Category Archives: medical

Oops – sleeping may be it

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The human body is full of mysteries. Especially down there. But today was a slightly different form of pleasant surprise from what the picture might imply to the younger reader.

So on Thursday I had my blood drawn to test for the proteins that signal a probable prostate cancer. The reason was the sudden onset of one particular symptom of enlarged prostate.

For unrelated reasons, I went to bed at 2AM and slept til 9:30 AM today. The thing is, I did not have to get up to urinate, and when I finally got up, there was almost no liquid. That’s when I realized: This is when I used to sleep for the last 15+ years!

Well, perhaps not exactly, but around 2 to 9. When I lived closer to the city, I could do this and still squeeze in a 90% job before the 5PM bus home. Or very nearly so. When I moved further away, the next bus in to the city would not be get me to the office until nearly 11, so I would have to get up early and take the previous bus now and then.  Three such “long” (8 hours) days over the course of two weeks would be enough.  (Norwegians are very productive – we work short hours and have long vacations and still get everything done. ^_^)

The thing is, I did not actually work 8 hour days as often as that, with the predictable result that I slowly built up a large mound of “time debt”, “undertime” or whatever you will call it. Sometime this winter I started paying it down.

With the help of LifeFlow delta brainwave entrainment, I can go to sleep three hours earlier than before, get up early  and still not be particularly sleepy during the day. In fact, if I wake up a couple times in the night, this makes me LESS sleepy in the morning, because even a minute awake is enough to start delta “music” again.  (I don’t keep it playing all night so as to not mess with the brain’s natural 90-minute sleep cycle too much, and to not develop immunity. A couple times a night seems fine though.)

Now the whole 90% job grew out of the fact that I have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, a minority condition where the body’s clock is nor reset by external stimuli in the normal way. There are divergent opinions on whether it can be cured, or even whether it should be cured. Arguably it needs to be cured to approximately the same degree that black skin needs to be cured: The only serious problems from this inheritable condition are those imposed by society.

In fact, if the minority with DSPS were allowed to live the way they were created, we would have less problems with rush hours and billions of dollars would not be lost to people sitting in cars and raging when they could have been at work.  But let us just let that slide for now. Humans are stupid, as we all know from direct observation of those around us. Especially in traffic, I suppose.

Anyway, my brain is happy with brainwave entrainment. But evidently my kidneys have no respect for it. They probably continue to work hard for the first three hours of the night, every night. (And then more slowly in the morning, as before.) Which means that the sudden onset of the nightly bathroom run did probably not come from any changes down there, but from the changes in my bedtime when I first started to try to work in my undertime, and later switched to working full time.

This, dear reader, is why I almost never go to the doctor. Because when I do, the local clinic usually concludes that I am healthier than those who work there, and the only things I achieve is to  a) embarrass myself, and b) add to my hypochondria score card.  There have only been a couple times in my adult life that a doctor visit has actually helped in any way. OK, perhaps four times.

Oh well. I understand in America, the land of extreme health expenses, it is customary for the better off to take these blood tests even if they have no symptoms.  (And even if the sum of the biopsies and the treatments are approximately as lethal as the cancer, statistically speaking.)

Now, the big question is whether the kidneys will eventually decide to join the sleep rhythm of the brain, or whether I shall have this divergence for the rest of my working life. I have a feeling that if I live to my planned retirement at 75, I won’t have any long nights of continuous sleep even after that. But who knows.

***

Well, I suppose I no longer need to eat tomato and take long walks. Well, unless I want to decrease my “overall mortality” – the risk of dying from any random reason – by 40% by investing half an hour a day. As far as risk management goes, that seems a pretty good investment to me. On the other hand we could be fatalists and say that the day when you are fated to die, you die. That is certainly true. But that day seems to come a lot earlier for most fat and flabby people, in our part of the world at least.  (It’s a bit different in hunger-stricken areas, of course.  May you and I never need to save up fat for times like that.)

Besides, I have started to kind of like both the spaghetti sauce and the long walks. I walked for an hour today again, in rain that was so light it was almost fog. Then went home and ate pasta with tomato sauce. I rather enjoyed them both, truth to tell. Although my “things to write” memory runs full before even half an hour of walking…

Now to decide whether to call off that doctor appointment. I presumably won’t benefit from it in any way; but on the other hand, if I cancel it, the doctor will never know if he later runs into a case like this again.

Not losing weight here!

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“I’ll definitely work out for what I ate later…” This may not be quite as easy as one would believe, even if you really do work out. I speak from experience here.

Today I will write a small article about health and physiology. After all, I assume my reader to have a body and be keenly aware of it. Even though our lives in the body are rather short, we try to make it last a little longer and serve us a little better.

And there’s the small point that for each day you live, life expectancy rises by approximately 5 hours. (That’s in the first world, obviously things are improving faster in the third world.) So, death is approaching, but not by 24 hours a day. The longer you live, the longer your life expectancy. Nifty, huh?

