Tips on small changes

Fresh & Easy New Year's Resolution


Registered Dietitian Shares Tips on How Small Changes Can Lead to a Healthy Lifestyle

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. Jan. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- January is the time of year when millions of Americans vow to make positive changes in their lives - from saving money to improving the way they eat. More often than not, what starts out as well-intentioned resolutions, quickly falter. Health experts say, especially in the area of fitness and nutrition, people easily lose focus and motivation because they think they have to make drastic changes to their daily routine to accomplish their goals.

"It's unrealistic to stay committed to completely changing a person's lifestyle," says Susie Garcia, a registered dietitian with Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market. "Small changes are all it takes to produce the best long-term results. When setting New Year's resolutions for a healthier lifestyle, do so with family and friends to remain accountable and to get support."

A few easy things people can do to lead healthier lives in the New Year are:

Walk Around the Block - Whether before or after work or school or during lunch time, walking is a safe, simple and low-impact exercise. It not only manages weight, but the activity can also lower cholesterol and blood pressure. Start with 20 minutes a day and work your way up to a 30-minute brisk walk five days a week.

An Apple a Day - It is recommended that Americans eat at least five servings of fresh fruits and vegetables daily. Garcia suggests that people start with at least one serving a day, slowly building it up to five. Fresh & Easy makes it affordable for people to have access to fresh fruits and vegetables with its 98-cent produce packs. Customers can always rely on having six different varieties of fresh fruits and vegetables at the store for just 98-cents.

Reduce Empty Calories - While tempting, chips, candy, sugary juices and sodas have no nutritional value and are therefore considered foods and beverages with empty calories. A great example is a typical 12-oz. can of soda contains more than nine teaspoons of sugar. Garcia suggests reducing intake of these items to see immediate results.

Eat Out Less - While it is sometimes easier to go through a drive-through or go to a restaurant to grab lunch or dinner, make it a goal to prepare at least one meal a day at home. It is not only less expensive; it tends to be healthier because people know exactly what they're eating. Fresh & Easy helps make it easy to eat well by offering affordable, high-quality products that don't contain artificial flavors, colors, added trans fats or preservatives unless absolutely necessary.

Garcia recommends that people eat five small meals every day with a combination of fresh fruits and vegetables, lean protein, whole grains and low fat dairy products.

Breakfast - Avoid convenient breakfast foods like donuts and muffins. One large blueberry muffin, for example, can have more than 600 calories and in excess of 30 grams of fat. Instead, choose a healthy breakfast like oatmeal with sliced bananas, almond slivers and a glass of milk. Another option is a whole wheat English muffin, with salmon, slices of tomatoes and cottage cheese. These breakfast ideas will not only keep people full longer, they also contain less calories and fat than a large blueberry muffin.

Salads as an Entree - Especially at the start of the New Year, salads are popular lunch and dinner options because greens are low in calories and contain a lot of fiber. To maximize nutrients, choose dark green leafy lettuces like spinach topped with grilled chicken breast, a sprinkling of walnuts or almonds and fresh fruits like raspberries or apple slices. The burst of flavor from fruits will help reduce the intake of high-calorie salad dressings. Healthier dressing options include squeezing fresh lemon or limes on the salad or combining olive oil and balsamic vinegar to make vinaigrette. Fresh & Easy offers convenient ready-made salads for those who want the work taken out of putting together a nutritious meal.

Desserts - It's okay to eat dessert after a meal, but try healthier sweet substitutions and remember moderation is key. Instead of fruit custard, cut fresh fruit to make a fruit salad and top with light whipped cream. Choose sugar free Popsicles or Fudgsicles instead of ice cream. These are simple ways to reduce calories without cutting dessert out completely.

Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market currently has over 130 store locations in California, Nevada and Arizona. For more information or store locations, visit www.freshandeasy.com.

SOURCE Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market

Urban Food Deserts Threaten Children's Health

Marian Wright Edelman

President, Children's Defense Fund
Posted: January 4, 2010 10:18 AM
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Urban Food Deserts Threaten Children's Health


If any of us were forced to live in a desert we'd probably find trying to survive in a barren, desolate wasteland difficult. But through a series of public policies and private sector decisions, millions of mostly low-income and minority families in America have been condemned to subsist in vast urban "food deserts" that pose serious health threats to their children. Food deserts, areas with no or distant grocery stores, are generally in communities where most residents can buy food only at "convenience" stores, liquor stores, gas stations, or fast food restaurants that sell foods high in fat, sugar, and salt. Getting to stores that offer a greater variety of foods is often challenging since many families lack cars and many city and state governments have cut back on investments in public transportation. When many Americans are resolving to eat more healthfully in the new year, children and families living in "food deserts" often lack that choice.

