Green Options » fat

Honey is a Health & Fitness Queen

Zachary Shahan — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:07:27 +0000

With a lot of great health and fitness benefits, honey should be a common staple in people’s daily diets. Other than its great taste, it has numerous benefits for our bodies, immune systems, weight, and energy which you may not be aware of.

Honey is a source of a variety of vitamins, minerals and amino acids. The main vitamins it provides are niacin, riboflavin and pantothetic acid, and the main minerals are calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium and zinc. Importantly, the amount of these substances in honey varies depending on its floral source, just as its color and taste vary.

On top of this, what are the main health benefits of honey?

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Car-Free Market Street Is Closer to Reality

Rhonda Winter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:12:55 +0000

My long held fantasy of a car-free Market Street became just a little closer to reality today. A transit improvement report was just approved by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority that encourages travel by bus, foot and bicycle along this busy thoroughfare. District 6 Supervisor Chris Daly, who requested the report, expressed his support for the positive changes being implemented that will limit car traffic on Market. “It will feel pretty good to see some progress, albeit incremental progress on Market Street,” he said.

A glorious car-free Market Street in June of 2008 after the queer pride parade.

I could not agree more, and am eagerly anticipating the upcoming changes; they can’t come quickly enough. Cars make us fat. The more we can increase walking, biking and mass transit use, the healthier our citizens will be, and the more livable and sustainable both our city and world will become.

Fat People Cause Global Warming? An example of climate change hysteria gone wrong…

Stephen Boles — Sun, 17 May 2009 20:21:10 +0000

Over the last couple of years the term ‘carbon footprint’ has become commonplace in our culture. A growing number of people now have at the very least a general understanding of what a carbon footprint is, and for the most part this is a good thing. This has begun to translate into a greater awareness of the life cycle of the products we consume, which is an important step towards becoming a more energy-efficient nation.

But with increased understanding of a concept like carbon footprints comes the likelihood that it will be abused and mis-used. With greater frequency we are seeing reports that pervert the concept, such as the pointless ‘carbon footprint smackdown’ that compares the footprint of one cheeseburger being equivalent to that of 15,000 Google searches.

The climate change finger-pointing hit a new level of insanity when a paper was published recently that links overweight people to increased greenhouse gas emissions. Surprisingly this report did not appear in a sensationalist tabloid or newspaper, but was an article in the respected International Journal of Epidemiology. The logic of the study is relatively simple: compared to the average population, obese people eat more and use their cars more for everyday chores. Since both driving and the production of food create greenhouse gas emissions, overweight people contribute more to global warming than the average population.

It is shocking that this article was able to successfully pass the journal’s peer-review process, as there are a large number of flaws with its simplistic theory. Peter Gorrie of the Toronto Star has done an excellent job of reviewing several reasons why this report can’t be taken seriously.

Of greater concern than the lack of scientific rigor in the study is the precedent that this report sets in labeling a subset of the population as the cause of increasing greenhouse gas emissions. The data and logic can be spun in a countless number of ways such that just about any subset of the population can be made to blame for climate change. As opposed to investing time and energy into questionable and discriminatory studies like the one described here, future efforts should be allocated towards developing solutions to the climate change problem.

Image: Victius at flickr under a CC License

Stephen Boles is co-founder of Kuzuka, a marketplace website that brings a new level of convenience and confidence to carbon offset customers and provide consulting services to organizations that want to assess and reduce their carbon footprint.

What’s the Dish on Grease Recycling in SF?

Rhonda Winter — Thu, 14 May 2009 18:15:12 +0000

Did you know that San Francisco spends approximately $3.5 million dollars every single year to unclog our sewers? Commercial restaurants and household kitchens are the largest controllable sources of Fats, Oil and Grease (FOG) in the City’s sewer system. Although most individuals don’t produce very much used cooking grease, collectively what we pour down our drains all adds up and makes a disgusting unhealthy clogged mess in our city’s sewers.

