You know what’s a really big problem? The Farm Bill. The quintennial piece of legislation that steers billions of dollars into subsidies for farmers who mass-produce the raw materials of which junk food is made. Yeah, I know, not exactly a hot topic, nor our normal fare. But Michael Pollan in the Times lays out a devastating indictment of the current system, which encourages our economy to overproduce food that is incredibly bad for us, while busting the federal budget, ruining the environment, and hurting small farmers and developing countries to boot. (Via Marginal Revolution.)

Here is the basic econo-physics of the situation:

As a rule, processed foods are more “energy dense” than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them “junk.” Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat.

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

I remember the moment it first dawned on me that Coke was significantly less expensive than orange juice. But making soda is a complicated chemical process, while oranges literally grow on trees! Of course, once you master that process, mass-producing the chemicals is fairly straightforward, while growing oranges requires a certain amount of patience. At the time I didn’t really appreciate the other aspect of the puzzle: we pay people to grow corn, which is turned into high-fructose corn syrup, which sweetens all of the processed food we find on our supermarket shelves.

Now, there does seem to be an obvious point missing in the article: the popularity of Twinkies over carrots cannot be put down solely to the greater density of calories per dollar. A lot of people like how Twinkies taste, deep-fried or not. But that doesn’t mean we should be actively subsidizing their production.

Pollan strikes an optimistic note at the end of his piece, suggesting that the importance of the Farm Bill may finally be percolating up to the national consciousness. (At least until the next time that a celebrity with fake boobs dies of a drug overdose.) It’s long been considered political suicide to even suggest messing with farm subsidies, especially with the Iowa caucuses playing such a large role in Presidential primaries. We’ll see if next year is any different.

You’ll read on a blog or hear on the news that it is Bike to Work Day in California on Thursday May 18th. On your way to buy that pint of milk, you’ll smile indulgently at the well-meaning cyclists out there during the whole of California’s Bike to Work Week, trying not to curse them (as perhaps you usually do at other times of the year) for getting in your way as you pilot your nice comfortable car past them, probably over-revving the engine and driving way too close to them as you do so.

You click on one of the websites of a participating local transport organisation and cleverly remark to yourself how amusing it is that the prize you could win for bringing your bike onto their subway, train, or bus system that special day is…. a bike. So if you don’t have a bike, you can’t participate, and so can’t win a bike….which would allow you to participate. Well, maybe you could borrow one and give it a try…..? Anyway…..

You’ll agree that it is in principle a good thing that those cyclists do (and you noted before that you’ve seen many more of them in the last few weeks due to the rising gas prices), and that it is a pity that your own special situation makes it impossible for you to join them, or perhaps use the bus or train, or some combination of them. Or does it? You make a mental note to try it next year. Or perhaps the year after…..

Happy Bike to Work Day!

-cvj

Again, apologies to Girls Are Pretty.

It seems that Europe, led by the UK in a surprising display of the items usually kept in a jar on George Bush’s mantlepiece, has decided to stand up against one of the most disgusting and damaging abuses of science by the current administration. As The Guardian reports

Europe, led by the UK, last night signalled a major split with the United States over curbing the Aids pandemic in a statement that tacitly urged African governments not to heed the abstinence-focused agenda of the Bush administration.

The statement with which the article is concerned makes clear that rejection of science is the problem here

We are profoundly concerned about the resurgence of partial or incomplete messages on HIV prevention which are not grounded in evidence and have limited effectiveness,” it says.

The current US stance on tackling AIDS in Africa is hopelessly hamstrung, requiring, among other absurd demands, that no funds be distributed to any organization that even counsels a pregnant woman that abortion is an option, and that two-thirds of funds go to programs that stress abstinence (a third goes to abstinence only programs). If you want to understand how experts in the US see this, see what Planned Parenthood has to say.

A specific example is provided by Uganda, which used to be the poster child for AIDS programs in Africa, and which has suffered a recent setback that is at least partially linked to a decrease in the availability of condoms due to US policies.

