JWhiting.com

Leave it to the superior state-side political blogs to take up this issue with such focused clarity…

I learned quite a few things by reading this post and hope you do to. It’s all about debunking some common American (and frankly, Canadian) myths about the Canadian health care system.

1. Canada’s health care system is “socialized medicine.”
False. In socialized medical systems, the doctors work directly for the state. In Canada (and many other countries with universal care), doctors run their own private practices, just like they do in the US. The only difference is that every doctor deals with one insurer, instead of 150. And that insurer is the provincial government, which is accountable to the legislature and the voters if the quality of coverage is allowed to slide.

The proper term for this is “single-payer insurance.” In talking to Americans about it, the better phrase is “Medicare for all.”

There’s also a part II to this post here.

Heath care is shaping up to be a major knock-down drag-’em-out issue in the upcoming U.S. federal elections. Exciting times ahead.

I don’t eat mammals for the following three reasons: 1) Cruelty to the Earth, 2) Cruelty to humans (read Fast Food Nation to find out what that’s about), and 3) Cruelty to intelligent, emotional animals.

There’s an article in the Globe and Mail today that says that Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nation’s Nobel Prize-winning scientific panel on climate change, has asked the world to “please eat less meat.”

Like the article says, this is unlikely to receive much traction in the media at-large as the commercial meat-packing industry is big-business, mainstream Western society has a lot of built-in meat-eating tradition and politicians hate to tell people that they have to make lifestyle changes if they actually want to stop the world from turning into an oven that drowns and starves all the polar bears.

Speaking at a press conference in Paris [Pachauri] said meat was a very carbon-intensive commodity, a fact established by UN research showing that livestock production creates more greenhouse gases than all forms of transport combined.

globeandmail.com: Care about the environment? Eat less meat

This is great news.

At the risk of having this blog veer dangerously off course, I wanted to give a shout out the white geek equivalent of a shout out (a w00t?) to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYC’s “activist health commissioner”, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden.

NYC is going to ban most trans fats from restaurants, including little restaurants like, oh I don’t know, McDonald’s.

This issue is dear to my heart because the way we’ve been operating up ’til now is completely fucking insane.

We know that trans fats cause heart attacks. That is non-disputed scientific fact. So why are foods containing trans fat still available in supermarkets? Is it alright to kill people if you do it real slow? Can you imagine what would happen if food companies were knowingly using an ingredient that was proven to cause cancer?

Trans fats cause thousands of unnecessary deaths every year. The stuff should be marked with a skull and crossbones symbol.

And what chaps my ass so sharply about this whole issue is that that food companies know all about the poisonous effects of trans fats. They’ve known for a long time.

For years the food companies have been coasting along, content with the knowledge that most people didn’t know that the stuff they were eating was killing them (people find it hard to be food science experts when they’re trying to raise kids and pay the mortgage and distracting stuff like that).

It’s only when governmental heath agencies here and in the U.S. passed legislation forcing disease food factories to start labeling the presence and amount of trans fats in their products that any of them started doing anything about it. And that’s not surprising really, when you consider that these big companies have a history of knowingly, willfully putting profit ahead of human health. (Kraft is owned by a tobacco company for fuck’s sake.)

Anyhow, bravo NYC. You are going to provide a powerful example for the rest of the world.

From the NYT piece, here’s the deal with trans fats:

Trans fats are the chemically modified food ingredients that raise levels of a particularly unhealthy form of cholesterol and have been squarely linked to heart disease. Long used as a substitute for saturated fats in baked goods, fried foods, salad dressings, margarine and other foods, trans fats also have a longer shelf life than other alternatives.