To defend our way of life abroad we may need to reconsider how much junk food it involves at home.

It’s not every day that former generals and admirals speak out about children’s health and education. But last Thursday was one of those days. According to Mission: Readiness, a nonprofit, bipartisan organization led by retired senior military leaders, 75 percent of 17 to 24 year olds cannot enlist in the military because they fail to graduate high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit.

One trend called out in the report deserves special attention: America’s obesity epidemic not only limits the military’s recruiting base, but is a growing drain on the Department of Defense budget and hurts the readiness of our forces. The numbers are alarming. Since 1998, the rate at which active-duty servicemembers received a medical diagnosis of being overweight or obese increased more than 2.5-fold.

We all know Americans are gaining weight. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one-third of adults in the United States are obese, double the rate in 1980; around two-thirds are at least overweight. (An adult with a body mass index between 25 and 29.9 is overweight; 30 or higher is obese. Someone 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighing 169 lbs, for example, is considered overweight. If that same person weighed more than 203 lbs, he would be obese.)

There’s no mystery behind this phenomenon. Less than 10 percent of high school students consume the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables daily. Less than one-third meet the recommended levels of physical activity. Children and adolescents average several hours of TV, DVD, and movie-watching daily. Sugar-sweetened drinks are everywhere, including schools.

These lifestyles, however, are reflected in our military, and the costs are considerable. One-quarter of DoD beneficiaries (which includes servicemembers and their families, and retirees) are obese, little better than in the general U.S. population, while 40 percent are overweight. As in the civilian sector, the military health system is spending a lot of money treating conditions that obesity promotes, like heart disease and diabetes. The DoD estimates its healthcare costs attributable to obesity at $2 billion per year, more than for alcohol- and tobacco-related conditions combined. The cost is sure to grow under an expanded DoD entitlement program for retirees (the Congressional Budget Office projects a near-doubling of DoD healthcare costs, from $46 to $85 billion, during the next 30 years), and could constrain other critical DoD medical treatment and prevention programs.

Then, of course, there is the impact on individual military members. The Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center reports that rates of joint and back disorders—among the leading causes of lost duty time—in overweight or obese active duty servicemembers are three times higher than the overall active duty rate. Nearly one-quarter of servicemembers diagnosed as obese or overweight last year also were diagnosed with a joint disorder during the previous year.

Obesity may even play a role in the mental consequences of war, a link we’re only just beginning to understand. This year, a large DoD epidemiological study that includes many personnel who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan reported that servicemembers who don’t see themselves as healthy—which we know correlates with being overweight or obese—were at significantly higher risk for post-traumatic stress disorder.

The link between America’s obesity epidemic and national security is becoming clear to public health experts like Dr. Richard Carmona, who is especially qualified to recognize the connection. He enlisted in the Army, served in Special Forces, and was a combat-decorated Vietnam veteran before beginning his medical career and going on to serve as President George W. Bush’s Surgeon General. Dr. Carmona said recently that “Obesity is not just a health issue” but “affects our national and global security.”

The DoD is launching new initiatives against obesity. The military health system recently completed a pilot project using an internet-based program to help beneficiaries lose weight. Commissaries now have shelf signs with dietary tips based on U.S. Government dietary guidelines. More important, probably, is to help children establish healthy lifestyle habits. Investing in early education on food and health is a good bargain for America whether or not these children choose military service later.

And that’s something that healthy lifestyle campaigners and supporters a strong military—not always a natural constituency—can agree on.

Today on Twitter we asked our followers when they last went to see a doctor or dentist and whether the visit was covered by health insurance. We collected some of our favorite responses below. We ask a question to our Twitter faithful once a day, so if you’re not yet following @GOOD, make sure to sign up and participate in the conversation.

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The average American is both overweight and spends more than 100 hours per year commuting, that vast majority of those hours being spent in a car. Are those numbers correlated? Could we help reduce our societal weight gain by encouraging more commutes by bike or foot? Our latest Transparency is a look at the number of active commutes in several countries, as compared to those countries obesity rates.

