Statins

I went to see my "doctor" (Jay the nurse) the other day to get a prescription renewed (sleeping pills). He has long been hassling me for a copy of my lipid profiles. I get them done every couple years through my job. So I brought them in. My total cholesterol was a bit high at 237. The Mayo Clinic rates 240 as too high; other groups say 200; but in any case, it's not exactly freakout high. But he tut-tutted. "Let's see, you're 42? Well, it's time to get you started on statins." As if it's just what you do at 42.

Jay the nurse is an idiot, always has been, but I go to him because he just gives me my damn prescriptions without major hassles. This, however, really irked me. I'm 42 and in otherwise good health, and he wants to put me on a liver-altering drug with ambiguous benefits, numerous side-effects, and unguessable long-term negative consequences, for the rest of my life.

"No, thanks. I'll lose some more weight." "Won't do any good," he says absently, not looking up. Jay really is an idiot. "No," I say flatly, "I won't take statins." Now he looks up. Awkward pause. "Ok," he says. "Uh, can I listen to your heart?"

He says I have a murmur, previously unnoticed by anyone, oddly enough. Maybe he didn't factor in the anger-fueled adrenaline pumping into it. I'm trying to be worried about that murmur, but I've never noticed it on thirty-mile bike rides or pressing 80-pound dumbbells. I don't feel like I'm about to drop dead. And I'm not taking statins.

Statins lower "bad cholesterol" (LDL), produced in the liver, by altering liver function. They are also anti-inflammatory and do many other things, intended and unintended. There is a string of theories going back to the 50s that high cholesterol causes arteriosclerosis, or heart disease. The theory, which has gone through several incarnations, is clearly not based entirely on science. It's always been a facile answer to a complex question. There is a society of researchers that oppose it entirely [1], and the ever-lucid Gary Taubes explains the basic grounds for skepticism. [2]

But this "lipid hypothesis" gained so much traction that Big Pharma saw enormous profit potential. Statins lower LDL cholesterol, indisputably, and are now the second most commonly prescribed medicine behind psychiatric meds. As a bazillion-dollar profit center, they have been marketed to doctors with unparalleled vigor. And clearly this marketing has been successful. They were first approved for the treatment of heart attack victims with advanced heart disease. Now they are prescribed to healthy 40-somethings. It's been seriously proposed that they be sold with hamburgers, as a sort of antidote to fast food. [3] They'll start putting them in our drinking water any day now.

I'm not giving medical advice here, but am advocating self-education. Google around and you'll see that, whatever Big Pharma may say, statins carry serous risks that are gradually being exposed, including an increased risk of diabetes [4, 4a], testosterone suppression [5], and long-known problems like muscle myopathy, memory loss and other neural issues, liver toxicity (of course), and various bowel and flu-like symptoms. I like this real-world perspective from an Amazon commentator:

While doctors will tell you they've rarely seen anyone with side effects from statins, among my own circle of middle-aged friends, I know 3 who've had serious problems with their livers, one who had some muscles permanently destroyed, one--a usually energetic tennis player-- who felt, for the few months he took statins, as though he had the flu, and could barely go to work-- and one who was left with ringing in the ears and a facial tic. All of these are listed as side effects of statins, as Kendrick points out. [6]

Compounded with the downsides, the actual benefits are ambiguous. Studies of benefits have been tainted by money, and surveys of studies reveal that while statins may help elderly patients with advanced coronary heart disease (CHD), there is no evidence that all the statins being given to the rest of us, even to people at high risk for CHD, actually reduce mortality at all. [7, 8, 9] And even when helpful, it may be due to statins' anti-inflammatory benefits (like aspirin) rather than its impact on lipids. [10]

Statins are big money for Big Pharma, which spends billions on "physician education" (marketing); in fact, twice as much as it does on research, "US$61,000 in promotion per physician during 2004" ($57.5 billion total). [11] Remember who is educating your physician and make an informed choice for yourself. Heart disease rates are still insanely high, in spite of us gobbling up statins. I think I'll take my chances with an old-school remedy: diet and exercise.

