A Princeton University research team lead by psychology professor Bart Hoebel (pictured) demonstrated that rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gain significantly more weight than those with access to water sweetened with table sugar. (Photo courtesy of Princeton University, Denise Applewhite)
We know eating too much sweet stuff puts on the pounds. A new study suggests the kind of sweet stuff matters too. Shawn Allee reports:
Transcript
We know eating too much sweet stuff puts on the pounds.
Shawn Allee reports a new study suggests the kind of sweet stuff matters, too.
Food companies mostly sweeten things with table sugar, called sucrose, or they use high fructose corn syrup.
Dr. Bart Hoebel is at Princeton University.
A while back, his team fed rats regular food and let them drink watered-down sucrose to see if they’d put on fat.
They didn’t.
But, recently he let rats eat the same food, but drink a solution of high-fructose corn syrup.
“The ones with the high-fructose corn syrup became significantly fatter.
Corn sweetener companies dismiss the study since it involves rats, not people.”
Hoebel says rat studies point out where we should do human studies later.
“So we want to find out if the kind of sugar matters as the food producers are putting sugar in more and more things.”
More research on corn syrup is in the pipeline, including work on animals and people.
Researchers studied records of more than 36 million births and found the birth weight of the average full term single baby actually decreased over a 15 year period. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)
American moms are giving birth
to smaller babies. Rebecca Williams
reports on a new study that suggests
this recent trend might be the
reversal of American babies getting
bigger and bigger of the past half-
century:
Transcript
American moms are giving birth
to smaller babies. Rebecca Williams
reports on a new study that suggests
this recent trend might be the
reversal of American babies getting
bigger and bigger of the past half-
century:
A few giant babies made the news last year. One was even 15 pounds.
“At guess at some point you can’t make bigger babies (laughs) so maybe we’ve maxed out.”
That’s Dr. Emily Oken with Harvard Medical School. She says babies are getting smaller. She studied records of more than 36 million births and found the birth weight of the average full term single baby actually decreased over a 15 year period.
But it was just a couple of ounces. Dr. Oken says that’s not a big deal for most healthy babies.
“But, is there an underlying reason why perhaps babies might be getting a little bit smaller and does that exposure have a short or longer term health implication for babies?”
She says she ruled out factors such as age, race, tobacco use, and birth complications. Dr. Oken says next, she wants to study mother’s diets, exercise, stress, and exposure to environmental toxins as possible causes.
Coal train.
(Photo courtesy of the Energy Information Administration)
When you turn on the lights,
there’s a pretty good chance
you’re burning coal. Almost
half of the nation’s electricity
comes from coal. Burning coal
causes the greenhouse gas,
carbon dioxide. But, have you
ever wondered how much?
Lester Graham got a pound of
coal, and then talked to Ezra
Hausman. He’s
the Vice President of Synapse
Energy Economics in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. The first question –
how long would a pound of coal
light up a hundred-watt incandescent
light bulb?:
Transcript
When you turn on the lights,
there’s a pretty good chance
you’re burning coal. Almost
half of the nation’s electricity
comes from coal. Burning coal
causes the greenhouse gas,
carbon dioxide. But, have you
ever wondered how much?
Lester Graham got a pound of
coal, and then talked to Ezra
Hausman. He’s
the Vice President of Synapse
Energy Economics in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. The first question –
how long would a pound of coal
light up a hundred-watt incandescent
light bulb?:
Ezra Hausman: Well, you haven’t told me where you got that pound of coal. Uh, it makes a big difference if it’s from the Appalachian region or the Western region, such as Wyoming in the United States. The Appalachian coal, Eastern coal, would burn a light bulb for about, uh, 10 or 12 hours. A pound of Western coal would only burn it for about 5 or 6 hours.
Lester Graham: There’s that much difference?
Ezra: There’s a big difference in the energy content of the coal, that’s correct.
Lester: And coal, a good portion of coal, is pure carbon. What kind of CO2 omissions would we expect from this one kind of coal?
