It is hard to discern any just principle behind an occupational qualification for receiving public money. Some farmers are poor, but seldom as poor as rural people who have no land, no buildings and no jobs. Why should one profession be supported when others aren’t?
Yet even farmers have been hurt by these payments. European subsidies have helped turn farmland into a speculative honeypot, making it highly attractive to City financiers. The price of land has more than doubled since payments by the hectare were introduced, pushing it out of reach of most farmers. By reinforcing economies of scale, these subsidies have driven out small farmers and accelerated the consolidation of land ownership.
Though we have paid enough money to have bought all the farmland in this country several times over, we have not acquired any direct democratic control over the land: farming, however it might alter landscape features, remains outside the planning system. The system amounts to taxation without representation.
Where are our priorities recycling, energy production, feeding our population or any others.
What is the purpose of food is it to feed people to form human energy and prolong survival or to produce other forms of energy, which again can be used for survival.
Where is the need most required?
Which is the most cost effective?
Which survival is more important?
Some questions and there will be many more before there will be effective answers.
Are we born to live or produce?
There lies the question, but who will provide the answers.
Today’s demo started rather hurriedly and to be honest I didn’t know if I was coming or going. This feeling was amplified because it was cold, rainy and my daughter was a bit fed up. understandable of course. But she soon settled down into our usual routine and all was well.
We are seeing a lot of new faces due to Stalybridge Jobcentre shutting. They don’t know us and what we are doing, and we don’t know them or their situations either. So we have to start from scratch, which at times isn’t easy. But it’s a whole lot harder for them.
I started a conversation with a man who had been previously attending Stalybridge Jobcentre for his appointments. The first thing that he said to me was that he couldn’t believe how rude the front desk staff are at Ashton Jobcentre, and how rude some of the advisors are also…
Lord McColl is obsessed with just one aspect, when there are many aspects to consider.
Health and Social Care go in tandem as you can not fund one without the other or even worse under fund both.
Health and Social Care need to work closer together and it does have to be a consideration should not one organisation manage both Social Care and Health, for to not to do so is bound to have some duplication of work, which is not cost effective, especially having two management structures.
However, in many cases, family life is seriously fragmented for in 1948 it was generally that the male was the person who went to work, while the female looked after the family. This is not so today for in many families both parents are working so that they can, in some respects are able to function as a family unit by having the monetary means to fund a reasonable life.
As both parents are now working, this creates problems in creating meals and there many families create meals by using convenience foods or take always, which in some respects is not cost effective, for within the cost is an element of preparation by another party.
Family units are now more diverse and to find work many units have splintered across the UK and beyond.
You then have the power of the media, especially advertisements, which are geared to influence children and parents alike, by promoting foods which are considered less healthy, but are very tasty and appealing.
Also are Social Care and Health sufficient to manage the ever increasing population, the living longer factor and the increase in persons with disabilities, both physical and learning, due to improvements in medical science.
The may be other factors, but to chose just one shows complete ignorance of the problems and thereby the solutions.
This is a story from another side of the Pond, but it’s relevant because it shows the kind of horrific medical system that the Blairites and the Tories are introducing over here through the destruction of the NHS. In this piece from the atheist/ secularist news channel, Secular Talk, Kyle Kulinski comments on a story in Raw Story from a report from a respected medical journal, The Journal of Antibiotics. A survey was done of 400 people in Houston, Texas, asking them how they obtained their antibiotics. These were people, who needed the drug, not those who did not. Kulinski is very clear to dispel this possible misunderstanding, as the overprescription of antibiotics is a separate issue. It’s responsible for the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, which is a serious threat to health around the world.
This is about people, who genuinely need the drug. It investigated how people…
Pink salmon is one of the species jeopardised by the impact of carbon dioxide emissions. Image: NOAA Fisheries via Flickr.com
Researchers warn of a serious threat to fish, mussels and other marine species as carbon dioxide acidifies the world’s waters and increases temperatures.
LONDON, 7 July, 2015 – Pink salmon – the smallest and most abundant of the Pacific salmon species, and a supper table mainstay in many parts of the world – may be swimming towards trouble.
And they are not the only dish likely to disappear from the menu. Mussels, oysters, clam and scallop could all become scarcer and more expensive as the seas become more acid. And as the world’s waters warm, fish will start to migrate away from their normal grounds at an ever-increasing rate.
Previous studies have repeatedly and consistently explored potentially problematic consequences of change in the pH value of the world’s oceans. The higher the carbon dioxide concentrations in the air as a consequence of the burning of fossil fuels, the greater the change in oceanic acidity levels.