Neurotypical Envy

(Warning, this an unusually personal post . . .)

I heard a feature on NPR driving home the other day about an autistic woman named Lisa Daxer, who blogs at Reports from a Resident Alien. She discusses both in the NPR story and extensively on her blog the differences between neurotypicals and people with autism and similar handicaps. She describes her autistic self as having "a weird brain." A neurotypical (her own great term) is "anyone who doesn't have a weird brain, someone in the middle of the neurological bell curve." Her atypicality is multiplex, but most challenging is her lack of social ability. She doesn't understand other people. Her brain is just wired differently. This isn't a lack of "social skills," something the study of Dale Carnegie and Miss Manners can correct. It's a lack of neurological capacity.

I really appreciated this young woman's honesty and advocacy. I'm not autistic, but I'm certainly not a neurotypical. I suffer from social anxiety and other neuroses that have defined my life, but which I've only come to recognize as neuroses quite late. Better late than never, but I'm still stunned that it took forty years for me to recognize that my challenging personality structure was something other than just a result of moral or religious failing.

Social anxiety, for me, is not shyness or social ineptness. I can be charming, if I need to, can even light up a party, if I need to. I just feel little need to. I'm not antisocial; I'm nonsocial.

But at the root of it, in fact, is anxiety. I find conversation to be full of potential conflict, embarrassment and shame, none of which I process well. I find social expectations a burden. Most conversations, sometimes even with people very close to me, seem like a walk through a minefield. I also handle stress poorly but project it regrettably well, which is (or I imagine it to be) a drain on those close to me, which in turn prompts me to withdraw when a neurotypical would be looking for social comfort. And when other people are stressed, well, I withdraw then, too.

Even casual social interactions are challenging. I'd rather take a fork in the eye than spend two hours making polite conversation at some work or church function. It seems like meaningless suffering.

Neurotypicals find conversation and socialization as natural as breathing. As Lisa Daxer says, "By default, they socialize. You have to actually interfere to stop neurotypicals from socializing." I find that incredible. I'll continue to challenge my anxiety, but I very much doubt I will ever have the neurotypical experience of compulsive and effortless socialization.

And I admit to being a bit jealous of that. Neurotypicals have super magical powers of sociability that are completely invisible to them, even though that sociability enables them to have a plurality of healthy relationships and take social risks that are personally and economically empowering. Their sociability defines their lives as much as my lack of it defines mine. They just have no idea.

But of course, my lack is only revealed by their abundance in numbers. If the bell curve were shaped differently, I'd be the neurotypical and they'd be struggling with the burden of hypersociality. O cruel averages.

Bigger Stronger Faster I

I freely write here what I like and know, but have not yet blogged on a serious hobby of mine in recent years, weight training. Partly because (like diet and nutrition) no one not already into it wants to read about it, and if you're into it, I have nothing new to tell you. But I believe everyone should lift weights, so read it or don't, but here we go.

When most people think of weight training, they think of bodybuilding. Bodybuilding is a competitive sport, in my lexicon, while weightlifting is just a form of exercise. Most people who weight train are not, would not, and could not be bodybuilders. They will not even put on much visible muscle. But even moderate weight training aids significantly in building and maintaining lean mass, keeping off fat, and reducing risk of injury during strenuous activity, among other benefits. I'll go into the benefits more in a later post. But first, about bodybuilding.

Conventional bodybuilding is big business and a sham. Open up any issue of Muscle & Fitness in the supermarket. The magazine is full of ridiculously huge guys talking about their exercise routines and endorsing myriad supplements. "Do this, take this, and you'll be like me."

Total rubbish. Most supplements (there are a couple exceptions) will do little or nothing for your average person, and even for elite athletes, their benefit is marginal. And if your average person spent 30 hours a week in the gym doing such extreme routines, they would become injured and overtrained in no time. And they still wouldn't get anything like that huge.

