Atkins-style low-carbohydrate diets help people lose weight, but people who simply replace the bread and pasta with calories from animal protein and animal fat may face an increased risk of early death from cancer and heart disease, a new study reports.

The study found that the death rate among people who adhered most closely to a low-carb regimen was 12 percent higher over about two decades than with those who consumed diets higher in carbohydrates.

But death rates varied, depending on the sources of protein and fat used to displace carbohydrates.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Helmut Newton }

related { Every five years the federal government updates its dietary guidelines for Americans. This year, with most Americans overweight or obese and at risk of high blood pressure, policymakers are working to reinvent the familiar food pyramid and develop advice that is simple and blunt enough to help turn the tide. | Washington Post | Continue reading }

The Windmills of Your Mind, music written by Michel Legrand, with Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman; lyrics by Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman; from the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair.

Noel Harrison performed the song for the film score. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1969 (Harrison’s father, the British actor Rex Harrison, had performed the previous year’s Oscar-winning “Talk to the Animals”).

The opening two melodic sentences were adapted from Mozart’s second movement from his Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Lyrics and guitar chord transcription | Listen | Download }

Okay, we’ll be starting in a few moments… just waiting for the drugs to take effect. (…)
 I mentioned that, earlier in the show, a drug joke - and I hate to do that, because it creates a mess, and I’m not into drugs any more. I quit completely, and I hate people who are still into it.

{ Steve Martin’s Monologue | Saturday Night Live Transcript | Continue reading }

photo { Bruce Davidson, Coney Island, 1959 }

We make a mistake when we think of cancer as a noun. It is not something you have, it is something you do. Your body is probably cancering all the time. What keeps it under control is a conversation that is happening between your cells, and the language of that conversation is proteins. Proteomics will allow us to listen in on that conversation, and that will lead to much better way to treat cancer.

{ Edge | Continue reading }

{ mattwolf.info | Continue reading }

Adopt a growth mindset. Students who believe that intelligence and academic ability are fixed tend to stumble at the first hurdle. By contrast, those with a ‘growth mindset’, who see intelligence as malleable, react to adversity by working harder and trying out new strategies. (…)

Sleep well. Study found that lack of sleep impairs students’ ability to learn new information. (…)

Forgive yourself for procrastinating. Everyone procrastinates at some time or another – it’s part of human nature. The secret to recovering from a bout of procrastination is to forgive yourself. (…)

Take naps. Numerous studies have shown that naps as short as ten minutes can reduce subsequent fatigue and help boost concentration. It’s only recently, however, that researchers have turned their attention to napping technique. Dayong Zhao and colleagues recruited 30 undergrad regular nappers and tested whether it makes any difference if you nap lying down or leaning forward with your head rested on a desk. Zhao’s team found that a post-luncheon twenty-minute nap in either position was associated with increased performance at an auditory oddball task (listening to a series of tones and spotting the odd one out), but only napping lying down was associated with an increased P300 brain wave signal during the task recorded via EEG – a sign of increased mental alertness. (…)

Believe in yourself. Self-belief affects problem-solving abilities even when the influence of background knowledge is taken into account.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

According to Bockus’s Gastroenterology, a standard medical text from 1964, “the ideal posture for defecation is the squatting position, with the thighs fixed upon the abdomen.” (…)

There’s now some empirical evidence for the claim that defecation posture affects your body. The more extreme assertions about squatting—that it prevents cancer, for example—remain untested. But when it comes to hemorrhoids—a painful swelling of the veins in the anal canal that affects half of all Americans—new research suggests that you may want to get your butt off the toilet.

Before we dive into the data, let’s review the mechanics of going to the bathroom. People can control their defecation, to some extent, by contracting or releasing the anal sphincter. But that muscle can’t maintain continence on its own. The body also relies on a bend between the rectum—where feces builds up—and the anus—where feces comes out. When we’re standing up, the extent of this bend, called the anorectal angle, is about 90 degrees, which puts upward pressure on the rectum and keeps feces inside. In a squatting posture, the bend straightens out, like a kink ringed out of a garden hose, and defecation becomes easier.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

{ Two glasses of water before meals the one true key to weight loss, say scientists. | Full story }

photo { Imp Kerr }

What is a healthy mind? Is it simply the absence of symptoms and dysfunctions, or is there something more to a life well lived? How can we embrace the diversity of behavior, temperament, values, and orientation across a wide range of cultures and still come up with a coherent definition of health? Just as some scientists are reluctant to define the mind, some people say that we shouldn’t define mental health at all, because it is authoritarian to do so—we shouldn’t tell others how to be healthy. But how do we account for the universal striving for happiness?

