With the obesity epidemic at its current rate, we can easily conclude that a lot of people have a lot of truly excellent excuses not to eat properly and exercise. In my experience, two particular excuses take the cake, so to speak: “I don’t have time” and “I can’t afford it.” These justifications seem to work wonders, trimming responsibility and slimming guilt- we all have more important things to spend our money and time on than something as fleeting and vain as health, right?

I’ll cut the sarcasm for a second. In all fairness, the perception that healthy living comes at a high price has some root in reality. Take this study by Northern Ireland charity NCH, which demonstrated that poor families frequently cannot afford balanced diets, based on the higher pricing for healthful food. And with the steep price on gym memberships and exercise equipment, many also get the impression that an active lifestyle must come at a paltry sum. Or at least the excuse sounds plausible.

But some recent economic analysis tears this web of self deception apart. Healthy lifestyles in fact save a sizeable amount of money in the longrun. Smartmoney Magazine puts an estimate on the total payoff: $84,000. Prescription medications, quadruple bypasses, and other such health care expenses cost more than fresh produce and a workout routine, as it turns out:

“According to a [RAND Corporation] study, overweight people pay 10 to 36% more a year on hospital stays and ambulances, depending on the severity of their weight problem. Smokers pay 20% more. Fitness counts too. Aging couch potatoes who started exercising at least three times a week saved an average of $2,200 a year on medical expenses, according to a recent study by Bloomington, a Minn.-based HealthPartners Research Foundation.”

USA Today also recently wrote about the financial impact of health. A few more interesting tidbits:

• People with Diabetes pay 240% more per capita on health care costs.
• A walk a day can save a middle-aged adult $50-$100 per month by avoiding the cost of blood pressure and cholesterol medications.
• The average healthy 35-40 year old American doubles his wealth in ten years; those in poor health typically see a decline over the same period of time.

It doesn’t stop there. With retirement getting financially rockier by the second, physical wellbeing has become even more crucial (and its inverse more expensive). Fidelity Investments gives a couple’s retirement a $200,000 health care price tag, not including dental care, long-term treatments, over-the-counter medications, and assisted living (which costs around $70,000/year in its own right). Fortunately, exercise and healthful eating can greatly diminish rates of dementia and other taxing age-related conditions as well as its other myriad benefits.

I believe that settles the cost-of-healthy-living dispute, to what extent the conflict even existed. As for the “I don’t have time” excuse, I have yet to find a water-tight response. I suppose one could argue that if you take the time to live well now, you’ll have more time alive to enjoy it, of course. It all comes down to what you’ll willingly invest.

All forms of birth control are immoral, according to many Christian conservatives.  We’ve previously written about this absurd position here and here. The Chicago Tribune recently reported on a formal conservative effort to prohibit all forms of birth control:

Emboldened by the anti-abortion movement’s success in restricting access to abortion, an increasingly vocal group of Christian conservatives is arguing that it’s time to mount a concerted attack on contraception.

Their voices were raised in Rosemont on Friday and Saturday at an unusual anti-abortion meeting that drew 250 people from around the nation to condemn artificial birth control. Experts at the gathering assailed contraception on the grounds that it devalues children, harms relationships between men and women, promotes sexual promiscuity and leads to falling birth rates, among social ills.

If immorality is not a good enough reason to ban all birth control, check out the “logic” of this argument:

“I think it’s great that more pro-life people are finally speaking up about it,” said Helen Mazur, 27, who flew in from Philadelphia with her husband for the conference . . . “It’s always been a touchy subject, but you have to stand strong on your beliefs. Contraception is the root cause of the explosion of the amount of abortions in the world,” Mazur said.

What?? 

I’m often asked for real life examples of how religious beliefs threaten society.  This is a good example.  Some might write these people off as an irrelevant fringe, but the views they voice are held by millions.  These same views underlie the oftentimes successful efforts to invite individual pharmacists to deny birth control to pharmacy customers.  See here and here.

As I’ve set forth previously, banning all birth control (other than the totally ineffective guessing game known as “natural family planning) is the focus of many, if not all, of the dozens of pregnancy resource centers that dot the country.

