Alternatives Magazine

More young people see opportunities in farming

2011-12-24T08:44:00.000-07:00

A Wisconsin factory worker worried about layoffs became a dairy farmer. An employee at a Minnesota nonprofit found an escape from her cubicle by buying a vegetable farm. A nuclear engineer tired of office bureaucracy decided to get into cattle ranching in Texas.

While fresh demographic information on U.S. farmers won't be available until after a new agricultural census is done next year, there are signs more people in their 20s and 30s are going into farming: Enrollment in university agriculture programs has increased, as has interest in farmer-training programs.

Young people are turning up at farmers markets and are blogging, tweeting and promoting their agricultural endeavors through other social media.

The young entrepreneurs typically cite two reasons for going into farming: Many find the corporate world stifling and see no point in sticking it out when there's little job security; and demand for locally grown and organic foods has been strong enough that even in the downturn they feel confident they can sell their products.

Laura Frerichs, 31, of Hutchinson, Minn., discovered her passion for farming about a year after she graduated from college with an anthropology degree. She planned to work in economic development in Latin America and thought she ought to get some experience working on a farm.

She did stints on five farms, mostly vegetable farms, and fell in love with the work. Frerichs and her husband now have their own organic farm, and while she doesn't expect it to make them rich, she's confident they'll be able to earn a living.

"There's just this growing consciousness around locally grown foods, around organic foods," she said. "Where we are in the Twin Cities, there's been great demand for that."

Farming is inherently risky: Drought, flooding, wind and other weather extremes can all destroy a year's work. And with farmland averaging $2,140 per acre across the United States. but two to four times that much in the Midwest and California, start-up costs can be daunting.

Still, agriculture fared better than many parts of the economy during the recession, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts record profits for farmers as a whole this year.

"People are looking at farm income, especially the increase in asset values, and seeing a really positive story about our economy," said USDA senior economist Mary Clare Ahearn, citing preliminary statistics. "Young people are viewing agriculture as a great opportunity and saying they want to be a part of it."

That's welcome news to the government. More than 60% of farmers are over the age of 55, and without young farmers to replace them when they retire the nation's food supply would depend on fewer and fewer people.

"We'd be vulnerable to local economic disruptions, tariffs, attacks on the food supply, really, any disaster you can think of," said Poppy Davis, who coordinates the USDA's programs for beginning farmers and ranchers.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has called for 100,000 new farmers within the next few years, and Congress has responded with proposals that would provide young farmers with improved access to USDA support and loan programs.

One beginning farmer is Gabrielle Rojas, 34, from the central Wisconsin town of Hewitt. As a rebellious teen all she wanted to do was leave her family's farm and find a career that didn't involve cows. But she changed her mind after spending years in dead-end jobs in a factory and restaurant.

"In those jobs I'm just a number, just a time-clock number," Rojas said. "But now I'm doing what I love to do. If I'm having a rough day or I'm a little sad because the sun's not shining or my tractor's broken, I can always go out and be by the cattle. That always makes me feel better."

Rojas got help in changing careers from an apprenticeship program paid for by the USDA, which began giving money in 2009 to universities and nonprofit groups that help train beginning farmers. The grants helped train about 5,000 people the first year. This year, the USDA estimates more than twice as many benefited.

One of the groups that received a grant is Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service, or MOSES. The Spring Valley, Wis., chapter teaches farming entrepreneurs how to cope with price swings and what to do in cases of catastrophic weather.

MOSES also organizes field days, where would-be farmers tour the operations of successful farms to learn and share tips. Attendance is up 20% this year, director Faye Jones said, and some outings that used to attract 30 or 40 people have drawn as many as 100, most between the ages of 18 and 30.

"I think for many people, farming has been a lifelong dream, and now the timing is right," she said. Among the reasons she cited: the lifestyle, working in the fresh air and being one's own boss.

If farming is beginning to sound like an appealing career, there are downsides. The work involves tough physical labor, and vacations create problems when there are crops to be harvested and cows to be milked.

