Progressive Wednesday

Yoga’s So Sexy

Editor’s Note: This is the first Progressive Wednesday post by Chelsia Rice, one of our featured writers. We’re lucky to have her, and, well, we think you’ll dig her and her writing, too. Read on….

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I’ll start with this disclaimer: I haven’t done yoga since 2007, the year that my anxiety was so uncontrollable that I started searching my college’s catalogue for extracurricular classes to help me get it under control. I enrolled and hated every minute and every day of the yoga class I chose. I despised the calm and sensitive way my instructor concluded every class with “Namaste” and the soothing meditative music that hummed in the background. I wanted nothing more to do than scream and punch and run, run, run, far away from that yoga class. I didn’t even make it through the semester. I mean I really hated yoga.

Until last Saturday. A few weeks ago I met a yoga instructor who moved to town from San Fran and started offering free yoga sessions in the park on Saturday afternoons. Having had enough time between my crazed late twenties and my early thirties, I decided I needed a little more exercise and gave it a go, again. And when I walked away from the park that afternoon I felt like I could fly.

Okay, maybe not fly. But I felt good, real good, which I didn’t expect. I knew that the practice of yoga and it’s incorporation of breathing, relaxation, and meditation was good for the body and the soul, but what I didn’t know is that it’s been clinically shown as beneficial to the body’s health in a multitude of other ways. Not only has it been shown to relieve anxiety and depression, but also lower blood pressure, improve joint function and relieve pain.

But yoga practitioners, you know, your overly flexible friends who, at age forty, can still stand on their head for longer than two seconds, already know about these health benefits, and it’s likely you did, too. But did they know, and did you know, that yoga also makes for better lovemaking?

In a preliminary study published by The Journal of Sexual Medicine, women who practiced yoga for 12-weeks found their sex lives more gratifying. In fact, 75% of the women in the study said they were more sexually fulfilled following yoga training. Not only that, they reported having improved sexual function. But let me get more specific: they had increased desire, better lubrication, better orgasms, less pain, and more, yes more, more, more satisfaction. All of this is due to yoga’s effects on breathing, abdominal and pelvic muscle tone, digestion, joint function, and mood. But not only do you become stronger and more flexible (and have more enjoyable sex), you become more attuned to your body and therefore, more comfortable with it.

But ladies, you already knew that an all-encompassing good feeling body makes for better sex. But as it turns out, yoga isn’t beneficial for just women. Turns out the benefits of yoga are not only universal, but the fellas specifically can benefit from it, as well. Yoga’s helps men to please their partners (and themselves) a bit longer by helping to stave off premature ejaculation.  Whoopee for makin’ better whoopee!

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. Yoga is wonderful for a multitude of reasons besides it’s benefits to your sexual health. Turns out supplementing your three-day-a-week-cardio-class with some cool meditative stretching helps to prevent injuries by increasing flexibility and focus. It reduces anxiety and bad moods and helps you sleep better, and let’s face it, when you sleep better everything else is better, you can ask just about anyone.

In a recent study published in the January issue of Psychosomatic Medicine, Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, a researcher at Ohio State University, found that yoga also decreases inflammation in the body. Inflammation is a beneficial immune response, but high levels of inflammation are known to contribute to conditions such as asthma, cardiovascular disease, and depression. As it turns out, 20 minutes of yoga a day also helps cancer patients fall asleep quicker and longer. So it turns out yoga, not just exercise, is good for just about everyone.

There are many different types of yoga out there, and while many are safe, some are quite strenuous and may not be appropriate for everyone. So before you run out and enroll in a yoga class, or find some generous soul donating time in a local park, check in with your physician before you begin.

Photo clicked by this fantastic photographer.

This Wednesday: Butt Out, Buddy

Problem:

I’m not going write this Wednesday without making a confession: there have been two times in my life when I regularly smoked cigarettes (between 1/2 a pack and 1 1/2 packs a day). Each time was brief (don’t worry, Mom), and both times I quit, quickly and cold, though not without struggles.

My buddy Pete, a former 15-year smoker, put it to me this way: “After a couple of days the nicotine is out of your body, then it’s just whether or not you’re a pansy.”

Even though it was mainly easy (but not-so breezy) for me to put out my last butt, I can see how people get hooked and hold onto the habit: it ain’t just chemical. It gets hard-wired in our brains in association with food, work, sex, travel, socializing, and escape. And those are six pretty damned good things.

