Support for Louisiana, the state we're in is provided by.

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I know customers are counting on me.

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Additional support provided by the Fred B and Ruth B Zigler Foundation and the Zigler Art Museum located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

With support from viewers like you So the House has passed its version of the budget, a PAR legislative commentary.

State lawmakers are not following the trend that is going on nationally and even in a conservative state like Louisiana.

Abortion exceptions killed in Committee.

Gulf of Mexico is is one of the biggest cases of of algal blooms in the world.

A breakthrough in carbon capture.

Worst thing we can do is presume it's a medical condition.

A discussion about gender dysphoria in about 39% of people in Louisiana live with obesity, reducing cases of obesity in Louisiana.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Kara St. Cyr.

And I'm Andre Moreau.

Republican lawmakers at the state capitol this week rejected legislation that would add exceptions of rape and incest to one of the strictest abortion bans in the country.

We'll have more on that story later in the show.

In the meantime, Ochsner the state's largest hospital system announced it will lay off nearly 800 workers.

Nearly 2% of Ochsner workforce, 38,000.

It will impact 42 hospitals and more than 200 urgent cares in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Our state has the second highest rate of new cancer cases in the nation.

And Louisiana Cancer Research Center is stepping up its statewide efforts to do something about it.

It'll hold a daylong free event at Louisiana Tech June 2nd.

It's called the Promising Practices Conference.

It'll also stream online the purpose to highlight resources and assistance available and spread awareness and produce much better outcomes.

How are lawmakers responding to the governor's budget proposals about halfway through this year's regular session of the legislature?

The Public Affairs Research Council is analyzing what they say is a budget clash at the state capital.

And Melinda Deslatte is PAR’s research director, is here now.

Why don't we take a look?

Melinda, thank you for being here, by the way, at what we're talking about in some of the different areas.

And one of the big areas is reducing the debt payments.

Right.

So what the.

So the House has passed its version of the budget, the package of budget bills, and now they've gone to the Senate.

So we're kind of waiting to see what the Senate is going to be interested in doing.

But now we know what the House plan is and we have a ton of just extra money floating around right now.

The state has been sort of awash in money right now, and we have all this short term cash.

And the House has decided its approach is to largely spend a lot of that money on paying down retirement debt, which I realize is not that very interesting, a subject to a lot of people.

But we have billions of dollars in retirement debt.

And if you can pay it off sooner rather than later, you save a ton of money on interest payments.

You help state agencies and school boards and public colleges and all of those places that have to pay towards this debt every year, especially when you have teacher pay raises, which have been talked about every year as let's get back up to more of a sustainable level and also early childhood education expenses, which everyone agrees we must invest better, but we don't necessarily do that.

Right.

Well, and what the House did with their version of the budget proposal is the governor had proposed increases in spending for a lot of education areas.

He proposed more money for early childhood education.

He proposed more money for higher education.

And then he proposed pay raises for public school teachers and public school staff.

And the House took out most of that.

They left in some higher education increases, but they took out most of the rest of that and used that money instead to prioritize these retirement debt payments over that.

But the House Republicans have taken the position that if they pay down some of this retirement debt, local school boards don't have to make those payments, which means they could save money and they could choose to raise teacher pay if they want to, but they're not required to.

It doesn't ensure that teachers have a pay raise.

It would be on a parish by parish basis, and that would be unusual for it to be parish by parish.

It seems in terms of, you know, say statewide teachers, you wouldn't even have that statistically more.

Well, it's just kind of a question of of do you want to leave it to locals to make decisions about how to fund teacher pay raises, or do you think the state should pay for them?

What about higher education?

So in higher education, they removed some of the increase that the governor proposed, but they did leave some other increases in there for like faculty pay raises and some other new initiatives.

Early childhood education is the place where they took out all of basically all of the increase that the governor proposed in state funding there.

And what the governor was trying to do is we used as a state, we used a bunch of federal pandemic money to increase the number of children who were getting served in these very various early learning programs.

That money is going to disappear.

The governor was trying to offset like a quarter of how much is going to disappear.

