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Bacon is really bad for you

by DonnieaBlevins Posted on March 7, 2013

Bacon is really bad for you

By John Upton

Shutterstock

/ Slavica StajicProcessed meat: Delicious but deadly.

Hot on the heels of the horse-meat scandal, here’s more bummer meat news.

Eating more than 0.7 ounces a day of processed meat — salami, cured bacon, sausages, that kind of thing — will make you more likely to die prematurely, killed by a heart attack or cancer.

That’s the conclusion of a new study published in BMC Medicine. Scientists tracked almost a half million people in 10 European countries and concluded that 3 percent of premature deaths could be avoided if everybody ate less than three-quarters of an ounce of processed meat every day.

It’s not just the fat in the processed meat that kills: The researchers say it’s the chemicals and salt used to preserve it.

Meat eaters who down 5.5 ounces of processed meat every day — roughly two sausages and a piece of bacon — were 44 percent more likely to die during the 13-year study than those eating just 0.7 ounces, the BBC reported.

But meat eaters with otherwise healthy lifestyles shouldn’t panic too much about that 44 percent figure. BBC noted:

[P]eople who munched on a lot of processed meat were also more likely to smoke, be obese and have other behaviours which are known to damage health.

However, the researchers said that even after those risk factors were accounted for, processed meat still damaged health.

Say you decide to limit your processed meat intake to bacon. How much bacon could you eat to keep within the 0.7-ounce limit? One small rasher. That’s it! One small strip of bacon every day. No more ham, salami, or pastrami. Just one small rasher of bacon.

“I’d say it’s fine to eat bacon and sausages,” University of Zurich epidemiology professor Sabine Rohrmann, the study’s lead researcher, told NPR. “But not in high amounts and not every day.”

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

tweets

, posts articles to

Facebook

, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

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New Volvo tech aims to keep drivers from hitting cyclists

by df4sx12 Posted on March 6, 2013

New Volvo tech aims to keep drivers from hitting cyclists

Bike Radar explains the tech in more depth:

Those outside-the-car airbags are pretty sweet, but what if we could make cars automatically stop before they, you know, hit people?

That’s what Volvo’s up to, with a newly updated auto-brake system that recognizes slow-moving pedestrians and now also fast-swerving bicyclists. “When bicyclists swerve in front of an automobile heading in the same direction, the setup immediately alerts the driver and applies full brake power — a world’s first Volvo says,” reports Engadget.

Volvo

Volvo’s promotional video of the technology in action presents the cyclist as a kind of clueless headphone-wearing dolt, while the car driver appears empathetic. Still, you can at least see how it works:

The technology uses information from a radar unit in the grille and a camera in front of the interior rear view mirror to constantly assess potential collisions. If an imminent impact is detected the driver is presented with a red warning flash and the car activates full braking power automatically. …

The system doesn’t guarantee that the vehicle will stop but it should be effective in reducing speeds in a collision, and in many cases should avoid an impact completely.

The benefits for cyclists will be limited, as the system functions in front of the [hood] — as a result, its ‘field of vision’ is restricted to this area only. The technology won’t stop a car pulling out of a parking space on you but it could well prevent an accident at a junction, or stop a dangerous overtaking maneuver.

Technology can’t stop bad driving that endangers cyclists, but it could help create safer and more equitable urban streetscapes where folks on bikes aren’t riding in fear. It would be bad news if drivers came to rely on it instead of paying careful attention to the road, though. Hey, maybe Volvo could add a feature that counts up all the times a driver triggers the auto-brakes and scares them with the number once a week?

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

New Volvo tech aims to keep drivers from hitting cyclists

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Proposed CA law: Bike at your own risk

by johnsmithwindows Posted on March 6, 2013

Proposed CA law: Bike at your own risk

Busted streets + incompetent city employees + you + bike = potential lawsuit! At least for now.

In most cities, if you injure yourself because of a neglected or damaged sidewalk or street, you can file a “trip and fall” lawsuit and claim damages. But California may soon change that for bicycle riders.

Assemblywoman Diane Harkey, (R-Dana Point) has proposed a law that would provide total immunity for governments and their employees in the event of a bike accident caused by faulty city infrastructure. Public agencies already have “design immunity” under state law (i.e. you can’t sue because of the poor layout of a road or bike lane), but this bill would broadly extend that immunity:

This bill would provide that a public entity or an employee of a public entity acting within his or her official capacity is not be [sic] liable for an injury caused to a person riding a bicycle while traveling on a roadway, if the public entity has provided a bike lane on that roadway.

So OK, the state must be thinking that if you disregard the city’s very thoughtful bike lane and go riding out into the road and a city bus hits you, the city shouldn’t be responsible, right? Oh, except for this part: “The immunity set forth in this section is applicable regardless of whether the bicyclist was within the bike lane at the time of the accident.” (Emphasis mine because omg.)

