Constipation     

This article is taken from a wiki article.

Constipation (also known as costiveness or dyschezia) refers to bowel movements that are infrequent or hard to pass. Constipation is a common cause of painful defecation. Severe constipation includes obstipation (failure to pass stools or gas) and fecal impaction, which can progress to bowel obstruction and become life-threatening.

Constipation is a symptom with many causes. These causes are of two types: obstructed defecation and colonic slow transit (or hypomobility). About 50% of patients evaluated for constipation at tertiary referral hospitals have obstructed defecation. This type of constipation has mechanical and functional causes. Causes of colonic slow transit constipation include diet, hormonal disorders such as hypothyroidism, side effects of medications, and rarely heavy metal toxicity. Because constipation is a symptom, not a disease, effective treatment of constipation may require first determining the cause. Treatments include changes in dietary habits, laxatives, enemas, biofeedback, and in particular situations surgery may be required.

Constipation is common; in the general population incidence of constipation varies from 2 to 30%.

Definition

 

The definition of constipation includes the following:

• infrequent bowel movements (typically three times or fewer per week)
• difficulty during defecation (straining during more than 25% of bowel movements or a subjective sensation of hard stools), or
• the sensation of incomplete bowel evacuation.

The Rome III criteria are widely used to diagnose chronic constipation, and are helpful in separating cases of chronic functional constipation from less-serious instances.

Children

Constipation in children usually occurs at three distinct points in time: after starting formula or processed foods (while an infant), during toilet training in toddlerhood, and soon after starting school (as in a kindergarten)

After birth, most infants pass 4-5 soft liquid bowel movements (BM) a day. Breast-fed infants usually tend to have more BM compared to formula-fed infants. Some breast-fed infants have a BM after each feed, whereas others have only one BM every 2–3 days. Infants who are breast-fed rarely develop constipation. By the age of two years, a child will usually have 1–2 bowel movements per day and by four years of age, a child will have one bowel movement per day.

Causes

The causes of constipation can be divided into congenital, primary, and secondary. The most common cause is primary and not life threatening. In the elderly, causes include: insufficient dietary fiber intake, inadequate fluid intake, decreased physical activity, side effects of medications, hypothyroidism, and obstruction by colorectal cancer.

Constipation with no known organic cause, i.e. no medical explanation, exhibits gender differences in prevalence: females are more often affected than males.

Primary

Primary or functional constipation is ongoing symptoms for greater than six months not due to any underlying cause such as medication side effects or an underlying medical condition. It is not associated with abdominal pain thus distinguishing it from irritable bowel syndrome. It is the most common cause of constipation.

Diet

Constipation can be caused or exacerbated by a low fiber diet, low liquid intake, or dieting.

Medication

Many medications have constipation as a side effect. Some include (but are not limited to); opioids (e.g. common pain killers), diuretics, antidepressants, antihistamines, antispasmodics, anticonvulsants, and aluminum antacids

Metabolic and muscular

Metabolic and endocrine problems which may lead to constipation include: hypercalcemia, hypothyroidism, diabetes mellitus, cystic fibrosis, and celiac disease. Constipation is also common in individuals with muscular and myotonic dystrophy.

Structural and functional abnormalities

Constipation has a number of structural (mechanical, morphological, anatomical) causes, including: spinal cord lesions, Parkinsons, colon cancer, anal fissures, proctitis, and pelvic floor dysfunction.

Constipation also has functional (neurological) causes, including anismus, descending perineum syndrome, and Hirschsprung's disease. In infants, Hirschsprung's disease is the most common medical disorder associated with constipation. Anismus occurs in a small minority of persons with chronic constipation or obstructed defecation.

Psychological

Voluntary withholding of the stool is a common cause of constipation. The choice to withhold can be due to factors such as fear of pain, fear of public restrooms, or laziness. When a child holds in the stool a combination of encouragement, fluids, fiber, and laxatives may be useful to overcome the problem.

Diagnosis

The diagnosis is essentially made from the patient's description of the symptoms. Bowel movements that are difficult to pass, very firm, or made up of small hard pellets (like those excreted by rabbits) qualify as constipation, even if they occur every day. Other symptoms related to constipation can include bloating, distension, abdominal pain, headaches, a feeling of fatigue and nervous exhaustion, or a sense of incomplete emptying.

