Study: Pregnancy and Peanut Butter

  • A study found that moms who ate peanut butter or nuts every day increased the risk of asthma in their kids by 50% (Photo courtesy of the EPA)

A new study finds pregnant moms
who eat peanut butter every day might be
affecting their babies’ health. Rebecca
Williams has more:

Transcript

A new study finds pregnant moms
who eat peanut butter every day might be
affecting their babies’ health. Rebecca
Williams has more:

The Dutch government has been following a few thousand kids and their moms
for 8 years. They wanted to see if there was a link between the moms’ diets
and whether the kids would develop asthma.

It turns out that moms who ate peanut butter or nuts every day increased the
risk of asthma in their kids by 50%.

Dr. John Heffner is a former president of the American Thoracic Society. He
says these results are interesting – but that doesn’t mean there’s a definite link
between eating nuts and asthma.

“I think that this is a piece of information that confirms a well balanced diet of
mothers is the most important thing to do. But it doesn’t suggest that mothers
oughta take nuts out of their diet if they’re ingesting nuts now.”

Dr. Heffner says there are a lot of factors that could lead to asthma. He says
this needs more study, but in the meantime, pregnant moms should stick to
their doctor’s advice.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Epa Phasing Out Common Food Pesticide

Over the next six years, the Environmental Protection Agency is phasing out the remaining uses of an insecticide used on foods. Lester Graham reports, some environmentalists say it should be banned immediately:

Transcript

Over the next six years, the Environmental Protection Agency is phasing out the remaining uses of an insecticide used on foods. Lester Graham reports, some environmentalists say it should be banned immediately:


The insecticide azinphos-methyl, or AZM, is still used on some vegetables, nuts, and fruits. The chemical can cause short term harm to farm workers and their families who live near orchards. Over-exposure can cause nausea, vomiting, and in severe cases convulsions, coma, and death. Low-level long-term exposure can cause memory loss and other affects on the brain.


Shelley Davis is with the group Farmworker Justice.


“There are plenty of adequate, safer alternatives for pest control on the market already. Growers do not need to use AZM. This is the time the EPA should show leadership and should say ‘Let’s switch to safer alternatives.'”


The insecticide won’t be completely phased out until late in 2012. Apples, blueberries, parsley, cherries and pears will be the last foods still treated with AZM.


For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Crafting a House From Scrap Lumber

  • Kelvin Potter on the third floor of the house he's building with scrap lumber. (Photo by Chris McCarus)

One man and a few of his friends are using some old-fashioned methods and some cutting edge techniques to build an environmentally friendly house. The builders are also using a lot of material that other people would throw away. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chris McCarus reports:

Transcript

One man and a few of his friends are using some old-fashioned methods
and some cutting edge techniques to build an environmentally-friendly house.
The builders are also using a lot of material that other people would throw
away. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chris McCarus reports:


Four men are raising a timber frame house on an old farm
in central Michigan. Several feet up in the air, they’re piecing together
some beams, 12 feet long and 12 inches thick with some help from a small
crane.


(Sound of engine)


“Cable it! Cable it! Cable it? Yes!”


(Sound of tool dropping)


The framing is like assembling giant Lincoln Log toys. Neighbor Nick
Van Frankenhuyzen is holding a rope attached to some beams.


“Look at that. Look at how far that is extended. We lifted one of
those beams yesterday by hand and they’re not light. Now this wall has to
come back. This has to pop out again to make that one fit and I don’t
know how that’s gonna happen.”


Facing these kinds of challenges is what people in the green building
movement seem to relish. Kelvin Potter owns this farm. He’s using materials
that most builders overlook.


Potter: “Yeah we saved all these timbers, developers were burning all these.
So. These were all going up in smoke. And some of these logs came off my
neighbor’s property. They had died and were standing. We dragged ’em over here. He planted them. He’s
standing right there.”


Van Frankenhuyzen: “Yeah we’re standing on them. And then Kelvin
said I sure could use them. Because they’re the right size. Go get ’em. So he did. And here they are. Can’t believe it. Much better than firewood.”


Kelvin Potter’s home is one example of a growing trend in green building.
The U.S. Green Building Council includes 4000 member organizations. It’s
created standards for protecting the environment. The standards include
reusing material when it’s possible, using solar and wind energy, renewable
resources, and non-traditional materials. Sometimes from surprising
places.


(Sound of truck)


A city truck dumps wood chips onto a municipal lot. On other days it
dumps logs like sugar maple, oak and pine. The trees came from routine
maintenance of parks, cemeteries and streets.
Kelvin Potter is also here, checking for any fresh deliveries. While other
guys come here to cut the logs with chainsaws for firewood, Potter says he
makes better use of it as flooring or trim. Even saw mills don’t take advantage of this kind of wood. That’s because
trees cut down in backyards often mean trouble for the mills.


