from the comments at that site:
If you show me that, say,
Homeopathy works,
I will change my mind,
I will spin on a fucking dime.
I’ll be as embarrassed as hell,
Yet I will run through the streets yelling,
It’s a MIRACLE!
Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And whilst its memory
Of a long lost drop of onion juice is infinite,
It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it.
I’m trying this diet where I avoid sugar and most grains, especially wheat and corn.
Things I’ve noticed:
I’ve been reading a lot about Glycemic Index and was disturbed to find that according to some measures, bagels have a higher Glycemic Index than coca-cola. I find that hard to believe. I can eat a dozen bagels per day if they are available. If each one has 300 calories thats…. well, you do the math.
Cold cereal is another culprit. Even so-called healthy cereals (granola, special-k, grape nuts flakes, oat bran) have GI values through the roof. I love cereal. I finally found a cereal I can eat without sugar that has a reasonable GI. And, no its not Colon-blow.
It is, in fact, Uncle Sam’s, darling of South Beach Dieters and diabetics. The taste is… subtle. Some people don’t like it, but the flavor of the grain comes through. For variety I throw in chopped up apples, blueberries, raisins, or bananas. I like that I can pour milk into it, walk the kid the bus stop and come back and it is still crunchy. I’ve only found it at Rainbow, but you can buy it on Amazon, probably because it’s fiber content closely resembles that of a book.
I went to a Kundalini Yoga class yesterday and I hurt in parts of my body that I didn’t know existed. It definitely invigorated me. I hates the camel pose.
There is a slight controversy with Kundalini Yoga. It used to be secret stuff, but rouge teachers such as Yogi Bhajan have brought the practices to the public.
Discover a huge store of nonsense on Wikipedia about Kundalini yoga and the results of hitting it too hard, Kundalini Syndrome, which is a melange of nervous twitches and creepy affectations.
I guess Kundalini differs from other yoga because of it’s specific breathing methods (Breath of Fire) and some more psychological aspects, which we did not address. My experience of it was to hold a pose that is slightly or massively challenging and then hyperventilate in that pose so that you feel really awesome when it is over and the rest of the day feels easy by comparison.
It turns out that the reason for some of the bizarre health issues at our house of late is due to fifth’s disease rather than a real or imagined curse. Four weeks ago, Maureen came down with a bizarre rash that seemed to be triggered by the sun. So, we figured she was allergic to the sun. Now Frank has a similar rash,also triggered by the sun, but this time the doctor immediately recognized fifth’s disease. It is a common, benign viral infection that leaves a rash (which is aggravated by the sun!) at the end of the illness (past the time when it is transmissible). It all fits!
If you’ve seen us in the past month or so, and your kids have a rash… maybe it is fifths (You’re welcome). We were concerned because the literature says that complications could develop if you get this virus while you are pregnant and we did expose a pregnant woman, but it seems that it is only the early stages of pregnancy that this is a concern. The baby was born last night is healthy.
It is called fifths because it is the fifth of the classic childhood skin rashes after measles, rubella, scarlet fever, and the mysterious fourth’s disease.
I went back to the Physicians Neck and Back Clinic today. I haven’t been there since early September. A feeling of wellness crept back into my spine immediately after I started the workout. I had to take a rest in the waiting room on the way out because I was so exhausted.
In my absence, they had replaced all their old computers with Windows PCs. And were they working? Nope!
This weekend is like “Leaving Lost Vegas” except with dairy products.
I’ve been spending some time at the Physicians Neck and Back Clinic. Their philosophy about back pain is that Americans just need to have their asses kicked. Until today, I was kind of wondering when the ass kicking would begin. It came in the form of a sarcastic therapist who joshed, “On this machine, you should be lifting about your body weight and you’re almost there! …assuming you weigh 130 pounds”. Brilliant man. He honed in on exactly the kind of insinuations that would motivate me.
Some of the PNBC research is outlined here. Basically, the sedentary life that most of us lead makes our backs go to pot. We try to mitigate this with operations, pills, avoiding activity, and, god help us all, expensive cushions. Instead, we should be working the very muscles that are failing us. So they have a bunch of weight machines that isolate various neck and back muscles and they have a bunch of supportive therapists that stand next to you and tell you how good you are doing. And they also have the guy who I had today.
I’ve been feeling significantly stronger in what they call the “core” - hips, thighs, back and abs - from their workouts, but today is the first day I’ve felt pushed past my own protection of my lower back. The first day I’ve felt that floppy flat tire feeling of exhausted muscles.
Revelation from the New York Times:
Left-brain injuries don’t necessarily lead to blissful enlightenment;
That is from a fascinating article about Jill Taylor, a woman who had a stroke that blew away her ego. and left her, after a long recovery, reasonably healthy. She is already an internet sensation, apparently, because her lecture at the TED conference is online.
