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Will McDonald’s Stop Serving Big Macs With a Side of Antibiotics?

by q9v9lw Posted on February 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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This month, McDonald’s announced that it plans to start transitioning to sustainable beef by 2016, with the goal of eventually making all of its burgers from sustainable meat. But the fast food chain has yet to specify what, exactly, it means by “sustainable.” The company is working with the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, a stakeholder group that includes Walmart and the World Wildlife Fund, to come up with a definition, and expects to announce further details of its plans in the spring. But food experts say that unless McDonald’s stops purchasing cows that are fed antibiotics to ward off disease in overcrowded feed lots, the promise will be an empty one. It’s not an unattainable goal—other chains that buy antibiotic-free beef, including Chipotle and Shake Shack, say they’ve been able to do so without significantly raising costs. But McDonald’s isn’t on board yet.

When Mother Jones asked McDonald’s whether it plans to cease using antibiotic-fed beef, a spokesman said, “McDonald’s will continue to rely on the sound science derived from this group of expert advisors including academia, suppliers, animal health and welfare experts and the FDA, as we continue to review our policyâ&#128;&#139;.” According to Hal Hamilton, founder of the Sustainable Food Laboratory, who is helping McDonalds develop its sustainability plan, the company “definitely cares about antibiotics and other feed additives, and they would like to achieve a system that avoids things that worry consumers, but I don’t think they’ve made any specific policies.”

Food experts say that could be a problem. “You can’t have sustainable production if you’re using antibiotics other than very, very occasionally, and only when there’s a diagnosed clinical disease,” says David Wallinga, M.D., the founder of Healthy Food Action, a network of health professionals. “In the case of cattle, they shouldn’t be in feed at all.” McDonalds has a written policy that aims to reduce antibiotic use, but the policy has been criticized for having major loopholes—such as allowing farmers to feed cows antibiotics for disease prevention, rather than merely treatment. (The McDonald’s spokesman says, “We take seriously our ethical responsibility to treat sick animals, using antibiotics to treat, prevent and control disease in food producing animals.”)

Last December, the Food and Drug Administration ruled that “it is important to use these drugs only when medically necessary,” given that 80 percent of antibiotics in the United States go to livestock farms, and overuse of these drugs poses a demonstrated threat to public health. For example, some women have been afflicted by antibiotic-resistant urinary tract infections that have been linked to overuse of antibiotics in poultry. But sustainability experts say the FDA’s new guidance is weak, since not only does it allow antibiotics to be used for prevention, but the recommendations are voluntary.

“The government kind of punted on this issue, when it announced voluntary standards,” says Michael Pollan, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, noting that it’s hard for the government to tackle two big industries at the same time—Big Agriculture and Big Pharma. “But if McDonald’s committed to getting rid of antibiotics, that would be a huge deal, it would change the industry.”

Industry experts say that it’s definitely possible for McDonalds to make this change. When Chipotle switched to sustainable, antibiotic-free beef, in increased prices by only about 25 to 50 cents per burrito (the price of antibiotic-free pork is a bit higher.) “Our customers are willing to pay a little more for food they recognize as being better,” says Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold. He notes that Chipotle does have some trouble getting the antibiotic-free supply to meet its demand, but adds: “Having more companies use this kind of meat would likely result in faster changes within the supply system, and that could be a good thing.” Shake Shack, which has been serving antibiotic-free beef since the chain opened, says it only costs 15 to 20 percent more than regular beef. The costs are higher, spokesman Edwin Bragg says, but notes that McDonalds could change that. “If a restaurant company of McDonalds’ size could do this on a large scale, it could change the paradigm.”

And Pollan says that this change needs to come sooner, rather than later: “I think it’s just hitting us. We’re now dealing with infectious microbes that are resistant to most antibiotics we have. We’re already paying a price and it’s going to get worse.”

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Will McDonald’s Stop Serving Big Macs With a Side of Antibiotics?

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Quick Reads: "Extreme Medicine" by Kevin Fong

by ESGMarie Posted on February 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Extreme Medicine

By Kevin Fong

THE PENGUIN PRESS

The devil’s in the physiological details as physician, NASA adviser, and outdoor fanatic Kevin Fong explores how feats at the edge of possibility—from the first major Antarctica expedition a century ago to the first manned landing on Mars at some future date—rely upon and, in turn, inform an ever-greater understanding of our own biology. With clear, evocative prose, he takes readers to ocean depths and mountaintops, and also deep within our bodies, in this entertaining exploration of human limits.

