Tag Archives: western

The Case Against Chlorinated Tap Water

by IDSMoisesjfofrr Posted on August 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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The chlorination of municipal tap water is considered one of the 20th century’s best public health ideas. The American Water Works Association credits the practice with increasing life expectancy by 50 percent over the past century by virtually eliminating water-borne diseases such as typhoid fever and cholera. But chlorine in drinking water can cause health risks of its own. And while some of the of those risks, such as reactions with organic compounds that can yield toxic byproducts, are relatively well understood and managed, at least one has been largely overlooked: The effect of chlorinated drinking water on the beneficial bacteria in our guts.

The notion that our bodies’ 100 trillion bacteria act as a crucial internal ecosystem, a sort of sixth human organ, has only recently gained currency among mainstream scientists. Researchers now believe a lack of beneficial bacteria in the gut can trigger certain autoimmune diseases, among them diabetes, asthma, and even neurological conditions such as autism. Those conditions have spread in step with Western society’s war on germs, which has scorched our good bacteria along with the bad, throwing our bodies’ microbiomes off balance in the same way that a slashed and burned rainforest becomes susceptible to invasive weeds.

Jeff Leach is a leading microbiome researcher and founder of the American Gut Project, which aims to sequence the microbiomes of tens of thousands of Americans. Leach suspects that several factors may impede bacterial diversity in Americans, among them the profligate use of antibiotics, over-consumption of processed foods, and, at least to some extent, consumption of chlorine in tap water. “It’s something I’ve discussed with a number of other microbiologists,” he replied when I asked about the possibility. “In short, nobody has done the research, but we are certain that there is an impact.”

Based on studies of chlorine’s effects on human cells, the Environmental Protection Agency sets the safe level in drinking water at no more than four parts per million. Even that dilute level can wipe out lots other life forms, however, as anyone knows who has filled a goldfish bowl from the tap.

There’s no debate that chlorinating our water kills off a wide array of malignant bacteria—just try drinking the tap water in countries that don’t fully disinfect it. Much less is known, however, about chlorine’s effect on good bacteria that help preserve healthy digestive systems. We simply don’t know enough about the microbial ecosystem in the human gut to identify every type of bacteria that’s important, much less how well those bacteria survive when we guzzle mildly chlorinated tap water.

Still, some tangential research suggests cause for concern. A 1987 Toxicology study found that consumption of water with even fairly low levels of monochloramine, a commonly used disinfectant that persists in drinking water longer than chlorine, disrupted the immune systems of rats—a finding that’s notable given the strong link between the human immune system and gut microbes.

Chlorine in tap water is also known to kill microbes in soil—watch out, home gardeners!—though it doesn’t penetrate deep into the ground, and microbial populations typically bounce back quickly after watering.

Though the risks of chlorine in tap water might justify purchasing a low-cost home water filter that can remove it, it’s definitely premature to back off of requirements to chlorinate or otherwise disinfect municipal drinking water, as some Wisconsin state legislators proposed a few years ago.

“Chlorination has done tremendous good, so the default is to continue as is,” Martin Blaser, the director of the Human Microbiome Project, told me, “but whether or not there are subtler effects needs to be studied.”

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The Case Against Chlorinated Tap Water

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Westerners Are Flocking to Iraq’s Top Terror Group—and There Seems to Be Very Little We Can Do About It

by LannyCurtiss Posted on August 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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In May, Moner Mohammed Abusalha, a 22-year-old American who had joined Jabhat al-Nusra, an Al-Qaeda-allied group in Syria, drove a bomb-laden truck into a restaurant in the northern province of Idlib, killing dozens.* Before carrying out this suicide bombing, the New York Times reported last week, Abusalha had briefly returned home to his native Florida. Abusalha’s story underscores a mounting concern among Western national security officials, for though he detonated his truck bomb in Syria he could have easily struck within the US. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State, the Sunni extremist group that has seized control of a swath of territory in Syria and northern Iraq, has enlisted thousands of fundamentalist volunteers from Germany, France, the Netherlands, Australia, the US, and elsewhere. Counterterrorism officials fear that jihadists like Abusalha, holding European Union or US passports, can all too easily return to their home countries and possibly import terrorism. US officials, says former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission, are “scared, really scared.” FBI Director James Comey recently told reporters that the threat of Westerners with European Union and US passports joining the Islamic State “keeps me up at night” and that he believes another wave of September 11-style attacks are a possibility. Attorney General Eric Holder told ABC News, “in some ways, it’s more frightening than anything I’ve seen as attorney general.”