So thousands of kids were going to lose slots no matter what happened.

But now it just means even more children than the governor anticipated will be losing slots if this budget proposal takes effect.

So that would not take place.

There would not be the increase for early childhood.

Correct.

All right.

Medicaid program growth.

So the governor's budget assumed that the Medicaid program was going to have increased expenses.

What the House decided is that they were going to reduce some of that increase.

And their argument is that federal pandemic protections that required people to stay on Medicaid, even if they were no longer eligible have gone away.

And so the state should be removing people from the rolls.

And so their argument is that there should be less of an increase in expenditures than the Department of Health suggests there will be.

All right.

Well Melinda Deslatte,.

Thank you so much.

It's great to have you here.

Thanks for making it simple to understand.

Thank you.

One of Governor John Bel Edwards requests at the beginning of the legislative session was for lawmakers to draft a bill that would provide exceptions for rape and incest.

That bill died in committee this week.

Jim Engster a political analyst, is here to talk through some of those details.

So at the very beginning of session, a lot of political analysts and lawmakers were saying this is going to be very difficult to pass.

And this week, I guess that's been proven to be true.

We have a conservative legislature with a supermajority, and Governor Edwards is largely in sync with conservatives on the abortion issue.

But he advocated an exception for rape and incest and the House Criminal Justice Committee said no.

And recently, we had a poll conducted by a reputable pollster showing that 53% of the state, those who responded, are in favor of abortion rights, which would include not only rape and incest, but abortions for other reasons.

And that's quite a departure, Kara from three years ago when there was an amendment on the state ballot in which 62% of the people, more than six out of ten Louisiana voters opted for basically outlawing abortion in Louisiana if Roe were overturned and it was overturned last year.

But it looks like the inertia has changed and state lawmakers are not following the trend that is going on nationally and even in a conservative state like Louisiana.

So I want to go back to something you said earlier.

You were talking about how Governor John Bel Edwards was vocal about being pro-life.

And it seems like since we have a super majority of Republicans right now, that's in line with what they believe.

Why do you think they didn't vote for the exceptions, given that, you know, it kind of goes hand in hand with what Governor John Bel Edwards said.

I think the argument has been that this would open a loophole in which people would be having abortions for other reasons and stating that it was rape or incest.

And some believe, of course, if you're going to protect, quote, the sanctity of life from conception forward, that you can't draw the line and say that a fetus created through rape or incest is any less of a person than one created in another way.

So that's generally the reason given.

But Louisiana, some of the people have been most strident about abortion are Democrats in the state legislature, Katrina Jackson in particular.

So it's in our state.

The legislature is highly conservative on this, but it appears far more conservative than the state as a whole.

And it would be fascinating if this were to be put back on the ballot.

But I don't think that's happening any time soon.

Well, what's next for this topic?

It's controversial.

We've been talking about it for years At this point in most states right now, unless the Supreme Court changes in most states in our area.

Abortion is illegal.

So if a person wants to get an abortion in Louisiana, they've got to go to Kansas or Illinois or someplace where it is legal.

And there are no surrounding states where there is availability.

And now not only are they going after abortion in clinics, but abortion through pharmaceutical means.

So right now, for those who favor abortion rights, it's not a good environment in Louisiana or many other neighboring states.

Is there anything else that people should know about these exceptions or, you know, the possibility of what the conversation of abortion would look like in the future?

I think the exceptions will continue to be brought up year after year.

And at some point, if lawmakers want to stay in office, they may have to at least adhere to their constituents at some level.

But right now, the Louisiana legislature is pro-life to the limit and there is no doubt that most people in Louisiana prefer abortion rights.

In some cases, whether it's rape, incest or basically the old way through Roe v Wade.

But at this point, the legislature has and has the votes.

And the governor, who's also, quote, pro-life, he couldn't get them to buckle on a rape and incest exception.

All right.

Well, we always appreciate you coming down and talking about these topics with us.

Thank you.

My pleasure.

Thank you.