This review originally appeared in our January/February 2014 issue of Mother Jones.

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Quick Reads: "Extreme Medicine" by Kevin Fong

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Do Sex Traffickers Really Target the Super Bowl?

by rikkiqlyons Posted on February 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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For the past few years, as January comes to an end, the media and government officials sound an ominous warning: Sex trafficking will be on the rise during the Super Bowl. Because of the sporting event, “the cruelty of human trafficking goes on for several weeks,” said Rep. Christopher Smith of New Jersey, the site of this year’s Super Bowl. John McCain’s wife, Cindy, has called the Super Bowl “the largest human-trafficking venue on the planet.” As their logic goes, hundreds of thousands of fun-seeking fans will descend on New Jersey and New York this weekend. With the crowds will come an increased demand for sex, and, in turn, sex trafficking.

But as several publications have noted, data from the past few years doesn’t support this link—only four arrests were made during coordinated sweeps at the last three Super Bowls combined. Bradley Myles, the CEO of anti-trafficking nonprofit Polaris Project, which houses the National Human Trafficking Hotline, told Mother Jones that “we haven’t seen a great deal of evidence that there is a massive rise in trafficking during the Super Bowl,” adding that the hotline will “staff up modestly” but “doesn’t experience a major increase in calls.”

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Do Sex Traffickers Really Target the Super Bowl?

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Here’s What People Are Saying About the Big Keystone XL Report

by KennethCovingto Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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The end is in sight for the tumultuous public debate over the Keystone XL pipeline. On Friday, the State Department released its Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for TransCanada Corporation’s controversial pipeline project—and concluded that approving the pipeline to carry oil from Alberta’s tar sands would have little impact on climate change.

The environmental assessment is one of the last major reports awaited by President Obama before he decides whether or not to approve construction of the pipeline. In his June speech on climate change, Obama said he would sanction the pipeline “only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” The pipeline requires State Department review because it crosses the international border between the US and Canada.

Obama’s final decision is still weeks away. But reactions to the report are already plentiful—here’s a sampling.

A statement from 350.org, the environmental organization founded by climate change activist Bill McKibben, reads, in part, “The President has already laid out a climate test for Keystone XL, that it can’t significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions. It’s clear that Keystone XL fails that test…the pipeline would pose an astronomical cost to our climate and a huge risk to families along the pipeline route. Keystone XL will fuel the climate crisis, which means more drought, more fires, more extreme weather events, and a more cost to our economy and the environment.”

Larry Schweiger, the president of the National Wildlife Federation, tells the Washington Post:

Regardless of what the EIS says, the Canadians have admitted that the amount of carbon they’re going to be releasing from the tar sands will increase Canada’s total emissions by 38 percent by 2030 instead of reducing emissions when all the science says that’s what we need to do in order to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Cindy Schild, senior manager for refining and oil sands policy at the American Petroleum Institute, told Bloomberg News, “If they can’t show this project is in our national interest, what is? The only thing left is for the president to decide that this project is in our national interest.”

Brian Straessle, a spokesman for API, added, “The president has had five years of inaction on the Keystone XL pipeline. If 2014 is really his ‘year of action,’ he should start by approving Keystone.”

In a statement, Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s international program director, said, “This is far from over. Next we must address whether the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would be in America’s national interest. To that question, there is only one answer: No. The evidence is overwhelming that this project would significantly worsen carbon pollution, endanger our farms, our homes and our fresh water, create few jobs and transport dirty tar sands to the Gulf for export.”

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Here’s What People Are Saying About the Big Keystone XL Report

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Friday Cat Blogging – 31 January 2014

by PhilomenaJephco Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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It rained yesterday here in Southern California. I’d put the total damage at a hundredth of an inch, and wunderground.com says I have it about right. It was more like a heavy fog than real rain. But just like those Atlantans freaked out by two inches of snow, it was enough to send Domino scurrying for the warmth and protection of a blanket, which someone had considerately put right on top of her faux sheepskin pod. It turned out to be a great way to ride out the storm.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 31 January 2014

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If Bing Wants to Attract Power Users, It Needs an Advanced Search Page

by Rad7edzw Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Matt Yglesias embarks on a short tour d’horizon of Microsoft’s future today and ends with Redmond’s white whale of a search engine:

And then there’s Bing. I am obsessed with Bing. Not because I use Bing or because Bing is a commercially important product but because Bing is a socially important product. Steve Ballmer’s heroic determination to compete with Google on search has helped us resolve a lot of very thorny issues that would arise if Google Web Search became a monopoly product. But while we all (in some ways even including Google) owe Ballmer a debt of thanks for doing this, it’s far from clear that it’s been a smart business decision for Microsoft. All the “Scroogled” ads in the world aren’t going to turn this into a market-leading product, and Google at this point seems to be benefiting from both superior engineering and strong network effects. But what will we do if Bing goes away?