I can assure you that these pregnancy resource centers have the ear of government, at least in Missouri, where I live.  Two months ago, Missouri Governor Matt Blunt signed a bill inviting Missouri citizens to take a tax credit (we’re not talking about a deduction, but a credit, which is a write-off of one’s tax bill) of up to $25,000 for donations to these outlandishly fraudulent organizations (in the bill they are called “Pregnancy Crisis Centers”).

Just connect the dots, then.  Just follow the admonitions of “fringe” goups to the passage of laws that use tax dollars to support organizations that do their best 1)  to present themselves to be medical centers when they aren’t and 2) to actively work to prohibit all forms of effective birth control.  Then top it off by denying abortions to those who are not attempting to have babies, then cut Medicaid to those same people as they struggle to survive.

I wondered recently, during an idle conversation, whatever became of that monumental media presence Rush Limbaugh.  Now I know.  He’s been upstaged.  Check out the following quote:

“They’re almost always biologists—the “science” with the greatest preponderance of women. The distaff MIT “scientist” who fled the room in response to Larry Summers’s remarks was, of course, a biologist. While I’m sure there have been groundbreaking discoveries about the internal digestive system of the earthworm, biologists are barely even scientists anymore. They’re classifiers, list-makers, like librarians with their Dewey decimal system. Except librarians don’t claim the Dewey decimal system holds the Rosetta Stone to the universe. There were once great biologists, but the morally vacuous ones began to promote their own at the universities. It was sort of intelligently designed devolution. Like Marxists gradually dominating the comp lit department, biologists will only be given tenure today if they foreswear any doubts about the evolution pseudoscience. Consequently, “biologist” almost always means “evolutionary biologist,” which is something like an “ESP biologist.”

Can anyone, for five points, tell me who said this?

I’ll save you the trouble and credit you the points.  Ann Coulter, in her latest screed “Godless”.

Rush used to combine some factoids and put a spin to it in ways that occasionally were very hard to find fault with, because he, for all his bombast, has a brain.  Ms. Coulter just screams any damn thing she thinks will fuel the fires of controversy.  To answer that one paragraph of destructive drivel would require a book or two and a couple of intelligent people who are well informed considerable time to undo.

But what intrigued me most was her insertion of the fact that WOMEN flock into biology, and this somehow makes the field suspect.  As if women cannot do the real hard stuff.  But even further, it’s somehow “natural” because women are all about biology anyway.  It’s just that, well, they don’t know anymore where the proper use of that essence lies.  You know…sex?  Making babies?

All of which is part of the tradition handed to us by that diva of privileged bias, Phyllis Schlafly, who chides “professional” women for abandoning their natural roles to have–god help us–careers!

Every time I hear a woman under 35–often quite innocently–condemn feminism, usually by associating them with lesbians or sexless scientist types or the like, I cringe.  I can now point to Ann Coulter and tell them “There lies your destiny if you don’t get your head out of your stereotypes!  The blond demigogue will take away your options and you will be cheerleaders, waitresses, and mommies and nothing else!

Coulter almost makes me wish for Rush to return as champion of rightwing reactionary screeding.  At least I felt there was some grasp in his nonsense.

But notice, in one paragraph–this is textbook stuff–she links moral vacuity, evolution, feminism, and science in general to cultural collapse in our society.  Joseph Goebbels would have been proud to have her as a student.

It is important for people like Ann Coulter to be challenged, and challenged thoroughly and thoughtfully.  It’s just that her nonsequiturs are so out of bounds that it’s difficult to know where to start.  But one might begin by recognizing that she in fact speaks for no one.  She is fueling her own fame.  Her books sell well.  She makes a lot of money.  And she’ll say anything to make more.  The best way to shut her down would be to ignore her.  But we can’t.  That doesn’t really work in this society.  We have to have an answer.

And what I have noticed is the latest trend of demagogues attacking biology–especially evolutionary biology–picked up when gene therapy began to appear practical.  Coulter and her ilk attack it now that something concrete is about to arise from it, which means they really do not see it as the nonsense–the non-science–they claim.

