The ruble traded near 91 per US dollar on Wednesday, extending its 3% fall after the Wagner Group’s short-lived rebellion against Moscow last week.
The latest move means Russia’s currency has blown through a key range of 80-90 per US dollar, which first Russian deputy prime minister Andrey Belousov described as the optimal level for the currency.
The ruble has been one of the worst-performing currencies in 2023 thanks to sanctions and economic headwinds resulting from Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, with investors eyeing the impact of Western trade restrictions and increased military spending on the Kremlin’s coffers. The value of the ruble against the dollar is now 21% lower from levels at the start of the year.
Ruble holders have also shown their desire to switch to other currencies, with retail deposits held in other countries rising to $43.5 billion from early 2022 through May 2023, per an analysis from Bloomberg Economics. 15 regions in Russia saw demand for other currencies increase as much as 70-80% shortly after Wagner’s attempted rebellion, Belousouv previously stated.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, has increased its reliance on other currencies, particularly China’s yuan. The government began selling its $54 billion yuan stash in February to cover falling energy revenues, Russia’s finance ministry said.
Major city announces ban on new homes due to concerning conditions: ‘We’re going to manage this situation’
Laurelle Stelle – July 5, 2023
Due to a lack of water, the state of Arizona has announced that it will not approve any more building permits for single-family homes that rely on wells in Maricopa County, CleanTechnica reported.
Like much of the western U.S., Arizona has been facing a huge drought for many years. A shortage of rainfall has led to residents relying on underground aquifers and the Colorado River for water.
As CleanTechnica explained, the state has been using far too much water. Homes, farms, businesses, and public programs have been drawing on water supplies at an increasing rate, totaling 2.2 billion gallons per day in Maricopa County alone.
Because of this overuse, the Colorado River and groundwater are both drying up. State officials that modeled Arizona’s future water use predict that in the next 100 years, the Phoenix area will need over 1.5 trillion more gallons than it has.
Much of this excess water use has been driven by the growth of towns and cities throughout Arizona, CleanTechnica reported. One of the worst offenders is Phoenix, the state capital, which is located in Maricopa County. The city is surrounded by ever-expanding suburbs that rely on well water.
That’s why Governor Katie Hobbs has put a stop to new building permits.
Unfortunately, the new ban won’t stop the 80,000 building permits for new homes that have already been approved. It also doesn’t cover building projects that rely on river water or source their water from nearby businesses and farms. According to Governor Hobbs, though, the situation is under control.
“We’re going to manage this situation,” Governor Hobbs said at a news conference on June 1, according to The Guardian. “We are not out of water and we will not be running out of water. It is also incredibly important to note that the model relates only to groundwater and does not concern surface water supplies which are a significant source of renewable water for our state. What the model ultimately shows is that our water future is secure.”
In the northeast corner of Indiana, soybean and corn fields stretch across the landscape, separating the schools of the East Noble School Corporation by as much as 20 miles. Last summer, when interim food service director Roger Urick geared up to offer summer meals to the district’s 3,400 students, pandemic-era waivers allowing him to offer to-go meals to families had expired, forcing him to go back to the old model.
Instead of being able to offer take-away meals at several locations in the area, Urick was required to serve meals at two designated locations where kids had to come in and eat their meals on site. (In the school nutrition world, this is known as a “congregate” setting.)
Participation dropped to half of what it had been the two summers prior. “We found it was difficult for parents and kids to come to our two buildings and eat on site,” says Urick.
Before the pandemic, an estimated 6 out of 7 kids who qualified for free or reduced lunch could not access food in the summer largely due to the mandate that it be eaten on site, a problem that’s particularly acute in rural regions.
“We have known for a very long time that structural, fundamental changes were needed in the summer meals program because of barriers like transportation to meal sites,” says Carolyn Vega, associate director of policy at Share Our Strength, the nonprofit whose No Kid Hungry campaign focuses on access to summer meals. “School buses aren’t running over the summer. A lot of summer meals would be (served) outside, but there can be extreme heat or rain.”
Early in the pandemic, though, congregate anything was forbidden and restrictions around summer feeding were stripped away. Families were allowed to pick up several days’ worth of meals in the summer or even have them delivered. As a result, the number of summer meals served nationwide in July 2020 was nearly triple the number served in July 2019, according to No Kid Hungry.
In December 2022, as part of the end-of-year $1.7 trillion budget bill, Congress approved $29 billion in meal programs for low-income kids, and permanently loosened the rules around congregate feeding during the summer—a win for child nutrition advocates. But it came with a cost, as Democrats agreed to end pandemic-era SNAP “emergency allotments” a few months early. (The end to those allotments has left millions of Americans with slashed benefits.)
“We would have liked to see those allotments continue,” says Clarissa Hayes, the deputy director of school and out-of-school time programs for the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC). “We never like to see one program cut to prop up another program.”
The boost in school meal funding will pay for two major changes. Starting this summer, families in rural areas will once again be allowed to pick up meals or have them delivered, if districts and community groups are available to do so. This “non-congregate” option is expected to benefit up to 8 million children living in rural areas, according to a USDA spokesperson. And come next summer, families of children who qualify for free and reduced meals at school will receive a $40 monthly grocery stipend when school is out, creating permanent summer assistance.
These two changes will “work together to end summer hunger and fill that gap that many families face,” says Hayes.
Long Overdue Option
The history of summer food service dates to the late 1960s, when the federal government provided grants to states to offer meals over break. Decades later, summer feeding programs have greatly expanded and are entrenched in many low-income and rural communities.
School districts participate in the Seamless Summer Option (SSO), which provides reimbursement for all meals delivered to kids under the age of 18. All children eat free in communities where at least 50 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), meanwhile, offers reimbursement to summer enrichment programs (such as camps and religious organizations) that offer meals in low-income areas.
Over the last few months, after the USDA greenlit “non-congregate” meal services in rural areas, most states opted to participate, and school districts, along with community groups that provide summer meals, have been busy submitting plans to whichever state agency oversees SFSP or SSO.
Vega, at Share Our Strength, says offering more flexible feeding options in rural areas is long overdue. “There aren’t a lot of community locations that [rural] kids can regularly and easily get to during the summer, much less twice a day for breakfast and lunch,” she says. “This is the level of service our rural communities have needed all along.”
In Indiana’s Noble County, where about half of the student population is eligible for free and reduced lunch, Urick says he’s “excited” to once again offer a service that should help ensure that more kids get access to meals after last year’s low participation rates.
The summer, families are able to pick up meals at seven different sites in the area, including a public library and two public housing apartment complexes. When Urick announced the change to the community, he says he was “overwhelmed” by grateful emails and calls. Though many school kitchens face staffing shortages, Urick has had no problem finding workers eager to earn some summer money preparing and delivering meals. But not all rural districts are that fortunate.