The issues here are entirely obvious to anyone who is not blinkered by ideology and/or repression. As the British international Development secretary, Hilary Benn, put it

“Abstinence works if people can abstain, but I don’t think people should die because they have sex. We need to make sure people have all the means [of prevention] at their disposal - condoms and clean needles. It includes education and access to sexual and reproductive health services.”

This is an example of what people mean when they say that the Bush administration is ignoring science in favor of ideology. It is an established scientific fact that abstinence only programs do not work. Yet these are the ones we are using to fight a disease that is ravaging parts of Africa. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. It is one of common sense, and of common decency. Is there any chance that sensible, reason-based people, Democrats and Republicans, could agree on this?

No, this isn’t one of those bait-and-switch titles. It really is about sex in space. Via Deepen the Mystery, a Guardian story on the hazards of sexual encounters on long-duration space missions.

They should be out-of-this-world experiences. But US experts have warned that sex in space will bring problems not pleasure for men and women heading to the moon and Mars.

A panel of scientists has told Nasa interplanetary passion could cause chaos to its latest plans to send humans on long missions.

Cramped in spaceships for years, surrounded by the starry void, astronauts thoughts are bound to turn to romance, states the report, ‘Bioastronautics Roadmap: a risk reduction strategy for human exploration of space’.

The resulting close encounters could have profound consequences, it adds. Without supplies of the necessary precautions, zero-gravity romps could lead to zero-gravity pregnancies.

Snickering aside, I’m sure it’s a real problem — send a bunch of people into isolation in close quarters for a period of years, and something will happen.

Now, I know that certain of my co-bloggers are reliable readers of the Guardian science section, but apparently they were going to keep this story to themselves. The extra value-added you get from Cosmic Variance, of course, is that we will actually link directly to the NASA Bioastronautics Roadmap from which the story derives. Although, as it turns out, a cursory inspection didn’t turn up anything nearly as off-color as you’d find in a novel by a recently indicted former high-ranking White House staffer. But this bit was interesting:

Serious interpersonal conflicts have occurred in space flight. The failure of flight crews to cooperate and work effectively with each other or with flight controllers has been a periodic problem in both US and Russian space flight programs. Interpersonal distrust, dislike, misunderstanding and poor communication have led to potentially dangerous situations, such as crewmembers refusing to speak to one another during critical operations, or withdrawing from voice communications with ground controllers. Such problems of group cohesiveness have a high likelihood of occurrence in prolonged space flight and if not mitigated through prevention or intervention, they will pose grave risks to the mission. Lack of adequate personnel selection, team assembly, or training has been found to have deleterious effects on work performance in organizational research studies. The duration and distance of a Mars mission significantly increases this risk. The distance also reduces countermeasure options and increases the need for autonomous behavioral health support systems.

Oh, great. I see a Stranger in a Strange Land scenario on our horizon.

AMERICAblog has a good post about Target’s email response to a complaint that one of their pharmacists has refused to fill a prescription for emergency contraception (EC). Here’s the email from Target

From: Target.Response Target.Response@target.com
Date: Oct 20, 2005 7:18 AM
Subject: Filling Prescriptions at Target

Dear Target Guest,

Target places a high priority on our role as a community pharmacy and our obligation to meet the needs of the patients we serve. We expect all our team members, including our pharmacists, to provide respectful service to our guests, particularly when it comes to their health care needs.

Like many other retailers, Target has a policy that ensures a guest’s prescription for emergency contraception is filled, whether at Target or at a different pharmacy, in a timely and respectful manner. This policy meets the health care needs of our guests while respecting the diversity of our team members.

Your thoughts help us learn more about what our guests expect, so I’ll be sure to share your feedback with our pharmacy executives.