Interesting.  Maybe they really believe that stuff in Genesis about the Tree of Life, and that eating thereof will makes us “as gods” and never die…

Nah.  I don’t really believe she’s that smart.  Clever, sure.  But all her cleverness is destructive.  All she does is try to make people feel bad about what they have.

Uh-oh, I’m annoyed again. Nothing new, just a recycled annoyance that popped into my craw today and won’t leave, I suppose, because this particular instance, while merely a minor irritation on the surface, indicates a raging cultural infection coursing underneath.

I’m easily annoyed by words used incorrectly in the hopes of making either the subject matter or the speaker sound more important or intelligent or valuable or necessary than it probably is. This happens regularly; verbal faux pas have been catalogued, column-ized and syndicated. Corporatespeak has created a behemoth of misuses and our own president plays with English as if it were a Nerf football to be tossed about, squished, stepped on, soaked in mud then caught in the dog’s teeth, and hey, don’t worry if a few chunks of actual meaning are missing.

This day, however, the word wasn’t grammatically trounced, but it assaulted my senses nevertheless, leaving an irksome sensation of unpleasantness, a bad taste on my cultural tongue. I was listening to news in the car, as most of my city lay without power after treacherous storms roared through the region. I mention this only because I normally listen to CDs in my car, music to soothe rather than news to agitate. I need calming when I drive so as to avoid my propensity toward early-onset road rage. Anyway, in the midst of the news, a commercial ran for a plastic surgeon who promises to make us all beautiful. He can create perfection. Upgrade us from our current, obviously sub-standard condition. He can make us better. He can “help you achieve the you you’ve always dreamed of.”

Huh? I mean, aside from ending the sentence in a preposition (which, duh, is just wrong), how exactly is going under the knife in the hopes of coming out better than you went in “achieving” anything? This is an achievement? Sorry, no. For the doctor, maybe. For the money guys who invested in his profitable little practice, perhaps.

But this is not an achievement for the patient choosing to suck off a bit of fat here and there instead of say, power-walking. Or for the patient who chooses to have her face sliced and stretched so she can pretend she’s younger than she is, instead of embracing herself in all her decades-old glory. And especially not for the patient who decides to poke a pair of unnaturally large and perky breasts into the peripheral vision of every seeing human who happens to pass her way. Oh NO, making sure breasts get more unnecessary attention than breasts already get in our painfully superficial culture is most certainly not an achievement.

(more…)

As reported by Think Progress, Karl Rove –”told the Denver Post that ‘recent studies’ show researchers ‘have far more promise from adult stem cells than from embryonic stem cells.’”  This provoked the people at Think Progress to do some digging.  Here’s what they found:

The Chicago Tribune contacted a dozen top stem cell experts about Rove’s claim. They all said it was inaccurate. So who wrote the “studies” that Rove was referring to?

White House spokesman Ken Lisaius on Tuesday could not provide the name of a stem cell researcher who shares Rove’s views on the superior promise of adult stem cells.

The White House knows that it just can’t win a fair fight, it seems.  At the risk of sounding petty or obsessed or trite, has anyone been meticuously documenting each of the White House lies and categorized them by topic?  Not that 29% of this country’s voters would ever care.  

By a vote of 63 to 37, the Senate passed a bill to expand federal funding for embryonic stem cell research on Tuesday. President Bush has promised to use his veto power for the first time in 5 ½ years on this bill, which the current vote can’t override.

The public opinion on stem cell research has changed over the last few years, as their overwhelming medical potential has become radiantly clear, and as even conservatives have followed Nancy Reagan’s move and pledged support. Bush steadfastly remains by his initial impression on stem cell research, however confident in his view because “murder is wrong”.