We've talked several times with Eyal Harel, CEO of Bluegreen Water Technologies, about their breakthrough method of carbon capture.

And that method now has full endorsement from the Social Carbon Foundation, which manages international greenhouse gas standards.

This is our contribution to piggyback on a natural process that would ultimately take all up carbon or a lot of that carbon that was released into the atmosphere that ended up in water.

Lock it within the biomass of an algal bloom, which is an ecological problem to begin with, cause it to collapse, go down to the bottom and end up getting buried and compressed into the sediment as it naturally has been doing over the past billions of years.

How many companies, how many organizations are doing this kind of carbon capture?

Well, actually, we're the first company that is that has developed this kind of methodology.

We have been working with the Social Carbon Foundation to develop the first methodology for carbon removal in deepwater in the world.

So this is actually going to be the first effort to harness water being a natural regulator of carbon and the natural occurrence, the natural phenomenon of harmful algal blooms that are able to uptake fantastic quantities of carbon and eliminate with one stroke.

Both the problem of a toxic bloom, which is an ecological problem, as well as remove from the atmosphere fantastic quantities of of carbon.

And so we're taking that medium of an extremely efficient microorganism, using it to grab all that carbon that it can grab and then triggering a self-destruct mechanism within those organisms that will cause them to lock in the carbon and send it to the bottom of the ocean or the lake where it will in part bury and eliminate that portion of carbon away from the greenhouse gas equation in the world.

Are there algal blooms in the Gulf of Mexico?

Yeah.

Huge.

Gulf of Mexico is is is one of the biggest cases of of algal blooms in the world.

The conditions there are primed for this kind of activity.

So what are the limiting factors in terms of rehabilitate aquatic ecosystems is that it's expensive, operationally doable.

But you know, if somebody would call us tomorrow and say, hey, clean up 1 million square kilometers of the the Gulf of Mexico, the price tag would be punishing.

And so and so that would be a limiting factor.

However, with the carbon credits in play, this could change.

We have a shot for the first time to reaching actually to reaching net zero and potentially even reaching net negative.

It's great to talk to you again.

Pleasure.

And thank you so much.

More teenagers and pre-teens are seeking transitions.

The medical community that treats them is deeply divided about why and what to do to help them.

Louisiana's legislature this week advanced a bill that would prohibit doctors from performing gender transition procedures like hormone treatments.

I spoke with Britain's foremost authority on gender dysphoria care.

Dr. Az Hakeem and heard his concerns about anything that he says would permanently harm children.

I'm a consultant, psychiatrist and medical psychotherapist.

And I've been specializing in the psychotherapeutic treatment of people with gender dysphoria, adults for 23 years.

So they're doing it quite a long time.

And in that time, you have seen a lot of change, especially in the past five years.

What is prompting this?

So you could divide the trans population into the people who would otherwise formerly been called transvestites, those who like dressing up, those who would have formerly been called transsexuals, the ones who want to have permanent bodily changes and other people who might have other fetishes and things which, you know, all coming to the new Trans umbrella.

So Trans is very nonspecific and there's always been far more transvestites than transsexuals.

The other thing to factor in is that there's a massive increase in young children identifying as trans and non-binary and myself and many other clinicians feel is but isn't really a transsexual thing.

It isn't that we suddenly have an epidemic of transsexual children.

I understand that as a current form of youth subculture, you know, like punks and goths.

You know, when I went to school and someone who had crazy hair and lipstick and we said, Oh, you're really cool.

What are you?

I'm a Goth, we became Goths.

Now, when a child goes to school and someone similar to that person in their hair and their makeup turns up and they go, You're really cool.

What are you.

Oh, I'm trans non-binary.

They're all trans non-binary.

And the worst thing we can do is presume it's a medical condition and it's not.

There's, there's a lot of myths flying around.

So one myth is that people are born in the wrong body.

There's no evidence that that's the case.

Brains of people with gender dysphoria is exactly the same as people without nobody's born the wrong body.

There are lots of psychological conditions where people are very unhappy with their body, whether it's anorexia, body dysmorphia.

But we always treat those psychologically.