A collaboration between GOOD and Lamosca.

To accomplish the goal of delivering 15,000 meals to 120,000 New Yorkers, Robin Hood has partnered with the grocer FreshDirect and is tapping into the vibrant social networks of the people behind the Obama campaign to generate attention. They’re asking for donations of $50, 100 percent of which goes directly toward providing a family of 8 with a holiday meal. So far, they’ve raised enough money to serve 50,000 people.

To hammer home just how easy it is for some of us spare 50 bucks, they’ve created the Twitter hash tag #50bucks, which you’ll find after phrases like “bought a round of shots for people I don’t even know.” Clearly, feeding a family of eight is a better use of that cash.

On December 8, Robin Hood is holding a city-wide “Stay In,” during which they’re encouraging New Yorkers to refrain from dining out, and asking them to make a donation of the $50 they would have spent at a restaurant on a dinner for a family. Donors that night will receive discounts at FreshDirect or SeamlessWeb, and a free download from Netflix Amazon for their evening at home.

You can make a donation to Robin Hood’s Food for Good program here. At the very least, it’s worth a retweet.

Why the restriction on abortion in the health care bill is unfair.

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) tussled with his party’s leadership in the House of Representatives for months before finally making an actionable threat: give me a floor vote on an abortion-restricting amendment, or I’ll kill your health care bill. Under the terms of that health care bill, uninsured Americans will be required to purchase health insurance, and the government will partially subsidize those who can’t cover the hefty price. The so-called Stupak amendment, which passed with the support of dozens of Democrats, forbids people who receive that government assistance from buying insurance policies that cover abortion.

The pro-life argument for the dread Stupak amendment is pretty straightforward: If the government helps a woman buy health insurance, and she uses that insurance to finance an abortion, then the government is indirectly spending taxpayer money on abortions. And we can’t have that because…a majority in Congress say we can’t.

So now, if Stupak and his sympathizers get their way, most, if not all women paying for health insurance will be forbidden from buying plans that cover abortions. What this will mean for the vast majority of women, who will continue to receive health insurance from their employers, isn’t known. If over time most people enter the market to buy their own insurance, the impact could be farther-reaching than even Stupak himself foresees. But at least the government won’t be “funding” abortions, right?

The problem is that the argument for the Stupak amendment oversimplifies the connection between government money and abortions. Even before Stupak muscled his way into the health care fight, the government was never really going to be funding abortions. The government was going to be funding insurance—private insurance, for the most part—which is really just an intermediary tool for pooling risk and money to finance privately-provided health care services, including, in some cases, abortion.

If you’re opposed to abortion, and think the government should stay out of it, this may sound like a direct enough connection to justify the Stupak amendment. But there’s a logical flaw at the heart of that position that hasn’t been fully explored, and that can only be resolved if the government were to either criminalize abortion or end all welfare services completely.

The problem with the Stupak amendment is that it assumes there’s something unique about each individual dollar—that serial numbers are like DNA and government dollars are distinct from private dollars in a meaningful sense. But they’re not. The insurance subsidies can’t be used directly to finance other spending—a woman couldn’t take her insurance tax credit directly to a grocery store to buy canned goods—but, like all welfare, the point of the spending is to ease up the burden for working Americans so that they’re free to pay for other goods and services without going broke. This concept—fungibility—leads us uncomfortable places.

Imagine for a moment that Members of Congress had decided that obesity, not abortion, was the nation’s most pressing crisis. Americans are too fat, they’d say. Heart disease is a shameful epidemic. They could do a lot of things, in theory, to change peoples’ behavior. But, of course, this is America, so taxes and blanket prohibitions are out of the question. Enter hypothetical Rep. Art Stupak, who has a different approach. Instead of battling to ban transfats, Art Stupak demands instead that poor people be forbidden from redeeming food stamps at stores that sell junk food. Government money, he says, shouldn’t be used to finance heart disease and its causes.