Thanks for taking the time to share your questions, thoughts and comments. I hope we’ll see you again soon at Target.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Hanson
Target Executive Offices

I’ve written before about this kind of nonsense. My Orange Quark post began

A pharmacist in California refuses to fill the prescriptions of AIDS sufferers, because that would be interfering with God’s plans for gays. Another pharmacist, in Michigan, won’t provide arthritis medication, because gnarled hands are God’s way of stopping masturbation. A third pharmacist, in Florida, refuses to fill Viagra prescriptions, because, after their child-bearing years are over, God does not intend women to have to put up with the advances of their wrinkly old husbands.

whereas AMERICAblog has their own examples of equally ridiculous possibilities that would seem to be consistent with paying pharmacists not to do their jobs.

It’s just a gut feeling, but I would guess that there are many more readers of this blog who might occasionally shop at Target than at, say, Walmart (Don’t ask me why - maybe it’s the Michael Graves collection - I don’t know). If so, then this is a real opportunity to make a difference. If you get a chance, follow the advice at AMERICAblog, and call Target’s press office at one of these numbers

Susan Kahn, 1-612-761-6735
Cathy Wright, 1-612-761-6627 or 1-847-615-1538
Paula Thornton-Greear, 612-696-3400
Carolyn Brookter, 1-612-696-6557

Instead, or in addition, you could call or write to your local Target and tell them how you feel about this. We really need to stand up against this insanity. I’m going to make my calls tomorrow. Perhaps I’ll do it instead of teaching. After all, just because I’m paid to teach doesn’t mean I should be forced to do it!

If our logs of traffic to this site are to be believed, many of you will read this post extremely late at night, much later than your parents would have thought of as bed-time. Yet more of you will read it in the wee hours, with precious little time left before you need to get up and go to work or school. And it’s not just our visitors who behave this way. You’ll often see our posts coming in after midnight, even on a school night, and even then we’re rarely straight off to beddy-byes right after posting.

It certainly seems that most people are burning the candle at both ends these days, partly because of work and family responsibilities, and partly because of the increasing availability and variety of communication and entertainment options, such as the Internet and cable television.

I’ve always been one of those people who wholly embrace such new freedoms and, since I’ve never really needed a lot of sleep, have often found myself taking advantage of them late at night and early in the morning. I frequently read or deal with email and refereeing requests after midnight, and spend part of the early morning, around 6am, reading news sites and blogs before (when things are going ideally) exercising and heading off to work. This means that I can devote most of the day-time hours, plus large chunks of many evenings, to working, plus going out with my wife or with friends on occasion. I like living this way, although I must say that, now and then (every couple of months or so), it all catches up with me and I spend a Saturday essentially curled up in bed reading a novel while watching baseball.

Many of my friends and colleagues have schedules of a similar tempo, although with different weightings of activities (often including getting up to get kids to school, which seems to be an immensely time-consuming process all on its own). We all seem pretty happy; but then again, we all also seem pretty exhausted from time to time.

But maybe we shouldn’t be so complacent. Sunday’s Washington Post has an interesting article about recent scientific studies concerning the health implications of living with a long term sleep deficit. Although, as I’ll mention briefly below, I don’t think this is a stellar science article, it nevertheless made me sit up and think.

Starting from the observation that most people need between seven and nine hours of sleep per night, the health complications that some researchers claim correlate with getting less than, say, six hours, comprise a scary list: heart disease, obesity, colon cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, diabetes and stroke. And I most definitely got the impression that they were just getting warmed up.

This is a timely article because the results of several new studies, with rather large sample sizes, have recently been released. I found it a little difficult to ferret out serious details of these studies from the article, but one involves 10,000 subjects, and another is out of Harvard Medical School and involved 82,000 nurses.

One thing I didn’t like was that there was an attempt to provide balance with the usual glib “but others think differently” comment:

“There are Chicken Little people running around saying that the sky is falling because people are not sleeping enough,” said Daniel F. Kripke of the University of California at San Diego. “But everyone knows that people are getting healthier. Life expectancy has been increasing, and people are healthier today than they were generations ago.”

Other researchers acknowledge that much more research is needed to prove that the apparent associations are real, and to fully understand how sleep disturbances may affect health. But …

This seems like it is an interesting and potentially important comment from a credible researcher. However, the details behind Dr. Kripke’s objections are not followed up, and one is left thinking either that his comment is unimportant or that something crucial is being ignored.

