A new study at Oregon State is designed to help clarify the risks. A multidisciplinary team of researchers at the Corvallis and OSU-Cascades campuses is monitoring 100 preschoolers in both communities, looking at chemical exposure and children’s behavior, particularly their ability to self-regulate, a key to school readiness.

“Given the fact that the numbers of children with neurological and cognitive disabilities is on the rise in the developing world, many have hypothesized that exposure to chemicals may be a contributing factor,” says Molly Kile, the public health environmental epidemiologist who is leading the study.

Research grabs the interest of students and keeps them inspired, says Cyndi Trevisiol, who worked in OSU's Skeletal Biology Lab. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

As a freshman, she learned all that, along with how to feed and care for the rats, in her first summer in OSU’s Skeletal Biology Laboratory.

Under the guidance of OSU professors Russell Turner and Urszula Iwaniec, Trevisiol produced results that led to a paper in Bone, one of the major peer-reviewed journals in the field. “It was hard, and I made mistakes,” she says. “But Russ and Urszula were always so open and willing to listen to my concerns and interests. And tell me where I had made an error in my thinking.”

A Better Idea

In 2006, the graduate of West Albany High School had come to OSU with interests in animals and tissue engineering. So when she saw an application for a research-for-undergraduates program funded by the National Institutes of Health, she decided to apply. “I didn’t know what a big deal that was for me, as a freshman, and when I asked Dr. Greenwood in biochemistry to recommend me, he said, ‘Well . . . . I have a better idea.’” He introduced her to Kevin Ahern, who ran OSU’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute summer research program.

With financial support from the HHMI program, Trevisiol became the first undergraduate in the newly established skeletal biology lab in the College of Health and Human Sciences. “She set the standards for everyone else,” says Iwaniec. “I would present Cyndi with a project, and she would take it from start to finish and make it her own. In a lot of cases, she went beyond it, looking at what was asked of her and finding alternative methods for data collection.”

In that first year, Trevisiol demonstrated that the process in which broken bones repair themselves was impaired in rats fed a diet high in alcohol. Physicians have long known that bones don’t heal well in human alcoholics, but Trevisiol’s research was the first to demonstrate the mechanism that inhibits bone fracture repair.

Real Contributions

“Undergraduates,” says Turner, “are capable of far more than simply obtaining a research experience. This is top-notch, first-line research in which undergraduates can make a very meaningful contribution in discovery processes.”

Using mass spectrometry and micro-computed tomography scanning, Trevisiol delved into proteomics, bone mineralization and growth factors. Her contributions led to her being listed as a co-author on three more papers (in Bone, Osteoporosis International and the Journal of Mineral and Bone Research) with Iwaniec, Turner and their colleagues.

Real Education

“I hope a lot more freshmen get involved in undergraduate research,” she says. “It was valuable for me to start doing research so early in my education. You start out a little unfocused, but if you’re interested in what you’re studying, and you’re committed to learning, all of sudden school will come into focus.

“It’s a really good experience that should be given to more freshmen,” she adds. “For a lot of people I know, if they had gotten into research at the right time, it might have grabbed them.”

Jennifer Kue is studying the reasons Hmong women are reluctant to undergo screening for breast and cervical cancer. (Photo by Jan Sonnenmair)

Jennifer Kue was just a little girl when she began assisting Portland’s Hmong community. Learning English was a snap for this child of Hmong immigrants, so helping her parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles navigate American society – translating and interpreting, making phone calls, setting up appointments – was a role she fell into naturally.

Over the years, the Ph.D. student in OSU’sDepartment of Public Health has turned her informal advocacy into a professional calling.

“I knew I wanted to work with immigrants and refugees because of the struggles and challenges my own family went through,” Kue explains. “I knew I was in a unique position to help newcomer communities – to help them establish their lives in the U.S. more easily than my parents did.”

Health Screens

Toward that end, Kue is working with Professor (and principal investigator) Sheryl Thorburn and with research assistants and OSU graduates Karen Levy Keon and Patela Lo to understand the barriers that prevent Hmong women from seeking breast and cervical cancer screenings. The team is exploring factors that may explain the extraordinary rates of cervical cancer mortality in this ethnic group from Southeast Asia (three to four times higher than among the broader population of Asians, Pacific Islanders and non-Hispanic white women), as well as their low rates of preventive mammography and Pap tests. Kue is co-investigator and project coordinator of the study that was funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Lo’s participation is funded by NCI through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

“Cervical cancer is so preventable when detected early,” Kue laments. “But in our culture, women don’t talk about issues like these – issues that are so personal, so private.”

About 80 women and men are participating in the study, answering questions about medical mistrust, historical discrimination, cultural beliefs and familial relations. Along with a team of bilingual interviewers, the researchers are exploring topics such as: perceptions of and experiences with the U.S. health care system; men’s influence on women’s decisions; levels of health literacy; and wariness toward hospitals and treatments.

Trust Among Kin

Kue’s own ethnicity, along with a decade’s experience as a caseworker and researcher at Portland’s Asian Family Center, have been essential to building trust among the participants, whose lives typically revolve around close-knit kinship networks.

“Jennifer is highly committed to her community and passionate about improving their health and well-being,” says Thorburn. “She is a critical link between the research team and the Hmong community.”

In addition to her research on the Hmong Breast and Cervical Cancer Project, Kue is focusing her doctoral dissertation on Hmong knowledge of hepatitis B, along with risk perceptions and barriers to screening and vaccination. Previous research, she notes, has found high rates of hepatitis B infection among the Hmong, accompanied by low levels of screening and vaccination.

“It’s not enough to provide written information for people,” Kue insists. “In our community, communication is word of mouth. You have to have that personal connection. You can’t just pass out pamphlets and expect to solve the problem.”

Laotian Dreams

When Kue talks about her homeland, her emotions run raw. She was just a year old when her mother and grandparents fled communist forces after the fall of Saigon in 1975, traveling by foot through the Laotian jungle at night, crossing the Mekong River and eventually finding safety in a Thai refugee camp. There, they were reunited with her father and his two older brothers, both of whom had been soldiers who had fought for the United States during the Vietnam War. A year later, a California church sponsored the family’s emigration to the U.S.

Kue dreams of living and working in Laos someday with her husband and two small children.

“I’ve never been back to see the place I was born,” she says, brushing at the tears welling up in her eyes. “It’ll be an emotional trip.”

As for the study, she hopes to translate the results into tools for change, to design a culturally sensitive intervention based on the findings.

“We have a commitment to the community to go that extra step – not just get this information and let it sit on a shelf,” Kue says. “We need to find what works.”

To support student scholarships, contact the OSU Foundation.

“The surge in obesity in this country is nothing short of a public health crisis, and it’s threatening our children, it’s threatening our families, and more importantly it’s threatening the future of this nation.”
— First Lady Michelle Obama

Romping in the backyard at Cozy Corners family childcare home, Avery and Lauryn are boosting their health by doing what kids do naturally - running, jumping and playing. (Photo: Nancy Froelich)

When the doorbell chimes, the toddlers instantly forget about the movie flickering on the giant TV screen. Scrambling over the plush sofa and scooting past the coffee table, the five preschoolers at Cozy Corners family childcare home cluster curiously by the door to see who’s here.

These pintsized Albany residents have, after all, seen Beverly Hills Chihuahua before. What they haven’t seen are the mysterious high-tech gadgets Oregon State University doctoral student Kelly Rice starts unloading from her backpack soon after childcare provider Michelle Hoyt ushers her in.

“What are they, what are they?” the kids clamor, crowding around.

“They’re called accelerometers,” Rice tells the wide-eyed boys and girls, who range in age from 2 to 5. “They tell us how much activity you guys are getting while you’re here. Who wants to be first?”

“Me! Me!” Riley yells.

“OK, Riley, come on over here.” She wraps a black elastic belt around Riley’s waist and cinches up the Velcro. “We need to make it nice and snug because the last thing we need is a floppy accelerometer,” she tells him.

The matchbook-sized electronic monitor on his left hip will keep track of activity levels (sedentary, light, moderate, vigorous) by recording the frequency and magnitude of movement. Riley and his playmates will wear the accelerometers for a week during Phase One of an OSU study led by Associate Professor Stewart Trost. This initial activity data will form a baseline, along with each child’s body mass index (the ratio of height to weight, used to estimate the proportion of fat to lean tissue), for gauging progress at the study’s end.

Listen to .mp3 audio of Stewart Trost

Stewart Trost

Cozy Corners is one of 60 Oregon childcare homes in seven economically diverse counties along the I-5 corridor that are participating in the Healthy Home Child Care Project. Half of the homes will use the obesity-combating techniques devised by Trost and his team. The other half will serve as a “control” group for comparison, as well as receive training in food allergies.

The program’s premise: You don’t need fancy jungle gyms or pricey cuisine to make kids healthy and keep them that way. Rather, ordinary household items like card tables and couch cushions can get kids moving, and small changes like switching to skim milk can add up to big benefits.