Becky Woodman, cafeteria operations manager at the Klamath-Trinity Joint Unified School District in Northern California, says she’s not participating in a grab-and-go or delivery option for summer feeding largely due to staffing. “We’re just not in a position to do that,” she says. “All of our cafeteria staff are 10-month employees.”
During the height of the pandemic, Woodman says, meal delivery to families was a huge challenge. The furthest delivery site was an 80-minute drive down a one-lane road. During the school year, she was able to lean on bus drivers and other district employees to help. “It took a lot of people working really hard and being creative and making things work,” she recalls. Over the summers of 2020 and 2021, though, that meal delivery service paused.
This summer, she has hired two people to serve breakfast, lunch, snacks, and supper at an elementary school located on the Hoopa Valley Reservation, where the majority of the district’s roughly 1,000 students live. The meals are included in a month-long summer school that typically only attracts about 70 students. She expects “100 percent” of those students will take advantage of the meals. And in a district in which nearly 68 percent of kids qualify for free and reduced lunch, she says many in the community will likely turn to nonprofits and other outreach programs during the summer for help with groceries and meals.
Why the US ‘does not get to assume that it lasts forever’
Ronald Brownstein – July 3, 2023
Giorgio Viera/AFP/Getty Images
As the United States marks its 247th birthday Tuesday, questions about how many more the nation will celebrate in its current form have become ominously relevant.
Possibly not since the two decades before the Civil War has America faced as much pressure on its fundamental cohesion. The greatest risk probably isn’t a repeat of the outright secession that triggered the Civil War, though even that no longer seems entirely impossible in the most extreme scenarios. More plausible is the prospect that the nation will continue its drift into two irreconcilable blocs of red and blue states uneasily trying to occupy the same geographic space.
“I can’t recall a time when we’ve had such fundamental friction between the states on such important issues,” says Donald Kettl, former dean and professor emeritus of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and author of the 2020 book, “The Divided States of America.”
The strains on America’s basic unity are broad and diverse. They include a widening divergence in the basic rules of life between red and blue states on everything from the availability of abortion and guns to what teachers can say in the classroom; sharpening conflicts not only between the states, but among the urban and rural regions within them; a growing tendency of voters in each political coalition to view the other party not only as a political rival but as an “enemy” that threatens their core conception of America; the increasing inability of almost any institution – from the media to federal law enforcement to even consumer products – to retain comparable credibility on both sides of the red-blue divide; more common threats of political violence, predominantly from the right, against local and national officials; and the endurance of Donald Trump as the first leader of a truly mass-scale American political movement who has demonstrated a willingness to subvert small-d democracy to achieve his goals.
Behind almost all of these individual challenges is the same larger force: the mounting tension between those who welcome the propulsive demographic and cultural changes reshaping 21st century America and those who fear or resent those changes. It’s the collision between what I’ve called the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation” and the Republican “coalition of restoration.” As the US evolves toward a future, sometime after 2040, when people of color will constitute a majority of the population, political scientists point out that the country is trying to build something without exact modern precedent: a true multi-racial democracy that provides a voice to all its citizens.
The urgent demands for greater opportunity and inclusion from traditionally marginalized groups (from Black to LGBTQ people) and the ferocious backlash against those demands that Trump has mobilized in his “Make America Great Again” movement demonstrate how fraught that passage has become.
“To expect we are going to be as unified as we [have been] trying to negotiate these fundamental transformations of American demography is wholly unrealistic,” says Daniel Cox, a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “There is going to be real differences and divisions on these things and, unfortunately, some people are weaponizing them in a way that is unhelpful.”
The ideal of national unity celebrated on July Fourth has almost always been overstated: the country from its founding has been riven by sectional, racial, class and gender conflicts. Large groups of people living within our borders have always felt excluded from any proclaimed national consensus: American Indians who were brutally displaced for decades, Black people who faced generations of legal slavery and then decades of state-sponsored segregation, women denied the vote until the 20th century.
But today’s proliferating and intersecting pressures have reached a height that is forcing experts to contemplate questions few Americans have seriously considered since the Civil War era: can the United States continue to function as a single unified entity, and if so, in what form?
In the late 1990s, Alan Wolfe, a Boston University political scientist, wrote a book called “One Nation, After All” based on in-depth interviews with hundreds of Americans around the country. His book was one of several published in the era that concluded the broad American public was not nearly as divided as its leaders and that average Americans, however much their views differed on issues, recognized the importance of finding common ground with others of opposing views.
Now, Wolfe told me in an interview, he considers the current situation much more worrying. “I was so optimistic with the title of ‘One Nation, After All,’ but I couldn’t say that now,” Wolfe, a professor emeritus, said. “I think the book was right for its time. I think the sociology of it was right. That’s what I found. But I’m sure I wouldn’t find it now.”
To Wolfe, the US is now trapped in a “vicious cycle” of rising partisan and ideological hostility in which political leaders, particularly on the right, see a “benefit in fueling the rage even more.” While President Joe Biden, Wolfe says, has struck traditional presidential notes of emphasizing the value of national unity, Trump – currently the front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination – has built his political strategy on widening the nation’s divides in ways that may be difficult to reverse any time soon. “I don’t know if [Trump’s] a political genius or just instinctively knows something, but he sure has exacerbated the shocks, and I don’t know how we are going to recover from him,” Wolfe says.
Experts may be the least concerned about the most often discussed scenario for a future American unraveling. That’s the prospect the nation will fully split apart into separate entities, as it did when the South seceded to create the Confederate States of America after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican from Georgia who has become a close ally of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, has called for “a national divorce” in which Republican- and Democratic-leaning states would go their separate ways, presumably peacefully. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” Greene said in a tweet on President’s Day this year.
Susan Stokes, a political scientist and director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, said that prospect could receive growing discussion in coming years, particularly on the right, “if we continue to go in this direction and we continue to view each other as threats and as anathema, immoral, and a threat to each other’s existence.”
But the practical barriers to any formal national divorce, she says, are likely to limit such discussion to the fringes. Unlike the Civil War, which had a clear geographical boundary, the nation’s current political divide has created a checkerboard – with Democrats strongest in coastal and upper Midwest states, as well as parts of the Southwest, while Republicans hold the edge in most Heartland states, particularly those in the South and Great Plains. Plus, Stokes notes, the red-blue line runs not only between but within the states, with the urban areas of every state leaning relatively more toward Democrats than their rural neighbors. In some future national divorce, “What do you do with upstate New York? What do you do with Memphis or Austin?” she asked.