But researchers at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and colleagues looked at the special problems of freshwater fish.
Only about 0.8% of the world’s water is fresh – that is, found in lakes and rivers – but freshwater species represent 40% of all fishes. Salmon spawn and the young are reared in fresh water, before taking to the seas to mature, then returning to repeat the cycle.
The Vancouver scientists report in Nature Climate Change that they tested very young embryos in water at acidity levels expected at the end of this century, and observed them for 10 weeks.
They found that these laboratory-reared salmon were smaller, and their ability to smell was reduced, which could mean problems in returning to their spawning grounds or for scenting danger and responding to it.
“It is not too late for society to benefit greatly from immediate reductions in CO2 emissions”
At the age of seaward migration, they were less able to use oxygen in their muscles, which promised problems finding food, evading predators or making long journeys.
“The increase in carbon dioxide in water is actually quite small from a chemistry perspective, so we didn’t expect to see so many effects,” said Michelle Ou, lead author of the study. “The growth, physiology and behaviour of these developing pink salmon are very much influenced by these small changes.”
Salmon aren’t the only freshwater fish at risk from climate change. Research published in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry reveals that a rise in water temperatures of 5°C could make common pesticides and industrial contaminants ever more toxic.
Ronald Patra, an environmental scientist at the Department of Planning and Environment in New South Wales, Australia, and colleagues tested rainbow trout, silver perch, rainbowfish and western carp gudgeon at temperatures higher than optimum for the species and in the presence of endosulfan, chlorpyrifos and phenol − all of which wash into waterways from the land.
Results varied according to pollutant, species and temperature, but, overall, all three chemicals became increasingly toxic as water temperatures rose.
Future toxicity
On the coast of Mangalore in southwest India, where mussel farming has become a growing industry, researchers decided to test future toxicity conditions for the green mussel.
The Society of Experimental Biology meeting in Prague learned that the bivalves were raised in high temperature and low salt conditions and exposed to toxic algae and bacteria of the kind that might be expected in a changing climate, which in turn affected the timing of the monsoon in ways that could lower seawater salinity.
“This is likely to increase the chance of outbreaks of toxic plankton blooms and make farming bivalves such as mussels increasingly challenging,” the meeting was told.
But changes to water chemistry – once again, the shift in pH values as yet more carbonic acid builds up in the seas – create problems enough for the commercial shellfisheries.
Wiley Evans, research associate at the Ocean Acidification Research Centre of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and colleagues report in the Public Library of Science journal PLOS Onethat shellfish farmers off the Alaska coast might, at extra expense, have to start modifying the sea water in their hatcheries because, the researchers reported, they expect “significant effects” from acidification by 2040.
The scientists monitored for 10 months the effects of water chemistry changes on oyster, clam, scallop and other shellfish larvae.
Alaska – with a limited growing season, melting glaciers that affect salinity, and with colder waters that more readily dissolve carbon dioxide – is a special case.
But in general, as researchers have repeatedly found, increasingly corrosive waters would make it more difficult for shellfish to exploit the calcium carbonate minerals needed to make shells.
Shellfish spend their maturity in one spot, whereas fish can and do shift their grounds when the conditions become uncomfortable − with consequences for established commercial catches such as sardines and sea bass.
Likely to migrate
But a 5°C average warming in global atmospheric temperatures – and climate scientists have repeatedly warned that this is possible before 2100 – means that fish are likely to migrate away from their existing habitats considerably faster than they are doing now.
Jean-Pierre Gattuso, of the Oceanological Observatory in Villefranche, France, and colleagues looked at the evidence on a global scale and report in Science journal that, without attempts to mitigate global warming, the oceans and the creatures in them will be seriously affected by temperature changes and acidification.
This is very bad news for the millions of people in the communities that depend on the seas for a living.
“On a positive note, we still have options to substantially reduce these impacts now, but the longer we wait the fewer and fewer options we have,” warns co-author William Cheung, of the fisheries centre at Canada’s University of British Columbia.
Commenting on the research, Jason Hall-Spencer, a professor of marine biology at Plymouth University in the UK, said: “This review screams at me that the evidence is in, and it is not too late for society to benefit greatly from immediate reductions in CO2 emissions.” – Climate News Network ……………’
Corn flakes cereal is a staple on breakfast tables all over the world. Today it is marketed as a healthy part of a balanced breakfast. But corn flakes were originally invented by a fanatically religious doctor as a way to stop people from masturbating.
The country’s most popular anti-sex food.