Recruits have flocked to Baghdadi’s cause from places such as Austria, where in April, two girls, 15 and 16 years old, left their homes in Vienna and flew to Adana, Turkey, leaving notes saying they had “chosen the right path”—that is, they were likely trying to join up with the Islamic State. A month earlier, a young Austrian man, now a foot soldier in Baghdadi’s crusade, posted footage online of Islamic State fighters obliterating a Shia mosque in the Syrian city of Raqqa, according to Der Standard. All told, about 100 young Austrians have left the country to answer Baghdadi’s call for jihadist recruits.

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Westerners Are Flocking to Iraq’s Top Terror Group—and There Seems to Be Very Little We Can Do About It

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That Antioxidant You’re Taking Is Snake Oil

by DominiqSikora Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Plants can’t move. They’re sitting targets for every insect, two- and four-legged creature, and air-borne fungus and bacteria that swirls around them. But they’re not defenseless, we’ve learned. Under pressure from millions of years of attacks, they’ve evolved to produce compounds that repel these predators. Known as phyotochemicals, these substances can be quite toxic to humans. You probably wouldn’t enjoy the jolt of urushiol you’d get from a salad of toxicodendron radicans (poison ivy) leaves.

But other phytochemicals have emerged as crucial elements of a healthful human diet. Indeed, they’re the source of several essential vitamins, including A, C, and E. But according to an eye-opening Nautilus article by the excellent science journalist Moises Velasquez-Manoff (author of a recent Mother Jones piece on the gut microbiome), our view of how these defensive compounds benefit us might be wildly wrong.

The accepted dietary dogma goes like this: The phytochemicals we ingest from plants act as antioxidants—that is, they protect us from the oxidative molecules, known as “free radicals,” that our own cells produce as a waste product, and that have become associated with a range of degenerative diseases including cancer and heart trouble.

It’s true that many phytochemicals and the vitamins they carry have been proven in lab settings to have antioxidant properties—that is, they prevent oxidization. And so, Velasquez-Manoff shows, the idea gained currency that fruits and vegetables are good for us because their high antioxidant load protects us from free radicals. And from there, it was easy to leap to the conclusion that you could slow aging and stave off disease by isolating certain phytochemicals and ingesting them in pill form—everything from multivitamins to trendy antioxidants like resveratrol. “A supplement industry now worth $23 billion yearly in the U.S. took root,” he notes.

And yet, antioxidant pills have proven to be a bust. In February, a group of independent US medical researchers assessed 10 years of supplement research and found that pills loaded with vitamin E and beta-carotene (the stuff that gives color to carrots and other orange vegetables) pills are at best useless and at worst harmful—that is, they may trigger lung cancer in some people. Just this month, a meta-analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that antioxidant supplements “do not prevent cancer and may accelerate it.”

And a 2009 study found that taking antioxidant supplements before exercise actually negates most of the well-documented benefits of physical exertion: That is, taking an antioxidant pill before a run is little better than doing neither and just sitting on the couch.

So what gives? Velasquez-Manoff points to emerging science suggesting that phytochemicals’ antioxidant properties may have thrown us off the trail of what really makes them good for us. He offers two key clues. The first is that plants produce them in response to stress—e.g., pathogenic bacteria, hungry insects. The second is that exercise itself is a form of self-imposed stress: You punish your body by exerting it, and it responds by getting stronger. Leaning on the work of Mark Mattson, Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, and other researchers, Velasquez-Manoff proposes that phytochemicals help us not by repelling oxidant stresses, but by triggering them.