The health and vitality of people living in many urban neighborhoods can differ from block to block depending on how near or far they are to a grocery store or supermarket that offers reasonably priced fresh fruits and vegetables that are low in calories and nutritionally dense. In many urban neighborhoods, it's easier to buy a pint of liquor, a fried chicken wing, or a gun than a fresh tomato. The failure of supermarket chains to locate stores that offer fresh fruits and vegetables in inner-city communities--a form of food redlining--has had a profound impact on the nutrition, health, and well-being of families lacking cars or access to public transportation to get to well-stocked grocery stores. As a consequence, children growing up in families trapped in food desert zip codes are at risk of becoming obese and developing early hypertension and full-blown high blood pressure that can lead to type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Food deserts originated with the urban White flight of the 1960s and 1970s. When White, middle-class residents left cities for the suburbs, grocery stores followed, according to PolicyLink, a national nonprofit focused on social and economic inequities. In urban communities from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., and from Detroit to Houston, the nearest grocery store is roughly twice as far as the nearest fast food restaurant. About 400,000 Chicago residents live in areas with an imbalance of food choices where there are nearby fast food restaurants but no or distant grocery stores.

A 2003 University of Michigan study of Detroit supermarkets found there were only five grocery stores in Detroit larger than 20,000 square feet. And while 24 percent of Washington, D.C.'s population lives in the predominantly Black areas east of the Anacostia River, only 15 percent of the city's 360 food stores are there. Nationally, the typical low-income neighborhood has 30 percent fewer supermarkets than higher-income neighborhoods. The problem is not only limited to urban areas; food deserts are also common in many rural communities. Across the country, too many families are forced to do their food shopping among convenience store shelves stocked with overpriced, highly processed fatty food with low nutritional value that often has passed its expiration date. In stores like these, staples such as milk can cost two dollars more than at a supermarket.

It's good to know that a number of groups are addressing this problem. The Philadelphia-based nonprofit Food Trust is working with school systems to provide healthy food and offering corner stores financing to stock healthy food and upgrade their refrigeration systems to better preserve fruits and vegetables. Various organizations are seeking federal and local anti-obesity funding to replicate this effort. Such efforts can make a real difference. In a 2002 study, University of North Carolina researchers found African Americans ate an average of 32 percent more fruits and vegetables for each supermarket in their census tract.

Access to nutritious food is a matter of social justice. We must follow the lead of First Lady Michelle Obama, whose community garden at the White House has focused public attention on better nutrition as part of a national movement to improve children's health and prevent obesity and diabetes. If we fail to ensure our children receive better nutrition, our nation will pay a heavy price over time in increased rates of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, resulting in the loss of resources and productivity. As legislators struggle to reform our nation's health care system and contain its skyrocketing costs, addressing the problem of access to nutritious food is one obvious step we must take.

Safety of school meals placed on front burner

Safety of school meals placed on front burner - Salinas Californian
New bill would speed up removal of recalled products


As Congress and the Obama administration seek new ways to ensure the safety of food served to the nation's schoolchildren, the most promising paths are no secret.

Scientists and food-safety experts say there are industries and major companies, both in the United States and abroad, that have made great strides in safety and consistently produce food free of the bacteria that sicken about 75 million Americans a year. Can those practices become the rule for the food the government buys for schools?

It has been a decade since the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided that the ground beef it buys for school lunches must meet higher safety standards than ground beef sold to the public. But those rules, which required that school lunch meat be rejected if it contains certain pathogens, such as salmonella, have fallen behind the standards that fast-food chains and other businesses are adopting on their own.

Moreover, the special protections the USDA sets for the ground beef it sends to schools do not extend to other products the federal government — or schools themselves — purchase for student meals. No extra testing is required for the spinach, peanuts or tortillas served in schools and, sometimes, those products present similar health risks.