But (you knew there was one coming, right?) none of those are a good enough reason to start or continue. Is there a good one? Of course not. Every smoker and non-smoker knows this. Should you be allowed to smoke? Probably Maybe. But should you? No $%&@*!^ way.

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Make Progress:

There are three ways to make progress this week: stop smoking; help someone else stop smoking (just email the post to your pals); educate yourself on smoking for your own sake and the sake of others.

• Quit
• Watch
• Look
• Protect

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Quit:

In case you or yours actually need to know why quitting would be a good idea, here goes:

1. According to the American Cancer Society, “smoking is responsible for nearly 1 in 5 deaths in the United States.”
2. And it ain’t just lung, larynx, and mouth cancer staring us down, my people. Smoking is directly linked to cancers of the pancreas, cervix, kidney, stomach, pharynx, esophagus, and bladder.
3. Of course, cigarettes don’t only bring about cancer. Smoking is a major or contributing cause of (in alphabetical order): aneurysms, asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, heart disease, pneumonia, and stroke.
4. There’s more: smoking increases your odds of bone thinning, hip fractures, peptic ulcers, and (get this) cataracts.
5. In the year 2000, 8.6 million Americans were suffering from “at least one chronic disease due to current or former smoking.” Says who? Says the Centers for Disease Control. Just for comparison’s sake, let me just mention that there are 8.1 million people living in New York City.
6. How many known carcinogens are in cigarette smoke? 43.
7. And as if we needed to know another reason why the tobacco behemoths dump nicotine in cigs, there’s this: “nicotine, when inhaled in cigarette smoke, reaches the brain faster than drugs that enter the body intravenously.” We’re all about sticking it to these companies whose goal it is, quite literally, to addict us and destroy us.
8. And on top of all that, cigarettes are freaking expensive.
9. Oh, and they make your breath stink like a burning tire.

But quitting, as I know, is easier typed than done. And why is it so damned difficult? Because, according to the U.S. Surgeon General, “the pharmacologic and behavioral processes that determine tobacco addiction are similar to those that determine addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine.” You read that right: cigarettes are like heroin and cocaine.

Look, I’ve quit myself, and I’ve fired up again. I’ve watched my friends struggle through this addiction. There ain’t nothing wrong with asking for some help, so here’s some from:

• The University of Texas
• The American Cancer Society
• The Centers for Disease Control
• SmokeFree.gov
• The Surgeon General

Or just call this number: 1-800-QUIT-NOW.

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Watch:

Need more umph for you or a pal? Give these pair of thetruth.com videos a whirl.

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Look:

Look, friends, we were going to post three or four or five pictures here of diseased lungs, gangrenous legs, cases of mouth cancer, and laryngectomies, but… well, two things:

1. These photos are so peel-your-eyelids-back gruesome, we didn’t think it would be appropriate for a place we consider to be rather PG, maybe PG-13.
2. These photos made us want to power-puke.

So, our advice to you is this: check it out for yourselves if you want to. If you smoke, it’s a must. I’ll wager dollars to donuts (and I really dig donuts) that you’ll seriously consider a self-imposed cease and desist order for cigarettes (or your tobacco product of choice). And if you don’t smoke, well, hell, these photos will do two things: keep you from ever, ever, ever, ever smoking; convince you to get your friends who stink like old ashtrays to kick the habit before they kick ye old can.

And where might you find some of these not-so-fun photos? Here, here, here, here, and here. Please, please, please don’t say we didn’t warn you. We did. In fact, we’ll warn you one more time: this stuff is messed up, kids.

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Protect:

This sucker is threefold, but we’ll focus on the most unusual of the three:

1. Do yourself a favor and steer clear of bars and restaurants that still allow smoking. (There are only 22 states that allow the former and 20 the latter.) Secondhand smoke kills ya. You’ve made it to adulthood and still need proof? Just click here.
2. Try to keep your kids away from secondhand smoke. Wanna know why? Read this, baby.
3. Protect your pets.

If you’re not worried about yourself and you don’t have kids, at least consider your furry and feathered friends, because besides saving your own hide from cancer, emphysema, and breath that smells like a cadaver, here’s another reason to leave Marlboro country:

“There have been a number of scientific papers recently that have reported the significant health threat secondhand smoke poses to pets,” said veterinarian Carolynn MacAllister of Oklahoma State University. “Secondhand smoke has been associated with oral cancer and lymphoma in cats, lung and nasal cancer in dogs, as well as lung cancer in birds.”

Cats living with smokers are also twice as likely to develop malignant lymphoma, a cancer that occurs in the lymph nodes and that is fatal to three out of four cats within 12 months of developing it.