Among the bill’s opponents, Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas made a spectacle on Monday when he used a 7-year-old girl’s explanation of stem cell research to make his point. How comforting that the Christian right has such a wide range of authorities to quote on the issue. Senator Brownback’s source, a girl named Hannah, came from an “adopted” frozen embryo, which the Senator no doubt thought illustrated what the bill puts at stake very well. He explained it this way:

“This is not just a group of a few cells. This is not a hair follicle. This is not a fingernail. You know, this is Hannah. And if nurtured, grows to be just this beautiful child, and we got a lot of them, of frozen embryos. And I hope people will consider put putting them up for adoption, because there’s a lot of people that want to adopt them.”

Unfortunately for the Senator, at least 90% of the stem cells considered by this bill currently end up discarded, without a use to anyone, and therefore not adopted at all. This brings me to the title of my post, garbage-picking for stem cells. If President Bush, Senator Brownback and their ilk label the stem cell research of garbage cells “murder”, and would prefer that we pitch the embryos rather than put them to use, let’s just dumpster-dive for them. That way we can get around Bush’s senseless veto, and the conservative right can go on pretending that droves of people want to adopt embryos (just as people eagerly claim all of the children available for adoption that otherwise would have ended up aborted, right?). (more…)

“Operation Save America” recently posted this epiphany on its website: 

Little did any of us know, as we ran to the roar to help those devastated by Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi and Louisiana, that God was preparing us to return to Mississippi to deal with an even more deadly foe—Abortion!

As reported by Tompain.com, on July 15, Operation Save America (formerly known as “Operation Rescue”) is planning to storm what it calls “the gates of hell.” It has announced 

that it is going to spend next week trying to make Mississippi an “abortion-free state” which is easy enough to do because it only has one clinic to shut down.

For the full article click here.

Would we harm our selves in ways that we would never let others harm us?  Yes, actually.  We do this all the time.  This common occurrence has long intrigued me.

About fifteen years ago, I was trying to lose weight.  A diet book I was reading presented a hypothetical, which I have embellished:

Imagine that a gang of strangers repeatedly broke into your house.  Each time they broke in, they brought a large basket of food with them.  Each time they broke in, they tracked you down and forced you to eat food that you didn’t need or want.  “Stop that!”  You would yell.  “I’m not hungry.  Go away!”  Nonetheless, the strangers forced you to eat food that you didn’t want.  They returned every few hours and repeated his attack on you.  Every time you tried to exercise, the strangers appeared and made you sit on the couch to watch television instead. 

Over the course of months, the excess food the strangers forced you to eat caused your body to bloat larger and larger.  Your clothing stopped fitting.  It became difficult to get in and out of your car.  Most of your acquaintances gossiped about how you had become “fat.”  

And it got even worse.  You became diabetic. You got depressed.  You constantly cursed those strangers for making you obese and unhealthy.  You bought special burglar-proof doors and windows (but they didn’t work).  Because this gang repeatedly violated your rights, you even considered buying a gun to defend yourself from the horrible things they did.

The punch line, of course, is that each overweight person serves as his or her own “gang of strangers.”  Overweight people repeatedly place unneeded food into their own mouths.  Day after day, they bloat their own bodies and they increase their own risks of disease and death.  Every day, it is the obese person who prevents himself or herself from exercising.  But somehow, because the victims themselves are also the perpetrators, they tolerate their own wretched misdeeds.

This post is not really about obsesity, though.  There is a deep principle at work. How is it that so many of us are so willing to inflict the same damage upon ourselves that we would never tolerate if done by others? (more…)

You might think that social conservatives, especially those in the so-called “pro-life” crowd, would welcome the use of a new vaccine that is virtually 100% effective against two deadly strains of cervical cancer that account for 70% of such cancer deaths and that kill over 3,700 women each year.  Unfortunately, you’d be wrong.

“Because the vaccine protects against a sexually transmitted virus, many conservatives oppose making it mandatory…,” so says this article:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/10/31/MNG2LFGJFT1.DTL

Because of the vaccine’s very high efficacy, health professionals want to make the vaccine mandatory for all girls, but social conservatives, whose knee-jerk reaction is apparently to oppose anything that makes sex safer for women, worry that the vaccine might encourage pre-marital sex; so, they favor “pro-choice” — i.e., letting parents chose to not give the vaccine to their daughters.  In a move that can only be described as screaming with hypocrisy (given their support for government interference in healthcare decisions about birth control and abortion), they object to the government overruling the parents’ decisions about giving children this potentially life-saving vaccine.