“We’re making the intervention as simple as possible,” says Rice, who is coordinating the study. “We’re looking for really little things that can make a huge difference, things like giving kids balls and bats to play with, adding a couple of veggies to the lunch menu — teeny little steps.”

Essentially, the program will plug into kids’ innate love of running and jumping and introduce fun, fresh foods like fruit pizza to compete with the “bubblegum-flavored cereal” and “Hot Pockets” children see every day on TV, says Trost.

“Just like puppies and lambs and kittens, kids have a natural inclination to play,” he says. “Active play is inherent to normal development. Yet our studies have shown that kids in family childcare settings are getting only about five minutes of physical activity per hour, on average.”

Designer Diabetes Gear

The statistics are alarming. Nearly 30 percent of American kids are overweight or obese. Their parents are even heavier, with two-thirds tipping the scales at excessive numbers. If trends continue, fully 50 percent of kids born this year will end up with Type 2 diabetes in their lifetimes. Just imagine: Half of Americans soon could be tucking a diabetes testing meter (these days, they come in designer colors like “Tickled Pink” and “Purple Fusion”) into their purse or pocket along with their iPod and cell phone.

It was these startling trends — along with her pediatrician’s warnings about her own daughters’ marginal BMIs — that inspired First Lady Michelle Obama to plant an organic garden at the White House and to launch a national campaign to curb childhood obesity. She has gone so far as to demonstrate how easy exercise can be by hula-hooping on the South Lawn. The changes she made in her own household — a ban on weekday TV, smaller portions, low-fat milk, water bottles and apple slices in lunchboxes, grapes on the breakfast table, brightly colored veggies for dinner — she described to USA Today as “very minor stuff.” But the payoff was surprisingly big. “These small changes resulted in some really significant improvements,” Obama reported.

These are just the kinds of practical strategies Trost and his graduate students are using in their program, which is built around the theme “Journey to Healthy Child Care Home.” Kids will map their make-believe travels and send postcards to friends and family along the way. The program is funded by the National Institute for Food and Agriculture.

Participating childcare homes in Benton, Linn, Lane, Yamhill, Polk, Marion and Washington counties were identified through local “resource and referral” agencies (“R&Rs,” which train providers and help parents find quality facilities). Assistant Professor Kathy Gunter is leading the program design and will train OSU county Extension faculty to use it. They, in turn, will train the providers.

“It’s a train-the-trainers, capacity-building approach,” says Trost. “Our goal is to translate research into practice in a sustainable, community-based way.”

With these kinds of novel approaches, Trost has rocketed to prominence in his field. “Stewart has rapidly become one of world’s foremost researchers of issues related to physical activity in children and youth,” notes Professor Russell Pate of the University of South Carolina. “He has developed an international reputation for his work on measurement and promotion of physical activity in kids.”

Rural landowners depend on access roads to move livestock and farm equipment. (Photo: Jesse Abrams)

Beautiful landscapes may inspire us, but it takes more than scenery to create community vitality. Wallowa County and rural communities across the country struggle with economic development, a future for their youth and the cultural tensions that arise from changing land ownership. For more than a decade, such issues in Wallowa have been addressed by Wallowa Resources, one of the nation’s leading nonprofit natural resources organizations.

“Wallowa Resources shows us what is possible. There are few places you can go in the country to get this range of innovative thinking about rural communities,” says Oregon State University forestry professor John Bliss.

So it was natural for Bliss and Associate Professor Kate MacTavish in Human Development and Family Sciences to partner with Nils Christoffersen, Wallowa Resources executive director, in the creation of an experiential learning course for OSU graduate students. Since 2005, students have spent 10 September days living with families and meeting with community leaders from Garibaldi on to the coast, to the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Central Oregon, to Wallowa County in the northeast corner of the state.

For students, the experience has been unforgettable. Caitlin Bell, who participated in 2008, had this to say on her final exam: “I was faced repeatedly with the formidable and humbling task of dismantling my assumptions and preconceptions and rebuilding knowledge from scratch. I learned, among many things, that rural residents are innovative, entrepreneurial, and warmly hospitable people who value community, simple living, and hard work.” Wallowa Resources reprinted her remarks in a 2009 newsletter.

The Communities and Natural Resources course has spawned student projects that arm local decision-makers with useful information about trends in education, land use, forests and other topics, adds Christoffersen. For example, two students working with MacTavish – Devora Shamah and Brooke Dolenc – surveyed Wallowa County high school students and graduates to find out what drives their aspirations. They discovered that while about a third of high school students wanted to live in Wallowa County as adults, about one quarter of graduates were actually doing so. Dolenc’s and Shamah’s reports are available online in the OSU Scholar’s Archive.

OSU’s relationship with Wallowa County is just one example of the close partnerships between the university and rural communities through Extension and agricultural experiment stations. In addition, the OSU Rural Studies Program has established formal agreements to do research in Wallowa and Tillamook counties and has been active in Lake, Coos and other counties as well.

A signature effort has been the development of “community indicators” of vitality. OSU students and faculty have collaborated with local citizens to identify markers that allow leaders to prioritize goals and evaluate progress in reaching them. Wallowa County was the focus of a recent effort led by Lena Etuk, a social demographer with OSU Extension and the College of Health and Human Sciences. With funding from the Ford Institute for Community Building, she worked with Wallowa Resources and a team of volunteers to outline 26 indicators of vitality in social, economic and environmental health and community capacity.

Reports for Oregon counties, including Tillamook and Wallowa, are available online here.

Related story: The Mythbuster

To support OSU Extension or the Rural Studies Program, contact the OSU Foundation, 800-354-7281.

Stewart Trost: Yes, that’s true. Some programs have tried sending home BMI (body mass index) report cards to parents. They’ve had a lot of push-back from parents saying, “You’re telling me my child’s fat.” It’s difficult, because on the one hand we’re trying not to erode self-esteem. We know that overweight and obese kids have lower self-esteem. They get picked last by schoolmates, and later in life, they’re actually less successful making money. They get all sorts of discrimination. Our challenge is how to frame the issue to say, “We believe you have a health problem” without implying, “You’re a bad person.”

Terra: So how do you avoid making kids and parents feel bad while still getting across the message?

Trost: Unfortunately, we tend to err on the side of maintaining the person’s positive self-image. By doing that, we’re failing to reduce their risk for debilitating diseases. We’ve got a large increase in the prevalence of children with Type 2 diabetes – which used to be called adult-onset diabetes, by the way. And the incidence is disproportionate among Hispanic, American Indian and African American kids.

Terra: When encouraging kids to achieve a healthy weight, do we also risk pushing them toward eating disorders?

Trost: We always fight the “you’re going to cause eating disorders” push-back whenever we go into schools to do a program. There’s a real need to avoid sending the wrong message. Teenage girls are already bombarded with unrealistic messages about body image in the media. So we as parents, educators and health-care providers often just bite our lip and allow them to continue on at an unhealthy weight. The research literature shows that there’s a huge amount of health benefit to a fairly modest weight loss. We’re not trying to create Cosmopolitan cover girls-which unfortunately are Photoshopped to look even skinnier. We’re not focused on weight. Our work is always focused on the behaviors. We’re trying to promote healthier choices for food and more activity.

Drawing on a lifetime of ups and downs and knowing that overreacting is not only futile but can be physically harmful, many elders make a reasoned appraisal of events that allows them to stay balanced, says Aldwin, a specialist in stress and aging who has done a number of longitudinal studies with elders, many of them combat veterans.

“Older people simply appraise situations differently,” she notes. “Wisdom tells them when to just let something go or laugh it off or say, ‘It’s in God’s hands’.”

Significantly, the toughening effects of trauma aren’t only psychosocial. Researchers have turned up clear health benefits to what Aldwin calls “stress-related growth” or “post-traumatic growth,” such as more robust immune systems and better heart-attack survival rates.

“To me, coping with stress is the crux of mental health,” Aldwin says. “Stress is ubiquitous. We’re all going to have bad stuff happen to us. What trauma does is show you what’s important – that is, if you can learn from it.”

Carolyn Aldwin's research reveals the power that stems from successfully coping with stress. (Illustration: Santiago Uceda)

Carolyn Aldwin has been privy to countless untold secrets, heartbreaking stories from war zones, hospital wards and prisoner-of-war camps. People from all walks of life have confided their everyday problems and their worst nightmares to her.

“I talked to someone who was a lawyer at the Nuremberg Trials,” she says. “I’ve talked to people who’ve committed murder. I’ve talked to people who’ve lost children to cancer. I’m very humbled by the things people tell me.”

Aldwin, a professor in OSU’s Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, has interviewed thousands of people across the United States, many of them combat veterans, for longitudinal studies of aging. Her findings have shaken up conventional notions about stress and trauma across the lifespan.