Inquiring about dietary habits will often reveal a low intake of dietary fiber, inadequate amounts of fluids, poor ambulation or immobility, or medications that are associated with constipation.

During physical examination, scybala (manually palpable lumps of stool) may be detected on palpation of the abdomen. Rectal examination gives an impression of the anal sphincter tone and whether the lower rectum contains any feces or not. Rectal examination also gives information on the consistency of the stool, presence of hemorrhoids, admixture of blood and whether any tumors, polyps or abnormalities are present. Physical examination may be done manually by the physician, or by using a colonoscope. X-rays of the abdomen, generally only performed if bowel obstruction is suspected, may reveal extensive impacted fecal matter in the colon, and confirm or rule out other causes of similar symptoms.

Chronic constipation (symptoms present at least three days per month for more than three months) associated with abdominal discomfort is often diagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) when no obvious cause is found.

Colonic propagating pressure wave sequences (PSs) are responsible for discrete movements of the bowel contents and are vital for normal defecation. Deficiencies in PS frequency, amplitude and extent of propagation are all implicated in severe defecatory dysfunction (SDD). Mechanisms that can normalise these aberrant motor patterns may help rectify the problem. Recently the novel therapy of sacral nerve stimulation (SNS) has been utilized for the treatment of severe constipation.

Criteria

The Rome II Criteria for constipation require at least two of the following symptoms for 12 weeks or more over the period of a year:

• Straining with more than one-fourth of defecations
• Hard stool with more than one-fourth of defecations
• Feeling of incomplete evacuation with more than one-fourth of defecations
• Sensation of anorectal obstruction with more than one-fourth of defecations
• Manual maneuvers to facilitate more than one-fourth of defecations
• Fewer than three bowel movements per week
• Insufficient criteria for irritable bowel syndrome

Prevention

Constipation is usually easier to prevent than to treat. Following the relief of constipation, maintenance with adequate exercise, fluid intake, and high fiber diet is recommended. Children benefit from scheduled toilet breaks, once early in the morning and 30 minutes after meals.

Treatment

The main treatment of constipation involves the increased intake of water and fiber (either dietary or as supplements). The routine use of laxatives is discouraged, as having bowel movements may come to be dependent upon their use. Enemas can be used to provide a form of mechanical stimulation. However, enemas are generally useful only for stool in the rectum, not in the intestinal tract.

Laxatives

If laxatives are used, milk of magnesia is recommended as a first-line agent due to its low cost and safety. Stimulants should only be used if this is not effective.  In cases of chronic constipation, prokinetics may be used to improve gastrointestinal motility. A number of new agents have shown positive outcomes in chronic constipation; these include prucalopride, and lubiprostone.

Physical intervention

Constipation that resists the above measures may require physical intervention such as manual disimpaction (the physical removal of impacted stool using the hands; see Fecal impaction).

Pediatric

Lactulose and milk of magnesia have been compared with polyethylene glycol (PEG) in children. All had similar side effects, but PEG was more effective at treating constipation. Osmotic laxatives are recommended over stimulant laxatives.

Prognosis

Complications that can arise from constipation include hemorrhoids, anal fissures, rectal prolapse, and fecal impaction. Straining to pass stool may lead to hemorrhoids. In later stages of constipation, the abdomen may become distended, hard and diffusely tender. Severe cases ("fecal impaction" or malignant constipation) may exhibit symptoms of bowel obstruction (vomiting, very tender abdomen) and encopresis, where soft stool from the small intestine bypasses the mass of impacted fecal matter in the colon.

Epidemiology

Constipation is the most common digestive complaint in the United States as per survey data. Depending on the definition employed, it occurs in 2% to 20% of the population.  It is more common in women, the elderly and children. The reasons it occurs more frequently in the elderly is felt to be due to an increasing number of health problems as humans age and decreased physical activity.

