Hurricane Season 2013 Update: 'A Guide to Food Safety: Severe Storms and Hurricanes'

The United States Department of Agriculture has prepared a free and helpful online guide to help prepare for the inevitable loss of power that comes with hurricanes, tropical storms, and bad thunder storms (printable versions are ready for the download!) on their home page.

This handy resource is called "A Consumer's Guide to Food Safety: Severe Storms and Hurricanes" and we think that it will be very useful for your family's hurricane preparations this storm season.   

Please click on this urlink to see the USDA's guide and learn more.

Follow IWN on Twitter

Did you know that Infinite Ways Network has a twitter page?  Follow us at @IWN_Inc to keep up with (and share) all of the latest news and trends in health and wellness.

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June is Caribbean-American Heritage Month!

June is Caribbean-American Heritage Month and Infinite Ways Network is proud to celebrate the unique and important contributions of Caribbean people to the United States of America as well as to the world.   

The history and heritage of West Indian people is both the source and inspiration for the work we do.    The pillars of Caribbean culture and society that are community, altruism, service, hard work, creativity, humility, and generosity form the foundation of our mission and work.  

Infinite Ways Network, Inc. invites our readers and clients to join us in celebrating Caribbean-American Heritage Month 2013!

   

 

 

2013 Hurricane Season

The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season starts tomorrow and Infinite Ways Network wants to know:  are you ready?   

Living in Miami-Dade County means having to live with the always-real threat of hurricanes (which are dangerous tropical weather systems) during summer and autumn.   To help prepare our community for any possible storms this season, IWN is planning to share various blog posts throughout the upcoming months to help raise hurricane awareness about the importance of preparedness.  

As always, we suggest that readers and clients have constructive, clear, specific discussions with your families about preparation for storms this season as well as plans for during and after storms.   If you have not already done, so please make sure to find out and document what your family will need in the event of a storm, whether or not you plan to evacuate emergency contacts that live outside of Miami, et cetera. 

 

Please keep checking back here at the Infinite Ways Network Blog for updated tips and notes and more about being ready and aware this hurricane season.

Aging & Disabled Americans: The Battle for Healthcare Funds

Disability Advocates, Nursing Home Industry Battle for Health Care Dollars for Aging, Disabled

In 2010, Washington State's then-governor Christine Gregoire made a decision that could potentially affect the self-determination of thousands of people in her state: she ordered the slashing of social service budgets by 10 percent across the board. Disability justice groups around the country quickly mobilized against the cuts. For many disabled people, the loss in funding meant the difference between keeping their home care assistants or being sentenced to nursing homes and effectively losing their independence.

Federal law says states must fund facilities like nursing homes, but whether they fund at-home care is left up to state governments. "While my heart is there, my pocketbook is empty," Governor Gregoire explained. As she would have had it, the forced ghettoization of thousands of disabled people was a sad but inevitable result of the recession.

Washingtonians with disabilities like Aditya Ganapathiraju were anxious. Prior to his spinal cord injury in 2002, he says, "I had a fairly typical life. I was really independent and whatnot." A motorcycle accident left the 18-year-old college student with mobility impairments. Unfortunately, "both my parents were deceased. I didn't have family that I could really go back to, and as a result, I had to go to the nursing homes."

Ganapathiraju's adjustment from able-bodied campus life to a highly regimented nursing home was rough. Like many facilities, his was run in a "one-size-fits-all" manner, even though people there had all sorts of disabilities. It was also isolated, far out in the suburbs of Snohomish County. "I couldn't just go down the street and go to the library or something. And so I really just craved interaction with someone." Even going to the hospital and chit-chatting with the doctors and nurses there became a treat. "More or less, when you're in a home [there aren't] people with whom you [can] converse with. It wasn't a great place for a 20-year-old, who was formerly fairly social, to find themselves in." The patient-to-doctor-and-nurse ratio was high, and most caretakers didn't have the specialized training to work with someone with a spinal injury. That made basic, daily functioning difficult.

Not long after entering the facility, Ganapathiraju wanted out and sought to live in the outside community with an assistant. But leaving proved difficult. "There's this institutional inertia where workers would kind of give you the pessimistic side of moving out into the community," he explains. His caseworker did little to facilitate the process ("It could have just been the thought of extra work that prevented him from being helpful," he speculates), but his persistence worked: he managed to find a family that invited him to come live with them, and he was paired with a more competent caseworker in neighboring King County. The new caseworker got the state to transfer funds that were going to the group home to a personal caretaker who could learn the specific needs of someone with a spinal injury. "It was liberating," he recalls. "It facilitated me re-entering school, because I couldn't have done that from a group home." Things were looking good, until Gregoire announced her cuts amidst the 2010 December holidays.

Around that time, disability justice activists, including Carl Peterson of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN), had what Peterson describes as a "really, really disconcerting call" with Gregoire's people. "They basically said, 'This is her budget, she's not going to make any changes to it.' It was horrible," he remembers. "It was her budget, and she felt very entitled that she had that power." The district attorney's office made the situation worse, according to Ganapathiraju, by trying "to convince the governor that if you back down on this issue, you'll never be able to make any cuts on any of your programs ever again. Which is not true, but that's the kind of message the governor was getting," he says.

