Prenatal exposure to pesticide may increase risk of autism

A new study published in Evironmental Health Perspectives found that maternal exposure to pesticides can increase the risk of autism in children.  Researchers from The University of California, Davis MIND Institute looked at associations between autism diagnoses and pesticides including organophosphates, pyrethroids and carbamates. They found that the risk of having a child with autism increased by two-thirds if mothers lived near farms or fields where synthetic pesticides were applied.  This association was higher when pregnant women were exposed during their second or third trimesters. “In that early developmental gestational period, the brain is developing synapses, the spaces between neurons, where electrical impulses are turned into neurotransmitting chemicals that leap from one neuron to another to pass messages along. The formation of these junctions is really important and may well be where these pesticides are operating and affecting neurotransmission,” said lead author Dr. Irva Hertz-Picciotto in a recent press release.  Many synthetic insecticides are neurotoxic, and prenatal exposure can have a disproportionate effect on babies because their developing nervous systems are more vulnerable to environmental pollutants.

Juan Luis Barrera Portillo

@ByPecowines

barrerayportillo.blogspot.co.uk

barrerayportillo@gmail.com

CANARY WHARF - LONDON

from: http://organic-center.org/hot-science/prenatal-exposure-to-autism-may-increase-risk-of-autism/

Organic wine?

Organic wine? What nouveau decadence will they think of next, you wonder? But oenophiles (wine lovers) could tell you that chemical-free cabernet and pesticide-free pinot aren’t new concepts at all. In fact, some of the world’s top wineries have been producing organic wines for decades. They just haven’t told anyone about it.

Reading the labels at a liquor store may not give you the full picture of what goes into (or what doesn’t go into) producing a particular wine. Modern winemaking techniques can depend heavily on chemical agriculture. Up to 17 applications of herbicides, fungicides and pesticides can be added to vines during the growing cycle, depending on factors such as location and climate. (These synthetic chemicals not only strip the soil, destroy ecosystems, pollute the environment and contaminate waterways, but they can also be ingested as residues, accumulating in the body over time to cause numerous neurological problems, poor organ function and even cancer.) In conventional winemaking, after the grapes are picked and bottling begins, one or more additives–up to 20 of them–may be utilized to improve taste, colour and clarity.

Organic wine, on the other hand, is harvested and bottled using the most natural methods and ingredients possible. At its simplest, organic wine is defined as "wine made from organically grown grapes." Grape species are usually chosen for better disease resistance and character, rather than maximum yield. Using pesticides or herbicides is a big no-no; the only allowable fertilizers are mature plant manures, which are sometimes combined with vine prunings. Artificial yeasts are avoided during the fermentation process in favour of wild yeasts that form naturally on the grapes. While all wines depend on sulphur dioxide for stability, organic wines contain far less.

Some producers with an eco-conscience, such as Jean-Pierre Margin of Chateau La Canorgue in France’s C? de Luberon, have gone organic to follow in the footsteps of their ancestors, who created superb wines by combining traditional techniques and the skills of their cellar masters.

"Confronting nature directly means you have to be vigilant,"said Margin in a recent interview with wine critic Gerald Asher. "You must look ahead–mistakes are difficult to correct organically. You become more efficient because you have to stay on top of every detail of every vine–and perhaps that’s why the wine is better."

For a brief stint in recent history, wine has been valued for its effect on health, but around 450 BC, Hippocrates touted specific wines to treat fever, disinfect wounds and as diuretics. Up until the 18th century, wine was a safer drink than water, which was unsanitary and filled with pathogens.

Modern research has shown that this fruit of the vine–when consumed in moderation–may protect against heart disease and some forms of cancer. Wine contains catechins, also known as flavonoids, which act as antioxidants and prevent free radicals from damaging cells. Resveratrol and quercetin are two other substances found in red wine that have been shown to boost the immune system and block cancer formation.

People in southern France typically eat a diet high in fat, yet they suffer from lower rates of heart disease than other countries. Scientists partly attribute this so-called "French paradox" to the effect of the wine they drink. According to findings published in the January 2000 issue of European Heart Journal, wine dilates the arteries and increases blood flow, thereby lowering the risk of clots that can damage the heart muscle and cause strokes.