Now, second only to smoking, fat is one of those things people know is Bad For You. There has been so much writing and broadcasting about this, there is hardly anyone in the English-speaking world who does not have a wary eye on their weight, or the weight of others. While some feel it is more important to enjoy life, most people have at least some interest in the issue. So here we go!

***

In official statistics, is is assumed that a grown man will burn about 2400 calories a day, a woman about 2000. The reason why we men burn more calories is that we are larger and have more muscles. The few remaining people who have hard physical work are not counted in these statistics, I believe, and neither are professional athletes. These are people who lie outside the normal range.  There is of course some individual variation.

Now that I walk an hour after work,  I burn 500 calories extra each day (my pulse watch shows 600, but that includes the basic 100 calories I would burn in an hour just by being myself). The smart reader would assume that these calories would be taken from my fat reserves, such as they are. I am not quite overweight, but my normal weight is right on the upper border of the recommended range.  (“Normal” weight in the literature, not that it is normal to be normal these days, it is normal to be moderately overweight.)

I went on the bathroom scales again. There is no sign of losing any weight after over two weeks of this.

Now, two weeks is not a lot. One pound of fat is approximately 3500 calories, which is roughly what I burn extra in a week. Diets or other techniques for rapid weight loss don’t actually reduce your fat very fast, but instead cause you to lose water, which can be lost and gained much faster. Some foods bind more water in the body than others, so it is possible to “lose weight fast” that way. Sweating a lot without drinking more can also cause you to “lose weight”, but is not good for your health at all!

Even if I burn 500 extra calories a day, I won’t lose weight if I eat 500 more calories too. That could easily happen: A large box of yogurt (half a liter is a common size here) contains about that many calories. So it could easily happen if I am just a little more hungry than usual. With light exercise this is very common, unless you also go on a diet and count calories.

Then there is the small detail that “weight” is not the same as “fat”. If I use my muscles more than usual, they may become larger – this happens especially easily to us men – and muscle mass is actually heavier than fat. So a man who is not overweight could easily gain weight by exercising! Obviously this requires that one eats that much protein, which muscles are made from. But there is plenty of protein in the western diet, both from plants and animals.

In my case, there is yet another reason why I might not lose weight: I may be actually burning 3000 calories a day already. This is not so relevant for most of my readers, who get a fairly large percentage of their calories from fat. I did too, until I got a chronic illness that strikes if I eat more than a few grams of fat in each meal. So I cannot eat typical fatty foods like cakes, cookies, sauces, chocolate, butter, margarine, mayonnaise and similar bread spreads, or most meat dinners.

In the first months after I dropped eating fatty foods, I lost weight, and quite a bit of it.  Some of it never came back. But gradually my digestion adjusted so I could eat larger portions of starch and sugary foods, and digest them efficiently. It is entirely possible that I eat 3000 calories a day, I have not sat down and counted them.

You would think that if I actually ate 3000 calories a day, I would have gained weight steadily over the last years.  But it is not that simple. When you eat both fat and carbs, the body will prefer to burn the carbs (it is faster and easier) but store the fat.  If you eat very little fat, the body will not be able to store much.  Carbs cannot be converted to fat easily. It is possible, but unlike some animals, humans really suck at converting sugar to fat. Only a small portion makes it over, almost all of it is lost along the way, and simply becomes waste heat.

(Fructose, which is a common sweetener in the USA, is more readily converted to fat. If I lived in America, I would probably be fatter. But I live in Norway, where fructose is rare. It is mostly found in honey, and I don’t eat much of that.)

So you can see, there are numerous reasons why I may not lose weight even though I burn 500 calories extra on fast walking each day. That is not a tragedy for me, since I am not dangerously fat. And in any case, there are health benefits to being active beyond losing weight. In fact, it is uncertain whether overweight is dangerous at all. Obesity probably is, but moderate overweight may be more a symptom of inactivity rather than a danger in itself.  Danish statistics show that overweight people who bike regularly (a common combination in Denmark, thanks to the flat terrain and delicious pastries) don’t suffer the metabolic syndrome that plagues overweight car drivers.

In other good news, weight loss from exercise is far more likely if you are already unnaturally fat. Obese people will generally not feel hungrier after moderate exercise than without; in fact, most of them will feel less hungry after light or moderate exercise like walking, biking or swimming. This is because this level of activity stimulates the brain centers that regulate the appetite. Moving about is the normal behavior in humans “in the wild”, so the body works best when we do this, including the brain.  So if you fall in that category, you should definitely start walking or something like that, but very moderately at first. Don’t suddenly start running without consulting your doctor!

I, however, may have to start running if I want to lose weight. Or I could eat less, I suppose. I have not really decided whether I should do that, though. I just want to maintain the body so I don’t lose it from sheer negligence.

 

Personal health reform

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You also need to exercise to balance your eating. (And your nation’s budget.)

