Ethiopia goes organic to feed herself - The Institute of Science In ...

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46 process in which new humans are moulded for better or worse. Canada should be vigorous in providing parents with supportive information, programmes, resources and assistance. Lifelong good nutrition is the foundation of a healthy and happy old age. But even when many years have been lived in poor nutrition, appropriate changes in diet can still ameliorate much of the damage done and greatly diminish needs for medical treatment. The nutritional quality and adequacy of food served in homes for the aged should be a matter for public concern and government attention. Optimum nutrition is not uniquely defined, diversity and individuality must be respected Canada has citizens with ancestry in all regions of the world: central African and south Asian, Mediterranean, North European, and from recent hunter-gatherer to 10 000-year experience of agriculture. Thus there is a broad range of food tolerances and intolerances that should be taken into account rather than prescribing a onesize-fits-all solution. The case of Canada's first nations is especially notable for suffering from the foods of industrial civilisation in high rates of type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, etc. Generally, everyone is an individual with characteristics that may deviate substantially from the average and merit special attention. One of the jobs of the enlightened physician will be to discover those individual vulnerabilities and needs and help the patient make due adjustments. Public institutions must set an example Publicly funded hospitals and institutions of education, and cafeterias and restaurants in government buildings, should lead by behaving as models of excellence in the foods offered on their premises. Currently, a minority of schools, colleges and universities offer their students healthy food and drink. Many, however, have admitted fast food outlets to their halls, with monetary benefit to the institution but a great disbenefit for the health and food habits of students and staff. Utterly scandalous are the deals with cola companies. Huge reforms needed in agriculture and animal husbandry A return to wholly organic operation is needed to put an end to the incidental poisoning of land, water, air, people and most other life forms. Today's high-input "modern" agriculture is simply mining the land, sapping future productivity for the sake of temporary monetary gain. It's not sustainable. Further, the concentration of animal production on factory farms should be stopped and production redispersed over the land. Animals should be raised humanely and in such a way that they are naturally healthy. Grazing animals should be raised largely by grazing; it is part of what gives their meat and milk high quality. Much greater attention should be paid to raising the nutritional quality of farm, ranch and market garden products. Government must ensure quality in food supply Government should not hesitate to use its powers of regulation, inspection and stimulation to ensure high quality in the food supply. Programs to recognise and promote quality, such as is happening with Canadian wines and Québec cheeses, should be expanded to other products. Quality production should be encouraged. The nutritional implications of any food processing should be evaluated by competent agencies and adjustments required to ensure acceptable nutritional outcomes. National and provincial laboratories need to be reinvigorated They should be given a new mandate and funding to effectively serve the public interest with appropriate research in nutrition, testing of foods and drugs, etc. Their primary concern should be protecting and informing the public, rather than assisting industry and promoting business. The government should also fund a number of university research Chairs and/or Institutes specifically to work on questions of food and nutrition that are of significant national or local importance. Conclusion In order to deliver health, we must deliver good food through implementing sweeping changes in medical education and goals, food and agriculture and government policies. We may still need as many physicians, if they indeed become guardians of our health rather than managers of disease. Economies will result primarily from vastly reduced demands for diagnostics, hospital care and other patient services, and medical therapies (medications, radiotherapy, etc.). Sales of pharmaceuticals may plummet, but the sacrifice of this economic activity will be happily endured as part of the price of better health. The