“When I was in grad school in the ‘70s, old people were viewed as frail, lonely, depressed and beset by overwhelming stresses and losses,” says Aldwin. “We’ve since learned that stress is fairly constant across the lifespan — that no stage is necessarily more or less stressful than another. What does change as we age is the way we view our troubles and the way we deal with them.”

Events as horrifying as 9/11 or as threatening as today’s tottering economy take on new perspective when seen through eyes that witnessed the Battle of the Bulge or the Great Depression. Aldwin continues to explore coping strategies through her research and to share what she learns with students. She currently teaches a University Honors College class, Coping with Stress.

Double Puzzle

At Leisure World, Carolyn Aldwin stuck out like a sore thumb. The blond, blue-jeaned 29-year-old researcher, crashing temporarily at her uncle’s townhouse, was easy to spot among the silver-haired retirees.

But this newly minted Ph.D. in the field of aging and adult development was thrilled. For her, the sprawling retirement community in Irvine, California, was a big metaphorical petri dish. Eager to discover how elders cope with life’s stressors, the young social scientist spent the next few months talking with her neighbors (average age: 78) about their struggles and worries. Scientists were just beginning to study stress-related health risks, both physical (high blood pressure, immune system suppression, heart disease) and mental (anxiety, depression). The impact of coping strategies on health and well-being was mainly theoretical at that point.

Certain puzzling patterns popped up early on. First, despite their seeming vulnerability to loss and illness, elders tend to report less stress in their lives. “If late life is supposed to be such a miserable time, why are old people reporting fewer stressors than younger people?” Aldwin wondered. This is Paradox One.

Second, most adults find positive aspects — the proverbial silver lining — in even the most wrenching events. This is Paradox Two.

“As a developmental psychologist, I believe events are connected, rather than being discrete, isolated episodes,” Aldwin says. “I wanted to investigate the ways people draw upon earlier experiences, even traumatic ones, when coping with current problems or crises.”

Teasing out the truths behind these two paradoxes has been Aldwin’s driving motivation in the decades since Leisure World. How, she wanted to know, did a soldier whose buddies perished on the battlefield convert that searing trauma into psychosocial strength over time? How could watching one’s child die of cancer mitigate the ill effects of daily stress down the road?

Ask the Right Questions

Aldwin turned up one crucial clue to the first paradox in her Leisure World study. Researchers, she discovered, were asking the wrong questions. The standard survey instrument for major life events was loaded with younger people’s milestones and struggles — marriage, parenting, military service, divorce, unemployment, incarceration. By broadening the questioning, Aldwin found that elders face not fewer stressors, just different ones. It turns out that as people age, they fret less about themselves and more about loved ones. These indirect stressors — a grown child’s job loss, a spouse’s move to a nursing home, a sibling’s struggle with Alzheimer’s — Aldwin calls “network” stressors.

She designed a new survey instrument, the Elders Life Stress Inventory, to account for them.

The new survey, however, failed to resolve the paradox. Instead, the question mark shifted from the amount of stress to the response to stress. With the new instrument, older subjects were reporting life stressors roughly equal in number to those of younger subjects. Yet still they claimed fewer worries. When prodded — “Certainly, you must have some problems”— one man parsed the wording for Aldwin. “I don’t have problems,” the octogenarian told her. “I have concerns.” The biggest of these concerns was his 90-year-old sister suffering from dementia and living alone in New York City. She refused to move, despite his entreaties. So he settled into a philosophical stance (“There’s nothing more I can do”), thereby keeping his emotional equilibrium.

This ability to stave off stress derives from what Aldwin calls “perspective.” Having survived the slings and arrows of life for 60, 70, 80 years, elders often are able to step back and assess new challenges with a steadier gaze. As one man told her, “Once you’ve watched your 20-year-old daughter die of cancer, it’s hard to get really upset about other things.”

Silver Linings

Aldwin and her adviser at the University of California, Irvine, Dan Stokols, both should have grown up to be drug-using dropouts — that is, if you believed the psychological research literature of the 1970s and 1980s. Each had lost a parent in childhood, and delinquency was the expected outcome for kids so bereft. Sitting together in Stokols’ office one autumn afternoon, these two highly accomplished PhDs wondered aloud how they had defied expert predictions. Maybe, they speculated, those predictions were off-base. After all, it was known that geniuses often had older parents who died. Other emerging evidence suggested that remarkable resilience was not only possible, but actually common, in the wake of tragedy. Their curiosity evolved into a research thread.

“We started asking, ‘Are there circumstances under which stress can have positive effects?’” she recalls. “This was a very radical notion at the time.”

No formal, quantitative studies existed then. But the trauma literature from records of tragic events turned up promising leads for further research. In tragedy’s aftermath, many victims reported closer community ties, increased mastery and heightened altruism. The extraordinary lives of many Holocaust survivors, such as Nobel laureates Elie Wiesel and Daniel Kahneman, also seemed to refute the view of trauma as inevitably and irretrievably damaging to the psyche.

To explore this intriguing phenomenon, Aldwin added one question to the 1,000-subject Normative Aging Study then under way in Boston: Was there anything in your earlier life that was useful in helping you deal with a current problem? She was stunned by the response — not so much because 80 percent of the respondents said yes, but because they identified serious, even horrific, occurrences as teachable moments. Battlefield traumas came up often for this population of men, who were mostly veterans of the Korean and Second World wars.

“One guy said, ‘I was shot down at Midway in the Pacific,’” Aldwin recalls. “‘I spent three days bobbing in a lifeboat while the battled raged around me. I thought, if I can survive this, I can survive anything.’” Midway became the yardstick against which he measured every tough spot he faced in later years.

Another veteran said he watched three commanders die on the European frontlines. Being next in rank, he was promoted on the battlefield. He managed to lead his men to safety. Ever after, he gauged life’s challenges against that life-or-death test of his mettle.

Over and over, Aldwin heard this story. Even the fiercest conflict in a boardroom or a courtroom is manageable after you’ve faced down death on the battlefield, the old soldiers said. Psychologists call the phenomenon post-traumatic growth or stress-related growth. “This is not to suggest that combat is good — not at all,” says Aldwin, who has taken flak from colleagues for suggesting that anything positive could come out of the horrors of war. “Trauma has long-term effects. But the guys who were able to find benefits in their military service — whether it was unit cohesion or believing in the mission — were much less likely to exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Aldwin found similar results in another Boston study, the Health and Personality Style Survey. A majority of subjects, 70 percent, reported that trauma led to positive outcomes including closer family ties, better coping skills, more positive values and deeper spirituality.

Observes Aldwin: “Older people understand that problems are finite, that grief is time-limited. They also know that letting yourself get upset when you have a chronic illness like hypertension can trigger a cascade of harmful physiological responses.”

To support the OSU College of Health and Human Sciences, contact the OSU Foundation

Tiffani Bowen drops her daughter Allexis at OSU’s laboratory preschool before heading off to class at Linn-Benton Community College.

Clutching a book about Clifford the Big Red Dog, 4-year-old Allexis clambers onto a sofa in the Library Corner. Her mom, Tiffani Bowen, jots the child’s name on a sign-in sheet at the Child Development Laboratory in OSU’s Hallie Ford Center and then sits down beside her. Bowen’s sheltering arm, sun-bronzed and tattooed with a delicate blue butterfly, folds around “Lexi” as they page through the storybook. Clearly, both mother and child relish this quiet moment stolen from a hectic morning. Soon, Bowen will kiss Lexi goodbye and hurry off to her 10 o’clock class at Linn-Benton Community College.

Leaving her daughter is never easy. Yet Bowen knows that the little girl in the gray pleated skirt and snow-white bobby socks will get top-notch care at the Child Development Lab, a model preschool and research facility where more than half the slots are reserved for low-income families. The Oregon Head Start Prekindergarten Program pays for Lexi’s care and education at OSU, and also helps Bowen with daycare expenses — including babysitting at her sister’s house for Bowen’s 10-year-old twins — while she earns her college degree. The lab preschool helps out, too, with scholarships and social services.

“I couldn’t afford to bring Lexi to preschool otherwise,” the young mother says. “I’m watching my little girl advance. Her vocabulary is like night and day since she started last year. Something’s clicking.”

Plenty of Oregon parents aren’t so lucky. Childcare that is both excellent and economical is hard to come by. Kids who receive high-quality care in settings staffed by well-educated, well-paid teachers have a running start on critical language and social skills. Kids who don’t will face an uphill climb. In fact, studies show that the quality of early childhood experience can affect the trajectory of an entire life, says OSU researcher Roberta “Bobbie” Weber.

“If children’s needs are not met appropriately in the first four years, we know for sure that they come to kindergarten widely disadvantaged,” says Weber, a research associate in the Family Policy Program of the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences. “For healthy development, children need to be in a consistent relationship with a nurturing caregiver.”