Mainstream bodybuilding has a few secrets that everyone on the inside knows but does not publicly discuss. The first is simply this: the amount of muscle mass you can develop is fixed by your genetics. We all have different body types. Some of us tend to be fat, others thin, and a few lucky dudes are just hugely muscled. They could never exercise a day and still you and I, training day and night, could never be as muscular as they are.

Robert Kennedy writes of training next to future champion bodybuilder Al Beckles many years ago. They were both doing the same exercise.

While exercising he was talking to a friend about where they were going that night, even pausing now and again to make a point. He was putting no effort into what he was doing. The weight he was using was pathetic. Al always trained like this. So here are the facts: I was using 180 pounds and had six solid years of training behind me. Al was using 35 in the same exercise with two years of training. My arms measured 15 1/2 inches. His measured 21 inches. All this was BS (before steroids) and it is a testament to the importance of genetics.

Genetics are one major reason Al Beckles looked unbelievable, and was still winning competitions, into his sixties.

However, Kennedy also mentions steroids. Now, there is a dirty secret. I'll tackle it next post.


I loved this picture of Al Beckles as a kid, found on the cover of a muscle mag, maybe the first I ever bought. He's about 60 here. Not your average grandpa.

The Revulsion Gene

I've commented before that I am a liberal sojourning in a land of conservatives. (My self-denial of liberalism is directed at specific ideologies, not disposition.) While there are certain conservative causes I support, as hard as I've tried, I cannot evince within myself those basic attitudes that actuate most conservatives, like respect for authority and antipathy for cultural change. I can feel a liberal's anger at unfairness and discrimination, but not a conservative's disgust at disrespect of tradition and the foreign.

Nick Kristof has a fascinating column today about the psychological basis of the liberal/conservative divide. After his Daily Me column (my take), he was contacted by psychiatrists who informed him that changing disposition and bias is not that simple:

Studies suggest that conservatives are more often distressed [than liberals] by actions that seem disrespectful of authority. . . .

Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.

The upshot is that liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses.

In other words, the brains of liberals and conservatives may just be wired differently. Some of us may lack the revulsion gene that would enable us to be proper conservatives. Kristof links to a "disgust test" that I plan to take (when not at work), to help gauge one's moral disposition and aptitude for liberalism/conservatism. I'll post my score.

The Happiness of Philosophers

Simon Critchley offers a view of happiness very different from that I gave a couple weeks back. He cites as his definition a quote from Rousseau:

If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.

Critchley explains the context of Rousseau's observation:

Rousseau is describing the experience of floating in a little rowing boat on the Lake of Bienne close to Neuchâtel in his native Switzerland. He particularly loved visiting the Île Saint Pierre. . . . On the way to the island, he would pull in the oars and just let the boat drift where it wished, for hours at a time. Rousseau would lie down in the boat and plunge into a deep reverie. How does one describe the experience of reverie: one is awake, but half asleep, thinking, but not in an instrumental, calculative or ordered way, simply letting the thoughts happen, as they will.

Critchley connects this view of happiness with Aristotle and the Greek philosophers, but to me it seems much more Buddhist than Greek (as several commenters also note).

I myself have never found attractive the eastern view that utterly empty consciousness is the pinnacle of happiness. I don't think of a vegetable as happy. Critchley's description of unordered consciousness is likewise unattractive. That would be animal happiness. We are people.

I do think that freedom from anxiety is a necessary preliminary to happiness, but it is not sufficient. As previously suggested, one also needs loving and altruistic relationships and purposive activities. That holds true even for those of us who love contemplative living and have low social needs. And while individual dispositions vary, I'm not convinced it's a whole lot more complex than that.

That doesn't make happiness easy. But it's not complex.

The Happiness of the Theoried Class

There are a blessed few who are so happy that they never reflect on the nature of happiness. I'm certainly not one of them. I'm a malcontent and think about happiness a lot. Of course, there are a lot of books on how to be happy, but I have no interest in junk psych or pep talks on positive mental attitude. I have no faith that there is some single, simple formula for perpetual bliss, though most happy folk certainly share some common denominators. For example, in one study those participants who watched the least TV were least likely to suffer depression. But cause and effect are very hard to determine.

