Tag Archives: rights-reserved

Milk Doesn’t Do a Body So Good After All

Mother Jones

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When I was a teenager, I drank a lot of milk. That made my bones strong, which is why I’ve been able to avoid fracturing my hip now that I’m over 50. Hooray for milk!

Except wait. Science™ has intruded on this idyllic marketing fantasy:

Researchers followed people for 22 years to see if drinking milk as a teenager affected the rate of hip fractures during the study period. What did they find? There were more than 1200 hip fractures in women and almost 500 hip fractures in men in the follow-up period. But it turns out that each additional glass of milk per day as teenagers was associated with a 9% HIGHER risk of hip fractures in men later in life. Drinking more milk had no effect in women.

In other words, regardless of what the ads say, as a teen there’s no protective effect of your “bones getting stronger” in terms of preventing hip fractures later in life by drinking milk. In fact, the evidence shows that it may make it more likely that males will develop hip fractures.

That’s a helluva thing, isn’t it? That Aaron Carroll is a real killjoy.

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Milk Doesn’t Do a Body So Good After All

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Friday Cat Blogging – 24 January 2014

Mother Jones

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Friday Cat Blogging – 24 January 2014

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Friday Cat Blogging – 10 January 2014

Mother Jones

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After her vacation last week, Domino is now tanned, rested, and ready for 2014. And what better way to start the year than with a classic cat-in-a-bag photo? I tried to lure her into a Microsoft bag (yeah, I went ahead and bought that Dell tablet), but she wasn’t interested. Is this a bad sign for Microsoft, or merely a preference for something that crinkles more invitingly? You be the judge.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 10 January 2014

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Chart of the Day: Being Poor Is Bad for Your Health

Mother Jones

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Hypoglycemia is an ever-present threat among diabetics who are being treated with insulin injections. Generally speaking, it’s caused by inadequate nutrition leading to dangerously low blood sugar, and it can usually be fixed by simply eating enough. But what if you’re poor, and at the end of the month you don’t have enough money left to buy adequate food? Adrianna McIntyre passes along this devastatingly simple chart that shows exactly what happens:

Take a look at the top three lines. Among those with high incomes, the risk of hypoglycemia is about the same all month long. But the red line shows the incidence of hypoglycemia among the poor. It goes down at the beginning of the month, when money is available for food, rises a bit in the middle of the month, and then jumps dramatically in the final week when money is tight. As a check to make sure that tight budgets really are at fault, the authors ran the same test on the incidence of appendicitis, which should be unrelated to income. It was.

McIntyre uses this as an object lesson: although policy wonks tend to focus a lot of attention on insurance and health care financing, there are plenty of other things that affect health. What’s more, solutions aren’t simple:

These findings also illustrate the difficulty in finding policy solutions to address health disparities. The authors note that food pantries and soup kitchens already ramp up staffing and resources toward the end of the month. We could explore different ways to distribute existing benefits, but that may have other negative impacts (ie: making it harder to pay rent or bills at the beginning of the month).

Nothing is ever easy.

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Chart of the Day: Being Poor Is Bad for Your Health

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Guess Who Gets the Most Brazen Federal Inflation Adjustment in the Country?

Mother Jones

I learned something new today. Apparently the federal government has a cap on the amount it’s willing to reimburse contractors for the salaries of their employees. If someone makes $50,000 per year, no problem. You can charge the feds for their entire salary if they’re working on government business. But if your company’s CEO makes $3 million per year, you can’t charge it all back to the feds even if 100 percent of the CEO’s time is spent on government contracts. The limit, set in 1998, was $340,000.

This cap was allowed to rise with inflation, so you’d figure that by 2011 it would be around $467,000. But no. It was $763,000. Why? Because ordinary inflation adjustments are for chumps, that’s why. For purposes of charging CEO overhead to the federal government, the cap was set at “the median amount of the compensation provided for the five most highly compensated employees of all publicly owned U.S. corporations with annual sales in excess of $50 million for the most recent fiscal year.”

Isn’t that fabulous? When it comes to the minimum wage, we don’t index for inflation at all. But for CEOs earning top-one-percent pay, we not only index for inflation, we index to the rise in CEO salaries. And since CEOs have been relentlessly voting themselves ever more astronomical compensation over the past few decades, we know that number is going to rise a whole lot faster than piddly old CPI. Ka-ching.

This comes via Lydia DePillis, who’d like to talk about raising the compensation floor, not just cutting the CEO cap back down to size. Good luck with that.

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Guess Who Gets the Most Brazen Federal Inflation Adjustment in the Country?

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Children Killed by Guns Since Newtown: Data from Mother Jones’ Investigation

Mother Jones

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A year after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mother Jones has analyzed the subsequent deaths of 194 children ages 12 and under who were reported in news accounts to have died in gun accidents, homicides, and suicides. They are spread across 43 states, from inner cities to tiny rural towns. Read the story here, see the interactive gallery here, and explore our full special report here.

(Click here for the Google Spreadsheet view of the below data, and click here to download in CSV, XLS, and TXT formats.)

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Children Killed by Guns Since Newtown: Data from Mother Jones’ Investigation

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for November 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Soldiers participating in the 2013 Best Warrior competition conduct physical training. U.S. Army photo by SPC Coty Kuhn.

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for November 27, 2013

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Friday Cat Blogging – 22 November 2013

Mother Jones

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Five quilts to go! Our year of quiltblogging is almost over. Today’s quilt doesn’t have a name, but Marian calls it a picnic quilt because it’s squarish and a bit of an odd size. So you should summon up a mental image of this quilt laid out in a park and covered with delicious lunchtime goodies. That’s probably what Domino is doing in this picture. In any case, it’s constructed out of 1930s repro charm squares, and it’s machine pieced and machine quilted.

In local cat news, an LA city councilman wants to allow Angelenos to own five cats, up from the currently allowed three. I have a suspicion that no one has ever paid much attention to this law in the first place, but hooray anyway. Next up: the feline council will be considering a proposal that raises the minimum number of human servants per cat. It’s expected to pass easily.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 22 November 2013

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Do Governors Make the Best Presidents?

Mother Jones

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Apparently the latest hot topic of conversation among our nation’s governors is the indisputable merit of electing a governor as our next president. I don’t have a lot to say about this. Instead, I offer only the brief table of postwar presidents below. If anyone can find any reason to prefer one column over the other, I’m all ears.

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Do Governors Make the Best Presidents?

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Quote of the Day: Chris Christie Suddenly Gets Shy

Mother Jones

From Chris Christie, suddenly getting shy about expressing an opinion on immigration reform:

Well, listen, I can have an opinion about lots of things, George, but we’re not going to go through all that this morning are we?

This came after Christie had wasted a good chunk of the morning by evading three previous questions about his views on immigration. I guess that once you become a serious presidential contender, that old-school Jersey bluntness has to be mothballed. Apparently Christie has caught the John McCain disease.

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Quote of the Day: Chris Christie Suddenly Gets Shy

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