In addition, many farmers need second jobs to get health insurance or make ends meet. As the USDA notes, three-fifths of farms have sales of less than $10,000 a year, although some may be growing fruit trees or other crops that take a few years to develop.

None of those factors dissuaded 27-year-old Paul Mews. He left a high-paying job as a nuclear engineer last year to become a cattle rancher in Menard, Tex. His wife's family has been ranching for generations, and Mews decided he'd much rather join his in-laws and be his own boss than continue shuffling paperwork at the plant.

"When you're self-employed, it's so much more fulfilling. You get paid what you're worth," he said. "It's really nice that what you put into it is what you're going to get back out."

By Dinesh Ramde, Associated Press

Is That Soda Safe?

2011-12-23T15:30:00.001-07:00

If you’ve always suspected that neon-colored sodas like Mountain Dew, Fanta Orange and various citrusy Gatorade drinks contain less-than-savory ingredients, you’re right. These and other highly sweetened, highly colored citrus-flavored sodas contain brominated vegetable oil (BVO), a synthetic chemical first patented as a flame retardant that some scientists now say deserves closer scrutiny. According to a recent article posted on Environmental Health News, BVO is found in 10% of sodas in the U.S., yet research about its health effects are limited.

What research does exist is decades old, and fails to account for the many worrisome potential consequences of over-exposure to bromine, including “skin lesions, memory loss and nerve disorders.” The article adds: “Other studies suggest that BVO could be building up in human tissues, just like other brominated compounds such as flame retardants. In mouse studies, big doses caused reproductive and behavioral problems.”

Essentially the BVO—derived from soybeans or corn—weighs flavoring down, preventing it from separating out. But it’s now known that these chemicals build up in human tissue and breast milk and they have been linked to reproductive problems, early puberty and altered thyroids. It’s particularly concerning for children and teens who consume large quantities of these sodas (often, as noted in the article, to stay awake while playing video games) and severe reactions to bromine in these drinks have landed some in emergency rooms.

In 1970, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pulled BVO from its list of chemicals on the Generally Recognized as Safe list, but later rescinded after industry studies indicated it was safe. While BVO is currently accepted for use as a “stabilizer” in fruit-flavored drinks at 15 parts per million, the FDA approval remains at the “interim” level, indicating more studies are needed. It’s been at this level since 1977. Meanwhile, studies with both pigs and dogs have not revealed significant health problems. Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest told Environmental Health News: “Is it harmful at the amounts consumed? Probably not. But it would be nice if the FDA did a thorough review of the literature and finalized an approval or a ban.”

But enough health risk is suspected with BVO that both Europe and Japan have banned it from food products for decades. Naturally based hydrocolloids replace the brominated chemicals in beverages abroad.

Facebook Greens Up

2011-12-23T14:59:00.000-07:00

Facebook has announced they will begin collaborating with Greenpeace, the site's most "liked" environmental nonprofit organization, as part of a major push to eventually power their data centers with clean and renewable energy.

Facebook looks forward to a day when our primary energy sources are clean and renewable, and we are working with Greenpeace and others to help bring that day closer, said Marcy Scott Lynn of Facebook's sustainability program. As an important step, our data center siting policy now states a preference for access to clean and renewable energy.

Facebook’s announcement comes nearly two years after Greenpeace launched its global Unfriend Coal campaign, which called on Facebook to power its data centers with clean energy instead of coal. Unfriend Coal’s Facebook page was “liked” by over 700,000 people in 14 countries, and in a rally for Facebook to “go green” by this past Earth Day, more than 80,000 supportive comments in over 11 languages were posted on Unfriend Coal’s wall in a span of just 24 hours, setting the Guinness World Record for the most Facebook comments in one day. The Unfriend Coal campaign has officially ended with Facebook’s new announcement.