• 12% of the population worldwide reports having constipation.
• Chronic constipation accounts for 3% of all visits annually to pediatric outpatient clinics.
• Constipation-related healthcare costs total $6.9 billion in the US annually.
• More than four million Americans have frequent constipation, accounting for 2.5 million physician visits a year.
• Around $725 million is spent on laxative products each year in America.

Reinstating the Draft is Not a Bad Idea

By Neil Snyder

It was fall of 1970. I was a junior in college, and by that time I had had the pleasure of getting to know several Vietnam War veterans who returned from Southeast Asia because of nonfatal injuries. It seemed as though several of them were in every class that I had, and they didn't mind talking with us about the war.

Although the war had been creating unrest on college campuses across the nation for some time, things intensified in May 1970 when several Kent State University students were shot and killed by members of the National Guard. In the wake of that horrific incident, the U.S. government moved to abolish the draft and replace it with a lottery.

It was a simple process. Each day of the year was drawn out of a hat, so to speak, and given a number. The first date drawn was number 1, and so on. Your lottery number was the number of your birthday. Thanks to the lottery, young men would be called up for duty starting with number 1 until the military had all the troops that it needed. If after 12 months you had not been called up, you were no longer eligible. The next year another lottery would be held for all able bodied 18 year old males.

While the draft was in effect, full-time college students got student deferrals. The lottery didn't change that policy. Each quarter as a part of the registration process, we were required to submit a form proving that we were enrolled in college. If we didn't submit the form, we were eligible for the draft immediately, but under the lottery if you failed to submit the form, you would be called up immediately if your number was low enough. That's one important reason why college enrollment exploded during the 1960s and 1970s.

Like B.C and A.D., the first lottery in the fall of 1970 divided my life on earth into two distinct parts: before this and after this. In advance of the lottery, military experts had informed us that people with numbers lower than about 150 were sure to see action in Vietnam. My number was 83. At age 20, I was forced to consider the very real possibility that after graduation I was going straight to Vietnam and that I might die.

Like most of my fellow classmates, I was young and foolish. Under the draft, there was at least a chance that I might not be called up, but my number in the lottery was so low that I was guaranteed to see action in Vietnam, or so I thought. Thus, I decided to forego the student deferral process beginning the next quarter and take my chances. I reasoned that I would be better off going to Vietnam before I graduated than postponing the inevitable until after graduation.

At the same time, President Nixon was winding down the war in Vietnam so my number was never called, but the thought process that I went through matured me in a hurry. For a calendar year, I believed that my life would end in a matter of months. That may sound like torture, but looking back on it, it wasn't. In fact, it's a part of my maturation process that I cherish, and one of my regrets in life is that I did not serve in the military.

Most young males in this country today don't have to go through that process, so they are free to fritter away their time playing on their Xboxes or marching with the Occupy Wall Street gang or getting into all kinds of mischief without having to consider the consequences of their actions. Because of the draft and the lottery we didn't have that luxury. If we got into trouble, we knew where we were going, and many of us went even if we didn't get into trouble.

In September 2011 when Occupy Wall Street began, the first thing that entered my mind was that we need to reinstate the draft or the lottery because those young people needed something meaningful to do with their time. Think of it as an attitude adjustment for young men with the side benefit of helping our nation. Unfortunately, they are growing up during a time when most of our citizens don't even pay federal income taxes. Even worse, most of them are the beneficiaries of government handout programs that produce noting of significance except deficits and debt.

It's time to put an end to this madness, and sequestration may be a blessing in disguise because it could force us to reconsider the draft. Bridget Johnson raised that possibility yesterday in an article for PJ Media titled "Will Obama's Defense Cuts Lead to a Military Draft?" She said,

If the military continues to be gutted under Obama, fewer men and women are expected to walk through the doors of recruiting offices. If there aren't enough men and women in uniform come the next conflict, will this administration or the next -- which will be left to mop up the damage at the Pentagon -- be forced to institute the draft?

Personally, I hope that we do reinstate the draft because it will help to reduce the cost associated with defending our nation. Additionally, although they may not realize it, those young people who are protesting because of the perceived lack of fairness in our society or campaigning for green energy to reduce C02 emissions or complaining about whatever will benefit more than they can imagine if we do.