And there's more trouble with Gregoire's "budget shortfall" argument: at-home "community care" is actually considerably cheaper than nursing homes and similar facilities. But the assisted-living industry is sinking billions into public relations and lobbying to make sure that state money is directed into their own wallets. Between 2011-2012, one company, Kindred Healthcare, spent over $3 million on lobbying, and donated more than $2 million to both Democrat and Republican party coffers. The lobbying seems to be working out for them: the $116 billion nursing-home industry gets between 60 and 70 percent of its funding from state governments, mostly through Medicaid.

According to an industry magazine that ranks nursing home companies by number of beds, in 2012, the top ten were proprietors of over 235,000 beds. Beds that are a money suck if they're empty but a potential goldmine when filled, particularly for the executives on top. Directors regularly make seven or eight figures off of facilities where a private room costs an average of about $87,000 per year. Compare that to the average wages of health aides, who make around $20,000 per year. Add to that home payments or rent, and even if those aides made a more livable wage, the cost difference is in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Pennsylvanian Jeff Petty got into the business 20 years ago. "I was just looking for a job," he explains frankly. "A lot of people in our industry have a passion; you know, 'I took care of grandma growing up; that left a searing kind of memory for me, so I went into the field.' That wasn't me. I was in big, corporate America, looking for an opportunity. I found one, and it happened to be in this business." Today, Petty heads up Wesley Enhanced Living, operating five facilities across Pennsylvania, which he calls "the Silicon Valley" of care facilities.

Petty, whose business caters mostly to seniors, believes the socialization offered by his "continuing care retirement communities" (CCRCs) helps combat depression. And even Ganapathiraju, who now sits on the Governor's Committee on Disability Issues and Employment, admits that often nursing homes are "Sometimes the only option, or the best option, especially for folks, say, with special needs, that need an extra kind of guide throughout the day." Still, the majority of disabled people (and seniors) would rather live outside of such facilities - even a place like Wesley, with its game rooms outfitted with Nintendo Wii systems, shuttles to the mall and concierge services. In fact, when asked whether or not he sees himself ever living in a CCRC, Petty laughs: "That's a great question. Everybody in the field, when they're my age, go, 'No.' As does everybody else. I have no idea, to be honest with you." So it shouldn't come as a surprise that in 2011, there were 511,000 people in the United States on waiting lists for waivers for home care services. Likewise, an AARP study from 2012 found that 64 percent of Medicaid long-term service dollars for older people and adults with physical disabilities went to nursing facilities, the study's authors noted, "even though most people prefer to live at home." (Meanwhile, the most recent Congressional report on the subject found that 9 out of 10 nursing homes were understaffed over a two-year period from 1999-2001.)

Jennifer McPhail, an organizer with the disability rights group ADAPT, believes that "there's an institutional bias within the system" against home care. "We've been trying to change the funding streams and policy decisions that lawmakers put in place," a process that requires negotiations and sometimes public protest or embarrassment of those lawmakers. In 1991, McPhail was one of 40 disabled people, many in wheelchairs, who refused to leave Texas' then-governor Ann Richards' office. Two days later, Richards agreed to move toward offering community-based care.

A senior legal counselor at the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Civil Rights Division, Eve Hill, is more optimistic: "Traditionally, states have made people with disabilities go into institutions like psychiatric hospitals or developmental disability centers or nursing homes to get their health care and other services, and over time we've come to realize that we don't have to gather all of the people with disabilities together" into these institutions. The segregation, she notes, "has led to sometimes problematic conditions for people when they're set aside, in a way, from the rest of the community" - conditions that include the depression Petty claims his facilities decrease. Some states, such as Nevada and North Carolina, "have been able to re-balance their programs, provide the services at often the same or lesser cost, and it works in every aspect." But other states are hedging on the issue. A Kaiser Family Foundation report released in December 2012 found that in 2009, Texas alone had nearly 100,000 people on its waiting list, more than double the number of people in its community care program.

On paper, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provides that disabled people are entitled to the "most integrated" setting and the Supreme Court's 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C. (known in disabled activist circles as disability's Brown v. Board of Education) found that people with mental disabilities should be allowed to live in the community, not institutions, on the condition that states have the resources to provide community care. In 2011, Governor Gregoire's cuts led to another case that was based around Olmstead, a case called M.R. v. Dreyfus. In Dreyfus, 12 disabled plaintiffs successfully argued that Washington's budget cuts would mean they wouldn't be able to get the hours with a care assistant they needed for basics like bathing, eating and going to the doctor. Their health would deteriorate, and they'd inevitably be sent to nursing homes. 

The plaintiffs won, but the fight wasn't over. Gregoire filed to extend the deadline for appealing the decision. Disability justice activists went into overdrive, calling in organizers from as far away as DC, New York and Texas.

In the case of Washington State, the pushback worked. After several protests, press conferences and petitions, Gregoire re-checked her pocketbook. In October 2012, Gregoire released an official statement: she would not challenge M.R. v. Dreyfus. It was a big win for disability rights advocates. ASAN's Peterson believes the national organizing made a "huge" difference. Without it, "honestly, we wouldn't have been able to pull this off," he says. "If we didn't organize, if that protest didn't happen" at the state capitol, "if those op-eds didn't get written, and what have you, I think she probably would have sent [the original budget] out."