Positive psychology has offered an important corrective to the disease model by identifying the characteristics of happy people, such as gratitude, compassion, open-mindedness, and curiosity, but is there some unnamed quality that underlies all of these individual strengths?

Over the last twenty years, I’ve come to believe that integration is the key mechanism beneath both the absence of illness and the presence of well-being.

Integration—the linkage of differentiated elements of a system—illuminates a direct pathway toward health. It’s the way we avoid a life of dull, boring rigidity on the one hand, or explosive chaos on the other. We can learn to detect when integration is absent or insufficient and develop effective strategies to promote differentiation and then linkage. The key to this transformation is cultivating the capacity for mindsight.

{ Daniel SiegelPsychotherapyNetworker | Continue reading }

photo { Scarlett Hooft Graafland }

Tracking your internal clock may be as easy as plucking a few strands of hair, according to a new study.

The research found that hair follicles hold a record of the gene activity that influences when we wake and when we sleep. The results could be used to diagnose and study sleep disorders and conditions like jet lag.

Whether you’re a night owl or a morning lark, your sleep-wake cycle is controlled in large part by genes called clock genes. These genes vary their activity throughout the day, setting the internal clock that drives our circadian rhythms.

The first human clock gene was discovered almost 10 years ago, but isolating the genes efficiently enough to study sleep-wake cycles in real time has proved difficult. When the genes are active, they transcribe their DNA into RNA, the first step in producing various proteins that essentially carry out a gene’s instructions and, in this case, influence circadian rhythms. The RNA can be found in cells all over the body, from white blood cells to the lining of the mouth, but techniques for extracting it from these cells proved unreliable.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

Do you sleep like a baby? You may have your thalamus to thank, according to research that suggests this brain region helps people sleep through bumps in the night.

To discover why some people can sleep through noise while others awake at the faintest disruption, Jeffrey Ellenbogen and colleagues at Harvard Medical School used electrodes to monitor the brain activity of 12 people while they slept in a pitch-black, soundproof room. They then repeated the experiment, this time playing 14 sounds, such as a toilet flushing and street traffic, at 30-second intervals, increasing the volume until the volunteers’ brainwaves showed signs of arousal.

Sleepers who tolerated louder sounds before waking showed a higher frequency of “sleep spindles” – short bursts of activity of specific wavelength – during non-REM sleep than those who woke more easily.

The spindles arise in the brain’s sensory relay centre in the thalamus.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

• If a vast conspiracy were afoot to create an entire civilization of insomniacs, it would operate pretty much the way our society does now.

• Relentless stress in the high-tech workplace of the 21st century is taking an unprecedented toll on our emotional lives and our capacity to wind down at the end of the day.

• Our widespread fear of and disregard for darkness -both literal and figurative- may be the most overlooked factor in the contemporary epidemic of sleep disorders.

{ A Nation of Insomniacs: The Lost Art of Sleep | Psychotherapy Networker | Continue reading }

photo { Kyoko Hamada }

Cash register and other receipts may expose consumers to substantial amounts of bisphenol A, a hormone-mimicking chemical that has been linked with a host of potential health risks, according to a trio of recent studies. Each study offers preliminary evidence that a large number of retail outlets print sales receipts on certain types of heat-sensitive, or thermal, paper that use BPA as a color developer.

Two of the new studies also showed that the BPA coating easily rubs off onto fingers. And one found evidence that BPA from receipts may penetrate skin.

{ ScienceNews | Continue reading }

The Gulf Oil Spill Disaster

First, let’s begin with the “good” news. The ecological destruction that was first feared is not going to be as bad as once thought, for a variety of reasons. It is not good, but it is not the unmitigated disaster it could have been.

Edward Overton, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Environmental Sciences, LSU, is an expert on oil spills. He was at the Exxon Valdez. The Exxon Valdez (EV) was a big, black, thick tide of oil. The Deepwater Horizon is a much bigger spill: every ten days the amount of the EV spill spewed into the Gulf, from April 20 to July 15. Professor Overton spoke mostly for the record. He is very much a concerned environmentalist, and he is also a very serious scientist.

He reminded us that the Louisiana wetlands are a very important part of the ecological system of the Gulf of Mexico. Oversimplifying, they are the nutrient source for the small animal world which feeds the larger. Without the wetlands much of the Gulf ecosystem dies. If they were destroyed, they would not come back very easily, as without their very root system the land would erode away. Bluntly, oil kills wetlands if it gets into it.