That’s where OSU comes in. Researchers in the College of Health and Human Sciences are delving into topics across a wide spectrum, from soaring costs and teacher shortages to worker compensation and child wellness. With support from the Barbara Emily Knudson Endowment, Weber and her colleagues are helping inform and guide better outcomes for Oregon’s children on the policy level by examining topics such as subsidies for parents, incentives for teachers and childcare gaps in rural communities.

Launching a Life

Tiffani Bowen exemplifies the power of programs that give parents and kids a leg-up to fiscal and emotional security. At 27, Bowen has already been a mom for a decade. She left high school early to raise her twin girls. Six years later, Allexis came along. The single mom, without a dependable partner to rely on, was determined to find independent financial footing. So she enrolled full-time at Linn-Benton. With comprehensive support from the OSU lab preschool — including home visits from family services workers and regular meetings with a family advocate — Bowen has hit her stride. She regrets falling short of the 4.0 GPA she has doggedly pursued in her dental assistant program. But she concedes that a 3.8 isn’t all that bad.

“I rely on myself now,” she says with a note of defiance. “I don’t need a man. I’m mom, dad, everything to my children.”

For a college student raising three kids alone, self-reliance means shouldering the roles of breadwinner, bottle-washer and babysitter.

“The last three years have been extremely tough,” Bowen admits, dropping her bravado. “Some nights, I’ve cried myself to sleep.”

Stories like this are what drive Bobbie Weber’s commitment to research-based policymaking. By discovering the factors that impede vulnerable families, she says, well-designed studies can suggest workable solutions. As lead researcher or co-investigator on nearly 30 studies conducted over the past 15 years by the OSU-based Oregon Childcare Research Partnership, Weber has captured national, state and local data on everything from system accountability to supply and demand. This statistical lens on Oregon’s three key childcare benchmarks — affordability, availability and quality — gives legislators the hard numbers they need to make sound laws in support of children and families.

“The OSU Family Policy Program provides invaluable guidance and support to policymakers and program administrators,” says Tom Olsen, administrator of the Oregon Child Care Division in Salem. “In particular, Bobbie Weber’s original research and exhaustive knowledge of the literature has been critical in the development of Oregon’s early-childhood care and education system. Her contributions to the well-being of children and families, in Oregon and nationally, can’t be overstated.”

Mother and daughter catch a few precious moments together after the morning rush of getting off to school.

Staggering Cost

Today’s No. 1 issue is affordability, Weber reveals in the partnership’s 2008 report, Child Care and Education in Oregon and Its Counties. Astoundingly, in 2008, a year of childcare cost more than a year of public college in most parts of the state — an average of about $9,800 for a toddler in a childcare center versus an average of $5,900 for a college student in the Oregon University System. Between 2004 and 2008, childcare costs increased about 20 percent.

Families in the lowest income bracket spend nearly 30 percent of their income on childcare. More daunting still is the chunk for a single, minimum-wage worker: almost 60 percent of total income.

Despite the staggering cost, many poor parents fail to use state subsidies. To find out why, Weber has studied Oregon’s subsidy program for low-income parents. Too much red tape discourages eligible families from seeking financial assistance, she found. One big hang-up: Families were forced to reapply every three months, filling out a mountain of forms and handing in tons of documentation. In fact, Oregon had the shortest subsidy spells in a five-state study of subsidy duration. Findings such as this led the Legislature to revamp the program in 2007. Now parents submit paperwork every six months, cutting the hassle factor in half. And the payoff for participants has improved, as well. Oregon ranked in the bottom three states for generosity of subsidies. That, too, has been rectified in Oregon law. Now the state ranks near the top.

Another recent report, a 2008 literature review funded by the Oregon Community Foundation, looked at the education and training patchwork for childcare workers — a crazy quilt of workshops that are poorly integrated from place to place. Too, credits often don’t transfer across colleges and universities. Facing a “crisis-level shortage” of childcare workers, especially in rural areas, Oregon is in dire need of more “articulation” across higher-ed programs to pave an easier path for early-childhood educators seeking degrees, Weber argues.

Meanwhile, her studies of successful programs in other states recently contributed to creation of a system to encourage childcare workers to gain more education and advance professionally — an educational award program. Aptly named EQUIP (Education and Quality Investment Partnership), this new public-private program builds on the Oregon Registry, a repository of documents for education and training of childcare and early-education professionals. EQUIP also provides incentives to achieve educational milestones in the childcare field. With federal stimulus and foundation dollars, it issues cash awards to workers as they attain professional-development benchmarks.

“We’re quite excited,” says Weber. “Oregon has never done anything like this.”

Seeding Self-Reliance

Tiffani Bowen is mere months from launching a new life for herself and her girls. Without family-friendly programs and policies, the epiphany that awakened her drive for autonomy would have been a pipe dream.

“When I was in high school, I never considered going to college,” Bowen says. “Education’s important in my life now. I want that for my daughters, too. I want them to be confident. I want them to be able to rely on themselves.”

For more information on the OSU Hallie Ford Center for Healthy Children and Families:www.hhs.oregonstate.edu/halliefordcenter

For more information on the Family Policy Program:www.hhs.oregonstate.edu/hdfs/hdfs-family-policy-program

To support research in the OSU Hallie Ford Center for Healthy Children and Families, contact the Oregon State University Foundation.

OSU researchers are working on ways to intervene.

Joanne Sorte, director of the OSU Child Development Center, and her colleague Inge Daeschel, a nutrition expert, have developed a research-based toolkit for boosting activity levels in childcare settings. Called “Health in Action: Five Simple Steps to Better Health,” the paired nutrition and activity strategies have been adopted in Head Start and other childcare centers and programs across the state and beyond.

Another researcher, Professor Stewart Trost in the Department of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences, is designing a related intervention for home-based childcare settings. Based on a study of diet and activity levels in 60 family childcare homes, the obesity prevention program will train participants in proper nutrition and activity levels for young children.

To learn more, visit the OSU Family Policy Program

watch video

Three times a week, as dawn breaks over the Willamette Valley, 25 women show up at the Benton Center gym in Corvallis. Their exercise clothes are loose and casual. No spandex for this crowd. On average, they’re my mother’s age and as feisty as they are friendly. “Oh, there’s men creatures in here,” clucks one when she sees me and a photographer. “Watch where you point that camera,” says another.

They hang up coats and put on tennis shoes. Some don weighted vests. Under bright lights and past mirrors and brightly colored exercise balls, they begin to walk around the gym. They share the latest news about themselves (“I walked four miles yesterday to see a friend”) and their families (“At the bone lab yesterday, my grandson got all excited because he got to see my skeleton”). Then they collect in a circle so the instructor can lead them through exercises that have them stretching, lunging, panting and “glistening” (not sweating, says one) for an hour.

For these women, the Better Bones and Balance class provides more than a few laughs and a faster pulse. It generates resilience. For some, it has already meant the difference between avoiding a fall and taking a trip to the hospital. OSU laboratory tests confirm that exercisers strengthen muscles and maintain or increase bone mass, reducing the risk of debilitating injury.

Resilience, the ability to adapt or recover from injury, comes into play in our cover story, too. Salmon researchers aim to increase the resilience of this iconic Northwest fish. The future of salmon depends on two things: their ability to respond to habitat changes and our management of hatcheries, watersheds and harvesting practices.

Resilience is also a cultural asset. Teaching Oregon Native Languages offers a view of language diversity at the time of statehood. Today, the native language movement is preserving knowledge and experience that has been encoded in the way people speak.

As exercisers know, building resilience takes work and commitment, but it’s well worth the effort. Our future depends on it.

- Nick Houtman,
Editor

Self-paced routines instill confidence. Kathy Gunter admits that if she had approached exercises for older women with a competitive attitude, many would have objected. "They had no problems telling me what they thought," she says. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

“Keep your tummies in. Arms up. Shoulders down. Up and over!” The sound of 25 pairs of feet thumping a wooden floor echoes through the Benton Center gym. On cue from fitness instructor Shelly Morris, the all-female class steps on and off platforms that range from four to 10 inches high, some participants moving quickly, lifting legs, planting feet, stepping to the side and going back in reverse.

Morris cheers on her students: “You’re looking great this morning! Best all week.”

“Of course. Women don’t sweat. We glisten!” one exerciser laughs.

It could be any exercise class anywhere except for one thing: Many of these women are the last people you’d expect to see in a gym. One celebrated her 88th birthday the previous week. If you saw a member of the class crossing the street, you’d be tempted to offer her a hand. “Nothing would annoy her more,” says Beth Lambright, one of Morris’ co-instructors, to the nodding agreement of several women in the class. “These women are more likely to help you.”

Fear of Falling

The class known as Better Bones and Balance has its roots in a 1994 Oregon State University research project and addresses one of the most significant health risks for older Americans. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, one in three people over 65 falls in a given year. The results are too familiar: broken hips, concussions and other bone-rattling traumas that, in 2006, sent about 1.8 million seniors to emergency rooms. Accidental falls are the leading cause of injury-related deaths among the elderly.

