318 clinical trials of antidepressants, for instance, showed that half of the therapeutic responses came from the placebo effect: Believing that the pill would relieve depression caused it to do so. (This is why the placebo effect drives drug companies crazy: A drug has to be really good to come out better than the placebo.)
The power of the mind also shows up in conditions that involve the immune system. Exposing people to what they thought was poison ivy caused them to develop a real rash, a 1998 study found, and giving people what they thought was a caffeinated drink (but was decaf) raised their heart rates just as real caffeine does. The mere sight of a doctor can raise blood pressure.
More striking is when the placebo effect shows up in ailments that seem not to have much mind-over-body potential. Parkinson's disease, for instance, is marked by aberrant firing of neurons in a brain region called the subthalamic nucleus. There is no obvious way for thoughts and beliefs to affect the subthalamic nucleus.
But in a 2004 study, scientists reported that injecting a salt solution that patients thought was a real drug didn't only relieve the rigidity of Parkinson's for some. It did so by altering the firing patterns of the haywire neurons: They fired more normally after the sham drug, just as they did after the real one.
As for exercise, believing that you are working out may reduce stress, which would lower blood pressure. The weight loss is harder to explain, but it may reflect a rise in the women's baseline metabolic rate.
Exercise physiologists are skeptical, to say the least. Decades of studies show that working out lowers your levels of lipids, glucose, triglycerides and other bad things, and how that happens is well documented.
Even the best studies, though, do not examine whether the benefits of exercise reflect a placebo effect, with belief in its healthfulness bringing physiological improvements, says exercise physiologist Arlette Perry of the University of Miami. "But if something that accompanies exercise, whether it is better sleep or belief, brings those benefits," she asks, "who cares?"
Read article at the original source
By Sharon Begley, Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2007; Page B1
One month into 2007 -- and therefore just in time for when we officially admit defeat on the New Year's resolution front -- science is offering one last chance. That heavy-lifting of lattes you do? Excellent strength training. Running for the elevator? Aerobic. Tidying up around the house? Good for the cardiovascular system.
Keep telling yourself this, and you may reap some of the benefits of exercise even if you have never used your gym membership.
Everyday activities do count toward the 30 minutes of daily exercise the surgeon general recommends. But according to a new study, the mere belief that you are getting a workout affects physiology much as the workout itself does. That is, exercise may affect health in part through the placebo effect: You believe you are doing your body good, and that belief leads to some of the well-documented benefits of exercise.
Psychology researcher Ellen Langer of Harvard University has long been intrigued by mind-over-body effects. She and student Alia Crum therefore invited 84 women, ages 18 to 55 years old, who worked as housekeepers at seven Boston hotels, to participate in a study. Those in four hotels were told that their regular work was good exercise and met the guidelines for a healthy, active lifestyle. After all, the women cleaned about 15 rooms a day, taking 20 to 30 minutes for each, so they did get a bit of a workout. Those in the other three hotels were told nothing.
Questionnaires established that the actual amount of work the women did, at work as well as off duty, didn't change over the four weeks of the study. Yet the so-called informed group told the scientists that their life was healthier. They had taken to heart the information about the fitness value of stripping beds and scrubbing bathrooms.
More surprising, the women in the informed group lost an average of two pounds, saw their systolic blood pressure (the first number) drop 10%, lost about 0.5% of their body fat, and reduced their body-mass index by .35 of a point. The other women showed no such changes.
True, these weren't "I dropped 20 pounds in a month!!" results. But considering that the women made no changes in how they lived or ate (the informed group didn't start dieting, for instance), it was nothing to sneeze at. The only change for the women who reaped these benefits was in their heads: They now believed that their cleaning work was a fitness routine.
"If you can put the mind in a healthy place, you can have dramatic physiological consequences," says Prof. Langer, whose study will appear in the February issue of Psychological Science.
The findings would seem more outlandish were it not for the fact that the placebo effect is showing up in other unexpected places. The power of belief has long been known to play a role in ailments that have a strong mental component. A 1998 analysis of 2,318 clinical trials of antidepressants, for instance, showed that half of the therapeutic responses came from the placebo effect: Believing that the pill would relieve depression caused it to do so. (This is why the placebo effect drives drug companies crazy: A drug has to be really good to come out better than the placebo.)
The power of the mind also shows up in conditions that involve the immune system. Exposing people to what they thought was poison ivy caused them to develop a real rash, a 1998 study found, and giving people what they thought was a caffeinated drink (but was decaf) raised their heart rates just as real caffeine does. The mere sight of a doctor can raise blood pressure.
More striking is when the placebo effect shows up in ailments that seem not to have much mind-over-body potential. Parkinson's disease, for instance, is marked by aberrant firing of neurons in a brain region called the subthalamic nucleus. There is no obvious way for thoughts and beliefs to affect the subthalamic nucleus.
But in a 2004 study, scientists reported that injecting a salt solution that patients thought was a real drug didn't only relieve the rigidity of Parkinson's for some. It did so by altering the firing patterns of the haywire neurons: They fired more normally after the sham drug, just as they did after the real one.
As for exercise, believing that you are working out may reduce stress, which would lower blood pressure. The weight loss is harder to explain, but it may reflect a rise in the women's baseline metabolic rate.
Exercise physiologists are skeptical, to say the least. Decades of studies show that working out lowers your levels of lipids, glucose, triglycerides and other bad things, and how that happens is well documented.
Even the best studies, though, do not examine whether the benefits of exercise reflect a placebo effect, with belief in its healthfulness bringing physiological improvements, says exercise physiologist Arlette Perry of the University of Miami. "But if something that accompanies exercise, whether it is better sleep or belief, brings those benefits," she asks, "who cares?"
Read article at the original source
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