In other words, according to conservatives, it’s OK for the government to overrule a parents’ decision when the parents want to protect their daughter’s life with effective birth control or an abortion, but it’s not OK for the government to overrule a parents’ decision when the parents want to jeopardize their daughter’s life by denying an important anti-cancer vaccine.  How twisted do the “family values” need to be to arrive at that dichotomy?

So, here’s my question:  even if the conservative argument is valid — i.e., that denying your own daughter a proven, life-saving, anti-cancer vaccine actually would discourage her from having pre-marital sex –  why would anyone with an ounce of moral conscience consider this an acceptable way to deter pre-marital sex?  On what sick moral scale does a risk of premarital sex outweigh a risk of death?

And what is wrong with conservatives that they believe their own failure as parents (namely, their inability to convey to their children their moral values against pre-marital sex) should be compounded by allowing them to endanger their childrens’ lives by denying this vaccine?  Indeed, doesn’t the fact that they want to deny their daughters access to this vaccine automatically discredit them as competent parents?  And what about future vaccines?  If an AIDS vaccine is ever found, will social conservatives oppose that, too, just as they have opposed sex education and the distribution of condoms in public schools? 

And if their decision to deny this vaccine to their child ever leads to the death of their daughter (or of other families’ daughters), exactly how do they square their decision with their so-called “moral values?”  Indeed, how do they even live with themselves?

Because the people at the top of our government are responsible for making decisions that could cost the lives and ruin the health of millions of citizens, they should be equipped with the best information and the best expertise.  Unfortunately, the White House has decided to muzzle experts and choke off critical debate on numerous topics of critical national significance.  Why?

The Administration’s political interference with science has led to misleading statements by the President, inaccurate responses to Congress, altered web sites, suppressed agency reports, erroneous international communications, and the gagging of scientists. The subjects involved span a broad range, but they share a common attribute: the beneficiaries of the scientific distortions are important supporters of the President, including social conservatives and powerful industry groups.

http://democrats.reform.house.gov/features/politics_and_science/index.htm

It’s gotten so bad that prominent Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner has called the president’s science adviser a “prostitute”:

The United States has been engulfed by a kind of “science war,” one pitting much of the nation’s scientific community against the current administration. Led by twenty Nobel laureates, the scientists say Bush’s government has systematically distorted and undermined scientific information in pursuit of political objectives. Examples include the suppression and censorship of reports on subjects like climate change and mercury pollution, the stacking of scientific advisory panels, and the suspicious removal of scientific information from government Web sites.

The list goes on and on: (more…)

Researchers have just spent a whole lot of money determining that prayer does not seem to work. 

In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.

As usual, when science is not of benefit to Believers, Believers disparage science.  Says Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center, “why would God change his plans for a particular person just because they’re in a research study?” Of course, if this study had shown a positive correlation between prayer and health, Koenig and his peers would be marching through town to proclaim this wonderful new finding.  

But maybe the researchers shouldn’t give up so quickly on the power of prayer.  Perhaps a modified prayer study could check out a few possible wrinkles.  Although the people in the original study certainly prayed, perhaps they prayed improperly or ineffectively.  New studies might show that the power of prayer becomes more detectable when the people doing the praying make the sign of the cross, pray standing up, pray louder or pray by reciting formal prayers rather than in conversational tone.  Maybe the power of prayer is stronger when those praying are kneeling, using a rosary or praying at a time of day when God is more attentive (perhaps we should avoid praying during HIS afternoon nap).

A new improved study could also shed light on a current Middle East dispute: half the participants could pray to God and the other to Allah. Based on the health of the respective heart patients, we shall truly see which Deity is superior.  It could be arranged prior to this study that those whose Deity is proven weaker will begin worshiping the other side’s Deity.

Or maybe, instead of spending substantial money on more prayer studies, that money should be used to assist real life children who lack food, clothing, medicine and education. Children International is one organization that gives great bang for the buck in helping such children.