Category Archives: medical

You can cure (some) cancer yourself

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Meditation – which brings detachment from the things of this world – is also one of the best ways to stay in this world longer. 

Back when the AIDS epidemic was new, before we knew about the HIV virus, doctors were grasping at any clue to find out what caused it. One thing they discovered was that several patients had a rare sarcoma, a muscle cancer. Usually we don’t get cancer in the muscles, or that’s what we thought. It turned out that the cancer was not a cause but an effect of the failing immune system. Other, more common cancers also were found more often in AIDS patients. So today we know that the human immune system can detect and destroy a range of cancers without us even knowing.

In fact, if you have been an adult for a long time, it is likely as not that you have already had cancer and healed yourself without even knowing it. The activation of the immune system would give some body-wide symptoms similar to the flu but without the localized symptoms. You might have a temperature for a while, feel tired and lose your appetite, things like that. Of course these can happen for any number of reasons, so I am not saying you have a cancer just because you’re under the weather for a while. But it is one of the things that can happen, and do to most people.

As with an infection, once you have beaten a particular strain of cancer, you will be immune to it, probably for the rest of your life. So if you get a sarcoma when you are 40, for instance, and the body quietly beats it, you are the lucky one. If your identical twin doesn’t get it until 70, it is likely they won’t see the cherry trees blossom twice. From middle age upward, white blood cells start dying off if they have not been used before. So the older we get, the harder it is to beat our cancers.

Thanks to genetic wizardry that I don’t understand, it is even possible to put white blood cells in a petri dish with a known cancer and teach them to recognize it, then put them back into the body to mop up any remnants of the cancer after surgery. This is expensive though, so I suppose even if it is approved, it will only be available for the rich. At least for a while. But the point is, bodies can cure cancer by using the same immune system we use to fight off the flu or an infected hangnail. I have even read of scientists who believe that being exposed to more germs during our healthy years – including some vaccines – could increase our chance of staying cancer-free well into old age.

People often talk about “fighting cancer” and even say of those who die that they “lost the fight against cancer”, as if dying means you are some kind of loser. In that sense, we are all losers, with the possible exception of Elijah and Enoch. Life ends, and cancer is one of the way it ends. But cancer is not always the end of life, less so now than before, but even apart from medical intervention, we know today that the body can heal itself of cancer sometimes – most times, probably. But not by fighting. Not by getting angry. Getting enough rest, meditating, eating healthy, moderate exercise, all these things help. Anger or fear weaken the immune system. Fighting cancer is a losing proposition. Rather we heal ourselves, the way we generally do.

But sometimes it is the end of the road. That does not mean that you are a loser, or that you did not have enough faith. So perhaps you did not eat your veggies as often as you should back before you knew you were ill. Perhaps you could have meditated more, stressed less, not burned your candle in both ends. Hindsight is surprisingly sharp-eyed. But we are mortals, at least physically. We can do our best but sometimes it is not enough. Sometimes it is not enough to run faster, you need to have started earlier. And we can’t wind back life. Life is the expression in time of who we are.

For as long as we have a future, we can change that, though. Mostly by changing ourselves.

Too late for Omega-3

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Double duty picture from City of Heroes! According to science, identifying with superheroes can make you stronger. But unfortunately discoveries like these tend to disappear over time, as if Real Life too was a game that gets patched…

I recently bought another box of Omega-3, the super healthy fat. Unfortunately, I was too late. Before I even got started, science had discovered that Omega-3 does not prevent cardiovascular disease after all. I read it on www.forskning.no. (In Norwegian.)

For some years, it has been known that Omega-3 fatty acids have various beneficial effects on blood vessels, and the way it worked was reasonably well understood. Or so we thought. But there is another effect which is poorly understood, a general law that says that a scientific discovery is likely to disappear gradually over time (the Decline Effect).

This is not true for the basics such as gravity or electricity, but more recent (and more complex) discoveries seem to fall under this surprising law. The first independent attempts to replicate the discovery agree that there really is such an effect, and it is surprisingly strong. Theorist then come up with various ways in which the effect can be explained, and new tests are run to pinpoint these. But meanwhile, the effect becomes gradually smaller, and after some years it disappears. This has now happened to the effects of Omega-3 on heart and blood vessels. While we now finally understand how it works, it no longer works, and we don’t understand why. When we didn’t understand how it worked, it worked well enough.