For those reasons, none of the experts I spoke to worry much about full-scale national separation through any intermediate time frame, though most no longer consider it inconceivable either. (Polls don’t show extensive interest among the public, with one national CBS/YouGov survey last year finding a quarter of Americans favoring the idea.) One wild card is what might happen if Trump wins in 2024 and moves to implement some of the policies he’s proposed that amount to mobilizing federal power against blue institutions and individuals – including a massive deportation program of undocumented immigrants and the deployment of the National Guard into high-crime cities. Blue state governors, legislatures and mayors might respond to such an offensive in forceful ways difficult to predict today.
The nation’s greater challenge may be the continuing incremental separation between the red and blue blocs – the political equivalent of continental drift. Polls show that voters in each coalition hold darkening views of the other. In that 2022 CBS/YouGov survey, about half of the voters for both Trump and Biden said they considered the other party not just “political opposition” but “enemies, that is, if they win, your life or your entire way of life may be threatened.”
More tangibly, red and blue states are hurtling apart. The most aggressive moves have come from red states shifting social policy sharply to the right on a broad array of issues, from retrenching abortion and LGBTQ rights, to censoring classroom discussion of race, gender and sexual orientation, expanding access to guns while limiting access to books that provoke conservative objections, and restricting access to voting. With red states exploring various ways to discourage their residents from traveling to blue states for banned activities (such as abortions or gender-affirming care for transgender minors), and blue states passing laws to inhibit such red state enforcement, the nation is facing open conflict over the cross-border application of state law reminiscent of the bitter disputes between free and slave states over the Fugitive Slave Act.
No single issue separates the red and blue states today as profoundly as the gulf between those with and without legal segregation during the Jim Crow era, or that between states with and without slavery before the Civil War. But, as experts point out, the current divergence involves more issues in more states than those earlier conflicts, with nearly half the country joining the red state drive to create what I’ve called “a nation within a nation” operating by its own rules and values.
“I really feel like we are becoming two different countries, if not that it has already happened,” says Wolfe. “I don’t like it, but I don’t see what we have in common anymore. I really don’t.”
To some students of government, allowing states to set their own course on these divisive issues may relieve pressure and help hold the nation together. “In some ways, you can say how this is terrible, how can we remain a unified country and address global concerns” when states are separating this fundamentally, says Cox. “But by the same token, there’s something that is positive about these ‘laboratories of democracy’ where one party is given free rein to put forward their ideas and legislate and the public can see how they do and react to that.”
Yet allowing states to diverge this comprehensively may do more to heighten than relieve national tensions. Cox acknowledges one reason: severe gerrymandering in many states’ legislative districts means most politicians are unlikely to suffer consequences even if the public doesn’t like the agenda they have advanced.
A second problem is this experimentation is unlikely to proceed on an even track. The Republican-appointed majority on the US Supreme Court has encouraged the red state social offensive with decisions that stripped away national rights – most prominently on abortion and voting. Many legal experts believe that conservative majority is unlikely to block many of the new red state social laws that critics (including, in many cases, the Biden administration) are challenging in federal courts. On the other hand, the six GOP-appointed justices have shown no hesitation about overturning blue state initiatives, such as gun control measures that conflict with their reading of the 2nd Amendment, or LGBTQ protections they argue infringe on religious liberty or free speech. “Given the make-up of the courts, it’s difficult for blue states to be hopeful about this,” says Kettl.
The biggest challenge created by the widening distance among the states is where to draw the line between local leeway and preserving a baseline floor of nationally guaranteed rights in every state. Racial segregation, after all, was justified for 70 years on the ground of respecting “local traditions.”
From both Congress and the Supreme Court, the general trend in American life from the 1950s through the 2010s was to nationalize more rights and to restrict the ability of states to curtail those rights. Now, though, the red states are engaged in the most concerted effort over that long arc to roll back the “rights revolution” and restore a system in which people’s basic civil rights vary much more depending on where they live.
“It is certainly good to have a chance to have a contest over basic values, and that’s one of the great strengths of the American republic,” says Kettl, co-author of the new book “Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems.” He continued: “But there is also a basic question of the fundamental rights of individuals and whether the balance of power in deciding them ought to lie” with states or the nation as a whole.
The chasm between the civil rights and liberties available in blue and red states has widened to the point where it will be highly explosive for either side to attempt to impose its social regime on the other. If Democrats win unified control of the White House and Congress in 2024 and pass legislation to restore a national floor of abortion or voting rights, red state leaders would likely sue to block them (even though abortion rights are popular in several of them). This Supreme Court majority could prove receptive to such challenges. Conversely, the fear that Republicans will seek to pass national legislation imposing the red state rules on blue and purple states, particularly on abortion and guns, may be the best Democratic asset in the 2024 presidential race in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona.
Michael Podhorzer, the former long-time political director for the AFL-CIO, has argued that the wave of restrictive red state social laws has simply made more apparent something that has long been true: that the red and blue parts of the country are so divergent in their values, priorities and even economic structures that they are more accurately described as separate nations than separate regions. In his mind, what’s changed isn’t that these different regions – or different nations – have divergent approaches on both social and economic issues, but that the Trump-aligned MAGA movement ascendant in the red states is now pursuing such an extreme and even anti-democratic (small d) agenda.
Eric Liu, co-founder of Citizen University, a non-partisan organization that trains people to work together on local problems across ideological, racial and other boundaries, agrees that Trump and much of his movement represent a unique threat to the future of American democracy. The nation, Liu says, now faces the challenge of doing two things at once: countering and isolating that threat to democracy, while building a bigger coalition for cooperation and consensus-building among what he calls (borrowing from Richard Nixon’s phrase) the “silent majority” of Americans who want to coexist.
Liu counsels that lowering the temperature does not require an artificial level of agreement between people of differing views: “It’s OK to argue it out. It’s necessary to argue it out because America is an argument.” But it does, he believes, require both sides to commit to respecting the democratic process and staying engaged with the other when that process produces decisions they don’t support. “That means to recognize that politics is not a one-and-done, winner-take-all, wipe-the-other-side-off-the-face-of-the-earth, scorched earth endeavor,” he says.
Even more important, strengthening the nation’s bonds, he believes, requires people on both sides of the political divide to see the other “as three-dimensional, complicated, sometimes contradictory human beings.” The best way to achieve that, he says, is to work together to solve local problems. Liu’s group tries to facilitate that through programs like Civic Saturdays that promotes collaborative local actions, or initiatives that bring together rural and urban residents around shared concerns.
Such interactions, Liu believes, can nudge the US toward the national unity it celebrates on July Fourth. But he acknowledges there’s no assurance this patient nurturing of civic connection can overcome all the forces in politics, the media and communications technology blowing toward separation. Even the most carefully cultivated garden, after all, may not survive a gale-force wind.
“It is totally not a given that we get through this,” Liu told me. “The United States does not get to assume that it lasts forever.”