Before and after photos of a San Francisco sewer encrusted with used grease

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Fast Food Outlets Linked to Increased Risk of Stroke

Rhonda Winter — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:35:19 +0000

Would you like a stroke with your cheeseburger? Scientists have found that your chances of having a stroke may actually be related to how many Burger Kings and KFCs are operating in your town. Researchers at the University of Michigan have discovered that the risk of stroke increases with the preponderance of fast-food restaurants in a neighborhood.

In the recently published study, Texas residents with the highest number of fast-food restaurants had a 13% higher relative risk of suffering strokes than those living in areas with the lowest number of restaurants. Each additional McDonalds, Jack in the Box or Taco Bell also increased the risk of stroke by 1%.

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This is Why You’re Fat (Possibly the Most Disturbing Website Ever?)

Amy Bell — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 23:07:03 +0000

Ok now, we all know the dangers of eating fried foods and food loaded with trans fats, sugar, and other unhealthy ingredients. Right?

Well apparently there are still plenty of people out there who either don’t know…or don’t care.
When I first saw this website I was shocked by the foods on it, it’s a meat-filled calorie bomb photo gallery you wont believe! (Who knew you could batter and fry just about anything imaginable, and/or cover it in bacon? Yuck.)

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ZapRoot: Google Causes Global Warming?

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:29:08 +0000

This post contains additional media. Click here to view the full post.

This week at ZapRoot: Is Google destroying the planet one search at a time? The recycling market has gone bust. And check out “That’s Just Weird.”

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Cars Make Us Fat

Rhonda Winter — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 20:04:37 +0000

A recent study published in the Journal of Physical Activity and Health found a strong correlational link between “active transportation” (defined as the percentage of trips taken by walking, bicycling, and public transit) and obesity rates in seventeen industrialized nations. It appears that the more we sit on our butts and drive automobiles, the fatter we all become.

David Bassett of the University of Texas and John Pucher of Rutgers University present their findings in “Walking, Cycling and Obesity Rates in Europe, North America and Australia”; they conclude that “Countries with the highest levels of active transportation generally had the lowest obesity rates. Walking and biking are far more common in European countries than in the United States, Australia and Canada. Active transportation is inversely related to obesity rates in these countries.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in the United States, where less than 12% of the population walks, rides a bike or takes mass transit, and one in three of us is obese.

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Soylent Fuel is People! Biodiesel Made From Humans? Ick.

Nick Chambers — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:42:48 +0000

In the category of “Things I’d Rather Never Read About Again,” we’ve found a winner.

A plastic surgeon in Los Angeles has discovered that he can use the fat he liposuctions off of his patients to provide all the biodiesel he needs to power his and his girlfriend’s SUVs. Not only that, he says he has extra. I wonder if he’s willing to share?

Got the heebies yet?

Alan Bittner, a high scale Beverly Hills doctor, has been making the liposuctioned human fat into biodiesel for some time now. There are lots of rendering firms in the US — like Tyson Farms, for instance — that already take similar waste, such as poultry fat, and turn it into biodiesel, but I’m imaging that Bittner is the first guy to actually turn human fat into fuel.

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UK: Bike Week 2008

Pem Charnley — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:28:36 +0000

Note: this article is part of this week’s EcoWorldly cycling series: Cycling and its importance in countries around the world.

Slimy

Actions speak louder than words. I can write no more scathing an attack on the leader of the opposition than he can achieve merely by being him. So it was that the man who instinctively knows where the camera is cycled to work whilst his chauffer followed just out of site driving a pair of shoes.

Fatuous, slimy, ultimately laughable. A joy to read. Silly boy.

So, now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s ponder on cycling here in the UK.

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Dolphins, and Turtles, and Seals - Oh My! The Effect of Fishing on the Animals We Care About

Colleen Patrick-Goudreau — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 13:43:16 +0000

In my first exploration of the issue of by-catch in commercial fishing , I looked at the devastating effects of fishing not simply for the "target" species, but on those animals who are unlucky enough to be caught in the lines, traps, hooks, and nets not meant for them. In this second part, I further explore this issue and take a look at how the dolphins, sea turtles, and seals - animals for whom we have affection - fare in our pursuit of gastronomic pleasure.