“After 20 months of mobilizing, agitating and negotiating to green Facebook, the Internet giant has today announced its goal to run on clean, renewable energy,” Greenpeace stated last Thursday. “The clear message to energy producers from Facebook is: invest now in renewable energy, and move away from coal power. That’s a status update we can all celebrate!”

Both parties plan to take on a range of endeavors, including ongoing research into clean energy solutions for Facebook’s future data centers as well as conversing with utility providers about increasing the supply of renewable power to Facebook’s current data centers. They will also promote energy efficiency to Facebook users through an upcoming Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and OPower affiliated social energy application. According to the NRDC, improvements in energy efficiency have the potential to deliver more than $700 billion in cost savings in the U.S. alone. Motivating consumers to take action, they add, is the key to unlocking this potential.

“Social networking represents the next frontier in delivering consumer energy savings,” said Dan Yates, cofounder and CEO of Opower. “This application will give users the ability to share their personal energy use information with like-minded individuals—fostering more conversations about energy savings and engaging a broader segment of the population, one that may have had little interest in energy efficiency to date. This application is about giving consumers the information and motivation they need to use energy more efficiently.”

As the already significant energy used to power data centers is projected to grow 12% or more per year, Facebook and Greenpeace will also encourage other large energy users and producers to utilize clean energy rather than re-commission coal plants or build new coal plants. Greenpeace’s website now includes links for visitors to tweet Facebook’s new environmental incentives to executives at Microsoft, Apple and Twitter.

“Facebook’s commitment to renewable energy raises the bar for other IT and cloud computing companies such as Apple, IBM, Microsoft and Twitter,” said Casey Harrell, Senior IT Analyst for Greenpeace International. “The Facebook campaign proved that people all over the world want their social networks powered by renewable energy and not by coal.”

Eating Less Meat is Good for the Environment

2011-12-15T15:39:00.001-07:00

Our meat consumption habits take a serious toll on the environment. According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), the production, processing and distribution of meat requires huge outlays of pesticides, fertilizer, fuel, feed and water while releasing greenhouse gases, manure and a range of toxic chemicals into our air and water.

A lifecycle analysis conducted by EWG that took into account the production and distribution of 20 common agricultural products found that red meat such as beef and lamb is responsible for 10 to 40 times as many greenhouse gas emissions as common vegetables and grains.

Livestock are typically fed corn, soybean meal and other grains which have to first be grown using large amounts of fertilizer, fuel, pesticides, water and land. EWG estimates that growing livestock feed in the U.S. alone requires 167 million pounds of pesticides and 17 billion pounds of nitrogen fertilizer each year across some 149 million acres of cropland. The process generates copious amounts of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide, while the output of methane—another potent greenhouse gas—from cattle is estimated to generate some 20 percent of overall U.S. methane emissions.

“If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million,” reports ecologist David Pimentel of Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. He adds that the seven billion livestock in the U.S. consume five times as much grain as is consumed directly by the entire U.S. population.

Our meat consumption habits also cause other environmental problems. A 2009 study found that four-fifths of the deforestation across the Amazon rainforest could be linked to cattle ranching. And the water pollution from factory farms (also called concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs)—whereby pigs and other livestock are contained in tight quarters—can produce as much sewage waste as a small city, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Further, the widespread use of antibiotics to keep livestock healthy on those overcrowded CAFOs has led to the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that threaten human health and the environment in their own right.

Eating too much meat is no good for our health, with overindulgence linked to increasing rates of heart disease, cancer and obesity. Worldwide, between 1971 and 2010, production of meat tripled to around 600 billion pounds while global population grew by 81 percent, meaning that we are eating a lot more meat than our grandparents. Researchers extrapolate that global meat production will double by 2050 to about 1.2 trillion pounds a year, putting further pressure on the environment and human health.

For those who can’t give up meat fully, cutting back goes a long way toward helping the environment, as does choosing meat and dairy products from organic, pasture-raised, grass-fed animals. “Ultimately, we need better policies and stronger regulations to reduce the environmental impacts of livestock production,” says EWG’s Kari Hammerschlag “But personal shifting of diets is an important step.”