There are only three ways to get rid of an oil spill. You can mechanically remove it, chemically remove it, or burn it. They used all three methods. But not fast enough. The Obama administration dithered while Rome burned. (This is not from Overton.) (…)

What should have been a no-brainer decision to use the Dutch ships was delayed for whatever reason. What should have been a no-brainer decision to waive the water purity rules was delayed beyond reason. My personal opinion. Whoever participated in that decision should be allowed to return to the private sector. They only made the problem of the spill worse. They should not be allowed near the decision-making process again.

Please note, this is no defense of British Petroleum. As noted below, they were extremely negligent, and deserve the costs and more. We just don’t need to compound stupid, incompetent, irresponsible (choose several more adjectives, some with color) corporate acts with dumb government ones.

There is a chemical called Corexit that is a product line of solvents primarily used as dispersants for breaking up oil slicks. It is produced by Nalco Holding Company. Corexit was the most-used dispersant in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, with COREXIT 9527 having been replaced by COREXIT 9500 after the former was deemed too toxic. Oil that would normally rise to the surface of the water is broken up by the dispersant into small globules that can then remain suspended in the water.

In hindsight, Overton thinks the use of Corexit was the correct thing to do. It probably saved the wetlands. But it is not without its own bad effects.

When you put Corexit on an oil slick, the surface oil disperses but also drops into the ocean about 15 feet. While Corexit (basically a type of soap) itself is not toxic (an admittedly controversial claim), the resulting dispersed oil is quite toxic. Fish swimming through it can be and are harmed. Marine mammals like porpoises are seriously harmed when they rise to breathe through an oil slick.

But here is the good news. It turns out that there are about the equivalent of two Exxon Valdezes a year from natural oil seepage from the floor of the oceans. The Gulf has an ecosystem of bacteria that eat that oil, which are then eaten again by plankton. To those bacteria, dispersed oil is filet mignon. They thrive and grow rapidly, turning that toxic waste into nutrients, which are absorbed by the plankton. The bacteria keep on growing until they lose their source of nutrition (the toxic oil) and then die out over time. Note: once absorbed by the bacteria, the oil is no longer toxic. There are no toxic minerals like mercury introduced into the ecosystem.

{ John Mauldin | Continue reading | PDF }

update:

I forget where I read this tip, but I have used it many times with great success. It starts with the notion that most women change their hair all the time. You might not notice, but a woman is very aware of these small deviations in everything from highlights to length to fluffiness. I’m probably not using the official hairdresser terms, but you get the idea. It’s different every day, at least according to the woman who owns the hair. To me, hair is either brown or it isn’t, and you either have some or you don’t. The rest is beneath my radar.

So here’s the tip. When you see a woman who you haven’t seen for a few weeks, you can pay her this compliment, and it works every time. Say, “You’ve done something with your hair. I like it.”

The woman will feel flattered that you noticed anything beyond her hair’s very existence and its degree of brownness. She might even wonder if you can be her new gay friend. But she will confirm that something is indeed different and offer many details about how it got there. You can use that time to think about your hobbies.

So far, this idea isn’t mine. I just forget where I stole it from. But I did add a twist to it that I will claim credit for. You know how embarrassing it is when you introduce yourself to someone you think is a stranger at a gathering and the person says, “We met a few weeks ago.” This is a sure tipoff that you consider the person non-memorable. If the person is a woman, you can use the hair trick to save yourself. Simply look surprised that you have met before then pretend you are having a flash of recognition, and add “Of course! But your hair is different today. It threw me.”

Now you have flipped it from being the idiot who can’t remember a new person for a few weeks into a person who has such intense memory for detail that any deviation is the same as a mask.

Yes, I’ve used that method often. I can’t say it works every time, but it sure beats my old method of arguing that I must look like some other person and I just arrived in town an hour ago.

{ Scott Adams }

photo { Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC }

[$12 a pack] It’s been six weeks since New York’s state government raised the cigarette tax to $4.35 a pack, and guess what? Cigarette sales have fallen by 35 percent. (…)

The crazy-high price of cigarettes here is sending New Yorkers over the state border to, say, Pennsylvania, where a pack of cigarettes can be obtained for around $5, or Jersey, where they’re $7ish. People are also heading to Indian reservations, where, according to a friend who does exactly this, you can get a carton for $22, and where sales have apparently gone up a whopping 300%.

{ Village Voice | Continue reading }

photo { Petra Collins }

Twenty years ago, a green laser would set you back $100,000 and occupy a good-sized dining room table. Today, you can buy a green laser pointer the size of a ball point pen for $15.

