>> Newsflash: Most married women are sex-starved. “In a much-discussed recent survey of 35,000 American women, published in the July issue of Woman’s Day, 72 percent of married women said they had considered leaving their husbands. Seventy-nine percent said they’d like sex more often, and 52 percent said they have no sex life to speak of.”
“We’ll probably never know until it’s too late, but we both think he’s hiding something,” said Prenner’s mother, Danna Prenner. “All of his friends are married and have children, so when he says to me, ‘Mom, I’m happy living the single life,’ I have to wonder what he’s not really telling us. I only hope that someone can intercede and bring him out of the black hole that he’s falling into, like a woman who wants to start a family and settle down right away, for example.”
>> Formaldehyde in baby shampoo’s totally safe, says Johnson & Johnson. Parents and enviro groups beg to differ — and want the company to take that stuff plus 1,4-dioxane out of Johnson’s baby shampoo — just like the company’s done for its Japanese products.
Japan’s got better consumer safety laws than we do — which is why eco-orgs like Environmental Working Group are pushing for the Kid-Safe Chemicals Act, which would overhaul the U.S.’s chemical regulatory law requiring chemical safety testing, proof of chemical safety from companies, and better EPA oversight for consumer products. Earlier: There will be polluted blood: 5 eco-justice leaders, 48 toxic chemicals
>> The Future Beneath Us is a New York Transit Museum exhibit of 8 underground projects planned for the Big Apple — like the Fulton Transit Center below the World Trade Center — with a pretty detailed website. (via kottke)
>>The “mental health bible” is getting updated. Been diagnosed with a mental illness or condition? The definition of what you’ve got could change as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders gets updated. L.A. Times notes that “For health insurance companies, [a DSM diagnosis] has become a basis for decisions on paying for care.” I’d like to point out that a DSM diagnosis has often become a basis for denying people health care coverage. Earlier: Finding health care.
A burger a day will kill you, basically, was the big health news this week. And since burgers are no friend of the environment, carnivores who cut back on red meat will be saving both themselves and the planet. Which begs the question (at least for me): If too many burgers can be so deadly, how, um, lively(?) can an anti-burger diet be?
The answer of sorts to that question comes from 6 diabetics who volunteered to drastically their eating habits, going on all vegan, all raw diet for 30 days in an effort to reverse their disease, and having their experiences turned into a newly-released documentary, Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days (trailer below).
So — Does eating raw reverse a disease that, according to the American Medical Association, “has no cure”? The answer, as I interpret the film, is yes, but….
Let’s start with the yes part. The raw food diet yields rather miraculous results for the six people — ranging from a healthy-looking 20-something grad student to a 30-something mother and receptionist to a retired chiropractor with little sensation left in his feet. We watch as all six people’s blood sugar levels and blood pressures drop rapidly to normal levels, even as they stop taking insulin and prescription drugs.
The achievement’s especially astounding considering the fact that the diabetics can eat all they want — including chocolatey desserts — so long as the food’s raw. At the end of the 30 days, the participants talk about their weight loss, their feelings of health, and their improved mood and energy levels. The chiropractor tears up, saying he’s been given a second chance at life.
But here comes the but part. To participate in this raw experiment, the 6 diabetics were flown in to The Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center in Arizona, where junk food doesn’t exist, where a variety of gourmet raw foods are prepared for them multiple times a day, where constant medical supervision and psychological encouragement is offered by the staff, where fellow diabetics also going raw have all the free time in the world to chat, commiserate, and push each other.
That sort of setting, as you know, is nothing like the real world.
In fact, even in the pristine, isolated setting of The Tree of Life, real life still sneaks in to disrupt the raw experiment. After all, we’re dealing with real people here — Real people with ingrained habits, problems, and addictions. One young dude’s clearly got some alcohol and depression issues. He’s unable to stay off the sauce and ends up sneaking booze into the center, messing up his stats for the experiment and ending up remorseful, repeatedly talking about how he doesn’t “deserve” to be part of the experiment. Another older man successfully brings down all his stats into the normal range — but gets so depressed that he stops getting out of bed and drops out of the program, saying his brain’s rejecting the food, health be damned.
Which is to say that the true experiment really only begins when the diabetics leave the center to return to their lives at home. Because really, even if the diabetics’ regular doctors at home may not have preached an all raw vegan diet, surely those docs must have conveyed to their patients that cutting back on sugary processed unhealthy food is necessary to control diabetes. And clearly, the diabetics must’ve found those directions difficult to follow under the pressures of real life — which is why they decided to try the center in the first place.