In America in particular, there is a bitter debate about how to finance the ever growing expenses of the country’s health care. The same problem faces most developed countries, although the debate is generally more civil in those I know. Still, there is much handwringing and various not-so-great ideas.

In the middle of this is the small voice of reason, belonging to Dr Dean Ornish: How about people stop eating fast food and starts walking at least a couple hours a week, meditating from time to time and be nice to their family? That way we would have much less illness to contend with in the first place.

Dr Ornish and his colleagues have proved, and in the sense of hard science, peer reviewed large-scale clinical tests, that radical lifestyle change can actually reverse coronary plaque, diabetes, and some cancers. A less radical change can prevent them in most cases, and even when not, improve your chance of survival and your quality of life.

The approach is fairly low-tech:  Cut down on fat, to no more than 10% of your calories. Avoid white sugar and corn syrup like the plague. Eat your veggies. Exercise at moderate intensity. Meditate. Stick with your loved ones. The  more of these things you do, the less likely you are to contract the illnesses that make up 75% of the country’s health care budget.

If we don’t do it for the sake of the country, at least it makes sense to do it because being terminally ill sucks.  You are going to die sooner or later, of course, but later usually seems like the best alternative – after all, that is why people will pay an arm and a leg for expensive new cancer drugs, although they were not willing to move an arm and a leg back when they could have prevented the whole horror.

***

Now, I am fully aware that it is not easy. You come home from work, your head is already tired, and perhaps your feet too. You want nothing more than sit down in a good chair.  And as if it was not bad enough, you have to drive your kids (if you have kids, and most people do sooner or later) to some far-off destination.  When you’re back, it is already late and the weather is not good for walking, running, biking or whatever. There may be criminal elements out there too. No, it is best to stay inside and eat snacks in front of the TV, just like every other day.

I totally understand. After all, I keep a bottle of cola in the house at all times, if possible, and another at work. True, I mix the cola with water before drinking it, but I am sure it is still an unspeakable sin in the eyes of every nutritionist worth his diploma.  Sugar = poison, after all. But it all boils down to this: We have to do something, we have to start somewhere, we have to make a sacrifice for the sake of our own future and those we love, and those we don’t particularly hate. Someone has to go the extra mile. Or, failing that, eat their veggies.

You know quite well that you would do it if your life was at stake, and it is. The thing is to do it BEFORE the doctor tells you that you have X months left to live. I am sure that is very motivating, but by then we’ll probably feel even much less energetic than today. By then we may pray to God, but today God is praying to us, so to speak, imploring us to not be idiots and waste the body we’ve been given.  It is not by accident that the world’s religious traditions put emphasis on various exercises in self-control. Holding back our impulses was never easy, not 2500 years ago and not today. But it is a good idea, not just for ourselves, but for others as well.

It is true that for the time being, at least, most people will probably still continue to eat their fast food and veg out in front of the tube. So that if you eat your greens and work out, you’ll be paying for their bypass and they won’t be paying for yours. Sure it is unfair. But we should love our neighbor, right? It is more blessed to give than to receive. No, seriously, it is; I have tried. But even apart from that, it is more blessed to go the second mile than to receive diabetes, constipation, knee pain and heart infarct. For the love of ourselves and others, we have to make at least some effort, and encourage each other to do what we can.

And of course, if you happen to live in America, there is the small matter of your country not defaulting on its debt and sliding rapidly to banana republic status. Or at least, when that happens anyway, to be able to say “It wasn’t my fault… this time.”

 

Tomatoes vs cancer: Fight!

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Actually we don’t know whether I even have cancer, but we do know that I have tomatoes!

Today I walked briskly for about an hour (burning 650 calories, according to my pulse watch.) This is supposed to be a good thing (see my earlier entry on this topic). Then again, I usually do that on Saturday anyway.

Unfortunately, it turns out that today it is vegetables that cure cancer, more exactly tomatoes and broccoli. And there are limits.  They go somewhere before broccoli. I find it impossible to believe that a merciful God would intend broccoli as human food, at least for regular use. It may not be as poisonous as it looks and tastes, but that’s the most credit I will give it.

“The only treatment that approached the tomato/broccoli diet’s level of effectiveness was castration” according to the article. That makes sense – it is also the only treatment that surpasses the tomato & broccoli diet on a scale of pure horror and revulsion…

Actually, the connection may be closer than that. “Another recent Erdman study shows that rats fed the tomato carotenoids phytofluene, lycopene, or a diet containing 10 percent tomato powder for four days had significantly reduced testosterone levels.” Yeah. Significantly reduced testosterone levels may help in consuming broccoli too, I guess. It is the archetypal spinster food, after all. Eat broccoli, avoid men, live till you are 90 and donate your fortune to a pet cemetery.

