ICN is the third web-based news organization to win national reporting honors, and the smallest among a trio that includes ProPublica and Huffington Post. InsideClimate News reporters Elizabeth McGowan, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer are the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. The trio took top honors in the category for their work on “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of,” a project that began with a seven-month investigation into the million-gallon spill of Canadian tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River in 2010. It broadened into an examination of national pipeline safety issues, and how unprepared the nation is for the impending flood of imports of a more corrosive and more dangerous form of oil. The Pulitzer committee commended the reporters for their “rigorous reports on flawed regulation of the nation’s oil pipelines, focusing on potential ecological dangers posed by diluted bitumen (or “dilbit”), a controversial form of oil.” It is great to see these reporters being recognized for their work done on such an important issue. Hopefully, as a result of this award, more attention is directed at? Keystone Pipeline XL, and its inevitable risks and damage to the environment.

Culprit in Heart Disease Goes Beyond Meat?s Fat

A new study finds evidence for a surprising new explanation of why red meat may contribute to heart disease. Researchers with the Cleveland Clinic have come to believe that what damaged hearts was not just the thick edge of fat on steaks, or the delectable marbling of their tender interiors. In fact, these scientists suspected that saturated fat and cholesterol made only a minor contribution to the increased amount of heart disease seen in red-meat eaters. The real culprit, they proposed, was a little-studied chemical that is burped out by bacteria in the intestines after people eat red meat. It is quickly converted by the liver into yet another little-studied chemical called TMAO that gets into the blood and increases the risk of heart disease.? Researchers tested to see if a burst of TMAO would show up in people?s blood after they ate steak? And would the same thing happen to a vegan who had not eaten meat for at least a year and who consumed the same meal? ?The answers were: yes, there was a TMAO burst in the five meat eaters; and no, the vegan did not have it. And TMAO levels turned out to predict heart attack risk in humans, the researchers found. The researchers also found that TMAO actually caused heart disease in mice. Additional studies with 23 vegetarians and vegans and 51 meat eaters showed that meat eaters normally had more TMAO in their blood and that they, unlike those who spurned meat, readily made TMAO after swallowing pills with carnitine. ?The researchers found that carnitine was not dangerous by itself. Instead, the problem arose when it was metabolized by bacteria in the intestines and ended up as TMAO in the blood, which enables cholesterol to get into artery walls and also prevents the body from excreting excess cholesterol.

How Committed is Your State to Local Food?

How does your state stack up against all the others when it comes to availability and consumption of locally-produced foods? Strolling of the Heifers has the answer. The Vermont-based local food advocacy group has released its second annual Strolling of the Heifers Locavore Index, ranking the 50 states and the District of Columbia in terms of their commitment to local foods. Using recent indicator data from multiple sources, the index incorporates farmers markets, consumer-supported agriculture operations (CSAs) and food hubs in its per-capita comparison of consumers? interest in eating locally-sourced foods?also known as locavorism.

Take a Guess What This Is

You thought pink slime was bad, check this out! This is a picture of McDonald’s chicken nuggets before they are cooked.? The paste you see in the picture above is leftover chicken parts that are forced through a high pressure sieve. The industry calls this method AMR ? Advanced Meat Recovery. Do you want to feed this to your kids?