In some states, nursing homes are already in decline. Minnesota, Tennessee and West Virginia decommissioned hundreds of beds between 2006 and 2010, while many others stayed static after a boom in assisted living facilities in the late 1990s. ADAPT and others are pushing for their Community Choice Act, which would make it easier to divert Medicaid funding from nursing homes to at-home care. The White House, the American Medical Association, and many in Congress are on board, though the Act was left out of the last round of federal health care reform. Taking notice, some nursing home conglomerates are expanding into home care. The second largest in the industry, Golden Living, got into the business in 2004 through its AseraCare offshoot. "When you go in the hospital, the first thing you do is, you get a wristband slapped on you, or a name on a door, and that means you're a patient. You've lost the ability to be a person," explains AseraCare's President Angie Hollis-Sells. "In home care, you can maintain personhood. And we want to be people, we don't want to be a wristband." Her company, which is being sued by DOJ after former employees alleged that it was defrauding Medicare out of millions of dollars, is paying close attention to the question of government funding. "Where is the dollar for health care gonna go? Is it going to reside with the patient? Is it going to reside with the payer? Is it going to reside with the physician, or with the hospital?" Hollis-Sells says the question is not going to go away.

To read the rest of this article, please click on this urlink. 

Childhood Happiness leads to Adult Wellness

DNA Doesn't Lie: Happy Children become Healthy Adults

It sounds like science fiction but it is a scientific fact. A happy childhood leads to a healthy adult life. This is what scientists found when they examined the effects of childhood adversities to DNA. They found that the tiny protective caps of our chromosomes, which are called telomeres, shorten prematurely when kids consistently experience traumatic events. Scientists have found that long telomeres are associated with health and vitality, while short ones are usually found in seniors or chronically sick people. Telomeres somehow record the accumulative impact of different lifestyle factors in our health. Although the way they do that is not clear yet, one thing is certain: they are sensitive to oxidative stress. It is well known that psychological pressure exposes our cells in debilitating free radicals. This could be a reason why telomeres become prematurely short. Research shows that adults who had difficult childhood years have consistently shorter telomeres and are at higher risk of chronic and debilitating disease.

If this sounds too exaggerated, think again. Doctors from the University of California have found that even when the expectant mother is experiencing consistent stress, the maternal hormonal and physiological responses are perceived and recorded by the fetal DNA. The research found that when women went through an intensely negative experience during pregnancy, their adult offspring had shorter telomeres, in comparison with individuals whose mother had a calm pregnancy. It looks like in some cases, adult disease is programmed in the fetal DNA. Psychiatric research now indicates that childhood maltreatment affects brain structure and in fact, the more serious the level of abuse, the more obvious neurobiological abnormalities are detected, especially in susceptible subjects.

To read the rest of this encouraging article, please click on this urlink.  

Troubling Links between School Suspensions & Ethnicity of Students Examined

Punishing Students For Who They Are, Not What They Do

Until last month, I had never seen a stop-and-frisk happen. Despite the amount of attention devoted to the controversial New York City policy in the last year, despite the protests, and despite having lived in the city for almost four years, I had never witnessed a stop-and-frisk. And then, a few weeks ago, I watched as two policemen stopped middle-aged black man on 98th Street, and frisked him. I wondered, not for the first time, what it would take for those same policemen to stop and frisk me. Controlling for all other factors—location, time of day, behavior—what would it take for the cops to stop and frisk a pretty white lady on the Upper West Side?

Somewhere in America, there’s a politically aware white high school student asking himself the same question, not about stop-and-frisk, but about school suspension. How much would I have to misbehave to run the same risk of suspension as my black classmates?

If you’re a white middle or high school student, and you don’t have a disability, your odds of being suspended from school are one in fourteen. If you’re a black middle or high school student without a disability, your odds are one in four. According to a new study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, a quarter of black students were suspended in the 2009-2010 school year. A quarter. For students with disabilities, the odds are one in five. And for black girls, the numbers are a stark demonstration of what happens when two forms of discrimination intersect: Black girls are more likely to be suspended than black boys or white girls. And, to the surprise of absolutely no one, when you add a third axis—disability—the figures get even worse. Black girls with disabilities are suspended at a rate sixteen percent higher than white girls with disabilities.

Schools, under-funded and over-populated, are suspending students for minor infractions like cell phone use or loitering (or for violating dress codes, which are problematic for a host of reasons), and being suspended dramatically increases your chance of dropping out altogether. One Florida study found that a single suspension in ninth grade doubled dropout rates, from sixteen percent to thirty-two percent. And though suspension rates are unnecessarily high, they’re disproportionately high for those students who are already marginalized.

There are ways to bring down the number of suspensions across the board, as the study notes. Changes to codes of conduct, implementing positive behavioral supports, better training and supporting teachers, and implementing principles of restorative justice, are all ways to reduce the number of suspensions. But that reduction in raw numbers will not be enough unless schools also address the disproportionate punishment of minority students.

Punishment rates in schools mirror the rates in the “real world” – though what could be more real than entrenched discrimination in our schools? – and in fact, contribute to those real world figures. The Civil Rights Project report notes that the abuse and misuse of suspensions can turn them into “gateways to prison.” Even if that were not the case, even absent a school-to-prison pipeline, the situation would be grim enough. What this report reveals is a disregard for the well-being of marginalized populations that, were it directed at other groups, would never be allowed to stand. If a quarter of white middle school boys were being suspended every school year, and if pretty white ladies were being frisked on the streets of Manhattan, there’d be uproar.

