This story comes from Mexico, a country renowned for being a hot place. Even in Northern Mexico it can be flipping hot (and that’s putting it nicely). Let’s face it I met Jeannie in San Carlos, Mexico in 2007. San Carlos is in the county of Sonora, just along the coast from Guaymas and about 270 miles South from Nogales on the Arizona border.
Recently, on a scorching hot day in northern Mexico, Adolfo Pazzi Ahumada witnessed love in its purest form.
After noticing he was out of milk at home, Ahumada decided to brave the 104°F weather to make a quick stop at his local market. When he arrived, he saw sweet scene unfolding out front.
“A stray dog was being fed and getting water from the [store] clerk,” Ahumada told The Dodo. “Then I saw they let the dog inside.”
Google Maps
Once Ahumada entered the store, he decided to ask the clerk about the dog. Ahumada recounted that conversation to The Dodo: “He has been here the past [few] days. We suspect he was left behind by his owner. He came to us for help,” the clerk told Ahumada. “We could only provide him with food, water and some toys from the store that we paid with our money.”
But the shop’s kindness doesn’t end there.
“We let him inside because the temperature outside is really hell-like. We feel bad for him, but he looks happier around the store,” the clerk said.
Peeking down one of the aisles, Ahumada observed that firsthand:
Adolfo Pazzi Ahumada
The downtrodden dog had found people who cared.
In the time he’s been there, the dog has shown kindness to the clerks and customers in return. The store hopes perhaps a shopper will see fit to adopt him into their home.
Unable to be that person, Ahumada paid for his milk and bought a treat for the dog to enjoy after his nap — resting assured the pup was in safe and caring hands until that day comes.
Adolfo Pazzi Ahumada
“I felt bad for what the dog has passed through,” Ahumada said. “But he is now receiving the love he deserves.”
ooOOoo
I find myself staggered at what this dog has endured yet at the same time how very quickly he settled in at the store. Well done to all the staff at the OXXO store. It would have been so easy to let the dog suffer and in all probability die in the heat.
Please, let the sweet dog find a loving home as soon as possible!
A quick scan of the horizon every twenty or thirty minutes and then back down to my bunk.
But what was that!
For the first time in ages there was a strange light off the starboard bow.
Impossible to gauge the distance.
Then I had it!
It was no ship’s light,
It was the edge of the rising moon.
My bunk below was forgotten in an instant.
The sight of the rising full moon was everything.
It rose seemingly rapidly and now cast its light over the ocean.
My ketch sailed in its golden light.
We seemed to sail on forever.
Now that’s coming on for thirty years ago,
But it is still clear in my mind.
Clear as if it was yesterday,
Reminded of it each full moon.
My ketch still sailing in its golden light.
The following is not Songbird but a much more appropriate photograph.
And the poem came to me just the other day. The memory of that full moon out in the Atlantic en-route to Plymouth from Gibraltar in 1991 will be with me for ever.
The Edinburgh Fringe, or perhaps a small portion of it!
The reason that I going there, albeit in topic rather than in person, is that they had a funniest joke award.
A joke about vegetables has made it to the top of the menu as this year’s funniest at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Swedish comedian Olaf Falafel has won Dave’s “Funniest Joke of The Fringe” award with the niche culinary pun.
In its 12th year, the prize rewards the funniest one-liner to grace the venues of the festival and celebrates the pool of talent the Fringe has to offer.
And the winning one-liner was:
“I keep randomly shouting out ‘Broccoli’ and ‘Cauliflower’ – I think I might have florets”.
Vegetable inspiration: cauliflower and broccoli – Getty Images.
I’m going to offer the rest in future Saturday posts. Enjoy!
“Organic” is more than just a passing fad. Organic food sales totaled a record US$45.2 billion in 2017, making it one of the fastest-growing segments of American agriculture. While a small number of studies have shown associations between organic food consumption and decreased incidence of disease, no studies to date have been designed to answer the question of whether organic food consumption causes an improvement in health.
I’m an environmental health scientist who has spent over 20 years studying pesticide exposures in human populations. Last month, my research group published a small study that I believe suggests a path forward to answering the question of whether eating organic food actually improves health.