DOLPHINS
The public became aware of the problems of by-catch in the 1980s when campaigns were led against tuna companies for harming and killing dolphins when tuna were the targets. The relationship between dolphins and tuna is that yellowfin tuna follow and school beneath dolphins, so fishing fleets would look for dolphins on the surface, herd them and encircle them and set out the nets to catch the tuna – ensnaring the dolphins at the same time. An estimated 5 to 7 million dolphins have been killed by this fishing method over the past four decades, the largest marine mammal kill in history.

In 1986, the International Marine Mammal Project organized a campaign, including a consumer boycott of tuna, in order to urge U.S. tuna companies to end the practice of intentionally chasing and netting dolphins, and to adopt "Dolphin Safe" fishing practices to prevent the drowning of dolphins in tuna nets. Dolphins are mammals and don’t have gills, so they drown while stuck in the nets underwater. There are other standards that a company must adhere to in order to label their tuna “dolphin-safe,” but it’s worth noting that just because it says “dolphin-safe” or “dolphin-friendly,” it doesn’t mean that dolphins were not killed in the production of a particular tin of tuna. It means that the fleet which caught the tuna did not specifically target a pod of dolphins.

Though the numbers are down since new techniques are used to catch tuna (400,000 dolphins killed annually in the 1960s and 100,000 in the 1980s), several thousand dolphins are still killed each year to satisfy our appetites for tuna. Dolphins — social, playful, intelligent animals — are also killed as by-catch in nets targeting trout. According to a 2003 BBC story by Alex Kirby called “Nets Kill 800 Cetaceans a Day,” more than 800 dolphins, porpoises, and whales die every day as they get tangled in fishing nets – that’s 300,000 every year.

TURTLES
Turtles are also common victims. Sea turtles are killed by the thousands. It’s estimated that more than 20,000 sea turtles die each year after getting hooked on longlines. Six of the seven species of marine turtles are listed as "Endangered" or "Critically Endangered," and the outlook is increasingly grim. In the Pacific, leatherbacks are heading for extinction, fast, and in the Mediterranean, green turtle numbers have plummeted. Though pollution and disease contribute to this, the nets and long-lines of fishing fleets play a major role in their demise.

According to Duke University, which recently conducted a global assessment of the problem, more than 250,000 loggerhead and 60,000 leatherback turtles are snared each year by commercial longline fishing, and tens of thousands die. The authors estimated that longline fleets from 40 different countries set about 1.4 billion hooks in the studied year of 2000, the equivalent of about 3.8 million hooks each day. Again, longlines are fishing lines that can stretch for 40 miles and dangle thousands of individually baited hooks. They are set at optimal depths and times to catch tuna and swordfish, shark, and other fish, and according to the data studied, the turtles most often die – not by drowning, by some kind of injury related to hooking or entangling.

SEALS
Another byproduct of the fishing industry is the brutal death of baby seals. Because of the overfishing of cod by the Canadian fishing industry in eastern Canada –- in the Atlantic Ocean for Newfoundland’s northeast coast — the cod population declined to such a degree that the government stepped in the late 1980s and imposed severe restrictions on commercial fishing. But it was too late. Because of overfishing, the fishery collapsed, never recovered, and the ecosystem changed such that it was no longer able to support cod fish.

What does all this have to do with the seals? Scapegoating the seals for the collapse of the cod fisheries, fishermen demanded a kill. In 2003, the Canadian government bowed to pressure from the fishing industry, and ordered the massacre of hundreds of thousands of seals, declaring war on the seals in hopes that massive seal kills will bring back the cod and keep their disgruntled fishermen working.

In fact, cod is not a major food source of the harp and hood seal diet. Further, recent evidence suggests that killing seals contributes to bacterial infestation on the ocean floor which leads to hypoxia, a condition in which patches of ocean lose all the dissolved oxygen and are unable to sustain cod or fish or marine life of any kind. However, these facts seem to have been brushed aside by the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans in their efforts to justify and continue the slaughter.

During the 3-year period of 2003-2005, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) allowed a kill quota of 975,000 baby and adult harp seals and 30,000 adult hood seals. When the "struck and lost" seals are included (these are the animals who’ve been hit but lost in the icy waters), the total killed exceeds one million, making this the largest marine mammal slaughter in the world.