Let’s say he wins. Soon, thousands of poor people will cash in their food stamps for Shredded Wheat, resulting in profits for the same company that makes Oreos. Isn’t this also the same as government funding junk food? To really cut the tie, you’d have to ban junk food, or end the food stamp program. Anything in between would be an unfair half-measure targeted at the poor.

Back in the real world, conservatives may not be a huge fans of food stamps in principle, but they would mock Democrats if they described the food stamp program as “government financing of Nabisco.” And yet, this is exactly the gambit Bart Stupak and his allies are pulling in their quest to reduce abortions in this country.

That their pet policy will disproportionately effect low- and middle-income women is, for them, an unavoidable side-effect, and an afterthought (if by some curse or miracle, 65 year old, voting women started becoming pregnant, would Stupak be so cavalier about forbidding Medicare from financing abortions?)

Now take the logic one step further. Somewhere in America a poor woman on Medicaid is feeding her family with foodstamps, while saving up for an abortion. Obviously she can’t redeem her foodstamps at Planned Parenthood, but the dollars are basically still interchangible, and if it weren’t for those welfare programs she’d never put together enough money to pay a doctor to end her pregnancy. So is the government funding her abortion? If Bart Stupak had the courage of his convictions, he’d say yes. Welfare, he’d say, is incompatible with the idea that the government shouldn’t finance abortions. But nobody says this, either because they don’t believe it, or they realize that resolving the conflict would result in an unthinkable injustisce. So instead the fallback position becomes, “make it as hard as possible for the neediest among us to do things we don’t like.”

The political opportunism at the heart of the Stupak amendment is precisely what makes it so incoherent. Private doctors and private hospitals provide abortions, and private insurers feel it’s within their interests to finance them. Today, anybody who has the money can buy such a policy, or they can buy abortions out of pocket. That includes rich men, and poor women on food stamps and people whose paychecks come from the government. Using Stupak’s logic, and the logic of fungibility, the latter two groups of people are guilty of using government money to help fund abortions.

In three years, millions of people will likely be required to buy health insurance. Subsidies are the price the government has to pay to foist that requirement upon them. But the Stupak amendment treats the subsidies as a gift they give to women, conditional on their adherence to pro-life protocols. They’ve got it backward.

A new tool for computer language analysis can evaluate your mind based on your Tweets (and might help psychologists, too)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or among the molemen, you’ve probably enjoyed the humor of @s–tmydadsays, the popular Twitter account of Justin, who describes himself like so: “I’m 29. I live with my 73-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down s–t that he says.” That s–t consists of cranky honesty like “I need to change clothes? Wow. That’s big talk coming from someone who looks like they robbed a Mervyn’s” and “Oh please, you practically invented lazy. People should have to call you and ask for the rights to lazy before they use it.”

Most agree that s–tmydadsays is funny, but did you realize his emotional style is angry, his social style is personable, and his thinking style is analytic, sensory, and in-the-moment? These psychological insights can be gleaned by plugging s–tmydadsays into Analyze Words, a new Twitter-analyzing tool put together by James W. Pennebaker, his colleagues Roger Booth and Chris Wilson, and his daughter Teal. Pennebaker—a University at Texas Professor of Psychology—is a longtime innovator in using computer analysis of language to study how we think.

I asked Pennebaker by email for insight into the s–tmydadsays results, and though he said the sample size was a bit small, “…the analyses catch the emotional tone perfectly. Some serious hostility, depression, and anxiety is in the air. Socially, the writing suggests someone immersed in his social world, with constant references to other people—wife, mother, father, son. In other words, very different from someone who writes about computer components. Low in arrogance because he does not use big words and complex sentences and a high rate of articles—all of which are markers of psychological distance. The valley girl language probably reflects his high use of present tense verbs and punctuation.”