What we don’t know
According to the USDA, the organic label does not imply anything about health. In 2015, Miles McEvoy, then chief of the National Organic Program for USDA, refused to speculate about any health benefits of organic food, saying the question wasn’t “relevant” to the National Organic Program. Instead, the USDA’s definition of organic is intended to indicate production methods that “foster cycling of resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity.”
While some organic consumers may base their purchasing decisions on factors like resource cycling and biodiversity, most report choosing organic because they think it’s healthier.
Sixteen years ago, I was part of the first study to look at the potential for an organic diet to reduce pesticide exposure. This study focused on a group of pesticides called organophosphates, which have consistently been associated with negative effects on children’s brain development. We found that children who ate conventional diets had nine times higher exposure to these pesticides than children who ate organic diets.
Our study got a lot of attention. But while our results were novel, they didn’t answer the big question. As I told The New York Times in 2003, “People want to know, what does this really mean in terms of the safety of my kid? But we don’t know. Nobody does.” Maybe not my most elegant quote, but it was true then, and it’s still true now.
Studies only hint at potential health benefits
Health-conscious people want to buy organic for its health benefits, but it’s not yet clear whether such benefits exist. Goran Bogicevic/Shutterstock.com
Since 2003, several researchers have looked at whether a short-term switch from a conventional to an organic diet affects pesticide exposure. These studies have lasted one to two weeks and have repeatedly shown that “going organic” can quickly lead to dramatic reductions in exposure to several different classes of pesticides.
Still, scientists can’t directly translate these lower exposures to meaningful conclusions about health. The dose makes the poison, and organic diet intervention studies to date have not looked at health outcomes. The same is true for the other purported benefits of organic food. Organic milk has higher levels of healthy omega fatty acids and organic crops have higher antioxidant activity than conventional crops. But are these differences substantial enough to meaningfully impact health? We don’t know. Nobody does.
Some epidemiologic research has been directed at this question. Epidemiology is the study of the causes of health and disease in human populations, as opposed to in specific people. Most epidemiologic studies are observational, meaning that researchers look at a group of people with a certain characteristic or behavior, and compare their health to that of a group without that characteristic or behavior. In the case of organic food, that means comparing the health of people who choose to eat organic to those who do not.
Several observational studies have shown that people who eat organic food are healthier than those who eat conventional diets. A recent French study followed 70,000 adults for five years and found that those who frequently ate organic developed 25% fewer cancers than those who never ate organic. Other observational studies have shown organic food consumption to be associated with lower risk of diabetes, metabolic syndrome, pre-eclampsia and genital birth defects.
The problem with drawing firm conclusions from these studies is something epidemiologists call “uncontrolled confounding.” This is the idea that there may be differences between groups that researchers cannot account for. In this case, people who eat organic food are more highly educated, less likely to be overweight or obese, and eat overall healthier diets than conventional consumers. While good observational studies take into account things like education and diet quality, there remains the possibility that some other uncaptured difference between the two groups – beyond the decision to consume organic food – may be responsible for any health differences observed.
What next?
Often, new medical and health knowledge comes from carefully designed clinical trials, but no such trial has been conducted for organic food. Anyaivanova/Shutterstock.com
When clinical researchers want to figure out whether a drug works, they don’t do observational studies. They conduct randomized trials, where they randomly assign some people to take the drug and others to receive placebos or standard care. By randomly assigning people to groups, there’s less potential for uncontrolled confounding.
My research group’s recently published study shows how we could feasibly use randomized trial methods to investigate the potential for organic food consumption to affect health.
We recruited a small group of pregnant women during their first trimesters. We randomly assigned them to receive weekly deliveries of either organic or conventional produce throughout their second and third trimesters. We then collected a series of urine samples to assess pesticide exposure. We found that those women who received organic produce had significantly lower exposure to certain pesticides (specifically, pyrethroid insecticides) than those who received conventional produce.
On the surface, this seems like old news but this study was different in three important ways. First, to our knowledge, it was the longest organic diet intervention to date – by far. It was also the first to occur in pregnant women. Fetal development is potentially the most sensitive period for exposures to neurotoxic agents like pesticides. Finally, in previous organic diet intervention studies, researchers typically changed participants’ entire diets – swapping a fully conventional diet for a fully organic one. In our study, we asked participants to supplement their existing diets with either organic or conventional produce. This is more consistent with the actual dietary habits of most people who eat organic food – occasionally, but not always.