Ezra: Well, a pound of coal is, let’s say, it’s about half carbon. So that would be a half a pound of carbon, but for every atom of carbon you add two atoms of oxygen from the air. So, you get for every 12 grams of carbon, you get 44 grams of carbon dioxide. That’s basically just how the chemistry works out when you burn carbon and oxygen; it produces carbon dioxide in that ratio.
Lester: So, this one pound of coal, would admit, by weight, more CO2 than I have in my hand here?
Ezra: That’s right; it would end up admitting about two pounds of CO2. Depending again on where the coal came from and how much carbon is in it.
Lester: Now my environmentalist friends would like to see no more coal plants built, no more coal burning power plants built, simply because of the CO2 emissions. The coal industry tells me they’re working on clean coal; there are experiments going on right now to find ways to sequester CO2 and other experiments going on how to store it underground. What do you think is the future of coal?
Ezra: Well, first of all, I think it’s important to say that there is no such thing as clean coal today. So in the first place, coal mining is an extremely environmentally damaging and dangerous process. The high volumes techniques that are now in use including strip-mining and mountain top removal have devastating consequences on mining regions. And secondly, while there are techniques in place that eliminate many of the regular pollutants such as sulfur and nitrogen from coal combustion, there is no current technology that can significantly reduce the amount of CO2 emitted from power plants.
Lester: What do you see as the future of coal and power generation from coal in America in the future?
Ezra: Well, I think we really have no option but the phase out the use of coal for power generation over the next several decades. The problem with coal is not that each pound has so much carbon; the problem is that there is just a vast reservoir of carbon and potential carbon dioxide in the coal reserves under ground in the United States.
Ezra Hausman is Vice President of Synapse Energy Economics.
He talked with The Environment Report’s
Lester Graham.
Overpopulation of deer is causing problems for forest
understory, farmers, and increased car/deer accidents.
Some programs are encouraging hunters to take an extra
deer and donating the meat to charity. (Photo by Lester Graham)
The hunting season for deer has ended or is about to end in most states. But the deer are still plentiful. Overpopulation of deer has led to an increase in deer-and-car crashes. Too many deer also damage the understory of forests. In some states, though, the deer overpopulation also means more deer meat is made available to low-income people. That’s because hunters, meat processors and food banks are working together to get venison to the poor. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Skye Rohde
reports:
Transcript
The hunting season for deer has ended or is about to end in most states. But the deer are
still plentiful. Overpopulation of deer has led to an increase in deer and car crashes. Too
many deer also damage the understory of forests. In some states, though, the deer
overpopulation also means more deer meat is made available to low-income people.
That’s because hunters, meat processors and food banks are working together to get
venison to the poor. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Skye Rohde reports:
It’s only been in the last decade or so that states have begun allowing hunters to donate
wild game to charitable organizations. In New York, meat processors and hunters started
the Venison Donation Coalition in 1998. Starting out, they gave a thousand pounds of
deer meat to food pantries in two counties.
Kathy Balbierer handles the coalition’s public relations. She says since that first thousand
pound donation, the program has grown…
“Last year, we had 108,000 pounds of venison donated, which on the average is, you
know – a deer is 40 pounds. It was approximately 27,000 deer. This year we have 119
participating processors throughout the state serving 52 counties.”
It’s an idea that hunters and meat processors across the nation are embracing. There are
venison donation programs in almost every state. Some, such as those in New York and
Illinois, are administered by state government. Others, like Michigan’s and Minnesota’s,
are run by private organizations.
Here’s how it works. First, a hunter who wants to donate meat takes it to a participating
processor. Ed Tanguey operates a meat processing facility in Kirkville, New York. He
says it’s a pretty simple process.
“Once the hunters show up to the building, we’ll have them come into our skinning room.
We’ll have them fill out some paperwork and once it’s brought in, we’ll start to skin the
deer, remove the hide and trim off any meat that’s not edible. We’ll bring the deer into
our cutting room.”
Butchers section the deer into shoulder, torso and hindquarters.
(sound of grinder starting up)
Then Tanguey sets up the grinder and grabs the meat from the cooler.