These devices create coherent green light in a three step process. A standard laser diode first generates near infrared light with a wavelength of 808nm. This is focused onto a neodymium crystal that converts the light into infrared with a wavelength of 1064nm. In the final step, the light passes into a frequency doubling crystal that emits green light at a wavelength of 532nm.

All this can easily be assembled into a cigar-sized package and powered by a couple of AAA batteries.

The result are devices generally advertised to have a power output of 10mW.

Today, Jemellie Galang and pals from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland say they’ve found worrying evidence that the output of some green laser pointers is much higher and more insidious. They describe one $15 green laser pointer that actually emits ten times more infrared than green light.

Galang and co are under no illusion as to the potential consequences of this. “This is a serious hazard, since humans or animals may incur significant eye damage by exposure to invisible light before they become aware of it,” they say.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

“Yoga is a good thing, so you tend to push further than you would in a sport where you are actually more attuned to injury and afraid of injuries,” said Dr. Michelle Carlson, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan who specializes in arms and hands. She said she recently “saw four women in a row in my office with hand injuries from yoga.”

Nobody seems to keep careful track of the numbers. The most recent estimate comes from the United States Product Safety Commission, which tracks sports injuries: it listed 4,450 reported yoga injuries in 2006, up from 3,760 in 2004. But Dr. Carlson and several others said they had seen large increases lately, as yoga became more popular. “I have been doing this for 20 years, and I didn’t see yoga injuries 20 years ago,” Dr. Carlson said. “I can see a couple of injuries a week.”

Training for yoga teachers can vary, and classes are so large in some studios that instructors do not pay enough attention to everybody. In New York, many people approach yoga with a no-pain, no-gain mind-set, with predictable results.

Then there is the age factor: you see a fair share of middle-aged people twisting and bending and lunging, and I know from experience that a 40-something body is temperamental.

Back injuries are quite common. Positions like upward dog and cobra, requiring backbends, can aggravate the spine. Others that call for elongating the back, like seated forward bend, can wreak havoc on discs. Rotator cuffs and wrists can get battered during plank poses and chaturangas, which are like push-ups, while knees are susceptible to the lotus position, hero’s pose and the warrior positions.

The headstand — a more advanced move — is an equal opportunity offender. If done improperly, it can roil your back, neck, shoulders and wrists.

Then there are the freak injuries. A woman in crow pose fell over and broke her nose.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Anthony Suau }

Female Viagra is ineffective at improving sexual desire in women, so FDA doesn’t approve the medicine.

After much review and public controversy, the FDA met this week and determined that flibanserin, a new medication that was hoped to be an effective treatment for female sexual arousal disorder, did not significantly improve symptoms of the disorder, and ruled against approving the medication.

Female sexual arousal disorder, also known as hypoactive sexual desire disorder, (HSDD) is a relatively new diagnosis. It was historically known as frigidity, and more attention was given to the concept of the lack of sexual desire or arousal as a biological disorder potentially treatable with pharmaceuticals. When Sildenifil (Viagra) appeared on the market with enormous publicity and profit for the pharmaceutical industry, a lack of desire in women came under consideration as a potentially treatable disease.

HSDD is often defined by a persistent lack of desire or a lack of sexual fantasies. Women with HSDD rarely initiate sex or seek sexual satisfaction. It is thought that as many as 10 percent of American women may suffer from HSDD.

Possible causes may include stress, relationship problems, anger, or a lack of intimacy with sex partners.  There are also known medical causes including side effects of certain medications including some antidepressants, blood pressure medications, and birth control pills. Menopause may also decrease sexual arousal and stimulation, as well as depression.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

The female-libido-boosting drug flibanserin proved marginally effective in two trials reported by the FDA on Wednesday. Still, its side effects may outweigh whatever benefits it offers: 15 percent of participants stopped taking the drug due to dizziness, nausea, anxiety, or insomnia. Why does it seem like every drug causes the same side effects?

{ Slate | Continue reading }

Lithium has been established for more than 50 years as one of the most effective treatments for manic depression, clinically termed bipolar disorder.

However, scientists have never been entirely sure exactly why it is beneficial.

Now, new research from Cardiff University scientists suggests a possible mechanism for why Lithium works, opening the door for better understanding of the illness and potentially more effective treatments.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Anthony Suau }

{ Nietzsche’s ‘last days’ in Weimar in the summer of 1899. Whether these clips are authentic has been debated. }