Category: Food, Drink & Health

At the Freakonomics blog, a report on a study that suggests that having your teeth cleaned at a dental office is less important than we’ve been led to believe. An excerpt:

My dad always told me that dealership rust-proofing was a scam to give dealerships some extra cash without providing your car with any extra protection. Could getting your teeth cleaned be the economic equivalent to having a car dealership rust-proof your car?

Like I said before, this post is probably just working out some wounded inner child issue. (And let me be clear that I’m not calling into question the value of brushing and flossing your teeth, or visiting your dentist regularly to check for cavities, as well as other potential problems). But it’s food for thought. The next time your dentist asks you to make an appointment to have your teeth cleaned, you might reasonably ask, “Why?”

The athlete in this case being Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

“Federal officials suspended operations at Westland/Hallmark after an undercover Humane Society video surfaced showing crippled and sick animals being shoved with forklifts.”

The Associated Press reporting on the largest recall of beef in U.S. history.

This isn’t the first time diet products have been suspected of causing weight gain; some studies show that diet soda might show a similar pattern.

Study author Susan Swithers told the LA Times that sweet tastes prompt the body’s digestive system to get ready to process caloric food. But when the calories don’t arrive because the sweetness was artificial, the body learns not to crank up the metabolic furnace. Over time that adjustment makes it it harder to burn calories and shed weight.

Wall Street Journal

“Doctors in Kentucky have issued a warning that people should not eat squirrel brains, a regional delicacy, because squirrels may carry a variant of mad cow disease that can be transmitted to humans and is fatal.”

The New York Times [1997]

If you have any interest in hospitals, critical care, survival, bureaucracy, heroes, or the occasional simplicity of solutions you need to read Annals of Medicine: The Checklist from last week’s New Yorker.

It occurred to me while reading this article how very screwed up so much of our political system is. What I would like to see in political candidates is an awareness that they are literate about issues such as this — even a few issues and even just to the extent of a New Yorker article — and I’d like to see them champion worthwhile causes (that save lives!). Instead we get mostly crap discussions from crap candidates.

There should be a law. Anyone who wants to be a politician is prohibited from being one. Or at least, anyone who wants to be a politician has to demonstrate an abiding interest in some things other than politics (and his or herself).

But ignore my rant and go read the article, which isn’t at all about politics.

Want to buy one of the personal DNA tests popping up these days? “My message is you are wasting your money,” Christine Patch, a genetics counselor and member of the UK’s Human Genetics Commission, said Friday.
. . .

It seems like a new company is cropping up every week to hawk DNA tests over the Internet. These aren’t the kinds of targeted tests doctors order for patients at high risk for a given disease connected to one or more well-known mutations. They’re one-size-fits all tests that can cost thousands of dollars and make a range of sweeping promises from predicting disease risk to describing ancestry.

Wall Street Journal Health Blog

Earlier today NewMexiKen posted an item discussing race, genes, and intelligence. Here’s a somewhat related article, this one from the Times, about the things we inherit — My Genome, Myself: Seeking Clues in DNA.

For as little as $1,000 and a saliva sample, customers will be able to learn what is known so far about how the billions of bits in their biological code shape who they are. Three companies have already announced plans to market such services, one yesterday.

Offered the chance to be among the early testers, I agreed, but not without reservations. What if I learned I was likely to die young? Or that I might have passed on a rogue gene to my daughter? And more pragmatically, what if an insurance company or an employer used such information against me in the future?

But three weeks later, I was already somewhat addicted to the daily communion with my genes.

I recommend you go read what she found.

An article by Stephen S. Hall in The New Yorker this week (November 19th issue) discusses the increasingly-accepted finding that low birth weight (less than 5.5 pounds) is a predictor of adult illnesses such as “coronary heart disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and stroke.” This article is not online.

Don’t flush it! Mix leftover medicine with kitty litter or coffee grounds or some other garbage to make it too disgusting for scavengers, put the mess in a plastic bag to keep it from leaching into the groundwater and dispose in the trash.

Here’s more from the AP via the New Mexican. Thanks to dangerousmeta! for the pointer.

Depression may be more common in some fields than others.

New research shows that people who work in personal care and services — such as child care workers or hairdressers — are more likely to report depression than engineers and architects.

—WebMD has the list.

Thirty-three hospitals and eight children’s hospitals were named top facilities by a health care business group Tuesday.

The facilities, mostly in large cities, got top scores for boosting patient safety standards and for treating high-risk diseases according to scientific evidence. Hospitals also got points if they used electronic prescribing programs.

Hospitals in Oakland, Calif., Pittsburgh, Boston, and Seattle were among those singled out by the Leapfrog Group, a group started by corporations and other large employers worried about health care costs. Children’s hospitals in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Detroit were also among top scorers.

The results are based on a survey of 1,285 hospitals.

— WebMD

Follow the link and scroll down a bit to see the list.

A new study shows people who drank fruit and vegetable juices more than three times a week were 76% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than those who drank juices less than once a week.

Researchers say the results suggest that a class of antioxidants found in fruit and vegetable juices called polyphenols may have a protective effect on the brain and help fight dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Polyphenols are found in fruits and vegetables, primarily in the skins and peels, and are abundant in juices, teas, and wine.

WebMD

What’s a guy to do when he has a negative experience at a local establishment, and he wants to vent, but there’s already been too much negativity for one week?

I’ve decided to go the therapeutic route and express myself in a poem:

Read Ode to Relish.

NewMexiKen had a poor experience in a Taos restaurant Saturday night. Bottom line, the cook had an “emergency wedding” to attend and the replacement wasn’t up to the task.

The replacement appeared to be a serial cook — the orders came out one at a time with every indication the next table’s entree was started when the previous table’s dinner was served. (We waited more than an hour after ordering.)

And let’s just say, that even after the wait, things weren’t cooked to order.

It was an otherwise fine restaurant (other than the food Mrs. Lincoln … ), not at all like those described below, but it reminded me of my list, published here before, of the top ten reasons to judge a restaurant unsuitable for a pleasant night out:

10. You pay before you eat

9. You pay after you eat, but you stand in line and pay a cashier

8. More men eating with caps on than those without caps

7. The piped-in-music is louder than the TVs

6. Soup served with soup spoon already in soup

5. They fill the condiments while you’re at the table

4. Menu includes photos of the food

3. Menu includes samples of the food stuck to pages

2. They wipe your table with a wet rag

And the number one reason to chose another restaurant if you want to impress your date or customer:

They wipe the seats of the chairs with the same rag

From Best Life Magazine, “Eat these eight foods every day to cover all your nutritional bases.”

Spinach
Yogurt
Tomatoes
Carrots
Blueberries
Black Beans
Walnuts
Oats

Link via Lifehacker, which elsewhere had a list of six foods that help prevent disease: broccoli, pumpkin, blueberries, fish, spinach, and tomatoes.

From now on, I’m having spinach, tomato and blueberry ice cream sundaes!