Women's Health and the Economy

You've probably heard a little (or maybe a lot!) about the Financial Crisis that has been happening in the United States over the past few months. The headlines in newspapers for the past two weeks have all been about American car companies trying to get some help from the government ($15 billion in help, that is). Just Thursday was a report that 533,000 jobs were lost in November (that's the biggest number for one month since 1974).

But in all these headlines and numbers, you only hear about companies and executives and politicians who are trying to make decisions. But what about the people? And how is the Financial Crisis impacting women?

In an answer to some of these questions, a new survey was just released from the National Women's Health Resource Center. It has some shocking news to report:

• 45% of women have skipped health care in the past year because the cost was too high.

Just stop to consider the fact that if you have two American women in a room together today, it is likely that one of the two of them decided not to receive some form of health care in the last year (whether it was a prescription or a doctor's visit or whatever) solely because of the price.

But even in the face of rising costs, mothers still have their priorities set:

• While 28% of women report putting off a visit to the doctor when they were sick because the cost was too high, only 4% report putting off a visit for their child for this reason.

[Note: After combing the study's raw data for clarity, I believe that the percentage who put off a child's visit to the doctor is 4% of women overall, not just 4% of mothers.]

Things aren't looking too bright in the immediate future though:

• Among women who have not skipped medical care for themselves or their families in the past year, 55% say that they would be somewhat or very likely to do so if the cost they had to pay out-of-pocket increased significantly.
• And at the same time: 76% of women expect their and their families' health care costs to increase in the next few years.

I paired these two items to highlight the fact that skipping health care could be a reality for 75% of women in America within just a few years. Health care's price has already risen above affordability for 45% of American women and another 30% expect it to happen to them too. This is a financial crisis if I've ever seen one. But the highest, most devastating cost of all isn't monetary: Financial stress is trickling down from adults to children.

From a September, (fantastic!) front-page article in the Wall Street Journal:

At a little under three years of age, Bailey Haag can't understand the turmoil on Wall Street. But last week, the little girl's brow furrowed and her face grew sad as she overheard her mother on the phone, reacting to a ripple effect of the nation's economic problems -- her father's layoff.

Although her mother, Claire Crawford Haag, had hoped to shield Bailey from stress, the child knew from her mother's voice that "it was not a good conversation," Ms. Haag says. Noticing her daughter's face crumple, Ms. Haag began fashioning in her head an explanation a small child could understand.

Amid fallout from the nation's worsening financial picture, many parents are trying to protect their children from worries about layoffs and financial hardship. But children are actually silent carriers of family financial stress, research shows. They're not only keenly aware of it, but it makes them more likely to behave badly or develop emotional problems. To help kids cope, psychologists and researchers say, parents need to communicate in ways they can understand, keep family relationships on track, and give children a role in helping solve family problems.

Children's mental health (and apparently, even their performance at school) is directly impacted by the level of stress in their household. Returning to the Women's Health survey from earlier, I'd like to point out that 43% of women are worrying more about their health (in the last year). This means that despite mother's attempts to shield their children's health from the economic downturn (remember from earlier, only 4% of women have skipped on their child's health care in the past year), a negative impact is still being made.

Job security is lower than ever -- which means that employer-based health insurance can be relied upon less and less -- as women's physical health deteriorates ever more quickly.

• 42% of women report that their health has gotten worse in the last five years -- the majority of whom (53%) blame stress
• In terms of health care, 16% of women say their health has gotten worse because they were unable to pay for needed health care, and others say it has gotten worse because they lost their insurance coverage (10%) or a good doctor (7%)

And apparently women have taken on more stress than men in the last few months, due specifically to the financial crisis. Again, from the Wall Street Journal:


Are those numbers so surprising? Women are still earning 80% of men's pay (that statistic from 2007), while close to 1 out of every 4 children in the US is living with a single mother.

This is what it means to be in the midst of a financial crisis. Banks on Wall Street losing their value at a record pace, car companies struggling to not go bankrupt: these are only pieces of the puzzle. What makes a recession into a crisis is when 3 out of 4 women anticipate skipping health care in the near future (1 out of 2 have already this year), when millions of children watch their parents lose jobs (533,000 jobs in November alone). It may have begun in the financial sector, but when it reached into our homes and took hold of our very lives, that was when it became a crisis.

Corn-Based Plastic

[Attention: The proper way to dispose of corn-based plastic products is in your green, curbside-pickup compost bin (or a compost heap if you have one in your back yard). If neither of these are options, then put them in a garbage can, rather than recycling bin.]

• In 2007, Americans produced 256 million tons of trash
• 31 million tons of it were plastic
  • Only 2.1 million tons of plastic were able to be recycled; the rest went to landfills

As people are trying to become more green and cut down on their waste, scientists around the world are trying to find ways to cut down on the amount of plastic that goes into landfills. (You may have heard the pseudo-fact that plastic bags take 500 years to decompose.) One promising way to go about this is by developing biodegradable plastics (plastics that break down easily in natural settings -- like a log decomposing in a forest).