“Sawmills typically aren’t interested in this material because there is
hardware, nuts, bolts, nails, clothes lines, all sorts of different things
people have pounded into them by their houses. ”


Potter says sawmills use big machines with expensive blades that get
destroyed. So THEY throw the logs away. Potter instead keeps the logs and
throws away his blades. He uses cheap ones, making it worth the risk.
When it’s finished, Kelvin Potter will have an environmentally friendly
house, even if it doesn’t meet all the criteria to be certified as a “green
building.”


Maggie Fields works for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.
She says there are many ways to build green. Anything that helps the
environment is a big improvement on the status quo.


“Every material that we reuse is a material that doesn’t have to be cut
from the woods, if that’s where it’s coming from, or remanufactured. And that means that the pollution that’s associated with that material getting
to that use state isn’t having to be created. So, it doesn’t matter if they
get the green seal. If they’re taking steps along that that’s great.”


(Sound of climbing ladder)


Kelvin Potter is climbing a ladder to the belfry of his new house. He
shows off his shiny steel roof, the kind now covering barns. He compares it
to asphalt shingles.


“It lasts 100 years versus 15, 20 years. We actually fill a lot of landfills with shingles. They don’t compress. They don’t decompose. Steel will
go right back into making more roofing or cars or what not. It’s a win-win
situation. It’s a lot cheaper all around and I can’t see why it’s not a lot
more popular.”


The point Potter and other green builders are trying to make is, good
building material isn’t just the stuff marketed at lumberyards. They say, “Look around. You might be surprised what you can use.”


For the GLRC, I’m Chris McCarus.

Related Links

Romancing the American Chestnut

  • American chestnuts (left) are smaller than Chinese and European chestnuts. The Chinese and European varieties are also resistant to the blight, making the imports more desirable to growers. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Food is always a big part of the holidays. But one
traditional food has – for the most part – disappeared from American tables. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Food is always a big part of the holidays. But one traditional food has – for the most part – disapeared from American tables. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:


(Sound of Nat King Cole singing, “Chestnuts roasing on an open fire…”)


That old chestnut of a song romanticizes roasting chestnuts as a part of the holidays. But a lot of us have never even seen chestnuts, let alone roasted them on an open fire. Chestnuts used to be a major part of the Eastern hardwood forest. There were millions of them. In fact, 25 percent of all the mature trees were chestnuts. But a blight, imported with some Chinese chestnut trees, slowly wiped out the American chestnuts. Now, they’re gone.


Well… almost. Much of the root stock is still alive. Sprouts grow until the blight knocks them back again. A blight only hurts the standing tree where it branches out.


And, in a few isolated pockets in the Midwest, the blight hasn’t reached the trees. A few American chestnuts are alive and growing and some of them are free of the blight. At Nash Nursuries in central Michigan, owner Bill Nash is guiding us through a rare sight… a grove of American chestnuts.


“These are 20 years old and as you can see, they’re fairly good sized. The American chestnut is quite a rapid growing tree. It’s well-suited for our climate, so it doesn’t have any of the problems that some of the hybrids do as far as growing and cultural care you have to take care of them. The Americans, you get them started and they’re pretty much on their own.”


In a few places in Michigan and Wisconsin there are small groves of chestnuts. They’re prized trees. They’re great for shade. The hardwood is rot resistant and makes great furniture and fence posts. And the chestnuts are eaten by humans and wildlife alike. Bill Nash says the tree will be popular again if it ever overcomes the blight that’s hit it so hard.


“The American chestnut will make another big comeback in this country as a yard tree, as a timber tree, as a wildlife tree.”


That part about a wildlife tree is more important than just worrying about the squirrels and bunnies. Chestnuts were an important food source for all kinds of animals.


Andrew Jarosz is a plant biologist at Michigan State University. He says the loss of chestnuts has been hard on wildlife populations.


“Chestnuts shed nuts in a more regular pattern than oaks, which will have what are called mast years – where they’ll have major crops, massive crops one year and very small crops in other years – which means it’s either feast or famine if you’re depending on oaks.”


Since the blight first began hitting American chestnuts about a century ago, researchers have been looking into all kinds of ways to stop it. One way is to cross it with the Chinese chestnut which has a couple of genes that resist the blight. But it takes a long time to breed out the Chinese characteristics from the American chestnuts and still keep the resistant genes.


Another approach is genetic manipulation. Genetically modifying the American chestnut tree to make it disease resistant. Again, work is underway, but it takes a long time. And even after success, it’s likely some people won’t like the idea of releasing a genetically modified organism into the wild.


The final approach worked in Europe when the blight hit there. It seems there’s a naturally occuring virus that kills the blight. It spread naturally in Europe. There are a few groves in Michigan that have naturally acquired the virus and it’s working to keep the blight at bay. Andrew Jarosz is working on the research. He says the trick is figuring out how to get the virus to spread to other trees short of manually spreading it on cankers infected by the blight.