Are Gas Furnaces Cheaper and Greener Than Oil?

2011-12-15T15:18:00.000-07:00

December 2011 | E Magazine

It is true that natural gas has been a more affordable heat source than oil for Americans in recent years. The federal Energy Information Administration (EIA) reports that the average American homeowner will pay only about $732 to heat their home with gas this winter season (October 1 through March 31) versus a whopping $2,535 for oil heat.

While the price of natural gas has remained relatively stable in the last few years, oil prices have been high and rising thanks in large part to continued unrest in Middle Eastern oil producing countries. Just two years ago the average winter home oil heating bill was $1,752.

While oil prices are likely to remain high and volatile in the foreseeable future, most energy analysts agree that pricing for natural gas, much of which is still derived domestically, is not expected to rise or fluctuate substantially in the U.S. any time soon.

According to EIA economist and forecaster Neil Gamson, the U.S. already has a glut of natural gas and expects even more domestic production to come online soon as drillers are set to open up the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and New York to more gas development.

Only about eight percent of U.S. homes are on oil heat today. Most are in the Northeastern U.S. and were built back in the day when oil was the cheapest way to keep toasty through the long winters. Many utilities have since put gas lines into neighborhoods that didn’t have them in the past, opening the door for homeowners to switch out old inefficient oil furnaces for more efficient gas units.

The federal government’s 30 percent tax credit (capped at $500) for upgrading to a high efficiency furnace expires at the end of 2011 but will likely be extended in one form or another into 2012. In the meantime, some states, municipalities and utilities offer their own incentives and low-interest loans on upgraded, high-efficiency furnaces.

Check what’s available in your area via a zip code or map-based search online at the website of the Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency (DSIRE). Regardless of incentives, gas furnaces tend to cost less than their oil counterparts anyway, but installing one from scratch will incur an extra thousand dollars or two to run a gas line to it from the street.

If natural gas continues to be substantially cheaper than oil, the fuel cost savings alone would pay back the up-front equipment and infrastructure investment within five years in most cases.

Environmentally speaking, gas has lower carbon emissions than oil, but hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”)—the highly controversial gas extraction method increasingly employed today (drillers inject water, sand and chemicals at high pressure underground to break through rock and access the natural gas)—takes a heavy toll on surrounding ecosystems and regional water quality.

Most environmental advocates would rather see people transition to truly renewable heating sources like geothermal or solar. If you’re going to the cost and trouble of switching out an oil furnace for something new, a geothermal heat pump may cost more ($7,500 and up) than a new gas heating system but will save big bucks and emissions in the long run.

For those in reliably sunny areas, a solar heating system will cost even more up front but can deliver similar long term economic and environmental benefits.

Fracking Linked to Toxic Tap Water

2011-12-15T14:40:00.000-07:00

The underground drilling method known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” has for the first time been definitively linked to contaminants in drinking water. As reported by investigative news site ProPublica, on December 8 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a draft report revealing that water contamination discovered in Pavilion, Wyoming, is almost certainly caused by fracking.

Frackng involves injecting water, sand and chemicals into the ground to fracture rock and release natural gas, and environmental groups and concerned community residents have long argued that these toxic chemicals can then leach into surrounding drinking water supplies. But definitive studies have been hard to come by. In Wyoming, however, 10 compounds related to fracking were found in residents’ drinking water, including benzene, methane, glycol ethers and alcohols. Benzene was found at 246 micrograms per liter, leagues above allowed concentrations of five micrograms per meter.

ProPublica writes that: “The agency’s findings could be a turning point in the heated national debate about whether contamination from fracking is happening, and are likely to shape how the country regulates and develops natural gas resources in the Marcellus Shale and across the Eastern Appalachian states.”

In light of the findings, a spokesperson for Canada-based Encana Corp., responsible for the wells, has said the data remains inconclusive, but shares of the company’s stock still fell more than 6% following the report’s release.