What's the problem with the "old" plastic?
The traditional plastics that you and I are used to are developed from fossil fuels (ie oil). This means that there are a great deal of carbon emissions (aka "Greenhouse Gases") from extracting the oil from underground and processing it into plastic. Also, as the oil-based plastic breaks down (over those "500 years" in the landfill), they will continue to release Carbon Dioxide (aka CO₂; aka the main man-made Greenhouse Gas). And this all on top of the space that plastics take up in landfills.

To avoid all these greenhouse gases (and save on rising oil costs), scientists and companies are now developing new types of plastic -- made from things beside oil -- that can biodegrade quickly and without all the Carbon Dioxide. Many different plants are being examined for their potential to be made into plastics (I recently heard about grass-based plastics). In the United States, we grow a crazy amount of corn, and it's rapidly becoming the popular new plastic. (So far, I've especially seen them as disposable utensils and clear, thin cups.)


If it's made from corn, it's "green" right?
The good news about corn-based plastics is that they cause far less Carbon Dioxide to be released into the atmosphere. Heck, the plastic originates from a plant that takes Carbon Dioxide and converts it into Oxygen. (Remember photosynthesis from your Biology class?) Unfortunately, not all of the Carbon Emissions of traditional plastics can be avoided: many of the power plants that run the corn-plastic factories are still burning fossil fuels like coal.

The bad news is that even though this new type of plastic can biodegrade (as opposed to the oil-based plastic), it only does so under very specific circumstances. The temperature must be about 140 degrees, it must be in a Nitrogen-rich environment, and there must be decomposing matter surrounding it. (Burying your corn-plastic fork in the back yard is not enough! You need a compost pile.)

This means that if you toss a corn-plastic fork into a landfill, it will still sit for 500 years next to that oil-plastic bag. And if you try to recycle it, it will just contaminate the oil-plastic that our recycling system is designed for. (The recycling system, of course, can be changed if corn-plastics ever become very common, but it will be expensive and take time.) Fortunately, here in the East Bay, we have an excellent curbside-pickup compost system, in addition to recycling and garbage. That is where the corn-plastic you use needs to be thrown out.

Also, it should be noted that corn-plastics are not as strong as oil-plastics. (As I mentioned above, they are considered a "contaminant" when they mix in with oil-plastics at recycling facilities because they make the oil-plastic weaker.) At cool temperatures, both plastics have about the same strength, but corn-plastic starts to melt at a significantly lower temperature than oil-plastic. This means that on a day where the temperature gets above 100 degrees, leaving corn-plastics out in the sun is a very bad idea. Not only because the plastics become weaker, but because they are toxic to humans and may contaminate any food or water that they come in contact with. (Think about water bottles that sit for a couple hours by the benches at a baseball field.)

Just tell me already: Are corn-based plastics good or bad?
If you have a green curbside-pickup bin or a compost pile in your back yard, then by all means go for the corn-plastics. (If you don't, then the decision can be a little tougher.) I'll say this much: even though they're not perfect yet, alternatives to oil-based plastics are definitely a good thing. Right away, the corn-plastics can reduce the amount of Carbon Dioxide we produce. And in the coming years, we may find plastics developed from other plants that are less toxic as well (oil-plastics are toxic enough as it is).

What does "overweight" really mean, anyway?

Just this morning, I went to see a new doctor. As part of all the procedures that we went through, she weighed me and measured my height. I knew what dastardly tricks she was up to: My doctor was calculating something called my BMI -- short for "Body Mass Index." It's a very simple method of classifying people's body-types, typically used to determine possible health risks. Essentially, you take a person's weight and divide it by their height squared.

(Okay, it's slightly more complicated than that because you need to have the weight in kilograms and the height in meters, instead of pounds and feet like we use in America. Fortunately, some easy multiplication can change our units of measurement into the correct form.)

The formula for BMI is:

So, you take a person's weight (in pounds) and multiply it by 703. Then, divide that product by the person's height (in inches), squared.

This may seem confusing so far, but let's think about what the BMI is figuring out. It's looking at two things: weight and height. Where have you seen a height squared before? (Phrased differently: What happens when you multiply a length times itself?)

Area=a²
The Area of a Square is found as the length of one side squared. This is just like what the BMI tells us to do with a person's height: Mathematically, the BMI flattens and stretches out a human body into a square that's as tall and wide as the person's height.

But overall, BMI is the person's weight divided by the person's height squared. So what does that mean? Basically, it determines how heavy each little square inch of the person's flattened out body is; it's some number of pounds per square inch (Rather it's the number of kilograms per square meter).

Okay. Now that we know how to figure out a person's BMI, let's calculate one real quick: mine. As of this morning, I am:

• 5'9.5"= (5 feet X 12 inches) + 9.5 inches = 60 inches + 9.5 inches = 69.5 inches
• 193 pounds

So,

• We square my height:
• (69.5 inches)²=4830 inches²
• Read aloud, that's: "Four thousand, eight hundred and thirty Square Inches"
• And divide my weight (times that conversion factor) by the height squared:
• (193 pounds X 703)/4830 square inches = 28

But what the heck does "28" even mean?