Even with just a partial dietary change, we observed a significant difference in pesticide exposure between the two groups. We believe that this study shows that a long-term organic diet intervention can be executed in a way that is effective, realistic and feasible.
The next step is to do this same study but in a larger population. We would then want to assess whether there were any resulting differences in the health of the children as they grew older, by measuring neurological outcomes like IQ, memory and incidence of attention-deficit disorders. By randomly assigning women to the organic and conventional groups, we could be sure any differences observed in their children’s health really were due to diet, rather than other factors common among people who consume organic food.
The public is sufficiently interested in this question, the organic market is large enough, and the observational studies suggestive enough to justify such a study. Right now, we don’t know if an organic diet improves health, but based on our recent research, I believe we can find out.
There is a blog site, primarily for all those interested in photography. It is called Ugly Hedgehog! Seriously! But UHH, as it is known, also has room for general non-photographic chat so it really does cater for all.
I have been a member since July, 2017, and have been amazed at how quickly the time has gone.
Anyway, the home page of Ugly Hedgehog is here, it’s free, and if you have any interest in photography I strongly recommend it.
This item came in a couple of weeks ago and I’m taking the liberty of sharing it with you.
ooOOoo
Spent a few days in Bozeman Montana visiting my youngest son and daughter in law before heading out to Southern California. A couple of images from my trip to Montana…
I must admit that I hadn’t heard of Margaret Heffernan before.
But in browsing TED Talks one evening recently we came across a TED Talk by her. And it was riveting!
Here’s how it was introduced:
The more we rely on technology to make us efficient, the fewer skills we have to confront the unexpected, says writer and entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan. She shares why we need less tech and more messy human skills — imagination, humility, bravery — to solve problems in business, government and life in an unpredictable age. “We are brave enough to invent things we’ve never seen before,” she says. “We can make any future we choose.”
Later on it explains: “The former CEO of five businesses, Margaret Heffernan explores the all-too-human thought patterns that lead organizations and managers astray.”
In doing more research I came upon this:
Margaret Heffernan was born in Texas, grew up in the Netherlands and was educated at Cambridge University. She produced drama and documentary programs for the BBC for 13 years, then moved back to the US where she became a serial entrepreneur and CEO in the early days of the internet.
All of Heffernan’s work challenges accepted wisdom about good lives and good work. Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, named one of the most important business books of the decade by the Financial Times, looked at how our most cherished beliefs, behaviors and rules blind us to what matters most.
In 2015, she was awarded the Transmission Prize for A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better than the Competition, a book that upended the idea that competition forces the best to the top, arguing that it mostly proves wasteful and destructive where collaboration is more sustainable and creative.
Her forthcoming book, Uncharted: How to Map the Future will be published in February 2020 in the UK and May 2020 in the US. It addresses the fundamental unpredictability of life, challenges technological determinism and asks how we can find in ourselves the freedom and imagination to create the futures we want. An early reader called it “Karl Popper for the 21st century.”
As lead faculty for the Forward Institute’s Responsible Leadership Programme, Heffernan mentors CEOs and senior executives of major global organizations.
This item from The Conversation website is very interesting!
Cancer touches so many people.
My father died of lung cancer in 1956. My step-father in turn died of cancer much later on (I can’t recall what cancer it was and when he died).
It’s a terrible disease.
Key facts. Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally, and is responsible for an estimated 9.6 million deaths in 2018. Globally, about 1 in 6 deaths is due to cancer. Approximately 70% of deaths from cancer occur in low- and middle-income countries.
Cancer – World Health Organization
But then this comes along and offers hope.
The Conversation
Published on Jul 23, 2019
Cheryl London, a professor of veterinary medicine at Tufts University, practices “comparative oncology,” or testing cancer treatments in animals for potential use in humans. Her trials give sick pets a chance at a longer life – and could help contribute to new therapies for people.
That seems like it’s good for dogs and good for us!
The new Covering Climate Now project will help media “tell the story so people get it.”
This is how the speech by Bill Moyers is introduced in this issue of The Nation:
The following is an abridged version of the speech by the iconic TV newsman Bill Moyers, as prepared for delivery at a conference at the Columbia Journalism School on April 30. A video of the speech can be seen at TheNation.com/moyers-speech.
Well, we have the advantage of going straight to the video.
“What is journalism for, if not to awaken the world to looming catastrophes?“
Learning from Dogs 