To find as many avenues as possible to profit from the annual, government-subsidized slaughter, Canada exports sealskins (furskins/pelts and leather), seal oil, and seal meat. Unfortunately, the demand for seal pelts has sky-rocketed, especially in Europe. Though seal meat isn’t doing so well, the Canadian government is trying to find markets for the bodies of the skinned seals. The kill continues to this day. The quota for the 2007 massacre was 270,000. Visit www.protectseals.org for more information.

TSUNAMI
Finally, while we’re talking about by-products/effects (not just "by-catch"), there is another by-product of consuming aquatic animals that went under the radar screen when an earthquake and subsequent tsunami in southeast Asia destroyed lives and communities at the end of 2004. Over 200,000 human lives were lost and an uncounted number of non-human lives. Experts agree that the destruction of coral reefs and mangrove trees played a significant role in the destruction caused by the tsunami. In many countries across Asia, including Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, mangroves stood all along the coasts in shallow waters. They offered protection against things like tsunamis. Over the last 20-30 years, they were cleared for shrimp or prawn farms. The shrimps and prawns are sold to Europeans and other foreigners at a price that does not take into account the environmental cost. The destruction of the coasts was also due to the building of large resorts where they should never have been built.

Of course, there are efforts to rebuild the shrimp farms, and we’ll see if we learn anything from the disaster. I’m a little skeptical, considering the fact that worldwide, shrimp farming has grown at an annual average of over 18% since 1970, and is the single most valuable internationally traded seafood product worldwide, valued at an estimated $50-60 billion at the point of retail.

BEYOND BY-CATCH
The cost of our consumption of aquatic animals is extremely high - not just to the target species who were living perfectly peaceful lives before we come along and snatch them out of their homes, but also to the non-target species and entire ecosystems. And this is just one aspect of this issue. We have yet to talk about all the others, including factory-farm raising fish; the pollution in the ocean; the fishing of smaller fish to feed to the larger fish we raise to eat; the toxins, such as mercury, in the fish that we consume when we eat their bodies; the research that supports the fact that fish feel pain; the human health concerns of eating fish; or the ethical considerations of “catch and release sport fishing."

We have yet to explore the many problems with consuming salmon – for instance, the problems with farm-raised Atlantic salmon, which is probably one of the worst choices we could make: the fish are raise in cramped pens in the ocean, and their waste pollutes the surrounding water and spreads disease to wild fish. In the Pacific, escaped farm-raised salmon also compete with wild fish for food, and interfere with spawning. Furthermore, salmon are fed a diet of fish meal (tinted to give their flesh that characteristic "salmon pink" color) which further depletes the ocean food chain. Wild Washington or Oregon salmon is a poor choice, since overfishing and habitat destruction have endangered many species. And remember: the fish have to consume Omega-3 fatty acids from phytoplankton, from algae. If they don’t consume it, they don’t have it in their flesh. If they don’t get it, we don’t get it. So again, go right to the source for your nutrients.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT
A recent issue of Fish and Fisheries magazine cited more than 500 research papers on fish intelligence, proving that fish are smart, that they can use tools, and that they have impressive long-term memories and sophisticated social structures. The introductory chapter said that fish are "steeped in social intelligence, pursuing Machiavellian strategies of manipulation, punishment and reconciliation … exhibiting stable cultural traditions and cooperating to inspect predators and catch food." A wonderful U.K. Guardian story explores these notions, quoting Dr. Culum Brown, a specialist in fish behaviour at Macquarie University in Sydney, and co-author of Fish Cognition and Behaviour. He says, "I spend half my life telling people fish aren’t stupid. Fish are more intelligent than they appear. The trouble is that most aquaculture treats fish as if they are little robots. They are not."

My hope is that we begin to question the criteria we use to determine the value of an animal’s life, who deserves to be spared pain, and who has a right to live free from harm, free from suffering, free from premature and unnecessary death.

My hope is that our hearts are large enough to include not only those with whom we can identify, with whom we can communicate but also those who don’t look us, those who don’t sound like us. May we be as fascinated by our differences as we are consoled by our similarities. We don’t need to travel to other planets to find interesting, exotic, different life forms. They exist right here, right now, on the earth and in the sea.