To read the rest of this article, please click on this urlink.

Home Gardens are Healthy - and Easy!

Are you thinking about home-gardening?   

More and more people in our community and others around the world are thinking about it and acting on those thoughts.   There are certainly many positives to growing your own vegetables at home.

For example, we found this simple yet encouraging list:

1-A veggie/fruit garden reduces the carbon foot printand global warming.
2-A home garden reduces the consumption and therefore production of chemical fertilizers as less demand will be followed by less supply.it increases the chemically free produce though!
3-Your own garden improves on the healthy diet of all the family as it introduces home grown organic food harvested right from the backyard.
4-It saves on the grocery bill -and medical bill as heath improves - and  grocery shopping drops.
5-Vegetable gardens have a definite beautification impact on the neighborhood ... as more gardens are planted.they beautify your city!
6-Quality family time increases as more members come along working the garden .communication and socialization effect pays in better family interaction.
7-Community gardens as well as home gardens foster bonds beyond the fences.they promote dialogue,cultural diversity,tolerance and provide healthy greens to families of lesser income and means!
8-Get the local youth at schools and home engaged in productive social projects with less time spent on tv,internet games etc.provide opportunities to learn about recycling, leadership, diversity, sustainability etc
9-Provide an educational ground to learn about outdoor activities that are productive like gardening skills,composting,
10-Support thr echo-system, create biodiversity and be a pro-active member in the new paradigm  of permaculture, sustainability and green ecology     - localharvest.org

They're also pretty easy to start, too!  Take for example this interesting article showing how simple it is to create your own seedlings with a few simple and inexpensive "pieces."

So, c'mon Dade County!   Start your vegetable garden this week.  Please email us updates and photos and maybe your home garden will appear in this blog.

Are Mental Health Cuts Making Jails "Asylums"?

As States Cut Mental Health Care Funding, Prisons Are Becoming Asylums

The Great Recession, in conjunction with states’ propensities to cut Medicaid benefits in the face of the rising cost of health care services, led to some of the biggest cuts to state mental health care services in U.S. history between 2009 and 2011. Of course, the population of Americans with mental health problems didn’t just disappear in that time. Facing a shortage of adequate medical resources, many of them are now ending up in the only place that will take them: America’s jails.

According to CBS News, a shortage of mental health facilities and adequate treatment resources — particularly in large states like Illinois and California — has produced an untenable status quo in which the prison system serves as an alternate pipeline to funnel through sick Americans, who have nowhere else to go:

• Police logs in twelve cities revealed that mental health crisis calls have increased an average of 37.5 percent over the last four years.
• Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca says more mentally-ill people end up in jail when they’re not getting the medications they need. 
• ”I believe it is, I think that medication is the stabilizer for most mentally-ill people,” said Baca. ”The money for that dried up with our California economy going south and when they go off their meds, they go back to the behavior that leads to a law enforcement solution.”
• Kathryn Wooten of Los Angeles called 911 for help when her 23-year-old son Terrence suffered a mental breakdown in October 2011.
• ”The police came and I thought they were going to take him to the hospital but he wind up in county jail,” said Wooten.
• Police say with few mental health beds available at state facilities, they have no choice but to leave the fate of people like Terrence Wooten to the criminal justice system.
• ”They have a mental ward in county but he wasn’t really getting the counseling and the therapy that he needed,” said Wooten.

To state the obvious, prisons are not treatment facilities, and guards are not professionally trained medical personnel — a fact that law enforcement authorities understand all too well. ”This is something that happens all the time here and the heart of it is, we’re not a mental health facility. These people should not be here,” said Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart. “These people by and large are not criminals. They’re people with mental illness but when they act out they end up in the jails because it’s the only place that’ll take them.”

California could serve as the poster child for what happens when slashes to mental health care funding — particularly through cuts to public insurance programs such as Medicaid — meets a sprawling industrial prison complex bursting at the seams. Patients become prisoners, reminiscent of a time when ignorance regarding mental illnesses perpetuated a system of asylums and involuntary commitment that public health advocates spent decades fighting, as it treated mentally ill Americans as dangerous vagrants to be locked up rather than patients to be cured. In fact, the mentally ill are not predisposed to violence, and are more likely to be the victims of violent acts than anything else.

To read the rest of this compelling article, please click on this urlink.  

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.’s and company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were hardly friends. Their stature was defined by their skill in fighting one another for what they called “stomach share” — the amount of digestive space that any one company’s brand can grab from the competition.

James Behnke, a 55-year-old executive at Pillsbury, greeted the men as they arrived. He was anxious but also hopeful about the plan that he and a few other food-company executives had devised to engage the C.E.O.’s on America’s growing weight problem. “We were very concerned, and rightfully so, that obesity was becoming a major issue,” Behnke recalled. “People were starting to talk about sugar taxes, and there was a lot of pressure on food companies.” Getting the company chiefs in the same room to talk about anything, much less a sensitive issue like this, was a tricky business, so Behnke and his fellow organizers had scripted the meeting carefully, honing the message to its barest essentials. “C.E.O.’s in the food industry are typically not technical guys, and they’re uncomfortable going to meetings where technical people talk in technical terms about technical things,” Behnke said. “They don’t want to be embarrassed. They don’t want to make commitments. They want to maintain their aloofness and autonomy.”