We never collude with the anorexic and say, yes, you need to be thinner.

We never collude with the body dysmorphia.

So, yes, your body is all wrong.

So for these kids, the concern is that they're being put on this conveyor belt of physical treatments which are irreversible.

There's another myth.

There's a myth that the medications that we call puberty blockers are reversible.

They're not puberty Blockers is a sanitized term for chemical castration.

If you are uncertain or not sure about your your physical sex, then at least going through puberty will reinforce what you know, what you are.

And that the risk is if you're not certain about your sex and then you don't go through puberty, then that just reinforces that you're not really a boy or a girl.

So it rather being helpful is unhelpful.

There's another myth that if you don't give these children puberty blockers, they're at a high risk of suicide.

That's a myth.

There's no evidence that whatsoever.

We label these people as gender dysphoria, but we don't look at other things.

And what I found in my population was the males.

100% of them.

Of the males I saw who would be called transsexual were on the autistic spectrum.

And in the females, they seemed to have a higher incidence of trauma, often sexual trauma, or they had a degree of homophobia.

So less the phobia either internalized or externalized from the cultures and societies that they were in.

So it was a way of escaping from that with a fantasy solution.

Gender ideology is the current new religion is part of social justice theory, all those other things.

Gender ideology is made up.

It's a social construct is a cult belief that the genders are social construct.

We have sex, we have male and female sexes, and some people are hermaphrodites.

Very small number.

But gender is a social construct and the the idea that gender ideology has is replacing biological sex is very unfortunate.

It's not helpful because it doesn't exist.

The data and the statistics that typically would be driving such change.

What does that look like?

There isn't any.

So if you go to hospital for a minor procedure, like a fingernail operation, there'll be tons of outcome data on that.

For some reason, giving children chemical castration and cross-sex hormones, there is no data.

So the big criticism of the the main clinic in the UK, the Tavistock Kids clinic, was that why aren't you collecting data?

And what's very strange is that myself and my research team created an outcome measuring tool which is free to use, takes 10 minutes and will measure outcomes, is the only one that exists.

And I I've been sending it to this clinic that was much criticized in the UK and today they refused to respond to any of my my letters.

I'm not asking for any money.

It's a free to use tool widely available online, but there seems to be a resistance to collecting data which is very, very suspicious.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

Oh, it is a Obesity remains a very serious chronic disease that affects more than 40% of America's population.

Pennington Biomedical Research Center has identified it as a public health issue in Louisiana.

And here to talk about the latest stats is Joe Nadglowski, president and CEO of the Obesity Action Coalition.

Thank you so much for joining us this morning.

So let's start off first with ironing out the details about how many people in Louisiana are affected with obesity.

So Louisiana's stats look just like the national stats, right?

About 39% of people in Louisiana live with obesity.

And I'll be frank here, it's probably an underestimate because how we actually measure that, as we call people and we ask you how much you weigh and how tall you are.

And let's be honest with you, most of us are not particularly honest about that.

Right?

We were a few inches taller, a few pounds less.

So probably those numbers are even higher than that.

Probably were probably in the mid-forties in terms of percentage of people living with obesity.

So as far as locations in Louisiana, where you see it the most, is there any place that sticks out to you?

So I think it's a problem all across the board.

But we actually find that obesity is often worse in rural communities versus in the city environments.

So we actually see higher rates among those people who live in these rural communities.

Now, why that is not 100% sure.

We're waiting for the data to tell us why that is.

But but it's a trend we actually see nationwide.

So so it's obviously dangerous to be overweight.

But I mean, are there any other health risks that are associated with it?

Yeah.

So obesity is definitely not just about your body size, right?

There are plenty of people who can live in a larger body and be healthy.

Obesity is really when you live in a larger body and it starts to impact your health and the health things that can be impacted as you have a greater risk for diabetes, heart disease, cancer, you know, you name the condition, there's actually about 250 conditions associated with obesity.

Now, obesity isn't to blame for every health condition, but the reality is many it does cause many of the health conditions that affect people.

Wow.