The draft is a sobering process, and it sure beats paying people to do nothing. That's what the Occupy Wall Street crowd was doing for days, weeks, and months on end. It's obvious that they didn't have jobs. How were they supporting themselves? The answer: either they got money from the government or from mommy and daddy. In either case, they were learning to be dependent in an already dependent society, and that's got to change. The draft can help us move in the right direction.

As an aside, if my mother-in-law reads this, she will finally know what was going on in my mind when I met her daughter in the fall of 1970.

Neil Snyder is the Ralph A. Beeton Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia. His blog, SnyderTalk.com, is posted daily.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/03/reinstating_the_draft_is_not_a_bad_idea.html#ixzz2MII9Y01W

The Mental Illness Conundrum

By Harold Wilber

Most of the advocates for increased gun controls are disregarding the mentally ill in America.

Mental health issues are problems our nation's jails staff have been contending with for years. In 1971, while assigned as a custody officer at the Navy prison at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, I along with our staff psychiatrist and JAG officer (lawyer) visited the Massachusetts Correctional Institute for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts on Titticut Street. Several hundred patient-inmates were confined under appalling conditions there. In the large "smoke room" where smoking was allowed, there were four televisions up on opposite walls where the inmates could sit on long benches to watch. All of the televisions only flickered. Several inmates roamed the room in a trance talking and shouting to themselves and some wore football helmets so they would not injure themselves. The small clinic had bloody bandages on the floor, and a wing holding 80 inmates had to use "honey buckets" for toilets because there was no indoor plumbing. A staff member remarked about the progress being made with one elderly man because he was down to sexually servicing less than 10 inmates a night. Psychotropic drugs were controlling the population; professional staff was at a minimum. We were glad to leave and head north to our well-run prison.

The 1967 award-winning documentary film Titticut Follies initially shown only in Europe exposed the abhorrent conditions at Bridgewater. After court battles the film was released in the U.S., and the facility was closed. The film also created a major knee-jerk reaction with the closure of mental health institutions across the country. It was then assumed communities could provide better, more humane care for the mentally ill. Folly again for sure; communities did not receive the resources needed to do this, nor did the jails where those mentally ill not unexpectedly ended up.

Following my retirement from the Marine Corps, I worked as the Director of Detention and Community Control at the Broward County, Florida Sheriff's Office. There I learned that estimates place the number of mentally ill in jails at around 17 percent of their populations, and most of that number are also substance abusers. Nationally, the number of mentally ill persons behind bars is almost five times the number of patients in state mental health hospitals, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

Jail staff are not adequately trained and equipped to secure and care for someone so ill. Those mentally ill act out, offend, get arrested, go to jail and court, hopefully get some meds and treatment and are usually released shortly thereafter -- and are rearrested, sometimes within minutes. They are usually well known to police and it is not uncommon for jail staff to be on a first-name basis with those ill inmates that they truly do all they can for. But those same inmates leave our jails without support systems to sufficiently track them and care for them. So, those released don't take the three days of meds they may have been provided because they lost them, forgot or sold or traded them for dangerous drugs. And, again, sooner or later they are back in jail.

Recent tragic shootings in Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia and elsewhere have spawned ballyhoos for stricter gun control. While there may be room for some tightening of gun laws that comports with our Second Amendment, such outcry does not focus enough on the plight of the mentally ill in America. A simple fact of life is people have access to guns whether the people are good, bad, healthy or sick. So, it seems focus needs to be on people. And I maintain that bad people need to be confined, and those severely mentally ill need to be removed from society where they can be humanely treated and where they are not a threat to themselves or others.

History shows that all the world's people have a segment, albeit a small one, that just cannot function normally while free. That properly identified segment requires institutionalization with treatment for their own protection and the protection of others, any otherwise misguided notions notwithstanding. This can be done in a humane and cost-effective manner.