And despite the company’s denials, The Wall Street Journal reports that Encana “has been providing fresh water to 21 homes in the area since August 2010, when it began meeting with the EPA and state regulators to find a long-term alternative to well water for the area.”

The EPA study followed complaints from residents of Pavilion, Wyoming, who voiced concerns about the way their drinking water smelled and tasted. Coverage of the new findings has noted that Wyoming fracking wells are only 1,220 feet deep, compared to rocks being fracked in Pennsylvania and other spots along the Marcellus Shale, which are thousands of feet deeper than water wells.

But as Amy Mall, senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council writes on her blog: “This draft report makes it obvious that there are many factors at play, any one of which can go wrong. Much stronger rules are needed to ensure that well construction standards are stronger and reduce threats to drinking water.”

School lunch guidelines lose to cooks in Congress

2011-11-29T14:14:00.002-07:00

USA TODAY Editorial:

When Mom told you to eat your vegetables, she wasn't thinking about pizza and french fries. She probably meant broccoli, carrots and that old standby, spinach.

But Mom clearly had more common sense than members of Congress, and their friends in the frozen food industry, who this month beat back efforts to make school lunches more nutritious. The story is a particularly unappetizing microcosm of how Washington works.

The tale begins 20 years ago, when putting 2 tablespoons of tomato paste on a slice of pizza allowed the slice to count as a vegetable in the federally funded school lunch program. (Forget, for a moment, the technicality that tomatoes are a fruit.) This year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture moved to change that little absurdity and other outdated guidelines in response to a congressional directive to improve school lunches.

But when the USDA came out with a set of sensible proposals this summer, there was a huge push-back from food producers with financial stakes in maintaining the status quo in the lunchroom, where pizza and fries are, respectively, the most commonly consumed entree and vegetable.

The American Frozen Food Institute and Minnesota-based Schwan Food Co., a major seller of frozen pizza, lobbied against a change in the way tomato paste would be counted. The National Potato Council and state potato lobbies, meanwhile, fought new guidelines to limit servings of potatoes and other starchy vegetables to twice a week.

Never mind that a third of the nation's children are overweight or obese. Or that everybody from nutritionists to first lady Michelle Obama have been trying to persuade Americans to eat less fattening, healthier meals. Or that the USDA looked to the venerable Institute of Medicine for guidance on its proposals. Or that school lunches, financed by taxpayers to the tune of $13 billion a year, are often the main meal of the day for the nation's poorest kids.

No, Congress chose to listen to industries whose profits and employment levels would be dented by the new guidelines. (And who also happened to spend nearly $500,000 lobbying this year.) Faster than you can toss a frozen pizza into a microwave, lawmakers undid key parts of the proposals.

Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Mark Udall, D-Colo., both from potato-growing states, sponsored the successful measure to block the limit on potatoes. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., challenged the tomato-paste proposals, along with most of Minnesota's representatives. Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., who has gotten $10,500 in campaign contributions from Schwan's political action committee (PAC) since 2000, wanted to scrap the new nutritional guidelines entirely, arguing that they cost too much. At least Congress kept parts of the program.

Mind you, the USDA wasn't trying to ban pizza or potatoes. There's nothing wrong with those foods in moderation. It simply wanted to make room for more vegetables and to ensure that a slice of pizza alone couldn't constitute an entire school meal, as it now can. The proposals would have merely required schools to serve pizza with a vegetable, not as one, as nutrition advocate Margo Wootan observed.

It's hardly breaking news that Congress is in the pocket of powerful lobbies for guns, banks and seniors. But you'd hope that when it came to healthier meals for hungry kids, lawmakers would do the right thing. Of course, low-income children don't vote or have PACs.

Midwest Tap Water Altering Hormones

2011-11-29T13:48:00.000-07:00

by Brita Belli

Tap water in the U.S., particularly in the agricultural regions of the Midwest, comes tainted with a weed killer called atrazine. The herbicide is spread across 75% of all U.S. cornfields and frequently turns up in surface and groundwater. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has set a safety limit of 3 parts per billion of the chemical in drinking water, but a new study reveals that women’s hormone levels and menstrual cycles can be radically altered at far lower levels.