same may be said of major sectors of the processed food industry. The many people who regard degenerative disease as an inevitable feature of living are wrong. We've seen these diseases proliferating and appearing earlier and earlier in life, so young children are now succumbing to obesity, Type II diabetes and even cardiovascular disease. However, if the needed reforms are made, onset of such diseases can be retarded and relegated to extreme old age, and indeed most of these diseases need not be commonly experienced at all. The choice is ours. The author is Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. This paper is based on his submission to the Romanow Commission and a forthcoming book. SiS continued from page 43 ments at pH neutral or slightly alkaline. The altered pH balance increases bioavailability of certain elements and decreases that of others including selenium. Heavy metals in rainfall also contain mercury, which can combine with selenium to produce the insoluble mercury selenide. Soil acidification therefore lowers the abundance of selenium in the global food chain, which may have contributed to the rapid increase of cancers and HIV/AIDS. Chlorofluorocarbons are unique to the latter half of the 20th Century and have contributed to the thinning of the ozone layer, which causes an excess of ultraviolet B radiation. Overexposure to ultraviolet light decreases helper T-lymphocytes and increases suppressor T-lymphocytes making the individual more susceptible to diseases. Chemical pollutants also play a role in altering the immune function and lowering host resistance to pathogens. The WHO estimates that there are 500 000 pesticide related illnesses and 20 000 deaths per year. Scientific studies on exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) show that glutathione peroxidase activity is depressed and induces apoptosis of pre B-lymphocytes in the plasma of animals. Whey protein, a derivative of milk production routinely discarded by the diary industry, contains all the essential and non-essential amino acids necessary to improve immunity by increasing glutathione levels in the blood. Oral supplementation of whey proteins can also help to combat wasting associated with AIDS. A wide variety of nutrients, vitamins, amino acids, herbs and minerals such as copper, zinc and selenium are clearly beneficial in slowing death rates in the HIV infected individual. And vitamins A, C and E can help to reduce the oxidative stress and viral load that characterises HIV/AIDS sufferers. This is especially important in areas where combination therapies are unavailable. Worryingly in Europe, moves are afoot to prohibit the sale of fourteen forms of selenium including organic forms, selenium yeast and selenomethionine if the EU Directive on Food Supplements comes into force in August 2005. A geographical perspective into the possible causes for the late 20th century phenomenon of AIDS is welcome adjuvant in the absence of a conventional vaccine or safe affordable treatments for all. SiS SCIENCE IN SOCIETY 23, AUTUMN 2004
New Age of Water 47 Water has a collective structure that's extremely flexible and dynamic, which may explain some of its 'anomalies'. Is Water Special? Dr. Mae-Wan Ho reports Water is simple, isn't it? There is nothing simpler than water as a molecule. Its chemical formula, H 2 O, is almost the first thing in chemistry that one learns in school. However, its structure in the bulk is multifarious and changeable. There are 13 known crystalline structures of ice that appear under different temperatures and pressures. As a liquid, water forms dynamic 'flickering clusters' or networks of joined up molecules, with intermolecular bonds that flicker on and off at random. The basis for all this complexity lies in the ability of a water molecule to join up with its neighbours through a special kind of chemical bond, the hydrogen-bond. The hydrogen-bond To understand how the hydrogen-bond comes about, picture the water molecule consisting of an oxygen atom bonded to two hydrogen atoms. The water molecule has a shape approximating a tetrahedron, a three-dimensional triangle with four corners. The oxygen atom sits in the heart of the tetrahedron, the hydrogen atoms point towards two of the four corners and two 'electron clouds' belonging to the oxygen molecule point towards the remaining corners of the tetrahedron. The 'electron clouds' are negatively charged, and result from the atomic structures of oxygen and hydrogen and how they combine in the water molecule. Oxygen has eight (negatively charged) electrons disposed around its positively charged nucleus, rather like the layers of the