P.S. Where do you think yogis fall on the nerd vs. jock spectrum?

From the article:

There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

So poignant!  Have you ever wondered why in the world it is that hospitals, whose sole reason for being is to keep people healthy, consistently serve highly-processed, un-fresh, terrible-tasting food to their patients?  We have…

And so the government is poised to go on encouraging America’s fast-food diet with its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that diet. To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

Luckily, signs from the Obama administration suggest that food reform is, in fact, on the future agenda (i.e. Michele Obama’s White House garden, President Obama’s remarks about a possible soda tax.)  And we certainly hope so, because if the food industry giants of today have their way, they’ll be stamping processed, sugar-filled children’s breakfast cereals like Cocoa Krispies and Froot Loops with tragically misleading labels like “Smart Choices”!  …Oh wait, they already are.

[New York Times]

1) The Washington Post highlights yoga people who make a difference! It’s often observed that the overwhelming majority of stories covered by the news media are negative ones, but this Washington Post piece is a shining example to the contrary.  We’re so pleased that a newspaper as established and respected as the Post took the time to write about these amazingly impressive “do-gooder” yoga organizations.  The groups featured include Sprout Yoga, which works to bring free yoga classes to post-traumatic stress and eating disorder sufferers, Upward Bound, which brings yoga to low-income kids, and Street Yoga, which teaches at-risk homeless youths, sexual abuse victims, and more.  We hope that the next time a news journal writes a piece on this topic, they remember to include Yoga Bear, a non-profit dedicated to bringing yoga to cancer survivors.  [Activists Aim to Make Yoga An Exercise in Accessibility]

2) Mercury is basically in every single fish in the universe. Yikes!  Is it the case that while we try to identify specific fish and their home waters as relatively low-risk when it comes to mercury, the truth is that mercury can be found in all fish everywhere?  What’s a lacto-ovo vegetarian to do? [Federal Study Shows Mercury in Fish Widespread]

3) (From the “Is This Really News” Department): Ex-wall street exec quits her job to teach yoga. Really, now – should this story truly be news? People change career tracks every day, and teaching yoga is certainly a popular career option, hence the abundance of yoga teacher training programs offered across the country.  But for some reason (probably a combination of the Wall Street/ivy league/young woman elements of this story), a plethora of news organizations have written about this, including the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and New York Magazine.  Check it out yourself to learn more about one woman’s choice to ditch the high-powered banking exec life in favor of the peace-and-love yoga life. [Princeton Grad Quits Morgan Stanley to Teach Yoga to Bankers]

4) Random fact of the day: Did you know that the uber well-known economist Paul Krugman (a Nobel Prize-winning Princeton professor who regularly writes op-ed pieces for the New York Times) is married to a yoga teacher?  This bit of trivia goes along with the  “Major Political Figures With Yoga Practices” post we ran earlier this year. ) Robin Wells Krugman is an economics professor at Princeton who also happens to teach Forrest Yoga at Four Winds Yoga Studio in Princeton, New Jersey. For proof of this exciting addition to the roster of yogis in politics, just read this.

5) The Landmark Form. It’s a “transformational” personal-growth weekend-workshop around whom the accusation of “cult” has often flittered.  Many of you are probably familiar with this workshop, and some well-known yoga businesses even sponsor their employees to attend it.  Interestingly, the notable magazine Mother Jones recently sent one of their reporters to the Landmark Forum armed with the task of experiencing and writing about it.  The title of the article is “The Landmark Forum: 42 Hours, $500, 65 Breakdowns: My lost weekend with the trademark happy, bathroom-break hating, slightly spooky inheritors of est.”  The article isn’t quite the scathing expose that Landmark opponents might hope for, but it’s certainly critical and eye-rolling in its tone.  Check it out here if you’re so inclined!

6) In the health and science department, the New York Times ran a piece titled “Does Exercise Reduce Your Cancer Risk?” (the answer is a tentative yes) and another about a newly-revealed fact about an insidious connection between the brain and stress: “The sensation of being highly stressed can rewire the brain in ways that promote its sinister persistence.”  Oh no!  (“Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop“)

7) From the “Scary Water Bottling Companies You Might Not Want to Support With Your Dollars!” department: A brutal military dictatorship backs Fiji water.

Fiji Water isn’t just devastating to the environment of Fiji, the planet that endures the cost of shipping it, and the environments of the places where it is consumed. It is also the product of a brutal military regime that monitors all outgoing Internet traffic from the island for criticisms of the water business and immediately arrests people who transmit them, bringing them in for intensive questioning and the occasional prison-rape threat, as journalist Anna Lenzer discovered.

