#5SmartReads - December 1, 2022

Diksha is a news junkie, as prone to binge on international affairs or pop culture. By day, she works to solve some of the world's most pressing challenges facing children, and rest of the time she is mom to 2. Currently living in New York, Diksha also calls Nepal, Italy and Thailand home.

When It Comes To Eating Disorders, Brown Girls Don't Measure Up (Elle)

This article brings to light the white, eurocentric body standards upon which BMI scale is based, and the lifetime of shame and destruction that can cause for many brown bodies.

I relate to this article so completely. It resonates in terms of a lifetime of feeling like my wide hips and full (HEALTHY!!) body didn't conform within the strict standards being applied.  And some of these suppressed thoughts are now reemerging as I raise a pre-teen daughter and don't want her to fall into the same traps I did. This area of parenting absolutely terrifies me- you'd think much has changed, but it's pretty scary that the ideal body type standard still doesn't deviate much from 30 years ago. Media representation matters so much, as does the medical bias that prevents women of color from being diagnosed with eating disorders. And I haven't come across much in pop culture exploring this. I just watched the author's Disney+ docuseries "Growing Up" titled Athena and so should you."

As South Asian women, Athena and I wanted to frame this topic through our specific cultural lens: from the subtle demands for perfection to the pressure to conform to white beauty standards to the earnest desire to unburden our hard-working immigrant parents of our problems, causing us to try to deal with our demons in secret."

Welcome to the Ambaniverse (Rest Of World)

This is a really cool interactive way to explore how the Ambani business empire touches the daily lives of millions of Indians.

Mukesh Ambani, one of the world's wealthiest men, and his companies sell everything from food, to clothes, to fuel to even the internet. 

In addition to their own brands, they have also partnered with many multinationals including Payless Shoes, Tiffany & Co.  and Armani to bring these brands to India. 

Ambani owns the huge Reliance Industries conglomerate, which he inherited from his father. However since taking over, he's turned Reliance (once known for textiles and petrochemicals) into a digital powerhouse.

Snooping on their outlandish whereabouts on social media is quite a rabbit hole if you have some time to spare. Their daughter's over the top wedding where Hillary was a guest and Beyonce performed! Their $2 billion home Antilia that has a staff of 600!  Nita Ambani's ultra rare Himalaya Birkin!

How Snobbery Helped Take The Spice Out Of European Cooking (NPR)

This is an interesting look at how until the mid-1600s, European cuisine had a similar flavor profile to other cuisines of layering contrasting flavors. 

What then led to the wealthy West with access through their colonies to a rich spices to choose a more limited flavor profile? 

The reasons (economics, politics, religion, taste) are too many to list, but I found it to be a fascinating read on the anthropology of food. 

Spices which were once expensive and exclusive, became available to everyone with colonization and thus the re-definition of what elegant food is once the masses had access was a part of the equation. 

World Population Reaches 8 Billion, U.N. Says (New York Times)

Amongst everything else making the news last week you may have missed that we have now hit 8 billion people on Planet Earth - and that too just 11 years after we hit 7 billion.

This has all sorts of implications, especially as this announcement coincided with the COP27 climate meeting in Cairo. We're producing and consuming at levels that aren't sustainable. Much of the population explosion is happening in some of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, where women and girls lack access to sexual and reproductive health care.

Superbug ‘pandemic’ stalks India as antibiotic resistance jumps 10pc in a year (The Telegraph)

This week marks World Antimicrobial Awareness week, a week to raise awareness about a  silent pandemic that is rendering ineffective many of our medicines to treat common infections, including many that disproportionately affect children. 

Those of us that work in public health emergencies have been unsuccessfully sounding the alarm. 

This article highlights AMR's toll in India where antibiotic resistance has jumped 10% in a year. And where doctors are reporting that only 43% of pneumonia infections could be treated with first line antibiotics in 2021 – down from 65% in 2016. 

To add to this dire picture, tuberculosis infections rose by 19 per cent in 2021, partly driven by a rise in multi-drug resistant infections.

By 2032, it is predicted that it will not be possible to treat 85% of TB cases in India with common drugs.

I work on AMR as it impacts children and it is a truly scary picture, and what stresses me out more than anything else I work on.

So what can you do about AMR? There are many actions at the individual level (like using antimicrobial drugs only when they are prescribed by a  health professional, and completing the full treatment course, questioning your doctor if you are prescribed antibiotics for viral infections). 

The Pasteur Act, sponsored by Congressman Doyle, is sitting in Congress and calls to establish a program to develop antimicrobial innovations targeting the most challenging pathogens and most threatening infections. 

In the US alone 2.8 million drug-resistant infections occurred in 2019.  

Do you know there hasn't been an antibiotic class introduced since 1987? We have reached a point where there are hardly any treatment alternatives left for some bacterial infections which is SCARY. 

So this WAAW week, take a bit of time to learn more about this silent pandemic.