In 1894, two brothers, Dr John Harvey Kellogg and Will Keith “WK” Kellogg, were running a sanitarium and health spa in the town of Battle Creek, Michigan. John was the Superintendent, and WK was the bookkeeper. Among the treatments offered at the sanitarium/hospital for various ailments were hot and cold water baths, hydro-therapy with water enemas, electric-current therapy, light therapy using both sunlight and artificial lamps, and a regimen of exercise and massage. Among the more famous of the hospital’s clients through the 1910’s and 1920’s were President Warren G Harding, actor Johnny Weissmuller, Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart, Sojourner Truth, and Mary Todd Lincoln.
Both of the Kellogg brothers were Seventh-Day Adventists, a fundamentalist church emphasizing strict Biblical literalism and clean living, and their religious beliefs had a huge influence on many of their “treatments”. The Adventists believed in maintaining the purity of the “body’s temple”, and forbade the use of caffeine, alcohol and nicotine. They were also strict vegetarians.
Dr John Kellogg, however, took the Adventist faith in the purity of the body to an even further extreme. He was firmly convinced that sex itself was impure and harmful–and most especially the “solitary vice”, the “self-pollution” of masturbation. Kellogg married, but never consummated the union–he and his wife had separate bedrooms, and they adopted all their children. Kellogg became famous across the country for his books condemning sex, promoting celibacy, and luridly describing the evil health effects of “onanism”, which included everything from epilepsy to mood swings to dementia. “Neither plague, nor war, nor small-pox,” he thundered in one of his anti-sex books, “have produced results so disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of onanism. Such a victim dies literally by his own hand.” Among the “treatments” that Kellogg proposed for masturbation were piercing the foreskin with silver wires to prevent erections, and using carbolic acid to burn the clitoris so it wouldn’t be touched.
But another part of his anti-sex and anti-masturbation “treatment” came from his traditional Adventist reliance on vegetarianism. Kellogg convinced himself that eating meats and spicy foods increased the desire for sex, and forbade any of them at his sanitarium. Instead, he prescribed a bland tasteless diet containing mostly whole grains and nuts. In this, he was following the earlier lead of Presbyterian religious fanatic Sylvester Graham, who had invented the whole-wheat graham cracker as part of a diet that would reduce people’s sexual desire and stop them from both copulating and masturbating. Kellogg now attempted to make his own anti-sex food, by mixing corn meal and oatmeal into dough, adding nuts, and baking them into biscuits which were then crumbled into pieces. He called it “granula”. Unfortunately for Kellogg, that name was already being used by another health food fanatic with a similar product, and he threatened to sue–so Kellogg changed the name of his concoction to “granola”.
The Kellogg brothers also experimented with different types of bread, and with using whole-grain dough to make thin rolled sheets of toasted crackers. One day, after just having cooked some wheat for rolling, they were unexpectedly called away. When they got back, they ran the cooled wheat through the rollers, and each grain was flattened into an individual flake. It was, they thought, a wonderful health food. In 1898 they tried the same process using corn instead of wheat, and “corn flakes” were born.
John Kellogg immediately began serving corn flakes to his patients at the sanitarium, as a method of cleansing their bodies and reducing their sex drive. His bookkeeper brother WK, meanwhile, had less religious fervor and more business sense than John did, and thought they should add sugar to the mixture to eliminate the cardboard taste (a heretical thought to John) and sell it to the public as a breakfast cereal. After some arguing, the two patented their flake cereals and formed the Sanitas Food Company to sell them through mail-order, mostly to former patients of the sanitarium. After a time, the wheat flakes were dropped. But corn flake sales remained low, mostly because John Kellogg still refused to add sugar to the recipe to make it more palatable. Finally in 1906, in frustration, WK Kellogg purchased the rights to make “corn flakes” from his brother, changed the recipe, and set up the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company. After a long legal battle with his brother over the use of the name “Kellogg”, this became the Kellogg Cereal Company, adding Bran Flakes to its product list in 1915 and Rice Krispies in 1927.
By 1930, the Kellogg Cereal Company was the largest breakfast cereal maker in the world. Its primary competition, the Post Cereal Company, had been founded by CW Post–a former patient at the Kellogg Sanitarium, who, WK Kellogg always claimed, had stolen the recipe for corn flakes from the hospital’s safe. Today, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes are the best-selling breakfast cereal in the US.
Quality sleep is one of the pillars of good health, along with physical activity, proper hydration, low stress, and healthy eating habits. If you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep throughout the night, certain foods you’re consuming might be to blame. These 6 foods can have an adverse affect on your sleep quality, and should be consumed well before bedtime if you’re a sensitive sleeper.