Around the same time, I read that reduced calorie intake did not prolong the lives of rhesus monkeys. Scientists have tested reduced calorie intake (less than 75% of normal) for a wide range of organisms, from nematodes to mice. They stayed youthful longer and exceeded the maximal life expectancy of their species. The monkeys also stayed youthful longer, but died at the normal time anyway. This is bound to be a slap in the face for the people who have gone on a starvation diet to live to see the Singularity. Well, you may want to be youthful longer anyway, but it bears mention in passing that one of the first effects of long-time calorie restriction is that your sex drive goes off and doesn’t get back until you get your fat back. So I guess prayer and fasting really is a good combination for those who want to stay super chaste. But immortality is not so easily achieved.

The most amusing explanation for the fading scientific discoveries is that Real Life is actually a MMRPG (massively multiplayer role playing game) and that the developers patch any unintentional exploits incrementally after they are published. Hey, the developers over on City of Heroes did this with their Mission Architect system. They would patch one exploit, then someone would discover a less powerful exploit, and it was patched too, and so on until the exploits were so mediocre that most people did not really care one way or another. So perhaps the developers of real life are doing the same.

Or perhaps we are just too eager to jump on anything that seems like a loophole in the laws of nature.

Brainwave entrainment and sleep, again

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Open your mind and let the New Age of Technology in! Messing around with your brain waves may sound scary, but that’s what they thought about flying too. And before that, running faster than horses. If God wanted us to go beyond our limitations, He would have given us the ability to create!

An online friend complained about insomnia again, so I hurried to recommend delta brainwave entrainment. This little masterpiece of modern science can replace up to 2 hours of sleep with half an hour of entrainment. Beyond that, you run into rapidly diminishing returns – it is not possible to replace sleep entirely, not even if you use several different frequencies of brainwave entrainment. Still, it is pretty impressive.

Unfortunately, it turns out my friend had experimented with brainwave entrainment in the past, on my recommendation, but experienced side effects that were worse than her lack of sleep. Even 10 minutes of delta entrainment caused blurred vision, sometimes migraine, and once she even experienced a seizure afterwards (although it is unclear whether this actually came from the entrainment). Unsurprisingly, she then gave up on the project, despite observing the almost magical effects of the technology.

It is more the rule than the exception that you will experience something when you first start using brainwave entrainment, especially if you start with delta, which is the slowest brainwave frequencies and only dominates naturally during our deepest sleep. So yeah, expect the unexpected. But for most people, the side effects are pleasant or just plain weird. Pain or neurological distortions like blurred vision or temporary loss of short-term memory are rare and typically symptoms of excessive use. The only permanent damage I have heard of is one user who got tinnitus, ringing in the ears. Given the thousands of users of brainwave entrainment, it is as likely as not that the fellow would have developed the problem during the same time period regardless. But who knows. Still, the odds are pretty good that you will benefit, and it is very unlikely that you will malefit, as it were.

Still, I recommend the LifeFlow approach of starting with a more accessible frequency. The LifeFlow program starts at 10 Hz, which is similar to a beginner’s meditation, or the relaxed feeling of lounging in a Stressless chair. It is recommended to use this for 40 minutes a day for two months before moving on to 9 Hz, a slightly deeper form of alpha wave, similar to what you experience the last few minutes before falling asleep. It continues this way down to 1 Hz, which is solid delta and comparable to deep sleep. During a night of sleep, you are unlikely to have delta after the first two sleep cycles unless you are a child. A sleep cycle is 90 minutes, and consists of several phases, so few adults and virtually no elderly get as much as 30 minutes of it naturally. Children do, however, and I don’t think delta entrainment is useful for them. They should get the opportunity to sleep naturally.

As I mentioned, the value of delta entrainment in connection with sleep is that it provides a type of brainwave that we need but which we don’t get much of as we grow older. Sleep consists of four phases, but two of them are particularly important. Deep sleep with delta waves is one of them. The other is REM sleep, or intense lifelike dreaming. Delta occurs naturally only at the beginning of the night, while REM increases gradually with each cycle through the night. Again, children have more of both, elderly less. In fact, elderly often go nights without delta at all, but also have less REM. Their dreams are often so prosaic that they wake up thinking they have not slept at all, despite snoring loudly!  When humans – and even animals – are kept awake for a long time, they catch up by having more delta and REM sleep the first night they are allowed to sleep again. This is a pretty good hint that these sleep phases are particularly important.

We don’t know any way to induce REM electronically. Sex will do it in rabbits, or so I have read. But delta waves we can create with precise sound patterns. All you need to do is close your eyes. You don’t even have to think about England. As long as you refrain from intense, primal emotions – fear, anger, lust or disgust – the entrainment will work its magic. You can even worry a little, if you feel the urge, just don’t panic.