I’ve used Bing. It works fine. In some ways it’s better than Google. In others it’s not. But there’s a very specific reason I’ve never switched: Bing has no advanced search page. Oh, you can do an advanced search if you care to remember the syntax for all the operators, but like millions of other people, I don’t care to do that. Google, conversely, makes it easy for me to do an advanced search. They also allow me to restrict a search to a date range, which is very, very handy.

Now, it’s true that most people don’t ever do an advanced search of any kind. They just type a few words into the search box and press Enter, which is one of the reasons that 99 percent of the world is hopelessly incompetent at searching the internet. But serious users use it, and it’s serious users who can end up being evangelists for your products. So why not add an advanced search page? The cost is basically zero, so it’s not like there’s really any downside. What’s the holdup?

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If Bing Wants to Attract Power Users, It Needs an Advanced Search Page

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Here’s a New Attempt to Fight the Scourge of Publication Bias

by BennieW87ooqw Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tyler Cowen points today to a wonky but interesting new paper about publication bias. This is a problem endemic to scientific research that’s based on statistical analysis. Basically, researchers only publish something if their results are positive and significant. If their results are in the very large “can’t really tell for sure if anything is happening” space, they shove the paper in a file drawer and it never sees the light of day.

Here’s an example. Suppose several teams coincidentally decide to study the effect of carrots on baldness. Most of the teams find no effect and give up. But by chance, one team happens to find an effect. These statistical outliers happen occasionally, after all. So they publish. And since that’s the only study anyone ever sees, suddenly there’s a flurry of interest in using carrots to treat baldness.

The authors of the new paper apply a statistical insight that corrects for this by creating something called a p-curve. Their idea is that if the true effect of something is X, and you do a bunch of studies, then statistical chance means that you’ll get a range of results arrayed along a curve and centering on X. However, if you look at the published literature, you’ll never see the full curve. You’ll see only a subset of the curve that contains the results that were positive and significant.

But this is enough: “Because the shape of p-curve is a function exclusively of sample size and effect size, and sample size is observed, we simply find the free parameter that obtains the best overall fit.” What this means is that because p-curves have a known shape, just looking at the small section of the p-curve that’s visible allows you to estimate the size of the full curve. And this in turn allows you to estimate the true effect size just as if you had read all the studies, not just the ones that got published.

So how good is this? “As one may expect,” say the authors, “p-curve is more precise when it is based on studies with more observations and when it is based on more studies.” So if there’s only one study, it doesn’t do you much good. Left unsaid is that this technique also depends on whether nonsignificant results are routinely refused publication. One of the examples they use is studies of whether raising the minimum wage increases unemployment, and they conclude that once you correct for publication bias, the literature finds no effect at all (red bar). But as Cowen points out, “I am not sure the minimum wage is the best example here, since a ‘no result’ paper on that question seems to me entirely publishable these days and indeed for some while.” In other words, if a paper that finds no effect is as publishable as one that does, there might be no publication bias to correct.

Still, the whole thing is interesting. The bottom line is that in many cases, it’s fairly safe to assume that nonsignificant results aren’t being published, and that in turn means that you can extrapolate the p-curve to estimate the actual average of all the studies that have been conducted. And when you do, the average effect size almost always goes down. It’s yet another reason to be cautious about accepting statistical results until they’ve been widely replicated. For even more reasons to be skeptical, see here.

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Here’s a New Attempt to Fight the Scourge of Publication Bias

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Koch-Tied Groups Funded GOP Effort to Mess With Electoral College Rules

by JuliaPage Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last election season, a shadowy nonprofit pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into a campaign to change how electoral votes are counted. The group didn’t disclose who was funding its efforts—a fact that Mother Jones highlighted in a story titled “Who’s Paying for the GOP’s Plan to Hijack the 2012 Election?” But now, thanks to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonpartisan government watchdog, it’s clear that organizations with ties to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch footed at least some of the bill.