“If we’re literally talking about millions of trees across probably, you know, the eastern third of the country, we obviously can’t treat every canker on every tree. And we need to be able to figure out a way to deploy the virus in a way that it can spread.”


Even with all that hopeful research, it’ll be ten years at least before some practical solutions end up in the forests, and Jarosz believes a couple of centuries before the American chestnut holds the place it once did in the forests.


Bill Nash knows it’ll be a while before there are major changes, but he is optimistic about the American chestnut.


“Oh, I would think the tree has a bright future. There’s enough people working on that, enough programs going on now… So, I would suspect that in the not-too-distant future we should have some of this progress made. You know, Robert Frost in his poem predicted the comeback of the American chestnut, that something would arise to offset that blight. And we’re starting to see that.”


Frost put it this way: “Will the blight end the chestnut? The farmers rather guess not, It keeps smoldering at the roots And sending up new shoots Till another parasite Shall come to end the blight.”


Seems Frost was an optimist too.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Hazelnuts Crop of the Future?

  • John Munter grows hazelnuts on his farm in northern Minnesota. He says the bushes are better for the environment than corn or soybeans, and that hazelnuts could be an important food in a future of climate change. (Photo by Stephanie Hemphill)

You might have tried hazelnut flavoring in your coffee. And we all know about the hazelnuts in European chocolate bars. Hazelnuts – or filberts – are traditionally grown in Turkey, Italy, and Oregon. Now, researchers are developing varieties that could thrive in more challenging climates, such as the Great Lakes region. A man in northern Minnesota is growing hazelnuts. It’s part of his attempt to live off the land. And he says hazelnuts are the perfect crop for a future of global climate change. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill visited his farm:

Transcript

You might have tried hazelnut flavoring in your coffee. And we all know about the hazelnuts in
European chocolate bars. Hazelnuts – or filberts – are traditionally grown in Turkey, Italy, and
Oregon. Now, researchers are developing varieties that could thrive in more challenging
climates, such as the Great Lakes region. A man in northern Minnesota is growing hazelnuts. It’s
part of his attempt to live off the land. And he says hazelnuts are the perfect crop for a future of
global climate change. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill visited his
farm:


John Munter lives on 40 acres of hay fields and woods. He and his wife and their four children
live in a ranch-style house in the middle of the fields. Munter works at a Northwest Airlines
reservation center. But his heart is here at the farm. It was settled by his grandfather, a Finnish
immigrant, 90 years ago.


Munter has a full beard. He wears round wire-rimmed glasses. And when he goes out to do the
chores, he puts on a fraying denim jacket that must be 50 years old. It belonged to his great-
uncle.


(sound of Munter walking outdoors)


“Here’s our maple sugaring operation… this is the garden here, you can see it’s pretty small.
We’re so busy it’s hard to spend a lot of time gardening… and to my right is the log sauna…”


John Munter has a lot of projects. He wants to be as self-sufficient as he can on the farm.


Twelve years ago he planted some hazelnut bushes south of the old farmhouse. They’re protected
from the north wind here, and they’ve grown to about seven feet tall.


This is a new crop for northern Minnesota. There are wild hazelnuts growing around here, but no
one had tried the newer varieties, that are bred to produce more and bigger nuts.


Four years ago, Munter’s bushes began producing nuts. He’s especially happy with one of the
bushes.


“It really just pounds out the nuts. They’re not real big, but they’re plentiful, last year we got
maybe two pounds of nuts from this little bush right here… Now this bush here produces nuts
early. They’re a signal to me because when the squirrels start attacking my nuts, they take after
this one first because they ripen earlier. You can see a bush loaded with hazelnuts, and the next
morning it’s stripped. And then they go to the next bush, and the next one, and so on. (Hemphill:
‘Then how do you get anything out of them?’) Well, I’m letting the animals have them at this
point, because I’m too busy with all my other projects to process all these little nuts.”


You have to take the long view with hazelnuts. Right now, these bushes are 12 years old, and
they’re just beginning to produce nuts. But Munter says in ten years, he could get hundreds of
pounds.


He could sell them to candy-makers, or just eat them. They’re high in protein and vitamins. And
Munter says the oil is as healthy as olive oil. Most hazelnuts come from Europe and Oregon.
John Munter is determined to show they’ll grow in northern Minnesota.


“They’re great for climate change too. Because they bend and don’t break… in hurricanes,
tornadoes and wind storms, whatever… if a forest fire burns it over, they’ll pop back up from the
base there.”


John Munter says hazelnuts could be an important source of food if the climate gets harsher.


Munter’s not the only one in the Great Lakes region trying out hazelnuts. Some researchers say
they’re the crop of the future. They say the bushes are better for the environment than corn and
soybeans.


Hazelnut bushes stay in the ground for years, so the soil isn’t eroded by plowing. And they’re
very good at absorbing fertilizers. That means excess fertilizer doesn’t run into nearby streams.


A few farmers are planting them, and thinking of switching gradually, from corn and soybeans, to
hazelnuts.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.