But to reduce the risk of creepy side effects, I recommend starting with lighter frequencies (alpha or at least theta) and perhaps even shorter time spans in the beginning. Notice that most side effects are actually either pleasant or just psychedelic, but they are still distracting. The less you think about the experience, the better really. Just close your eyes, relax and let the sound wash over you.

I have an MP3 player with delta tracks beside me on my bed. That way, if I go to bed early enough to not fall asleep instantly, I can spend the time relaxing with delta waves. It is pretty nifty. I am a lot more awake at work than I used to be – I used to need to nap twice or thrice during most workdays, although my naps were brief – and I can now work full days instead of 90%. I still have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome and perhaps I will for the rest of my life, but at least now I can do something to reduce the impact on my life.

I should admit that I am not sure it all comes from the brainwave entrainment, I made other changes in my life too. I learned laws of the mind from Happy Science and started to read esoteric books of timeless wisdom by Christian and near-Christian philosophers during the same time frame. It may even be a combination of several of these. Perhaps the passing of a couple years count as well, midlife changes and all that. But from a scientific point of view, when it comes to the effect on daytime sleepiness, brainwave entrainment is the main suspect.

A bit more enthusiastic than me, this fellow LifeFlow user escaped psychiatric hell by the power of brainwave entrainment. There are a number of such stories among the LifeFlow regulars.  His review is here at MeditationStars.

 

How much exercise?

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If you ask: “How much exercise is enough?”, the answer is “Enough for what?” – If you simply want to not die horribly from lack of exercise, you should be fine doing light exercise like walking from a quarter to half an hour each day, or at least most days. If you want to participate in the Olympics, on the other hand, you should probably quit your job to concentrate on your exercise, as it would take more than a full workday.

Okay then, what if my goal is to live as long as possible? In that case, you should exercise as much as possible but not as hard as possible. From approximately half an hour a day and upwards to at least 3 to 5 hours a day, each hour spent on exercise is an hour of lifetime gained. So if you hate exercise, you have to ask yourself “how much do I really fear death”? Because you are basically trading an hour for an hour. That’s for moderate exercise. If you exercise hard for hours each day, you are actually shortening your lifespan. It is better to exercise hard for short time every other day if you just want to stay alive and stay in shape, and spent the rest of your exercise time doing light to moderate exercise.

Let us be honest here. If you don’t have sports as a career, you are not going to spend hours each day exercising. Simply doesn’t happen. And there are probably no other jobs left in the English-speaking world which count as “exercise” either. But if you manage to exercise hard enough that you can just barely keep a conversation or recite a poem, for half an hour (or a quarter twice a day), you will have drastically reduced your risk of heart disease, hypertension, diabetes II, several cancers and even depression. Ignore this, and health issues are likely to hunt you down. Go above and beyond it, and you should make sure to do something you like or that is genuinely useful, as you are likely trading an hour for an hour. (On average. Of course, you may collide with a truck tomorrow, but on the other hand, you may narrowly avoid a cancer that would have lopped 30 years off your life, and you won’t even know it. Averages are for crowds, but you are part of that crowd, like it or not.)

If you are obese, half an hour of moderate exercise will still halve your risk. It is just that your risk was twice as high to begin with. -_- In these case it is recommended that you exercise more, but if you could exercise more, you would probably have done so already. Obese people are not universally praised and given special benefits in our society, to put it that way. Still, it is better to move about and live than to lie down and die. Probably. I can’t remember having ever been dead, so theoretically it could be awesome and I would never know. But what I do know is that life is short and death seems to be very long.

If you are only moderately overweight, with a BMI from 25 to 30, your life expectancy is actually no different from most of those with normal weight. Most people in this category are able to exercise and have the motivation to do so, within reason. The 30 minutes of exercise seems to be particularly useful in this category, reducing the health risks all the way down to the same level as those who are not overweight at all. Those who already have normal weight are less motivated to stay active, and this may be why they generally don’t live longer than the moderately overweight. Or their self-reported non-smoking may be somewhat exaggerated.

Death is not the only danger on the couch. There is also the danger that you may be sick a lot, grow old before the time, think less clearly, experience frequent or even chronic pain (especially of the back), suffer from depression, be shunned socially and be cut off from various aspects of romance. If you don’t have time for exercise, you may have to take time out for health problems. So before you skip your 30 minutes, think twice.

