(Akiit.com) WASHINGTON (AP) — Michelle Obama has talked to schools and nutrition groups across the country in her effort to reduce childhood obesity. On Tuesday, she will face the food companies that make the snacks and junk food that stuff grocery aisles and school vending machines.

Not that the companies mind. The Grocery Manufacturers Association — which counts Kraft Foods Inc., Coca Cola Co. and General Mills Inc. among its members — invited her to speak at its science forum.

Welcoming the first lady and embracing her campaign for healthier kids, launched earlier this year, could have advantages.

The industry is positioned to take some blows in the coming year, including a child nutrition bill about to move through Congress that could eliminate junk food in schools, digging into some companies’ profits.

The Food and Drug Administration is also beginning to crack down on misleading labeling on food packages, saying some items labeled “healthy” are not, and the Senate last year mulled a tax on soda and other sweetened drinks to help pay for overhauling health care.

That tax did not make it into the health care bill, but it could be seen as an opening shot in a quietly growing effort to target food companies, especially as local, state and federal governments scrounge for revenue in a tight fiscal environment.

Michelle Obama has not previously taken her anti-obesity campaign directly to the large food companies. She said recently, however, that she would like to see more customer-friendly food labels “so parents won’t have to spend hours squinting at words that they can’t pronounce to figure out whether the foods that they’re buying are healthy or not.”

She has also said she will push companies that supply foods to schools to improve nutritional quality. Her campaign is largely focused on school lunches and vending machines, along with making healthy food more available and encouraging children to exercise more.
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(Akiit.com) When condoms breed suspicion and fear of herpes lurks behind every other hookup…

When fear of herpes lurks behind every other hookup.

He yelled, “Helena Andrews has the best p**** in the world!” into the receiver, and the line went dead-leaving the next man on the other end speechless. I didn’t hear about this mobile hit and run until weeks later when the podiatrist I was dating at the time just so happened to mention that he’d gotten a courtesy call about my vagina.

Thing is I had a clue as to which ex-man(iac) would take the time out of his busy schedule of being nuts to start a phone tree about other people’s property. But then again, it could’ve been anybody. Well, not an-n-nybody. But a few bodies. I never found out whom because investigating something like that is not just embarrassing, it’s exhaustive. Granted the list of unusual suspects wouldn’t be Traci Lords-long, but Lord knows it’d be longer than Mother Mary’s.

That was nearly five years ago, before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to ruin me with newly released information that says 48 percent of black women between the ages of 14 and 49 have the virus that causes genital herpes. Perhaps the podiatrist might have taken my pocketbook’s prank caller more seriously this week.

Add to that the 2010 urban myth that a young woman dressed provocatively in a “Prostitution Free Zone” was stopped by D.C. police and then questioned about her “profession” because she had more than two condoms in her purse. Someone told me that story very seriously over brunch last weekend.

In January, the Washington City Paper, which first reported the “three condom” rule, clarified. “According to D.C. police spokesperson Gwendolyn Crump, carrying condoms can lead an officer to suspect prostitution-but there’s no three-condom arrest rule,” wrote Amanda Hess in her CP blog, The Sexist.

No mention of an unfortunate condom-carrying kid in Kardashians by Bebe being mistaken for a prostitute. But the fact that a group of college-educated 20-somethings sat and seriously discussed the probability of such is a clear indication of how dangerous the perception of sexual liberation is among the single. After said mimosa-fueled discussion, I searched Google, consulted a local journalist and got laughed at by a public information officer in order to confirm the tale. I came up empty, but I still believe the tale of the girl who carried condoms could be true.

In a story about the latest doomsday data to out of the CDC, The Root wrote “…it’s no surprise that black women draw the short straw when it comes to getting genital herpes.” As of late, it seems as if we’ve been drawing that straw on a regular basis. As if the game is rigged somehow.
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(Akiit.com) Antiabortion advocates are claiming that Black women are being specifically targeted for abortions in an effort to keep the Black population down-a conspiracy against the Black population.

This comes after several antiabortion billboards popped up in Atlanta stirring up the race issue.

The billboards feature the face of a Black baby and the words “Black children are an endangered species.”

The billboards direct people to a website called toomanyaborted.com, which says for African-Americans, abortion has become a crisis. Nearly 40% of all Black pregnancies end in induced abortion, the website says, which is more than three times the rate of white women and two times the rate of all other races combined.