Today, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has embraced a different measure for food safety — one that goes beyond pathogen tests and looks at the true toll: how many people get sick. "Until we get the number of food-borne illnesses down to zero, and the number of hospitalizations down to zero, and the number of deaths down to zero, we have work to do," he said.

The stakes are especially high for schoolchildren with still- developing immune

systems. There were more than 470 outbreaks of food-borne illnesses in schools from 1998 through 2007, sickening at least 23,000 children, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet the USDA's National School Lunch Program, which provides food to nearly every school district in the country, lacks systems to ensure that students don't get tainted products.



Vilsack and Congress vow to address the problem as they work to update the Child Nutrition Act, which governs the National School Lunch Program.

Food-safety legislation

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has introduced a bill requiring new initiatives to ensure that recalled products are removed quickly from school pantries. She and Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., also are pressing the USDA to stop using school lunch suppliers with poor safety records — and to set standards for school lunch food that mirror those used by fast-food chains and other discriminating companies.

Thus far, the food-safety focus has been on technological solutions after the harvest — anti-microbial dips, disinfecting sprays and testing.

It's partly a matter of efficiency: There are millions of ranchers and thousands of feedlots where cattle are raised and fattened, but only 50 processing plants. So in terms of the cost-effectiveness of installing safety systems, "the packing plants made the most sense," says Mike Engler, president of Cactus Feeders, a feedlot in Amarillo, Texas and a biochemist.

Produce is different. The safety drive has shifted to the field and farm — furthest along in leafy greens.

"Industry couldn't wait for the government" to solve the food safety problem after a spinach recall in 2006, says Wendy Fink-Weber, spokeswoman for Western Growers. So the growers worked with universities, food-safety experts and processors to write new standards that are overseen by the California Department of Food and Agriculture and paid for by the growers.The standards require bacterial testing of irrigation water, named as a possible source of contamination in federal reports. If test results suggest a problem, the vegetables are tested for E. coli and salmonella. If either is found, the crop cannot be used.

So far, 120 California growers and handlers have voluntarily signed on to the standards.

Earthbound Farm went even further. The company, based in San Juan Bautista, also tests all seeds and fertilizers for E. coli and salmonella, then tests both raw and finished product and holds it until the tests come back negative; testing takes 12 to 16 hours.


Will Daniels, Earthbound's vice president in charge of safety, says the new processes add about 3 cents to the cost of a package of baby greens.

California and Arizona together grow 90 percent of the leafy greens Americans eat, Fink-Weber says — which means that at least some schools already have salad bars operating under these high standards. Safety standards for produce could become even more important when Congress takes up reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act because there's mounting pressure to emphasize fresh fruits and vegetables.

Legislators, led by Rep. Sam Farr, D-Carmel, are pushing a bill to require the USDA to increase produce purchases for schools programs and encourage salad bars in schools.

Earlier this year, an audit by Congress' Government Accountability Office noted that both the USDA and the FDA lack systems for giving schools timely alerts when products such as peanut butter — focus of a nationwide recall this year — are bought for meals.

Part of the problem is that commodities purchased through the National School Lunch Program often pass through multiple processors and distributors, and there's no system for tracking foods to their final destinations. That undermines efforts to "inform states and school districts which products were produced with recalled foods and which were not," auditors said.

In some cases, such problems have led unwitting school officials to serve recalled food, the auditors found.

Gillibrand's bill would require the FDA and the USDA to develop new systems for identifying whether foods implicated in a safety investigation may have been distributed to schools. It also pushes the USDA to alert schools to recalls more effectively.

Improving the recall system is the first step the government should take to assure safety of school lunches, says Dora Rivas, head of food and nutrition services for Dallas schools and president of the School Nutrition Association, which represents school meal directors. It is time, she adds, to "bring this system into the digital age."

Former Arrow truckers launch class action suit

Former Arrow Trucking workers launch class action suit
01/04/2010


TULSA, Okla. -- Over 1,000 former employees of bankrupt Arrow Trucking have filed a class action lawsuit for the manner in which the carrier ended operations.

Some drivers were left stranded across the U.S. days before Christmas when the flatbed carrier abruptly cancelled fuel cards and closed up shop without any notice to workers.

Daimler Truck Financial and Navistar offered drivers of their financed equipment bus tickets home, but many had too many personal belongings to take home or ran into complications, local media reports.

Philadelphia firm of Klehr Harrison Harvey Bransburg LLP filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of 1,400 former employees of the company.

