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It is well known that obesity rates have been increasing around the Western world.

The American obesity prevalence was less than 20% in 1994. By 2010, the obesity prevalence was greater than 20% in all states and 12 states had an obesity prevalence of 30%. For American children aged 2 – 19, approximately 17% are obese in 2011-2012. In the UK, the rifeness of obesity was similar to the US numbers. Between 1993 and 2012, the commonness of obesity increased from 13.2% to 24.4% for men and for women from 16.4% to 25.1%. The obesity prevalence is around 18% for children aged 11-15 and 11% for children aged 2-10.

Policy makers, researchers, and the general public are concerned about this trend because obesity is linked to an increase likelihood of health conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, among others. The increase in the obesity prevalence among children is of concern because of the possibility that obesity during childhood will increase the likelihood of being obese as an adult thereby leading to even higher rates of these health conditions in the future.

Researchers have investigated many possible causes for this trend including lower rates of participation in physical activity and easier access to fast food. Anderson, Butcher, and Levine (2003) identified maternal employment as a possible culprit when they noticed that in the US the timing of these two trends was similar. While the prevalence of obesity was increasing for children so was the employment rate of mothers. Other researchers have found similar results for other countries – more hours of maternal employment is related to a higher likelihood of children being obese.

What could be the relationship between a mother’s hours of work and childhood obesity? When mothers work they have less time to devote to activities around the home, which may mean less concern about nutrition, more meals eaten outside of the home or less time devoted to physical activities. On the other hand, more maternal employment could mean more income and an ability to purchase more nutritious food or encourage healthy activities for children.

We looked at this relationship for Canadian children 12-17 years old – an older group of children than studied in earlier papers. For youths aged 12 to 17 in Canada, the obesity prevalence was 7.8% in 2008. We analysed not only at the relationship between maternal employment and child obesity, but also the possible reasons that maternal employment may affect child obesity.

We find that the effect of hours of work differs from the effect of weeks of work. More hours of maternal work are related to activities we expect to be related to higher rates of obesity – more television viewing, less likely to eat breakfast daily, and a higher allowance. On the other hand, more weeks of maternal employment are related to behaviour expected to lower obesity – less television viewing and more physical activity. This difference between hours and weeks of work raises some interesting questions. How do families adapt to different aspects of the labour market? When mothers work for more weeks does this indicate a more regular attachment to the labour force? Do these families have schedules and routines that allow them to manage their child’s weight?

Unlike other studies that focus on younger children, we do not find a relationship between maternal employment and likelihood of obesity for adolescents. Does the impact of maternal employment at younger ages not last into adolescence? Is adolescence a stage during which obesity status is difficult to predict?

The debate over appropriate policy remedies should not focus on whether mothers should work, but rather should focus on what children are doing when mothers are working. What can be done to reduce the obesity prevalence in adolescents? Some ideas include working with the education system and local communities to create an environment for adolescents that fosters healthy weight status, supporting families with quality childcare, provision of viable and high-quality alternative activities, or flexible work hours. Programs or policies that help families establish a healthy routine are important. It may not be a case of simply providing activities for adolescents, but that these activities are easy for families to attend on a regular basis.

The post Childhood obesity and maternal employment appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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tatiana de la tierra


It’s a new decade and times are grim as we head into the scripted doomsdays, with 2012 just around the corner. Will the world (as we know it) end with the Mayan calendar? Will there be a massive shift toward higher consciousness that will lead the planet to true healing? Or will humanoids continue to limp on amidst wars, poverty, corporate deceit, and rampant consumerism? Religious zealots are talking cataclysm and spreading the word with glossy pamphlets urging sinners to give it up for the Lord. Others are chanting for peace, meditating on divine love, and gearing up with vibrational healing tools.

I barely know what’s in store twenty-four hours ahead of time and make no claims about the future. But let me suppose that things will stay on the same course at least a bit longer. Today’s hot issues—unemployment, global warming, gay and lesbian marriage, health care, war, education, hunger, and immigration, to name a few—are also tomorrow’s. And they’re not going to magically go away as long as corporate interests continue to reign or as long as misogynist (mostly white) men are making decisions to affect us all.

What to do? If you’re tired of waiting for social justice or if you’ve lost all hope for change, you can take a few things into your hands. Make your own change, or speed up the process of deterioration so that the prophetic transformations can finally take hold. There’s a magical spaceship out there—there has to be.

Meanwhile, as a public service, I offer up some ideas of things you can do in times of doom.

1. Become a communist. Republicans claim that having health care for everyone is a sure sign of socialism. They’re right! Want health care? Go socialist!

2. Join the military. Out of a job? Can’t get into college? Can’t afford a gym membership? If you’re young and in your prime, the military is a great option for getting in shape, learning discipline, and being part of the brotherhood. Sure, you may lose a limb or end up with post-traumatic stress syndrome, but if you make it through, you might have a shot at an education.

