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vegetable food MANILA, Philippines Grow vegetables in your garden. Change yourmind-set about rice it does not always define a complete meal. Buyproduce from organic farmers. These are simple, eco-friendly ways for consumers in Metro Manilato stave off a looming food crisis, according to the PhilippineRural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM), an NGO that advocates ruraldevelopment. Wherever you may be, whether you re an urbanite or a promdi (fromthe province), you can lend a hand in growing food. Just [do]simple gardening in a small plot of 50 square meters, PRRM seniorvice president Isagani Serrano said Tuesday. Serrano gave a talk on the NGO perspective on the food crisisduring a forum organized by the House committee on human rightschaired by Quezon Rep. Lorenzo Ta

George was having a fine time with our little cooking exercise. He was eager to pour, eager to measure and especially eager to whisk. But he was not eager to taste. "I don't like vegetables," George announced. His almost 4 1/2-year-old palate had seen the enemy, and it was green. Or maybe red, if you counted the pepper we had just added to the bowl. Getting some kids to eat their five-a-day is more difficult than others, and begging, pleading, reasoning, bribes of ice cream and offers of cash all have proven ineffective. There are kids like mine, who likes her green beans even better with a splash of vinegar, and there are kids for whom bitter and texture are four-letter words, never to cross their lips. Three cookbooks take three very different approaches to this issue of children and vegetables. All achieve the same result -- the ingestion of healthy nutrients -- but with varying degrees of involvement or deceit.Using subterfuge Perhaps the clearest example of "what they don't know can't hurt them" is Jessica Seinfeld's Deceptively Delicious (HarperCollins, $24.95). Here, vegetables are the light-and-sound guys of the production -- necessary, but never seen or appreciated. Fruits and veggies are pureed en masse to a consistency resembling baby food, then stored in pre-measured quantities in your freezer. Each recipe includes one or more of these purees in amounts just small enough that your kids will never see, smell or taste the existence of the powerhouse slipped inside. The cookbook offers excellent nutritional profiles of the most common fruits and vegetables. Nutritionist Joy Bauer also has vetted every recipe; healthy highlights are sprinkled through the book along with comments from Jessica, her kids and other moms. (Comedian husband Jerry shares just a few thoughts.) Enthusiastic justification for this approach seems to be missing just a few steps in its logic, however. The introduction states that "the best parenting solutions are the ones that build good habits -- invisibly." Yet if a child is in the habit of eating macaroni and cheese or muffins, it seems likely he or she will continue to do so into adulthood, even when Mom isn't slipping undetectable creamed vegetables inside. It's hard to make something a habit if you don't know you're doing it in the first place. In the foreword by Dr. Roxana Mehran and Dr. Mehmet Oz, they say, "Later, as [your children] grow, they will want healthy vegetables on their own, since, for years, they had their chicken nuggets coated with them already!" Yet the idea here is to make these vegetables "as invisible as possible," Seinfeld says on Page 49. When later presented with the flavor and texture of naked beets or broccoli (part of the chicken nugget recipe as purees), will a child dig in or demand chicken nuggets? Bauer offers this wisdom, too: "... it's important for kids to develop control and confidence when it comes to what they eat." Yet with this approach, your children will discover they had no idea what they were eating. Might they become suspicious rather than confident? No one involved with Deceptively Delicious was willing to be interviewed for this story, but Bauer does go on to state in the book that "proper nutrition increases energy, prevents injury and enhances healing, improves academic performance, and even has a positive effect on moods." For the parent who has lost all hope that even a carrot might make an appearance at dinner, and academic performance or health is at stake, this might be a technique of last resort. Seinfeld says it brought peace to dinners with her three kids. And George did eat his couscous (see related story).