Consider that exercise actually generates free radicals in our muscles—the very thing, according to current dogma, that makes us vulnerable to cancer and aging. But a while after a bout at the gym or on the running trail, these free radicals disappear, replaced by what Velasquez-Manoff calls “native antioxidants.” That’s because, he writes, “post-exercise, the muscle cells respond to the oxidative stress by boosting production of native antioxidants.” And these home-grown chemicals, “amped up to protect against the oxidant threat of yesterday’s exercise, now also protect against other ambient oxidant dangers” like ones from air pollution and other environmental stressors, he writes. In the exercise study, the supplements may have interrupted the process, the study’s main author, Swiss researcher Michael Ristow, tells Velasquez-Manoff—they prevent the body from producing its antioxidants, but what they deliver doesn’t offset the loss.

Yet phytochemicals found in whole foods—”the hot flavors in spices, the mouth-puckering tannins in wines, or the stink of Brussels sprouts”—may work on our bodies much as exercise does. Velasquez-Manoff writes: “Our bodies recognize them as slightly toxic, and we respond with an ancient detoxification process aimed at breaking them down and flushing them out.”

To bolster his case, Velasquez-Manoff cites the example of sulforaphane, the compound that gives broccoli and other members of the brassica family of vegetables—such as Brussels sprouts—their sulfurous smell when they cook. It’s what’s known as an “antifeedant”—i.e., it’s pungency discourages grazing (and makes many people hate Brussels sprouts, etc). Unlike many phytochemicals, sulforaphane isn’t an antioxidant at all, but rather a mild oxidant—that is, it mimics free radicals and thus under the old dietary dogma, we should avoid it. And yet…

When sulforaphane enters your blood stream, it triggers release in your cells of a protein called Nrf2. This protein, called by some the “master regulator” of aging, then activates over 200 genes. They include genes that produce antioxidants, enzymes to metabolize toxins, proteins to flush out heavy metals, and factors that enhance tumor suppression, among other important health-promoting functions. In theory, after encountering this humble antifeedant in your dinner, your body ends up better prepared for encounters with toxins, pro-oxidants from both outside and within your body, immune insults, and other challenges that might otherwise cause harm.

In this theory, what causes cancer and general aging isn’t oxidative stress itself, but rather a poor response to oxidative stress—”a creeping inability to produce native antioxidants when needed, and a lack of cellular conditioning generally.” And that’s where the modern Western lifestyle, marked by highly processed food and a lack of physical exertion, comes in.

The National Institute on Aging’s Mattson calls this the “couch potato” problem. Absent regular hormetic stresses, including exercise and stimulation by plant antifeedants, “cells become complacent,” he says. “Their intrinsic defenses are down-regulated.” Metabolism works less efficiently. Insulin resistance sets in. We become less able to manage pro-oxidant threats. Nothing works as well as it could. And this mounting dysfunction increases the risk for a degenerative disease.

While this emerging view of phytochemcials is compelling, Velasquez-Manoff acknowledges that it isn’t fully settled. For one thing, it’s unclear why isolated phytochemicals in pills don’t seem to work the same magic as they do in the form of whole foods. Here’s Velasquez-Manoff:

Proper dosage may be one problem, and interaction between the isolates used and particular gene variants in test subjects another. Interventions usually test one molecule, but fresh fruits and vegetables present numerous compounds at once. We may benefit most from these simultaneous exposures. The science on the intestinal microbiota promises to further complicate the picture; our native microbes ferment phytonutrients, perhaps supplying some of the benefit of their consumption. All of which highlights the truism that Nature is hard to get in a pill.

But human nutrition is a deeply interesting topic precisely because it resists being settled. As Michael Pollan showed in his 2008 book In Defense of Food, humans have adapted to a wide variety of diets—from the Mediterranean and Mesoamerican ones based mostly on plants, to the Inuit ones focusing heavily on fish. The one diet that hasn’t worked very well is the most calibrated, supplemented, and “fortified” of all: the Western one.

