Health Spectator

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.

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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.

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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.

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