A chemist by training with a doctoral degree in food science, Behnke became Pillsbury’s chief technical officer in 1979 and was instrumental in creating a long line of hit products, including microwaveable popcorn. He deeply admired Pillsbury but in recent years had grown troubled by pictures of obese children suffering from diabetes and the earliest signs of hypertension and heart disease. In the months leading up to the C.E.O. meeting, he was engaged in conversation with a group of food-science experts who were painting an increasingly grim picture of the public’s ability to cope with the industry’s formulations — from the body’s fragile controls on overeating to the hidden power of some processed foods to make people feel hungrier still. It was time, he and a handful of others felt, to warn the C.E.O.’s that their companies may have gone too far in creating and marketing products that posed the greatest health concerns.

The discussion took place in Pillsbury’s auditorium. The first speaker was a vice president of Kraft named Michael Mudd. “I very much appreciate this opportunity to talk to you about childhood obesity and the growing challenge it presents for us all,” Mudd began. “Let me say right at the start, this is not an easy subject. There are no easy answers — for what the public health community must do to bring this problem under control or for what the industry should do as others seek to hold it accountable for what has happened. But this much is clear: For those of us who’ve looked hard at this issue, whether they’re public health professionals or staff specialists in your own companies, we feel sure that the one thing we shouldn’t do is nothing.”

As he spoke, Mudd clicked through a deck of slides — 114 in all — projected on a large screen behind him. The figures were staggering. More than half of American adults were now considered overweight, with nearly one-quarter of the adult population — 40 million people — clinically defined as obese. Among children, the rates had more than doubled since 1980, and the number of kids considered obese had shot past 12 million. (This was still only 1999; the nation’s obesity rates would climb much higher.) Food manufacturers were now being blamed for the problem from all sides — academia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. The secretary of agriculture, over whom the industry had long held sway, had recently called obesity a “national epidemic.”

Mudd then did the unthinkable. He drew a connection to the last thing in the world the C.E.O.’s wanted linked to their products: cigarettes. First came a quote from a Yale University professor of psychology and public health, Kelly Brownell, who was an especially vocal proponent of the view that the processed-food industry should be seen as a public health menace: “As a culture, we’ve become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco.”

“If anyone in the food industry ever doubted there was a slippery slope out there,” Mudd said, “I imagine they are beginning to experience a distinct sliding sensation right about now.”

Mudd then presented the plan he and others had devised to address the obesity problem. Merely getting the executives to acknowledge some culpability was an important first step, he knew, so his plan would start off with a small but crucial move: the industry should use the expertise of scientists — its own and others — to gain a deeper understanding of what was driving Americans to overeat. Once this was achieved, the effort could unfold on several fronts. To be sure, there would be no getting around the role that packaged foods and drinks play in overconsumption. They would have to pull back on their use of salt, sugar and fat, perhaps by imposing industrywide limits. But it wasn’t just a matter of these three ingredients; the schemes they used to advertise and market their products were critical, too. Mudd proposed creating a “code to guide the nutritional aspects of food marketing, especially to children.”

“We are saying that the industry should make a sincere effort to be part of the solution,” Mudd concluded. “And that by doing so, we can help to defuse the criticism that’s building against us.”

What happened next was not written down. But according to three participants, when Mudd stopped talking, the one C.E.O. whose recent exploits in the grocery store had awed the rest of the industry stood up to speak. His name was Stephen Sanger, and he was also the person — as head of General Mills — who had the most to lose when it came to dealing with obesity. Under his leadership, General Mills had overtaken not just the cereal aisle but other sections of the grocery store. The company’s Yoplait brand had transformed traditional unsweetened breakfast yogurt into a veritable dessert. It now had twice as much sugar per serving as General Mills’ marshmallow cereal Lucky Charms. And yet, because of yogurt’s well-tended image as a wholesome snack, sales of Yoplait were soaring, with annual revenue topping $500 million. Emboldened by the success, the company’s development wing pushed even harder, inventing a Yoplait variation that came in a squeezable tube — perfect for kids. They called it Go-Gurt and rolled it out nationally in the weeks before the C.E.O. meeting. (By year’s end, it would hit $100 million in sales.)

According to the sources I spoke with, Sanger began by reminding the group that consumers were “fickle.” (Sanger declined to be interviewed.) Sometimes they worried about sugar, other times fat. General Mills, he said, acted responsibly to both the public and shareholders by offering products to satisfy dieters and other concerned shoppers, from low sugar to added whole grains. But most often, he said, people bought what they liked, and they liked what tasted good. “Don’t talk to me about nutrition,” he reportedly said, taking on the voice of the typical consumer. “Talk to me about taste, and if this stuff tastes better, don’t run around trying to sell stuff that doesn’t taste good.”

To react to the critics, Sanger said, would jeopardize the sanctity of the recipes that had made his products so successful. General Mills would not pull back. He would push his people onward, and he urged his peers to do the same. Sanger’s response effectively ended the meeting.

“What can I say?” James Behnke told me years later. “It didn’t work. These guys weren’t as receptive as we thought they would be.” Behnke chose his words deliberately. He wanted to be fair. “Sanger was trying to say, ‘Look, we’re not going to screw around with the company jewels here and change the formulations because a bunch of guys in white coats are worried about obesity.’ ”

The meeting was remarkable, first, for the insider admissions of guilt. But I was also struck by how prescient the organizers of the sit-down had been. Today, one in three adults is considered clinically obese, along with one in five kids, and 24 million Americans are afflicted by type 2 diabetes, often caused by poor diet, with another 79 million people having pre-diabetes. Even gout, a painful form of arthritis once known as “the rich man’s disease” for its associations with gluttony, now afflicts eight million Americans.