Hard research on happiness comes to the basic conclusion that it is simple in theory and complex in execution. This much we all knew already. But thanks to my favorite columnist, David Brooks of the Times, this essay on the nature of happiness by Joshua Shenk just came to my attention, and I found it very compelling. (And yes, I just cited Shenk a couple of days ago, though I'd never even heard of him a week ago. Too strange.)

I won't summarize Shenk's essay (Brooks does), but basically happiness comes down to our capacity (both innate and developed) for resilience or adaptation in the face of disappointment or tragedy. Here is a long pull:

[A]daptations (also called “defense mechanisms”) are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person’s reality.

Vaillant [i.e., the article's expert] explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin. Vaillant’s taxonomy ranks defenses from worst to best, in four categories.

At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or “psychotic,” adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the “immature” adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. “Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal” people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.” The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship). . . .

Most psychology preoccupies itself with mapping the heavens of health in sharp contrast to the underworld of illness. “Social anxiety disorder” is distinguished from shyness. Depression is defined as errors in cognition. Vaillant’s work, in contrast, creates a refreshing conversation about health and illness as weather patterns in a common space. “Much of what is labeled mental illness,” Vaillant writes, “simply reflects our ‘unwise’ deployment of defense mechanisms. If we use defenses well, we are deemed mentally healthy, conscientious, funny, creative, and altruistic. If we use them badly, the psychiatrist diagnoses us ill, our neighbors label us unpleasant, and society brands us immoral.”

This is all interesting. But what is fascinating is that long-term "longitudinal" studies show that our deployment of defense mechanisms changes over the course of our lives, from more to less healthy and vice-versa, and upbringing, education, income, etc., the usual presumed predictors of happiness, determine relatively little and guarantee nothing. One study concluded that 50% of a person's happiness simply stems from one's dispositional "set-point" for happiness, with another 10% attributable to circumstances and 40% to factors more or less within our control (religiosity, healthy relationships, PMA, etc.).

That 40% is of course the critical bit, and in the end the science says that happiness is mostly about loving and altruistic relationships. “Happiness is love. Full stop,” Valliant says. “The only way to keep it is to give it away.”

Yea to Fish, Nay to Beef

This article in the NYTimes discusses the results of a new study on the long-term effects of beef and processed meat consumption. To no one's surprise, I should think, the results showed that high levels of consumption of beef and processed meat is linked to an increased mortality rate of "20 percent to nearly 40 percent." Very interesting as well was the finding, "In the study, the largest consumers of 'white' meat from poultry and fish had a slight survival advantage."

The article also mentions the results of other studies on the consumption of fish:

[F]ish contains omega-3 fatty acids that have been linked in several large studies to heart benefits. For example, men who consume two servings of fatty fish a week were found to have a 50 percent lower risk of cardiac deaths. . . . Data from one million participants in the European Prospective Investigation Into Cancer and Nutrition trial found that those who ate the least fish had a 40 percent greater risk of developing colon cancer than those who ate more than 1.75 ounces of fish a day. Likewise, while a diet high in red meat was linked to an increased risk of prostate cancer in the large Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial, among the 35,534 men in the study, those who consumed at least three servings of fish a week had half the risk of advanced prostate cancer compared with men who rarely ate fish.

Similar health results were reported for women.

I do not eat a lot of red or processed meat, but I do eat a lot of poultry. I think I'm probably OK there. Likewise, I should eat less dairy fat, but I'm not too bad there either. But while I do take omega-3 supplements, I really ought to be eating more fish. There is of course some concern over mercury and other toxins present in seafood, but the prevailing opinion is that, unless consumed in unusual quantities, the health benefits of eating fish outweigh the risks.

