Category: Food, Drink & Health

Yuck!

I was glancing down the page and read about Ah-Dee’s Belly again.

It occurs to me that I too got some medicine flavored with Hershey’s syrup as a little kid and — this is true —I haven’t liked chocolate milk or chocolate ice cream since. I’ll eat an occasional Hershey’s candy bar and Hershey’s kisses, but I don’t like chocolate sundaes or chocolate shakes or dark chocolate cake or dark chocolate frosting or chocolate pudding.

Maybe my memory is wrong or maybe it’s just a coincidence, but is Aidan still drinking chocolate milk?

(Chocolate milk is a superior energy drink by the way — as if I’d know.)

I was thinking about this a little more and realized while I do like M&Ms, I always avoided the brown M&Ms thinking they were more chocolaty (though they aren’t, of course). I’d blame the psychological impact of the chocolate flavored medicine for sure for that one, except I also now remember resisting the medicine because it had chocolate and I already didn’t like chocolate. I could probably justify a couple of years therapy over this. I wonder if Dr. Melfi is accepting new patients.

Wake up and smell the coffee

What if merely waking up and smelling coffee powers up your brain, without ever taking a sip? Most people drink coffee for its taste and its caffeine jolt, but the smell may bring its own benefits.

New research is shedding light on how drinking and smelling coffee might affect genes and proteins in the brain.

WebMD

What are the best drink swaps?

A study from the University of North Carolina found that we consume 450 calories a day from beverages, nearly twice as many as 30 years ago! This increase amounts to an extra 23 pounds a year that we’re forced to work off—or carry around with us.

There’s good news and bad news when it comes to liquid calories. The bad news is they are the most difficult calories for us to gauge, because we have none of the greasy, cheesy visual cues we get when we go face-to-face with a plate of loaded nachos or a triple cheeseburger. The good news is that they are the easiest calories to cut from your diet.

Men’s Health

There’s an accompanying list. For example, Beck’s Premier Light has 64 calories, Bud Light 110. Honest Tea Green Dragon Tea has 60, Arizona Iced Tea 200. A Long Island Iced Tea has 700 calories.

Omnivore’s Dilemma

NewMexiKen has finished Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and highly recommends it to anyone interested in food. It was one of The New York Times 10 best books of the year in 2006.

This isn’t a cook book or a health book. It’s well-done journalism, reporting facts, history and trends, while profiling various people and places. The omnivore’s dilemma is that because humans can eat almost anything, we are easily confused (and manipulated). Pollan thinks we need to be better educated about the source of our foods so that we can make more informed choices. He sets out to increase his (and the reader’s) awareness about what we eat and where it comes from. He does so without grossing you out or trying to convert you (well, maybe a little). Pollan is not a vegetarian or animal rights absolutist.

[Pollan] embarks on four separate eating adventures, each of which starts at the very beginning — in the soil from which the raw materials of his dinners will emerge — and ends with a cooked, finished meal.

These meals are, in order, a McDonald’s repast consumed by Pollan with his wife and son in their car as it vrooms up a California freeway; a “Big Organic” meal of ingredients purchased at the upmarket chain Whole Foods; a beyond-organic chicken dinner whose main course and side dishes come from a wondrously self-sustaining Virginia farm that uses no pesticides, antibiotics or synthetic fertilizers; and a “hunter-gatherer” feast consisting almost entirely of ingredients that Pollan has shot dead or foraged himself.

The New York Times Book Review.

Here’s a lengthy adaptation from the final (but perhaps least interesting) section of the book — The Modern Hunter-Gatherer.

What do brain surgeons know about cellphone safety that the rest of us don’t?

Last week, three prominent neurosurgeons told the CNN interviewer Larry King that they did not hold cellphones next to their ears. “I think the safe practice,” said Dr. Keith Black, a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, “is to use an earpiece so you keep the microwave antenna away from your brain.”

Dr. Vini Khurana, an associate professor of neurosurgery at the Australian National University who is an outspoken critic of cellphones, said: “I use it on the speaker-phone mode. I do not hold it to my ear.” And CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon at Emory University Hospital, said that like Dr. Black he used an earpiece.

NYTimes.com

35 bottles of wine on the wall, 35 bottles of wine

First, the Good News:

“Red wine may be much more potent than was thought in extending human lifespan, researchers say in a new report that is likely to give impetus to the rapidly growing search for longevity drugs.”

Now, the Great News:

“The Wisconsin scientists used a dose on mice equivalent to just 35 bottles a day. But red wine contains many other resveratrol-like compounds that may also be beneficial. Taking these into account, as well as mice’s higher metabolic rate, a mere four, five-ounce glasses of wine ‘starts getting close’ to the amount of resveratrol they found effective, Dr. Weindruch said.”

The New York Times

Bipolar on Bipolar

Tuesday:

Many people who have been told by their doctors that they have bipolar disorder don’t really have it.

So say researchers who used a standardized, comprehensive, psychiatric diagnostic interview to evaluate 700 adult psychiatric outpatients.

WebMD

One year ago Wednesday:

There appear to be almost twice as many Americans with bipolar disorder as previously thought, and many are not getting the treatments they need, researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health report.

Once thought of as a single mental illness, bipolar disorder is increasingly recognized as a spectrum disorder, with symptoms ranging from less severe to devastating.

WebMD

Why we like red or green

NewMexiKen found this in a 1992 New Yorker article about chiles and New Mexican cuisine.