The public and the food companies have known for decades now — or at the very least since this meeting — that sugary, salty, fatty foods are not good for us in the quantities that we consume them. So why are the diabetes and obesity and hypertension numbers still spiraling out of control? It’s not just a matter of poor willpower on the part of the consumer and a give-the-people-what-they-want attitude on the part of the food manufacturers. What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive. I talked to more than 300 people in or formerly employed by the processed-food industry, from scientists to marketers to C.E.O.’s. Some were willing whistle-blowers, while others spoke reluctantly when presented with some of the thousands of pages of secret memos that I obtained from inside the food industry’s operations. What follows is a series of small case studies of a handful of characters whose work then, and perspective now, sheds light on how the foods are created and sold to people who, while not powerless, are extremely vulnerable to the intensity of these companies’ industrial formulations and selling campaigns.

To read the rest of this article, please click on this urlink. 

Prison & the Poverty Trap

Prison and the Poverty Trap

Why are so many American families trapped in poverty? Of all the explanations offered by Washington’s politicians and economists, one seems particularly obvious in the low-income neighborhoods near the Capitol: because there are so many parents like Carl Harris and Charlene Hamilton.

For most of their daughters’ childhood, Mr. Harris didn’t come close to making the minimum wage. His most lucrative job, as a crack dealer, ended at the age of 24, when he left Washington to serve two decades in prison, leaving his wife to raise their two young girls while trying to hold their long-distance marriage together.

His $1.15-per-hour prison wages didn’t even cover the bills for the phone calls and marathon bus trips to visit him. Struggling to pay rent and buy food, Ms. Hamilton ended up homeless a couple of times.

“Basically, I was locked up with him,” she said. “My mind was locked up. My life was locked up. Our daughters grew up without their father.”

The shift to tougher penal policies three decades ago was originally credited with helping people in poor neighborhoods by reducing crime. But now that America’s incarceration rate has risen to be the world’s highest, many social scientists find the social benefits to be far outweighed by the costs to those communities.

“Prison has become the new poverty trap,” said Bruce Western, a Harvard sociologist. “It has become a routine event for poor African-American men and their families, creating an enduring disadvantage at the very bottom of American society.”

Among African-Americans who have grown up during the era of mass incarceration, one in four has had a parent locked up at some point during childhood. For black men in their 20s and early 30s without a high school diploma, the incarceration rate is so high — nearly 40 percent nationwide — that they’re more likely to be behind bars than to have a job.

No one denies that some people belong in prison. Mr. Harris, now 47, and his wife, 45, agree that in his early 20s he deserved to be there. But they don’t see what good was accomplished by keeping him there for two decades, and neither do most of the researchers who have been analyzing the prison boom.

The number of Americans in state and federal prisons has quintupled since 1980, and a major reason is that prisoners serve longer terms than before. They remain inmates into middle age and old age, well beyond the peak age for crime, which is in the late teenage years — just when Mr. Harris first got into trouble.

‘I Just Lost My Cool’

After dropping out of high school, Mr. Harris ended up working at a carwash and envying the imports driven by drug dealers. One day in 1983, at the age of 18, while walking with his girlfriend on a sidewalk in Washington where drugs were being sold, he watched a high-level dealer pull up in a Mercedes-Benz and demand money from an underling.

“This dealer was draped down in jewelry and a nice outfit,” Mr. Harris recalled in an interview in the Woodridge neighborhood of northeast Washington, where he and his wife now live. “The female with him was draped down, too, gold and everything, dressed real good.

“I’m watching the way he carries himself, and I’m standing there looking like Raggedy Ann. My girl’s looking like Raggedy Ann. I said to myself, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ ”

Within two years, he was convicted of illegal gun possession, an occupational hazard of his street business selling PCP and cocaine. He went to Lorton, the local prison, in 1985, shortly after he and Ms. Hamilton had their first daughter. He kept up his drug dealing while in prison — “It was just as easy to sell inside as outside” — and returned to the streets for the heyday of the crack market in the late 1980s.

The Washington police never managed to catch him with the cocaine he was importing by the kilo from New York, but they arrested him for assaulting people at a crack den. He says he went into the apartment, in the Shaw neighborhood, to retrieve $4,000 worth of crack stolen by one of his customers, and discovered it was already being smoked by a dozen people in the room.

“I just lost my cool,” he said. “I grabbed a lamp and chair lying around there and started smacking people. Nobody was hospitalized, but I broke someone’s arm and cut another one in the leg.”

An assault like that would have landed Mr. Harris behind bars in many countries, but not for nearly so long. Prisoners serve significantly more time in the United States than in most industrialized countries. Sentences for drug-related offenses and other crimes have gotten stiffer in recent decades, and prosecutors have become more aggressive in seeking longer terms — as Mr. Harris discovered when he saw the multiple charges against him.

For injuring two people, Mr. Harris was convicted on two counts of assault, each carrying a minimum three-year sentence. But he received a much stiffer sentence, of 15 to 45 years, on a charge of armed burglary at the crack den.