Researchers compared women in Vermont (in towns without atrazine use) to those in Illinois (with high levels of atrazine use) and found that atrazine exposure in drinking water, even below the EPA’s standards, was associated with altered menstrual cycles and periods delayed by over six weeks, as well as lowered levels of reproductive hormones. Specifically, as reported in Environmental Health News, “The women from Illinois farm towns were nearly five times more likely to report irregular periods than the Vermont women, and more than six times as likely to go more than six weeks between periods. In addition, the Illinois women had significantly lower levels of estrogen during an important part of the menstrual cycle.”

The more tap water an Illinois woman drank, the more likely she was to have irregular periods. Most troubling was that levels of atrazine in the water in both states was well below the EPA’s established 3ppb standard. In the case of Illinois, tap water concentrations of atrazine averaged at 0.7ppb. While it is possible some other chemical is causing these hormonal changes, atrazine has been tied to such abnormalities before. Notes the article in Environmental Health News: “In 2009, a study tied atrazine in drinking water to low birth weight in Indiana newborns. And in a study of more than 3,000 women enrolled in the Agricultural Health Study, those who described using atrazine and other pesticides had an increased risk of missed periods and bleeding between periods.”

One researcher added that the hormonal changes in evidence could also impact a woman’s fertility, and they could play a role in diseases from osteoporosis to diabetes to cancer. Atrazine has been the subject of numerous studies as to its health impacts and has been banned in the European Union due to increasing evidence that it poses harm to both humans and wildlife. In fact, the herbicide appears to “affect development of the male reproductive system” in frogs, “decreasing fertility and in some cases leading to hermaphroditic frogs.” Despite growing concerns, use of the herbicide is on a steady climb in the U.S.

Did You Watch This?

2011-11-07T16:10:00.001-07:00

If you watched Leslie Stahl's interview on 60 Minutes Sunday night with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramhoff it only reinforces the frustration and futility with our system and leadership in this country. It was greed and corruption right in our face (and he'll probably write a bestseller). It's amazing the country can function at all. And if watching that interview didn't send a WAKE UP call, nothing will.

Stahl talked about how stomach-turning it was for her to hear the nitty gritty of how lobbyists corrupt our legislature. "I think the public's going to be furious watching this," she said. "The story just shows you that our system really, really is in trouble."

Bike Town Alberta, where "Cycling is the New Golf!"

2011-11-07T08:39:00.000-07:00

Devon, AB recently undertook a branding initiative looking for that one thing that would set Devon apart from neighbouring communities. Bike Town AB was inspired by the free spirited, adventurous nature of our residents and visitors. The vision is to create a community bold enough to stand up and declare to the world what we believe in. Bike Town AB says that Devon is a community that believes: MORE.

Food Matters: Uncovering the trillion dollar worldwide 'sickness industry'.

2011-11-07T08:36:00.000-07:00

With nutritionally-depleted foods, chemical additives and our tendency to rely upon pharmaceutical drugs to treat what's wrong with our malnourished bodies, it's no wonder that modern society is getting sicker. Food Matters sets about uncovering the trillion dollar worldwide 'sickness industry' and gives people some scientifically verifiable solutions for overcoming illness naturally. See trailer http://vimeo.com/29028735

Oil boom brings growing pains to North Dakota town

2011-11-07T07:41:00.003-07:00

Rock Center’s report on the jobs boom in North Dakota sparked more than a thousand comments from viewers with some declaring that they were heading to Williston to find work and some Williston locals saying that the jobs boom is good news for the economy, but there are growing pains.

North Dakota’s oil boom has turned the town of Williston into a kind of mecca for job seekers, but with the surge of newcomers and traffic come potholes and ruts in the city’s roads, a severe housing crunch and even stresses on the city’s sewage system. Click on the link below to view video documented by Harry Smith on Rock Center.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/45112911#45112911

"Sitting Disease?" Yes, It's Now a Disease.