(From the “practice what you preach” department: For what it is worth, I usually do a combination of walking and jogging, staying within the “fat burning range” for about an hour a day, which is literally what the doctor ordered since I have pre-diabetes. In addition I spend about half an hour a day on foot as part of my commute. Even single and childless, I would balk at spending 3 hours of my free time each day exercising.  Perhaps I am going to regret that on my deathbed. Then again, there are a lot of things I will likely regret on my deathbed, if any. Including not spending more time writing this journal.) Now, get out there and dance if you still can!

Pulse while jogging

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No. A high pulse while jogging is not a good thing.

After reading the transcript from my cardiologist, I pondered how to make my potential “superpower” of super-low resting pulse into something useful. When walking fast, my pulse is typically around 110-120 depending on the day. But jogging even a short distance brings my pulse up in the 140es, at which point I slow down to a walk again. No point in taunting the asthma to attack.

And then I used Google to learn more about normal pulse while jogging, and found numerous young people asking “Is it normal to have a pulse of [180 / 190 / 200] while jogging?” The answers varied in quality, but generally the answer is NO WAY! Most humans have a maximum pulse below 200 even when young. A pulse of above 180 should be reserved for when you try to outrun a tsunami, or during the spurt phase of a championship. Or in other words, don’t voluntarily bring on a pulse like that unless there is a cardiologist and a heart starter nearby, or unless your life is forfeit anyway.

(The exception to this is high-intensity interval training, where you exert your muscles and heart very hard for a brief interval. This is used by athletes who want to improve their maximum performance. As long as you know your limits and do it right, it is surprisingly harmless. But if you are not already an athlete, don’t do interval training without the OK from a competent physician. Get to know your max pulse and that you don’t have any illnesses that may interfere.)

Back to the joggers. It is likely (and sometimes they actually say it) that these people are in a similar situation as I, only younger. They have not actually been jogging before, but they have seen others do it. So they set off, but it is harder than it looks. Why is this? It is usually because the body is not adapted to this particular use.

Even if you are in good shape, when you switch from one type of exercise to another which you are unfamiliar with, the pulse will go way up for some weeks. In part the body simply does not know how to do this exercise efficiently. In part the muscles for that task are not developed. Two things happen to muscles when you start using them in a new way: 1) They add muscle fiber, if you are straining them harder than before, and 2) they add small blood vessels, if you are using them longer than before.

If your body tries to bring sugar and oxygen to the muscles but the blood vessels are too small and too few, the heart needs to work that much harder, and your pulse will go way up, even if you don’t have an illness. What you need to do then is to give your muscle time to adapt. This means weeks where you exercise in the new way but not too hard.

For instance, after I have warmed up by walking, if my pulse is below 120, I start jogging until the pulse passes 140 on its way up. Then I slip back into walking, which I am quite experienced at. When the pulse fall below 120 again, I can jog for another stretch. If you are young and don’t have asthma, you can go quite a bit higher than that, but the point is that you should not stress test your heart when your muscles can’t benefit from it anyway. They still need to grow to their optimal size, and interval jogging three times a week will be enough to make them do that. But you have to keep at it. There is no magic wand. You have to put time and miles into walking if you haven’t even done that, and later you do the same for jogging, and eventually running. It may look easy on TV, but you have to put your own miles into it.

When you’ve got your jogging right, you should be able to keep a simple conversation while jogging, without having to slow down to get your breath back. If you jog alone, you should be able to recite a poem, or a familiar prayer. If your pulse is anywhere near 180, I’d go for the prayer.

“Fat-burning zone”

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OK, that doesn’t even make any sense. Although there are people who would like to face the fat head-on. This is easier said than done, though.

It is amazing what humans find controversial. I can see religions and unusual sexual practices causing some agitation, especially in combination. But fat burning exercise? Yet, there is a pretty intense debate around a concept called the “fat-burning zone”.

I think I first heard of this after I bought my first pulse watch back in 2005. It is already 7 years ago, around this time of the year. The watch had three zones, one for light exercise, one for medium and one for hard or intensive exercise. The medium zone more or less corresponds to the so-called “fat-burning zone”, which is generally said to be from 60 to 70% of maximum heart speed.

One thing that has made me wonder from time to time is that our muscles get tired even at moderate intensity of exercise, such as a brisk walk or a slow jog. This was at odds with the explanations I read, that we got tired because we accumulated lactic acid in the muscles (this theory is pretty much discarded now, I believe) or that we got tired because we ran out of glycogen. If we kept going in the fat-burning zone, shouldn’t we be able to run 16 hours a day until we ran out of fat?