The World Health Organization has a handy chart that it gives to doctors around the planet to figure out health risks for patients based on their BMI:

BMI	Classification
Less than 18.5	Underweight
18.5–24.9	"Normal" Weight
25.0–29.9	Overweight
30.0–34.9	Class I Obesity
35.0–39.9	Class II Obesity
Over 40.0	Class III Obesity

So, according to the WHO, I am Overweight. This basically means that I have a slightly increased risk for certain types of cancer and possible heart problems over people who have a "Normal" BMI. This is where the problems start.

For a person with my height to have a "Normal" BMI, I would have to weigh somewhere between 127 and 172 pounds. I'll admit, if I lost 20 pounds, I'd be a little better off -- although I'd be skinnier than looks healthy for someone with my frame. According to the BMI, however, 172 pounds is supposed to be my maximum weight. They're saying that I could even weigh down to 127 pounds and be "Normal." If I weighed 127 pounds, I would be a sickly little thing that gets blown around by the wind. Even my doctor would tell me to gain a little weight.

All types of groups are against the BMI system for various reasons: 1) It identifies one group of people as Normal... which implies that people outside of that group are Abnormal. 2) The "Normal" group isn't necessarily the healthiest for many reasons, including the fact that 3) it doesn't take into account much human variation.

(I'd like to point out, specifically: studies have shown that people in the "Overweight" and some in the "Obese I" range of the BMI have the lowest risk for some types of heart disease.)

There are much better systems out there, including the Waist-Hip Ratio. This system is also pretty easy to compute: Divide the length around of your waist -- up near your belly-button -- by the length around of your hips. Females should shoot for the ratio 0.7-0.8, and for males, the ratio should be 0.9-0.95. These are only rough figures, since more research still needs to be done. But, in fact, a new study just came out confirming that Waist-Hip Ratio is better as a health indicator than BMI. (They examined 359,387 different people and came to that conclusion!)

As my doctor weighed me this morning, I told her that I don't buy the BMI system and that I believe there are better ones out there. She responded: "Then, I won't tell you that you should lose a couple pounds."

Bottled Water

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is a fantastic organization of scientists and sociologists (people who study the behavior of societies) based right here in the East Bay that studies all kinds of issues in people's everyday lives. Their latest study is on BOTTLED WATER. (If you're a Wave Maker, you probably have already drunk at least one bottle today, so this is a study for you to check out!)

The reason why the EWG did this study is because tap water has to be tested by the government at least once per year to see if there are pollutants, but there is nobody like that testing bottled water. The companies that make bottled water claim that they hold themselves to the same government standards, so the EWG decided to see if they were telling the truth.

The results are not great. First, they determined that Walmart and Giant's store brands ("Sam's Choice" and "Acadia," respectively) are essentially tap water. And those were the healthiest of the brands tested. There were all kinds of pollutants in the other brands, including Tylenol and arsenic:

Altogether, the analyses [...] of these 10 brands of bottled water revealed a wide range of pollutants, including not only disinfection byproducts, but also common urban wastewater pollutants like caffeine and pharmaceuticals (Tylenol); heavy metals and minerals including arsenic and radioactive isotopes; fertilizer residue (nitrate and ammonia); and a broad range of other, tentatively identified industrial chemicals used as solvents, plasticizers, viscosity decreasing agents, and propellants.

The EWG did not name the other 8 brands of bottle water for various reasons, including the fact that the level of pollution in each brand can change over time (eg, a company might change its purification system slightly from one month to the next). In case you are wondering, the Walmart and Giant brands were revealed because they were some of the first tests that EWG did, and EWG is planning to bring a lawsuit against Walmart soon.

Now, there may be some of you at home who are wondering why Walmart would have a lawsuit brought against them, if they were just bottling tap water. Well, that's because California has some of the toughest laws in the county about chemical levels in consumer products. (You are probably familiar with the label: “WARNING: This product contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer" -- note that it's only California and not other states!) Apparently, Walmart was bottling their water in Nevada (specifically in Las Vegas), where they allow higher levels of pollution. If Walmart doesn't change their water soon, they are going to have to start putting that Warning label on their water.

What should you, Wave Makers, do? Stop drinking water?

NO! If bottled water is all that's available, then by all means drink it! Water is one of the most basic nutrients for human beings. But instead of just thinking about what's immediately available to you, start planning ahead.

The first thing that you can do is take that empty water bottle that you just drank and fill it with the filtered water from the tap in the kitchen. That way, you get the healthiest water available and you produce less trash!

The second thing that you can do is buy something like a Kleen Kanteen, which is made of stainless steel, to hold your water. Long story short, many plastics have certain kinds of toxins that leech into whatever is inside of them. I wouldn't worry too much if I were you, especially if you're not putting hot liquids (eg hot chocolate) into them, but in both my and EWG's opinion, it's best to be on the safe side.

[Extra: EWG's last major report came out early in the summer, revealing that 4 out of 5 sunscreens "contain chemicals that may pose health hazards or don't adequately protect skin from the sun's damaging rays. Some of the worst offenders are leading brands like Coppertone, Banana Boat, and Neutrogena."]