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That Antioxidant You’re Taking Is Snake Oil

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A 70-Year-Old Reflects On the So-Called "American Century"

by LashundU23 Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

* Seventy-three years ago, on February 17, 1941, as a second devastating global war approached, Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines, called on his countrymen to “create the first great American Century.” Luce died in 1967 at age 69. Life, the pictorial magazine no home would have been without in my 1950s childhood, ceased to exist as a weekly in 1972 and as a monthly in 2000; Time, which launched his career as a media mogul, is still wobbling on, a shadow of its former self. No one today could claim that this is Time‘s century, or the American Century, or perhaps anyone else’s. Even the greatest empires now seem to have shortened lifespans. The Soviet Century, after all, barely lasted seven decades. Of course, only the rarest among us live to be 100, which means that at 70, like Time, I’m undoubtedly beginning to wobble, too.

* The other day I sat down with an old friend, a law professor who started telling me about his students. What he said aged me instantly. They’re so young, he pointed out, that their parents didn’t even come of age during the Vietnam War. For them, he added, that war is what World War I was to us. He might as well have mentioned the Mongol conquests or the War of the Roses. We’re talking about the white-haired guys riding in the open cars in Veteran’s Day parades when I was a boy. And now, it seems, I’m them.

* In March 1976, accompanied by two friends, my wife and I got married at City Hall in San Francisco, and then adjourned to a Chinese restaurant for a dim sum lunch. If, while I was settling our bill of perhaps $30, you had told me that, almost half a century in the future, marriage would be an annual $40 billion dollar business, that official couplings would be preceded by elaborate bachelor and bachelorette parties, and that there would be such a thing as destination weddings, I would have assumed you were clueless about the future. On that score at least, the nature of the world to come was self-evident and elaborate weddings of any sort weren’t going to be part of it.

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A 70-Year-Old Reflects On the So-Called "American Century"

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Quick Reads: "Unruly Places" by Alastair Bonnett

by AlanKXQWcflxcog Posted on July 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Unruly Places

By Alastair Bonnett

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

By now, given the pace of technology, you’d think every square inch of the planet’s surface had already been discovered, scrutinized, and made accessible online. In this catalog of the world’s forgotten, ignored, and phantom places, British geographer Alastair Bonnett shows us that our maps still hold plenty of secrets. Take Wittenoom, an asbestos-mining center turned ghost town in Western Australia that vanished from official records—but not from the face of the earth. Or the no man’s land between Senegal and Guinea that is host to entire nationless villages. There’s also Sandy Island, a South Pacific sandbar that existed on Google Earth until 2012—when an Australian expedition discovered that it never actually existed. The geography of the unknown has never been so comprehensible.

This review originally appeared in our July/August issue of Mother Jones.

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Quick Reads: "Unruly Places" by Alastair Bonnett

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A Scary Super Typhoon Is Bearing Down on Japan…and Its Nuclear Plants

by FlorentButton Posted on July 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Japanese forecasters are calling it a “once in decades storm.” And at Kadena Air Base, a US military installation on the island of Okinawa, one commander dubbed the storm “the most powerful typhoon forecast to hit the island in 15 years.”

Super Typhoon Neoguri, currently sporting maximum sustained winds of nearly 150 miles per hour and just shy of Category 5 strength, is heading straight at Japan’s islands, and its outer bands are currently battering the island of Okinawa. Here’s the forecast map from the Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center. As you can see, the forecast for tomorrow brings the storm up to maximum sustained winds of 140 knots (161 miles per hour), or Category 5 strength (click for larger version):

Joint Typhoon Warning Center.

The Western Pacific basin, home to typhoons (which are elsewhere called tropical cyclones or hurricanes), is known for having the strongest storms on Earth, such as last year’s devastating Super Typhoon Haiyan. July is, generally, when the Western Pacific typhoon season really starts getting into gear, but August, September, and October are usually busier months.

Neoguri will weaken by the time it strikes Japan’s main islands, but as meteorologist Jeff Masters observes, “the typhoon is so large and powerful that it will likely make landfall with at least Category 2 strength, causing major damage in Japan.”