Reducing those risks is the purpose of Better Bones and Balance. Through a prescribed routine of self-paced stretching and weight-bearing exercises that build muscle, bone mass and confidence, the class equips seniors to safely handle everyday chores — getting dressed, doing the laundry, vacuuming floors, carrying groceries.

“Most seniors in the United States cannot stand on one foot for 30 seconds,” says Lambright. “Mine can stand like that for two minutes. We do things forever on one leg so that if they start to fall, they have time to figure out where they want to go. Or we train their legs to go out to the side where they can catch them and break the energy of the fall.”

Next year, she plans to start a class for 90-year-olds.

Better Bones and Balance grew from research by Christine Snow, former director of the OSU Bone Research Laboratory, and by Ph.D. student Janet Shaw, now a professor at the University of Utah. “Christine saw that athletes who participated in high-impact sports such as gymnastics, where the landing forces are very large, had extraordinarily high bone mass in comparison to other athletic populations,” says Kathy Gunter, assistant professor in OSU Extension’s Family and Community Development Program and the Department of Nutrition and Exercise Sciences. Gunter did her Ph.D. work with Snow. “Obviously we can’t have older adults dismounting off the (balance) beam and the impacts associated with that. The question came down to: How can we safely increase the load on the skeleton in a group-exercise setting and effectively increase or preserve bone mass?”

Donor support is critical to the success of these OSU students. From left, Laura Marquez-Loza, Stephen Summers, Hiromi Omatsu, Blake Kelley, Nikki Marshall. (Photos: Jim Folts)

Five undergraduates — five dreams.

Blake Kelley sees a bright future for nuclear power and is learning all he can about reactor designs.

For Hiromi Omatsu, the future is in technology that enables elderly people to stay in their own homes.

Writing is Stephen Summers’ love. He publishes poetry and fiction in OSU’s student literary magazine Prism and hopes to make a living as an author.

After studying the molecular machinery in living cells, Laura Marquez–Loza wants to go to medical school.

And Nikki Marshall’s research with seeds has inspired her to work in environmental restoration and organic farming.

The common thread? Private scholarship support has enabled each to stay in school and pursue his or her goals.

Carmen Steggell, professor in the Department of Design and Human Environment, knows how much that support matters. The recipient of OSU’s Faculty Teaching Excellence Award has seen high–achieving students drop out of school for lack of money. And she has seen students stretch financially to participate in research that opens career doors.

At OSU, students receive about $12 million in private support annually through scholarships, fellowships and other funds managed by the OSU Foundation. Nevertheless, says Steggell, rising expectations (bring a laptop to class; buy software and the latest textbooks) and tuition rates strain student budgets. The trend is national. According to a recent U.S. Department of Education report, “… financial barriers will keep nearly two million low– and middle–income college qualified high school graduates from attending college.” (A Test of Leadership, www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports.html)

Steggell sees the local impact. “You can’t be frugal in the ways that you used to be frugal” she says. “And many of the students I work with are juggling work schedules around their class schedules. For most, it’s going to school money.”

The foundation has set a $100 million goal for endowed and current use scholarship funds in the Campaign for OSU. Here, in their own words, students describe their research and how scholarships have helped them.

Hiromi Omatsu

Year and discipline: Senior, Design and Human Environment
Hometown: Kawagoe City, Saitama, Japan
Scholarship: The University Research Awards Program in the College of Health and Human Sciences helped to pay my tuition. Without it, I would have had to work at other jobs. (Note: Hiromi also received a LIFE Scholarship, supported by OSU’s healthy aging research initiative.)
Inspiration: My parents, who allowed me to decide my own future, and my two brothers and my sister (flute repairer, computer systems engineer and embroidery expert), who created their own careers.
Career goal: To conduct research on or to design housing systems that enable elderly people to enjoy life in their own homes.
Academic focus: The technology that people use to monitor health, alert them to medications, detect movement and provide security.

Laura Marquez–Loza

Year and discipline: Senior, Wood Science and Engineering
Hometown: Mexico City, Mexico
Scholarship: The Richardson Scholarship allowed me to go to school. If it had not been for that I would have been unable to pay for college.
Inspiration: My parents, because they have overcome many obstacles together and achieved so much. My grandma has also been an inspiration because she was very independent and ran a successful business to help support her seven children.
Career goal: To apply to medical school and pursue a career in health-related research.
Academic focus: In a plant virology lab, I learned laboratory techniques (how to extract RNA). Last summer, I learned to analyze wood from transgenic poplars, performing macerations and working with imaging techniques to measure fiber lengths.

Blake Kelley

Year and discipline: Senior, Nuclear Engineering
Hometown: Grants Pass, Oregon
Scholarship: This year I’ve received 11 scholarships ranging from $500 to $2,500. The Alan H. Robinson Scholarship cemented my financial security, enabling me to focus on schoolwork and research. This also gives me time to prepare for graduate school and a summer internship.
Inspiration: People who teach math and science: my adviser, Todd Palmer; my high school physics and chemistry teacher, Ron Rollins; and my high school calculus teacher, Martin Connelly.
Career goal: Doing research on spent fuel storage, reactor design or radiation detection. I would like to live in an era when the public embraces nuclear power as a clean, longterm energy source.
Academic focus: Using new methods to simulate the response of radiation detectors.

Stephen Summers

Year and discipline: Senior, English and Philosophy
Hometown: Canby, Oregon
Scholarship: The Ronald P. Lovell Presidential Scholarship brought me to Oregon State. Without the funding, I wouldn’t have been able to come here and dedicate myself to my studies.
Inspiration: Writers inspire me, because they manage to take some memory from their own lives and transmit it across time and space into something that touches me. My parents inspire me in their wholehearted dedication to my brothers and me. Also, Jesus Christ.
Career goal: To teach literature at the university level. Eventually, I hope to support myself writing crime novels and making public appearances.
Academic focus: I write poetry for myself and fiction for others. I publish contemporary poetry and short fiction in Prism (OSU’s student literary magazine).

Nikki Marshall

Year and discipline: Senior, Bioresource Research
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
Scholarship: The Jaworski Scholarship has opened up opportunities or me in sustainable, organic farming and ecosystem restoration. Financially, it has enabled me to pay for childcare for my daughter. (Note: Marshall has also received the E.R. Jackman Scholarship, support from the Oregon Seed Trade Association and an award from the American Seed Trade Association with Future Seed Executives.)
Inspiration: My daughter Trinity is 8 years old. She is always asking questions and giving me hope.
Career goal: To own a farm and to restore lands harmed by invasive species or toxic chemicals.
Academic focus: I have been learning how to control seeds through heat treatments and consumption by beetles. Seeds of invasive species and other weeds pose problems for agriculture and environmental restoration.

Baskets of Concern

Food is only the most obvious way contaminants enter the human body. Poisons also come in through the pores of the skin and the lobes of the lungs.

Read more…

Picture this: You come home from work to find a rusty, 55-gallon drum of radioactive sludge leaking on your living room rug.

That’s what the native people of the Columbia River Basin face on a monumental scale. Tribes that have lived for centuries on the sweeping plateaus of northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington are struggling to restore a landscape and a way of life damaged by dams, industrial pollution and nuclear waste from a World War II plutonium factory. And the Columbia Basin tribes are not alone. Degradation and contamination of ancestral lands threaten American Indian cultures across the United States. The Navajo Nation in Black Mesa, Arizona, is battling coal mining. The Oglala Sioux in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, are fighting uranium extraction. Mohawks in Akwesasne, New York, are protesting PCBs in groundwater. The list goes on and on.

“The lives of indigenous people are embedded in, even emergent from, the environment,” observes Barbara Harper, an associate professor affiliated with OSU’s Department of Public Health and manager of environmental health for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR). “It is their living room, their grocery store, their pharmacy.”

To help tribes weigh the risks to health and culture from contaminants, OSU researchers and tribal scientists have developed a unique tool, the Traditional Tribal Subsistence Exposure Scenario and Risk Assessment Guidance Manual. The guidebook, funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), explains how to trace pollutant pathways into natural resources (soil, water and air) and then into the human body (lungs, skin and mouth). And, drawing on historical and archaeological evidence, it recreates traditional lifestyles in scenarios of four Western tribal groups, including the Confederated Cayuse, Walla Walla and Umatilla of the Columbia watershed.

By using the manual to overlay contamination pathways with traditional practices, native communities can quantify the risks of living off the land as their forebears did.

“There are many unique exposure pathways that are not accounted for in scenarios for the general public, but may be significant to people with certain traditional specialties such as basket making, flint knapping, or using natural medicines, smoke, smudges, paints and dyes,” the guidebook states. The report does not focus on existing illness or other health conditions potentially related to traditional or contemporary lifestyle practices.

