Health care in America seems more appropriately like “sick care,” and we need to make sure health, of the proactive variety, is more a part of the equation.

The recent debate raging over what happens, who pays and who’s covered comes at the same time of shocking evidence that we, as a nation, continue to ignore these five simple rules of wellness.

1. Don’t smoke.

2. Exercise almost every day.

3. Eat well (five to nine veggies and fruits a day, smaller portions, few to no soft drinks).

4. Maintain a healthy weight.

5. Drink alcohol in moderation.

Only 8 percent of us adhere to those rules, according to a study in the June issue of the American Journal of Medicine.

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The problem with all these sorts of theories is that they do an okay job explaining the latitudinal data–we’re fat, we’re subsidizing roads, we’re subsidizing corn, so that must be making us fat!–but they don’t explain the trend. I have not done an exhaustive survey, but I’ve been unable to find any study that even attempts to establish in any sort of rigorous way that Americans have become more sedentary in, say, the last twenty or thirty years.

The data is even less persuasive for other candidates. Corn, and simple starches more broadly, have been the cheapest part of the American diet for centuries. As a child, my mother didn’t get any fresh vegetables at all eight months out of the year, because they simply weren’t available. She got frozen or canned, but their two winter staples were sugared homemade applesauce and butternut sqaush, both of which are basically pure simple carbohydrate. Lean chicken was pricier than beef, but fatty pork was cheaper than either. Look in a cookbook from the thirties or fifties and you’ll find that recipes for some sort of mostly starch dish are at least 65% of the book. And those weren’t healthy whole grains, either. They were white flour, or rice, richly laced with fat and sugar.

With the possible exception of corn subsidies (I don’t have good data on the relative penetration of corn into the food supply chain), almost every alleged deficit that is “causing” our obesity epidemic, from highways to bad urban grocery stores, is either basically the same as it was fifteen years ago, or somewhat better. So I find them deeply unsatisfying as a causal explanation for the sudden uptick in overweight people now.

To me, government behavior is at best an incredibly incomplete explanation of what’s happening. A better fit is simply that food–all food–has gotten much cheaper. People spend less of their income on food than they did thirty years ago, despite consuming a lot more of it. Stopping them from doing so will require a great deal more than subsidizing tomatoes.

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Lots of good food for thought here. I especially like #2, tax simplification, and #8 on becoming healthier.

School systems nationwide are trimming lunch menus, buying more food in bulk and delaying purchases of kitchen equipment to offset the costs of serving free or reduced-price lunches to millions of newly eligible students from cash-strapped families.

Record enrollment in subsidized meal programs has school systems large and small stretching already paper-thin budgets to ensure that students are well-fed and ready to learn. No region seems immune.

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Watch it all-makes the heart glad.

To replace the fossil fuel food economy, we need a sunshine food economy. A sunshine economy represents a unique revolution in human consciousness and practice. In contrast to civilization’s previous revolutions””the agricultural, iron, industrial, green and now global revolutions””the sunshine revolution restores rather than burns up carbon. Each of the previous revolutionary advances depended on the exploitation of previously untapped forms of carbon””they used the soil, burned forests, consumed coal or burned oil and natural gas. A sunshine economy would cultivate diverse forests and return green cover to the bulk of the earth’s landscapes. Keeping carbon in the ground rather than burning it up is a vital step in the effort to halt, if not reverse, the worst effects of climate change.

Over the past several months a number of this nation’s leading agrarians, including Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, David Orr, Herman Daly and Fred Kirschenmann, have been meeting to work out the conceptual and practical details necessary to move beyond today’s fossil fuel addictions. They are devising a 50-Year Land Use Bill that will nurture soil fertility, conserve forests and watersheds, rebuild rural communities and bring food production into harmonious alignment with ecological systems.