Now that you’ve read the fiction, let’s talk about the facts.

Fact-Just like with the Mormons and Proposition 8, Black people are not the architects of this campaign but for the right price you’ll find some of us willing to serve as spokespersons for the campaign. Just don’t believe the hype.

Fact-the biggest conspiracy against the Black population was the exporting and importing of Blacks from Africa to the now United States of America-not abortion. The Middle Passage claimed more Black lives than abortion doctors.

Fact-next to slavery, the second biggest conspiracies working against Black people continue to be the U.S. Justice system and the effects of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.

Fact-if abortions were such a conspiracy against Black people in particular, they’d be free and there’d be a clinic next door to every Black church, nail shop, beauty supply, and liquor store in the community.
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(Akiit.com) Speaking on ABC’s “This Week”, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi commented, “I think everybody wants affordable health care for all Americans. They know that this will take courage.

It took courage to pass Social Security. It took courage to pass Medicare. And many of the same forces that were at work decades ago are at work again against this bill.”

There is that word again. What exactly does affordable mean? The left tosses the word about but never bothers to define exactly what they mean by affordable. It could mean anything and everything and no doubt it will.

Affordable is a political term that is unassociated with actual costs, only addresses price and means, “you pay according to the amount of political capital you have.” For instance if you belong to the SEIU you pay less than if you didn’t. But I digress.

I dare say that the only reason it takes courage to pass Obamacare is because a majority of Americans oppose it. According to a recent CNN poll only 25% of Americans want congress to pass this Healthcare bill. It is particularly telling that the new left continues to depict the 75% of Americans that oppose their efforts to nationalize healthcare (which is the end game) as ignoble, uncompassionate, ignorant racists. More annoying is that they portray themselves as visionary, compassionate champions of good.

I suspect that the truth is that Americans do not like the substance of the healthcare bills – all 4000 pages! Nor are they enamored of the back room deals this administration cut in order to secure the votes of their own party. Frankly, the stench of bribes like the latest appellate-judgeship-for-yes vote is more reminiscent of B.S. than it is of hope and change.

It is also likely true that Americans have weighed the fiscal promises of huge government programs like Social Security against their reality and decided they would like to find other avenues towards reforming healthcare- other than putting it in charge of Washington bureaucrats.
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(Akiit.com) SAN ANTONIO (AP) — A moment on the lips, forever on the hips? A bad figure is hardly the worst of it. Eating a lot of fat, especially the kind that’s in cookies and pastries, can significantly raise the risk of stroke for women over 50, a large new study finds.

We already know that diets rich in fat, particularly artery-clogging trans fat, are bad for the heart and the waistline.

The new study is the largest to look at stroke risk in women and across all types of fat. It showed a clear trend: Those who ate the most fat had a 44 percent higher risk of the most common type of stroke compared to those who ate the least.

“It’s a tremendous increase that is potentially avoidable,” said Dr. Emil Matarese, stroke chief at St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, Penn. “What’s bad for the heart is bad for the brain.”

He reviewed but did not help conduct the research, which was presented Wednesday at an American Stroke Association conference. It involved 87,230 participants in the Women’s Health Initiative, a federally funded study best known for revealing health risks from taking hormone pills for menopause symptoms.

Before menopause, women traditionally have had less risk of stroke than similarly aged men, although this is changing as women increasingly battle obesity and other health problems.

After menopause, the risk rises and the gender advantage disappears, said Dr. Ka He, a nutrition specialist and senior author of the study from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

He and another researcher, Sirin Yaemsiri, wanted to see whether dietary fat affected the odds.

Participants in the study had filled out detailed surveys on their diets when they enrolled, at ages 50 to 79. Researchers put them into four groups based on how much fat they ate, and looked about seven years later to see how many had suffered a stroke caused by clogged blood vessels supplying the brain — the most common kind.

There were 288 strokes in the group of women who consumed the most fat each day (95 grams) versus 249 strokes in the group eating the least fat (25 grams), Yaemsiri told the conference.

After taking into account other factors that affect stroke risk — weight, race, smoking, exercise and use of alcohol, aspirin or hormone pills — researchers concluded that women who ate the most fat had a 44 percent greater risk of stroke.
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