Health Spectator

On Tuesday, August 30 actress and activist Daryl Hanna was arrested in front of the White House for sitting in against the Keystone XL oil pipeline. That pipeline, if built, would transport oil from Alberta, Canada’s tar sands fields to Texas at the Gulf of Mexico.

What does that have to do with our health? you might ask. Indeed, that is a logical question.

First, the oil in question is extremely dirty crude oil. Its carbon content is exceedingly high. In fact, tar sands oil produces 82 percent more greenhouse gas than conventional crude oil. So not only is it much more expensive to convert to, say, gasoline than conventional crude, it also has a far worse effect on the environment even if it doesn’t spill.

But when it spills, it spells disaster. Residents of Michigan can tell you about that. An existing pipeline extends from these same oil fields to refineries in Oklahoma. Now barely a year old, that pipeline has leaked twelve times in twelve months. In July 2010 it spilled one million gallons of tar sands crude into a Kalamazoo River tributary. Forty miles of river are still contaminated with the oil more than a year later. In part, that’s because tar sand sinks in water. Of course, it still coats and kills fish and wildfowl.

So if you don’t want crude oil contaminating your waterways and drinking water or excess carbon, sulfur and mercury polluting your air and soil, there must be cleaner energy alternatives. Or maybe we just have to cut back on our use of energy and our miles of driving, perhaps using electric cars (which still require us to produce that electricity in the first place—we know).

But that soil, air and water pollution don’t really affect us, right? Breast cancer is still on the rise wordwide. Of course, that’s because of “Western” lifestyles, right? According to the World Health Organization (WHO) there will be 20 million new cases of cancer per year by 2030, up from 12 million new cases in  2008. But if the cause were simply our Western lifestyle as so much of the media assure us, shouldn’t the cancer rate reach a steady state, at least in the U.S.? How do we blame a continuing increase in cancer rates worldwide on our Western lifestyle? Has life changed that radically in India and Southeast Asia?

Incidentally, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) reports that the current increase in cancer translates into approximately 56% more cancer in men and 22% more cancer in women over the course of a single generation. The NCI reports that one in two men or women will experience cancer in their lifetime. And it expects the cancer rate to double by 2050. In Ireland, a report just out states that cancer cases have risen 50% since the 1990s. Has Ireland become that much more “Westernized” since 1990?

If this is purely the result of a Western lifestyle, which presumably means inadequate exercise and a diet of processed foods, why do the rates keep rising? Once one does not exercise and one’s diet consists entirely of processed food—which is, unfortunately, the case for many of us—how can you justify further increases in cancer?

The only explanation, we believe, is a continuing deterioration in our environment, with subsequent ill effects on our health. And the  Keystone XL pipeline is one more giant step in that direction.

We’ve grown accustomed to seeing those signs on the local buses that say, “Powered by Clean Natural Gas.” It always gave us a bit of a lift to see that cheerful improvement touted, even knowing that the buses in this area sporting that sign hold fewer seats than the older buses and are less comfortable for travel.

Still… just the price of progress and greenness, we always thought.

Never again. After seeing Josh Fox’s Gasland, we cannot view natural gas (or any fossil fuel, for that matter) in quite the same light. The old natural gas that gushed from an oil well that has just struck a deposit may have been different. Perhaps there are natural gas wells somewhere in this country that are not the result of fracking—hydraulic fracturing—and which we can still view benignly. But we now know that the odds favor fracking as the likely source of natural gas, as fracking wells spread across our national landscape like locusts or the plague.

Josh Fox hails from Pennsylvania (as we do) and happened to be one of those apparently lucky people who received a lease in the mail from a natural gas company. All he had to do was sign the lease in order to receive a check for approximately $100,000. Of course, signing that lease would have enabled teams from the natural gas company to come and drill on his parents’s beloved rural homestead, giving Fox pause.

Fortunately for Fox and the rest of us, he decided to do some research before signing on the dotted line. The result was the documentary film Gasland.

Fox discovered that fracking was a process patented by Halliburtion, and its rapid spread is an artifact of the Bush-Cheney administration. That’s because in 2005, Cheney and friends pushed through the Energy Policy Act, which exempted the oil and gas industries from control by the Safe Drinking Water Act as well as from other legislation normally assuring some degree of public safety. For example, Halliburton and those companies actually performing the fracking need not reveal the chemicals injected into underground shale deposits to break loose natural gas.

We suspect that hasty legislation was undertaken because in 2004 a scientist with the EPA (Weston Wilson, a 30-year agency veteran) blew the whistle on the EPA’s hasty approval of fracking under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Initially, fracking was used in the West—where it has done untold damage—and is now working its way eastward, leaving behind a path of devastation. Fracking not only causes natural gas (mostly methane) to exude spontaneously from streams and meadows, wells and water faucets, it also pollutes the ground, water and air with potentially hundreds of deadly poisons, including but not limited to, polyglycols, napthalene, xylene, benzene and toluene. Residents in areas treated with fracking appear to be quite fond of demonstrating that their tap water can be set afire, a sort of dark humor that provides them temporary relief from the daily horrors of living in a fracking zone, which include death and severe illness of family and livestock.