Intended as legislation, this bill would supplant the dismal farm bills adopted by Congress every five years that keep the nation mired in policies that exhaust and degrade waters, lands and bodies and that prevent good forestry and agricultural practices. Sunshine-powered, natural-systems agriculture must replace many of the current agriculture policies and practices if we hope to eat healthy food in the long term in a world of growing populations and declining habitats. It will not be enough simply to tweak today’s food economy and expect healthy, sustainable food production.

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A wonderful and inspiring story.

An office party goes on without her, across town in an affluent world vastly different from the one where Mariana Chilton now finds herself. Her husband’s tried calling. Twice.

And still she sits in dress slacks and stocking feet, gray suede shoes tossed aside, on the drab carpet of a row house in the Philadelphia projects, playing with someone else’s children while her own three kids wait for Mom to come home.

A mouse scurries by, but Chilton doesn’t flinch.

She is listening, for the umpteenth time, as another mother speaks about what it means to be poor and hungry in America.

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Watch it all–makes the heart glad.

Watch it all–a very interesting report.

Cindy Dreeszen and her husband live in one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. They have steady jobs, his at a movie theater and hers at a government office. Together, they earn about $55,000 a year.

But with a 17-month-old son, another baby on the way, and, as Dreeszen put it, “the cost of everything going up and up,” the couple went to a food pantry this month to ask for some free groceries.

“I didn’t think we’d even be allowed to come here,” said Dreeszen, 41, glancing around at the shelves of fruit, whole-wheat pasta and baby food.

“This is totally something that I never expected to happen, to have to resort to this.”

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Since it was raided by immigration agents last May, the kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa has been an endless source of national fascination and headlines. Just last week the Orthodox man who ran the Agriprocessors plant was released from jail on bail after a contentious hearing — this after being hit by child-labor and bank-fraud charges.

The raid and its aftermath were not a surprise to me. I’d visited the plant in 2006 and written an article about the immigrant workers who had been shorted pay and lost limbs in the plant. But the attention to the plant’s woes — particularly in the Jewish community — astonished even me. The Agriprocessors raid, as it became known, inspired fund-raising campaigns, sermons, front-page headlines and lots of biting debate.

What was it that so riveted our attention? It was never articulated and it took me a while to see it, but this one story had managed to distill some of the most essential questions and issues that are dividing and defining the Jewish community, and indeed religious communities of all stripes today.

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T he new administration’s projected $825 billion stimulus package should create jobs not only in traditional ways, like infrastructure improvements on roads, bridges and school construction. It should also focus on offsetting the sharp rise in hunger and homelessness among the nation’s rapidly growing number of poor people.

Already, low-income advocates predict that people in deep poverty, that is, those with incomes of less than half the poverty line of $21,200 for a family of four, will increase by between five and six million if unemployment reaches 9 percent. Barbara Sard, a policy analyst at the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, has said that such an increase would put as many as a million families at risk of housing instability and homelessness. Even those not yet in deep poverty could face homelessness because of home foreclosures that have already pushed many into the rental market, which, because of competition for affordable rental housing, has experienced an increased demand that in turn has caused rents to rise.

And yet, precisely at a time when help is most needed because of the escalating rate of unemployment, homeless prevention programs in some areas are being cut back because of state and local budget shortfalls.

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Inglewood resident Michael Brown has a master’s degree in counseling and has spent 20 years working as a mental health professional. He lost his job at Kedren Community Health Center last March because of a cutback in state funds.

On Friday, Brown, 43, made his first visit to a food pantry. He and his 9-year-old daughter had nowhere else to turn.

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See how many you can guess before you look at the list.

Go to the second link down where it says “Super Downsize Me” and click on those words. This is an excellent report on the way companies are raising prices on many food items while hiding that fact from many (most?) consumers. Watch it all.

Food stamps, the main U.S. antihunger program which helps the needy buy food, set a record in September as more than 31.5 million Americans used the program — up 17 percent from a year ago, according to government data.