I’m glad that we have her brain to look at and I truly do think it is a miracle, but her route to awareness kind of misses the point. She didn’t have to overcome her ego through thousands of hours of practice, facing down the delusions built in by evolution and society, it just got obliterated. Without it to contend with, she isn’t burdened with the human condition and so hasn’t really developed awareness.
I don’t know enough about monks, but I’m tempted to say the same thing about them. Yes, they have practiced for thousands of hours and have made unconditionally amazing achievements in awareness, but they did so in a controlled environment that removed many of the impediments that keep the rest of us from gaining “awareness”.
The Buddha’s followers resented his inclusion of “householders” into his inner circle. I contend that householders, those with positions to defend and in-laws to impress, have real attachments and benefit the most from Buddhist teachings, even if they don’t get as far towards enlightenment as the monks do. Jesus knew this too: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”
It is inspiring, as one commenter says, to know that enlightenment waits inside all of us.
The 9th wedding anniversary is a good occasion to check your spouse for lice. Kate and I performed this ritual on one another yesterday morning and again this morning. Now I know why monkeys spend their days doing this. Nitpicking brought us closer together. I also applied pesticide shampoo to my youngest daughter. That did not bring us closer together.
The Louse Zapper is a battery operated comb that buzzes until it hits a louse, which gets electrocuted. We borrowed this device from a friend of ours. I zapped one freak of an adult louse plus 7 juveniles on Maureen. It was immensely satisfying.
There is a great fact sheet about lice maintained by the Harvard School of Public Health. The most important and relaxing detail is that lice can’t survive at room temperature for very long. They evolved into human hair specialists hundreds of thousands of years ago and can only live next to the body heat of a human head. Once they are established there, though, it takes a military campaign to get them out.
We only discovered ours because Kate was doing a casual, routine check on one kid and by chance found one (it escaped into the carpet). The lesson, I guess, is that routine checks are the best way to ward of such an infestation and prevent your kids from spreading the bugs to others.
Even though I kind of enjoyed the process and now think of myself as quite an expert, I kind of dread it happening again. It is a lot of work. You have to freeze your pillows, bag your hats and dry your sheets. But don’t worry about having the energy for this work. The ugliness of these creatures, in all their life stages, inspires frenetic hygiene.
On our trip to Texas and before, I was chewing a lot of sugarless gum to entertain myself and try to manage my need to always be chewing on something. On our trip, I became very irregular. I have heard from an informed source that the sorbitol in sugar-free gum causes intestinal discomfort, but I didn’t think I was susceptible. Then, as I started to unwrap another stick of the stuff while I looked around for a plastic bag to put my pants in, it hit me: I had been chewing ever greater amounts of this stuff and it might be worth it to cut it out. When I quit, my problems went away.
Sorbitol is a sugar-alcohol that breaks down slowly and causes an “osmotic purge” because it isn’t absorbed well in the intestines. I can tell just by the sound of “osmotic purge” that yes, that is what was happening.
Matt turned me on to a use for old sippy-cups.
They work perfectly as Neti Pots!
Fill with warm salt water (1/4 teaspoon salt to 1 cup warm water), lean over a sink, tip your head sideways and jam the nozzle of the sippy cup into the higher nostril and pour. You will feel the salt water fill your nasal passages and then it will fall out of your other nostril. It left me with feeling of cleanliness in an entirely new place. There are all kinds of purported benefits to this mentioned across the internet, some warning that the only true way to do this is with a $30.00 ceramic pot. Supernatural benefits may exist, but I just find it soothing, especially in the dry winter air.
Note. If water steadily rises across your vision in one or both eyeballs while doing this, or if more than two cups of water disappears into your nose without any exiting, cease immediately.
From Adopt A Microbe
Hi, I’m V. cholerae.
I’m a Gram negative, oxidase positive fermenter bacteria.
Many of my strains cause cholera, a severe diarrhoeal illness.
I can be epidemic or pandemic and I love the developing world.
I have a high fatality in malnourished populations, where people get very dehydrated.
To give you severe diarrhoea, my strains need to make the cholera toxin.
I have lots of strains!
Most of my strains that cause outbreaks are ‘type-01′ strains, but there are also 139 ‘non-type-01′ strains.
You can classify me into Inaba, Ogawa and Hikojima serotypes if you want. Or you could classify me into classical and El Tor biotypes (you don’t see my El Tor much anymore though).
seen on BoingBoing.
.
The following plan seems to be working for me. They are rules that are pretty easy to not break because they aren’t all that extreme.