Studies have also shown that dogs living in a smoking household are susceptible to cancers of the nose and sinus area, particularly if they are a long-nosed breed, because their noses have a greater surface area that is exposed to carcinogens and a greater area for them to accumulate. Dogs affected with nasal cancer normally don’t survive for more than one year.

Birds are also at risk for lung cancer, as well as pneumonia, because their respiratory systems are hypersensitive to any type of air pollutant.

While I’ve heard some interesting arguments for banning smoking outright, I still fall on the libertarian side: as long as you’re not harming me (which means no smoking in public places, thank you), you should be allowed to do, for the most part, whatever you please. This study, though, complicates things: where does a person’s right to harm themselves end and the rights of an animal begin? The same goes, even more so, for kids.

So, will I smoke a cigar the next time one of my buddies gets hitched? Despite my better judgment, I probably will. But ask me this: Will you smoke that stogy in front of Weasley, Eric’s Cavalier King Charles Spaniel? No sir, I won’t. Why? Not just because I don’t want to harm the poor thing, but because what in the hell is his puppy doing at a wedding reception? That’s just not right.

McPreschoolers

Today’s tasty bit of not-so-tasty news comes to us via VegNews, a fantastic progressive journal, but the article itself originally appeared on CNN.com. Anyhow, the upshot is this:

Anything made by McDonald’s tastes better, preschoolers said in a study that powerfully demonstrates how advertising can trick the taste buds of young children.

Even carrots, milk and apple juice tasted better to the kids when they were wrapped in the familiar packaging of the Golden Arches.

The study had youngsters sample identical McDonald’s foods in name-brand and unmarked wrappers. The unmarked foods always lost the taste test.

The groundbreaking study, first published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, demonstrates that corporate product branding is stronger than we ever realized. We have an uphill battle, if it wasn’t already obvious, against these mega-corporations. We’ll talk about this topic more in the future, but this is precisely why we believe that lobbyists, even those we agree with, must be booted from D.C. for good.

Back to the article for a moment…. My favorite (read: “the scariest”) tidbit is this: “Fifty-four percent preferred McDonald’s-wrapped carrots versus 23 percent who liked the plain-wrapped sample.” Even McDonald’s carrots taste better?! That, my friends, is some powerful marketing.

For more information about fast food and all its evils, check out our Wednesday on the topic — “I’m not lovin’ it.”

Picture clicked by this fine photographer.

Food is good food.

One of the lingering problems with organic food is cost. While prices have fallen on many products (I do find some organic produce costs about the same as the artificially fertilized counterparts), many of the more processed foods or staples, like milk and eggs, can come with a pretty hefty price tag. This, of course, means that the poorest among us miss out on the goodness and healthfulness of organic foodstuffs.

So, along comes a progressive idea to help fuel our larger progressive revolution:

At the One World Café in Salt Lake City, customers set the price for their organic, fair-trade meals. Urbanite reports that One World provides options for all customers, from homeless patrons to business folks on their lunch breaks. A daily free entrée is always on the menu and the restaurant offers a “hand-up, not a hand-out” option by exchanging meal coupons for every hour of volunteer service. At the end of the day, says founder Denise Cerreta, the restaurant ends up with a fair price for the staff’s work.

Even though most of us don’t live in Salt Lake City, we can still be glad that such wonderful efforts are being made. And there are things we can do to help those suffering in poverty feed themselves better. Amongst many charities we could lend hand or buck is America’s Second Harvest. And what is America’s Second Harvest, pray tell? Here goes:

America’s Second Harvest– ”The Nation’s Food Bank Network is the nation’s largest charitable hunger-relief organization:

• A network of more than 200 member food banks and food-rescue organizations
• Serving all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

The America’s Second Harvest Network secures and distributes more than 2 billion pounds of donated food and grocery products annually. Each year, the America’s Second Harvest Network provides food assistance to more than 25 million low-income hungry people in the United States, including more than 9 million children and nearly 3 million seniors.

There’s not enough props we can give this organization. So here’s the deal — just give five. (All you’ve got to do is click this sentence.) Five bucks to most of us is next to nothing–a McMeal or a summer blockbuster we wish, afterwards, that we’d skipped. To an organization that feeds those with next to nothing, five bucks is nothing they’ll sneeze at (though, I imagine 100 dollars wouldn’t make them sneeze either… really I doubt any amount of would make them sneeze, so don’t worry about the infinitesimally small chance that you might make someone sneeze).

So, here’s to good food (and tissues) for all.

