Tag: health

Help Citizens with Disabilities Participate in the Political Process

Posted on by Jalees Rehman

by Jalees Rehman

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that over a billion people live with some form of disability, expressed as impairments, activity limitations and participation restrictions.  Disabilities are often manifestations of health conditions and as such, people suffering from disabilities not only require general medical care such as immunizations and preventive screenings but also need additional care to address the underlying health conditions. According to the WHO, people with disabilities are far more likely to suffer catastrophic health expenditures and receive inadequate medical care than people without disabilities. In addition to the medical and financial challenges, people with disabilities are often isolated and marginalized in society. The lack of political participation by people with disabilities in politics is especially concerning because it sets in motion a vicious cycle of marginalization. If the voices of people with disabilities are not adequately represented in the political arena, then it becomes less likely that governmental measures are taken to ensure adequate medical care and social integration of people with disabilities.

The researchers Lisa Schur and Meera Adya recently studied the political participation of people with disabilities in the United States in their article Sidelined or Mainstreamed? Political Participation and Attitudes of People with Disabilities in the United States. They used data from four US surveys: the 2008 and 2010 Current Population Surveys (CPS), the 2006 General Social Survey (GSS), and the 2007 Maxwell Poll on Citizenship and Inequality. The surveys ask respondents whether they suffer from distinct forms of impairment such as visual, hearing, mental-cognitive or mobility. There were 12,027 people in the 2008 CPS and 12,064 people in the 2010 who answered yes to at least one of the disability questions. The large sample size of CPS and the inclusion of a “voting supplement” in the CPS during even-numbered years allowed the researchers to study the extent of political participation by people with disabilities. Read more »

On Veganism

Posted on by Tara* Kaushal

by Tara* Kaushal Renee-Somerfield-Save-the-Earth-300

Why I think it is the only food and lifestyle philosophy that aligns with my value-systems.

So shall we get the calls of “hypocrite” out of the way?

I am not a vegan (eats and uses only plant matter). I've spent my adult life oscillating between being a lacto-ovo-vegetarian (vegetarian, plus dairy and eggs), pescetarian (lacto-ovo-vegetarian, plus seafood) and omnivore (eats both plant- and animal-origin food). (I'm calling out the way I've used these terms, as there are so many types and definitions: eg, in Indian Hindus, ‘pure veg' usually means lacto-vegetarian.)

Truth is, veganism is the only food and lifestyle philosophy that aligns to my belief systems; and food is the only aspect of my life in which I am a blatant hypocrite, where my actions don't match my words. With a personality that's “guilt-prone” (my therapist's words, not mine), it bothers me no end that I am not even a committed vegetarian; niggling guilt and disappointment tinge the pleasure of a good steak. I cannot believe my lack of will power, that my tongue and hedonism (and laziness) win in a battle against my beliefs.

So what are the beliefs that point me straight to a vegan lifestyle?

Anthropocentricism: Let's consider, first, the mediocrity principle, the opposite of anthropocentricism. What is the place of humanity in The Grander Scheme of Things? We are, for all our self-aggrandisement, no more than one species on earth, and one of millions in the universe. If we are no more or less than the animals who co-inhabit earth with us, we don't—shouldn't—have rights over them.

Let's say one believes the opposite, that humans are the most significant species on the planet, the very pinnacle of evolution, the Masters of the Earth. One could take an anthropocentric belief system to mean that we are the rightful owners of everything that lives—or see that it grants us agency, great power… and great responsibility. In a situation where we can control the fates of other species, how should we treat them? If you had a kingdom, what kind of monarch would you be?

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The Body Complex

Posted on by Tara* Kaushal

by Tara* Kaushal

Psychology-of-Food-Sahil-Mane-PhotographySome thoughts on diet and exercise, food and drink, and health. Conceptual image by Sahil Mane Photography.

I've been on one diet or the other since I was in my teens. Most have been the very definition of crash (cigarettes and Diet Coke for a week, anyone?) and, later, I've tried more wholesome, longer-term lifestyle ones (that I would soon abandon and revert to my yoyo crash-trash diet cycle). First, it was only for aesthetic reasons, to lose weight; the lifestyle diets, Eat More Weigh Less and the like, started when I started to encompass health and fitness as a goal for my body (duh)!

Diet vs. Exercise: A Gendered Choice?

While all of us recognise that the key to a healthy body is a combination of good-for-you food and exercise (and not smoking, limited drinking, etc, and the absence of genetic and birth defects) most people fall in to one or the other category—some preferring exercise, unable to control their need to eat, drink and be merry; others preferring to diet or at least practice diet control, unable or unwilling to exercise. There are the some that do both, as we all should, and those, of course, that do neither.

I've realised that the choice, whether to diet or exercise, both or neither, is quite personality driven. Dieting is passive, to not eat; exercise is active, to get off your butt… And, in light of this fact, I hate to admit that my observation, that more women choose to diet, more men choose to exercise, falls in to gender stereotypes. Though there are exceptions all around, and my casual survey, of friends and boyfriends, and numbers from my local gym, has a small sample size, one could analyse my observation to bits. Is it because women are more driven by aesthetics, we are judged on them from an early age; and power, muscle, sports are traditionally male? Then there are the questions of time, priorities and lifestyle factors, and socioeconomic and cultural positioning. (More about the question of genderism in sports.) Also, men or women, individuals negotiate a complex social, familial, ethical, religious, consumerist, emotional, psychological and gendered relationship with food and drink.

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Friendly Ferments, Cool Cultures

Posted on by Gautam Pemmaraju

by Gautam Pemmaraju

It was in Kankakee, IL, at a thanksgiving celebration in the mid 80’s that J introduced my fresh-off-the-boat brother to his family as “the guy I told you about, who eats boiled rice with plain yogurt”. They apparently, recoiled in horror. His alienness was acutely amplified by what was to them utterly inconceivable. Over the course of their undergraduate years however, the mid-eastern lad of German stock was to become a neophyte, an enthusiastic partaker (and proponent) of the peculiar delights of curd-rice – a south Indian staple of phenomenal ubiquity, commuting across homes, roadside eateries, college hostels, factory canteens, corporate boardrooms and temples, with the very same attenuated presence that marks its somewhat esoteric flavours. The smooth, pacifying and palate-cleansing qualities offer not just the satisfaction of a no-fuss, functional meal, but also holds within mythic curative and sacramental promises. Url

Stories abound in my family (perhaps readers will share more?) from the mid 60s of desperate emigrant relatives in the States, from Louisville, KY, Bowling Green, OH to Washington DC, in a perpetual search for the ‘right’ yogurt; not the tart, custard-textured supermarket varieties, or even the smaller artisanal yogurts that were fine for what they were, but the dainty coagulum, mostly form-retaining solid with adjunct watery whey, that was set each night by boiling buffalo or cow’s milk (or sometimes a blend), cooling it down to warm/tepid, and then judiciously spooning in a tiny amount of the previous night’s dahi, to instigate once again, the fermentation of friendly bacteria that have long provided us with an mind-boggling variety of moderated milk products.

There were rumours too, of aunts cunningly smuggling in starter cultures from India in thermos flasks, shamelessly lying to customs men when asked if they had any perishable food items on them, aided of course, by their pious looks, their oblique head nods, not to forget, their mesmerizing bindis.

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