One pressing issue is the safety of Japan’s nuclear plants. In the wake of the 2011 tsunami and the subsequent disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, it’s important to consider whether a similar vulnerability arises here.

Fukushima is located north of Tokyo on Japan’s largest island, Honshu. By the time the typhoon reaches that point, it is forecast to be considerably weaker. But there are a number of other reactors spread across the islands; perhaps most exposed will be the southwestern island of Kyushu, where the current forecast has the typhoon making its first major landfall.

According to reporting by Reuters, there are two nuclear plants on the island. A company spokeswoman for Kyushu Electric Power Co. told the news agency that it “has plans in place throughout the year to protect the plants from severe weather.”

Will that be good enough? According to Edwin Lyman, senior scientist in the global security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, the good news overall is that Japan’s nuclear plants are currently shut down, awaiting permission to restart as they institute stronger safety protections, including the construction of higher seawalls. A shut-down plant is still not without risks, because “you still have to provide cooling for the fuel,” says Lyman. But overall, he thinks that the newer protections, combined with the fact that the plants have been cooling while shut down, suggests less vulnerability than existed in 2011.

“I would say that they’re probably in a better position than they were to withstand massive flooding from a typhoon, and the fact that the reactors have been shut for some time, increases the level of confidence,” Lyman says. “But there’s still issues, and we’ll just have to hope that if there’s a massive flooding event at one of the reactors, that the measures they’ve already put into place will be adequate to cope with them.”

Here’s a stunning NASA image of Neoguri, snapped yesterday:

Typhoon Neoguri on July 6 NASA

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A Scary Super Typhoon Is Bearing Down on Japan…and Its Nuclear Plants

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Berkeley could mandate climate warnings on gas pumps

by ThaliaZjpfqhrmb Posted on June 17, 2014

Berkeley could mandate climate warnings on gas pumps

By

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Motorists in the famously lefty city of Berkeley, Calif., could one day be confronted with a “CO2 ALERT” when they fill up their tanks.

Berkeley’s Community Environmental Advisory Commission has approved a proposal to mandate climate warning labels on gas pumps. It would require the approval of the city council before it could take affect; a council vote is expected in the coming months.

City of Berkeley

The idea is to mimic warning labels on cigarettes. It’s being pushed by Beyond The Pump, a group of San Francisco Bay Area activists associated with 350 Bay Area. If approved by the council, Berkeley would become the first American city to impose such a requirement. (Similar, but more specific, labeling proposals have been floating around Europe for years.) The tentative label design is shown on the right.

“I’d like to see this become a statewide policy for transportation emissions,” campaign manager Jamie Brooks told Grist. “We’d like to see it as a systematic point-of-sale ordinance, like the cigarette packs. We want to connect cause and effect for consumers.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the oil industry is freaking out at the idea that its customers could be confronted with reminders about the climatic effects of their gas-guzzling practices. In a letter sent to Berkeley’s planning department last week, Western States Petroleum Association President Catherine Reheis-Boyd argued that such a rule would be unconstitutional, setting the stage for a possible lawsuit. “Far less restrictive means exist to disseminate this information to the general public without imposing onerous restrictions on businesses and forcing unwanted speech in violation of the First Amendment,” wrote Reheis-Boyd.

She then compared the petroleum industry’s nascent struggle against climate warning labels with the historic free-speech movement at U.C. Berkeley in the 1960s. “Perhaps no city in our nation has as rich a tradition in the exercise of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech as the City of Berkeley,” Reheis-Boyd wrote. “Throughout times of tremendous civil upheaval in this country, citizens of this City have exercised great courage in resisting efforts by those at all levels of state and federal government to force them to agree with or advance government opinions.”

OK, thanks for the disingenuous lecture. Now, about all that global warming?


