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Episode details

Radio 4,31 May 2016,45 mins

kd lang, Science behind obesity, Teaching fertility in schools

Woman's Hour

Available for over a year

k.d. lang on her new creative collaboration with fellow singer-songwriters Neko Case and Laura Veirs, combining forces to form a new supergroup with an album called case/lang/veirs. With conflicting advice over what we eat - particularly the role of fat in our diet - which message do you believe if you want to be healthy? Dietician Lucy Aphramor and Peymane Adab, Professor of Chronic Disease Epidemiology & Public Health at Birmingham University, discuss the opposing claims. After increasing calls for education about women's fertility to be taught in schools, we sit on a lesson at girls' school where the idea's being tested. What do the 15 year-old students make of it? Author and activist Joan Smith joins us to discuss whether this should be considered compulsory teaching in schools. Award-winning writer and critic Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among the great and the good of Chicago's black elite. She shares her experience of growing up and being educated in a community that she calls "Negroland" where residents were sheltered by privilege and plenty. How did they shape society's attitude to race, sex and class in America?

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