Alcohol. That’s right. That glass of wine so notorious for making you feel sleepy works to sabotage your precious REM time. Alcohol can lessen the duration and quality of REM sleep, which is the most restorative part of your night. This cycle is hugely important and can impact concentration the next day, so if you’re feeling groggy and foggy it may be time to lay off the wine.
Celery. Believe it or not, the high water content of celery — along with cucumbers and watermelon — can act as a natural diuretic and could lead to a full nighttime bladder. Any time you wake up mid-sleep sets you back a little, so it’s best to steer clear of eating celery by the stalks before bedtime lest you want to be interrupted by a full bladder at 3 am.
Fatty, fried foods. These can unsettle the stomach, as they take a long time to digest which can cause abdominal discomfort. If your stomach is achy, relaxing and falling asleep is so much more difficult. When you do indulge in very fatty or fried meals, try to consume them at least 3 hours before you hit the sack.
Chocolate or hot cocoa. If you are caffeine sensitive, the small amount of caffeine in chocolate could have you buzzing a little later than you’d prefer. Also, the sugar content in a lot of chocolate can cause a blood sugar spike. This kind of blood sugar activity can cause restless, disturbed sleep. Save the hot cocoa for a few hours before bedtime, or opt for herbal tea instead.
Meat. The body takes a long time digesting meat — especially something like a thick steak. If you eat a lot of meat too close to bedtime, your body will still be digesting while your eyelids are trying to drift off into dreamland. That means you can’t go full force into restorative sleep — your body has to multitask. This adds up to a less restful night.
Soda. Ah, that lovely combination of caffeine and sugar again! Having a soda too close to bedtime is detrimental to sleep. The sugar causes a blood sugar spike; the caffeine stimulates brain activity. Mix that with some alcohol and you can pretty much kiss your quality shut-eye goodbye.
Sleep is paramount to good health. If you’re having trouble keeping yourself in deep sleep throughout the night, try adjusting your pre-bedtime diet to improve your sleep quality. If you continue to have trouble sleeping, talk to your doctor to discuss potential causes.
Our bodies are home to a complex, vast community of microorganisms, and there is mounting research looking at how how these bacteria and viruses are connected to our overall health.
You probably already know that good bacteria are a key part of a healthy gut, but it turns out that our bodies may be more bacteria than human. Sort of. Microorganisms only account for about three percent of our body mass, but because these cells are around 10,000 times smaller than human cells, there are actually more of them in and on our bodies than there are human cells.
I’ll give you a moment to go wash your hands.
Just like in our guts, though, most of these microorganisms are either harmless or beneficial to our bodies. And while researchers are identifying helpful and harmful microorganisms all the time, figuring out how they’re doing what they do is a whole different story.
Bacteria get most of the glory when we’re talking about beneficial microorganisms, but our bodies also house beneficial viruses. Some of these viruses attack harmful bacteria, but there are many more that researchers still need to study. According to Professor of Plant Pathology and Environmental Microbiology Marilyn Roosnick, PhD, “The gastrointestinal tracts of mammals are plush with viruses. So far, little is known about how these viruses affect their hosts, but their sheer number and diversity suggest that they have important functions.”
The community of microbes living on our bodies is so complex that scientists still don’t know exactly how they interact with us. Some microbes, for example, may be linked to obesity, but it’s hard to suss out exactly how they’re interacting with our bodies and with the other microbes that live there.
Even prebiotics and probiotics, which we accept as pretty well-studied, need a lot more research. There’s evidence that gut bacteria are linked to a slew of medical conditions, but a recent release the National Institutes of Health explained that there are still “fundamental knowledge gaps” about how these good bacteria work and how they impact our overall health.
That doesn’t mean you should pour out your kombucha and skip the sauerkraut, though. There is a a lot that researchers don’t know, but there’s also a lot that they have discovered about how bacteria impact our overall health. This graphic from The Huffington Post summarizes some of what researchers have concluded about good bacteria.
While gut bacteria has been studied extensively, our bellies aren’t the only place where bacteria and viruses live and interact with us. There are microbes on our skin, for example, that are harmless to us but protect us from infections that would take root if they weren’t there.
Our personal ecosystems are complex, and what’s becoming more and more clear is that these microorganisms are inextricably linked to our health. We’re just not totally sure how. Yet.
Becky StriepeBecky Striepe is a freelance writer and vegan crafter living in Atlanta, Georgia. Her life’s mission is to make green crafting and vegan food accessible to everyone! Like this article? You can follow Becky on Twitter or find her on Facebook! ………’
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