Source
New proposal would require climate change warning labels at city gas stations, The Daily Californian

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin 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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Berkeley could mandate climate warnings on gas pumps

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Live Coverage: Obama Takes His Boldest Step Ever to Fight Climate Change

by ElveraFavenc Posted on June 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Live Coverage: Obama Takes His Boldest Step Ever to Fight Climate Change

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The Scorecard in Ukraine Is Murkier Than Most Pundits Think

by VirginiaGwl Posted on May 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Doyle McManus says that Vladimir Putin has played a shrewd game in Ukraine:

Here’s the score card: Putin has pocketed Crimea, the first territory in Europe to be seized by force since World War II. (On paper, the United States and the European Union are still demanding that he give the peninsula back to Ukraine, but in private, their leaders concede that’s unlikely to happen.) He has forced the European Union to put the brakes on Ukraine’s progress toward membership in the Western economic club. He has kept most of Russia’s business with the West intact and signed a big new natural gas deal with China. Now all he has to do is wait for Western attention to Ukraine’s travails to wane, as it probably will.

….”Even Petro Poroshenko is saying it’s time for normalization with Moscow,” she noted. “He knows who’s going to call the shots over Ukraine’s future: not Brussels, not Washington. It’s Moscow.”

This isn’t a ridiculous read of the situation, but I think it’s missing something key: compared to what? Sure, Putin might have found a way to salvage his disastrous intervention in Ukraine, but the right way to look at this is to compare Russia’s situation now to its situation in, say, October of last year. It’s true that Putin scuttled Ukraine’s free-trade deal with the EU, but look at the fallout. In order to turn things around after his incompetent diplomatic efforts failed, Putin was forced to intervene so clumsily that it inspired the Maidan protests that ended up causing Ukraine’s president to flee. He massed troops on Ukraine’s borders and used Russian special forces—again, disguised so clumsily that no one was fooled for even a second—to try to force a secession of the east. When that failed, Putin was forced to back down. He can pretend that he never had any intention of using military force in the first place, but no one takes that seriously and he knows it. His threat failed because the Russian military is weak and the American/EU sanctions had already begun to bite. He was hoping for a bloodless takeover, but he miscalculated badly and failed to get it.

So what’s the scorecard? On the plus side, Putin has Crimea. Maybe all by itself that was worth it—and if he’d been smart enough to stop there he might have come out ahead. But on the downside, Putin has demonstrated once again that Russia isn’t a reliable supplier of natural gas and will use it as a club whenever it feels like it. He’s earned the enmity of most of his neighbors. He’s gained nothing in Ukraine except the end of the EU association agreement, which was never a huge threat in the first place and will probably end up being implemented piecemeal over the next few years anyway. He’s damaged the Russian economy and set back relations with Europe. And sure, Poroshenko is saying it’s time for normalization with Moscow, but Putin had that back when Viktor Yanukovych was president.

So….Crimea. And possibly a slowdown in the pace of Ukraine’s integration with the West. That’s about it. But I wouldn’t underestimate the cost of this to Putin. Threats of military force are flashy, but unless you’re willing to back them up regularly, they do a lot more harm than good. I’m not sure why so many people who are generally clear-sighted about the drawbacks of military action suddenly get so smitten by it when it’s wielded by a thug like Putin. Hell, he doesn’t even use it well.

When the dust settles, it’s hard to see Putin gaining much from all this in the places that count. Regardless of the brave face they put on it, I’ll bet there aren’t many people in the inner sanctums of the Kremlin who think of the past six months as much of a triumph for Russia.

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The Scorecard in Ukraine Is Murkier Than Most Pundits Think

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National Briefing | Rockies: Colorado: Three Men Disappear After Mudslide

by Myrna Posted on May 27, 2014

Rescuers searched Monday for three men after a half-mile stretch of a ridge saturated with rain collapsed, sending mud sliding in a remote part of western Colorado. See original article:  National Briefing | Rockies: Colorado: Three Men Disappear After Mudslide ; ;Related ArticlesDot Earth Blog: Gavin Schmidt on Why Climate Models are Wrong, and ValuableNear-Average Hurricane Season Is Predicted for U.S. as El Niño Develops in the PacificEconomic View: Buying Insurance Against Climate Change ;

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National Briefing | Rockies: Colorado: Three Men Disappear After Mudslide

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