American jails have daily bed costs ranging from $50 to well over $100 in some jurisdictions. Most jails also house at great cost to taxpayers nonviolent criminals who don't need to be locked up to control their behavior. They can be placed in all kinds of restorative justice schemes where they pay back society for their misdeeds while keeping or getting a job. Accrued jails savings could then be used for needed mental hospitals. And finally, there can be unfathomed public cost avoidance as well as the absence of unimaginable tragedy caused by a deranged shooter that should have been placed in a mental institution for his or her own good.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/the_mentally_ill_conundrum.html#ixzz2MHebDObe

The importance of morale

                   I just cannot say it enough.

                        In my case, sitting by a fire in a wood stove that makes heat is good for my morale and is a good deal to me.  And today is March 1st, and there is snow and other such chilly things out and about where I live. But the warm stove, and even the warm stew it makes, is good for my morale.  Even barely warm rock gut coffee is OK.

            I especially like the expectation during my cold times that proceed. And especially during the early morning times.

            And my old bones may be cold, but my morale from the heat is warm, like OK.

            Enough said.

Will Obama's defense cuts lead to a military draft?
 

Forces will be stripped, recruitment will be difficult, and gutting defense "will threaten the foundations of the all-volunteer force" as crises abound.

by Bridget Johnson

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) today echoed the concerns of those who fear President Obama has shown a willingness to break the military through repeated cuts and a low prioritization in saving operational and maintenance funds over pet domestic programs.

“The cuts he continues to insist on, while below the level of sequestration, are still severe enough to hollow out our force. This approach forces me to conclude that the president, for all his stump speeches and props, wants the sequester to happen,” McKeon wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed. “The president is forcing America to indulge him in this dangerous experiment with national security.”

That experiment, as military leaders have told committee after committee in hearings leading up to Friday’s sequestration, would scar military readiness to a point where this superpower may not be able to bounce back.

Training will be skipped. Flight hours will be cut. Even Special Forces are not immune from the hit.

Obama has ordered military pay to be excluded from the cuts, even as roughly 750,000 civilian employees — political appointees and foreign nationals excluded — face furloughs that amount to a 20 percent pay cut. That cuts into the support staff for military operations.

And a recurring theme under the surface of the daunting figures thrown out by the chiefs of staff lately is fear for the very future of America’s all-volunteer military force.

If the military continues to be gutted under Obama, fewer men and women are expected to walk through the doors of recruiting offices. If there aren’t enough men and women in uniform come the next conflict, will this administration or the next — which will be left to mop up the damage at the Pentagon — be forced to institute the draft?

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing earlier this month, Marine Corps Commandant James Amos warned that sequestration “invalidates the careful planning of the services to manage a predictable resource decline, replacing it instead with a dramatic resourcing cliff that guarantees inefficiency, waste in its accommodation.”

“The effects of sequestration, over the long term, will threaten the foundations of the all-volunteer force, putting the nation’s security on a vector that is potentially ruinous,” Amos said. “It dramatically shapes perceptions of our government, as both an employer and as a customer, reducing confidence throughout institutions.”

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno predicted cuts “will impact our units’ basic warfighting skills and induce shortfalls across critical specialties, including aviation, intelligence, engineering, and even our ability to recruit soldiers into our Army.”

The Pentagon was hit by $487 billion in cuts and a continuing resolution that tied its hands in directing funding to needed operations before the $500 billion sequestration tab was added on.

“We must be mindful of the corrosive effect of this uncertainty on the morale of our people and be vigilant regarding the potential effects of sequestration on the propensity of our force to stay with us and of new recruits to join,” said Adm. Mark Ferguson, vice chief of Naval Operations.

Leaders reiterated these warnings to the House Armed Services panel the next day.

“The effects of sequestration over the next 10 years will threaten the foundations of the all-volunteer force, putting the nation’s security on a vector that is potentially dangerous,” Amos said.

At a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing this week on the impacts of budget cuts on military strength, lawmakers heard confirmation that despite Obama’s pledge to put troops first that many may be on the chopping block.

“In the case of the Army, we will come to a point where unfortunately we’ll have to use some involuntary separation measures,” Army Deputy Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Howard B. Bromberg testified. “In the case of the Army, it will probably be about 24,000 enlisted and about 7,000 officers.”