More research tops off the glass–Wine appears to boost levels of "good" HDL cholesterol and prevent "bad" LDL cholesterol from damaging arteries. The drink’s phenols may slow the growth of breast cancer cells. Red wine may help prevent oral cancer. Moderate drinkers have greater bone mineral density than non-drinkers. (No study needed to show us that a glass of wine with dinner can be a great de-stresser.)

But wine isn’t a panacea. Overindulgence in any form of alcohol turns a good thing bad, and can cause or contribute to serious health problems including nutritional deficiencies, liver disease, damage to the internal organs, early menopause or menstrual irregularities, brain injury, impotence, sterility and immune depression. 

Juan Luis Barrera Portillo
@ByPecowines
barrerayportillo@gmail.com
Canary Wharf - London

Organic ‘is the future’ for Bordeaux

Organic ‘is the future’ for Bordeaux, declared Guillaume Halley, owner of Chateau de La Dauphine in Fronsac (pictured), at a dinner held in London to discuss innovation and change in the prestigious French wine region.

Several winemakers have previously highlighted the difficulty of managing organic vines in Bordeaux, where mildew is a common problem for growers and producers.

Still, the French locality of Gironde, which encompasses Bordeaux, had the second highest number of certified organic producers in the country in 2011, at 477, behind only Vaucluse in Provence, according to a joint report by Agence Bio and the Millesime Bio expo published in January this year.

Across France, there were 4,692 producers with certified organic vineyards in 2011, equivalent to 7.4% of the country’s vineyard area and up from 6% in 2010.

Halley, who’s estate has 40 hectares of vines and has just taken on Michel Rolland as consultant, said that he believes the benefits of going organic, in terms of the quality of the wine, longevity of the soil and for the health of vineyard workers, will convince more producers to make the switch.

‘It’s hard work but it’s necessary,’ he said. ‘At the moment, 7% of the Bordeaux estates work like this, but it was only 3% ten years ago.’ He says he expects 100% of Bordeaux to be organic within 30 years from now.

‘When you treat [vines] with synthetic products, it stops the maturity,’ he said, adding that, with organic methods, ‘it’s easier to get the perfect maturity’.

Ludovic David, oenologist at Chateau Marquis de Terme, a 4ème Cru Classé in Margaux, said that he ‘completely agrees’ with Halley about Bordeaux. This year, David has experimented by tending two hectares of vines organically. ‘We have had very good results,’ he said.

David added that he is also a convert to ageing a proportion of wine in concrete, egg-shaped vats, which are manufactured by French group Nomblot. At €3,000-a-piece, eggs are clearly not an option for everyone, but David said his experiments so far have convinced him that the 600-litre vessels ‘give more roundness to the wine’, and help to protect the fruit.

At the dinner, David and Halley were also joined by Romain Baillou, sales manager at Chateau Couhins, a Cru Classé de Graves in Pessac-Léognan and owned by France’s national agri-food research agency, INRA.

Baillou spoke of the property's use of satellite GPS technology to monitor 'each leaf of each vine' in its 25 hectares of vineyards. ‘Thanks to that, we have a map of the ripeness of one plot. If you have good ripeness, it’s easier in the cellar.’ Couhins has also used infra-red technology to measure polyphenol content in grapes since 2009.

All three men at the dinner said that Bordeaux is increasingly benefiting from producers and wine consultants travelling to other wine regions.

Still, in a region with as much clout and tradition as Bordeaux, don’t expect things to move too quickly.

Juan Luis Barrera Portillo
@ByPecowines
barrerayportillo@gmail.com
Canary Wharf - London

Read more at http://www.decanter.com/news/blogs/team/584355/organic-is-the-future-for-bordeaux-wine#1XfLLohz1BQVKmKw.99

We are what we eat

Lifestyle.
The gourmet products, every day more present among Londoners. Also, the organic products are the most sought every day. We are very clear that we are what we eat. Health and pleasure are combined in these products. We're talking about finest products, exclusive, hight quality. The key is to specialize. To have the ability to produce the best product. We are what we eat. That is clear. therefore, we are seeing growing so fast consumption of these products. The reports of the top universities support this. Improving Health begins improvement in food products.
 I take this occasion to make a very important comment. The price charged by agencies of development, integration, public relations, here in London are around 60,000 pounds. The person who really does the work may be a scholarship recipient does not gain more than £ 20,000 a year ...

Are just some prices?


Juan Luis Barrera Portillo
@ByPecowines
barrerayportillo@gmail.com
Canary Wharf - London

foto by pasowinerealestate.com

Bill Gates, Facebook, Apple, and nowadays in wine sector!