You Want This Fat (Really)

Quick shoutout to an article today in the NYTimes about a kind of body fat we all need more of, called brown fat. This fat is highly metabolically active (i.e., it burns loads of calories), but it is only activated in certain conditions, principally by cold or "by catecholamines, hormones that are part of the fight or flight response" (see on adreneline, below). Babies have lots of the stuff, but adults much less or even none at all. Amount seems to be determined by genetics, and an individual's amount of brown fat doubtless factors in to their overall metabolic rate. That is, naturally obese people seem to have less than thin people, or in some cases, none. But useful research on this in just beginning.

Of course, a pill that stimulates brown fat would be brilliant. Scientists will be working on that, guaranteed. But one medicine that inhibits its action is beta blockers, taken for high blood pressure. The only substances known to stimulate it are epinepherine (adreneline) and ephedra/ephedrine.

Ephedra is just the natural form of the pharmaceutical ephedrine. Ephedra has been (irrationally) banned, but ephedrine can be purchased OTC in antihistamines. It is a mild stimulant, but one of the things it stimulates is brown fat, especially if taken with caffeine. The article says that ephedra/ephedrine and caffeine "have too many side effects to be used for weight loss," which as a general statement may be true. Again, they are mild stimulants. They may cause weight loss, but can also cause twitchiness or even anxiety. Think of the prototypical coffee (caffeine) and cigarette (nicotine) addict. Thin but jittery.

But the fact is, this has been known for years. Tens of thousands of physique athletes take an "EC stack" when cutting fat to boost metabolism and keep from loosing muscle. It's one of the only proven thermogenics. Likewise, green tea, another mild stimulant, has long been known to contribute to weight control. There are many reasons Asians traditionally are thin, but one factor is that they drink oceans of green tea.

This is not to advocate stimulants for weight loss, but just to say: science has once again succeeded in demonstrating what we've always known.

Good News for Your Prostate

Some very important research on prostate cancer screening and treatment was just concluded and published. NYT has a good writeup.

The fact is that if you get prostate cancer it will kill you, or not, at whatever stage it is diagnosed. Say a man has a PSA test today and it comes back positive.

It leads to a biopsy that reveals he has prostate cancer, and he is treated for it. There is a one in 50 chance that, in 2019 or later, he will be spared death from a cancer that would otherwise have killed him. And there is a 49 in 50 chance that he will have been treated unnecessarily for a cancer that was never a threat to his life. Prostate cancer treatment can result in impotence and incontinence when surgery is used to destroy the prostate, and, at times, painful defecation or chronic diarrhea when the treatment is radiation.

So, each year more than 180,000 men receive a diagnosis of prostate cancer, but of those only 3600 will truly benefit from the traumatic treatment. And there is no way to tell who those are.

The good news, then, is that it now appears pointless to get screened and treated for prostate cancer. You may be that one in fifty men who will benefit. But the odds are not high and the downside risks are very substantial.

And in fact, these studies are also significant for women with respect to mammograms and breast cancer:

Screening is not only an issue in prostate cancer. If the European study is correct, mammography has about the same benefit as the PSA test, said Dr. Michael B. Barry, a prostate cancer researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital who wrote an editorial accompanying the papers. But prostate cancers often are less dangerous than breast cancers, so screening and subsequent therapy can result in more harm. With mammography, about 10 women receive a diagnosis and needless treatment for breast cancer to prevent one death. With both cancers, researchers say they badly need a way to distinguish tumors that would be deadly without treatment from those that would not.

Update: There is a follow-up article in the NYT on the results of these studies that is a little more nuanced in interpreting them (for another counterpoint, see also here). Clearly further research may modify their conclusions. But it also summarizes the present results in clear and simple terms: "The [PSA] test is about 50 times more likely to ruin your life than it is to save your life."

