New research shows that ornamental plants can drastically reduce levels of stress and ill health and boost performance levels at work because they soak up harmful indoor air pollution.
Researchers have now identified five "super ornamental plants" which every workplace should have to clean up indoor air.
They include English ivy, waxy leaved plants and ferns.
According to a World Health Organisation report in 2002, harmful indoor pollutants represent a serious health problem that is responsible for more than 1.6 million deaths each year.
Whether it's the surplus chicken from a factory farm snuck into your kids meal in the form of chicken nuggets or the cheese made from hormone-laden milk made acceptable on WIC food lists, it's really no secret: the role of the USDA's Food Distribution Programs (FDPs) since the Great Depression has been to get rid of surplus agricultural commodities by passing them on to those who need nutritional foods the most.
Tomorrow is World Food Day and since I can't invite you all over
for dinner, I thought I'd serve up a smorgasbord of facts and figures about the
way the US
and the world eat or don't eat, as the case may be.
One of the earliest health and anatomy lessons for many of us came from the traditional spiritual "Dem Bones," when as children we sang how "the toe bone's connected to the foot bone," the foot bone to the ankle, the shin, on up to the neck and head.
The lesson reflects the importance of connectivity. Without the knee bone, leg bone or even the tiniest of bones, the body's ability to work and move about as a whole suffers. We can apply this lesson today as we consider how we get places and how we create healthy, sustainable communities.
Racial health disparities cost the United States $229 billion between
2003 and 2006 - money that could help cover an overhaul of the nation's
health care system, according to a new report by Johns Hopkins and
University of Maryland researchers.
'We walked out into a wasteland, grey and desolate. The buildings had
deteriorated, windows had been smashed.
There's unusual lunchtime chatter at ACE Charter School in East San Jose: Students are actually raving about lunch. School lunch. And so are some teachers.
Just ask Arallana Sanchez, 11, in between her munches on a chicken barbecue sandwich and sips of organic, hormone-free milk. "At my old school everyone always drank chocolate milk because the regular milk tasted like it had expired."
PARIS - America has some of the industrial world's worst rates of infant mortality, teenage pregnancy and child poverty, even though it spends more per child than better-performing countries such as Switzerland, Japan and the Netherlands, a new survey indicates.
The OECD, a Paris-based watchdog of industrialized nations, urged the United States to shift more of its public spending to its youngest children, under the age of six, to improve their health and educational performance.
I applaud President Obama for his efforts. I too believe that everyone deserves proper healthcare and that access to healthcare must be a right for all. But I think Washington is barking up the wrong tree. They're busy arguing about what amounts to health
insurance reform, while what this country needs is true health
care reform.
Interestingly, what is happening in Washington mirrors much of what we do in Western Medicine. We suppress symptoms instead of dealing with the root causes of the problem.
President Obama’s plans to reform the healthcare system in U.S. have taken over the headlines in the past several weeks. Doctors, economists, insurance executives, public health experts—all of them are being afforded the chance add their two cents on how to fix our broken healthcare system. The voices that are strikingly absent, though, are those of the agricultural community. What, you may ask, does agriculture have to do with overhauling the healthcare system?