This Wednesday: Ten Essential Pints

PROBLEM:

Okay, we’ve got a two-parter for you this week, and it’s got everything to do with that stuff giving our hearts a practical purpose (though I suppose you could argue that its other “purpose” is nearly as practical, nearly as required). Anyhow, I’m talkin’ ’bout blood. My fellow Potter fans, I’m not referring to the “Half-Blood Prince.” Though I’m pumped for that book to make it to film, I’m writing this Wednesday about the ten pints we all have pulsing through our Muggle bodies.

So here’s the problem: we don’t have enough of it in our hospitals; we don’t offer enough help to those with deadly and painful disorders. That’s it. It’s that black, it’s that white. Let’s do something.

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MAKE PROGRESS:

We’re going to ask you to do the same thing twice: give, baby, give.

• Donate, Part I
• Donate, Part II

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DONATE, PART I:

So, we need you to bleed. Though not for a vampire or a voodoo ceremony, but rather for, you know, your fellow humans. Why? Here's why:

• According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, every year in the United States, almost 5 million people are saved by blood transfusions. That's more than the populations of Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont combined.
• Someone needs blood in the United States every two seconds. Put another way — three gallons of the stuff is used every minute here in the Red, White, and Blue.
• Approximately 20% of all patients entering hospitals require blood.
• 38,000 blood donations are needed every day to maintain our supply.
• Giving blood just once can save the lives of three people. I'm pretty sure that throws the “I don't like needles– excuse out the proverbial window.
• It's not just people in car accidents who need your blood. People with sickle-cell anemia, cancer, and leukemia require large amounts of transfusions. Severe burn victims need transfusions, as do folks undergoing organ transplants and many premature infants.
• Here's a final troubling statistic: only five percent of those who could donate blood do so (yours truly included… though that will change, and I mean pronto).

In case you’re at all concerned, you can't get an infectious disease from donating blood, and the process won't decrease your strength. And how often can you give blood? Every 56 days, baby. Just click this sentence for the blood donation eligibility guidelines from the Red Cross.

So give. And don't give until it hurts, because, if you're not a complete pansy, it really won't. If you'd like to donate blood through the Red Cross, just click this sentence. You can even watch an online presentation of the process. But if donating cabbage is more your speed, click right here, yo..

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DONATE, PART II:

Here we're going to tackle three blood diseases that tend to fly under the radar but are serious nonetheless, or maybe they're still serious because we let them fly under the aforementioned radar. (Please Note: I don't really think we've all got some sort of mythical and magical radar pulsing in our brains, though it might be cool if we did.) So, what illnesses?

– ¢ Malaria

1. The World Health Organization estimates that “every year more than 500 million people become severely ill with malaria.” To give that a little perspective, that’s more people than live in Canada (33 million), Mexico (103 million), and the United States (303 million) combined.
2. According to the Centers for Disease Control, “over one million people die [each year from malaria],” and most of them are infants, young children, and pregnant women.
3. While we’re facing a resurgence of the disease, it remains preventable (since we can whack the mosquitoes who transmit it) and treatable.

If you’ve got a fiver burning a hole in your pocket, consider donating it to the Malaria Foundation International.

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– ¢ Sickle cell disease

1. Lest I forget to mention it since I just learned it myself, this broader illness is frequently (and incorrectly) referred to as “sickle cell anemia.” So what is it? In brief, it’s an inherited blood disorder: sufferers have an abundance of an abnormal hemoglobin. Hemoglobin, for those of you keeping score, helps our bodies transfer oxygen to our various parts. Sickle cell hemoglobin dies sooner than normal hemoglobin, and it also doesn’t travel well through blood vessels, and you know, that’s kind of important.
2. A sufferer faces infection, severe pain episodes, hand and foot swelling, stroke, acute chest syndrome, and vision problems.
3. And here’s one of the biggest problems when it comes to the funding of new treatments and the possibility of a cure: racism. According to the NIH, most U.S. cases occur with African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, and “about one in every 500 African-Americans has sickle cell disease.”

Since we can’t count on the racists raging in our culture, let’s do something ourselves. Please consider a donation to the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America.

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– ¢ Hemophilia

1. First, let’s clear up what we’re dealing with here. According to the National Institutes of Health, “hemophilia is [an] inherited bleeding disorder in which blood doesn't clot normally.” 18,000 Americans have inherited hemophilia. When you grow up in the boondocks like I did, you realize that 18,000 is a surprisingly large number of people (it’s about 12 times the population of my old hometown).
2. But the NIH also points out that “hemophilia also can be acquired… if your body forms antibodies to the clotting factors in your bloodstream.”
3. I realize that only 1 in 10,000 are born with hemophilia A and 1 in 50,000 are born with hemophilia B, but this rare disease bends my heart a bit because one of my favorite writers, Tom Andrews, died from complications from hemophilia when he was only 40.