[Brutal Military Dictatorship That Backs Fiji Water]

The corporate chain Whole Foods, many a yogis’ grocery store of choice (except for those yogis who prefer to support local, independently-owned businesses, of course), has come under harsh criticism and even organized boycotting since its CEO and frontman John Mackey published a pointed op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

In his commentary, Mackey expressed his wholehearted disagreement with the health care reform plan which is being proposed by Democrats.  In boiled-down terms, he is ardently against universal health care and thinks we should be moving toward “less government control and more individual empowerment” when it comes to the American health care system.  He even argues against the belief that all people have an intrinsic right to health care, instead claiming that:

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges.

Wow! Whole Foods customers tend to be health-conscious, yoga-practicing, progressive-leaning types who are certainly supporters of universal health care.  With this WSJ piece, Whole Foods’ CEO just opened up the floodgates to controversy and criticism from a huge swath of his most frequent shoppers.

The backlash has so far ranged from an op-ed piece in today’s Los Angeles Times to coordinated boycotts and a new anti-Whole Foods Facebook page.  Whole Foods has also reportedly set up a special hotline to field phone calls from angry customers as well an online forum dedicated to this issue on its website.

What will become of this whole debacle?  Will Whole Foods see any significant drop in dollars from boycotts, and will John Mackey honestly re-evaluate his rather conservative views on health care?  Let’s stay tuned to find out!

P.S. Should it really be that much of a surprise that the CEO of a major, publicly-traded corporation which grossed nearly $8 billion dollars last year would turn out to be… conservative?  Just wonderin’.

Here are pertinent links to explore to find out more about this Whole Foods controversy:

Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by Whole Foods CEO Jack Mackey

Los Angeles Times op-ed piece in response

Whole Foods Boycott Facebook page

Whole Foods website health care reform forum

“Many of them are people who would otherwise be in church,” Putnam said. “They have the same attitidues and values as people who are in church, but they grew up in a period in which being religious meant being politically conservative, especially on social issues.”

Putnam says that in the past two decades, many young people began to view organized religion as a source of “intolerance and rigidity and doctrinaire political views,” and therefore stopped going to church.

While this article is thought-provoking in and of itself, we also enjoyed reading a piece by Tara Stiles of The Huffington Post which discusses Putnam’s study in a passionate manner.  Stiles is a yoga instructor who rejects organized religion herself, and in this opinion piece, she argues strongly that the practice of yoga is a fulfilling alternative to the rigid nature of religion.  Titled “Generation X: Praying To No One?”, we found this commentary quite compelling, and judging from the multiple pages of reader comments at the article’s end, other people did too.  Check it out!

In addition to discovering that Rahm Emanuel practices yoga, it turns out that his yoga instructor Pary Williamson also teaches New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and Meet the Press host David Gregory.

The fact that political heavyweights Rahm Emanuel, Maureen Dowd, and David Gregory all practice yoga is definitely fascinating trivia to share with your politically-literate yoga friends!

[HuffPost]

2) Over this past weekend, a cupcake-eating contest was held at a bakery in Brooklyn, New York.  The winning contestant, who consumed 17 frickin’ cupcakes in 5 short minutes, was a yoga instructor named Nancy Cummings.  She credited her yoga practice with giving her the winning edge over her competitors (who we assume don’t practice yoga?), stating that “I am disciplined and focused and I can digest them faster.”  Let’s ponder that one for awhile…

3) Donna Karan, the famous fashion designer who has received much attention from the yoga world due to her powerful work promoting yoga within the medical field, held a nutrition conference at her Urban Zen Foundation in New York City a couple of weekends ago.  Here’s a recent article by Tara Stiles of The Huffington Post about Donna Karan’s work with yoga and health care, and here’s a video interview which Tara conducted with Donna at the nutrition conference the other weekend.

4) This article seemed to pop up wherever we turned on the internet last week, but just in case you didn’t see it, check out this charming 83-year-old yoga teacher in Australia who still easily busts out intense poses like mayurasana and bakasana to this day.  Oh yeah, there was also an article making the rounds last week about a 90-year-old yoga instructor at a senior center in New Jersey.  Wowza!

5) Lastly, in the “random” category, we were particularly entertained by this article entitled “4 Things To Consider Before You Try To Join The Amish“.  It’s witty and informative at the same time!  Did you know, for example, that there is a chain store in Ohio called Spector’s which is designed specifically for Amish customers?  They carry products like quilting supplies and fabric and other necessities of Amish life.  (Ironically, we just tried to find a website for Spector’s, but they don’t seem to have one.   How appropriate, huh?)