Last year I posted a surprising Cochrane review which found that breast self-exams led to absolutely no benefit in breast cancer survival, while doubling the rate of biopsies (which contain their own set of risks) - and now a government panel of doctors and scientists are telling us that mammograms for younger women are equally unnecessary.

President Obama sees a problem, and he sees a solution.  The problem?  American students don't seem to be able to compete internationally.  The solution?  More hours and more days in school.  More years, in fact, as he has long been a proponent of universal preschool, promoting it even as studies continue to show little or no benefit.

In the AP article hosted at Yahoo that I linked above, we learn that in many of the Asian nations we often compare ourselves to, children actually spend fewer hours per year in school than American kids.  ( DOE solution ultimately about daycare ... )</div>

God bless & strengthen our new President

I just have a second to post this one.  The Washington Post reports a major study finding that when a pharmaceutical company funds a study, over 90% of the time, the study comes out in their favor.  When drugs go head-to-head, the winner is nearly always whoever funded the study.

A former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine explains ( How to skew ... )

Government is about to grow.  The state that believes it knows how to live our lives better than we do and manipulates us through money and law into doing it is about to swell.  I'm about to have a massive tax increase that will take away the income I've been using to help Tanisha. 

I mourn.

Thanks be to God!

We went to the hearing yesterday, ready for DFCS to throw the book at her.  Since they hadn't given her a petition beforehand, and there were no business hours between the removal and the hearing, we had no idea what the allegations were.  We were ready for them to dredge up anything and everything.

( Read more... )

Well, crap.  Remember Tanisha?  You know, the young poor single black mother of six who's working hard, paying her bills, keeping her children fed, clothed, sheltered, schooled, medically cared for, & much loved?

Today I had to tell my four year old that Maliq can't come to his birthday party tomorrow because the government took him away and we don't know where he is.

I had to answer my 7yo, asking what they did for Halloween, "Nothing - they were taken away from their mother last night and put in the home of a stranger."

You see, Tanisha committed the grievous crime of taking her 2yo with cerebral palsy to the ER when it appeared she just wasn't eating enough after several days of trying.  And the ER - well, they called DFCS.  And DFCS came to the house, looked around, saw no beds, and carted off all the children - without regard for the sweet child with CP's medical records (which show consistent care and a history of feeding issues) or the fact that the children's words, bodies, & fridge showed they're eating fine.  They even made the newborn's father & grandmother drive him over and took that breastfeeding baby away from its mother - for who knows how long?

I tell you, I have called and emailed everyone I can think of today, from friends to governors.  WSB's investigative reporters tell me this horror story comes to them FREQUENTLY - DFCS taking children away without any evidence of harm, immediate or otherwise.

"It happens all the time" isn't good enough for me.  This must stop.

When government gets too big for its britches, it says, "I know better than you do how to raise your children."  When women like Tanisha try to throw off the chains of years of bondage to government services, pulling herself up by her proverbial bootstraps, they cut the bootstraps, reshackle the chains, and throw her to the corner to remind her just who's the Massa.

Well, folks, she's not alone.  I'm here.  You're here.  Pray, friends.  Pray.

11/3: Update!

I just flipped past Mike Huckabee & he was talking about how he lost 100 lbs.  I decided to stay & listen a minute & he had some great, simple words.  He said he was motivated by a type 2 diabetes diagnosis (caused by sugar & refined carb intake) to do two things for the first time in his life:

1. Eat well. 
2. Exercise.

And in the first category, he had two principles:

1. If it comes through a car window, it's probably not food.
2. If it wasn't food 100 years ago, it's not food now.

He summed it up his "how to" with the statement that he had to give up everything Southerners eat: sugar & junk fried food.

Pretty good advice!  This is his new way of eating, not a short-term diet.  And yes, his diabetes is gone.

One aspect of the Hunger Challenge is sharing recipes made with items commonly available to Food Bank clients.  It's definitely a challenge - lots of beans, onions, carrots, & cabbage.  It seems to me that the recipes should also take into account what recipients are unlikely to have - a pantry full of herbs or unusual ingredients like tofu or papaya.

I started thinking about those items and realized that just one thing was missing to make a very common start to lots of gourmet dishes - it's a mirepoix!  A good mirepoix is the starter to all kinds of roasts, stews, & soups.  Since I spent most of my life hating celery (before I realized that organic celery is twice the flavor with none of the stringiness), I can attest that you can make a good starter with just two of the three.

They're also the flavor & nutrient boosting components of a good bone broth.  Or a veggie broth, for that matter!

( My Hambone soup & sauerkraut recipes ... )

Solidarity.  John Paul II made this a household word as he invited the world to stand in solidarity with the oppressed people of his native Poland. 

I was given a lesson in solidarity last month.  Meet Tanisha*.

She was walking on the side of a downtown highway that "people like me" never go on.  With toddlers on both shoulders and two more little ones in tow, ( Read more... )

So, I know that this isn't exactly a dollar *per* meal.  Because the dinner obviously costs way more than the breakfast & the lunch.  But if I were on food stamps, there's nothing that says that I have to spend evenly on each meal.  Of course, you also can't buy stuff the way I do on food stamps.  