Why Obama has been lackadaisical about the risks posed by force reduction and readiness cuts may reflect his unwillingness to fight new battles after campaign-talking-point pullouts from Iraq and, next year, Afghanistan. His desire for major cuts in nuclear weapons and endorsement of the Global Zero initiative reflect a worldview willing to power down regardless of moves taken by nefarious regimes or terrorist entities.

Even Obama’s proposal to avert the sequester, which puts 50 percent of the cuts on a department that uses 18 percent of the budget, would take $250 billion out of the military in addition to tax hikes.

His new Defense secretary, fueled by opposition to the Iraq war, said in 2004 he was “not so sure that isn’t a bad idea” to bring back the draft.

Appearing with Chuck Hagel on an episode of the Today show back then, Sen. Joe Biden said he didn’t rule out a draft, adding, “I don’t think it’s necessary now.”

“The whole notion of shared burden is something we should be talking about well beyond the issue of just the draft,” Biden said in a statement that could similarly apply to the administration’s fairness doctrine on tax rates.

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) this month advocated the use of a draft as an anti-war tool, saying “if a president can’t convince the Congress to support the draft, then he should not be bringing the question of war in front of the Congress or the American people.”

“If this country has its security threatened, I would like to believe that all of us, no matter how old we are, would want to do something. And in this case, it will be universal,” he said. “…Listen, the military takes what it can get.”

Rangel introduced a bill after the Pentagon’s announcement women would be allowed in combat roles to require Selective Service registration for all, effective 60 days after the bill’s passage. It has one co-sponsor, Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.).

Still, Reps. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) and Mike Coffman (R-Colo.) have re-launched a quiet effort to eliminate the Selective Service altogether, arguing that the office is antiquated and is a waste of $24 million a year.

“The Selective Service System was never meant to be permanent. Now, 31 years and over $700 million later, Congress has yet to give serious consideration to establishing a conscripted force,” Coffman, a combat veteran, wrote in 2011 after first introducing the bill. “It is time to end the registration requirement and dismantle the Selective Service System.”
 

Bridget Johnson is a career journalist whose news articles and opinion columns have run in dozens of news outlets across the globe. Bridget first came to Washington to be online editor at The Hill, where she wrote The World from The Hill column on foreign policy. Previously she was an opinion writer and editorial board member at the Rocky Mountain News and nation/world news columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News. She has contributed to USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, Politico and more, and has myriad television and radio credits as a commentator. Bridget is Washington Editor for PJ Media.

How to make charcoal

       People have been making charcoal for thousands of years. It is not rocket science, and has advantages over wood.

            There are many ways to do it. One can simply search on the internet to find one of the zillions of ways that might also fit their situation.

            Here's one simple way to provide you an idea.

            The link is:  http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Charcoal

            And here's one video link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xpWBgkuNRE

March Sky: Fertile Crescent Moon

The crescent moon offers more than bedtime story symbolism.

By Corey S. Powell 

The crescent moon is one of most ubiquitous symbols of the night sky, and one of the most misunderstood. Children’s books are rife with crescents, often used to signal that a story ends at bedtime. And yet for those of us north of the equator, almost all of those moons face the wrong way: illuminated on the left, like a letter C.

In reality, at mid-northern latitudes, the evening crescent moon is lit up on the right, facing toward the western sky where the sun has just set. The left-illuminated moon is the one we see when it appears just before dawn, a cruel time to put a child to sleep.

Look closely at a thin waxing crescent—you’ll see a nice example on the 16th of this month—and you will notice that you can dimly see the rest of the moon as well. This is traditionally called “the old moon in the new moon’s arms.” You are looking at moon rocks reflecting the light of the Earth, which shines nearly 50 times as brilliantly in the lunar sky as the moon does in ours.

 

 

‘Mystery meat’ takes on a whole new meaning

 

By Christie Wilcox

From Discover Magazine 

In case you didn’t hear, the big news in the food industry this week is the fact that — *gasp* — horsemeat has been detected in Burger King burgers and Ikea’s Swedish meatballs. Noses worldwide are turning up in disgust at the use of such crude ingredients in ground beef products.*

There’s no doubt that a good part of the fuss is that, for some of the Western world, horsemeat is taboo. Many people have an immediate, visceral reaction to the notion of eating horse, just like Americans generally react strongly to the idea of eating dogs. While our preferences are culturally rooted, the recent labeling exposures don’t just offend our palates. As consumers, we rely on retailers and restaurants to give us accurate information about which foods we are buying — whether it be to avoid allergies, follow religious preferences, choose more sustainable options, or count calories. Now, DNA barcoding is exposing just how often we are duped.