Bill Gates commitment to hiring based on skills, not titles.

  From the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are making an effort to encourage businesses to hire employees based on their competence and skills and not on whether or not they have formal qualifications. Otherwise, reviewers, many companies are overlooking potential skilled employees who care enough to dominate a given field just because they could not enter university.

   Innovate + Educate, partners of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are those who have launched this program, known as "New Project Options". Its director, Angela Cobb stresses in the blog of the Gates Foundation, these and other data, such as the fact that companies are losing money because many new graduates do not know how to do a job, because they are unprepared.

   While there are many highly qualified young autodidacts who are left out of the selection process for not having a college degree or other kind of official capacity.

   Indeed, the Aspen Institute gives official data on this situation: three million unemployed in the U.S., and companies without covering your jobs because they can not find qualified for the skills workers need.

   That's why the new draft Innovate + Educate is working to change the way businesses conduct their recruitment or selection of candidates. Overall, what is sought is the test of the candidate and subsequent employment, if your skills are necessary to perform the job.

   Some of the leading voices in education and business, including Bill Gates, the Aspen Institute, the National Skills Coalition and the White House agree with this view, and have implemented similar programs that enhance the development of skills and skills based on the hiring of the candidate.

INCREASED REVENUE

   The first results of the implementation of this program speak for themselves. Research by Innovate + Educate shows that entrepreneurs who have built workers based on their skills, have seen a reduction of 25-75% in turnover, reduced 50 to 70% at the time of hire, the reduction of 70 % in the cost-to-hire and 50% reduction in time teaching job. In short, hiring based on skills is five times more predictive of success than hiring the worker based solely on the degree.

   "Ultimately, the greatest hope for the project is to help leverage opportunities, and that everyone can have a successful career, regardless of their previous education or work experience," writes Cobb.

   Remember that Bill Gates himself created an empire without finishing college. And the same case applies to winners as Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, and the late Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple. The three dropouts to get their innovative products and companies because they had an idea and thought they had enough knowledge to do so.


Juan Luis Barrera Portillo
@ByPecowines
barrerayportillo@gmail.com
Canary Wharf - London

Our Food, Our Future

If we want to feed the world, we have to spray the countryside with poisonous chemicals. We have to splice fish genes into tomatoes, and bacteria into corn. We have to pour on chemical fertilizers. It's the only way. Organic methods are for backyard gardens, not for feeding billions. That's what you hear over and over, in the media, from politicians, from so-called experts. One of the loudest of those self-proclaimed experts is Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute, a probusiness think tank funded by some of the world's largest agrichemical conglomerates. Avery says, over and over, things like this: "Widespread organic farming is simply not a viable option at this time. The first consequence of a global shift to organic farming would be the plowdown of at least 6 million square miles of wildlife habitat to make up for the lower yields of organic production."

Alarmist statements like this drive me crazy. They leap with suspicious speed to a conclusion no thinking person can readily embrace. They close off options that have not even been explored. They add up to a dictum so common it is developing a nickname: TINA, There Is No Alternative.

TINA statements seem designed to make us swallow just one course (to which, after all, There Is No Alternative). Often it is a course that thinking people question because, however profitable it might be to some, it imposes costs on others—to society, to the environment, to our future. Whenever I hear TINA, I start listening hard, seeking out evidence, and above all looking for alternatives.

When I listen to those who say we must intensify and bioengineer agriculture to feed the world, I notice that they are basing their arguments on three big assumptions: 1. It will take a lot more food to feed the world. 2. More-intensive industrial agriculture can produce a lot more food. 3. Organic farming cannot.

But when I look at the evidence, I find little support for any of those claims. In fact we already grow enough food to feed everyone; the excess simply is not distributed where it is needed. Industrial agriculture, far from being the salvation it promises, is actually undermining the resource base—healthy soil, clean water, and diversity of plants and animals—needed to sustain the world's growing human population in the long term. If anything can restore that resource base and at the same time eliminate hunger it is organic methods.


Juan Luis Barrera Portillo
barrerayportillo@gmail.com
@ByPecowines

Canary Wharf - London

Information obtained from: http://www.organicgardening.com/living/our-food-our-future

America vs. Europe: The Organic Divide

The first thing you notice at Millésime Bio, the huge organic wine trade show in Montpellier, France, is that organic wine is booming in Europe. The second thing is that nobody at Millésime Bio talks about being organic.