“The cops knew I was selling but couldn’t prove it, so they made up the burglary charge instead,” Mr. Harris contended. He still considers the burglary charge unfair, insisting that he neither broke into the crack den nor took anything, but he also acknowledges that long prison terms were a risk for any American selling drugs: “I knew other dealers who got life without parole.”

As it was, at the age of 24 he was facing prison until his mid-40s. He urged his wife to move on with her life and divorce him. Despondent, he began snorting heroin in prison — the first time, he says, that he had ever used hard drugs himself.

“I thought I was going to lose my mind,” he said. “I felt so bad leaving my wife alone with our daughters. When they were young, they’d ask on the phone where I was, and I’d tell them I was away at camp.”

His wife went on welfare and turned to relatives to care for their daughters while she visited him at prisons in Tennessee, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico.

“I wanted to work, but I couldn’t have a job and go visit him,” Ms. Hamilton said. “When he was in New Mexico, it would take me three days to get there on the bus. I’d go out there and stay for a month in a trailer near the prison.”

In Washington, she and her daughters moved from relative to relative, not always together. During one homeless spell, Ms. Hamilton slept by herself for a month in her car. She eventually found a federally subsidized apartment of her own, and once the children were in school she took part-time jobs. But the scrimping never stopped. “We had a lot of Oodles of Noodles,” she recalled.

Eleven years after her husband went to prison, Ms. Hamilton followed his advice to divorce, but she didn’t remarry. Like other women in communities with high rates of incarceration, she faced a shortage of potential mates. Because more than 90 percent of prisoners are men, their absence skews the gender ratio. In some neighborhoods in Washington, there are 6 men for every 10 women.

“With so many men locked up, the ones left think they can do whatever they want,” Ms. Hamilton said. “A man will have three mistresses, and they’ll each put up with it because there are no other men around.”

Epidemiologists have found that when the incarceration rate rises in a county, there tends to be a subsequent increase in the rates of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy, possibly because women have less power to require their partners to practice protected sex or remain monogamous.

When researchers try to explain why AIDS is much more prevalent among blacks than whites, they point to the consequences of incarceration, which disrupts steady relationships and can lead to high-risk sexual behavior. When sociologists look for causes of child poverty and juvenile delinquency, they link these problems to the incarceration of parents and the resulting economic and emotional strains on families.

Some families, of course, benefit after an abusive parent or spouse is locked up. But Christopher Wildeman, a Yale sociologist, has found that children are generally more likely to suffer academically and socially after the incarceration of a parent. Boys left fatherless become more physically aggressive. Spouses of prisoners become more prone to depression and other mental and physical problems.

“Education, income, housing, health — incarceration affects everyone and everything in the nation’s low-income neighborhoods,” said Megan Comfort, a sociologist at the nonprofit research organization RTI International who has analyzed what she calls the “secondary prisonization” of women with partners serving time in San Quentin State Prison.

Before the era of mass incarceration, there was already evidence linking problems in poor neighborhoods to the high number of single-parent households and also to the high rate of mobility: the continual turnover on many blocks as transients moved in and out.

Now those trends have been amplified by the prison boom’s “coercive mobility,” as it is termed by Todd R. Clear, the dean of the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. In some low-income neighborhoods, he notes, virtually everyone has at least one relative currently or recently behind bars, so families and communities are continually disrupted by people going in and out of prison.

A Perverse Effect

This social disorder may ultimately have the perverse effect of raising the crime rate in some communities, Dr. Clear and some other scholars say. Robert DeFina and Lance Hannon, both at Villanova University, have found that while crime may initially decline in places that lock up more people, within a few years the rate rebounds and is even higher than before.

New York City’s continuing drop in crime in the past two decades may have occurred partly because it reduced its prison population in the 1990s and thereby avoided a subsequent rebound effect.

Raymond V. Liedka, of Oakland University in Michigan, and colleagues have found that the crime-fighting effects of prison disappear once the incarceration rate gets too high. “If the buildup goes beyond a tipping point, then additional incarceration is not going to gain our society any reduction in crime, and may lead to increased crime,” Dr. Liedka said.

The benefits of incarceration are especially questionable for men serving long sentences into middle age. The likelihood of committing a crime drops steeply once a man enters his 30s. This was the case with Mr. Harris, who turned his life around shortly after hitting 30.

“I said, ‘I wasn’t born in no jail, and I’m not going to die here,’ ” he recalled, describing how he gave up heroin and other drugs, converted to Islam and went to work on his high school equivalency degree.

But he still had 14 more years to spend in prison. During that time, he stayed in touch with his family, talking to his children daily. When he was released in 2009, he reunited with them and Ms. Hamilton.

“I was like a man coming out of a cave after 20 years,” Mr. Harris said. “The streets were the same, but everything else had changed. My kids were grown. They had to teach me how to use a cellphone and pay for the bus.”

The only job he could find was at a laundry, where he sorted soiled linens for $8.25 an hour, less than half the typical wage for a man his age but not unusual for someone just out of prison. Even though the District of Columbia has made special efforts to find jobs for ex-prisoners and to destigmatize their records — they are officially known as “returning citizens” — many have a hard time finding any kind of work.

This is partly because of employers’ well-documented reluctance to hire anyone with a record, partly because of former prisoners’ lack of work experience and contacts, and partly because of their difficulties adapting to life after prison.