And because of the broad language used, this bill wouldn’t just give cities immunity for their infrastructure — it would also indemnify the actions of city employees. As the California Bicycle Coalition puts it, “if you get hit by a drunk city employee, you’ll have no recourse.”

According to Cyclelicious, “State and local bike advocacy groups are already gearing up to fight this bill.” Hurry up, folks! And, uh, don’t trip.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Volcanoes are keeping the planet from boiling over — for now

by LeannqOsborn Posted on March 5, 2013

Volcanoes are keeping the planet from boiling over — for now

By John Upton

ShutterstockSmoke from volcanoes helps cool the planet.

While we’ve been pumping the atmosphere full of heat-trapping gases, Mother Earth has been belching sulfur pollution through volcanoes and slowing down global warming.

That’s the conclusion of a new study that’s helping to explain why the globe warmed less during the first 10 years of this century than climate models suggest it should have. If volcanic activity calms down and sulfur pollution levels fall away again, runaway global warming could ensue.

Scientists believe that elevated levels of aerosols in the stratosphere, particularly sulfuric acid and water particles formed from sulfur dioxide pollution, have been shielding the ground from solar radiation. That has helped offset the warming effects of a spike in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It was previously thought that the aerosols were perhaps being pumped into the atmosphere by industrial activity. But the new research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the aerosols have come from a natural source. From Science NOW:

[B]y using a computer model that includes processes due to global atmospheric circulation and atmospheric chemistry, [CU-Boulder atmospheric scientist Ryan] Neely and his colleagues show that the human contribution of aerosols to the stratosphere was minimal between 2000 and 2010. In one set of simulations, the researchers estimated the effects of all known volcanic eruptions, including the quantity of aerosols produced and the heights to which they wafted, on the month-to-month variations in particulate concentrations.

The pattern of stratospheric particulate variations during the past decade “shows the fingerprint of volcanoes, with the right episodes showing up at the right time,” says William Randel, an atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. “This is very convincing to me.”

So please keep those volcanic burps coming, Mother Earth. We could use all the help we can get.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

tweets

, posts articles to

Facebook

, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

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Public surprisingly OK with government policies that push healthy eating

by Jacobi Posted on March 5, 2013

Public surprisingly OK with government policies that push healthy eating

USDA Eat this!

Subsidize green veggies, slaughter big sodas, and steal candy from babies? These kinds of government policies intended to promote healthy eating are A-OK with most of the American public, it turns out. A new poll from Harvard’s School of Public Health found that people “were surprisingly positive about these new public health laws,” as NPR reports, with big percentages in favor of encouraging exercise, making fruits and veg affordable, pushing for healthier restaurant choices, and banning use of food stamps to buy unhealthy foods.

From NPR’s The Salt blog:

“We clearly saw that the more coercion was involved, the more people you lost,” says Michelle Mello, a professor of law and public health at the Harvard School of Public Health, who was a co-author of the study. It was published in the March Health Affairs.

The researchers were surprised to find that people with health problems like obesity and diabetes didn’t object to new laws targeting them.

“We thought that people who felt like targets would be much less likely to support them,” says Stephanie Morain, a graduate student in ethics who co-authored the study. “That wasn’t true.” …

But though people are pretty supportive overall, the results make it clear that they’re more likely to buy in if they feel like public health officials understand their values, and they have a voice in the process. “If people feel like they’re engaged in the policy-making process, they’re more engaged across the board,” Mello says.

The poll found interesting racial differences: Blacks were two to four times more likely to support government intervention than whites, and Hispanics were more supportive than whites too.

Who was least happy about being told what to do by The Man? Older white men, of course! I mean, I coulda told you that.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Public surprisingly OK with government policies that push healthy eating

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New York Times kills its ‘Green’ blog

by sreg2 Posted on March 2, 2013

New York Times kills its ‘Green’ blog

By Lisa Hymas

Less than two months ago, The New York Times dissolved its environment desk, eliminating its two environment editor positions and reassigning those editors and seven reporters.

Now the paper is swinging the hatchet again, shutting down the Green blog that had been home to original environmental reporting every weekday. The news was announced in a brief post on the blog today:

The Times is discontinuing the Green blog, which was created to track environmental and energy news and to foster lively discussion of developments in both areas. This change will allow us to direct production resources to other online projects. But we will forge ahead with our aggressive reporting on environmental and energy topics, including climate change, land use, threatened ecosystems, government policy, the fossil fuel industries, the growing renewables sector and consumer choices.

The paper says environmental policy news will move to the Caucus blog and energy technology news will move to the Bits blog.

But a Times insider tells Grist that the decision probably means an end to the significant amount of freelance reporting that appeared in the Green blog.