onion, two in an inner shell and six in the outer shell. The inner shell can only accommodate two electrons, so its capacity is filled. The outer shell, however, can hold as many as eight electrons. The hydrogen atom happens to have only one electron, so oxygen, by combining with two hydrogen atoms, completes its outer shell, while the hydrogen atoms each completes its first electron shell with two electrons, which it shares with the oxygen atom. That is how the usual 'covalent bond' of chemistry arises. The oxygen nucleus has more positive charge than the hydrogen, so the shared electrons are slightly more attracted to the oxygen nucleus than to the hydrogen nucleus, which makes the water molecule polar, with two 'electron clouds' of negative charge at the opposite poles to the two hydrogen atoms, which are each left with a slight positive charge. (Though quantum mechanical calculations have shown that the two electron clouds are not really separate from each other.) The positively charged hydrogen of one water molecule can thus attract the negatively charged oxygen of a neighbouring water molecule to form a hydrogen-bond (H-bond) between them. Each molecule of water can potentially form four H-bonds. Two in which it 'donates' its hydrogen atoms to the oxygen atoms of two other water molecules, and two in which its oxygen atom 'accepts' one hydrogen atom from each of two other water molecules. In other words, each molecule is capable of acting as hydrogen 'donors' and 'acceptors' for two other water molecules, so it has four bonded neighbours, or a '4-coordination'. Ice structures Water molecules in ordinary hexagonal ice crystals are close to the ideal tetrahedral structure described above. The hydrogen-bonded O-O distances are almost identical, varying between 2.759 Å and 2.761 Å (an angstrom is 10 -10 m), while the O-O-O angles also vary only slightly between 109.36 o and 109.58 o , which is close to the H-O-H angle of 104.52 o of the individual water molecule. However, there are many more forms of ice crystals (at least 12 others known) under different temperatures and pressures, where the bond lengths and angles vary much more widely. For ice II, which forms under moderate pressure of about 5 kbar (1 kbar is equivalent to a pressure of ~ 1 000 atmospheres), the basic four-coordinated motif is maintained. But the bond length varies between 2.74 Å and 2.83 Å, while the bond angle varies between 80 o and 129 o . In liquid water, there is much less constraint compared to a solid crystal lattice, and so the variations in bond length and bond angles take on a much wider continuous range. Instead of the regular hexagonal (6- member) ring structure of ordinary ice, a snapshot of the hydrogen-bonded network shows five, six and seven-member rings, and even smaller or larger rings. Instead of the 4-coordination motif, 2-, 3- and even 5- coordinations are possible, with the H of some water molecules in a 'bifurcated' schizophrenic state, seemingly bonded to two different neighbours. Why is water special? Why is water so special that life cannot exist without it? According to John L Finney of University College, London, the basic tetrahedral structure of the water molecule is central to the structural versatility of water in the condensed state (solid and liquid). It enables water to form extended, flexible networks of H-bonded www.i-sis.org.uk
Page 1 and 2: Science in Society ISSUE 23 Autumn
Page 3 and 4: From the Editor Corporations coveti
Page 5 and 6: 5 dependency ratio and although off
Page 7 and 8: 7 Figure 1. Maize yields in 5 sites
Page 9 and 10: Rice Wars 9 Fantastic Rice Yields F
Page 12 and 13: 12 New Rice for Africa Dr. Mae-Wan
Page 14 and 15: 14 Does SRI Work? The first reality
Page 16 and 17: 16 hybrid rice Liangyoupei 9, which
Page 18 and 19: ier around the field. There is a pa
Page 20 and 21: 20 Chinese researchers have develop
Page 22 and 23: 22 Two Rice Better than One Lim Li
Page 24 and 25: "Silicon Valley of agricultural bio
Page 26 and 27: 26 Approval of Bt11 Maize Endangers
Page 28 and 29: 28 Prof. Joe Cummins discovers that
Page 30 and 31: 30 Collusion and Corruption in GM P
Page 32 and 33: 32 Questions over Schmeiser's Rulin
Page 34 and 35: 34 DNA in GM Food & Feed The govern
Page 36 and 37: 36 denum of cattle. The studies wer
Page 38 and 39: Prof. Joe Cummins explains why gene
Page 40 and 41: 40 Technology Watch Bio-remediation
Page 42 and 43: Rethinking health Selenium Conquers
Page 44 and 45: 44 Delivering Good Health Through G
Page 48 and 49: 48 molecules in liquid, allowing ra
Page 50 and 51: 50 Water Forms Massive Exclusion Zo

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