3. Buy an illegal immigrant. They’re great for taking care of your house and kids. They can cook, clean, build things, do errands. And they’re cheap since there’s no comprehensive immigration bill being considered and they have no guaranteed rights. It’s the deal of the century!

4. Have more babies. Disposable diapers do a great job of choking up landfills, are wonderfully toxic, deplete the earths’ resources, and take a few hundred years to decompose. Want to push pollution and global warming along? Use disposable diapers!

5. Heal yourself and others. Medical doctors are great at diagnosing and prescribing pharmaceuticals, but they’re out to lunch when it comes to herbs, supplements, nutrition, and energy medicine. There are a zillion alternative healing modalities you can train in, such as homeopathy, Reiki, Quantum Touch, acupuncture, Tong Ren, crystal healing, sound healing, shamanism, Emotional Freedom Technique, midwifery, and naturopathy. They’re fabulous, low tech, and cost-effective modalities that people are tuning into more and more.

6. Learn Chinese. Want to be forward-thinking and speaking? Already a quarter of the earth’s population, the Chinese have a commercial and economic edge and will be a dominant force in the future. Learn the Mandarin mother tongue to get in step with the times, ahead of time.

7. Become a reverend. Gays and lesbians are busting to do the “I do’s” and more and more state legislations are permitting same sex unions. Who’s going to marry all these queers? Who’s going to baptize all their babies? If you become a reverend, you can be the one to do the honors.

8. Get a medical marijuana license. Who knows when we’ll have a health care plan that favors the people instead of insurance companies, medic

Michael Sedano

Back in October 2005, I reported on a valuable parenting resource, How to Raise Emotionally Healthy Children and its Spanish-language translation, Como Criar Niños Emocialmente Sanos. In 1999, the company where I was working, gave a copy to every employee in the company’s 15 US and 4 Canadian cities, and to hundreds of trade show attenders. The NY Times’ November 19, 1999 business section carried a story about corporate support for family health, quoting me about my employer’s support for “family values.” As Human Resources Director, I made it a point to give a copy to new employees as I conducted their new hire orientation.

Recently, I had lunch with the author, Gerald Newmark, and his wife Deborah. They were excited about a documentary film in process, and the growing use of the book—now in its second edition--in social service, health, and educational agencies and schools. I asked Jerry what kind of feedback he’s getting from people once they’ve read the book. And ay ‘sta la detalla, as Mario Moreno might quip. Newmark’s agency, The Children’s Project, was selling the book at a deep discount to the adopting agencies, but few people were taking the book home and actually reading it.

What a pity. The book is packed with valuable ideas and solutions to issues and problems revolving around child-rearing, family communication, and parental time-management. I asked the Newmarks if they’d considered offering the book in recorded form. It seems people in our cultures, neither the English-speaking nor Spanish-speaking U.S. cultures, can, do, or enjoy reading. Yet, given that many cars nowadays have CD players, kitchens and bedrooms have clock radio-CD players, CD technology might be a workable alternative to the labor and work of reading printed words.

The Newmarks were intrigued by the notion but lacked any concept of how to create a book on CD. That’s where I stepped in. I'm a long-time multimedia producer, dating back to the days of multiple carousel projectors synchronized by pulse-tones on audiotape soundtracks. Now technology makes quick work of what used to require six months or more. Hence, for the past three weeks, I have been working with three talented voice actors, Carolyn Zeller, Christopher Youngblood, and Reymundo Pacheco, to create the aural version of Newmark’s book, in English and Español. We used an Azden wireless microphone received into a Macintosh PowerBook G4, recorded and edited using Bias, Inc.’s Peak Pro 5.2 software. This is fantastic technology. Back in the mid 70s, large studio equipment was the sine qua non of this type project. Audio editing required blank tape, a tape recorder, white china markers, razor blades, splicing tape, and infinite patience, not to mention long, uniterrupted hours of scrubbing marking cutting taping trimming. Today, I follow along in the book. When the actor makes a flub, I mark the text, the actor retakes from the previous comma or period. Later, I open the file in the Peak Pro software, follow the wavy lines until the flub. I insert electronic place markers at the beginning of the flub and the beginning of the retake. Two keystrokes later, instant edit! Still a time-burner, but nowhere near the exhaustion of making hundreds of physical splices.

And the payoff! I visualize gente driving here and there listening to the good sense advice and sound analysis written by Dr. Newmark, read beautifully by the talented speakers, learning to, as Newmark writes in his Preface, use their abilities to help raise children who feel respected, important, accepted, included and secure, "who knows, we might just change the world."