Conservatives go to red states and liberals go to blue as the country grows more polarized
Nicholas Riccardi – July 4, 2023
Jennifer and Tim Kohl poses for a photo in their front yard with the American flag and a thin blue line flag in Star, Idaho, on April 14, 2023. The couple recently moved to Idaho from the Los Angeles area. Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history. (AP Photo/Kyle Green)Kathleen Rickerson poses for a photo at her home Wednesday, May 24, 2023, in the west Denver suburb of Lakewood, Colo. Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)Aaron and Carrie Friesen feed chickens in the backyard of their home in Boise, Idaho, on April 12, 2023. The couple, who has three children, recently moved to Idaho from the Bluffton, S.C., area. Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history. (AP Photo/Kyle Green)Leah Dean, a native of the Texas Panhandle, poses outside her home Monday, July 3, 2023, in Denver. Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
STAR, Idaho (AP) — Once he and his wife, Jennifer, moved to a Boise suburb last year, Tim Kohl could finally express himself.
Kohl did what the couple never dared at their previous house outside Los Angeles — the newly-retired Los Angeles police officer flew a U.S. flag and a Thin Blue Line banner representing law enforcement outside his house.
“We were scared to put it up,” Jennifer Kohl acknowledged. But the Kohls knew they had moved to the right place when neighbors complimented him on the display.
Leah Dean is on the opposite end of the political spectrum, but she knows how the Kohls feel. In Texas, Dean had been scared to fly an abortion rights banner outside her house. Around the time the Kohls were house-hunting in Idaho, she and her partner found a place in Denver, where their LGBTQ+ pride flag flies above the banner in front of their house that proclaims “Abortion access is a community responsibility.”
“One thing we have really found is a place to feel comfortable being ourselves,” Dean said.
Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history.
One party controls the entire legislature in all but two states. In 28 states, the party in control has a supermajority in at least one legislative chamber — which means the majority party has so many lawmakers that they can override a governor’s veto. Not that that would be necessary in most cases, as only 10 states have governors of different parties than the one that controls the legislature.
The split has sent states careening to the political left or right, adopting diametrically opposed laws on some of the hottest issues of the day. In Idaho, abortion is illegal once a heartbeat can be detected in a fetus — as early as five or six weeks — and a new law passed this year makes it a crime to help a minor travel out of state to obtain one. In Colorado, state law prevents any restrictions on abortion. In Idaho, a new law prevents minors from accessing gender-affirming care, while Colorado allows youths to come from other states to access the procedures.
Federalism — allowing each state to chart its own course within boundaries set by Congress and the Constitution — is at the core of the U.S. system. It lets the states, in the words of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, be “laboratories of democracy.”
Now, some wonder whether that’s driving Americans apart.
“Does that work as well in a time when we are so politically divided, or does it just become an accelerant for people who want to re-segregate?” asked Rob Witwer, a former Republican Colorado state lawmaker.
Colorado and Idaho represent two poles of state-level political homogenization. Both are fast-growing Rocky Mountain states that have been transformed by an influx of like-minded residents. Life in the two states can be quite similar — conversations revolve around local ski areas, mountain bike trails, and how newcomers are making things too crowded. But, politically, they increasingly occupy two separate worlds.
Witwer watched Colorado steadily swing to the left as affluent, college-educated people fled the coasts for his home state starting in the late 1990s. For two decades, it was one of the nation’s fastest-growing states, and during the Trump era it swung sharply to the left. Democrats control all statewide offices and have their largest majorities in history in the legislature, including a supermajority in the lower house.
In contrast, Idaho has become one of the nation’s fastest-growing states during the past decade without losing its reputation as a conservative haven. It has moved even more sharply to the right during that time and become a beacon to those, like the Kohls, fleeing blue states where they no longer feel welcome.
The states’ swings aren’t simply due to transplants, of course. The increasing clustering of Americans into like-minded enclaves — dubbed “The Big Sort” — has many causes. Harvard professor Ryan Enos estimates that, at least before the pandemic, only 15% of the homogeneity was due to people moving. Other causes include political parties polarizing on hot-button issues that split neatly on demographic lines, such as guns and abortion, and voters adopting their neighbors’ partisanship.
“A lot of this is driven by other sorting that is going on,” Enos said.
When Americans move, politics is not typically the explicit reason. But the lifestyle choices they make place them in communities dominated by their preferred party.
“Democrats want to live in places with artistic culture and craft breweries, and Republicans want to move to places where they can have a big yard,” said Ryan Strickler, a political scientist at Colorado State University-Pueblo.
But something may have changed as the country has become even more polarized. Businesses catering to conservatives fleeing blue states have sprouted, such as Blue Line Moving, which markets to families fleeing from blue states to Florida. In Texas, a “rainbow underground railroad” run by a Dallas realtor helps LGBTQ+ families flee the state’s increased restrictions targeting that population.
The switch might have been flipped during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, which created a class of mobile workers no longer bound to the states where their companies were based. Those who are now mobile are predominantly white-collar workers and retirees, the two most politically engaged parts of the national population.
Mike McCarter, who has spearheaded a quixotic campaign to have conservative eastern Oregon become part of Idaho, said most people didn’t pay much attention to state government until the pandemic.
“Then it was like ‘Oh, they can shut down any church and they can shut down my kids’ school?’” McCarter said. “If state-level government has that much power, you’d better be sure it reflects your values, and not someone else’s values that are forced on you.”
The pandemic helped push Aaron and Carrie Friesen to Idaho. When the pandemic hit, they realized they could take their marketing firm remote from its base near Hilton Head, South Carolina. They’d always planned to return to the West, but California, where Aaron, now 39, was born and raised, was disqualified because of its cost and progressive politics.
The Friesens and their three children settled on Boise. They loved the big skies, the mountains rearing up behind the town, the plethora of outdoor activities.
And they liked Idaho’s pandemic policies. When the Friesens visited, almost no one was wearing masks, which they took as a good sign — they were happy to mask up when sick, but found constant masking pointless.
“This was a place that had like-minded people,” Carrie Friesen said.
The Friesens are happy with the direction of their new state and the abortion and transgender restrictions out of the latest legislative session. But they don’t see themselves as part of what they called “the crazy right,” referring to the families displaying Trump yard signs in the less-politically-mixed Boise suburbs. They like living close to the center of Boise, one of the more liberal areas in the state.
They try not to make too many decisions based on politics — to a point.
“With the temperature of politics nowadays, if people choose to move somewhere, they are going to choose to move to a place with like-minded people,” Aaron Friesen said.
That’s apparently been happening in Idaho, said Mathew Hay, who oversees a regular survey of new arrivals for Boise State University. Historically, transplants mirrored the conservative population’s leanings, with about 45% describing themselves as “conservative,” and the rest evenly split between liberal and moderate.
But something changed last year — the share of newcomers that said they lived in Idaho for the politics jumped to 9%, compared to 5% for long-timers. The percentage describing themselves as “very conservative” also rose.
