Like Wayde Lodor, 53, who will likely face a penalty this year for defying the state’s requirement for health insurance.”I’m in good shape, I don’t eat meat, I don’t drink excessively, I’ve never smoked. The last thing I’m going to do is not pay my rent because I have to pay for some state-mandated health coverage that I don’t think I need.” [NYT]
Meet the 2 Percent of Massachusetts Residents Who Don’t Have Health InsurancePosted by daily feed on 3/28/2012 at 7:13AM | No Comments
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Five Reasons to Leave the House This WeekendA Zombie 5K, Irish film, soul music, and more.Posted by Anne Vickman on 3/22/2012 at 8:32AM | No Comments
Zombies Best. Idea. Ever. This 5K obstacle race in Amesbury isn’t until May 5 and 6, but registration ends in a mere three weeks on April 13, so consider this your official heads up. All you need to know is that race participants — wearing three flags on a belt, just like ye olde days of flag football — will have to navigate a series of obstacles and make strategy calls on the quickest way to the finish line. The best part? All runners will be chased mercilessly by zombies. Hungry for brains. And those flags. Oh, and guess what happens if all flags are to the living dead? Zombie conversion, duh. Not a runner? No sweat — spectators are welcome. |
Boston Public Schools Shelves Pink SlimeWhat awful foods should be next to go?Posted by Katherine Ozment on 3/20/2012 at 8:58AM | No Comments
In case you haven’t heard of it, “pink slime” is the pulverized and ammonia-hydroxide-treated slaughterhouse scraps mixed into regular beef. It’s a food product that most of us have been ingesting without realizing it — and that lunch ladies have been lovingly piling onto cafeteria trays across the nation for years. Last week, Boston Public Schools joined other public school districts across the country when it decided to ban the unappetizing mixture from its school lunch program after Houston resident Bettina Siegel, who blogs about kids and food at The Lunch Tray, started an online petition, which went viral. This is good news for parents who aren’t comfortable having their kids eat a food product that is more product than food. But it also got me wondering what other misbegotten concoctions have we been ladling onto kids’ lunch trays all these years? I decided to ask a few experts what they would ban, in school or out, from kids’ diets. Here’s what they said: Continue reading “Boston Public Schools Shelves Pink Slime” » |
Boston, The Catholic Church, and The PillIt's amazing how the Church helped to shape the Pill as we know it.
To bleed or not to bleed? That was the question. Apparently, when the Pill was first invented in the 1950′s, Boston’s researchers saw no scientific reason for the women who took it to have periods at all. So why did menstruation become part of the package? Because of the Catholic Church. Yes, knowing that Catholic discourse was all about keeping things “natural,” scientist Gregory Pincus saw how maintaining a woman’s “natural cycle” would increase the likelihood of the church’s approval. This is why the monthly packs of contraceptive pills, which were originally planned to contain 21 pills, were actually distributed in packs of 28, including 7 placebos that triggered a week-long menstruation period. Continue reading “Boston, The Catholic Church, and The Pill” » |
Saved by the Nanny State!The mayor made the decision for us on low-acuity health care.Posted by Steve Poftak on 3/7/2012 at 9:10AM | No Comments
Yesterday’s Globe brought news of an initiative by the City of Boston to move folks out of emergency rooms and into Community Health Centers for treatment of non-acute conditions. That’s a laudable goal, but it brings to mind the inconsistency of the city’s full-throated opposition to another group of non-acute healthcare providers just a few years back. Back in 2008, the mayor warned of dire consequences, saying that permitting these health care providers to operate “jeopardizes patient safety” and that they “will seriously compromise quality of care and hygiene.” As a result, Boston didn’t get any MinuteClinics. Lots of other Massachusetts communities (including Newton, Braintree, Quincy, Cambridge, and Medford) have them. Did you miss the stories about the utter collapse of the health care system in those cities and towns? Yep, I did too. As a parent and a consumer, I’d like to have a convenient option for repetitive, low-acuity health care needs (think: ear infections, strep tests, pink eye). And I think I’m mature enough to decide the appropriate venue for care. Instead, the mayor decided for me. Crossposted at Pioneer Institute’s blog. |
Tufts Creates Tiny Edible Food SensorsNow your milk can tell you when it's about to spoil.Posted by Janelle Nanos on 3/5/2012 at 9:38AM | No Comments
In the first few opening lines of my story, “So Appy Together,” in this month’s issue, I offer a play-by-play of my morning routine with my phone:
Well as it turns out, now I apparently don’t need my husband to tell me the milk is going to spoil, as there’s an app for that too. Tufts University scientists are developing tiny edible sensors that can determine whether a food is about to go bad. The sensors are created of gold foil (like the kind that you see in some fancy desserts) that’s embedded in tiny silk patches that can stick to produce and eggs, and can be left to float in milk. The gold foil will detect when the chemical composition in the food changes as it ripens or spoils (this is know as a food’s dielectric properties) and will in theory be able to transmit a signal to a handheld device, letting you know you better drink  your milk before it curdles. It’s too soon to know what these tiny gold and silk sensors would cost, but just think of the dollars saved in grocery bills each year. And you get the thrill of living in an Alice In Wonderland version of reality, where your food tell you to “Eat Me.” You can probably already guess that I’m excited at the prospect. Just don’t tell my husband. [Esquire via Fast Company] |
How Smartphones Could Impact Public HealthSmartphone owners now outnumber regular cell phone owners for the first time, according to a new study.Posted by Janelle Nanos on 3/1/2012 at 12:41PM | No Comments
In my latest story in the magazine, “So Appy Together,” IÂ wrote about how our smartphones are getting increasingly smarter, and may be changing what it means to be human in the process. When I set out to do the reporting, the numbers available from PEW’s Internet and American Life Project said that about a third of Americans owned smartphones. Well today they released a new study showing that those numbers have spiked in the past year, and now nearly half of us have these smart little gadgets in our hands. For the first time, smartphone owners now outnumber regular cell phone owners in the country (46 percent vs. 41 percent), and what’s fascinating is that the devices are far more widely distributed than the researchers expected:
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Cue the Latest Yoga … Sex Scandal?I don't understand why anyone is surprised by John Friend.Posted by Katherine Ozment on 2/28/2012 at 10:31AM | 5 Comments
John Friend, the national yoga superstar who popularized a brand of yoga he cooked up in Texas in the late 1990s, has recently been outed as just another bad boy. What I don’t understand is why anyone is surprised. Years ago, I wrote a story about a yoga war right here in Boston. I’d been doing yoga myself on and off for years and loved it. But, while researching that story, I peeled back the curtain to find whole segments of the industry riddled with competition, infighting, sexual transgression, and a meanness not usually associated with the good karma preached in so many studios. I also learned that yoga scandals have been around since people started “oming.” As long as there have been yoga teachers, there have been devotees willing to bestow guru status on them. The next step — a guru’s abuse of that power — is not all that different than it is in any other setting where one person, usually a man, gains outsize importance. Continue reading “Cue the Latest Yoga … Sex Scandal?” » |
Romneycare Totally WorksUniversal health care is actually starting to save money in Massachusetts.Posted by Patrick Doyle on 2/27/2012 at 10:23AM | 2 Comments
The last few days have seen a rash of stories about how Romneycare is — gasp — working in Massachusetts! The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein posted a column this morning on the topic:
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The 5K Run for Your Lives obstacle race. (Photo by Happy Go Lucky.)
(Image via ThinkStock.)
(Chart via Pew.)