“You spend long enough in prison being constantly treated like a dog or a parrot, you can get so institutionalized you can’t function outside,” Mr. Harris said. “That was my biggest challenge, telling myself that I’m not going to forget how to take care of myself or think for myself. I saw that happen to too many guys.”

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'The Grandfather & his Grandson'

"The Old Grandfather and His Little Grandson"

traditional European, retold by Leo Tolstoy

The grandfather had become very old. His legs would not carry him, his eyes could not see, his ears could not hear, and he was toothless. When he ate, bits of food sometimes dropped out of his mouth. His son and his son’s wife no longer allowed him to eat with them at the table. He had to eat his meals in the corner near the stove.

One day they gave him his food in a bowl. He tried to move the bowl closer; it fell to the floor and broke. His daughter-in-law scolded him. She told him that he spoiled everything in the house and broke their dishes, and she said that from now on he would get his food in a wooden dish. The old man sighed and said nothing.

A few days later, the old man’s son and his wife were sitting in their hut, resting and watching their little boy playing on the floor. They saw him putting together something out of small pieces of wood. His father asked him, “What are you making, Misha?”

The little grandson said, “I’m making a wooden bucket. When you and Mama get old, I’ll feed you out of this wooden dish.”

The young peasant and his wife looked at each other and tears filled their eyes. They were ashamed because they had treated the old grandfather so meanly, and from that day they again let the old man eat with them at the table and took better care of him.

Long-term Care Concerns for 'Boomers'

Confronting the legacy of Baby Boomer long-term care

Baby boomers have a lot to answer for. The vast number of births between 1945 and 1964 necessitated an expansion of the education system, a housing boom and infrastructure investment. They helped steer America out of the Great Depression and into a fast growing economy, and under their cultural leadership America entered a new era of social freedom.

Now these aging pioneers are leaving their children with an unwanted legacy. By 2020 a third of working Americans will be faced with ensuring some form of long-term care for their parents.

“When I was 22 I didn’t have a concept for what it would be like to get to 60, 70, 80,” said Jesse Slome, executive director for the California-based American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance. “But I guarantee if you talk to your parents or grandparents they know what it’s like and they know the consequences for living a long life.”

The statistics are sobering. Roughly 75 percent of Americans over 65 will eventually need long-term care, a reality that will cost, on average, a quarter of a million dollars per person in as little as three years.

The average American had $212,600 in savings in 2011, according to research by Fidelity Brokerage Services.

Medicaid, the government program that provides healthcare funding to low-income Americans with limited resources, covers around half of long-term care expenses. Unlike Social Security and Medicare, Medicaid is not funded through a dedicated trust fund. Federal and state contributions come from general revenue, specifically income taxes.

“It’s a costly issue. It impacts families, it impacts states who pay the lion’s share,” Slome said. And yet only 8 million Americans currently have long-term care insurance, roughly 2 percent.

In 1993 a pilot program was introduced in California, Connecticut, Indiana and New York to create a partnership between private insurance companies and the states. The plan aimed to reduce the burden of growing long-term care needs on state resources.

A key benefit of long-term care insurance partnership policies is the asset protection clause. Within a partnership plan, if policyholders’ needs are greater than their insurance coverage, they can access Medicaid without having to sell off their assets to qualify.

It proved so successful that the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 made it possible for all states to offer a similar program. 

Eight years later only seven states do not offer a partnership program, among them Illinois where the statute has not been finalized. 

The process for Illinois has now spanned almost two decades. The state was one of two that attempted to create a partnership program under the more limited terms allowed in the 1993 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act.

The Department of Insurance is working on a regulation that will outline how insurance providers can file for partnership policies in Illinois, according to Kimberly Parker, communications manager for the Illinois Department of insurance.

The state is hoping to conclude the process this year.

It is a far cry from neighboring Indiana, one of the first four states to try the program. Since 1993, 53,000 partnership policies have been purchased in the state.

“A partnership policy benefits both consumers and the state,” said Rebecca Vaughan, director of the Indiana Long Term Care Partnership Program.

“The impact of the aging population will be tremendous on all aspects of the country’s social and economic future,” said Vaughan. A partnership serves the dual purpose of reducing Medicaid expense while helping citizens protect their personal assets, she added.

Specialist life and annuity insurance company Genworth Financial Inc., which is based in Virginia, has been involved in the Indiana partnership since it started in 1993. Genworth reports that approximately 80 percent of long-term care policies sold by the firm were in partnership with Indiana.

“The partnership program is a good example of a public/private solution to help Americans deal with long-term care risk,” said Beth Ludden, vice president of long-term care product development for Genworth. “It promotes planning for one of the largest unfunded exposures a resident may face as they age while reducing reliance on Medicaid.”

Slome agrees that a large part of the program’s appeal lies in encouraging residents to take up a policy. “The partnership was a wonderfully conceived program designed to create incentives for more people to consider and purchase long-term care insurance,” Slome said.

Nevertheless, Slome maintains that getting people to recognize the importance of long-term care planning is about connecting on a personal level.

Once family members have experienced the financial burden of long-term care, they will come to recognize the importance of preparing for the future. Ultimately, there will simply not be enough federal funding to go around.

“You aren’t going to want to spend the vast majority of your adult life paying taxes so your parent’s generation and your grandparent’s generation can get excellent care,” Slome said.

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