Tainting Ancient Ways

The Cayuse, Walla Walla and Umatilla people have lived on the sagebrush steppe beside the Columbia for 11,000 years. In the old days, salmon swam and leapt at the center of their existence. The red-fleshed Chinook was the religious and cultural nexus sustaining spirit as well as body. Like all the original inhabitants of the continent, they were inseparable from the landscape in which they fished, hunted, gathered and studied the complex ways of nature. Millennia of ecological investigation formed the basis of their seasonal traditions and bound them together in a timeless, Earth-driven rhythm.

Today, the Columbia River salmon are depleted. The ones that remain contain mercury and a host of other pollutants from mining, agriculture and other sources according to United States EPA studies. Some of the lands and waters of the plateau tribes became further compromised in 1943 when, as part of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government sited its Hanford plutonium facility on 586 square miles along the river between the Saddle Mountains and Rattlesnake Hills. Today, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is one of the nation’s most contaminated Superfund sites — places that must be cleaned up under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980. The law provides broad federal authority to respond directly to hazardous substances that may endanger public health or the environment.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Environmental Management treats and disposes Hanford’s 50 million gallons of ”highly radioactive, highly hazardous” liquid waste stored in 177 aging underground tanks, according to the DOE Web site. Also dumped on the site are 2,300 tons of spent nuclear fuel, 12 tons of plutonium and 25 million cubic feet of solid waste. Leaching into the river are groundwater plumes containing chemicals such as chromium, uranium, strontium-90, tritium and technetium-99.

“Parts of the Hanford site are so badly contaminated with radioactive waste that full environmental restoration is im-possible,” according to the Nuclear Safety Division of the Oregon Department of Energy. “Contamination has reached groundwater and the nearby Columbia River.”

Under Superfund law, the tribes have special status as “sensitive populations,” those who are disproportionately exposed. Poisoning the land violates tribal treaty rights, notes Stuart Harris, a tribal member, OSU graduate (Geology, ’91) and coauthor of the manual. The tribes retained their rights to fish and hunt, gather roots and medicinal plants, pick berries and graze horses and cattle on their ancestral lands when they signed the Treaty of 1855. A landmark ruling in 1974, the Boldt decision, affirmed the Indians’ guarantee to traditional salmon harvests.

“The salmon return year after year to the remnants of their homes, as they promised our people in the beginning.”
Stuart Harris, Director, Department of Science and Engineering, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation

But exercising those rights “depends on the health of the natural resources,” argues Harris, a scientist for the CTUIR who analyzes contamination risks. Those rights run infinitely deeper than treaty language granting access to particular riparian or terrestrial parcels, Harris says. In fact, they go even beyond Indians’ rights to physical health. What’s at stake is the very culture that the Columbia Basin peoples inherited from ancestors who stood on the plateaus surveying the bounteous waters of the continent’s second-largest river, even as the last ice age was retreating.

“The environment constitutes a cultural homeland where the people and their genetics coevolved with the ecology over thousands of years,” says Harris. “Impacts to the environment directly impact the health of my people and put my culture at risk.”

Heritable Rights

In the old days, a river dweller consumed about 500 pounds of salmon a year. If someone ate that much fish in today’s toxic environment, Harper bluntly predicts, “they’d be sick or dead.” Contamination levels in foods, water and soils have been well documented. And exposure risks for average American suburbanites have been calculated by scientists with the EPA and others. What no one had previously established, however, was the exposure risk for Native Americans who live, or wish to live, a traditional, land-based lifestyle.

“Risk-assessment scientists typically aren’t trained to look at risks holistically, to investigate entire lifestyles,” says OSU Professor of Public Health Anna Harding. “Public health experts, on the other hand, are trained to look at risks very broadly — not focusing only on medical impacts but considering community well-being as well.”

That’s why Harper, Harris, Harding and former OSU nutrition scientist Therese Waterhaus sought EPA support to develop a risk assessment tool tailored to Indian Country.

“It is a matter of environmental justice,” argues Harding who served on an EPA scientific advisory board from 2002 to 2007.

Harding recalls with clarity a crystallizing moment in her career. The year was 1992. The movement for environmental justice (insiders call it EJ) “was just getting up a head of steam,” she says. As a researcher in environmental health, she was invited to attend the nation’s first federally sponsored EJ summit in Washington, D.C. Leaders from tribes and other ethnic communities across the U.S. were there, too, at the invitation of the government. The summit opened with a panel of federal agency reps seated on a raised platform, talking about their accomplishments in EJ. One by one, community members rose from their seats and began lining up at microphones positioned around the auditorium. “They said, ‘We’re not going to just sit here and listen,’” Harding recounts. “‘We need to be the ones telling you what the issues are and what the research agenda needs to be.’”

The organizers quickly adjourned the session, revamped the agenda and reconvened the summit in a collaborative spirit. “It was probably the most interesting and groundbreaking meeting I’ve ever been to,” Harding says.

Returning to the land is an aspiration for many tribes, explain Harper and her colleagues, who have become national leaders in developing ecologically-based traditional lifeways scenarios for assessing risks to tribal members. “Even though tribal lands have been lost and resources degraded,” they write, “the objective of many tribes is to regain land, restore resources, and encourage more members to practice healthier (more traditional) lifestyles and eat healthier (more native and local whole) food.”

The desired goal, they say, “is to restore the ecology so that the original pattern of resource use is both possible (after resources are restored) and safe (after contamination is removed).”

Switching from eating salmon to, say, Bumblebee tuna or Big Macs may seem like a reasonable choice to non-native observers. But such choices are not simply alternatives on a menu. That’s because salmon is not, for the Columbia River tribes, merely a culinary option. It is a cultural imperative. Salmon is not just something to have for dinner. It is the nucleus around which revolve social networks, kinship patterns, seasonal customs, religious beliefs and educational practices. Orbiting around this hub are all the other activities that define the culture, such as weaving baskets or sweating in steam-filled lodges.

“You can’t just substitute something else for salmon,” says Harding. “Whatever you use as a substitute won’t have the same cultural and traditional uses or meanings.”

Woven Baskets For countless generations, indigenous women of the Columbia Basin scoured the lush riverbanks, gathering dogbane, willow, cattails and reeds. They wove the plants into containers for storing food and mats for sitting and sleeping. Beyond being useful, the implements are beautiful – their colors, patterns and designs embodying millennia of tradition. But they are more than tangible artifacts of a culture. Weavers are bound together as they work, braiding their unique histories and identities into the plant strands. Today, wading into the rich riparian muck can be hazardous to health. Riparian zones act as “sinks” for pollutants such as heavy metals (mercury, cadmium, copper, lead), and cattails and other waterside plants take up these pollutants. All of them can be absorbed by the weaver as she works, both through her skin and, because she holds strands in her teeth as she weaves, through her mouth.

Sweat Lodges A religious ceremony of ritual and physical purification begins when family members choose a site near surface water or a well, then gather branches, clay, moss and leaves to build a 6-foot-diameter dome-shaped sweat lodge. White fir boughs or woven mats cover the floor. Carefully selected rocks are heated in a fire and piled inside the lodge. Finally, water (sometimes infused with medicines) is poured over the rocks. Clouds of steam fill the structure. Contaminants from the water, plants and rocks are absorbed through the lungs and skin of the practitioners, who traditionally are introduced to the sweat lodge as toddlers. Traditional practitioners may use the lodge twice a day for an hour and may drink an extra liter of water each time to stay hydrated.

The typical middle-aged woman takes care of everybody in her household except one — herself. The consequences of this benevolent self-neglect can be dire: chronic disease, even death.

Even the healthiest lifestyle can’t always prevent disease. Still, millions of wives, mothers and grandmothers could better fend off, or at least slow down, the ravages of diabetes, heart disease and stroke if only they could find the time (or make the time) to exercise and eat right. Professor Alexis Walker in OSU’s College of Health and Human Sciences is digging into the social and psychological reasons they can’t (or don’t). If she can identify barriers, she can help craft interventions that break them down.

Walker’s area of expertise, family dynamics, is the third prong of a cross-disciplinary OSU investigation into lifestyle choices among women who have been diagnosed with “metabolic syndrome” — a dangerous complex of risk factors that has reached epidemic levels in the United States. Tackling the first prong of the study, motivational interviewing, is Rebecca Donatelle in Public Health. The second prong, diet and nutrition, is being handled by Melinda Manore in Nutrition and Exercise Sciences (see “Energy Source,” for more on Manore).

“My role in the study,” says Walker, “is to pay attention to how women’s family lives and responsibilities limit their ability to make changes that would benefit their health.”

Afflicting fully one-quarter of middle-aged Americans, metabolic syndrome is the coexistence of high blood sugar, low HDL (“good”) cholesterol, elevated blood pressure and extra fat at the waistline. After menopause, women’s risks go up. So middle age is the “last window of opportunity” to head off illness, Walker stresses.

For women juggling jobs, kids, husbands and homes, going to the gym usually means dropping something else. And then there’s the eternal question, “What’s for dinner?” When the answer is, “spinach salad,” the groans can be heard in Missoula. In short, alterations in daily routines can gum up the works of domestic routines and expectations.