U.S. Postage Stamp Honors Journalist Ruben Salazar Tuesday, April 22, the US Postal Service issues a 41 cent postage stamp honoring Salazar. Against a brown field and the outline of a water jug the designer has assembled like a ransom note torn from a newspaper pages the words, "during Chicano protest rally in East Los Angeles".

It was a police riot. And he was killed miles from the park rally.

It was August 29, 1970. The Chicano Moratorium had assembled massive numbers to march along Whittier Boulevard to a neighborhood park, where they would be entertained by poets, musicians, and speakers. But as the march reached its destination and gente had begun the rally, the cops, on a pretext (can you say agent provocateur?), went crazy, attacking people mindlessly, chasing mothers with babies in arms into private homes. By day's end, law enfarcement would notch three dead Chicanos: Lyn Ward, a 14-year old boy; Angel Diaz; Ruben Salazar.

Several Chicano novels cite the police riot in East Los Angeles. The earliest is Guy Garcia’s Skin Deep, where the riot marked a turning point in the character's life. Lucha Corpi’s Death of a Brown Angel, opens with her character fleeing the crazed cops. She turns into an alley where she discovers a murdered infant, whose dreadfully abused corpse will lead the woman to solve the mystery. More recently, Stella Pope Duarte's Vietnam war/movimiento novel, Let Their Spirits Dance, recalls the event as a focal point illuminating the contradictions of Chicano activism on one hand, military dedication on another. And I wish I remember the poet who wrote a heart-rending poem about a baby's shoe in the gutter littered with the detritus left in the wake of the panicked crowd fleeing the gas and batons of Laguna Park.

The deaths of those three Chicanos on August 29 was the third time law enforcement killed war protestors in 1970. Three anglo kids were shot by national guardsmen on the Kent State University campus. Ten days later, two black kids were shot by police at Jackson State University. Then came August 29. At Kent State, an iconic image of an anguished girl kneeling over the body of a fallen protestor, hit the cover of Newsweek magazine. The black kids were shot at night in or near their dorm rooms, with no “live” media, so their deaths largely went unmemorialized. The East LA event memorialized the Silver Dollar bar. The Coroner’s Inquest was broadcast live, for all the good that did. (See this satirical piece depicting Nixon’s Tape 231 discussing the Salazar, Diaz, and Ward killings). No police officer or Sheriff’s Deputy was ever brought to account in the shootings of Lyn Ward, a 14-year old Chicano, Angel Diaz, nor La Opinion and LA Times journalist Ruben Salazar. Salazar's murder included a mysterious phone call alerting Sheriff's to a "man with a gun" inside the Silver Dollar. The Deputy fired blind, through a curtain, decapitating Salazar, who was enjoying una chelada miles from the heat of the riot at Laguna Park.

None of this, of course, is in that stamp. Only the ongoing coverup, "during a Chicano protest rally".

There's something more, yet less, in the stamp story. It's "good" only for the next twenty days. The USPS issued the stamp at the current first class standard, 41 cents. On May 12, you’ll have to add a one cent mark-up if you want to honor Salazar with his stamp, since the first class rate goes up to 42 cents.

For a 300 dpi image of the Salazar stamp, click the image above. From the USPS site: Note: When reproducing the Salazar image, please include the following: Ruben Salazar, from the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive (Collection 1429), Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA


Author Alicia Gaspar de Alba fighting women’s cancers

La Bloga is happy to pass along word that the author of Sor Juana’s Second Dream, Desert Blood, and Calligraphy of the Witch, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, has set a goal of raising $2000 in the 5 kilometer event Revlon RunWalk for Women. The event raises money to fight women’s cancers. If you’d like to contribute a few dollars for an important cause, click here. If the link is broken, just go to Revlon’s find participant site and search for firstname Alicia lastname Gaspar de Alba. The resulting page will guide your commitment.

Here’s another way to lend a hand to combating breast cancer and other worthwhile projects. Make it a daily habit to click at the free mammograms website. In addition, you can click to support children’s health, combat hunger, give free books for kids, save rainforest land, and help animals in shelters.

I do not know how much help the above provide, but I suspect it’s as productive, if not more, than giving six grains of rice for every word you get correct, in that vocabulary game that fascinates a number of people. Maybe readers of Denise Chavez’ Loving Pedro Infante will click, remembering Tere’s hope that her annual check to help a Latin American child isn't a foolish act of kindness.

There we have it, the penultimate April Tuesday. La Bloga welcomes your comments on anything you read here. If you have something of your own to present as a guest columnist, La Bloga welcomes guests. Just click here, or leave a comment indicating your interest in being our guest.

mvs

If you are an animal person, you will like the Pet Monolouges site. The folks there were gracious enough to allow me to put a mention about my online gallery exhibit on their blog. Check it out here.