2011-11-05T11:30:00.001-06:00

According to a poll of nearly 6,300 people by the Institute for Medicine and Public Health, it's likely that you spend a stunning 56 hours a week planted like a geranium—staring at your computer screen, working the steering wheel, or collapsed in a heap in front of your high-def TV. And it turns out women may be more sedentary than men, since they tend to play fewer sports and hold less active jobs.

Even if you think you are energetic, sitting all day at work is common for most of us. And it's killing us—literally—by way of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. All this downtime is so unhealthy that it's given birth to a new area of medical study called inactivity physiology, which explores the effects of our increasingly butt-bound, tech-driven lives, as well as a deadly new epidemic researchers have dubbed "sitting disease."

"Our bodies have evolved over millions of years to do one thing: move," says James Levine,M.D., Ph.D., of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and author of Move a Little, Lose a Lot. "As human beings, we evolved to stand upright. For thousands of generations, our environment demanded nearly constant physical activity."

But thanks to technological advances, the Internet, and an increasingly longer work week, that environment has disappeared. "Electronic living has all but sapped every flicker of activity from our daily lives," Levine says. You can shop, pay bills, make a living, and with Twitter and Facebook, even catch up with friends without so much as standing up. And the consequences of all that easy living are profound.

When you sit for an extended period of time, your body starts to shut down at the metabolic level, says Marc Hamilton, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Missouri. When muscles—especially the big ones meant for movement, like those in your legs—are immobile, your circulation slows and you burn fewer calories. Key flab-burning enzymes responsible for breaking down triglycerides (a type of fat) simply start switching off. Sit for a full day and those fat burners plummet by 50 percent, Levine says.

That's not all. The less you move, the less blood sugar your body uses; research shows that for every two hours spent on your backside per day, your chance of contracting diabetes goes up by 7 percent. Your risk for heart disease goes up, too, because enzymes that keep blood fats in check are inactive. You're also more prone to depression: With less blood flow, fewer feel-good hormones are circulating to your brain.

Sitting too much is also hell on your posture and spine health, says Douglas Lentz, a certified strength and conditioning specialist and the director of fitness and wellness for Summit Health in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. "When you sit all day, your hip flexors and hamstrings shorten and tighten, while the muscles that support your spine become weak and stiff," he says. It's no wonder that the incidence of chronic lower-back pain among women has increased threefold since the early 1990s.

And even if you exercise, you're not immune. Consider this: We've become so sedentary that 30 minutes a day at the gym may not do enough to counteract the detrimental effects of eight, nine, or 10 hours of sitting, says Genevieve Healy, Ph.D., a research fellow at the Cancer Prevention Research Centre of the University of Queensland in Australia. That's one big reason so many women still struggle with weight, blood sugar, and cholesterol woes despite keeping consistent workout routines.

In a recent study, Healy and her colleagues found that regardless of how much moderate to vigorous exercise participants did, those who took more breaks from sitting throughout the day had slimmer waists, lower BMIs (body mass indexes), and healthier blood fat and blood sugar levels than those who sat the most. In an extensive study of 17,000 people, Canadian researchers drew an even more succinct conclusion: The longer you spend sitting each day, the more likely you are to die an early death—no matter how fit you are.

THRIVE Gives Meaning to the Occupy Movement

2011-11-05T11:22:00.000-06:00

In the wake of the growing "occupy" movement throughout the country, this is a must see movie that provides the reasons why it's happening. THRIVE is an unconventional documentary that lifts the veil on what's REALLY going on in our world by following the money upstream -- uncovering the global consolidation of power in nearly every aspect of our lives. Weaving together breakthroughs in science, consciousness and activism, THRIVE offers real solutions, empowering us with unprecedented and bold strategies for reclaiming our lives and our future.

http://www.thrivemovement.com/