The insider, who’s not authorized to speak on the record about the blog’s closure, says, “I’m not 100 percent sure that we’re going to spend as much time on the environment as in the past. To a large extent that depends on the news. The paper is plastic — it reorganizes itself to meet the requirements of the world around us.”

With that world getting warmer and weirder by the day, there shouldn’t be any shortage of climate and environmental news to report. If the Gray Lady is serious about keeping her green tint, that is.

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on

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Organic tomatoes are healthier for you, researchers find

by donnajansen Posted on February 25, 2013

Organic tomatoes are healthier for you, researchers find

They may be smaller but they’re also mightier. Organic tomatoes pack in more cancer-fighting phenols and vitamin C than conventionally grown tomatoes, according to research published in the journal PLOS One. But the organic tomatoes do tend to be about 40 percent tinier, so make sure your next tomato fight features the conventional kind.

waltarrrrr

From Mother Jones:

The authors hypothesize that the additional stress experienced by organic plants — having to fend off pests, scrounge harder for nutrients like nitrogen in soil, etc. — “resulted in oxidative stress and the accumulation of higher concentrations of soluble solids as sugars and other compounds contributing to fruit nutritional quality such as vitamin C and phenolic compounds.” In other words, when the plants suffer a bit, they generate more of these vital nutrients. And the same could be true for other phenol-rich fruits and vegetables.

If you’re excited about this news, that’s great! But don’t get too excited. Tomato season is summer and early fall, so even though our globalized industrial food system brings organic tomatoes to stores year-round, they won’t taste really good until several months from now, when they’re also more likely to be locally grown.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Organic tomatoes are healthier for you, researchers find

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It’s too hot and muggy to work this century

by kx93z6g Posted on February 25, 2013

It’s too hot and muggy to work this century

By John Upton

jalalspages

It’s getting too hot to get any work done.

Think back to summer. No, no, don’t think about the good times. Instead, try to remember what it was like when it was too stinkin’ hot to get any work done.

Humans don’t work so well when it’s stinking hot. And that means that as the globe warms around us, we’re doing less work. How much less? According to results of a study published Sunday in Nature Climate Change, humanity’s summertime productivity has already fallen 10 percent since before the Industrial Revolution. And it’s going to get worse.

Using middle-of-the-road future temperature and humidity projections, experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated that our productivity during the hottest months could drop by an additional 10 percentage points by 2050. More extreme warming would lead to more extreme impacts.

From Reuters:

A more extreme scenario of future global warming, which estimated a temperature rise of 10.8 degrees F (6 degrees C), would make it difficult to work in the hottest months in many parts of the world, [lead author John Dunne of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton] said at a telephone briefing.

Labor capacity would be all but eliminated in the lower Mississippi Valley and most of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains would be exposed to heat stress “beyond anything experienced in the world today,” he said.

Under this scenario, heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, while in Bahrain, the heat and humidity could cause hyperthermia — potentially dangerous overheating — even in sleeping people who were not working at all.

All of which points to one thing: Less work, more party!

Right?

Oh. The hyperthermia thing.

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Gas prices are spiking, and it’s not clear why

by Obeey99 Posted on February 21, 2013

Gas prices are spiking, and it’s not clear why

By Philip Bump

Here’s what gas prices have done over the last month:

GasBuddy

This isn’t an unprecedented rise; prices went up last February, too.

GasBuddy

What’s odd, though, is that the recent rise isn’t tied to rising crude oil prices, the traditional reason prices fluctuate.

GasBuddy

So what’s happening? The Washington Post dug into it, noting concerns over Middle East stability, lower production by OPEC, and the continuing high price of oil — though crude prices dropped significantly yesterday.

One key factor is limited refinery capacity.

[S]ome analysts … pointed to refinery issues. Several refineries have been shut down for routine maintenance, and in the eastern United States, several refineries simply went out of business in the past year.

“Atlantic Basin capacity closures have improved refining fundamentals,” the nation’s biggest refiner, Valero, said in a slide presentation at a Credit Suisse conference this month. It estimated that refineries have closed nearly 1 million barrels a day of capacity on the East Coast or in the U.S. Virgin Islands in the past two years, which Valero said allowed it to increase profit margins.

Refinery constraints were a key factor in California’s huge gas price spike last summer. Let’s go back to the law of supply and demand. Less supply means increased demand, which means more profits. Valero’s suggestion that reducing refinery capacity increased profit margins falls squarely in line with that: Less crude oil refined into gasoline means less gasoline, which means a higher price per gallon. Granted, these refineries didn’t all close this month, but combined with other factors, the closures appear to be playing a role — and may help explain why the price of gas is going up independent of the price of crude oil.

Let that be consolation to you next time you go to fill up. It’s just basic supply and demand, manipulated by oil companies. As it always has and always will, the system works.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.