This criticism aside, I did learn some interesting nuggets about the kind of research that’s going on and what it might tell us about the potential hazards of our changing sleep habits. The connection with obesity leads to some particularly cute evolutionary speculation

The newest study on obesity, from Columbia University, is just the latest to find that adults who sleep the least appear to be the most likely to gain weight and to become obese.

Other researchers have found that even mild sleep deprivation quickly disrupts normal levels of the recently discovered hormones ghrelin and leptin, which regulate appetite. That fits with the theory that humans may be genetically wired to be awake at night only when they need to be searching for food or fending off danger — circumstances when they would need to eat to have enough energy.

“The modern equivalence to that situation today may unfortunately be often just a few steps to the refrigerator next door,” [Emmanuel] Mignot [of Stanford] wrote in his editorial [in the journal Sleep].

Despite all this, I can’t imagine dramatically changing my lifestyle any time soon - I just like it too much. However, I think I will try to be a little more alert for those signs that I’m becoming over-tired, and maybe take that lazy Saturday or the occasional lie-in a bit more frequently than I do at present. It’s for my health you understand. The fact that those sleepy mornings usually lead to deliciously decadent afternoons of baseball and contemporary literature is just a side effect of the medication.

Of course the news came out on a Friday afternoon, when it might be buried in the under-read Saturday papers (and I was trying to stay away from the internets for a while, and then a huge hurricane hit… but this is still important) : the FDA has decided to indefinitely postpone approval of Plan B, the so-called “morning after pill”, aka emergency contreception (EC). From the
NYT article:

For more than a year, federal drug officials have insisted that their repeated delays in deciding whether to approve over-the-counter sales of a morning-after contraceptive have nothing to do with abortion politics. Among veterans of the battles over drug approvals here, it is hard to find anyone who believes them.

The most recent study on EC (which, for those who are unaware, is just a high dose of normal birth control pills: sometimes with estrogen and progestin, sometimes just progestin) suggests that in the majority of cases, it prevents pregnancy by inhibiting ovulation or fertilization (ie, just like normal birth control pills) — and not by preventing implantation. There is no evidence that EC can effect an implanted fertilized egg in any way; it cannot abort it and it does not seem to harm it. Much of the hubbub is also about whether girls under the age of 18 can understand how to use the drug properly; there is also no evidence that 16 and 17 year olds can’t understand how to take a few pills, or any evidence of stronger adverse effects on girls under 18 — except, of course, for the fact that then they might not be sufficiently punished for having sex.

These facts make it pretty clear that at least for the bulk of the anti-abortion movement, it’s not about saving babies, it’s about controling women. If you want to prevent abortions, over the counter emergency contreception is a proven, excellent way to do it. If you want to prevent women from controlling their own lives, not so good. (Note: Amanda at Pandagon makes this same point better and snarkier…)

More info on emergency contreception here, with details about how to use normal birth control pills. Planned parenthood has an action alert here.

At least someone who (was) still left in the Adminstration had some balls (so to speak): the women’s health chief at the Food and Drug Administration resigned today over the decision. Here’s what she had to say:

”I have spent the last 15 years working to ensure that science informs good health-policy decisions,” Wood, director of FDA’s Office of Women’s Health, wrote in an e-mail about her departure to agency colleagues. ”I can no longer serve as staff when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended by the professional staff here, has been overruled.”

Wood said the final decision was made not in FDA’s usual manner but ”at the commissioner level … where most if not all of the professional staff were excluded.” Nor has FDA ever raised questions about teen use of other drugs, she said.

This should have been a medical and scientific decision, not a political one. Bravo for her.

Apparently coffee is now a health drink! According to a new study, “Americans get more of their antioxidants from coffee than any other dietary source. Nothing else comes close.” This may mostly say something about how vegetable poor the average American diet is, but at least we can all keep on drinking without remorse!

Although, my new antioxident love is Brazilian açai…