More Americans pray for improved health

The American Psychological Association says in a new study that praying among Americans about health issues has risen dramatically in the past three decades; it notably increased by 36 percent between 1999 and 2007.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s data used for the study suggest that praying increased among those not only with chronic health problems but also with an acute health issue to cope with their changing circumstances. The groups of people more likely to pray about their health included females, African-Americans, those of the lowest income status, the well educated, and people who exercise less.

While the study didn’t indicate which types of prayer people used, lead author Amy Wachholtz, PhD, of the University of Massachusetts Medical School said: “There is also a greater public awareness of Buddhist-based mindfulness practices that can include prayerful meditation, which individuals may also be using to address a variety of health concerns.”

“We’re seeing a wide variety of prayer use among people with good income and access to medical care,” Wachholtz said. “People are not exchanging health insurance for prayer.”

The article appears in the May issue of the APA journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.

The next agricultural revolution may be sparked by fungi

The use of fungi on crops may help to greatly increase food production for the growing needs of the planet without the need for massive amounts of fertilizers.

Mycorrhizal fungi, a type of fungus that can live in symbiosis with plant roots, help plants grow larger by acquiring the essential nutrient phosphate, a key component of fertilizers, for the plant.

“The United Nations conservatively estimates that by the year 2050 the global human population is expected to reach over 9 billion. Feeding such a population represents an unprecedented challenge since this goes greatly beyond current global food production capacity,” says Ian Sanders of the University of Lusanne, Switzerland.

Sanders spoke at the 111th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans yesterday and told the audience that phosphate levels in the soil are rapidly being depleted and that in most tropical soils, plants have enormous difficulty in obtaining phosphate.

Increasing demand for the nutrient is driving up prices and farmers are having to spend a huge amount of money on phosphate fertilizer. Some countries are now stockpiling phosphate to feed their populations in the future, according to Sanders.

Recent biotechnological breakthroughs now allow scientists to produce massive quantities of the fungus that can be suspended in high concentrations in a gel for easy transportation.

Sanders and his colleagues are currently testing the effectiveness of this gel on crops in the country of Colombia where they have discovered that with the gel they can produce the same yield of potato crop with less than half the amount of phosphate fertilizers.

“While our applied research is focused on Colombia it could be applied in many other tropical regions of the world,” says Sanders.

Mass extinction of marine life may be on the horizon

Dead zones – areas of the seas and oceans that are lacking in oxygen and are suffering from increases of CO2, rising temperatures, nutrient run-off from agriculture and other factors - are rapidly growing in numbers and total area around the globe.

Professor Martin Kennedy from the University of Adelaide and Professor Thomas Wagner from Newcastle University, UK, have been studying these dead zones, or “greenhouse oceans.” They studied core samples from the Late Cretaceous Period (85 million years ago) across a 400,000-year timespan, and found evidence that points to a mass mortality in the oceans at a time when the Earth was going through a greenhouse effect. The mass extinction of marine life in our oceans during that prehistoric time is a warning that the same could happen again due to similarly high levels of greenhouse gases, according to their research.

“This could have a catastrophic, profound impact on the sustainability of life in our oceans, which in turn is likely to impact on the sustainability of life for many land-based species, including humankind,” he added.

What the geological records show, however, is a glimmer of hope attributed to a naturally occurring response to the greenhouse effect. After the phase when the oceans suffer a lack of oxygen, the concentration eventually improves, along with an increase in marine life. Carbon burial of the excess carbon ultimately contributes to CO2 removal from the atmosphere, cooling the planet and the ocean.

“This is nature’s solution to the greenhouse effect and it could offer a possible solution for us,” said Professor Wagner. “If we are able to learn more about this effect and its feedbacks, we may be able to manage it, and reduce the present rate of warming threatening our oceans.”

Their research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

New salt findings contradict long-standing thinking

A report recently published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association created a controversy over its results that indicated a low-salt diet could lead to heart disease.

Belgium researchers followed almost 3,700 people for an eight-year period, ending when the participants were approximately 49 years old, and found that those individuals who consumed the lowest amount – approximately 2,500 mg per day – were no more likely to develop hypertension (high blood pressure) compared with individuals who consumed an average of 6,000 mg per day. There was also a higher rate of death from heart disease (4 percent) associated with the lowest amounts of consumption, whereas the rate was only 1 percent among those who consumed the highest amounts.