When Melissa Wintrow rode her motorcycle across the U.S. in 1996, she was captivated by Idaho.
“It was this grounded, commonsense, reasonable group,” Wintrow said. “Of course they were conservative, but they weren’t going to say openly racist and homophobic things.”
Now a Democratic state senator, Wintrow is aghast at how her adopted state has become more hardline.
“The state has just moved to a more extreme view,” she said. “It’s a certain group of people that is afraid their ‘way of life’ is diminishing in the world.”
In Colorado, the reverse may be happening.
Bret Weinstein, owner of a realty firm in Denver, said politics has become the top issue for people buying a home.
“It’s brought up in our initial conversations,” Weinstein said. “Three years ago, we didn’t have those conversations, ever.”
Now, many entering the state tell him they’re looking for a way to escape their red state — and homeowners leaving Colorado say they’re fed up with it turning blue. Even within Colorado, Weinstein said, homebuyers are picking based on politics, with some avoiding conservative areas where debates on mask mandates and curriculum has dominated school board meetings.
One of those politically motivated migrants is Kathleen Rickerson, who works in human resources for Weinstein’s firm. Rickerson, 35, lived in Minnesota for seven years, but during the pandemic grew weary of the blue state’s vocal anti-masking, anti-vaccine minority.
Rickerson’s parents and sister urged her to join them in Texas, but that was out of the question. Ready for a change, Rickerson instead zeroed in on Colorado. She moved to a Denver suburb in December 2021.
Cheered by the state’s strong stance to protect abortion rights, Rickerson wants Colorado Democrats to go further.
“Colorado isn’t as quick to take a stand on things, and I’d like to see that happen a bit more,” she said.
That was a sentiment shared by Colorado progressives, who were frustrated their party didn’t muscle through an assault weapons ban and other priorities of the left during the most recent legislative session.
“There is a point at which we need to stop acting like trying to get along with our enemies is going to preserve our institution,” progressive state Rep. Stephanie Vigil said at the end of the session, after the chamber’s Democratic leader said it was important that Republicans still feel like they have a voice.
The increasing political homogeneity in states makes it harder for both parties to feel invested, said Thad Kousser, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego.
“It gives one party the ability to move a state further when they’re doing exactly what their constituency wants,” he said.
The system works as a sort of escape valve, Kousser said, letting the majority in the state feel in power regardless of what’s happening in Washington, D.C. But the local minority party gets shortchanged.
The Kohls felt shortchanged in California. They said they watched their native state deteriorate before their eyes, and no one was willing to fix the problems. Trash piled up with homeless encampments. Tax money seemed to go to immigrants who had entered the country illegally rather than U.S. citizens. Jennifer’s mother qualified for government assistance due to her low income, but was on dozens of wait lists that were seven years long. Tim’s police station, in a former hippie colony in the mountains running through West Los Angeles, was firebombed during the George Floyd protests in 2020.
The Kohls wanted to live in a red state, but Jennifer said they’re not just party-line voters. A nurse, she hasn’t registered with either party and has a wide range of beliefs, including that abortion is sometimes necessary.
“I believe so many different things,” she said.
On balance, they feel more comfortable in a more conservative place.
“Here, the tax dollars naturally goes to the citizens, not the immigrants,” said Tim Kohl, who can understand why Idaho is growing so fast. “Most of the people we’ve met here are from California originally.”
In Denver, Dean has found other people who fled red states. She and her partner, Cassidy Dean, discovered that their neighbors fled Florida after the state’s hard turn to the political right.
Leah Dean was a 19-year-old cosmetology college student in San Antonio in 2008 when she had an abortion. She chafed at the obstacles she faced — the state-mandated waiting period before the procedure, having to get a sonogram before the procedure — and became a committed Democratic activist. She met her partner at the Texas state party convention in 2016, and every year since then she’s felt the Republican state legislature and governor make the state less and less hospitable to people like her.
Now in Colorado, she and her partner both work from home, telecommuting to their old Texas jobs. They have limited social outlets, but took care of that by throwing themselves into politics again, with Leah Dean becoming vice chair of Denver Democrats.
“It’s also how we meet people,” she said. “We don’t have any other way to do that.
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Tick safety: A guide to avoiding ticks, treatments for bites and info about Lyme disease
Krys’tal Griffin, Delaware News Journal – July 3, 2023
We’ve waited months for warm weather to grace us so we can spend more time outdoors, but with warm weather comes pesky ticks.
As more people hike through summer grasses, play in backyards and camp in forests, ticks are taking the opportunity to shimmy up pantlegs, crawl through sleeves or land in your hair to do what they do best: feed on your blood.
Reports show some states are seeing an increased presence of ticks this spring and summer, and with them, a surge in Lyme disease cases.
Here’s the rundown of everything we know about tick presence, Lyme disease cases and tick bites in Delaware, including prevention, symptoms and treatment.
Where are ticks found?
Trails, forests and other humid and moist environments are where ticks can be found.
Wooded areas, tall grass or brush — the edges where woods and lawn meet — are desirable spots for ticks, along with leaf litter, beneath ground-cover plants and around woodpiles or stone walls where small mammals live.
From there, ticks can latch onto the birds, mammals or reptiles they prey on and spread to other organisms.
Ticks are active year-round if temperatures are above freezing.
What types of ticks are in Delaware?
While there are hundreds of species of ticks found worldwide and dozens in the United States, only a handful are commonly spotted in the First State.
Lone Star tick
This photograph depicted a dorsal view of a female “lone star tick”(Amblyomma americanum).
The most common tick species in the area is the Lone Star tick, identifiable by a white dot on its back. Found all over the state, it is more common in Kent and Sussex counties.
“It’s described as being an aggressive biter,” said Ashley Kennedy, tick biologist at the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. “The bite itself can be very painful, very itchy.”
A bite from a Lone Star tick could trigger flu-like illness or, in rare cases, alpha-gal syndrome, in which a person develops an allergy to red meat and other products made from mammals such as dairy.
Black-legged/deer tick
The black-legged tick, also called the deer tick or bear tick, is a carrier of Borrelia burgdorfi bacteria, which causes Lyme disease.
The black-legged/deer tick is not as common as other species but is more likely to infect you if it bites you.
One of the illnesses it can cause is Lyme disease, a bacterial infection that can spread to your joints, heart and nervous system if not treated early.
American dog tick
The American dog tick is one of the tick species present in Delaware.
The American dog tick is the least likely to make you sick, but a small percentage of them carry Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Kennedy said.
Rocky Mountain spotted fever is a bacterial disease that begins with symptoms such as fever, headache and rash. It can be deadly if it is not treated early on with the correct antibiotics.
Asian longhorned tick
Asian longhorned tick
The newest Delaware tick species, first spotted in 2019, is the Asian longhorned tick.