Bio Fertilizers Licensed pesticide applicators who used chlorinated pesticides on more than 100 days in their lifetime were at greater risk of diabetes, according to researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The associations between specific pesticides and incident diabetes ranged from a 20 percent to a 200 percent increase in risk, said the scientists with the NIH's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI). "The results suggest that pesticides may be a contributing factor for diabetes along with known risk factors such as obesity, lack of exercise and having a family history of diabetes," said Dale Sandler, Ph.D., chief of the Epidemiology Branch at the NIEHS and co-author on the paper. "Although the amount of diabetes explained by pesticides is small, these new findings may extend beyond the pesticide applicators in the study," Sandler said. Some of the pesticides used by these workers are used by the general population, though the strength and formulation may vary. Other insecticides in this study are no longer available on the market, however, these chemicals persist in the environment and measurable levels may still be detectable in the general population and in food products. For example, chlordane, which was used to treat homes for termites, has not been used since 1988, but can remain in treated homes for many decades. More than half of those studied in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in 1999-2002 had measurable evidence of chlordane exposure. "This is not cause for alarm," added Sandler "since there is no evidence of health effects at such very low levels of exposure." Overall, pesticide applicators in the highest category of lifetime days of use of any pesticide had a small increase in risk for diabetes (17 percent) compared with those in the lowest pesticide use category (0-64 lifetime days). New cases of diabetes were reported by 3.4 percent of those in the lowest pesticide use category compared with 4.6 percent of those in the highest category. Risks were greater when users of specific pesticides were compared with applicators who never applied that chemical. For example, the strongest relationship was found for a chemical called trichlorfon, with an 85 percent increase in risk for frequent and infrequent users and nearly a 250 percent increase for those who used it more than 10 times. In this group, 8.5 percent reported a new diagnosis of diabetes compared with 3.4 percent of those who never used this chemical. Trichlorfon is an organophosphate insecticide classified as a general-use pesticide that is moderately toxic. Previously used to control cockroaches, crickets, bedbugs, fleas, flies and ticks, it is currently used mostly in turf applications, such as maintaining golf courses. "This is one of the largest studies looking at the potential effects of pesticides on diabetes incidence in adults," said Freya Kamel, Ph.D., a researcher in the intramural program at NIEHS and co-author in the paper appearing in the May issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. "It clearly shows that cumulative lifetime exposure is important and not just recent exposure," said Kamel. Previous cross-sectional studies have used serum samples to show an association between diabetes and some pesticides. Diabetes occurs when the body fails to produce enough insulin to regulate blood sugar levels or when tissues stop responding to insulin. Nearly 21 million Americans have diabetes. The cause of diabetes continues to be a mystery, although genetics and environmental factors such as obesity and lack of exercise appear to play roles. To conduct the study, the researchers analyzed data from more than 30,000 licensed pesticide applicators participating in the Agricultural Health Study, a prospective study following the health history of thousands of pesticide applicators and their spouses in North Carolina and Iowa. The 31,787 applicators in this study included those who completed an enrollment survey about lifetime exposure levels, were free of diabetes at enrollment, and updated their medical records during a five-year follow-up phone interview. Among these, 1,171 reported a diagnosis of diabetes in the follow-up interview. The majority of the study participants were non-Hispanic white men. Researchers compared the pesticide use and other potential risk factors reported by the 1,171 applicators who developed diabetes since enrolling in the study to those who did not develop diabetes. Among the 50 different pesticides the researchers looked at, they found seven specific pesticides -- aldrin, chlordane, heptachlor, dichlorvos, trichlorfon, alachlor and cynazine -- that increased the likelihood of diabetes among study participants who had ever been exposed to any of these pesticides, and an even greater risk as cumulative days of lifetime exposure increased. All seven pesticides are chlorinated compounds, including two herbicides, three organochlorine insecticides and two organophosphate pesticides. "The fact that all seven of these pesticides are chlorinated provides us with an important clue for further research," said Kamel. Previous studies found that organochlorine insecticides such as chlordane were associated with diabetes or insulin levels. The new study shows that other types of chlorinated pesticides, including some organophosphate insecticides and herbicides, are also associated with diabetes. The researchers also found that study participants who reported mixing herbicides in the military had increased odds of diabetes compared to non-military participants. The Agricultural Health Study (AHS) is a prospective study of licensed pesticide applicators from North Carolina and Iowa recruited in 1993-1997 at the time of license renewal. The cohort includes 4,916 commercial applicators from Iowa and 52,395 private applicators, mostly farmers, from both states. More than 75 percent or 32,347 spouses of married private applicators also enrolled in the cohort. The study is a collaboration of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).