Fasting after dinner is key. It is very easy to follow and has little pain associated with it. I do wake up so hungry every morning. The no chips rule is also key because these are ubiquitous in my environment, provide very little nutritional value, and are high in the worst kind of calories: easy to burn carbs and extra oils. bleh! There is no place for portion control here. Eat one, eat a bag, is my experience. Better just to not let these pass my lips!
Exercise, of course, is also key, especially since I have such a sedentary job. Exercise reduces my appetite noticably.
I’ve been riding my bike to work almost every day and trying to bring the kids where they need to go on bikes. Last night when I took the bike train across town to drop Maggie at a friend’s house for a sleepover. We stopped at Brackett Park, which is accessed through a cool bike tunnel under the railroad tracks. I was surprised to see that they were working on the Midtown Greenway all the way down there. It is accessed by a paved ramp from Brackett Park. We rode up there, past some construction equipment and onto a level, dirt trail that we took all the way to the rail bridge over the river. We cruised down what will soon become the ramp to the river road and Bubba began to freak out because he had the strong sense we weren’t supposed to be riding around there. How did I end up with such rule-conscious children? Round trip totalled 11 miles. With the weight of kids in the trailers, it was more than enough of a workout. I was finished after that!
Centers For Disease Control reports on Catching multi-drug resistant salmonella from pet rodents.
Minnesota. During August 2004, a boy aged 5 years had diarrhea of 14 days’ duration (initially bloody), abdominal cramps, vomiting, and fever (103ºF [39.4ºC]). A stool culture yielded S. Typhimurium. Four days before the boy became ill, his family had purchased a mouse from a retail pet store supplied by a Minnesota distributor. The mouse became lethargic and had diarrhea immediately after purchase. Even though the mouse was ill, the boy frequently handled and kissed the mouse. One week after purchase, the mouse died; the mouse was frozen and later submitted for testing at MDH. Cultures of the mouse’s lungs, pooled liver and spleen, and intestines yielded growth of S. Typhimurium, with a pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) pattern indistinguishable from the boy’s isolate.
The article mentions that many distributors in the "Pocket Pet Industry" use lots of antibiotics pre-emptively to prevent disease. One company puts tetracycline in all the feed. They can’t prove that this resistant strain arose because of overuse of antibiotics, but here is yet another industry literally pouring antibiotics into the ecosystem.
Meanwhile, I can’t legally get antibiotics unless I visit the doctor and get a prescription.
How do you monitor a population for a disease outbreak? An article on Public Library of Science – medicine , a peer-reviewed open access journal, goes into the math of a new method by a guy named Martin Kulldorff. I found this via Focus, news about Harvard Medical and Public Health research, which I found via someone who left a comment on this weblog. Here, I try to put into my own words what the paper said, in order to more fully understand what they are talking about. This is also an experiment in "using a weblog to make it seem like you know more about something that you actually do". Any corrections are welcome. LINK to article
I feel that since I lauded Super-size me, I should post updates about the movie.
First, in keeping with his vow to show the movie at high schools across the country, the film maker has released an edited version. It apparently caused a minor student uprising in New York. (via The Health Care Blog)
Also, a teacher in Canada has challenged the anti-McDonalds attitude with his own McDonalds diet.
I already knew this about sugar (wow, I wrote "Hitler" instead of sugar just now!) but learned it again. This morning I fed the children Cascadian Farms Oats and Honey Granola and Quaker Oatmeal Squares. Marketed as a health food, sold at Target, Cascadian Farms Granola is full of sugar. The other morning I had some and fell asleep in my car after I parked. I hate that. Anyway, I watched the kids just go all squishy after eating their cereal. Unable to focus, whining, rythmic head and arm motions, voices raised by a few decibels. So, no more sugar in the morning. Also, Sugar is Hitler And that goes for organic cane juice and crystalized corn fructose as well.
This is meant to inform, not to panic:
When I worked at a restaurant, the management was very concerned that the tomatoes be washed carefully because of possibility of salmonella. Because of those precautions, I always assumed that washing them and removing the stem scar would protect from salmonella. Today the CDC has posted a study about salmonella outbreaks caused by roma tomatoes last summer and it indicates that there is no way to ensure a raw tomato is free of salmonella and there is little enforcement at the packing houses. So, I guess eating raw roma tomatoes this summer is a roll of the dice.
Side Note
Could food irradiation protect us from this? When I worked at MPIRG, there was a guy publishing strange studies of food irradiation. He was convinced that it was bad news and verily frothed at the mouth when I asked him how fried chicken could get any more cancerous than it already is if it got exposed to radiation.
Some neurologists did a study of the brain activity of buddhist monks who have done 10,000 - 50,000 hours of meditation. The monks’ brain activity was compared with that of students new to meditation. It is part of the current interest in neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to restructure itself based on how it is used.
The article is here.
50,000 hours?