This invasive species has a female-only population that can lay eggs without needing a male and occasionally bites.
What is Lyme disease?
Like mosquitoes, ticks are feared for their capacity to spread debilitating illnesses like Lyme disease.
A major concern when it comes to ticks is Lyme disease, the most common vector-borne disease in the U.S. but just one of 16 tickborne illnesses that can be passed to humans.
It is transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected blacklegged tick and can lead to an infection of the joints, hearts and nervous system if left untreated. There is no evidence that the disease can be passed from person to person, according to the CDC.
Lyme disease accounts for approximately 30,000 of the reported tick-borne illnesses each year. The CDC suggests this number is actually closer to 476,000 due to underreporting when it comes to the disease.
Lyme disease in Delaware
Autumn colors at Bellevue State Park.
In accordance with the Delaware Division of Public Health’s section of Epidemiology, Health Data and Informatics, the entity cannot disclose the current number of Lyme disease cases in Delaware, said Laura Matusheski, media relations coordinator for DPH.
“Delaware sees cases of Lyme disease in all three counties year-round and continues to monitor disease trends. People who spend time outdoors in grassy or wooded environments are at risk for increased exposure,” the Division of Public Health stated.
The CDC defines Delaware as a high-incidence state for Lyme disease, ranking it among the top 10 states for cases in the United States.
DPH tracks yearly totals for the number of Lyme disease cases reported in Delaware, and the number of cases per 100,000 people per year over the last five years are as follows:
In 2018, there were 540 cases of Lyme disease statewide per 100,000 people. New Castle County contributed 302 cases, followed by Kent County at 87 and Sussex County at 131.
In 2019, there were 659 cases statewide. New Castle County contributed 437, followed by 86 in Kent County and 136 in Sussex County.
In 2020, 353 cases were reported statewide. New Castle County contributed 249, Kent County contributed 43 and Sussex County contributed 161.
In 2021, 354 cases were reported statewide. New Castle County reported 250, Kent County reported 40 and Sussex County reported 64.
In 2022, the most recent year with data, 385 statewide cases were reported. New Castle County documented 253, Kent County documented 64 and Sussex County documented 68.
As the data shows, New Castle County has reported the highest incidence rates of Lyme disease compared with Kent and Sussex counties, at time documenting cases that are four times greater than throughout the rest of the state.
What are the symptoms of Lyme disease?
Lyme disease bacterium can infect several parts of the body and cause different symptoms at different times. Some of these symptoms may be nonspecific and resemble other diseases, according to the Division of Public Health.
Early symptoms of Lyme disease include:
Headache.
Fatigue.
An expanding red rash, commonly referred to as a bulls-eye rash. It can appear anywhere on the body and be warm to the touch but is usually not itchy or painful. Not all affected individuals will develop a rash.
Fever and/or chills.
Muscle and joint aches.
If left untreated, the following symptoms can occur:
Heart palpitations and dizziness.
Severe joint pain and swelling, usually in large joints like the knees.
Severe headaches and neck stiffness due to meningitis.
Loss of muscle tone on one or both sides of the face, called “Bell’s palsy.”
Neurological problems like numbness or tingling in extremities and problems with concentration and short-term memory.
If you think you have Lyme disease, contact your health care provider. Most cases of Lyme disease can be cured with antibiotics taken over the course of a few weeks, but the severity of symptoms and subsequent treatment may vary this timeline.
Some patients experience chronic symptoms months and years after the infection has cleared.
How to keep ticks away from your home
Fall foliage, picture here at Killens Pond State Park in Felton, is the perfect spot for ticks to latch onto unsuspecting hikers.
When it comes to keeping ticks away from you and your home, there are several ways you can decrease the presence of ticks on your property.
Keeping your grass mowed and removing leaf litter, brush and tall weeds from the edges of your lawn are routine ways to keep ticks out.
Moving firewood, birdhouses and feeders away from your home. Wood should be stacked in a dry area.
Using plants that do not attract deer or exclude deer by using various types of fencing. Deer are the main food source for adult ticks.
Creating a 3-foot or wider wood chip, gravel or mulch barrier between your property and the woods.
Removing old furniture or trash, which ticks love to hide in, from your yard.
Keeping playground equipment, patios and decks away from yard edges and trees, instead placing them in sunny locations, if possible.
Tick bite prevention
Check yourself thoroughly after spending time in tick habitats.
Knowing where ticks usually dwell is the first step in preventing an encounter with them.
If you find yourself in a moist and humid environment that is near wooded or grassy areas, there are extra steps you can take to stay safe while in these places.
For those of you tasked with wading through fall leaves or tidying up the shrubs, wear light-colored clothing to allow you to see ticks crawling on you.
If you find yourself in an area ripe for ticks, be sure to wear long sleeves and pants. Tuck your pant legs into your socks and consider wearing a hair tie on your sleeves to prevent ticks from crawling into the openings of your clothes.
Other ways to prevent tick bites, according to DPH, include:
Applying tick repellent that contains DEET. This lasts only a few hours and needs to be reapplied as necessary. Adults should use a repellent containing less than 50% DEET. Children’s repellents should contain less than 30% DEET. Do not use repellents with DEET on infants under 2 months old.
Searching your body for ticks during and after an outing. Be thorough when checking under your arms, inside your belly button, in and around your ear, behind the knees, between the legs, around the waist and in and around all head and body hair.
Checking children and pets for ticks. Your beloved pet probably has no clue a tick just latched onto him for a free ride into the house after a round of fetch. Giving your kids another look after they check for ticks can’t hurt either.
Symptoms of a tick bite
An image of what a tick bite looks like
If you suspect you have been bitten by a tick, many tickborne illnesses share similar signs and symptoms.
See your health care provider if you develop the following symptoms within a few weeks of a tick bite:
Fever or chills: All tickborne diseases can cause fever.
Rash: Lyme disease, Southern tick-associated rash illness, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, ehrlichiosis and tularemia can cause distinctive rashes.
Aches and pains: Tickborne diseases can cause headaches, fatigue and muscle aches.
Tick bite treatment
After spending the day outdoors, your tick check might alert you to some unwelcome hitchhikers on your body.
If you discover a tick on you or your pets, do not use home remedies like petroleum jelly or hot matches to remove the ticks. They do not work, the Division of Public Health said.
Instead, use these steps to help rid yourself of ticks:
Use fine-tipped tweezers or shield your fingers with a paper towel, rubber gloves or a tissue to remove ticks. Do not pick at them with bare hands.
Grasp the tick close to the skin surface and pull upward with steady, even pressure.
Do not squeeze, crush or puncture the body of the tick. Its fluids, such as saliva, body fluids and gut contents, may contain infectious germs.
After removing the tick, clean the removal spot with an antiseptic or soap water. Don’t forget to wash your hands afterward!