Even tomatoes and I don’t have the most cordial relationship. I have (repeatedly) been told that when I was little, I enthusiastically grabbed my first tomato and bit into it. Then I declared: “Tomatoes taste best in fresh air” and went outdoors and threw the tomato as far as I could. Which was at the time not very far, and it was found not much later. My brothers will probably not let that story go until we are old. If we grow old at all. Old age may be the source of many complaints, but most still prefer it to the alternative.

During my long walk I thought a bit, although not much. Here is an overview of what I thought:

So, in order to outpace cancer and various other common but grisly deaths, you have to walk briskly. The study drew a line at 3 hours a week, but this was probably more for practical reasons (there are probably not enough Americans who walk 7 hours a week to be statistically significant). So probably the more the better.

Now in addition to this, you are to eat lots of tomato and broccoli. But you can not eat sugar, sugar is poison (again).  Some fats are healthy (this year) but that does not much help me, since I get violently ill if I eat more than a few grams a meal of any fat. Actually I may be able to eat slightly more milk fat than other fats, but it is hard to say. My main source of fat is cheese, and it is not like I eat pounds of the stuff. Anyway, for now suffice it to say that I can’t eat fat and am not supposed to eat sugar (unless I am willing to die a grisly death).

Well, if all I can eat is veggies, and I am traipsing around the countryside every day, at least I won’t get aggressive prostate cancer from overweight. On the contrary, I will probably end up as something closer to a walking skeleton. Perhaps I could get a part time job showing medical students the various bones of the human body?

We already found out that sitting might kill me, but on the other hand Meditation can Boost the Immune System. So, meditation without sitting? Perhaps I should meditate while walking. Actually, that is something I occasionally do, but it tends to be less deep than classic meditation, for the obvious reason that one does not want to fall into a ditch or get run over by a car or stumble over roots.

There sure are a lot of things to do and not do if one wants to avoid an untimely death! And not least, Do Not Worry! For on the day you do that, you shall surely die. Or at least raze your immune system to the ground or something.

***

At this point, we are pretty close to what the ancient called “reductio ad absurdum”. Trying to live a healthy life can be so stressful that it kills you.  Later in the day, I listened to the latest weekly broadcast from Happy Science NZ. To my amusement, this week’s short lecture by Master Okawa was how to achieve definite health.

It is really a miracle that you can create illness in your body by the power of your thoughts, says Okawa. Even an ordinary person has this amazing power, to create illness. About 70% of illness is created this way, with the power of the mind. Despite this, people seem unable to create health. Isn’t that strange? Perhaps you really want to be sick, so you have an excuse for your failures. But if you want to be healthy (or only 30% sick, I guess), you should focus on thinking bright, positive thoughts. Reflect on yourself to get rid of hate and accusation. Practice gratitude to bring happiness into your life. Hold on to healthy habits. Make a life plan that is in accordance with the will of Heaven.

Mind you, I am not a big fan of the “if you had faith, you would not be sick” theology. But Okawa’s estimate that about 70% of illness is self-inflicted in one way or another seems reasonable. In our civilization, “lifestyle diseases” and stress-related illnesses are dominating the charts, massively so. So until further notice, I will continue to take my walks when feasible, eat tomatoes when feasible, and live with brightness and gratitude in my heart, hopefully for the remainder of my life, whether it is 6 months or 60 years. So far I’m planning for the latter though.

 

Killer commute?

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I’m not normal! Not exactly news, I guess, but here is another example. Perhaps.

OK, this is baffling to me, but evidently ordinary humans can recognize themselves in it:

“Your Commute Is Killing You: Long commutes cause obesity, neck pain, loneliness, divorce, stress, and insomnia.”

Now admittedly this is from Slate, which I rank slightly below the Watchtower in unbiased science. It is one of those places dissatisfied leftists congregate to reinforce their discontent. (Actually, there are no happy, content leftists. That would be a contradiction in terms: Happy people naturally want to conserve their current happy life and all it entails, which would automatically make them conservative, literally so.) So unless you feel good watching leftists whine and despair, it may be wiser to go closer to the source. Luckily they are meticulous in linking back.

Long commutes ‘bad for marriage’: Swedish study (theLocal.se).

Now, arguably Sweden is also a place stuffed with leftists, at least by conservative American measure. But the Swedes are leftist mostly out of habit. The social democrats, when they rule at all, are the ones trying to stick to the past. Sweden is a country of “after the revolution”, although a quiet and bloodless revolution, where the former revolutionaries are now the ones defending status quo. Anyway, you may notice that taking one step closer to the source, the claim of utter and pervasive evil is toned a bit down.

The Swedish  article also have the hilarious comments, as can be expected. “I actually prefer long commutes. It gives me more time to spend with my girlfriend and less time around that seething bitch that I married.” “This is why I quit my job and went on welfare 20 years ago. My marriage is too important to me to jeopardize it.” (These are almost certainly facetious, as they play on popular stereotypes in Scandinavian humor. Your humor may vary.)

In all fairness, the Slate article also draws on other studies, among them one of 900 Texan women who liked sex best (what? NOT going to church?) and commute least.