“Women feel they have to keep the machinery of their families running — the psychological machinery, the emotional machinery and the practical machinery,” Walker says. “So it’s very difficult to work out these kinds of changes.”

Walker’s research on the ways family members support, or fail to support, one another in everyday tasks and care-giving is the key reason she holds the Petersen Chair in Gerontology and Family Studies, endowed with a gift from JoAnne (“Jody”) Petersen, who grew up in Silverton, Oregon. The 1947 OSU graduate was inspired to endow the chair after sharing the in-home care of her elder parents with several siblings, Walker explains.

“This research is really about helping women to be self-caregivers,” she says. “I think this is just the sort of social science that Jody would absolutely applaud.”

Often getting up before sunrise to attack the hills rimming Corvallis, Professor Melinda Manore has overcome injuries from a skiing mishap and a car accident in her quest to stay active. Exercise, she says, keeps her mentally and physically fit. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

The mixed messages blare at every grocery checkout: supermodels smiling seductively from magazines that push chocolate-cake recipes and weight-loss tips on the same page. No wonder millions of American females struggle with food and body image, laments OSU Professor Melinda Manore.

The health of women across the age and activity spectrums — from teenage Olympic athletes to middle-aged pre-diabetics to elderly arthritis sufferers — is at the heart of Manore’s research in the dual sciences of nutrition and exercise. The broad question that drives her is, “How can we be healthy women and be happy with our bodies?” For answers, she looks at levels both micro and macro: chemical (micronutrients, hormones), physical (bone density, metabolic efficiency), motivational (lifestyle changes, food choices), even societal (family habits, media messages).

“Thirty years ago, if you saw a glamorous woman on a magazine cover, it was a head shot,” she says. “Now, it’s full-body — with nothing on. These young girls see these photos and think they should look like that, too.”

When she began her career a quarter-century ago, only a handful of researchers were investigating the linkages between eating and exercising. Back then, the two fields were rarely paired. So in 1984, the year she earned her Ph.D. in nutrition at OSU with a minor in exercise science, she was at the forefront of a movement. As obesity and diabetes galloped across America over the next couple of decades, the need for more research became acute. Investigating the interactions of food and movement has, at last, come into its own as a discipline.

“There’s been this whole turnaround,” she says. “Finally, we’ve gotten together.”

Besides coauthoring four top-selling textbooks, publishing 100-plus papers and articles in refereed journals, and holding the associate editorship of the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health and Fitness Journal from 1998 to 2006, Manore works with Oregon Health and Science University’s Department of Medicine through an OSU-OHSU research exchange.

Good Vibrations

Manore’s studies span vastly different demographics: from elite speed skaters to self-professed couch potatoes; from limber gymnasts to stiff-limbed grandmothers; from athletes with eating disorders to Hispanics with diabetes.

Some of her most notable research is in the “female athlete triad” — how the synergy of sports, hormones and bone growth affects the health of girls and women. The 2002 Winter Olympics were, for Manore and one of her graduate students — Nanna Meyer, a former racer on the Swiss National Ski Team — a rare chance to study this all-important triad in top winter sport athletes. Meyer headed to Salt Lake City, legendary for its dry powder, to compare the bone densities of skiers, bobsledders and skaters against those of ordinary college women. It turned out that all the athletes who rocket down icy mountains at breakneck speeds — whether on skis, boards or sleds — had denser bones than the control subjects.

This first-ever bone study among winter athletes — a collaboration among Manore, Meyer and University of Utah researcher Janet Shaw — suggests that winter sports provide beneficial “loading patterns:” physical forces that stress the skeleton in ways that promote mineral growth. These bone-loading patterns include “mechanical loading” (impact from jumping or pounding) and “vibration loading” (stress from vibrating).

The sliding sports (luge, bobsleigh, skeleton) topped all events for whole-body bone density, the data revealed. It might seem improbable that a luger could build a better set of bones than a speed skater. One rips down the ice, toes-first, while lying flat on her back. The other attacks the ice on her feet, pumping and gliding, pumping and gliding. But the research team wasn’t all that surprised.

“Recent work on animals,” the researchers wrote in the September 2004 issue of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, “has shown that vibration loading, imposing low-magnitude, high-frequency mechanical signals, can increase bone formation.” The Utah Olympics study, along with ongoing studies in OSU’s Biomechanics Laboratory, have added important human-subject evidence to the research base on skeletal vibration.

Hormones are the third prong of the triad. That’s because when young women’s diets are dangerously low in calories, menstruation can stop. “Hormone production goes flat, just as if the women were starving,” Manore explains. “You see this all the time in third-world countries; when there’s not enough food, the women stop menstruating. It’s a protective effect so they don’t get pregnant, because they can’t sustain a child if there’s no food.”

This hormonal shutdown can, along with poor energy and dietary nutrient intakes, suppress bone growth. In developed countries like the U.S., food abundance is a greater problem than shortage. Here, the girls and women most vulnerable to “ammenorhea” (no periods) are typically those who take extreme measures to shed pounds: strenuous dieters, disordered eaters, gymnasts, dancers and other athletes driven to extreme thinness. Over five or six years, a young woman can end up with “bones that look like an old woman’s,” reports Manore, who served on the International Olympic Committee for Gymnastics from 1996 to 2000. “So now, you have a 20-year-old with a hip fracture — or worse. It’s an issue for coaches; it’s an issue for parents. When a girl gets into eating disorders, I’m sorry, but you can lose her.”

Some protection against skeletal damage is provided by intense, bone-loading exercise, the Utah study suggests. In the short term, denser bones mean fewer fractures. In the long term, they fend off postmenopausal osteoporosis.

Getting enough of the B-vitamins, which are important for energy metabolism and blood formation, is another pitfall for women. Healthy levels of vitamin B-6 and riboflavin — essential nutrients found in the so-called “B-complex” — can succumb to the quest for a svelte physique. As with the female triad, athletes who shun calories are at risk, as are those who avoid meat or dairy foods, Manore and former doctoral student Kathleen Woolf reported in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism in October 2006. For her doctoral research Woolf, who is now at Arizona State University, examined the B-vitamin status and requirements of older active women with rheumatoid arthritis, a disease that compounds the risk of B-vitamin deficiency in later years.

The deep complexity of the exercise/nutrition/health dynamic was highlighted yet again in a 2006 OSU study centered on a compound unfamiliar to most Americans: homocysteine. Its cousin, cholesterol, has become a household word. Fretting over one’s ratio of LDL-cholesterol to HDL-cholesterol is practically a national pastime. Yet few Americans are versed in homocysteine, even though the compound was discovered decades ago, and scientists have long since linked high levels to cardiovascular disease.

Scientists are still unraveling homocysteine’s secrets. Manore and her Ph.D. student Lanae Joubert have found that blood levels vary in surprising ways. For example, it appears that some types of exercise, especially high-intensity exercise like running a marathon, increase blood levels of homocysteine, while others do not. Joubert’s research was designed to decipher how physical activity and diet interact to alter blood homocysteine levels. She wanted to find out, too, if individuals who exercise hard need more B-vitamins, which help to keep blood homocysteine low.

“Being physically active does not necessarily equate to a healthier nutritional status,” the OSU researchers warn in the international journal. Active individuals may, they caution, lack essential nutrients right along with sedentary people — a deficit that “may influence homocysteine levels independent of the amount, intensity or type of exercise.”

Zealot for Health

Watching people make unhealthy lifestyle choices clearly pains Manore. From her previous office in Milam Hall, she had a direct view of the elevator. “I cannot tell you how many people, including students, used that elevator instead of walking up the stairs,” she reports. “I wanted to put up a big sign: ‘for disabled and delivery only.’ Or, because it was a really creaky old elevator, ‘use at your own risk.’”

As she tells this story, the frustration in her voice leaves no doubt: For her, healthy living goes deeper than professional interest. Hard work, whole foods and fresh air are in her blood. She was raised on a farm in the shadow of the Rockies. Getting up with the roosters to help gather eggs in the 5,000-chicken barn was her task as far back as she can remember. On the family’s Montana acreage, the lowing of cows, the bleating of sheep and the clucking of hens were the sounds of self-sufficiency. “Where I grew up, you raised your own food, you baked your own bread, you churned your own butter,” she says. “You didn’t go to the store. You didn’t eat out. Everything you did for activity — skiing, hiking, riding horses, gardening — was outdoors.”

Manore’s salt-of-the-earth Montana girlhood is intact even today. Her salad bowls and pasta platters brim with the tomatoes, peppers and basil she grows in her Corvallis garden. Her kitchen is a lab, of sorts, where she experiments with maximizing the fiber content in her home-baked muffins and with cooking dishes that typically veer in creative (but always nutritious) directions. And she panics when the grainy breads baked weekly by her husband are getting low. Her approach toward commercial bread — toward any processed food, in fact — is to leave it in the supermarket along with those airbrushed magazine covers. She’s careful, however, to avoid sounding extreme.