Okay.

So 250 other conditions that are linked to this.

And of course, you mentioned diabetes, heart disease, which are things that pop up a lot here in Louisiana.

Are there any demographics that are affected more than others besides people that are in rural communities?

Yeah.

So I think for sure, when we look at the data, you know, people of color have higher obesity rates, especially African-American women who struggle with obesity higher.

Now, part of that we have to acknowledge, could be a flaw in how we measure obesity, which is through body mass index.

But but the reality is we see, you know, higher rates of diabetes, for example, in black women as well.

Right.

Kind of thing.

So it is important to recognize, especially if you're in those demographics, that you should actually talk to your doctor about how your body weight is impacting your health.

Because I want to be very, very clear.

Not everyone who lives in a bigger body has obesity, right?

Because it may not their extra body fat may not be affecting their health.

But if it is, you need to talk to your doctor about it and work on a plan to get as healthy as possible.

So we talked a little bit more about this before we started filming, but having obesity or people that live with obesity, it kind of affects the community as a whole.

Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

So it's important to recognize that obesity impacts people's life, not just from the health perspective, but the entire the entirety of their lives.

Yeah, it's a stigma that they're really dealing with.

Absolutely.

So weight bias and stigma, arguably, is that the most challenging thing to live with when when you have obesity?

You know, somehow when we made obesity bad as a world, as a society, as a nation, we made the people who live with obesity bad as well.

And that's a big problem right now with other conditions, with other diseases.

You know, we're very clear.

You know, cancer is bad, but we have compassion and empathy for people with cancer.

But somehow with obesity, we don't do that.

Right.

We have this tendency to blame and shame people.

And I'll be honest with you, it's that blame and shame that actually keeps us as a society from doing something to address obesity.

Right.

And I've noticed, you know, throughout this entire interview, you've not said that a person has obesity.

They they live with it.

And that's part of addressing the stigma.

Absolutely.

So, I mean, again, we are more than just our condition.

So the word you hear often used by people is the word obese.

And I would encourage people not to use that word.

We wouldn't say someone's cancerous.

Right.

They live with obesity.

They live with cancer.

Let's treat this condition with the respect it deserves.

And all we're asking for is a little compassion and respect around it.

All right.

So in your opinion, how do you improve these statistics in Louisiana?

Yeah.

So I think the real challenge here in Louisiana is, you know, if you woke up today or you're watching this today and you say, you know what, I want to do something about my obesity and you go to talk to your health care provider about it, it's likely that the options you have are limited.

You know, we actually do not have access to care for many people who live with obesity.

You know, they may want to again, seek behavioral therapy, medical therapy, surgical therapy, but oftentimes their insurance will exclude those kind of coverage.

So that's one of the things we're working very hard here in Louisiana to do is actually improve access to those therapies.

We also then have to recognize as we we have to make systems change, as we have to change the food environment, we have to make the healthy option, the easy, easy option, right kind of thing.

We can't we can't continue to live in an environment where it's just too easy to on unhealthy foods.

It's going to take this combination of both preventing obesity and treating obesity to make a real difference.

Preventing and treating.

Can't do one without the other.

Both of them together.

All right.

Well, thank you so much for coming in.

I appreciate you talking to us about this.

Thanks for having me.

And everyone.

That's our show for this week.

Remember to watch any SWI segment or broadcast.

You can find it all on our YouTube page at Louisiana Public Broadcasting slash videos.

And remember, if you're on the go, keep our LPB PBS app handy.

That's right.

And you can also watch LPB news and public affairs shows as well as other Louisiana programs you've come to enjoy over the years.

And please like us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

For everyone in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

I'm Andre Moreau and I'm Kara St. Cyr.

Until next time.

That's the state we're at.

Every day I go to work for Entergy, I know customers are counting on me.

So Entergy is investing millions of dollars to keep the lights on and installing new technology to prevent outages before they happen.

Together, together.

Together.

We power life.

Additional support provided by the Fred B and Ruth B Zigler Foundation and the Zigler Art Museum located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

With support from viewers like you.