Check out the trailer for Soul Food Junkies, which is slated for release in 2012.

Byron Hurt is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, a published writer, and an anti-sexist activist. His most recent documentary, Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. It was later broadcast nationally on the Emmy award-winning PBS series Independent Lens, drawing an audience of more than 1.3 million viewers. To date, Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes (BBR) has been selected to appear in more than 50 film festivals worldwide and The Chicago Tribune named it “one of the best documentary films in 2007.”

There are so many beautiful things about the African American race, like our beautiful skin tones, our amazing skills and talents, our aggressive competitive nature, our strong spirituality, our dedication to the ones we love, but there is a glaring problem that we must take responsibility for and change!

All violence is wrong and should end, but it is heart wrenching to continue to hear of innocent black people dying at the hands of their brother.

Now I am no fool and I understand the plight of a black man, I understand the conditions under which some black men are forced to live, but does it give them the right to be so angry and to kill? Too many African Americans believe that somehow they were wronged or the system is keeping them down, but that mentality only perpetuates the same situations and circumstances we are already in. So many have come before us to allow us equal rights as our counterparts and we are still making excuses. Our circumstances are only made worse by our perspective. If we can change our perspective we instantaneously change our circumstances. Now this is not to down play our past, instead I write this in hopes to change our future.

Here’s a story…..

I sat on the plane with a man whose father chose not to be in his life. His mother was forced to raise him and his brothers alone, and had difficulties keeping a job and providing for the boys. She did the best she could, but her children were forced to live in rough communities and get jobs at a young age to help keep the family afloat. The gentleman I sat next to, went to school, did well enough to earn a scholarship, and eventually became a doctor. He was headed to India to do research and provide free medical care! Now after reading this story you may think it was an African American man, but it wasn’t! It was a Caucasian man that believed that his situation was only temporary. He believed that it was only a matter of time before he would be doing something that would change his financial situation and forever bring him out of poverty!

Now why is this? Why did this man KNOW that things would change? We could say a lot of things……but the number one reason was his perspective!

Too many of us believe that our current situation is a definite indicator of our future. We don’t see it as a temporary place from which we WILL grow! If we continue to believe that we must live in the ghettos because our parents lived there, or because that’s where we belong, we will forever be an angry race blaming others for our situations.

A.J Jewell and Derrion Albert did not have to die, and even though I wasn’t at either scene, I already know what happened! I’ve seen it over and over again. Black men that care more about their shoes than the value of another human life! They care more about their reputation of being a thug than taking the high road and doing what’s right. We also must stop robbing one another for personal advancement. There are so many ways to make money in America and none of us have an excuse to steal or kill to provide for our families or for ourselves.

We must unite on this issue and change our perspective. Now I understand this is a major issue and I don’t want to simplify it by saying that we all can just change our circumstances in a day, but we are a beautiful race full of potential. When we all truly believe that, then and only then, will we reach our goals. We must realize that as we kill or steal from our brothers we essentially kill the spirit of our entire race!

[From Time.com]

For decades, heart disease has had the dubious honor of being the leading killer of Americans. Most heart-related deaths happen among the elderly, by far the largest at-risk group for cardiovascular disease. But a new study finds that an alarming portion of heart failure cases are occurring in a much younger group – under age 50 – and overwhelmingly among African Americans.

In the first large-scale study to document the extent of the race gap in heart disease, researchers report that one in 100 black adults develop heart failure in their 30s and 40s – a rate 20 times higher than that of similarly aged white men and women. In fact, the heart failure rate among young black adults was more like that of white men and women in their 50s and 60s. “What these data point out is that it’s important to recognize that disease patterns differ in different populations,” says Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, one of the study’s authors and co-director of the Center for Vulnerable Populations at the University of California, San Francisco, and San Francisco General Hospital. “We would have completely missed this at-risk group had we only been looking at older age groups. We would have also missed them if we had not been studying African Americans in large numbers.”

The new report, published in the March 19 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, is a large government-funded survey that began in 1985. The aim of the study was to document the frequency of heart disease among young adults, so researchers recruited more than 5,000 volunteers from four cities and tracked them for 20 years, measuring their blood pressure, weight, cholesterol, fasting blood sugar and kidney function. These tests were repeated six times over the two-decade period.

The black adults who developed heart disease early had at least one of four risk factors – high blood pressure, being overweight, chronic kidney disease or low levels of “good” cholesterol (high-density cholesterol, or HDL). Blood pressure and heart risk rose in step: for each 10 mm increase in diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number of the ratio), the risk of having heart failure in their 40s doubled. For each 5.7 increase in body mass index (BMI), a ratio of weight and height, the risk of developing heart failure increased by 40%. And each 13.3 mg/dL drop in HDL levels also boosted the risk of heart disease by 40%.

But the largest risk factor for heart failure among this group was chronic kidney disease, a condition that is often triggered by untreated diabetes and obesity. Black adults with chronic kidney disease experienced a stunning 20-fold jump in their risk of heart failure, compared with black adults without kidney disease. “Here we have tangible evidence that heart failure in the young is a real dilemma,” says Dr. Clyde Yancy, president-elect of the American Heart Association.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

THESE make for a good way to keep your blood pressure down!

Heart disease is also the number one killer of African American women. Here are ways to help save your heart!