Labeling isn’t a European problem. In South Africa, game is a popular alternative to beef, with over 2.5 million hectares of land dedicated to farming a wide variety of wild meats. But a study published in Investigative Genetics today found that more than 3/4 of the game samples they tested were not the animal they said they were. Cuts labeled as wild game species were identified as horse, kangaroo, pork, lamb, and a suite of African animals not on the labels. The most prevalent substitution occurred for products labeled kudu (92% were mislabeled). A different South African study tells a similar story. A study of beef products in South Africa published earlier this week found that 68% of samples contained species not declared in the product label, including donkey, buffalo, goat and pork, and almost a third of the products contained soy and gluten, even though the labels didn’t tell the consumer that. But, they didn’t find any horsemeat in their beef.

In the US, studies have found that more than 1/3 of all US fish are mislabeled. A recent Oceana report found that 39% of fish sold in NY grocery stores, fish markets and sushi restaurants were not the fish they claimed to be, building on their earlier findings of in Boston (48%), Los Angeles (55%), and Miami (31%). Every single one of the 16 sushi restaurants tested sold mislabeled fish. Some species were substituted more often — 69% of the tuna sold wasn’t tuna, and thirteen different species were sold falsely under the label “red snapper”. But perhaps the worst part was that 94% of white tuna sold was actually escolar, a fish species known to cause poisoning. While the world is fretting about horses, I’d rather eat a little horsemeat than diarrhea-inducing escolar any day.

Why does it seem so hard for the world to correctly label the species in our stores? Part of the problem is that there is high economic incentive to lie. Species that are worth top dollar are particularly lucrative to forge. Until now, exposing such fraud has been difficult, as many species look the same once they’re ground, cut or filleted. But now, we can test foods on the genetic level, allowing us to identify all species present. Given these frauds have real financial, religious, ethical and public health ramifications, it seems past time that genetic testing become a constant part of the regulatory process.

Actually enacting such legislation, however, has proven difficult. In the UK, the the Food Standards Authority was quick to commission genetic testing after the scandal hit, but beforehand, testing had been declining for years. In the US, the USDA only genetically tests meat when there is a reason to suspect horseplay. And despite our clear fish labeling problem, no action was taken when the Safety And Fraud Enforcement for Seafood (SAFE Seafood) Act was introduced last year. If we want to improve labeling, we need to push our governments and tell them that genetic testing is non-negotiable.

Perhaps, though, it is also time to look inward and reflect on our own cultural biases. What makes a cow so much better to eat than a horse, anyway? Why not make burgers out of insects? In a world where fishery after fishery collapses under our demand and livestock threatens our land, air and water resources, perhaps we need to diversify our idea of what is fit for our plates, and ultimately seek to minimize our ecological footprint by any food necessary. If there is anything that our labeling failures have exposed, it is the need to closely examine the animals we consume and the ways we catch or farm them to determine the best ones for us, both in terms of nutrition and by measures of sustainability.

* Just to put things in perspective, according to American Beef Standards cheek meat (read: beef face) is a fine additive. 30% fat? No problem! You don’t even want to know what parts of the cow go into the grinder… Heck, Taco Bell’s “meat filling” only has to be 40% meat to pass. But no, not the horses!

Citations:
-Jacquet J.L. & Pauly D. (2008). Trade secrets: Renaming and mislabeling of seafood, Marine Policy, 32 (3) 309-318. DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2007.06.007
-Where is the game? Wild meat products authentication in South Africa: a case study. Maria E D’Amato, Evguenia Alechine, Kevin W Cloete, Sean Davison and Daniel Corach Investigative Genetics (in press)
-Cawthorn D.M., Steinman H.A. & Hoffman L.C. (2013). A high incidence of species substitution and mislabelling detected in meat products sold in South Africa, Food Control, 32 (2) 440-449. DOI: 10.1016/j.foodcont.2013.01.008

The Democratic Majority Is Doomed

The entitlement mentality can't survive a weak economy.