He packs the ground meat into five-pound black-and-white tubes and slaps a label on
with his name and the hunter’s license number on it.
Tanguey has processed 250 deer so far this season, 44 of them for the Venison Donation
Coalition. The coalition pays him a reduced rate, about a dollar a pound. Once there’s
enough meat in Tanguey’s cooler, he calls the Food Bank of Central New York to pick it
up.
Tanguey says this is his way of giving back to his community.
“When I see a hunter bringing in his son or grandson and they’re giving a second deer or
a third deer to the food bank, I think it’s going to pass it on to them. And years from now
we’ll keep the coalition supplied with some more food for the food bank.”
Jim Giacando is operations manager at the Food Bank of Central New York. He says
200 of the 600 agencies he works with ask for venison.
“In our freezer, we have almost 1,000 lbs ready to distribute, and it’s already committed
to a number of agencies throughout our 11-county area. And we’ll be distributing it this
week and next week, and then hopefully we’ll receive more in and fill more orders.”
The food bank will receive venison up until January. But Giacando says the greatest
challenge is keeping up with the demand for deer meat. A lot of people want it.
“I think we actually may have to get to a point where we might have to say ‘you know,
you can’t order that much. We have to keep it for all the other programs.'”
(ambient sound in church)
One of the food pantries asking for the deer meat is the University United Methodist
Church in Syracuse, New York. Norma Goel ordered venison from Giacando’s food
bank. The church’s food pantry feeds about 150 people every week.
Goel says she can’t buy as much food for the pantry as she’d like to because of the
church’s limited budget and an increase in the number of poor people asking for food.
She says farm-raised meat is a high-priced commodity…
“We’re always looking for a way to provide meat to participants in the pantry. And it’s
become increasingly difficult to buy frozen meat that the food bank has. By and large,
we’re not purchasing frozen meat from the food bank because we can’t afford it.”
So the deer meat is a cheaper alternative. Last year, Goel ordered venison too late to
receive any. This year she got all she could for the pantry: 60 pounds. She only has to
pay the handling costs – the coalition covers processing.
Goel says she’ll encourage people to use the deer meat in place of ground beef because
it’s high in protein and low in fat. She says the 60 pounds will feed a lot of hungry people
in her community.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Skye Rohde.
Work is now being done to reduce mercury emissions. Pennsylvania pioneers an incentive program for the removal of mercury switches from cars. (Photo by Davide Guglielmo)
One of the nation’s top sources of mercury emissions is
scrap automobiles. U.S. automobiles built before 2003 used mercury in light and brake switches. When those cars are recycled, the mercury can escape into the air. Now one state in the region is working to prevent that from happening. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder reports:
Transcript
One of the nation’s top sources of mercury emissions is scrap automobiles.
U.S. automobiles built before 2003 used mercury in light and brake
switches. When those cars are recycled, the mercury can escape into the
air. Now one state in the region is working to prevent that from
happening. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder reports:
Mercury is a neurotoxin that can be found in the air, water, and soil.
Pregnant women who eat fish with high levels of mercury might see
developmental delays in their children after they’re born.
Pennsylvania is the first state in the nation to offer a bounty on mercury
switches from cars. This month, the state started offering a dollar per
switch to automobile recyclers.
Kathleen McGinty heads the state’s Department of Environmental Protection.
She says the goal is to reclaim 350-thousand switches, or nearly 600
pounds of mercury over the next two years. The material will be sent to
mercury recyclers.
“They safely take that mercury, they clean it up, they put it back into some products where it is still essential that we still use mercury.”
McGinty says the mercury can be reused in products ranging from
fluorescent lighting to dental fillings. She says mercury emissions from scrap automobiles are second only to coal-burning power plants in Pennsylvania.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Brad Linder.
A Princeton University research team lead by psychology professor Bart Hoebel (pictured) demonstrated that rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gain significantly more weight than those with access to water sweetened with table sugar. (Photo courtesy of Princeton University, Denise Applewhite)