The number of people using food stamps in September surpassed the previous peak of 29.85 million seen in November 2005 when victims of hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma received emergency benefits, said Jean Daniel of the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service.

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Did you know that the same amount of corn that produces enough ethanol to fill the fuel tank of an SUV would feed a Mexican for a year?

Or that the price of tortillas, Mexico’s staple food, has tripled and even quadrupled in some parts of that country because the price of white corn, which is indexed to the international price of yellow corn used for ethanol production, has risen dramatically?

In other words, there are people around the world who are starving because more and more land is being dedicated to cash-rich fuel crops like corn instead of food.

These were some of the points raised at a recent forum, Connecting the dots on the food crisis, sponsored by Kairos, the Canadian ecumenical justice organization, of which the Anglican Church of Canada is a member. The forum explored the root causes of the food crisis in the Global South, including the push for agro-fuels in rich countries like Canada and the U.S., the decades-long liberalization policies of governments, and the growth of agri-business transnational corporations.

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A nice piece on the reality of abundance and the illusion of scarcity–watch it all.

The line for a Thanksgiving meal was long when the Chicago Christian Industrial League shelter opened Thursday morning, and volunteers served more than 200 people in the first 40 minutes _ record demand for the shelter.

Among the hungry were familiar faces, people who had eaten their last Thanksgiving meal at the shelter and others who had helped provide those meals, said executive director Mary Shaver.

“These are the people who are always giving money _ and now they’re asking for help,” Shaver said. “These were the people donating money to us.”

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Fueled by rising unemployment and food prices, the number of Americans on food stamps is poised to exceed 30 million for the first time this month, surpassing the historic high set in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina.

The figures will put the spotlight on hunger when Congress begins deliberations on a new economic stimulus package, said legislators and anti-hunger advocates, predicting that any stimulus bill will include a boost in food stamp benefits. Advocates are also optimistic that President-elect Barack Obama, who made campaign promises to end childhood hunger and whose mother once briefly received food stamps, will make the issue a priority next year.

“We soon will have the most food stamps recipients in the history of our country,” said Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, a D.C.-based anti-hunger policy organization. “If the economic forecasts come true, we’re likely to see the most hunger that we’ve seen since the 1981 recession and maybe since the 1960s, when these programs were established.”

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‘Tis the season for family, faith, fellowship ”” and fat.

As families gather around buffet tables smothered with food on Thanksgiving, religious diet groups caution us God might not approve of that second piece of pie. Yes, that’s right. The omnipresent world of wonder diets and slim-down regimes now has a foothold in the world of the omnipotent.

Faith-based weight loss groups have been a quietly growing presence for more than three decades. Organizations such as First Place 4 Health, a Texas-based group with chapters in more than 12,000 churches nationwide, and the Weigh Down Workshop,which offers in-person and online Bible-based weight-loss plans, boast that participants have lost the pounds (and kept them off) by placing more faith in God, and less in Ben & Jerry’s.

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Tough economic times are forcing more people than ever to seek help with their Thanksgiving meal, creating such demand at local food pantries that many will likely be disappointed this year.

Martha Reed, coordinator of the food pantry at Grace Episcopal Church, said the church had begun to turn people away Monday.

“A woman came this morning with six children. I was able to give her a couple of good-sized chickens, but there are a lot more people looking,” she said.

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While the United States is reeling from the stock market’s plunge and the credit crisis, there are severe worldwide consequences to America’s economic woes that have been almost entirely ignored. Most people have not given any thought to the millions of victims of our economic situation: the children in the poorest areas of the world now supported by U.S. donors. While financial struggles may reduce the number of donors to organizations such as mine who are working to release children from poverty, the still-greater impact is being felt as the result of rising food and fuel prices. People ”” and children in particular ”” are going hungry around the world as the global food crisis continues to silently plunge millions of people deeper into the depths of poverty.