Each state and the District of Columbia has a certain number of electoral votes, based on their population, and they get to decide for themselves how those votes should be allotted. Currently, every state except Maine and Nebraska gives all of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote. But in 2011, GOP lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin introduced bills that would divide electoral votes among candidates based on how many congressional districts they won. Because Republicans drew the boundaries of the districts in those states, this scheme would be almost certain to hand Republican presidential candidates the majority of their electoral votes—even if more voters cast ballots for Democrats. (Read more about how the plan would work here.) Presuming the race is close enough, this could decide the nationwide outcome.

In the case of Pennsylvania, a mysterious nonprofit called All Votes Matter spent large sums lobbying for these changes. Local officials wondered about its funding sources. “They raised an awful lot of money very quickly—$300,000 in just a few days,” Democratic Pennsylvania state Sen. Daylin Leach told Mother Jones at the time. “We’re all curious where that level of funding comes from.” But All Votes Matter didn’t disclose its donors, nor did it have to. The group is organized as a 501(c)4 “social welfare” nonprofit, which means that it can spend money on politics while keeping its donors secret. (Such groups are not supposed to spend more than half of their budget on political causes, but IRS enforcement is slack.) Thus the public knew little about the agendas behind this effort to upend the mechanics of presidential elections.

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Koch-Tied Groups Funded GOP Effort to Mess With Electoral College Rules

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Wide Receiver Turned Foreign Policy Wonk? Donté Stallworth’s Second Act

by JosetteOneil Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Even if you don’t like football, you’ve probably heard of Donte’ Stallworth. Back in March 2009, the then-Cleveland Browns wide receiver made news when, driving drunk the morning after a night of partying with friends, he struck and killed a pedestrian crossing a Miami street.

Stallworth ended up serving just 30 days in jail. He also reached a financial settlement with the victim’s family and was suspended by the NFL for the entire 2009 season, but he couldn’t dodge being seen as just another celebrity escaping justice by virtue of being rich and famous. After his return to football in 2010, Stallworth never again was quite the same. He was a free agent for the entire 2013 season, and after 10 years in the league, his time in football might be over.

For most, that’d be the end of life in the limelight. But Stallworth has gotten a jump on an unusual second act: On the strength of his social-media savvy and his passion for foreign-policy wonkery, he has built a Twitter following of some 143,000 users, who check in with @DonteStallworth to get his take on everything from the latest blown call to the last Snowden revelation. And along with Chris Kluwe and Richard Sherman, he’s pushing back against the dumb-jock stereotype, one tweet at a time.

I recently caught up with Stallworth to talk about his future in the NFL, football and concussions, and how he uses Twitter to interact with the world.

Mother Jones: First of all, given that you last played for Washington, what’s your take on the controversy over the team’s name?

Donte’ Stallworth: I’ve heard both sides of the argument. I don’t know. I mean for one, I do feel like the name itself is obviously—it’s a derogatory term toward a certain racial and ethnic group. However, at the same time, I do know that there have been many Native people—I don’t like to call them “Native Americans,” I guess, definitely not “Indians”—I’ve seen and read a lot about there’s a big number of Natives that don’t mind the Redskins name and they actually embrace it. Although there are a number of groups as well that are opposed to it.

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Wide Receiver Turned Foreign Policy Wonk? Donté Stallworth’s Second Act

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Are Fitbit, Nike, and Garmin Planning to Sell Your Personal Fitness Data?

by bestpage Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Lately, fitness-minded Americans have started wearing sporty wrist-band devices that track tons of data: Weight, mile splits, steps taken per day, sleep quality, sexual activity, calories burned—sometimes, even GPS location. People use this data to keep track of their health, and are able send the information to various websites and apps. But this sensitive, personal data could end up in the hands of corporations looking to target these users with advertising, get credit ratings, or determine insurance rates. In other words, that device could start spying on you—and the Federal Trade Commission is worried.

“Health data from a woman’s connected device, may be collected and then sold to data brokers and other companies she does not know exist,” Jessica Rich, director of the Bureau for Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, said in a speech on Tuesday for Data Privacy Day. “These companies could use her information to market other products and services to her; make decisions about her eligibility for credit, employment, or insurance; and share with yet other companies. And many of these companies may not maintain reasonable safeguards to protect the data they maintain about her.”

Several major US-based fitness device companies contacted by Mother Jones—Fitbit, Garmin, and Nike—say they don’t sell personally identifiable information collected from fitness devices. But privacy advocates warn that the policies of these firms could allow them to sell data, if they ever choose to do so.

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Are Fitbit, Nike, and Garmin Planning to Sell Your Personal Fitness Data?

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