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Cutting Out Even a Little Salt Can Have Big Health Benefits

Sometimes, seemingly small changes in a health measurement can make a very large difference to people’s well-being. Such is the case with the effect on blood pressure of the essential nutrient sodium, the problematic half of the popular flavoring agent sodium chloride, commonly known as salt.

The amount of salt that is safe for people to consume has been embroiled in controversy for a century. Scores of studies of varying quality linking sodium intake and health have swung the pendulum back and forth, stymieing regulations to limit sodium in most commercially prepared foods. Some people are especially sensitive to sodium’s ability to raise blood pressure, but given how common high blood pressure already is, and how difficult it is to avoid consuming too much salt, many experts maintain that the safest approach is an overall reduction in sodium levels in prepared and processed foods.

More than 100 million Americans have high blood pressure, a disorder that increases their risk of heart attacks and strokes, and which, for many people, is made worse by consuming too much sodium. Just a four-millimeter rise in blood pressure — say, from 130 to 134 millimeters of mercury — can jeopardize the health of some people, and the blood pressure of those who are especially salt-sensitive can rise by 10 or more millimeters of mercury on a typical high-salt diet. In 2010, a Stanford University team estimated that cutting about 350 milligrams of sodium a day (less than a sixth of a teaspoon) would lower systolic blood pressure by only 1.25 millimeters of mercury yet avert about a million strokes and heart attacks.

The human species evolved on a very low-sodium diet of 200 to 600 milligrams a day. In fact, our bodies are designed to conserve sodium and get rid of potassium, which explains why a high-sodium diet can be a problem.

Though doctors have long argued that Americans should consume less salt, the wheels of regulatory action turn at a glacial pace, and modifying people’s taste buds is equally challenging.

INSTRUCTIONS: HOW TO INSTALL A WASHING MACHINE

1. Hook Up the Drain Line. Depending upon your machine, you might have to hook up the drain connection to the back of the machine with a hose clamp. Sometimes, the drain connection is already installed. If yours is the latter, simply push the drain line into the drain line standpipe before plugging in the machine.

2. Test the Machine. Lastly, begin a test load to ensure the washer is working properly. When you begin the test load, check the water lines at all four connections for signs of a leak. Allow the machine to go through the full process so you can watch for proper drainage as well. Watching the machine carefully this first time can save you from a flood or maybe even a small leak that you may not catch right away.

3. Place the Machine. Using a dolly or a strong helper, carefully position the washing machine very close to the wall with the drain, hose outlets, and power outlet for beginning the process.

4. Plug in the Machine. Plug in the electric cord before you push the washer into the final position. Turn on the water lines.

5. Connect the Water Hoses. Then, connect the washing machine hoses to the water outlets behind the washing machine. Note that the outlets on the machine are "hot" and "cold." Keep track of the hoses so you can remember to hook them into the appropriate hot and cold valves.

Manuais de instrução trazem, em passos, etapas para instalação de máquinas. O texto dado explica como instalar uma máquina de lavar roupas. Entretanto, no texto, as etapas para esse procedimento estão desorganizadas. De acordo com o contexto, organize a sequência das etapas apresentadas em 1, 2, 3, 4 e 5.

Men Adrift
Cynthia Fuchs Epstein
The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi, William Morrow & Co., 1999 662 pp. $27.50

Scores of men, their wives and partners, friends and kin, and the sharks that have exploited them come alive through Faludi’s keen reporting. The men she writes about are presented as prototypes of the generation of baby-boomer men who have experienced layoffs, broken promises of upard mobility, the Vietnam War, meaningless work, and new definitions of “what it means to be a man” in contemporary America. A further “cause” of their plight, she writes, is the emphasis on celebrity in American culture. The narratives in Faludi’s book are woven through with themes of loss and the substitution of superficial values for the “real” values of meaningful work.

Faludi asserts that many men today feel “shipwrecked” in a service economy, but that this is only the start of their troubles. Victims of downsizing and de-skilling, they no longer play breadwinner roles in their families and develop difficulties in their marriages. In some cases, wives they once supported now support them.

Through this book she hopes to make men conscious of their condition and to encourage them to mobilize in ways approximating the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This is a commendable task, but it is doubtful whether men will either accept its premises or identify with the individuals Faludi refers to in making her case.

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Bolsa Família - a decade of social inclusion in Brazil A decade debunking myths and exceeding expectations

In 2003, the Bolsa Família Program (BFP) was taking its first steps, with a broad set of challenges still ahead. Its objectives were to contribute to the social inclusion of families constrained by extreme poverty by providing immediate relief to their situation, and to stimulate improvements to their education and health, in order to cease the intergenerational cycle of poverty reproduction. It was necessary to unify existing sectoral programs of cash transfer, consolidate the Unified Registry for Social Programs (Cadastro Único para Programas Sociais – CadÚnico), create a federal strategy for its management, monitor the conditionalities and ensure supply and access to basic services. Ten years later, the objectives were fully achieved and, in most cases, surpassed. Based on its wide coverage, excellent focus and significant impacts on the living conditions of the population, the success of the BFP is evident

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The asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs gave birth to our planet’s tropical rainforests, a study suggests. Researchers used fossil pollen and leaves from Colombia to investigate how the impact changed South American tropical forests. After the 12 km-wide space rock struck Earth 66 million years ago, the type of vegetation that made up these forests changed drastically.

The team has outlined its findings in the prestigious journal Science. Co-author Dr Mónica Carvalho, from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institution in Panama, said: “Our team examined over 50,000 fossil pollen records and more than 6,000 leaf fossils from before and after the impact.” They found that cone-bearing plants called conifers and ferns were common before the huge asteroid struck what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

But after the devastating impact, plant diversity declined by roughly 45% and extinctions were widespread, particularly among seed-bearing plants. While the forests recovered over the next six million years, angiosperms, or flowering plants, came to dominate them.