The most surprising was the finding that time spent on commute is actually worse than time spent at work when it comes to reducing motivation for exercise and healthy eating. I had expected them to be equal at most. After all, for the majority who don’t have manual labor, we still come home from work with the feeling that we have worked all day and want to rest. It takes an effort of will (or fear, I suppose) to come home from work and change into your sweater.

(By the way, after the commute home from work today, I spent 10 minutes on the exercise bike and took a 45 minute fast walk. See previous entry for why.)

Now, if you were to see me on the street, you would probably mistake me for an ordinary human. I don’t radiate light in the visible spectrum, honest, nor do I have wings.  But once again I have to pick the opposite side from your average human: I love my commute and wish I had more of it. Well, except when I have diarrhea.

Part of it is that I use bus instead of car, I suppose. This means I can concentrate on the things I don’t always take the time to do at work or at home: Checking Facebook and Twitter, and especially reading Kindle books on my high-resolution cell phone. In fact, I have been known to lug along paper books in some cases, but I currently have a backlog of unread Kindle books, so that goes here. On the commute home from work I also habitually nap – so habitually in fact that I have set an alarm to avoid driving past my stop! (That was mostly a problem when this commute was new to me though. These days I usually wake up when we leave the Europe road, basically Interstate. The road standard is rather different.)

As I said back when I was preparing my (so far) last move, I seriously considered a two hour commute. The reason was that you could rent a house of high standard up in the valleys at a very affordable price. It was even theoretically possible for a one-person household to buy a house up there, which it hardly is here. And the two hour commute I counted as a benefit, not a problem. (This is even more the case today, when I finally have the go-ahead to work from home the days my digestion is haunting me. But even before, it was like 1 day a month most of the time.)

Four hours a day for reading and napping? That sounds great. Of course, that would mean that much less time writing my journal and playing City of Heroes, but I think that is a good trade. I already find myself playing less computer games than I did.

Now, I have from numerous sources that City of Heroes is better than sex, but I am not sure how it stacks up against spending time with your kids. My impression is that most adults are rather less enthusiastic about this than are the kids, but that does not mean God or Evolution won’t punish them if they fail to do it, I suppose. We are after all descendants from those whose kids were not eaten by predators and did not fall into rivers, so there may be some implicit genetic contract here.

But for the few actual singles in the world who are not monks, commute seems a lot less threatening than it does to the Slate crowd. Or perhaps it is just me. I doubt I am quite that unique, though.

 

Outpacing cancer and such

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“I guess exercise really is important.” Yeah, and more so for us guys, perhaps.

In case you didn’t know (I didn’t) and couldn’t guess, walking briskly for several hours a week drastically reduces the dangers from prostate cancer. While doing so, it also happens to drastically reduce mortality from pretty much anything else (except getting run over by bikes, I strongly suspect).

So yeah. Half an hour today. ^_^

(Actually I was aiming for one hour, but it began to rain after a quarter. Anyway, half an hour should be about right – the article mentions 3 hours a week. Of course, there is reason to doubt that I will do this every day, especially if I am not diagnosed with cancer. Then again, who knows. I used to walk like crazy for much of my life, and still do by American and modern Norwegian standards.)

***

On a vaguely related note, I woke up to a bulk e-mail from my “friend” Bill Harris, of Centerpointe Research Institute. These are the people from whom I bought the Holosync brainwave entrainment solution, my first of that kind and one of the best known. I mostly use LifeFlow these days, but I like to keep up with my old supplier. Plus, the almost daily e-mails make me appreciate LifeFlow and the Project Meditation that supplies it. You see, they are not only about Holosync. Far from it.

Today, for instance, brings the good news “Amazing non-toxic liquid kills cancer cells”. Which is probably true. I am sure clean water will do that under the right conditions, and probably various other substances. Not all cancer cells are robust enough to survive for long outside the body. Anyway, the lengthy e-mail does not offer any clue as to what this non-toxic liquid is, only that it is available over the counter. (Could still be water, I suppose, depending on the counter.) There are repeated links to one of his innumerable business friends, who will tell us more.

It is a very, very safe bet that if I were to follow the link, I would get a long and somewhat multimedia-based spiel about the awesomeness of the cancer-killing substance, which the health establishment does not want us to know, and still no hint as to what it is. To find out, we will have to buy some kind of report or something from Mr Friend, of which I assume Mr Harris gets a small percentage for sending the sheep for shearing. Not to say slaughter, if one is such a prime case of Darwinian evolution in action as to substitute this for actual medical treatment. Or long walks, I guess. For some reason the evil medical establishment seems to have no problem whatsoever with letting us know that we can actually walk away from cancer, heart infarct, stroke, diabetes etc at little or no cost to us and no income to them.

Then again, perhaps they know very few people will actually do it, even though it is free, harmless and pretty fun if you have an MP3 player.