Both production and consumption of organic wine are skyrocketing in Europe, while across the Atlantic Ocean, organic wine is a niche product. The difference is all in the definition.

In 2012, the European Union decided to allow the use of "organic wine" as a term for the first time, and decided that organic wine could include sulfites.

This was the exact opposite of a 2011 decision in the U.S., where the National Organic Standards Board denied a petition to allow sulfites in "organic wine."

The impact of these decisions on wine, both production and consumption, is striking. In the U.S., organic wine is still a niche category that is outsold even at many natural foods stores by unregulated, loosely defined "sustainable wine." Moreover, wines labeled as certified organic actually sell for 7 percent less on average than similar conventional wines, according to a 2010 study by a UCLA business professor.

Across the Atlantic, at a time when the French are drinking less wine overall every year, they are drinking more organic wine: consumption was up 61 percent over the last four years. And swathes of growers are converting to green practices, with more than 1,200 certified organic wine producers now in Languedoc-Roussillon alone.

The U.S. and EU reached an agreement in 2012 to recognize each others' organic certifications for every product but wine. There are free-trade talks about food going on right now between the EU and U.S., and no one knows what the outcome of those will be, but unless there is a change, Europe and North America will continue to be at odds over sulfites.

It's not a small distinction. Sulfites are an allergen, and although they are not responsible for red wine headaches as many people believe, they can cause hives and breathing difficulties in those who are sensitive. However, sulfites play a number of important roles in wine, some of which can be made unnecessary by careful viticulture and better hygiene. But there is currently no replacement for sulfites as a means of preventing wine in the bottle from oxidizing over time.

"Today it's difficult to make a wine without sulfites. You need to send your wine all over the world," says Valerie Pladeau, consultant winemaker for Sudvinbio, a French organic wine trade association.

In the EU, organic red wines may contain as much as 100mg of sulfites per liter while the limit for whites is 150mg/liter. These are tighter limits than conventional wines, but permissive enough that most European organic winemakers say they don't come close to using as much sulfites as they're allowed.

It's hard to imagine European organic vintners voluntarily giving up sulfites, though there are a few advocates. Massimiliana Spinola, owner and winemaker of Castello di Tassarolo in Gavi, is one.

"I think the law should be much stricter on sulfites," Spinola says. "Like in America, organic wine should be without sulfites. It's difficult for me to taste the other wines. I get all the sulfites in the nose. The wines taste bitter."

But much more common are European winemakers who insist that sulfites are necessary, even in organic wine.

Jean Baptiste Adam's winery in Alsace is celebrating its 500th anniversary this year; it was making wine when Europeans thought California was an island. He converted to organics in the 1990s and biodynamics in 2007. His daughter Laure, 25, has been making wine with him for two years; she will be the 15th generation.

"We do a lot of treatments to try to use less sulfur," she says. "We have to spend a lot more time in the vineyard, but that's okay. We tried to make wine without sulfites and we were not really happy with it."

Patrick Guiraud, president of Sudvinbio, claims there isn't much support among European vintners to eliminate sulfites from organic wines. The EU will revisit organic wine regulations next year, to discuss whether to continue to allow sugar to be added (chaptalization) and whether to allow new wine additives that have come on the market since 2012. But sulfites are not currently on the agenda.

"In the U.S. that issue was dropped into the activist community, which had a knee-jerk response," says Paul Chartrand, who imports organic wines from Europe to the U.S. "In Europe the winemaking community is a much bigger part of society. You find some producers in Europe making no-sulfite wines, but very few want to make all their wines that way. They don't want to change the world of organic wine."

But many Europeans would like to change the U.S. definition of organic wine. Guiraud said the influx of newly certified organic producers in France has created a situation where the country has more organic wine to sell than it has buyers.

"Now we can go to new markets," Guiraud says.

It is only natural that they would want to sell to North America: it is the world's largest wine market, and accounts for 44 percent of all organic products sold in the world, according to the U.K. Soil Association. And indeed, some producers at Millésime Bio had signs on their tables advertising that they had a few no-sulfite wines for distribution. Without exception, those tables had signs in English.


Juan Luis Barrera Portillo
@ByPecowines
barrerayportillo@gmail.com
Cabary Wharf - London



From: http://www.wine-searcher.com/m/2014/02/america-vs-europe--the-organic-divide