And as you might have suspected, when Simply Raw catches up with the six a few months after the end of the 30 days, most seem to have fallen at least partially off the raw and/or healthy eating wagon. The film’s descriptions of the diabetics’ “new” lives are positive in tone but extremely vague, in the vein of “She has kept most of the weight off.” There are few specific details about what sort of diet the participants were able to maintain, or how their blood pressure and sugar levels are holding up.
That’s not to say that the lessons in Simply Raw aren’t valuable. I’m sure that some diabetics, shown visual proof that a permanent diet change can get them off insulin and meds, will muster up both the willpower and resources to really give healthy eating a serious go. One of the six in Simply Raw got so gung ho about the raw diet that he’s now in medical school, with the goal to use his knowledge about food to help other diabetics in the future.
And certainly, a film like Simply Raw might help shift our nation’s thinking both in terms of preventing and managing diabetes, a disease that costs us millions each year. At the moment, the effort to reverse diabetes naturally is still a fringe movement — though a RDN website does make it easy for those interested to join the cause.
For those who tend to think of the raw food movement as a mere fad: While Simply Raw does focus on the raw diet, the film isn’t against cooked food. Before leaving the center, the participants are even given a cooking lesson for creating healthy cooked dishes. Simply Rawalso includes interviews with Morgan Spurlock of Supersize Me fame, Woody Harrelson, and other celebrities and experts. The DVD’s available for $26.99 on Amazon.
Rock out while supporting single payer health care for Californians! We Be Illin’ — a series of benefit events for universal health care — has expanded to Los Angeles. And the first event happens next week in Hollywood:
When: Monday, March 30, 7 pm Where: Knitting Factory, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles Cost:$10 online, $12 at the door.
Local bands I’ve never heard of but perhaps should have — Spencer Kent, Max and the Marginalized, Chris Marsol, Waiting 4 Wyatt, 3rd Alley — will perform. And between sets, you can watch short educational videos about single payer health care system, hear local patient stories, talk to USC doctors and medical students, or pick up educational materials.
Organized by USC medical students, this We Be Illin’ event will raise funds for single payer advocacy, including medical student Lobby Days in Sacramento. I’m planning to go. Who’s with me?
As of Feb. 1, I’m now covered under the MRMIP plan, with Kaiser as my insurance provider. Hopefully this will end my health care woes for a long while — though I’m not exactly looking forward to the fact that I now have to find new Kaiser doctors and will be forced to make long treks to get to Kaiser-specific pharmacies.
Still, I feel somewhat lucky that at least California HAS an MRMIP plan — and that I can afford to pay for it.
That’s not to say California’s at the forefront of health care in the U.S., by any means. In fact, California’s getting sued a lot for health-care related issues these days:
>> San Francisco’s city attorney sued California state regulators, alleging that they approved a system that lets insurance companies discriminate against women, making them pay as much as 39% more than men for similar individual health care policies. The lawsuit could be dropped if either of two bills in the legislature seeking to address this gender inequity issue gets passed.
>> Emergency room doctors sued California because our emergency health care system’s “on life support,” mainly due to lack of Medi-Cal funding. Our state ranks dead last in the country for emergency care access.
>> The Medi-Cal program could get a boost from Obama’s economic stimulus plan — but how much help California will get is up for debate. “The House version of the bill that was approved this week would give financially strapped California about $11.1 billion in Medicaid funds to help pay for healthcare for the poor, according to the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The measure the Senate will take up next week would provide about $9.6 billion.”
Earlier: Finding Health care outside employer-based programs part I, part II, part III.
>> Newsflash: Most married women are sex-starved. “In a much-discussed recent survey of 35,000 American women, published in the July issue of Woman’s Day, 72 percent of married women said they had considered leaving their husbands. Seventy-nine percent said they’d like sex more often, and 52 percent said they have no sex life to speak of.”
>> 
The achievement’s especially astounding considering the fact that the diabetics can eat all they want — including chocolatey desserts — so long as the food’s raw. At the end of the 30 days, the participants talk about their weight loss, their feelings of health, and their improved mood and energy levels. The chiropractor tears up, saying he’s been given a second chance at life.
The good news: After a little over 2 months on the waiting list, I finally got a letter letting me know that “space is now available in the