GAUTAM NAIK, - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan: We are killing ourselves with a diet that is tuned for maximum profitability for corporations; health is hardly a consideration, except when it is occasionally a marketing tool. Billions are spent to get us to eat this diet. Poor urban people have few ways of experiencing sense satisfaction, taste is one they can achieve, and this national diet is relatively cheap. One also has to see this in the context of food deserts in cities, lack of markets and food options, except fast food. These ill people feed the illness profit system. Our values are completely upside down.
The number of adults with diabetes has doubled world-wide over the last three decades to nearly 350 million and increased nearly threefold in the U.S., a sign that the epidemic will impose an ever-greater cost burden on health systems.
The latest calculation, based on a study published in the British journal Lancet, found that the number of adult diabetics jumped to 347 million from 153 million in 1980.
According to the study, the U.S. had 24.7 million diabetics in 2008, nearly triple the level of three decades ago. The estimate includes people afflicted with type-1 diabetes, which is a disorder of the body’s immune system, as well as the far more common type-2 diabetes, a chronic disorder marked by high levels of sugar in the blood.
While about 70% of the increase was attributed to population growth and aging, the balance was linked to changing diets, rising obesity and growing rates of physical inactivity.
‘Diabetes is a long-lasting and disabling condition, and it’s going to be the largest cost for many health systems,’ said Majid Ezzati, a professor of global environmental health at Imperial College London and a lead author of the study.
Many public-health experts consider the rise in diabetes to be more worrying […]
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Stephan: The account of these events is too polemic. I am using it because it describes what happened. The fact that such a person, in such a position, felt compelled to speak out in this way is what is notable.
Chicago’s new police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, made remarks that angered gun rights advocates earlier this month, when he referred to federal gun laws as ‘government-sponsored racism.
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ANDREA NILL SANCHEZ, - ThinkProgress Justice
Stephan: This is part of the new American Slavery (see SR archives) I have been talking about. This is the new America.
Yesterday, the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) released a report chronicling the political strategies of private prison companies ‘working to make money through harsh policies and longer sentences.
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Stephan: Our culture is going to change either proactively, with wellness in both its smallest and largest dimensions as first priority, or we are going to go through a diminished and humiliating period. The evidence just piles up.
The recovery may be rocky at the moment, but when it picks up steam, confidence will increase, jobs will return and the Great Recession will become an unpleasant memory (and perhaps a useful subject from which to draw policy lessons).
More from BNet.com:
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, - Pew Research Center Publications
Stephan: This is a thorough data based assessment of the evangelical leadership.
Preface
Although its historical roots are mostly in Northern Europe and North America, evangelical Protestantism is a global phenomenon today. In 1910, by one estimate, there were about 80 million evangelicals, and more than 90% of them lived in Europe and North America. By 2010, the number of evangelicals had risen to at least 260 million, and most lived outside Europe or North America. Indeed, the ‘Global South’ (sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and most of Asia) is home to more evangelicals today than the ‘Global North’ (Europe, North America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand).
As the evangelical movement has grown and spread around the globe over the past century, it has become enormously diverse, ranging from Anglicans in Africa, to Baptists in Russia, to independent house churches in China, to Pentecostals in Latin America. And this diversity, in turn, gives rise to numerous questions. How much do evangelicals around the world have in common? What unites them? What divides them? Do leading evangelicals in the Global South see eye-to-eye with those in the Global North on what is essential to their faith, what is important but not essential and what is simply incompatible with evangelical Christianity?
To […]
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