A couple of other recent studies also point to similar results: A national nutrition survey published September 2008 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that low sodium intake was linked to higher cardiovascular mortality, and a study published in the April 2011 edition of Diabetes Care found that type 1 diabetes patients with the lowest sodium intake were most likely to die during its 10-year duration.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was quick to publicly criticize the Belgium study. “Salt increases blood pressure.  More salt leads to higher blood pressure and higher blood pressure leads to worse cardiovascular health,” said Dr. Briss of the CDC. He also stated the study was too small, the participants too young, and some of the participants were heavy smokers.

U.S. public health officials set the maximum recommended daily consumption at 2,300 mg, while the American Heart Association recommends no more than 1,500 mg per day.

EarthTalk: Reducing energy use — globally; and would legalizing pot be good for the environment?

Dear EarthTalk: With all the talk of the need for safe, renewable energy sources, isn’t the elephant in the room really that we should use far less energy than we do? Wouldn’t more rules about conservation (like not leaving commercial building lights on all night) make the challenges easier?
– Jennifer B., New York, NY

In short, yes: Scaling back our energy consumption significantly, whether voluntarily or as a result of laws and regulations, would go a long way toward achieving our pollution reduction and air and water quality goals. But Americans—and to a lesser extent those in many other developed nations—have never been very good at using less of anything, let alone the energy that makes everything in our whiz-bang modern world possible. That said, conservation is going to play an increasingly important role in all of our lives as we struggle to reduce our collective carbon footprints in a quickly warming world.

Earth Hour 2011 saw the participation of millions of
individuals in 135 countries who turned their lights off
for one hour to make a statement about the need to
conserve energy to fight climate change. Organizers
expect the 2012 event (March 31 at 8:30 p.m.,
wherever you live) to be even bigger.
Photo credit: Reway2007, courtesy Flickr

President Obama has repeatedly highlighted the need for greater conservation efforts when it comes to shoring up our existing and future energy reserves and reducing our dependence on foreign sources of oil. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 set aside upwards of $3 billion to bolster efforts across the country to weatherize existing buildings in order to conserve energy.

Grants to local communities for such projects, along with calls for voluntary reductions in energy consumption, are part of the plan. The White House is also betting on technology by subsidizing various initiatives aimed at reducing energy use and making our existing power network more efficient overall. Research has shown that investments in energy efficiency that promote conservation are cheaper and provide quicker returns than building new, cleaner power plants. A recent study released by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory predicts annual spending on energy efficiency and conservation to quadruple to as much as $12 billion a year by 2020.

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One-third of world’s food lost or wasted

Approximately 1.3 billion tons – or about one-third – of all the world’s food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted, according to a new report compiled by The Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology (SIK) for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Important facts about global food waste from the report include:

• Food waste is a much bigger problem in industrialized countries, where a significant amount of food is thrown away by households and retailers, usually still fit for consumption.

• In developing countries, food waste is attributed to financial, managerial and technical limitations in harvesting techniques, storage and cooling facilities in difficult climatic conditions, infrastructure, packaging and marketing systems.

• Fruits and vegetables have the highest rates of wastage.

To reduce food loss, the report recommends improving harvesting techniques and post-harvest logistics; re-thinking quality standards that over-emphasize appearance; and changing consumers’ attitudes to buy only within their means, instead of falling prey to the popular “2-for-1″ marketing promotions. Specifically, consumers fail to properly plan their food purchases and tend to discard food because it wasn’t consumed before the expiration date.

Report: Global Food Losses and Food Waste (PDF), May 2011

It is time to end the low-fat myth, say Harvard nutrition experts

Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) nutrition experts told food industry leaders at the seventh annual World of Healthy Flavors Conference held in Napa, Calif., in January that it’s time to stop focusing on low-fat diets and asked them to take the “no more low-fat” pledge. The conference brought together nutrition researchers from establishments such as schools, supermarkets, and restaurants, including Panera Bread and Olive Garden.

The “Focus on Fat” panel recommended avoiding “low-fat” terminology and thinking, since diets low in fat are often high in sodium and carbohydrates from sources such as white flour and rice, refined snacks, and sugary drinks. They encouraged the nutritionists to instead focus on eliminating trans fats and educating consumers about healthier fats.

Dr. Ronald Krauss, a senior scientist and the director of atherosclerosis research at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, and cardiologist and epidemiologist Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, who co-directs the program in cardiovascular epidemiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and is an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, have been involved in numerous studies measuring the effects of dietary habits on cardiovascular health and disease. They and many of their colleagues have found little evidence that low-fat diets are any better for health than moderate or high-fat diets.