Actually, there once was a man who could do that, run most of the day every day. His name was Mensen Ernst, and he was of course a Norwegian. (It is typical Norwegian to be good, as a former Prime Minister in Norway once said.) He was born in 1799, unfortunately, long before modern genetic testing. He seems to not have left any children either, so we will probably never know whether he was some sort of mutant, or whether it was some kind of technique (he was said to run in a different manner than other runners, described as a “loping” run). Or perhaps it mostly came down to practice. But probably not only that, for there has never been anyone like him again, and as far as we know there were none before him either.

The rest of us get tired eventually. So I once again looked at the mystery of the fat-burning zone, and found this controversy. So, based on reading various sides of the issue, and my own personal experience, I’ll try to throw some light on this.

***

First, warming up is not a one-step process. For walkers, it is recommended to walk leisurely for 5-10 minutes before speeding up to a brisk pace.  (Longer the older you are, children don’t really need to warm up at all.) However, this does not burn off the sugar and start on the fat. Warming up simply increases the blood flow through the muscles, making them more elastic and active so you avoid minor muscle damage and discomfort that you would otherwise have.

Ten minutes of leisurely walking will not budge your blood sugar or make any noticeable impact on your glycogen storage. It takes about half an hour of energetic walking to do that, less with jogging or running. With practice you should be able to feel for yourself when this shift occurs: Heart rate, breathing and body heat shift to a slightly higher level without a corresponding increase in speed or elevation. The difference in pulse is something like 10% in my experience. Not dramatic, but noticeable if you keep track. This is the point where you enter the actual fat-burning zone, no matter what your heart rate monitor may have been telling you for the last half hour. (The exact time varies – for me it was 25 minutes a year ago, but is now up to 35, probably because I store more glycogen in my muscles after almost a year of frequent, long walks.)

So when one article claims that you burn 85% fat in the “fat-burning zone” of moderate exercise, and another claim 50%, you have to ask: How long have you exercised before you start measuring? The higher number may be rather optimistic, but it may well be true if you don’t start measuring until the actual zone shift has happened.  If you measure before that, half and half sounds more likely.

However, even if half your calories come from sugar, you don’t burn equal amounts of fat and sugar. Fat contains twice as much energy, so you still burn two grams of carbs for one gram of fat. That means that even should you burn 85% fat, you don’t actually do that in terms of body weight.  85% fat calories would correspond to 59% fat weight. The rest comes mainly from glycogen in your liver, and there is only so much liver in a human.

Luckily at this point you can accept a bottle of cold, fresh Pepsi cola from your attractive friend, and continue exercising. (Imagine TV ad here.) Yeah, that would help you lose weight for sure. ^_^ But seriously, if you are planning to keep walking or jogging for hours, you should add sugar and water from time to time. For a one-hour stretch, it is not necessary. Your liver typically stores enough glycogen for one day or so of normal activity. (Jogging is not normal activity for most of us, so it will deplete faster, but not in an hour or two if you are reasonably healthy.)

***

 So to sum it up: The fat-burning zone is real, but it burns only a little more than half fat and the rest sugar or excess protein. Also it only kicks in after around half an hour of brisk walking. Also, if you exercise harder, you will burn just as much fat per minute or more, but also more sugar and you will tire much faster.

If you have plenty of time, you can keep going much longer in the “fat-burning zone” (moderate exercise), but if time is your limit, you will lose more fat by exercising harder. Speak with your doctor before starting an intensive training program, especially long-distance or high-intensity.

Fructose revisited

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Don't mess around, we're baking here!

Don’t mess around, we’re baking here! But what kind of sugar are we using?

I have spoken out against fructose in the past, so maybe it pleases the Light that I am now looking to eat more of it. In this particular case, I cannot recommend you follow my example. But I do have a reason for what I do. It is not just because the voices in my head tell me. ^_^

I am first going to sum up some useful facts about fructose. Then I will explain why it may be useful for me and a few others like me. Finally I will argue why most people should stay away from it.

***

Fructose is a sugar that appears naturally in honey, and in fruits (thus the name) together with glucose. (The proportion varies among different types of fruit.) It is easy to create from corn (maize) and therefore very cheap in the US, where it is widely used as a sweetener.

Where fructose appears in the intestines, it is absorbed into the blood and goes to the liver, where it is given a special treatment that no other sugars get. Unlike all other sugars, fructose can be converted to fat with very little loss of energy. More exactly, the liver converts it to triglycerids which are released into the bloodstream. Hopefully fat cells will pack these away, otherwise they may settle on the inside of your arteries and bad things are likely to happen.

