If yesterday was an average day, around 6,600 Americans alive Wednesday are not alive today. About 2,600 of those deaths yesterday were sudden.
Like the 39-year-old firefighter who fell to his death at the Texas Rangers game last night when he reached for a ball tossed to him by Josh Hamilton. His young son was at the game with him.
Hot dog ingredients explained by Scientific American.
“Researchers examined data on more than 44,000 drivers in single-vehicle crashes who died between 1999 and 2009. They found that 24.9% tested positive for drugs and 37% had blood-alcohol levels in excess of 0.08, the legal limit. Fifty-eight percent had no alcohol in their systems; 5% had less than 0.08.”
“But in 2007, the National Roadside Survey found that 16% of nighttime weekend drivers tested positive for illegal drugs.”
“[A] study published by the American Psychological Association shows that synthetic fat substitutes used in low-calorie potato chips can backfire and contribute to weight gain more so than their fatty counterparts.”
It seems that olestra tricks the body so convincingly into believing that calories are coming that our metabolism does its own thing. (Just as artificial sweeteners are now being shown to trick the body into believing sugar is coming, and messing up insulin production.)
Diet soft drink users, as a group, experienced 70 percent greater increases in waist circumference compared with non-users. Frequent users, who said they consumed two or more diet sodas a day, experienced waist circumference increases that were 500 percent greater than those of non-users.
Abdominal fat is a major risk factor for diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and other chronic conditions.
I refer you also to:
Most important lines of the day
“Antibiotics for sore throats and CT scans for minor head injuries in children are among the most wasteful practices in primary care medicine, a national physicians’ group said last week. Among the others are electrocardiograms performed routinely on healthy adults and widespread prescribing of brand-name statins to reduce L.D.L., or ‘bad’ cholesterol.”
“According to CNET, Tuesday’s finding place cell phones in the same category as lead, engine exhaust, and chloroform.”
World Health Organization says radiation from wireless phones is “possibly carcinogenic”
And, as reported previously, in a moving vehicle is the worst time because the phone transmits more energy searching for cell towers.
“A blood test that can show how fast someone is ageing – and offers the tantalising possibility of estimating how long they have left to live – is to go on sale to the general public in Britain later this year.”
The wonderful website Information Is Beautiful has published a bubble chart on the scientific evidence for health supplements. Fascinating.
You know that chart they have in many doctors’ offices with the one-to-ten scale for pain and the smiley face and the frowny face?
Well, I’m having some back problems the past few days — it’s a chronic condition with occasional acute flareups — and I just learned that the chart is graded on the curve AND I HAD NO PREVIOUS IDEA WHAT A 10 COULD BE.
I only hope I know now, because this is frowny face enough for me.
A 50-year-old woman who had spent an hour in the ER at the same time as the Swiss woman caught the disease from her. Patient 2 got taken care of, went home, and started feeling feverish nine days later. She had difficulty breathing and thought at first she was having an asthma attack, so she went back to the hospital and was admitted for two days. That she had measles would not be discovered until six days after that.
While she was in the hospital, Patient 2 unknowingly infected a 41-year-old health care worker who took care of her — and who was scheduled to get a measles-vaccine booster shot that very day, because the hospital was also caring for the tourist. Patient 2 also passed measles to an unvaccinated 11-month-old boy who was in the same ER while she was waiting to get checked for asthma, and to two unvaccinated siblings — 3 and 5 years old — who were visiting their mother on the same hospital floor after Patient 2 was admitted.
Patient 3, the health-care worker, passed measles to a 47-year-old woman in her emergency department — who later ended up in an intensive care unit with measles pneumonia — and later to a 41-year-old man in his home. Patient 4, the toddler, gave the virus to an unvaccinated 1-year-old while they were both in the same pediatrician’s office. Five other people were infected somewhere in their everyday lives: a 2-year-old boy who had never been vaccinated and who also ended up in an ICU with seizures brought on by high fever; a 9-month-old and an 8-month-old, also unvaccinated; and two adults, 35 and 37, who might have gotten one dose as children, but had no documentation of receiving a second dose.
From What vaccine refusal really costs: Measles in Arizona | Wired Science.
Fascinating. And scary.
“Even as more people are struggling to pay medical bills and being rushed through office visits with their doctors, an elite group with money has another option: exclusive medical care, around the clock and anywhere in the world, including on a yacht or private plane.”
You may not want to know.
From The Atlantic Wire
Wonderful piece from Joe Posnanski — Daughters and Roller Skating.
You absolutely should read One In A Billion: A boy’s life, a medical mystery. It won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting and is fascinating. It’s three parts (see the left column at the link for the three). You may need some tissues.
Modern war fighting technology still requires good human judgment — Anatomy of an Afghan War Tragedy.
That’s it for now.
Remember the H1N1 uproar two years ago — schools and offices closed in Mexico, pigs slaughtered in Egypt, ERs swamped in the U.S., $10 billion spent on “influenza preparedness” worldwide.
Guess what? Some reports indicate that the large pharmaceutical companies may have influenced the World Health Organization to overstate the danger of a pandemic.
Imagine that.
The New York Review of Books has the story.
“When you’re at the top in Hollywood, as he is now, you can do anything you want. Including doing what you want.”
“What a brush with death taught David Eagleman about the mysteries of time and the brain.”