 

Sitting kills! Perhaps.

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Don’t sit down with your computer if you value your life, says Daily Science. Happy Science disagrees, but only slightly.

I have written about this before, but Science Daily has rather a bunch of articles on the evils of sitting, especially in front of screens, and worst of all the TV. Since I consider the TV a tool of Evil, I am not surprised at the last part.  Not so sure about sitting in front of the computer screen though. I think it depends on what you do there.

But there seems to be an actual bodily mechanism that makes sitting hurt the body. Not just the back pains that are common among office workers these days, but there is also a link to heart disease, diabetic and other typical western lifestyle diseases.

Basically, sitting down causes the large leg muscles to shut down. These don’t simply keep us on our feet, but also function as a kind of internal organs: They are largely fat-powered, so they release chemicals that cause fat to be absorbed into muscles rather than drift around in the bloodstream making trouble. They also regulate the balance between “bad cholesterol” and “good cholesterol”.

(It is probably worth mentioning that some of the largest leg muscles are in the buttocks. If nothing else, at least every mention of healthy buttocks is likely to shift the article several pages up in Google.)

Some effects of sitting start at once, some gradually build up over time. You can reduce the damage from sitting by getting up now and then, at least every half hour is recommended. But you cannot eliminate all effects by getting up at certain intervals, just some.

Me, just to be sure, I get up every now and then from my boss chair in the home office and walk to the fridge and back…

***

When studies say that sitting increases risk of death regardless of whether you exercise, that does not mean exercise is pointless unless you remain on the feet all day.  It means that if you exercise and sit, you are worse off than if you exercise and just potter around. And you are worse off to the same degree that someone who does not exercise is still worse off sitting than just pottering around in the house or garden.

It is worth noticing that these studies mainly look at recreational sitting, not sitting as a job. Obviously the same bi0logical effects appear at work, but there is probably not a lot people can do in the current economy to pick a job with less sitting. It is advised to place some office equipment out of reach, but employers generally aren’t too fond of putting the printer far away. They pay you for the hour, but they don’t bear the expense when you get sick. Well, probably not. Here in Norway they do to some extent. My current employer has exercise equipment and organized (but voluntary) walks during work hours. You should probably not expect that in the USA, unless you work for Google or similar.

Now, the thing these reports don’t say, and which I am burning to know, is: What do these people do who don’t sit for two hours or more on an average day?

My best guess is that they have toddlers, in which case Evolution (or whatever your name for God) has probably thrown in some extra protection because, let’s face it, a toddler is not going to live long without parental supervision, or something very similar. The natural response to this is a divine decree that Chasing Toddlers Shall be Good for Your Health.

One study goes after television in particular, another lumps TV, computer and video games.  Sitting in front of these is evidently a shortcut to early death. But what about sitting with a book? Has anyone ever studied that? What about sitting in church?? Several studies show that people with high church attendance are less likely to die than people who boycott church. (The same effect holds true for at least some other religions, but church attendance is by far most common in the USA, so most reliable data are on this.)  How can sitting in the church keep you alive while sitting at home kills you?  Mysteries abound!

This is where I part ways with Daily Science and team up with Happy Science instead. (Happy Science is a new Japanese religion.) In their worldview, illness rarely begins in the physical body, unless you are run down by a car or some such. Typical lifestyle illnesses are instead caused by changes in your astral body, or aura body. Your mind gets poisoned and the body follows.

That seems like pure superstition, but the fact remains that placebo remains one of the most useful and potent forms of medication around, the standard against which all other medication is measured. In other words, what happens in people’s minds really DOES influence their bodies, all other things being equal. Things that cause negative thought patterns (like most TV channels and most video games) will have a completely different effect on the body than things that cause positive thought patterns (like benevolent religions, good books, or good friends).

If we strip the religious language, I think Happy Science really is scientific in this. Certain inactivities are worse than others, because they harm the will to live, while others strengthen it.

Or as myself  said to me this morning:  “If you don’t do anything meaningful, it is like calling the Angel of Death to say ‘I am finished here’.”

This is often easy to see with old people. Many look forward to their retirement, but when the time comes, it does not take long before they start feeling useless. After that, it goes downhill fast. They get sick, they complain, become pessimistic and either die early or linger in ill health for a long time. But grandparents who have small children living in the house often remain vital and healthy longer, and even a pet can substantially improve the health of many elderly. Intellectuals who read and write a lot also tend to live longer and healthier lives. And famously, gardeners live the longest lives of all.  Evidently being connected to life, encouraging life to grow, keeps the power of life flowing through the body.

So perhaps we should think of it this way:  If you sit down, you better have a reason for it!

 

Why liposuction sucks

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Maybe you did get fatter, but there are worse fates than being a little chubby.  Liposuction, for instance.

I readily admit that I don’t speak from experience this time. On the other hand, I have news for the average person. So please spare a little time if the topic interests you or anyone you hold dear. Or even an enemy, I guess, though I am not responsible for what you might do then. I desperately seek to not be an enemy and, if feasible, not have enemies.

