Don't frack our food and farms!

PETITION STATEMENT
California is the largest producer of food in the U.S. Fracking and farming cannot co-exist. If we frack California's farms, we put the entire country's food supply at risk. Please stop auctioning off California's public lands to the oil and gas industry for fracking.
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Petition Background

You may not live in California, but chances are a lot of the food you buy, including organic produce, is grown there. California is the largest producer of food in the U.S. In 2011, the state's 81,500 farms and ranches had sales of $43.5 billion. What happens to our food if we frack and poison the groundwater that irrigates California’s farms?
In a move that a federal judge says violated environmental law, the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has already auctioned off 1,750 square miles of California’s public lands to oil companies intent on extracting oil, using a controversial technology called hydraulic fracturing – or fracking. In May, the BLM plans to auction off even more of California’s Monterey Shale, a geological formation that extends from northern California to Los Angeles, and is home to cattle ranches, dairy farms, vineyards and organic farms.
Fracking and farms cannot co-exist, as we’ve heard over and over from farmers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Dakota, West Virginia and Colorado. Farmers whose lives and farms have been ruined by fracking’s methane emissions and toxic chemicals. As one farmer explained, “We depend on good water for our cows, our crops and our own health. Once you mess up your groundwater, you can’t fix it.”
The oil and gas industry argues that it’s fine to pump huge amounts of cancer-causing chemicals deep into the earth, because we’ll never use that water. U.S. environmental regulators agree – which is why fracking is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act, and why the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued more than 1,500 permits for companies to pollute aquifers in some of the country’s driest regions. But as our population grows, and temperatures rise, we may find ourselves doing what Mexico City has already been forced to do: drawing water from mile-deep aquifers that until now would not have been tapped for drinking water.
We all depend on California for our food. California’s unique Mediterranean climate allows the state to grow over 450 different crops. Some of these crops are exclusive to California: almonds, artichokes, dates, figs, kiwifruit, olives, persimmons, pomegranates, pistachios, prunes, raisins, clovers, and walnuts.
Fracking is bad for our water, bad for our air, bad for our health, bad for the climate. Without clean air and clean water, there are no farms. Without farms, there is no food.
Please sign this petition to the Bureau of Land Management asking officials there to stop auctioning off California’s public lands for fracking.

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Take Back the Tap Guide to Safe Tap Water

Do you drink bottled water? Do you think it is safer than tap water? So did I until I began to do some investigating.
Turns out I was wrong...and I was paying a lot of money for water that is tested less often and less extensively than my own tap water.
Tap water is tested more frequently for safety concerns than bottled water, but the water quality reports issued by local utilities can be confusing to read. Use this guide, the Take Back the Tap Guide to Safe Tap Water to help understand these reports and why they are important. Then get tips on finding the right filter for your household tap water based on the water quality in your area. 

Get the Facts. Bottled water is not safer than tap water. Despite the marketing, bottled water is not safer than tap water. In fact, tap water is subject to more stringent regulation that bottled water. Tap water is regulated by the EPA, while bottled water is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Perpetually under-funded and short-staffed, FDA has a poor record of protecting consumer health and safety. FDA sends inspectors to bottling plants once every two to three years. Read this: Bottled Water: Illusions of Purity and then resolve to reduce your bottled water consumption.
You can download a nifty app for your smartphone called Tap Buddy to find water fountains in your area, and you can visit Food & Water Watch's website to see what you can do to support access to safe food and water.

Vitamin D deficiency increases risk of type 2 Diabetes.

This study investigated whether baseline vitamin D level is associated with the incidence of type 2 diabetes in high-risk subjects for up to 5 years of follow-up, independently of obesity, baseline insulin resistance, and β cell function. Participants were 1080 nondiabetic Korean subjects based on the presence of one or more risk factors for type 2 diabetes, including obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and/or family history of type 2 diabetes. Of the participants, 10.5% had a serum vitamin D deficiency (<10 ng/mL), 51.6% had an insufficiency (10.0-19.9 ng/mL), and 38.0% had a sufficiency (≥20 ng/mL), and the incidence of type 2 diabetes at 32.3 months declined accordingly: 15.9%, 10.2%, and 5.4%, respectively. After adjustment for age, sex, blood pressure, lifestyles, family history, season, parathyroid hormone, and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, the participants with vitamin D deficiency had an increased risk of type 2 diabetes (106% increase for vitamin D levels 10-19.9 ng/mL compared with ≥20 ng/mL and 223% for vitamin D level <10 ng/mL compared with ≥20 ng/mL) independently of BMI, HOMA2-IR, and insulinogenic index. The authors conclude "The current prospective study suggests that vitamin D metabolism may play a role in type 2 diabetes pathogenesis independently of known risk factors".

Lim S, Kim MJ, Choi SH, Shin CS, Park KS, Jang HC, Billings LK, Meigs JB. Association of vitamin D deficiency with incidence of type 2 diabetes in high-risk Asian subjects. Am J Clin Nutr. 2013 Mar;97(3):524-30.

Omega-3 promotes weight loss.

 This study investigated whether supplementation with omega-3 alone, then consumed together with a very low calorie diet (VLED), facilitated weight loss, improvements in blood lipids and positive changes to inflammatory mediators. For 4 weeks of prior supplementation, one group consumed 6 × 1 g capsules per day monounsaturated oil (placebo), the other group consumed 6 × 1 g capsules per day of fish oil each comprising 70 mg EPA and 270 mg DHA, while consuming their usual diet. Each group continued with their supplements for another 4 weeks while both groups followed a VLED regimen. At 4 weeks levels of EPA and DHA doubled in the fish oil group, with no significant changes to anthropometric measurements for either group. At 8 weeks a significant reduction in weight and BMI with a greater percentage decrease for females was seen in the fish oil group compared to placebo.

Note that the dose of 2040mg combined EPA/DHA is not achievable through diet. You'll need a high quality supplement.

Munro IA, Garg ML. Prior supplementation with long chain omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids promotes weight loss in obese adults: a double-blinded randomised controlled trial. Food Funct. 2013 Apr 25;4(4):650-8.

Why are we not up in arms about the cost of health care in America?

About Time Magazine’s “Bitter Pill”

To read Bitter Pill, click here.

The story opens with an all too common tale of life in America. We have the right to pursue life liberty and happiness, but not at a price the rest of the world might enjoy, at least not when it comes to health care.

Take Sean Recchi.

Diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age 42. Total cost, in advance, for Sean’s treatment plan and initial doses of chemotherapy: $83,900. Charges for blood and lab tests amounted to more than $15,000; with Medicare, they would have cost a few hundred dollars.

Why are we not up in arms about the cost of health care in America? It approaches 20% of our GDP. We pay more than anyone, ANYONE else in the world pays. And we are not even covering everyone. Nor is the care top quality. In fact we are nowhere near the top as quality of care goes. Our ranking? Paying the most? 37th. We rank 37th in quality of care.

When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?

What are the reasons, good or bad, that cancer means a half-million- or million-dollar tab? Why should a trip to the emergency room for chest pains that turn out to be indigestion bring a bill that can exceed the cost of a semester of college? What makes a single dose of even the most wonderful wonder drug cost thousands of dollars? Why does simple lab work done during a few days in a hospital cost more than a car?

Read this article, "Bitter Pill". I implore you. It is long, but it is important for all of us to understand that health care in America is extortion. Nothing more than government sanctioned extortion.