At its onset, the global food crisis was about food distribution and dwindling supply. It was about import and export policies, natural disasters that ruined crops, land use and new economies which encourage industry but undercut resources needed to grow food. It was even about the new prominence of biofuels. Now it’s about rising inflation in food production and transportation, which have triggered substantial increases in the cost of food at the market.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), people in 50 developing countries around the globe remain at risk through 2009 because of deteriorating foreign exchange reserves, rising inflation and slowing world economic growth. People in these nations are losing their ability to purchase food ”” meaning parents are deciding not what their children should eat but whether their children will eat.

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The troubled U.S. economy is forcing tens of thousands of people to visit food pantries for the first time. But as the demand rises, donations to those pantries are drying up and some places have run out of food entirely, even in the nation’s breadbasket.

Although Kansas’ Johnson County is one of the richer counties in the United States, a food pantry there run by the local Catholic Diocese had to close last week.

Ellen Jones, director of Catholic Community Services, says she was stunned.

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People who have lost a significant amount of weight and keep it off for years are constantly vigilant about what they consume, rarely overeat for emotional reasons and do about an hour a day of exercise, a new study shows.

“They are doing the behaviors that we know work, and they are doing them every day. They don’t give up,” says Suzanne Phelan, assistant professor of kinesiology at California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo. She presented her findings here at the recent meeting of the Obesity Society, an organization of weight-loss researchers and professionals.

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When Marilyn Lorenz of Alma, Mich., talks about living out her Catholic faith in daily life, she starts by describing what’s inside her refrigerator.

The produce is grown on nearby farms, and the milk is organic and hormone-free. Meat comes from a local farmer who lets his animals graze freely and doesn’t use antibiotics.

“Packing animals in factory farms, I think, is against God’s wishes,” says Lorenz, who changed her shopping and eating habits after a speaker at her parish broached the issues in 2007. “It isn’t something my faith could ever support.”

In bringing faith to bear anew on diet, Lorenz is among a growing movement of believers from various traditions who are exploring how to better reflect their moral values in the ways they eat. A few examples…

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I enjoyed this–watch it all.

Warning that rising food and oil prices pose a crisis for the world’s poor, Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, is calling on President George W. Bush and other leaders convening in Japan next week in an economic summit meeting to make new aid commitments to avert starvation and instability in dozens of countries.

“What we are witnessing is not a natural disaster — a silent tsunami or a perfect storm,” Zoellick said in a letter sent Tuesday evening to the major leaders of the West. “It is a man-made catastrophe, and as such must be fixed by people.”

Zoellick’s letter, obtained by The New York Times, came with a lengthy study of the impact of rising prices for food, fuel and commodities on the world’s poor. He sent the letter as Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda prepares to host Bush and six other world leaders in the Group of 8 economic summit meeting on the northern island of Hokkaido.

In recent weeks, the United States and some other countries have stepped up their pledges to get food to the poor in the 50 hardest-hit countries. But Zoellick said in his letter that the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Food Program had short-term needs of $10 billion.

Bank officials said that the world faced a shortfall in aid, but that pledges of financing had not been channeled into a central place and the size of the shortfall was not clear. “This is a test of the global system to help the most vulnerable, and it cannot afford to fail,” Zoellick said.

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Making ends meet on food stamps has never been easy for Cassandra Johnson, but since food prices began their steep climb earlier this year, she has had to develop new survival strategies.

She hunts for items that are on the shelf beyond their expiration dates because their prices are often reduced, a practice she once avoided.

Ms. Johnson, 44, who works in customer service for a medical firm, knows that buying food this way is not healthy, but she sees no other choice if she wants to feed herself and her 1-year-old niece Ammni Harris and 2-year-old nephew Tramier Harris, who live with her.

“I live paycheck to paycheck,” said Ms. Johnson, as she walked out of a market near her home in Hackensack, N.J., pushing both Ammni and the week’s groceries in a shopping cart. “And we’re not coping.”

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