Porcine Superbugs

Just a quick shoutout to a recent NYT column by Nick Kristof on MRSA "superbugs," staph infections that are resistant to antibiotics. These seem to be transmitted from pigs to humans and are near-epidemic among people who work with hogs. I was shocked to read that 18,000 people a year die from MRSA infections, more than die annually from AIDS. The pig MRSA problem is probably linked to the extreme overuse of antibiotics with industrial-farm pigs, as with all industrial livestock. After reading about "pig brain infections" a while back, I personally am feeling even more put off by pork. Risk of parasites is bad enough. It really is a high-risk meat.

Update: If Kristof's first column wasn't enough to put you off pork, this follow-up may do the trick.

Big Pharma Exposed Again

If that title sounds a little tabloid, well, I really wish this issue would hit the scandal rags. Few things fill me with more pure outrage than than Big Pharma's takeover of American medicine. Most doctors, many unwittingly, are Pharma pawns. Some of course are not. But how can you tell which from which?

This problem has long been known. But now, students and some faculty at Harvard are taking the ethical highground and demanding reform at their own institution.

In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects. Mr. Zerden later discovered something by searching online that he began sharing with his classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments. “I felt really violated,” Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. “Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn’t as pure as I think it should be.” . . . The students argue, for example, that Harvard should be embarrassed by the F grade it recently received from the American Medical Student Association, a national group that rates how well medical schools monitor and control drug industry money. . . . “Harvard needs to live up to its name,” said Kirsten Austad, 24, a first-year Harvard Medical student who is one of the movement’s leaders. “We are really being indoctrinated into a field of medicine that is becoming more and more commercialized.” David Tian, 24, a first-year Harvard Medical student, said: “Before coming here, I had no idea how much influence companies had on medical education. And it’s something that’s purposely meant to be under the table, providing information under the guise of education when that information is also presented for marketing purposes.”

Orthorexia

First, a word of explanation and apology. Almost all my reading right now falls into three categories: I read for work/school, I read in service of my hobbies and interests, and unless I'm on a media fast, I read a bit most days from the New York Times online. Some of all that turns up here, but if it seems like most of my general interest posts come from the NYTimes, well, that's about all the general reading I do.

Now, if that wasn't enough of a turn-off, I'll warn you that this post is really nothing special. Just an "I need a break so I'll blog something" post. And it's a little depressing. But this article from (you guessed it) the NYTimes gave me pause. I am, compared to most people, food obsessed, and on two levels. First, as I've blogged before, I love really great food. And when it comes to great food, nutrition is not a consideration. I'm very happy to eat 1500 calories of fat and sugar in one meal, if it's a truly great meal. Otherwise, as a National Weight Control Registry candidate, I am usually quite careful about what I eat the rest of the time. I have a definite personal list of "good" foods and "bad" foods.

But in spite of that, I believe strongly that moral categories like "good" and "evil" should not be applied to food. It's a good thing to eat "bad" food sometimes, if truly pleasurable and celebratory. (I speak nutritionally, of course. Lousy cooking and spoiled food are rightly called "bad" and should not be eaten).

Speaking of good or bad eating makes more sense. But as this article illustrates, obsessing about healthy eating can itself become a destructive eating disorder. We have to be especially careful around our kids, who are less able than adults to moderate or interpret hyperbolic comments we may make about "evil" foods.

Lisa Dorfman, a registered dietitian and the director of sports nutrition and performance at the University of Miami, says that she often sees children who are terrified of foods that are deemed “bad” by parents. “It’s almost a fear of dying, a fear of illness, like a delusional view of foods in general,” she said. “I see kids whose parents have hypnotized them. I have 5-year-olds that speak like 40-year-olds. They can’t eat an Oreo cookie without being concerned about trans fats.”

A Different Fast

Many religious traditions have physical fasts, and some people occasionally fast for purely for their heath. I personally do not believe there are any valid heath reasons, unless crashing your metabolism has hidden health benefits I cannot see. But integrative medicine guru Andrew Weil (that beard alone makes him some kind of guru) has long advocated the benefits of a "media break" or "news fast." He's written on this a lot, but one piece can be read here. Basically, news specifically but also other media can contribute significantly to stress and depression. An NYT article recently reported a study linking television watching and depression. One snippet:

“We looked at 8 to 10 activities that happy people engage in, and for each one, the people who did the activities more — visiting others, going to church, all those things — were more happy,” Dr. Robinson said. “TV was the one activity that showed a negative relationship. Unhappy people did it more, and happy people did it less.”