Why you should never remove a tick with your fingers, according to a nurse
Kim Schewitz – July 4, 2023
A tick embedded into the skin.Getty Images
A nurse explained why you should never remove a tick with your fingers.
Using your fingers risks the tick regurgitating its stomach contents into your body.
Ticks bites can spread diseases including Lyme.
A registered nurse has warned against removing ticks with your fingers, amid a particularly bad tick season in the US.
Not removing a tick correctly risks regurgitating its stomach contents into your body, Jennifer Quante, a Texas–based nurse who makes health-related videos, said in a recent TikTok. This could increase the risk of infection, according to Harvard Medical School.
How to remove a tick
How to remove a tick with tweezers.CDC
The proper way to remove a tick is by using fine-tipped tweezers to grasp it as close to the skin’s surface as possible, the CDC advises. Then, you should steadily pull upwards and avoid twisting, which could cause the tick’s mouth to break off and remain in your skin.
If any parts of the tick can’t be removed easily, leave the area and let the skin heal. Once you have removed the tick, thoroughly wash the bite area and your hands with rubbing alcohol or soap and water.
To dispose of a live tick, either put it in alcohol, flush it down the toilet, place it in a sealed bag or container, or wrap it tightly in tape.
The CDC says you should always get checked out if you develop a rash or fever in the weeks following a tick bite.
“Never, ever, ever, ever remove it with your own hands. You’re just gonna have to, unfortunately, let it stay there until you get access to tweezers,” Quante said.
Quante said folklore remedies, such as burning the tick with a flame or trying to suffocate it with petroleum jelly or essential oils, are all risky.
Ticks can spread disease including Lyme
Not all ticks carry disease, but the bites of those that do can cause Lyme and rarer conditions such as Powassan virus disease and Heartland virus disease. Quante recommended putting the tick in a zip-lock bag after you’ve removed it and sending it out for testing to check if it’s infected.
Insider previously reported that the number of Lyme infections in the US and Europe has soared in recent months in what could be the worst season on record, as tick territories expand due to climate change.
Lyme disease, a tick-borne condition spread by the blacklegged tick, is caused by a bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi, and Borrelia mayonii less commonly. Though it can usually be easily treated with antibiotics, the infection can cause debilitating symptoms, such as Lyme arthritis and fatigue, if left untreated.
Around 500,000 Americans a year are affected by Lyme disease, according to CDC estimates, and research suggests that 15% of the world has caught the disease.
Early symptoms typically include a fever, muscle aches, joint swelling or pain, headaches, swollen lymph nodes, and sometimes a red bull’s eye rash, known as erythema migrans.
The law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in May, makes it a third-degree felony for people to use a false identification to get hired for work. Any business that is found to knowingly employ those unauthorized workers could have its license revoked and face daily fines. Additionally, hospitals that accept Medicaid are now required to question a patient’s immigration status, driver’s licenses given to undocumented immigrants in other states are invalid, and it’s a third-degree felony to knowingly transport undocumented immigrants into the state.
An estimated 772,00 undocumented immigrants lived in Florida in 2019, with many working on construction sites, farms and packaging facilities. Migrant workers began leaving the state once DeSantis signed the new law in May, The Wall Street Journal reported, including those who are authorized to work but are married to someone who isn’t. A spokesperson for DeSantis defended the law, saying that businesses that hire undocumented immigrants “instead of Floridians will be held accountable.”
At multiple construction sites in Miami, workers shared with the Journal that they have lost about half of their crews; one man said he knows people who went to Indiana, where they could make $38 an hour instead of $25 and not have to worry about running afoul of the immigration law. Tom C. Murphy, co-president of Coastal Construction, told the Journal there was already a labor shortage before the law went into effect, and while “we fully support documentation of the immigrant workforce, the new law is aggravating an already trying situation.”
Immigration is usually a federal area of law, immigration lawyer Daniela Barshel told the Journal, and it will be difficult to give guidance to clients when there are differing state and federal rules. “It’s kind of extreme that Florida passed a law like this,” she said. Companies cannot be advised to stop hiring noncitizens, since that could be discrimination on the basis of race or national origin, leaving businesses with no easy path forward. “You don’t want to be fined by the government, and you also don’t want to be sued by someone because they were authorized to work and you didn’t hire them,” Barshel said.
Probiotics, prebiotics and postbiotics: The microbe garden in your gut
Anahad O’Connor – July 4, 2023
Gut microbiome concept. Stylized human intestine microbiota with healthy probiotic bacteria. Flat abstract illustration with hand drawn textures. (DrAfter123 via Getty Images)
Think of your gut microbiome as an intestinal garden, teeming with trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that play a crucial role in your health.
Whether the beneficial microbes in your gut are flourishing or getting crowded out by unwelcome guests largely depends on how well you’re taking care of them.
Scientists estimate that a typical person’s gut microbiota contains between 300 and 500 species of bacteria. Your gut microbiome is a complex ecological community, and the food that you feed it, the new species you invite, and the waste products they create all can affect your physical and mental health.
Here’s a guide to the busy world of “biotics” that inhabit your gut, and how to care for them.
Probiotics
What are probiotics?
The word “biotic” refers to “life” or living organisms. Probiotics are live microbes – including bacteria and fungi – that have beneficial effects on your health. Think of probiotics as the seeds that you sprinkle on soil: With proper care, they’ll turn into flowers that beautify your garden, repelling pests and crowding out weeds.
Why are they important?
Probiotics help metabolize your food and produce vitamins, fatty acids, and other nutrients. They regulate your immune system, lower your risk for Type 2 diabetes and other chronic disease, and prevent the bad guys from colonizing your gut.
Where do they come from?
Among the most well-known probiotics are bifidobacteria. These bacteria colonize our digestive tracts as soon as we’re born. We get them from our mothers during delivery and through breast milk.
Another common probiotic, lactobacillus, is found in many fermented foods. Lactobacillus and bifidobacterium are just two of the many different types of bacteria that inhabit our intestinal gardens.
How do I increase probiotics in my body?
Probiotic supplements, which come in the form of capsules, gummies, powders, and pills, are immensely popular, but they shouldn’t be your first choice. While they may help certain people, studies show they can also crowd out the wrong microbes. In general, a better way to cultivate your gut garden is to eat plenty of fermented foods and fiber-rich plants.
In one recent study, Stanford researchers found that assigning people to eat fermented foods every day for 2 1/2 months reduced their inflammation and increased their gut microbiome diversity. Higher levels of microbiome diversity are associated with better health and lower rates of disease.
Examples of fermented foods include the following:
-Kimchi and sauerkraut.
-Kombucha, a fizzy sweet and sour drink made with tea.
-Fermented dairy products like yogurt, kefir and cottage cheese.