Arrow Trucking suddenly ceased operations on Dec. 21. It immediately laid off all 1400 employees without notice, turned off the phones, and shut down its website.

Reportedly, the final blow to the embattled company occurred when Transportation Alliance Bank of Ogden, Utah, froze the company's fuel cards and operating capital.

The suit alleges violations of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act for the company's failure to give 60 days notice before closing, and for bouncing paychecks.

The lure of carbon farming - too strong?

From Cap and Trade to Carbon Farming - NYT
By JAMES MCWILLIAMS

The EPA’s decision to regulate carbon emissions, made on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit, immediately incurred the wrath of industry. Businesses are petrified, as Iain Murray writes in The National Review online, that the agency will regulate “everything larger than a Gore-sized mansion.”

What are we to make of this fear?

There’s really no need to panic over the prospect of EPA dominance. Instead, industry should take the hint that’s it high time to push hard for climate-change legislation. Sure, the move by the EPA to exercise regulatory authority over carbon — a power granted to it by a 2007 Supreme Court ruling — was designed to give President Obama moral leverage in Denmark. But it also serves as a presidential prod to Congress to pass a climate-change law. No matter how you feel about global warming, greenhouse-gas emissions are not going to go unregulated. I suspect Obama ultimately nudged the EPA because he wants the U.S. Congress to do the regulating. Industry should support him on this.

But here’s the less obvious point: the EPA’s wake-up call — assuming it’s listened to — will have as much impact on agriculture as it does industry. Climate-change legislation — insofar as it hinges on cap-and-trade rather than a carbon tax — could be quite advantageous to agriculture.

Cap-and-trade is a policy that aims to limit greenhouse-gas emissions by requiring certain industries to buy carbon offsets if emissions exceed the legal cap. According to the House version of the bill (and almost certainly the Senate’s), agriculture would not be capped.

This matters primarily because farmers would be in a position to sell carbon offsets. Indeed, through a wide variety of carbon sequestering techniques that are achievable in most agricultural operations — things like preserving pastureland, improving soil quality, planting trees, transitioning to no-till farming, cultivating perennials, reducing fertilizer application, etc. — agriculture could significantly counteract the increasing costs of fuel and fertilizer that cap and trade would cause while improving a much-maligned agricultural environment. It could profit while going eco-correct.

Financial projections on this score are optimistic. Fred Yoder, former president of the National Corn Growers Association, claims that, with “a properly constructed system,” farm revenues could grow by as much as $13 billion a year. A recent study undertaken by the University of Tennessee’s Bio-Based Energy Analysis Group (and released in November by the 25x’25 Carbon Work Group) found that, even with the increased energy costs, farmers would see positive net returns on all major crops.

Commenting on these findings, Bart Ruth, chairman of 25x’25, explained, “The study has found that income from offsets and from market revenues is higher than any potential increase in input cost, including energy and fertilizer, if cap-and-trade is done right.”

If it’s done right. Agricultural interests would be well served to focus on this caveat as the Senate churns away at a bill. I don’t know a whole lot about how legislative sausage gets made, but I do know that a bill done right for agriculture will be a bill that protects cap-and-trade from EPA regulation, confirms the right of industry to buy offsets, and ensures that big agriculture will, as long as it is selling offsets, remain exempt from being capped.

For complete thread in discussion group go here....

Good banks, bad banks - Washington Post

Good banks, bad banks - Washington Post


This year’s annual list of the top national news stories did not include the collapse of one or more big U.S. banks. Contrary to many a dire forecast in the first quarter of 2009, Bank of America, Citigroup and the rest pulled through. And they did so even though the government did not adopt any of the experts’ most far-reaching recommendations — such as nationalization and division into “good” and “bad” banks.

By year’s end, in fact, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s plan for a “public-private partnership” to dispose of the banks’ toxic assets, which was widely criticized as a half-measure, has proved mostly unnecessary because private investors stepped up without it. As Geithner recently testified to Congress, the 19 largest U.S. banks have raised more than $110 billion in common equity and other regulatory capital since he announced the results of a government “stress test” — ridiculed as too tepid — in May. That amount almost equals the $116 billion in repayments of bailout funds the Treasury has received from various banks. Current interbank lending rates are at or near levels consistent with financial normality.
So, all is well? Not quite.


Read the complete story and follow this thread at this link...