I have myself tried media fasts, news fasts in particular, and it really works for me. Reading the news simply expands my world of concerns. Some times a smaller, simpler world is what I really need.

Fine Food Causes Brain Damage

Or, brain damage causes you to eat fine food. While precise cause and effect is not clear, a new "benign" eating disorder has apparently been identified. Termed "gourmand syndrome," a new study "describes a preoccupation with food and a preference for fine eating."

Analysis of the clinical and anatomical data of 36 patients who displayed this behavior revealed, in 34, a strong association with lesion location in the right anterior part of the brain involving cortical areas, basal ganglia or limbic structures. Our finding provides further evidence of a correlation between right hemispheric damage, eating, and other impulse control disorders.

I admit that I'm becoming a bit of a foodie, so I'm not sure whether I should be worried at this or just amused.

Melancholy Nation

An interesting paragraph from a wellness article in Outside, which parallels my experience. Our passive lifestyles are extremely detrimental to our mental health. It's one of the reasons I've come to believe that constantly engaging in creative activity is essential to well-being.

We're a nation of depressives. According to Randolph-Macon College behavioral neuroscientist Kelly Lambert, author of Lifting Depression (2008), we're ten times more likely than our grandparents to suffer from the blues. The clinical blues, that is—not the my-girlfriend-dumped-me sort. Why? We've abandoned physical interactions with our environment. "A lot of our mental illnesses are about the perception that we have no control," says Lambert. She proposes that, thanks to our affinity for computers and drive-throughs, we don't engage the brain's "effort-driven rewards circuit" enough. Our ancestors made plans—"build shelter; plant potato; kill elk"—and executed them with well-evolved hands. It's called controlling your envi­ronment. When we do this, our brains reward us with dopamine. But these days we've stopped using our hands for much beyond punching buttons. So curing your mood may mean putting down your BlackBerry and pulling on some work gloves. A few suggestions: Grow a tomato plant. Be your own bike mechanic. Catch a fish. Clean it and eat it. Learn guitar. Call next in pickup basketball. Just don't lose—if you don't execute your plan correctly, well, you don't get the dopamine.

Eat Fiber, Pump Iron

NYT has two good articles out that vindicate yet again two of my primary principals of good health. The first article reports findings that diabetics on a low glycemic index (GI) diet have a lower instance of heart disease than those on the standard whole grain (higher GI) diet, among other health benefits. I've been convinced for some time that the best diet for weight control and optimal health is a low GI diet. The second article reports findings that, "People with more lean muscle mass may have an advantage when it comes to fighting cancer," and may even have lower risk for some cancers. This I had not heard, but again, I know maintaining lean muscle mass as we age is critical to remaining healthy and vigorous. Exhibit A: Jack Lalanne at 90!

An Anti-Frailty Pill for Seniors?

A real holy grail for medical researchers is to find a way to safely restore the declining levels of growth hormones that attend aging. Dropping levels of testosterone and HGH result in a decrease of muscle mass, which can result in frailty among the elderly. This in turn leads to loss of mobility and independence, as well as to accidents (falls) and to other health issues. Muscle mass and mobility can be maintained or restored through physical training, but most people won't do it.

If this research continues to be successful, there may be a "muscle pill" in our future.

Researchers at the University of Virginia Health System report that a daily single oral dose of an investigational drug, MK-677, increased muscle mass in the arms and legs of healthy older adults without serious side effects, suggesting that it may prove safe and effective in reducing age-related frailty. Published in the November 4, 2008 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, the study showed that levels of growth hormone (GH) and of insulin-like growth factor I (IGF- I) in seniors who took MK-677 increased to those found in healthy young adults. The drug restored 20 percent of muscle mass loss associated with normal aging.

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