If one has enemies, though, liposuction might be something one would wish for them.

This is not obvious. Body fat is bad, right? So having less of it should be good! Alas, it is not quite that simple.

Fat has a natural place in our body. Every cell in the body has some lipids (fat) in it, and it makes up a rather large part of the brain.  (The brain grows slowly though, so there is no need to fatten your kids excessively. Just don’t give let them grow very skinny.)

Besides being a building block, however, fat is also (and mostly) a fuel. The body burns it to get energy. But you already knew that.  This is the obvious reason why our body has “adipose tissue”, large collections of fat cells, storing lots of fat for the dry season that never comes these days. Until recently, this was the only way this tissue was viewed. It turns out there is another aspect as well.

Fat that is locked inside the fat cells is mostly harmless. Fat that floats freely in the bloodstream, however, is not. It causes inflammation. OK, that may be a slight exaggeration. What it does is increase the tendency toward inflammation. A small infection or just chafing can develop into a pretty big inflammation if there is lots of fat in the blood, but barely register if not. I am not sure whether there is yet a logical explanation for this, it is a fairly new discovery. I think I first read it last year.

When you eat more fat than you can burn off, the fat cells will quietly snatch fat molecules from the blood and store them away. In this way, they keep the blood fat down. In fact, the more efficient they are, the less fat in your blood, and the less infections of anything from gums to arteries, if all other things are equal. So a person who puts on weight easily can be very healthy. In fact, this is common. During the years of ballooning, you have few health problems.  But then…

When the fat cells reach their capacity, which varies with families and even individuals, bad thing begin to happen. Suddenly you become more prone to a lot of illnesses, from hangnails to diabetes. It seems that even cancer is more likely, although I am not sure how.

Some people don’t have a lot of fat cells and they reach their maximum while still looking thin. This is not a good thing: Even though they don’t look fat, in a sense they are, and they suffer fat poisoning. Another person with more fat cells could have continued to absorb fat from the blood for a long time and remain healthy.

Now you see why liposuction sucks:  You are left with fewer fat cells, and have less ability to absorb new incoming fat.  And most people who have had a liposuction regain the fat within a year or two!

If you have had liposuction and you change your lifestyle, exercising more than you eat, you actually have a kind of benefit from the surgery.  Since you are less heavy, you will be able to exercise more easily, with less pressure on your knees; these are hard pressed during many kinds of exercise, and more so the heavier you are. Exercise also feels more comfortable when you are not so big and heavy.

But if you don’t change your ways to a low-fat diet or plenty of exercise, you are left with more fat in your blood, and it will poison you in subtle ways, making you more prone to a wide range of diseases.  And most obvious, diseases of the circulatory system. So take care. Don’t let vanity be your doom.

***

PS: One related but slightly different explanation of the mechanism may be more exact: When fat cells overfill and are about to burst, they release distress molecules of the “dying cell, cleanup crew required” type. This excites immune cells, who may then attack the wrong target.

Science is just now catching up to the fact that fat is more than just a “dead weight”, so there will likely be more exciting discoveries in the near future. May we all be there!

PPS: Read more at ScienceDaily. Also with nifty links.

Food consciousness

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Having a spare stomach for cake, dessert etc is actually quite common. How does this work?

What I reveal today is a truth that can change lives and even make life much longer and more enjoyable for many. Even if you don’t need it, bookmark this or save it, print it, and share it with a friend. Or better yet, understand it so deeply that you can tell them in your own words. But if not, printing is OK. In fact, I explicitly allow you to copy this to your own website.

Science tells us that only about 5% of those who lose weight through diets, actually keep the weight off. I hope these numbers are adjusted for those who in the meantime have taken up smoking, or got some chronic illness to their digestion, or changed to a physically demanding job. Because if not, the number would be around 0%.

Another scientific fact is as least as puzzling: Different diets give roughly the same results, even opposite diets. So if you pick a high-fat, low-carbs diet and your identical twin picks a low-fat high-carbs diet, you are likely to lose weight at around the same rate.

It gets better. One of the most effective “diets” has actually nothing to do with what you eat. Eating in front of a mirror is one of the surest ways to return to a healthy weight for those who are prone to overeating. A more time consuming but less insane looking alternative is a food diary, as detailed as possible, including all meals and all snacks. There is no need to restrain yourself, just make sure to never eat anything without writing it down.

A final piece of this puzzle: Studies show that people who eat in front of the computer or the TV (if it is on) eat about twice as much as if eating in the kitchen or dining room.

I actually had the privilege of seeing this in action when visiting a highly intelligent friend once. He devoured a bag of chips on front of the TV, and later that night accused his daughter of having taken it. Needless to say, this man lived a constant “battle of the bulge” over his belt.