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There is no agent of ecological imperialism more ferocious than the wild pig. Wherever Europeans invaded, from the Americas to Australia, so did their pigs, many of which escaped into the countryside to wreak havoc. The beasts tear through native plants and animals, they spread disease, they destroy crops, and they reconstruct whole ecosystems in their wake. They’re not so much pests as they are chaos embodied.

Now add climate change to the wild pig’s résumé of destruction. In their never-ending search for food, the pigs root through soils, churning the dirt like a farmer tills fields. Scientists already knew, to some extent, that this releases the carbon that’s locked in the soil, but researchers in Australia, New Zealand, and the US have now calculated how much soil wild pigs may be disturbing worldwide. The carbon dioxide emissions that they produce annually, the authors concluded, equal that of more than a million cars.

It’s yet another piece of an increasingly worrisome puzzle, showing how modification of the land has — in this case, inadvertently — exacerbated climate change. “Anytime you disturb soil, you’re causing emissions,” says University of Queensland ecologist Christopher O’Bryan, lead author on a new paper describing the research in the journal Global Change Biology. “When you till soil for agriculture, for example, or you have widespread land-use change — urbanization, forest loss.”

Given their domination of whole landscapes, pigs had to be making things worse, the researchers knew, but no one had modeled it worldwide. “We started to realize there’s a big gap at the global scale looking at this question,” O’Bryan adds.

Texto

Mudam-se os tempos, mudam-se as vontades

Mudam-se os tempos, mudam-se as vontades,
Muda-se o ser, muda-se a confiança;
Todo o mundo é composto de mudança,
Tomando sempre novas qualidades.

Continuamente vemos novidades,
Diferentes em tudo da esperança;
Do mal ficam as mágoas na lembrança,
E do bem, se algum houve, as saudades.

O tempo cobre o chão de verde manto,
Que já coberto foi de neve fria,
E em mim converte em choro o doce canto.

E, afora este mudar-se cada dia,
Outra mudança faz de mor espanto:
Que não se muda já como soía.

The climate expert Nina Lakhani thinks that “Jennifer Lawrence’s character will resonate with many female climate scientists”.

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Americans sure love their coffee. Even last spring when the pandemic shut down New York, nearly every neighborhood shop that sold takeout coffee managed to stay open, and I was amazed at how many people ventured forth to start their stay-at-home days with a favorite store-made brew

All of us should be happy to know that whatever it takes to secure that favorite cup of coffee may actually help to keep us healthy. The latest assessments of the health effects of coffee and caffeine, its main active ingredient, are reassuring indeed. Their consumption has been linked to a reduced risk of all kinds of ailments, including Parkinson’s disease, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, gallstones, depression, suicide, cirrhosis, liver cancer, melanoma and prostate cancer.

In fact, in numerous studies conducted throughout the world, consuming four or five eight-ounce cups of coffee (or about 400 milligrams of caffeine) a day has been associated with reduced death rates. In a study of more than 200,000 participants followed for up to 30 years, those who drank three to five cups of coffee a day, with or without caffeine, were 15 percent less likely to die early from all causes than were people who shunned coffee. Perhaps most dramatic was a 50 percent reduction in the risk of suicide among both men and women who were moderate coffee drinkers, perhaps by boosting production of brain chemicals that have antidepressant effects.

As a report published last summer by a research team at the Harvard School of Public Health concluded, although current evidence may not warrant recommending coffee or caffeine to prevent disease, for most people drinking coffee in moderation “can be part of a healthy lifestyle.”

It wasn’t always thus. I’ve lived through decades of sporadic warnings that coffee could be a health hazard. Over the years, coffee’s been deemed a cause of conditions such as heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes, pancreatic cancer, anxiety disorder, nutrient deficiencies, gastric reflux disease, migraine, insomnia, and premature death. As recently as 1991, the World Health Organization listed coffee as a possible carcinogen. In some of the now-discredited studies, smoking, not coffee drinking (the two often went hand-in-hand) was responsible for the purported hazard.

De acordo com o texto, no passado, o consumo de café era considerado como causa de certas doenças. Conforme as pesquisas atuais mencionadas no texto, algumas dessas mesmas doenças podem ter seu risco reduzido pelo café.

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The Last Kingdom

The Last Kingdom is a contemporary story of redemption, vengeance and self-discovery set against the birth of England. The series combines real historical figures and events with fiction, retelling the history of King Alfred the Great and his desire to unite the many separate kingdoms into what would become England.

Set in the 9th century AD, many of the separate kingdoms of what we now know as England have fallen to the invading Vikings, only the great Kingdom of Wessex stands defiant under its visionary King Alfred the Great. It is the last kingdom. Against this turbulent backdrop lives Uhtred. Born the son of a Saxon nobleman, he is orphaned by the Vikings and then kidnapped and raised as one of their own. Forced to choose between the country of his birth and the people of his upbringing, his loyalties are ever tested. What is he — Saxon or Viking? On a quest to claim his birthright, Uhtred must tread a dangerous path between both sides if he is to play his part in the birth of a new nation and, ultimately, recapture his ancestral lands.

The Last Kingdom is a show of heroic deeds and epic battles but with a thematic depth that embraces politics, religion, warfare, courage, love, loyalty and our universal search for identity. Combining real historical figures and events with fictional characters, it is the story of how a people combined their strength under one of the most iconic kings of history in order to reclaim their land for themselves and build a place they call home.

Complete the sentences bellow with the correct form of the verbs in parenthesis:

I - I have __________________ (eat) sushi before.

II - He __________________ (break) his foot.

III - They__________________(finish)their projects yesterday.

IV - She hasn’t __________________ (send) the email yet.