So, please consider making a small donation (Who needs that Big Mac Value Meal today?) to the National Hemophilia Foundation.

Not-so-holy smoke.

I’m not going write the rest of this post without making a confession: there have been two times in my life when I regularly smoked cigarettes (between 1/2 a pack and 1 1/2 packs a day). Each time was brief (don’t worry, Mom), and both times I quit, quickly and cold.

My buddy Pete, a former 15-year smoker, put it to me this way: “After a couple of days the nicotine is out of your body, then it’s just whether or not you’re a pansy.” Even though it was easy and even breezy for me to put out my last butt, I can see how people get hooked and hold onto the habit.

But (you knew there was one coming, right?) besides saving your own hide from cancer, emphysema, and breath that smells like burnt tires, here’s another reason to leave Marlboro country:

“There have been a number of scientific papers recently that have reported the significant health threat secondhand smoke poses to pets,” said veterinarian Carolynn MacAllister of Oklahoma State University. “Secondhand smoke has been associated with oral cancer and lymphoma in cats, lung and nasal cancer in dogs, as well as lung cancer in birds.”

Cats living with smokers are also twice as likely to develop malignant lymphoma, a cancer that occurs in the lymph nodes and that is fatal to three out of four cats within 12 months of developing it.

Studies have also shown that dogs living in a smoking household are susceptible to cancers of the nose and sinus area, particularly if they are a long-nosed breed, because their noses have a greater surface area that is exposed to carcinogens and a greater area for them to accumulate. Dogs affected with nasal cancer normally don’t survive for more than one year.

Birds are also at risk for lung cancer, as well as pneumonia, because their respiratory systems are hypersensitive to any type of air pollutant.

While I’ve heard some interesting (I’m not sure I’d call them good) arguments for banning smoking outright, I still fall on the libertarian side: as long as you’re not harming me (which means no smoking in public places, thank you), you should be allowed to do, for the most part, whatever you damned well please. This study, though, complicates things: where does a person’s right to harm themselves end and the rights of an animal begin?

So, will I smoke a cigar the next time one of my buddies gets hitched? Damn right I will. But ask me this: Matt, will you smoke that stogy in front of Weasley, Eric’s Cavalier King Charles Spaniel? No sir, I won’t. Why? Not just because I don’t want to harm the poor thing, but because what in the hell is his puppy doing at a wedding reception? That’s just not right.

Photo c/o this picture-clicker.

The anti-antibacteria

This May we talked about corn. We told you about the effects that this plant has on our society, economy, environment, and especially our health. If you haven't read it, you should. If you have read it, you should read it again. It's full of information that you won't want to know, but should. You can find the whole shebang here.

Corn is very quick to add weight to the animals (and, consequently, the people who eat those animals). But corn is not a natural food for the animals that eat it. In most cases, cows in particular, the animals require antibiotics in order to properly digest it. Here are some facts from the Union of Concerned Scientists:

An estimated 70 percent of antibiotics and related drugs produced in this country are used for nontherapeutic purposes such as accelerating animal growth and compensating for overcrowded and unsanitary conditions on large-scale confinement facilities known as “factory farms.” This translates to about 25 million pounds of antibiotics and related drugs fed every year to livestock for nontherapeutic purposes– ”almost eight times the amount given to humans to treat disease.

The use of these antibiotics on animals, along with the overprescription of antibiotics by doctors has led to a dramatic increase in bacterial resistance to these drugs, forcing doctors to use increasingly stronger antibiotics to treat relatively minor infections. In other words, the bacteria are becoming immune to the treatment.

Fortunately there is a bill in Congress that aims to eliminate those antibiotics in feed animals:

The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2007, bipartisan legislation introduced in Congress, would phase out the routine use of medically important antibiotics as feed additives in animal agriculture. More than 350 health, consumer, agricultural, environmental, humane, religious and other organizations have endorsed the legislation.

I'm asking you to join them, just click this sentance. It'll only take a second. Okay, maybe ten seconds. And next time you're buying beef, look for the pasture-fed stuff, and avoid that Vancomycin steak dinner. It's better for your health, the environment, the animals, the economy– ¦

Hopefully this photographer feeds his cows grass