But I have seen a much worse case. I worked for over a year at an institution for alcoholics. One of the patients had for some reason drunk methanol instead of ethanol some years earlier, and blown his long-term memory. He could hold a reasonably sane conversation, as he could remember the last minute or so. But what happened and hour ago was left to his imagination. This included any meals he had eaten and not just recently finished. So he would eat them again. Any attempts to convince him otherwise were ignored.

We imagine that the feeling of being fed comes from the physical pressure or weight of the food in our stomach, but this is only for the first minutes after a large meal. Pretty soon the contentment actually comes from the brain. The level of blood sugar does signal a recent meal, but that does not last long, and may soon turn worse than nothing. At that point, your subconscious uses your memory to determine how fed you are. This fact completes the puzzle. The picture is now clear.

The higher your “food consciousness”, the more precise your appetite.

In the past, food was a scarce resource. Eating was not something you did to while away the time, or because you had your hands free. Filling your stomach was an occasion of joy, and surrounded by ritual. Thanks were given to the spirits, all of the family was together (and in earlier times often the whole clan or village in case of a large feast). Everyone knew that eating your fill was not a basic human condition like breathing. It was something worthy of notice.

The human operation system still works the same way as in that not so distant past. But these days, food is often beneath notice. It is eaten alone while we read through the latest report from management. And so, like in the unfortunate alcoholic I mentioned, the meal never quite enters long-term memory.

When you start a new diet, you pay a lot of attention to your eating. By chance, you somewhat duplicate the conditions of the past, and your body and mind become aligned. But after a while the awareness fades, and your brain goes “What food? I don’t remember any food” and so you eat again.

Yes, there are certain illnesses that severely warp the metabolism and make a person prone to obesity (or the opposite). But they do not count in the tens of millions in one country alone! These things are more like people being born with fur or an unusual number of fingers. Diets are unlikely to have much influence in such a case, I fear. But for the normal human, raising food consciousness to its natural level is definitely worth a try.  Especially when the alternative so often is to live hungry or die early.

As a final note, I feel obliged to mention that the body is in any case a temporary dwelling, and we would be well advised to raise other forms of consciousness to a higher level than that of our food. But those who want to hear that can hear about it another day, or somewhere else. Take this for today.

Carbohydrate gluttony

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So good! Eating is a primal pleasure, and these days, when it is no longer regulated by religion, it is still held in check by social taboos and personal complexes.  But not for everyone, I guess…

A few hundred years ago, in the Middle Ages, gluttony was considered one of seven Deadly Sins: A transgression against God and natural order, so heinous that the sinner would go straight to Hell. Those who kept doing such things were thrown out of the church and shunned by good people.  I guess it is kind of like racism today. It is something you just don’t do if you care at all about your soul, or your reputation, or common decency.

Today, people rarely even say grace as they sit down with a double whopper cheese with fries. As in so many ways, objective measures have replaced the commandments of Heaven. Now, the commandment is “Thou Shalt Not Be Fat!”  In the modern mind, it is the life of the body rather than the soul that is in danger, but you still face the threat of excommunication – not from the Church, but from your circle of friends, or at least polite society. (Your friends will generally forgive you if you grow fat at roughly the same rate as they do.)

Now for the “carbohydrate” part. Regular readers may remember that humans really suck at making fat from carbohydrates (or “carbs” as they are known these days – sugars and starches). The only notable exception is fructose (as in “corn sugar”), which can be transformed into fat in the liver. This is a slow process though, and in practice the difference between the carbs rarely matters. Normally we all eat a mixture of carbs, fats and proteins.  In this situation, the body has the foresight to burn most carbs, which are hard to store in the body.  (It can be stored in the liver and muscles as glycogen, but only enough for about a day’s use. Fat, in contrast, can be stored for years.)

Basically, the more you shift the balance of your diet toward carbs, the more your body burns carbs and stores fat.  If you go the other way, eating almost only fat, the body can use fat as a substitute for sugar too. Even the brain can run on fat in a pinch, although it usually uses only sugar.  But during normal life, we burn carbs quickly and fat slowly.

Of course, not all of us are normal. I, for instance, fall ill if I eat more than tiny amounts of fat. But I can eat lots and lots of carbs with no ill effects, or at least none that I can discern. And I don’t become fat. If I eat more sugar than I need, I just burn it off harmlessly, at least as long as it is “real” sugar and not fructose. So unless you actually watch me work my way through the cola, candy and sweet desserts, there is nothing to betray my gluttony.

Today my conscience is pretty good, though. According to my pulse watch, I burned some 1060 calories (kcal in Europe) on shoveling snow and walking to the grocer’s.  That will take its SWEET time gaining back – carbs have only half as much energy as fat, and 1000 calories is quite noticeable: That’s half as much as an average woman burns in a whole day (24 hours). Imagine eating 12 hours’ worth of food extra, and having to avoid anything fatty. No cakes, nothing with cream, no sauces, only tiny specks of chocolate. Do you think you could do it?