“I’m not the food police,” she insists. “I like chocolate and desserts, just like anyone else. I just think you need to eat them in moderation.”

Making healthy choices doesn’t need to mean self-deprivation and sacrifice, Manore argues. Rather, those choices can become preferences. You might find that you prefer the grilled chicken on whole wheat instead of the double-stack cheeseburger. You might enjoy a hike in the forest over a trek through the mall. “Instead of forcing you to give up your favorite things,” she says, “a healthy lifestyle can become your favorite thing.”

Bridging the gap between scientists and the public — between laboratories and living rooms, kitchens, playgrounds, malls, parks, workplaces — is Manore’s main focus these days. With her doctoral students, she is studying ordinary people facing ordinary problems: middle-aged moms who care for young children and elder parents but forget to care for themselves; Hispanic pre-diabetics in need of culturally appropriate interventions; active 40-something women whose nutrient status is poor despite regular exercise; elderly arthritis sufferers, some active, some not.

“The question is, How do you change your lifestyle for the rest of your life?” Manore says. “You don’t have to become a marathon runner. You just have to start moving more and making better food selections.”

• Melinda Manore’s Web page
• Department of Nutrition and Exercise Sciences
• College of Health and Human Sciences
• OSU Extension Nutrition Education Program
• OSU Foundation
• International Olympic Committee
• U.S. Department of Agriculture
• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
• Poor athletic performance may be linked to vitamin B deficiency (OSU news release 11-15-06)

“A 30-year-old single mother from Iowa laughed when asked whether she considered herself an adult: ‘I don’t know if I’m an adult yet. I still don’t feel quite grown up. Being an adult kind of sounds like having things, everything is kind of in a routine and on track, and I don’t feel like I’m quite on track.’”
— Furstenberg Jr., F. F., S. Kennedy, V. C. McLoyd, R. G. Rumbaut, & R. Settersten. 2004. Growing up is harder to do. Contexts, 3(3), 33-41.

It takes longer to become an adult today, and that passage is more complicated than in the past. Our MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood and Public Policy is focused on understanding the above passage.

In the eyes of the law and society, young people cross the threshold of adulthood at ages 18 or 21. But as our recent book On the Frontier of Adulthood (University of Chicago Press, 2005) reveals, few 21-year-olds today would actually be considered “adult” based on traditional markers such as leaving home, finishing school, starting a job, getting married and having children.

A lengthy period before adulthood, often spanning the 20s and even extending into the 30s, is now devoted to further education, job searching and exploration, experience in romantic relationships and personal development.

But we should not take these changes to mean that the early adult years are now an extended “moratorium” characterized by pervasive experimentation and the avoidance of commitments.

To be sure, a subset of young adults falls into this category. But most of the young people in our studies are seeking responsibility, negotiating autonomy, making commitments, nurturing relationships and finding ways to contribute to their communities. Yet many are having a difficult time finding their way, and it is taking them much longer to get there.

The new terrain of early adulthood carries tremendous social and cultural significance. For many young adults, navigating this transition phase is often possible only with significant family support. Accordingly, sizeable child-rearing costs now occur between the ages of 18 and 34, and they have increased dramatically in the last 30 years. While middle-class families make substantial investments in their children through their 30s, the fate of young people who come from struggling or fragmented families is therefore of great concern.

We must especially be concerned about the fate of young people who have been in the foster care, special education or juvenile justice systems and are abruptly cut off from state support when they hit age 18 or 21. These young people are without any safety nets whatsoever. Our network closely examined the struggles of these and other vulnerable populations in the subsequent book, On Your Own Without a Net (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Our work is now focused on how social institutions and policies might be redesigned to more appropriately meet the needs of young people, and how the capacities of young people themselves might be strengthened so that they are better equipped to make their way.

“As individuals age, they become increasingly like themselves.”
Bernice Neugarten,
1964 (founder of the field of personality and aging)

In 2006, the first wave of baby boomers turned 60. Even for the bold cultural warriors of the 1960s — the rockers, idealists, protesters and iconoclasts who transformed the nation — the transition to retirement is likely to be tough, according to OSU researcher Karen Hooker. Whether they thrive or struggle as they redefine their roles and restructure their time, she says, will depend largely on their personality.

The role of personality in life’s trajectory has intrigued Hooker ever since her undergraduate days at Denison University in Ohio. Why, she wondered, do some people move through adulthood with relative ease, rolling with the punches, keeping a sense of purpose and hope, while others succumb to depression, addiction or hopelessness? Then, as a graduate student in developmental psychology at the College of William and Mary, the nascent field of aging captured her.

“The whole notion that development doesn’t stop when you hit 21 was really just emerging,” says the professor of Human Development and Family Sciences, reminiscing in her Milam Hall office. “It wasn’t on the general public’s radar screen, in spite of the demographics of a growing aging population. I thought, ‘Wow! This is really untapped.’”

That was the late 1970s, a time when old people were getting a bum rap in popular culture. “Everywhere you looked, there was a lot of ageism,” she recalls. “If you watched TV, you didn’t see very many models of old people, and the ones you did see were extremely negative.”

The stereotypes of crotchety, decrepit, frumpy or demented elders didn’t jibe with Hooker’s own experience. Her grandmother and great-grandfather both maintained optimism, good humor, curiosity, energy and intellect throughout their lives. She remembers watching her great-grandfather working on his Pennsylvania farm and her grandmother playing bridge with friends, well into their ‘90s. “They were vibrant and interesting and resilient,” she says. “They were living history.”

So the scholar-athlete from the Midwest (who once dreamed of becoming a gym teacher) went on to earn her Ph.D. at Penn State, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Duke University’s Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development. Over the next quarter-century — with funding from agencies such as the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute on Mental Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — she has delved deeply into the mysteries of personality and aging. The issues she explores with surveys, interviews, statistical analyses, and theoretical models are some of the most wrenching and life-altering in human experience — bereavement, institutionalization for dementia, mental health of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease caregivers, memory loss, becoming a parent, retiring from the workforce. “The thread underlying all my work is transitions — those times during the course of life when personality may act as a compass for navigating new circumstances,” she says.

Ironically, her decades absorbed in aging have barely registered on Hooker’s face. The lithe 50-year-old can be seen most evenings swimming laps in the campus pool or running the hills of Corvallis — the very kinds of lifestyle choices whose benefits are well-documented in the literature. Researchers know with certainty that working out, eating and drinking in moderation, and eschewing tobacco and other risky behaviors support healthy aging. They are clear about the effects of education, affluence, and ethnicity. They know, too, that engagement with life and strong social support networks are vital. Less understood, however, is how our personalities interact with these myriad factors to influence our mental and physical health over the years.

To broaden and deepen the concept of personality, Hooker has developed a theoretical model called “the six foci of personality” with Dan McAdams of Northwestern University. Published in the prestigious Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences in 2003, the model has been adopted by universities across the U.S. as a powerful tool to guide future studies in personality and aging. That’s because it weaves the various strands of personality into a whole fabric, including the life stories we construct and the narratives we tell. This new unity of personality as a multidimensional concept opens the way to more comprehensive explorations of the aging self.

“The framework lets researchers better address the full richness of personality,” Hooker says. “It helps to solidify the science of personality in adulthood through a common language that had previously been elusive.”

Hooker’s current investigations into our “possible selves” are also yielding tantalizing clues. Self-concepts about the ideal we hope to be or the person we fear to become play critical roles as internal motivators, she explains, acting as psychological carrots and sticks in decision-making. By the time we reach old age, she has found, most of us have at least one health-related possible self. If you carry around a mental image of yourself as, for example, a 75-year-old equestrian cantering across the landscape, or an 80-year-old bicyclist pedaling Cycle Oregon, you’re better able to cope with — and fend off — that scary possible self, the bedridden nursing-home resident, Hooker says.

“Personality is the driving force behind successful aging,” she asserts. “What type of person you are, how reliably you can be counted on, your approach to people — all are crucial for understanding social support, coping strategies, stress and other health-related behaviors.”

When she uses the term “personality,” Hooker isn’t talking only about the traits we characterize with adjectives such as bubbly, aloof, shy or gregarious. Those outward qualities are just one side of personality. The other side is about actions — setting and achieving goals, for instance. Hooker’s ongoing research and scholarship in developmental psychology is revealing how those two aspects of personality — traits (“structures”) and states (“processes”) — affect social and emotional adjustment in later life. Although traits are more-or-less fixed, states are dynamic. In other words, they can change. That means that useful skills for coping with retirement — such as how to structure leisure time to make it both meaningful and manageable — are teachable and learnable.

“People tend to think of personality as immutable, carved in stone,” she says. “But we are finding that in fact, it’s a domain where there’s potential for growth, even in the very last days of life. You can always grow in some aspect of yourself.”