Approximately 20% of the fructose is converted to glucose instead and ends up as blood sugar. This is much less than ordinary cane sugar, which ends up as 80% blood sugar. If you are a diabetic or pre-diabetic, this is definitely something to consider! (I am diagnosed with pre-diabetes, so this is relevant to me.) Fructose is also almost 50% sweeter than common sugar, so for the same sweetness you get about 6 times more blood sugar with cane sugar than fructose!

High-fructose corn syrup, which is the usual sweetener in soda etc in the USA, contains both glucose and fructose. Glucose becomes blood sugar directly, so you still get a spike in blood sugar when you drink it, and then a little later you get the fat from the fructose.

***

Most people with diabetes II (late-onset diabetes) or pre-diabetes are fat, to put it bluntly. Usually you can see this at a glance, but there are also some who have the fat stored mostly around their guts and kidneys where it is not so easy to spot. It is mostly this fat that contributes to diabetes. Fat on the hips and thighs is pretty much harmless, while the fat that is scattered around on your body under your skin is somewhat dangerous but not as bad as the gut fat.

In my case, however, things are a little different. I have another illness that means I can only eat small quantities of fat. After I stopped eating normal fat-rich food in spring 2005, I lost weight for several months. At the end I had lost almost 15% of my weight, and I was only moderately overweight before. The thinner I became, the hungrier I became too. This cannot be helped, after all, the body will try to preserve itself.

Since I could no longer eat fat, I ended up eating twice as much carbs instead.  (Carbohydrates contain half as much energy as fat, and in addition much of the energy is lost when the body tries to convert it to fat. Except for fructose, as I mentioned before, which is converted almost perfectly into fat.)

The constant intake of carbs means my body is always awash in sugar. (More complex carbs are broken down into sugar before they are absorbed into the blood.) So my high blood sugar is not because my fat storage is full and cannot store away the sugar: There is plenty of room for more fat, I am well below my natural weight. Rather, the blood sugar comes from constant intake of carbs, which I have to do:  If I stopped eating carbs as well as fat, I would starve.

However, since my problem is not too much fat, I could eat fructose. The liver would convert it into fat and only 20% would become blood sugar. This would solve the pre-diabetes problem. Furthermore, because of my exercise asthma I can not exercise at high intensity, where you burn mostly carbs. My exercise is mostly in the fat-burning range.  So once again, fructose to the rescue. As long as I exercise regularly, the fat from the fructose would be burned away before it had time to settle on my arteries. Probably.

*** 

 Most of you, however, eat fat. You may not actively seek it out, but you eat ordinary food: Cakes, bread with butter or margarine, mayonnaise, steaks, sauces, fast food, chips and milk chocolate among others. Even cookies contain quite a bit of fat. When you become sensitive to fat, you discover how much fat there is in food that does not even taste fatty. Anyway, you eat fat already.

I am not a fan of the Atkins diet, but one thing it got right (for most people) is that if you eat fat, your appetite for more fat will fall. You will still happily eat something sweet, though. I am sure most of you are aware of the “dessert stomach” phenomenon: You could not eat one more bite of sausage, but you will happily eat a plate full of sugary dessert. The thing is, if you use fructose for this, your body will get far more fat than it thought. Not a good idea. You already have plenty of fat without tricking your body into eating more of it!

Of course, if you have a treadmill at your office desk as some people here in Norway have recently, you can get away with it. But if you live a sedentary life and eat fat, stay off the fructose. Leave it to us who can’t get fat the normal way, OK?

 

Exercise, fat or diabetes

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You could also go to a gym, but it costs money and people snicker at you if your clothes are more fancy than your skill.

Now that the ice has left the roads here on the south coast of Norway, I once again make it a habit to take a brisk walk outside when it does not rain too much. I generally burn 700-800 calories for each trip. How much is that? If you take a common drinking glass from the kitchen and fill it to the top with pure white sugar, that’s about 800 calories.

Obviously I don’t celebrate my trip with a glass of pure sugar. But I do get more hungry the more I exercise, and so it will always be for us who are in the normal weight range. (The weight range that is described as “normal” for your height in books and websites is actually what I call the “recommended” range, although it was supposedly normal in the 1970es when smoking was common. Today what’s normal extends some 10% higher.)

Walking and other light exercise, then, is not really a means to lose weight unless you are obese or quite a bit overweight. Some people simply have a constant appetite  or eat for social or emotional reason, and the only alternative to eat less is to exercise more. In fact, for some their appetite will decrease after exercise, because the body’s natural system for regulating appetite will begin to function again. But for us of unremarkable shape, moderate exercise will not make us lose weight permanently. We would have to exercise more and more to do that.