-Tempeh, natto, miso and other fermented soy products.
-Some cheeses, like gouda and gruyère. You can identify cheeses that contain probiotics by looking for phrases like “live cultures” or “active cultures” on their labels.
Prebiotics
What are prebiotics?
Think of prebiotics like fertilizer for your microbiome. A prebiotic is typically a high-fiber food.
Why are they important?
The trillions of microbes that live in your gut depend on you for sustenance: Every time you eat, you’re feeding them too.
“If probiotics are the good guys, then prebiotics are the foods that promote the good guys,” says Erica Sonnenburg, a senior research scientist in microbiology and immunology at Stanford University.
Where do they come from?
Prebiotics consist mainly of complex carbs and fibers found in a variety of different plant foods. When you eat fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and other plants, much of the fiber they contain passes through your stomach and small intestine relatively intact because humans lack the enzymes to break it down. But the microbes in your large intestine can metabolize fiber and break it down into other compounds.
The way to promote lots of different friendly bacteria is to feed them lots of fiber and prebiotics, says Chris Damman, a gastroenterologist at the digestive health center at the University of Washington Medical Center.
How can I eat more prebiotics?
Prebiotic foods include:
-Vegetables such as asparagus, onions, garlic, shallots, leeks, cabbage, peas, tomatoes, Jerusalem artichokes and chicory.
-Chickpeas, lentils, kidney beans and soybeans.
-Whole grains such as oats, barley, rye, wheat and corn.
-Fruits like apples, berries, bananas, grapefruits and watermelon.
-Almonds, pistachios, cashews, and other nuts and seeds.
-Prebiotic supplements aren’t typically recommended. One small study found suggested that a prebiotic supplement called inulin at low doses was likely good for health, but that consuming more than 20 grams of it daily could be harmful. They also pointed out that the “health effects vary among individuals.”
Some marketers are selling prebiotic beverages, but nutrition experts say there’s no strong evidence that they work.
Postbiotics
What are postbiotics?
Your gut microbes break down high-fiber foods. The waste products this process leaves behind are called postbiotics. These compounds include a wide range of new compounds including vitamins, enzymes and amino acids.
“There are thousands and thousands of compounds that they’re making,” says Damman.
Why are they important?
When you feed your gut microbes prebiotics, they transform them into a group of postbiotic compounds called short-chain fatty acids, which are exceptionally good for your health.
One of the most well-studied short-chain fatty acids is butyrate. This compound helps to maintain gut health because it serves as a source of fuel for the cells that line your colon. Butyrate helps to reduce inflammation and mediate the immune system. It influences brain health and can stimulate the production of GLP-1, a hormone that reduces appetite, says Damman. (Ozempic and Wegovy, the popular weight loss and diabetes drugs, work by mimicking the action of GLP-1.)
“Butyrate is maybe the superpower of the microbiome,” Damman says. “It’s one of the key things that it’s producing that is critical in all aspects of our health.”
Where do they come from?
Postbiotics are created during the digestive process as your gut microbes break down fiber. One of the fascinating things about postbiotics is that the compounds that one species of bacteria produces can be the food – or prebiotic – that another species of bacteria depends on.
“It’s cyclical,” Damman says. “You have this web of many players, and in this community they’re both depending on one another and providing sustenance for each other.”
What can I do to increase postbiotics in my body?
Fermented foods contain postbiotics like lactic acid (yogurt) and acetic acid (kombucha), and these compounds have been shown to confer health benefits.
Coffee, chocolate and some teas don’t contain live bacteria, but they do contain postbiotics, which may be part of their healthful effects, Damman says.
“We’re still trying to tease this all apart,” Sonnenburg says. “If it turns out that lactic acid, for example, is the part that’s most important than all these probiotic pills that people are taking may be missing the most active component of fermented food. That’s why we tell people it’s better to just eat the fermented food.
What about antibiotics?
We’ve talked a lot about friendly bacteria, but there are plenty of pathogenic bacteria that cause deadly infections. The best line of defense against harmful bacteria are antibiotic medications, which kill off bacteria or make it difficult for them to grow and multiply.
Antibiotics were one of the great discoveries of the last century. They’ve saved many lives and made it possible for doctors to pioneer medical procedures like open-heart surgery and organ transplants. Experts say the introduction of antibiotics a century ago helped to extend the average human life span by 23 years.
But one downside of antibiotics is that they kill both the harmful and friendly bacteria in your gut. Think back to the lawn analogy. If you’ve got a bunch of weeds growing all over your lawn, you may have to use an herbicide and destroy some of your grass and plants in the process – so you can clear space for new grass to grow.
If you have a bacterial infection, taking an antibiotic will kill off the bad microbes and perhaps sacrifice some good ones in the process.
Should I use a probiotic to counter the effects of antibiotics on gut health?
Many people who take a course of antibiotics combine it with a probiotic supplement, hoping that the supplement will protect or restore their communities of good gut microbes.
But research suggests that it’s better to eat fermented foods instead or let your gut recover on its own rather than taking a supplement. In one study, the microbiomes of people who took a probiotic while using antibiotics took far longer to recover. While probiotic supplements are very useful for specific conditions – like irritable bowel syndrome, traveler’s diarrhea and inflammatory bowel disease – there are more reliable ways to nourish your gut microbiome.
The way to promote lots of different friendly bacteria is to feed them lots of fiber and prebiotics, Damman says. “It all comes back to diet,” he added. “Diet is not the only thing, but it’s a big thing – and the problem for a lot of people is that they’re not eating the right foods.”
World registers hottest day ever recorded on July 3
Gloria Dickie – July 4, 2023
FILE PHOTO: Red alert for heatwave in Beijing
Monday, July 3, was the hottest day ever recorded globally, according to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction.
The average global temperature reached 17.01 degrees Celsius (62.62 Fahrenheit), surpassing the August 2016 record of 16.92C (62.46F) as heatwaves sizzled around the world.
The southern U.S. has been suffering under an intense heat dome in recent weeks. In China, an enduring heatwave continued, with temperatures above 35C (95F). North Africa has seen temperatures near 50C (122F).
And even Antarctica, currently in its winter, registered anomalously high temperatures. Ukraine’s Vernadsky Research Base in the white continent’s Argentine Islands recently broke its July temperature record with 8.7C (47.6F).
“This is not a milestone we should be celebrating,” said climate scientist Friederike Otto of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Britain’s Imperial College London.
“It’s a death sentence for people and ecosystems.”
Scientists said climate change, combined with an emerging El Nino pattern, were to blame.
“Unfortunately, it promises to only be the first in a series of new records set this year as increasing emissions of [carbon dioxide] and greenhouse gases coupled with a growing El Nino event push temperatures to new highs,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, in a statement.
(Reporting by Gloria Dickie; Editing by Mark Potter)