By PETE DU PONT

Many argue the coalition that elected and re-elected Barack Obama represents a long-term shift in the electorate that will determine elections and public policies for generations. Some of commentators think conservatives have lost their relevance, and the Republicans are about to go the way of the Whigs.

It's an interesting theory, but of course it's wrong. Politics, like much in life, tends to move like a pendulum, shifting back and forth around equilibrium. While the liberal Democratic coalition is ascendant now, a few decades ago people were speaking about the decline of the Democrats. More recently, leftists took to calling themselves "progressives" to avoid what was seen as the pejorative term "liberal." And just over two years ago, the Democrats took a drubbing in the midterm elections. Today, with the real-time flow of unfiltered information via blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and more Americans self-identifying as independents and able to shift their support rapidly to either party, lasting coalitions will be difficult to maintain.

But the primary reason today's liberal Democratic coalition will fade is because the very policies it pushes sow the seeds of its own destruction. The coalition can survive over time only by allocating slices of our nation's economic pie in a way that favors and placates its constituent members. But people, being human, will continually want larger slices of our economic resources, so continued success in placating those members, while at the same time adding the necessary new members, requires a continuing and ever-growing economy. A flat or shrinking economy will never generate the resources needed to feed the coalition.

Yet the White House and congressional Democrats are working to stifle economic growth. From their views on taxes and redistribution, to their policies on energy and regulation, liberal Democrats are standing in the way of the strong economy their coalition needs.

Instead of pushing policies that spur innovation and risk-taking, the left advances policies that discourage them. Instead of lower marginal tax rates and less complication in the federal tax code, we see higher rates and more complication. We see new taxes in ObamaCare and the partial expiration of the Bush cuts. California's new tax on millionaires brings the state rate to more than 13%, and the combined federal and state rate to almost 52%. The high rates are discouraging at least some wealthy taxpayers from staying in or moving to the state. As federal rates increase, such economic discouragement will be found across the nation.

Instead of policies that lead to the available and affordable energy supplies required for a growing economy, we see onerous new regulations on coal-fired electricity plants, foot-dragging in the permitting for oil and gas drilling, and a surprising lack of interest in the hydrofracturing process that has revolutionized the extraction of natural gas and worked to lower energy costs.

Instead of thinking of the government's role in the economy as one of providing the minimum rules for fairness, ensuring those rules are enforced, and then getting out of way, we see efforts to push federal bureaucrats—and their ever-expanding government programs, regulations and mandates—into more and more facets of the world in which we live and work.

The toll on the economy is real. According to a report by Sentier Research released last fall, inflation-adjusted median household income has fallen more since the end of the recession in mid-2009 (down by 4.8%) than it did during the actual recession (2.6%).

Without economic growth, other means are needed to mollify the coalition. So we see warnings of disaster if the left's policies are not pursued. We see over-the-top claims about the damage to be caused by having to cut federal spending in sequestration—by less than 2.5%. We see attempts to gin up phony wars against women and minorities. We see efforts to come up with even more groups that are labeled as "victims" in need of the federal government's help. The coalition is fueled by a growing sense of entitlement. But without robust economic growth, this very same sense of entitlement will drive the coalition's decline.

In the short term, the coalition can help delay this decline by picking the right standard-bearer in 2016. It is clear that at least some of the liberal Democratic coalition exists because of the historical nature of Barack Obama as the first black president. While a candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 would bring her own sense of history and excitement to the coalition, Joe Biden, while a nice guy, would not.

Ultimately, the coalition will collapse under its own weight. Such shifts take time, and conservatives and Republicans can, and should, do what they can to hasten the collapse. They need to advocate more effectively a set of policies that will reverse America's decline—and do a better job of explaining the benefits for individuals, families and businesses that come when we have lowered tax rates instead of increased them; the benefit of the independence that comes from a smaller federal government instead of a larger one; and the overall well-being and safety our nation enjoys when our economy is strong.