So why walk up and down the hills if not to fit into the clothes of last summer or the summer before that? Well, basically it is to remind the body that it is still inhabited. In an effect known as “hormesis”,  the body reacts to small challenges by starting a repair system that repairs not only the small damage caused, but also some of the accumulated damage from the passing of time. There are a few toxins that are known to have hormetic effect in very low levels, among them ordinary alcohol, but the safest and most efficient hormesis by far is regular exercise. It may be slightly habit-forming, but not to the same degree as alcohol.

For me in particular there is a second reason to keep walking. I am diagnosed with “pre-diabetes” since last year, although I may have had this condition longer than that. You see, this is a purely technical term: There are no symptoms, and the health effects are uncertain. (Pre-diabetes usually appears as part of “metabolic syndrome”, which impairs health in ways not related to blood sugar.) The blood sugar is slightly higher than usual, but not enough to cause damage. The problem with pre-diabetes is that there is around 10% chance each year of progress to actual diabetes, which is bothersome, expensive and potentially deadly.

By exercising regularly, I clear out part of the sugar that is stored in my liver and my muscles. You see, people with pre-diabetes and diabetes II produce enough insulin, but the body starts ignoring it. (Or, for pre-diabetes, not taking it quite as seriously as it should.) Insulin gives an order to three types of cells:  Muscles, liver and fat cells. The order is to grab sugar from the blood and store it. Muscles and liver store it as glycogen, kind of “tightly packed sugar” that can be quickly made into sugar (glucose) again. Fat cells convert the sugar into fat, which can not be made into sugar again but is burned at a slow rate in daily life. Fat can also be burned at a high rate by long bouts of exercise at moderate levels.

I am already around 20 pounds less than I was at my fattest, so I know it is not the fat cells that fail to take action. They have plenty of room. But after 2005 I have not been able to digest much fat, so I live mostly on a diet of carbs. (It is that or not living at all, really, so the choice is pretty easy.)  Because of this there is always plenty of sugar in my blood, and my liver and muscles easily fill their storage space. This leaves the poor fat cells with all the rest, and they are evidently not up to it, thus the pre-diabetes.

So basically if you eat carbs, you need to exercise to clear out the storage in muscles and liver. Otherwise diabetes is likely. If you eat fat instead, you still need to exercise to slow down the aging, but the chance of diabetes is small as long as you stay well below your maximum weight. A high-fat diet also raises the risk of angina and heart infarct. So there really is no “silver bullet”, no cure for all. At least not yet. I am sure scientists all over the world are still looking. Until then, I intend to keep walking.

 

Responsibility for our own health

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"I aim to become a tropical girl, fruit juice running through my veins!"

“I’m aiming to be a tropical girl so fruity that fruit juice runs trough my veins!” That’s more like it. As long as there are toilets within running distance, at least.

There is a tendency in America, and increasingly in other countries as well, to expect medicine to fix our health, while we otherwise destroy it with our poor life choices. Not every person is like this, and there is a gradual awakening to the truth in this matter, but this is still mostly limited to the well off and the intellectual. Most of the population is still caught in a very dangerous situation: They take a short-term view of the long-term challenge of staying healthy.

It is natural that children don’t think far ahead. Even being 30 is old to them, so they hardly give it a thought. But for adults it should not be a great surprise that they may want to live, and live a good life, some decades into the future as well.

We know some of the greatest causes of poor health in adults are caused by lifestyle choices:  Smoking, inactivity, eating lots of fat or sugar, casual sex, abuse of alcohol and pleasure drugs, stress and conflict. Oh, and not washing your hands.

Yet when public health is discussed, it is mainly a discussion of money, of insurance and the quality of health care. Of course that matters too, but once you need health care, things are already pretty bad.  There are so many things that can be done to prevent illness, for most of us. Of course some are born with the disposition for certain illnesses, and there are accidents. But this is not the most common.

There is nothing flashy about preventive health maintenance. Taking the stairs instead of the elevator when feasible, keeping the snacks in the opposite end of the house from the TV or computer, taking a walk every day or two or having some physical activity as hobby, working through feelings instead of drowning them in booze or worse… none of these things are likely to bring you praise if you do them or consternation if you don’t. Nobody notices anything until you seem to be more lucky than other people.

Is it really worth it? You could be lucky. Perhaps you have the kind of genes that let you smoke all your life and never get cancer, gorge on fat and never get heart disease, may be you are even naturally resistant to HIV (some people are, especially those of Nordic ancestry, but still only a minority). You never know until you try, right?