According to scientists who have studied the effects of fiery food, a very hot chili sends the nervous system into a state of panic, and the brain reacts by flooding the distressed nerve endings with endorphins, which are the body’s natural painkillers—a sort of friendly morphine. The sudden shot of endorphins is what transforms the pang of hot food into pleasure, and also what makes it considerably more tolerable after the first few bites.

The article, by Jane and Michael Stern, is not available online.

Try glass

BPA is a component used in making plastic sport water bottles, sippy cups and baby bottles. Concerns have been raised that the chemical could present long-term cancer risk. There is nothing definite.

A quote from “The Wall Street Journal” summarizes the current state of knowledge the best: “Though the evidence isn’t entirely clear, it’s possible that exposure to the chemical during infancy could cause changes in prostate and mammary tissue that raise the risk of change later in life. The latest analysis goes beyond two others from last year, both of which concluded the chemical was safe in low doses.”

There is more investigation under way, but for now BPA in plastic baby bottles is under advisement until more is known. As moms and soon-to-be moms, we want to do what is best for our babies. So what does this report mean in our world? It means you get to go shopping!

There are plastic baby bottles and sippy cups that do not contain BPA. On the Web, they seem a little pricey. Wal-Mart, meanwhile, has announced that it will convert its entire U.S. stock. They currently stock BPA free bottles. Others will do the same.

MayoClinic.com

See, I’m not the only one

This Sonics move can really eat at an NBA writer, too.

“As a longtime NBA traveler, I’d much rather see the SuperSonics in Seattle,” wrote Sam Smith of The Sporting News. “It’s a beautiful city with phenomenal restaurants and culture and a quirky populace that makes you wonder at times if the country tipped in the late 1960s and the hippie movement landed there and stayed. It’s a place unlike any in the U.S.

“Among the best last meals has to be the Copper River salmon available in the late spring.

“It hardly compares with my favorite IHOP in Oklahoma City.”

Sideline Chatter

Bisphenol A Update

Popular plastic water bottles, sippy cups and baby bottles made with a chemical called bisphenol A may be on their way out.

Two big signs in this morning’s papers: Wal-Mart says it’s going to stop selling BPA baby bottles early next year, and the company that makes Nalgene water bottles says it will stop using the chemical as well.

Wall Street Journal

If you need any convincing

Here’s what the tobacco pharmaceutical gun plastic industry spokesman said about the potential harm in their products:

Steven G. Hentges of the American Chemistry Council’s polycarbonate/BPA group said the findings “provide reassurance that consumers can continue to use products made from bisphenol A.”

“The limited evidence for effects in laboratory animals at low doses primarily highlights opportunities for additional research to better understand whether these findings are of any significance to human health,” he said.

Source: Los Angeles Times

Mexican Diet May Cut Breast Cancer Risk

When it comes to breast cancer, a traditional Mexican diet may serve up an ounce of prevention for a variety of women.

A study involving hundreds of women living in the Four Corners region (Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) shows that a diet emphasizing Mexican cheeses, beans, soups, tomato-based sauces, and meat may help lower the risk of breast cancer in both Hispanic and non-Hispanic women.

WebMD

There’s more info. Like most of these kinds of studies, the results are mixed. Still …

The world really does seem to be falling apart

I’m talking about the food crisis. Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled, with much of the increase taking place just in the last few months. High food prices dismay even relatively well-off Americans — but they’re truly devastating in poor countries, where food often accounts for more than half a family’s spending.

From an important column by Paul Krugman today. Read it.

I blame Bush.

Peddlers win

If you walk 1.5 miles, Mr. Goodall calculates, and replace those calories by drinking about a cup of milk, the greenhouse emissions connected with that milk (like methane from the dairy farm and carbon dioxide from the delivery truck) are just about equal to the emissions from a typical car making the same trip. And if there were two of you making the trip, then the car would definitely be the more planet-friendly way to go.

These results would vary, of course, depending on exactly what kind of car you’re using and what kind of food you eat (or, if you’re going by pedicab, what kind of food your cabbie eats). Michael Bluejay, who’s done some number-crunching at BicycleUniverse.info, says that walking is actually worse than driving if you replace the calories with food in the standard American diet and if the car gets more than 24 miles per gallon. He calculates that bicycling is a win for the environment because it’s 117 percent more efficient (in calories expended per distance) than walking is, but he’s assuming one cyclist on a regular streamlined bike, not a cabbie pulling two other people in a pedicab dealing with lot more friction and air resistance.

TierneyLab

Pointer via Freakonomics.

Are Generics Worse Than Brand-Name Drugs?

Like the Times, we found that both doctors and patients felt passionately that generics weren’t always up to snuff. But despite lots of searching, we couldn’t find a solid, randomized and well-controlled study proving there was a problem. The Epilepsy Foundation and allied doctors acknowledged they didn’t have one either.

WSJ.com Health Blog

The WSJ blog is responding to stories in today’sLos Angeles Times.

The money quote:

After first walking down the same road as the Times, we discovered that major brand-name drug makers were playing a behind-the-scenes role in the debate, encouraging the Epilepsy Foundation to pursue it and even funding some of the lobbying. The same companies just so happened to have big-selling epilepsy drugs going off-patent.

Stay in School to Outsmart Death?

Researchers from Harvard Medical School looked at data from the National Health Interview Study from 1966 to 2003. From the 1980s to 2000, the findings show that those who lived the longest were the most highly educated.

The “highly educated” were defined as anyone who had had at least one year of college. The researchers defined “low level” of education as having at most graduated from high school.

WebMD

It isn’t the education itself but rather that educated folk are less likely to smoke and less likely to be obese.