Yes, s–tmydadsays scored high in the social style category “Spacy/Valley Girl,” which is kind of a brain-bender. If you’re equally surprised that this category is included at all, it’s because it can measured—not every emotional, social, and thinking style has reliable linguistic symptoms. As Pennebaker said in a phone interview, “I know what I can measure and what I can’t.” It would be wonderful to measure something like “guilt-riddenness,” for example, but that tendency can’t be quantified yet.

Pennebaker has worked for decades on figuring out just how words and mental states are associated, in an effort to “come up with a way to measure healthy writing.” Starting in the early nineties, he first collaborated with grad student Martha Francis and later with New Zealand immunologist Roger Booth to create LIWC—Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, pronounced “Luke”—which provides the methodological basis for the Analyze Words site. Using language as a window into the mind is as old as listening for Freudian slips, but Pennebaker’s work is groundbreaking in how it links, as he puts it, “low-level words with broad psychological processes.” It turns out that style words (such as articles and prepositions) actually reveal more about what’s on our minds, psychologically and socially, than content words (like dog, airplane, etc).

Many of Pennebaker’s discoveries are counterintuitive, to say the least—particularly with regard to that pesky pronoun “I.” To many, “I” feels like a word of the powerful and arrogant, but it isn’t really: It turns out that women, followers, young people, poor people, depressed people, crappy students, and sick people all use “I” more than men, leaders, older people, rich people, happy people, good students, and healthy people. That paints a clear overall picture: “I” is a marker of low status, mainly because people who are lower status are more self-conscious. (“I” is also used more often by people telling the truth, as well as the worried more than the angry). In looking extensively at President Obama—who critics have incorrectly accused of being in love with the word “I”—Pennebaker found just the opposite: Obama is an infrequent I-user, reflecting self-confidence, coolness, and psychological distance.

President or peon, our words give away emotions and thoughts we might prefer to conceal. As Pennebaker wrote in “The Psychological Meaning of Words: LIWC and Computerized Text Analysis Methods” (co-authored with Yla R. Tausczik), “The words we use in daily life reflect what we are paying attention to, what we are thinking about, what we are trying to avoid, how we are feeling, and how we are organizing and analyzing our worlds.” Digital tools like LIWC allow those symptoms to be collected and quantified with tremendous ease. As Pennebaker puts it, “In the amount of time it takes to run a single participant in a social psychology language study, we can now download thousands of personal writings, interaction transcripts, or other forms of text that can be analyzed in seconds.”

That said, Pennebaker emphasizes that while style words are “reflections of what is going on in people’s heads,” but they’re not a tool for getting someone to change their way of thinking. In other words, you can’t ask someone to mindlessly repeat more “positive” words and expect them to become less depressed or suicidal. LIWC’s real use is in detecting problems such as excessive worry or anger and then showing when progress has been made. When we become more mentally healthy, our language changes unconsciously, because we are changing perspectives. The internal world manifests in the lexical world.

Let’s just hope Pennebaker detects minimal “progress” in s–tmydadsays. When it comes to humor, anger and worry are pure gold.

While a time table for progress is tough to assess at this point, Atala sees “a future when organs will be available off-the-shelf, ready to ‘plug in’ and replace injured or diseased organs.”  He believes that “we’ll have a boutique of technologies that will includes tissue engineering and cell therapies and doctors will select the ideal treatment based on the patient’s needs.”

I recommend taking a look at this video gallery, with clips depicting efforts to grow a human ear, finger, and, ultimately, an entire limb.

Via PSFK.

David Rakel and colleagues have found that patients who rate their doctor as highly empathic recover more quickly from a cold. Their illness is shortened by about a day—the same effect shown by the most promising anti-viral drugs. But a doctor’s empathy, unlike the anti-viral, doesn’t trigger nausea and diarrhoea.