But on behalf of society it would certainly be a good thing if people didn’t try their luck in this regard. And for those who don’t have unusual luck, it is likely they will regret their lifestyle choices. Of course, most of us have done things we regret. But every time we avoid it, we do a service to ourselves, our families (if any) and the society as a whole. It is not too late to start… probably.

Stop dieting!

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Running like the wind in Sims 3

Run like the wind! You’ll love it, at least more than dieting. Or if you are too sick to run, just walk. Or do yoga, if your neighborhood is too dangerous. Don’t just sit there and diet! Do something!

If you know what’s best for you, drop that diet and back away slowly. Then faster and faster. It has been known for years that diets are ineffective; now it seems more and more clear that they are outright harmful, quite likely every one of them.

Of course there are situations where you have to avoid certain foods, such as allergies or particular problems of the digestion. I am here talking about dieting to lose weight, a multi-billion dollar industry which it seems (like so many others) is based on the near-demonic eagerness to exploit the ignorant as if they were cattle.

As I said, we have known for a while that diets don’t work except in so few and rare cases that it would be like relying on lottery for a living. There are in fact numerous diets that leave the subject noticeably lighter after a few months. However, after five years the number who has stayed down in weight is less than those who have actually grown fatter than they were when they started. In all fairness, they might have gained weight anyway, and they did get a brief respite. But in any case, this means we cannot make a correct judgment from the “before” and “after” pictures, but also need a “much later” picture in which you have regained your plumpness and then some.

Still, while I have mentioned this in the past, it did not move me to an impassioned plea. That only happened because of new reports coming in from several sources, including Norway’s University of Science and Technology (NTNU Trondheim), showing evidence that weight has virtually no effect on health and survival in a modern society. What causes the wide range of “lifestyle diseases” is instead inactivity. An overweight person who is physically active is no more likely to get diabetes, hypertension and stroke than a slimmer person. Only when obesity reaches a level where exercise becomes impossible, does it spell impending doom.

The flip side of this is that if you are slim but inactive, you are risking your very life. And this, dear reader, is the problem. Not that diets are ineffective; that is the Light’s own grace, if I may say so. The danger is the time in which the diet is effective and you actually lose weight. This means you no longer have to exercise to keep your weight down; the urgency fades.

If you can both diet and exercise to your fullest extent, then I suppose it is harmless. But the moment you choose between activity and dieting, you need to be aware which one is purely cosmetic and which one is likely to save your life.

***

Even children are at risk now. When I was a boy, 40 years ago in Norway, the idea of children dieting was unnatural if not outright blasphemous. Instead, they would run around. There were two fat kids in our village, a brother and sister; they had some kind of hormone disease, we were told. It is probably true, because they were giants from before they started school. The rest of us, including their brother, were slim. Boys would spend whole afternoon playing soccer; I am not sure what the girls did, probably something useful? In school breaks they were playing tag or throwing small balls.

These days, kids are sitting in front of the TV or computer monitor all afternoon instead. Well, not all of them all of the time, but enough so that there are fat kids everywhere. I very much doubt they have all suddenly  were born with hormone disturbances! And contrary to what you kids may believe, there was plenty of food 40 years ago. OK, so out in the countryside there weren’t potato chips in bags, but we made our own, cutting potatoes in slices and frying them in animal fat, salt and pepper, and frequently adding a fried egg to the mix. And then we ate until we were full.

Some of us loved a good book as well, and would read for hours. So we did not run around all day. But we ran around everyday. Or walked around, in my case, since I have exercise asthma since I was tiny.

But now we have, for the first time in history, teenager whose arteries are partially clogged by fat before they are even grown up. Medical science proceeds at a brisk pace, so hopefully they will live to old age anyway, somehow. But it won’t be cheap. And not particularly pleasant, I dare say. Wouldn’t it have been easier to run around at least an hour each day?

But mainly I write to adults here. You have the opportunity to make your own life decisions, at a cost. So you thought you would not spend the time on walking around (or you live in a neighborhood where you cannot walk around without being mugged / raped / killed, if you live in certain parts of South Africa or America). Instead, you will just eat less fat or sugar or bread, or whatever the fad is when you read this. And it works. You may feel hungry for a while, but you lose weight, and everyone is happy. Until your body starts degenerating from lack of use anyway, and you get the same illnesses as the obese people, only a little later.

Humans are made to move about on their feet, and if you don’t do it, there will be trouble. Even if you diet. So drop that diet and start moving! You’ll soon find you need your energy and can eat with a good conscience.