Therein lies our problem.  It's a big one.  It's faced by tens of thousands of people every day.

I love this inspiring story of how one family avoided the processed food trap on almost no money for food: beans, greens, & cornbread two meals a day, every day but Christmas.  And in Nina Planck's great, fun book on Real Food, she reiterates something important - if you can't afford real, organic food, choose real over organic.  Roast beef over organic canned beef stew.  Green beans over "lowcarb" french fried onions.  Just real food.

Well, ( here's day two... )

I'm taking up the SF Food Bank's Hunger Challenge: a dollar per person for each meal this week.  Now, this is going to be hard to prove, b/c I add up my food budget yearly, not weekly or daily.  I guess we're on the honesty policy here.  :)

( Here's today ... )</div>

The San Francisco food bank is sponsoring a Hunger Challenge - can you live on $1 per meal?  (That's the average amount that someone on food stamps receives.)  I just found out about the blogger component to this, and really, I love the idea!  Raising awareness of what so many people live on, challenging us to live in solidarity with them, and donating the difference to help - brilliant! 

I was getting ready to live on beans & rice this week.  Ick.  Like this empathizing blogger, I envisioned going through the store and realizing again and again what I *couldn't* get.  It is really eye-opening to understand just what so many fellow Americans feel each time they try to shop for their family.

Then I did the math.  For our family of six, we're allotted $126 for the week.

But when you take the amount we spend in a year on food, & divide it by 52, in an ordinary week, buying only organic/pastured meat, produce, dairy, & eggs, we currently only spend $150.

So I thought that maybe part of the contribution I could make this week is contemplating what kind of changes could be made to food supply systems that would help others be able to eat a nourishing meal on that $1/meal.

( Real food on a dollar a meal ... )

Okay, I've been pondering the water thing for a while.  Can it really be necessary to drink 8 cups or more of water every day?  To do this, our ancestors would have done almost nothing but cart water for their large families & villages.  Maybe we're really supposed to have more water-rich veggies, fruits, soups, & fresh milk, with less water-sucking sweets & ill-prepared grains?

( Science + LYM's own experience ... )

When we played in the field during recess in elementary school, sometimes we would pull up a clump of taller, greener, more perfect looking grass.  And at the bottom of the grass, we discovered a cute little surprise - onions!  Little, tiny, baby wild onions.  I love the idea that something I could eat would grow wild in a random place.  (Of course, I dutifully hated onions...)

Then I grew up, got a big girl house, and lo! and behold! there were wild onions growing in my yard.
( Wild strawberries & blackberries & mint - oh, my! ... )

Years ago, a teacher in Wisconsin conducted an experiment with her class (p. 31).  They took 6 normal mice, put half in each of two cages, and fed them different diets for 3 months.  One set ate whole, natural food - you know, stuff you can imagine growing, like fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, whole rice or oats - and the other ate the stuff from the cafeteria.  The article doesn't specify, but I can imagine they mean pizza, American "cheese", Coke, hot dogs, candy, cookies, fries, mac & "cheese", white rice/noodles/buns, "riblets," waffles, canned fruit in heavy syrup, chicken patties, tater tots ...

Those mice went berserk.  While the "real food" mice continued to sleep & play normally,

( Well, what did the school do? ... )

( We've known for years that real food is best ... )

We know what we have to do.

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece last month, Dalmia & Snell implore us to protect our kids from preschool.  They overview the findings that lasting benefits have only been seen in children who are both low IQ and impoverished.  Even Head Start showed no lasting gain, and for middle & upper class children, preschool offers no benefits that last beyond first grade.

We're pushing for all 5 year olds to read, kicking and screaming, yet with no long term results.

( Why don't preschool gains stick? ... )

America's Amish population has nearly doubled in the last 16 years.  Why?

• More children.  With an average of 5 per family, and 4 of 5 choosing to remain Amish upon reaching adulthood, they are just simply growing!
• The appeal.  There are both converts and a high retention rate because people are becoming disenchanted with the pursuit of ever more stuff, ever more entertainment.

When my parents visited Pennsylvania Dutch country a few years ago, they brought back a book on the Amish.  From it, I learned that I had always been wrong about their opposition to technology.  It's not because they believe it's inherently immoral, or playing God, or what have you.  It's because it separates people.  You can only go so far in a day in a horse-drawn buggy, and your neighbors are going to see a lot more of you in a small house with no phone or internet.

There is no doubt that we move away from families more, spend less time visiting with our children and spouses, and more time with our noses in phones, iPods, and computers as more and more technology comes about.  Even while believing that technology can be a useful tool in society, we can take a lesson from the Amish and be more present with those around us, here and now, wherever we are.

HRH the PoW is right!  He says that genetically modified foods (or GMOs) bode poorly for future generations.  While the companies behind GM foods (foremost of which is Monsanto) claim that they are crucial to help us feed "an ever-increasing global population," the crown prince is correct in saying that relying on "global corporations" for food would result in "absolute disaster."

(Put aside for a moment that hunger in our world is nearly always a result of corruption & incompetence - not insufficient food.  And that GM crops are not necessarily higher yield.)