I happen to think empathy is valuable in and of itself, but it’s nice to to be able to show the Jack Donaghy types out there that it actually saves money too. The end of the article features this circumspect observation:

“This finding is in need of replication,” the researchers concluded. “Until then, including empathy in the clinical encounter has little potential for harm and has positive influences that extend beyond the medical consultation.”

You can’t fault them for leaping to conclusions.

Noticing that the city gets a lot of fog, Alimon set up nets in the hills above the neighborhood that trap that moisture and funnel it into aqueducts and reservoirs where it can be used for drinking or farming. The large nets cost the equivalent of $800 and can yield as many as 60 liters in a night. Sounds like a net benefit to me. Ahem.

You can check out Alimon’s “green desert” project here, which includes some other innovations as well. National Geographic has some nice photos of the nets.

How climate change legislation and financial reform depend on the health care debate.

For most of 2009, the public option—a hypothetical government-run health insurance plan that, if created, would compete with profit-driven, millionaire-making insurance companies—has defined the health care debate. Other issues pit liberals against conservatives, reformers against skeptics, but none has inspired the sort of passion that the public option has: Republicans and conservative Democrats reject it vehemently. Progressives say public option or bust.

No matter what side of the argument you find yourself on, though, President Obama’s position on the issue will leave you disappointed. He says that the public option is a good idea, but it’s not, on the merits, a policy that will make or break health care reform on substantive grounds, and he thinks it’s surprising and unfortunate that it’s become the redline for progressives.

The best you can say about that position is that it’s about half right. At this point, the public option is unlikely, in the early years of reform, to be a revolutionary force in the health care system. But, politically, it was critical to keeping activists hopeful about an otherwise-uninspiring policy designed to keep deep-pocketed stakeholders from revolting, and killing reform altogether. That progressives have, to this point, prevented those stakeholders, and conservative politicians, from killing the public option, is an unalloyed good. It’s good because, without their support, the reform effort will perish; good because the public option remains a good idea, and one that can be improved upon; and good because they are proving that they won’t push over and let a consensus oriented President sell out the change he promised.

As originally conceived, the public option would have been transformational—it would have forced insurance companies to do what they’re supposed to do (pool risk, and finance health care) or driven them out of business. That public option was the compromise away from single payer that was still promising enough to keep the large and passionate base of single-payer supporters engaged in debate and willing to go to the mat for a plan otherwise designed to appease, or even strengthen, the for-profit health care industry.

After months of political wrangling and compromise, the public option will more likely be a fail safe—a small program that can be expanded and strengthened if insurance companies continue to do a disservice to the country, and a safe harbor for people who, forced to purchase some kind of insurance, won’t want to hand over their money to the same untrustworthy companies that have abused them and their friends and families for generations.

Progressives have sacrificed plenty on this score already. What was once envisioned to be a government program that provided a service to many tens of millions of taxpayers, and used its sheer heft to pummel private insurers, doctors, hospitals, and drug manufacturers into completely overhauling their incentives, will now likely be just another medium-sized insurer, that can compete because it won’t have to turn a profit. But though the legislative process has stripped the public option of its greatest promise, liberals will do themselves a disservices if they ease up or fold now that a health care bill seems within reach.

They should continue their fight to keep the public option in the reform package, and, if possible, to strengthen it. If they allow the public option to wither on the vine, and lose its political import, they will make it extremely difficult for the government to ever circle back, and create a government insurance plan for middle-class workers.

But, more crucially, they will send a message—to the administration, to well-heeled interest groups, to “centrist” politicians and Republicans—that they don’t, at the end of the day, have the wherewithal to scuttle legislation that isn’t good enough. If that happens, the pattern that’s already been set in place will continue, and quite possibly worsen. Obama and Democratic leaders will introduce more, ambitious proposals, then do the easy thing and let corporations and their congressional surrogates render them all but useless.

If those same leaders learn that their only hope for success is to twist other people’s arms, then perhaps there’s hope that the next big projects—climate change, financial reform—won’t be long exercises in disenchantment.