Need we mention that flammable water raises concerns of cancer, neuropathy and endocrine imbalance?

Gasland not only received a special jury prize for documentary film at the Sundance Film Festival 2010 and other coveted prizes, it was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary as well. To add to its mystique, the oil and gas industry lobbied hard to get the Academy to withdraw the film from competition, saying it was full of factual errors. Apparently there were no factual errors of sufficient merit to warrant an attempt to attack the filmmaker via the courts, however.

Take a look at Gasland below, then click here to buy it.

While you are waiting to read our exposé on factory farming and swine flu (which should finish final editing in the next 24 hours) you can watch this video from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.

As we hope to show in greater detail over coming weeks,  the trend in agriculture toward large farms has changed our rural landscape and is affecting not only our national health, but the health of humans globally along with their environment.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 40 percent of people in rural areas lived on farms in 1950. Now USDA statistics reveal that less than 10 percent of the rural population lives on farms and that only 14 percent of the rural workforce is employed in agriculture.

Some rural areas thrive as they become home to commuting professionals, but some just sink deeper into isolation. This helps to explain why in 2003 14.2 percent of the population living in rural America were poor, while the poverty rate in metropolitan areas was 12.1 percent, a disparity that has been constant for several decades.

As for the farming trends themselves, in 1980, approximately 65,000 farmers in the state of Iowa raised hogs, with an average of 200 hogs residing on each farm. By 2002, the number of farms with hogs had fallen to about 10,000, but the average number of hogs per farm had risen to 1,400. Similar trends toward industry concentration have been in effect in North Carolina, which is the second largest pork producer in the U.S. As early as 1993, 13 percent of the producers in North Carolina were responsible for 95 percent of that state’s total swine production.

A new study from the University of Michigan published in the November issue of Pediatrics found that children aged 9 to 12 who sleep less than nine hours a night are more likely to be overweight. Their risk of gaining weight was accompanied by other negative risk factors such as moodiness and a lack of alertness in school, according to primary study author Dr. Julie Lumeng.

The National Sleep Foundation recommends that elementary school children receive 10 to 12 hours of sleep a night. Getting less sleep not only affects the children’s tendency to feel energetic and play outdoors, it also affects their hormone levels, which can lead to increased fat storage and an impaired tolerance for glucose. These same risk factors have been shown by other research to lead to increased weight and a tendency toward diabetes and heart disease in later life.

Yogis and Buddhists, among others, have long known the benefits of meditation and mindfulness. Now, Western science is not only confirming those benefits, but attempting to find clues to how it works.

Studies currently being published in the journal Psychological Science by UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues seem to indicate that naming negative emotions helps us handle them better. Lieberman and his colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to identify regions of the brain that were active during their experiments. Meanwhile, they had subjects, whom they showed faces of people expressing strong emotions such as fear and anger, pick either a name for the person or a name for the emotion.

Only when they spoke the name of a negative emotion did the subjects’ brains react with more activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region and less in the amygdala. The amygdala is a portion of the brain that processes strong emotions such as fear, anger, and panic. The right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region, on the other hand, controls impulses. Thus, the experiments seem to indicate that naming or talking about a negative emotion helps calm the individual and helps him gain control.

Putting the brakes on

This may be an explanation, the researchers hypothesize, for why talking therapies help people to feel better: Simply talking about the emotion helps “put the brakes on.”

Some meditation teachers advise putting a label on a thought or emotion that we want to get rid of while meditating. In such forms of meditation, the goal is to divest the self of ego-based images and emotions, especially destructive emotions such as greed and anger. The naming process seems to form a separation from the emotion; otherwise, the meditator may begin to identify with that emotion, temporarily becoming one with it, as commonly occurs in day-to-day life.

Previous research has shown that depression often results from negative emotions or thoughts spiraling out of control, particularly in the elderly. One particularly bad practice to which many are prone is called rumination, which one researcher described as “problem solving gone awry.” In rumination, one can go from pondering what has gone wrong to cause the current situation and wind up in repetitive negative thought patterns, which result in depression.

Other workers point out that not all rumination leads to depression. In 2003, Treynor, Gonzalez, and Nolen-Hoeksema differentiated between “reflective pondering” and “brooding.” They described reflective pondering as “a purposeful turning inward to engage in cognitive problem solving to alleviate one’s depressive symptoms.” Brooding, on the other hand, they saw as representing “a passive comparison of one’s current situation with some unachieved standard.”

These same authors found that a brooding response style was associated with an increased risk for future depression while a reflective pondering response style was not. In general, it appears that the practice of comparing one’s current situation with some abstract ideal or even with another person’s situation is psychologically dangerous: it can lead to depression.

As it happens, Buddhist teachers have for centuries discouraged their disciples from making mental distinctions or judgments. One of the techniques they have long taught—mindfulness, or staying in touch with the present moment rather than turning thought inward—has in recent years caught the attention of psychological researchers, who find that it serves to cut off rumination, and as a consequence, results in greater mental health, while avoiding depression.