When Eagleman was a boy, his favorite joke had a turtle walking into a sheriff’s office. “I’ve just been attacked by three snails!” he shouts. “Tell me what happened,” the sheriff replies. The turtle shakes his head: “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”
Unfortunately, losing the ability to detect the subtle social clues that help you know when you’re being doused with sarcasm or even dissed with a big fat lie may actually be an early warning sign of dementia, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco.
The scientists, who reported their findings at a recent meeting of the American Academy of Neurology, have discovered that a certain type of neurodegenerative disease may chip away at the ability to understand the social, physical and verbal cues that help people recognize indirect language, such as sarcasm, and even deceit.
“These are the patients who fall for all the online scams, and lose all their money, because they just don’t get the lie,” said lead author Katherine Rankin, a neuropsychologist in the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, who led the new study. “They don’t understand sarcasm. They would think ‘The Colbert Report’ is real.”
People don’t need the experts to tell them that sitting around too much could give them a sore back or a spare tire. The conventional wisdom, though, is that if you watch your diet and get aerobic exercise at least a few times a week, you’ll effectively offset your sedentary time. A growing body of inactivity research, however, suggests that this advice makes scarcely more sense than the notion that you could counter a pack-a-day smoking habit by jogging. “Exercise is not a perfect antidote for sitting,” says Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center.
This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.
“Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives.”
Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.”
“The past month has been a booze-fueled haze for the nation’s toddlers at chain restaurants. After a Michigan child received a cup full of alcoholic margarita mix instead of apple juice at an Applebee’s, a Florida Olive Garden filled a toddler’s cup with sangria instead of orange juice. The child was checked out at a local hospital and was unharmed.”
The Eagles had it right, “Take it easy, don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.”
Do you treat yourself as well as you treat your friends and family?
That simple question is the basis for a burgeoning new area of psychological research called self-compassion — how kindly people view themselves. People who find it easy to be supportive and understanding to others, it turns out, often score surprisingly low on self-compassion tests, berating themselves for perceived failures like being overweight or not exercising.
How come when you go out to a really fine restaurant — you know, the kind that has a prix fixe for Valentine’s Day — and you get several courses, and the first course is soup, that all you really want after that is more soup?
(Roasted apple and cauliflower bisque, if you must know.)
“Daily diet soda drinkers (there were 116 in the study) had a 48 percent higher risk of stroke or heart attack than people who drank no soda of any kind (901 people, or 35 percent of total participants). That’s after taking into account rates of smoking, diabetes, waistline size and other differences among the groups.”
Diet Soda Tied To Stroke Risk, Though Reasons Still Unclear
“Earlier studies have tied diet and regular soda consumption to greater risk of diabetes and a group of weight-related problems called the metabolic syndrome.”
The American Beverage Associate spokesman said there is no evidence. He used to work for the tobacco industry.
The secret to a long and happy life is finding the balance between the health benefits of caffeinated coffee and the health benefits of naps.
I find that the health benefits of red wine bridge the gap.
I am about to make today’s coffee. First I thought I would repost this from two years ago.
Via The Huffington Post:
Drinking coffee may do more than just keep you awake. A new study suggests an intriguing potential link to mental health later in life, as well.
. . .After controlling for numerous socioeconomic and health factors, including high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the scientists found that the subjects who had reported drinking three to five cups of coffee daily were 65 percent less likely to have developed dementia, compared with those who drank two cups or less.
Coffee, for some is an acquired taste they haven’t acquired. You might want to acquire it — or are you already demented?
Or as WebMD puts it?
“Want a drug that could lower your risk of diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and colon cancer? That could lift your mood and treat headaches? That could lower your risk of cavities?”
In a comment, Bob asked about my “favorite Mexican food restaurant” in Albuquerque.
To answer, I need to begin with some qualifiers.
First, New Mexican cuisine is distinct from Mexican, which has numerous subsets, of course. The New Mexico distinction is chiles, which while part of many Mexican dishes, are to New Mexicans like sauce is to pasta for Italian food. Hence, the state question: Red or green? Chiles are the Pueblo Indian contribution to conventional Mexican food.
Second, my favorite New Mexican restaurant isn’t in Albuquerque. It’s in Santa Fe: Maria’s New Mexican Kitchen. And I like the enchiladas at the Pink Adobe Cafe, though it has gone from one set of owners to another and just last month back to the first, so who knows.
And third, I don’t have a favorite in Albuquerque, though several are OK.
SnoLepard refers to Garduño’s, but the only one of that local chain that I particularly liked was the one on North Fourth, now closed.
I used to think that the Church Street Cafe was exceptional, but it has been disappointing lately.
El Pinto has a delightful physical ambience, especially when the weather permits dining in the courtyards. But El Pinto had become hit or miss for both the food and the service recently. In fact, most recently, it has been miss and the prices keep climbing to pay for all the vanity photos on the walls (and there is the fact that it was George W. Bush’s favorite).
Sadie’s has the hottest chiles. Monroe’s has the best prices and is always tasty. La Hacienda in Old Town was Bill Clinton’s favorite, but not mine. Some like Los Cuates, but I can’t say.
And none of these is the least bit fancy — if you count tablecloths and menus that aren’t plastic-coated as some sort of threshold for fancy.
But even so-so New Mexican food is ahh-some — it makes me hungry just writing about it. And you do understand, that the hotter the chiles the greater the reward. The capsaicinoids result in increased metabolism (also perspiration, runny nose and teary eyes). And the pain leads to a release of endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers, which reward us with blissful feelings.
Hey, they’re all my favorites.