We need to transform how we live in the world. We must do this in the next two to three years, or it will be too late. A new synthesis of the world literature by the United Nations group that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month is a brave and inspiring call to action. My husband and I were reading the New York Times this morning, which is to say that we were getting about one minute of focused concentration before our toddler would need us. We felt that much of our mounting alarm and wish for expeditious intervention to lessen climate change was reflected in a new document (check it out at nytimes.com/dotearth) called the Synthesis Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What inspired me about the article on page 3 of the front sections were the following: 1. The synthesis report was approved by 130 nations. That's not easy when you are aware of the science involved. 2. It is personal -- the cost of action is less than the cost of inaction, to paraphrase Jeff Sachs of Columbia University's Earth Institute. We need to get rid of our two cars (and just keep the Prius), we need to make our homes energy-efficient, we need to walk and bike when we can, we need to think carefully about our consumption and it's effect on climate change, we need to figure out how best to model this for our kids and encourage them to join us on the path of earth stewardship. We need to find ways to integrate social justice into the movement so it's not just the upper classes who are able to afford to "green" their homes, lives and closets. 3. Achim Steiner - head of the UN Environment Program - wants this message sent to individuals and not just world leaders: "What we need is a new ethic in which every person changes lifestyle, attitude and behavior." My husband and I have been paying a lot of attention to "greening" our lives over the five years we've been together. My husband likes to reinvent some of the principles from his work as an entrepreneur as tools for green living, such as his "life balance sheet." We are deep in the design of a deep-green remodel of a small bungalow in our hometown of Rockridge here in Oakland. We are trying to be mindful of our mutual tendencies to be overachieving and under-relaxed, and how this affects our health, connection and our kids. This is my corner - the intersection of health and green. We are lessening our carbon footprint, although some experiments are more successful than others. Meanwhile, the UN report pumps up the urgency. I would love to hear from other moms, yoginis and fellow warriors who have figured out how to lessen the carbon footprint of driving our beautiful kids many miles to the glorious schools we've chosen for them. I've found carpooling to be much harder to pull off than it should be -- perhaps again getting to Mr. Steiner's comment about us needing a new ethic of lifestyle, attitude and behavior, so that driving our kids to school is less about our individual needs, schedule and convenience, and more about modeling for our kids our willingness to try new things to do our part in reducing climate change. Get inspired, do your part. Walk the talk. Tell us about it. Namaste and blessings, SG.

Check out this new study that shows the female brain reacts to stress differently then the male. Maybe this will help us understand the higher rates of depression and anxiety in women vs. men. The bottom line is that in women, the LIMBIC SYSTEM (our prehistoric part of our brains that mediates emotions) activates under stress. A longer-lasting response was seen in women. And what about our adrenals? Happy Thanksgiving! SG STUDY RESULTS--Penn researchers use brain imaging to demonstrate how men and women cope differently under stress **Findings have implications for identifying gender differences in mood disorders PHILADELPHIA – According to a study that appears in the current issue of SCAN (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience), researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine discuss how men and women differ in their neural responses to psychological stress. “We found that different parts of the brain activate with different spatial and temporal profiles for men and women when they are faced with performance-related stress,” says J.J. Wang, PhD, Assistant Professor or Radiology and Neurology, and lead author of the study. These findings suggest that stress responses may be fundamentally different in each gender, sometimes characterized as “fight-or-flight” in men and “tend-and-befriend” in women. Evolutionarily, males may have had to confront a stressor either by overcoming or fleeing it, while women may have instead responded by nurturing offspring and affiliating with social groups that maximize the survival of the species in times of adversity. The “fight-or-flight” response is associated with the main stress hormone system that produces cortisol in the human body – the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Thirty-two healthy subjects – 16 females and 16 males – received fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans before, during and after they underwent a challenging arithmetic task (serial subtraction of 13 from a 4 digit number), under pressure. To increase the level of stress, the researchers frequently prompted participants for a faster performance and asked them to restart the task if they responded incorrectly. As a low stress control condition, participants were asked to count backward without pressure. The researchers measured heart rate, cortisol levels (a stress hormone), subjects’ perceived stress levels throughout the experiments, and regional cerebral blood flow (CBF), which provides a marker of regional brain function. In men, it was found that stress was associated with increased CBF in the right prefrontal cortex and CBF reduction in the left orbitofrontal cortex. In women, the limbic system – a part of the brain primarily involved in emotion – was activated when they were under stress. Both men and women’s brain activation lasted beyond the stress task, but the lasting response in the female brain was stronger. The neural response among the men was associated with higher levels of cortisol, whereas women did not have as much association between brain activation to stress and cortisol changes. “Women have twice the rate of depression and anxiety disorders compared to men,” notes Dr. Wang. “Knowing that women respond to stress by increasing activity in brain regions involved with emotion, and that these changes last longer than in men, may help us begin to explain the gender differences in the incidence of mood disorders.”

Hi, Friends. We are in the midst of an epidemic of low Vitamin D levels yet the bad news is that conventional physicians rarely check them. Demand your "25-OH-Vitamin-D" level now! Below is a link to a great article from the New England Journal of Medicine from July - a review of the importance of Vitamin D. Basically 50,000 IU per day is too much and the dose that is recommended keeps going up higher and higher. Check your level to see if you're getting enough from sun, food sources and/or supplements. Here's the link to the article: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/extract/357/3/266