NOTE: This article is a few years old but is very much relevant now. Have people learned to disconnect from their digital devices yet? Live with more balance and digital detox to reboot your brain and your soul.Notice the effect that time online is having on your relationships and your productivity. Interactive technology has addictive properties.
..................
Stuart Crabb, a director in the executive offices of Facebook, naturally likes to extol the extraordinary benefits of computers and smartphones.
But like a growing number of technology leaders,he offers a warning:
log off once in a while, and put them down.
In a place where technology is seen as an all-powerful answer, it is increasingly being seen as too powerful, even addictive.
The concern, voiced in conferences and in recent interviews with many top executives of technology companies, is that the lure of constant stimulation — the pervasive demand of pings, rings and updates — is creating a profound physical craving that can hurt productivity and personal interactions.
“If you put a frog in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, it’ll boil to death — it’s a nice analogy,” said Mr. Crabb, who oversees learning and development at Facebook.
People “need to notice the effect that time online has on your performance and relationships.”
The insight may not sound revelatory to anyone who has joked about the “crackberry” lifestyle or followed the work of researchers who are exploring whether interactive technology has addictive properties.
But hearing it from leaders at many of Silicon Valley’s most influential companies, who profit from people spending more time online, can sound like auto executives selling muscle cars while warning about the dangers of fast acceleration.
“We’re done with this honeymoon phase and now we’re in this phase that says, ‘Wow, what have we done?’ ” said Soren Gordhamer, who organizes Wisdom 2.0, an annual conference he started in 2010 about the pursuit of balance in the digital age. “It doesn’t mean what we’ve done is bad. There’s no blame. But there is a turning of the page.”
At the Wisdom 2.0 conference in February, founders from Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Zynga and PayPal, and executives and managers from companies like Google, Microsoft, Cisco and others listened to or participated in conversations with experts in yoga and mindfulness.
In at least one session, they debated whether technology firms had a responsibility to consider their collective power to lure consumers to games or activities that waste time or distract them.
The actual science of whether such games and apps are addictive is embryonic. But the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, widely viewed as the authority on mental illnesses, plans next year to include “Internet use disorder” in its appendix, an indication researchers believe something is going on but that requires further study to be deemed an official condition.
Some people disagree there is a problem, even if they agree that the online activities tap into deep neurological mechanisms. Eric Schiermeyer, a co-founder of Zynga, an online game company and maker of huge hits like FarmVille, has said he has helped addict millions of people to dopamine, a neurochemical that has been shown to be released by pleasurable activities, including video game playing, but also is understood to play a major role in the cycle of addiction.
But what he said he believed was that people already craved dopamine and that Silicon Valley was no more responsible for creating irresistible technologies than, say, fast-food restaurants were responsible for making food with such wide appeal.
“They’d say: ‘Do we have any responsibility for the fact people are getting fat?’ Most people would say ‘no,’ ” said Mr. Schiermeyer. He added: “Given that we’re human, we already want dopamine.”
Along those lines, Scott Kriens, chairman of Juniper Networks, one of the biggest Internet infrastructure companies, said the powerful lure of devices mostly reflected primitive human longings to connect and interact, but that those desires needed to be managed so they did not overwhelm people’s lives.
“The responsibility we have is to put the most powerful capability into the world,” he said. “We do it with eyes wide open that some harm will be done. Someone might say, ‘Why not do so in a way that causes no harm?’ That’s naïve.”
“The alternative is to put less powerful capability in people’s hands and that’s a bad trade-off,” he added.
Mr. Crabb, the Facebook executive, said his primary concern was that people live balanced lives. At the same time, he acknowledges that the message can run counter to Facebook’s business model, which encourages people to spend more time online. “I see the paradox,” he said.
The emerging conversation reflects a broader effort in the valley to offer counterweights to the fast-paced lifestyle. Many tech firms are teaching meditation and breathing exercises to their staff members to help them slow down and disconnect.
At Cisco, Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology and strategy officer and its former head of engineering, a position where she oversaw 22,000 employees, said she regularly told people to take a break and a deep breath, and did so herself. She meditates every night and takes Saturday to paint and write poetry, turning off her phone or leaving it in the other room.
“It’s almost like a reboot for your brain and your soul,” she said. She added of her Saturday morning digital detox: “It makes me so much calmer when I’m responding to e-mails later.”
Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist who lectures about the science of self-control at the Stanford School of Medicine (and has been invited to lecture at the business school at Stanford), said she regularly talked with leaders at technology companies about these issues.
She added that she was impressed that they had been open to discussing a potential downside of their innovations. “The people who are running these companies deeply want their technology and devices to enhance lives,” said Dr. McGonigal. “But they’re becoming aware of people’s inability to disengage.”
She also said she believed that interactive gadgets could create a persistent sense of emergency by setting off stress systems in the brain — a view that she said was becoming more widely accepted.
“It’s this basic cultural recognition that people have a pathological relationship with their devices,” she said. “People feel not just addicted, but trapped.”
Michelle Gale, who recently left her post as the head of learning and development at Twitter, said she regularly coached engineers and executives at the company that their gadgets had addictive properties.
“They said, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that.’ Or, ‘I guess I knew that but I don’t know what to do about it,’ ” recalled Ms. Gale, who regularly organized meditation and improvisation classes at Twitter to encourage people to let their minds wander.
Google has started a “mindfulness” movement at the company to teach employees self-awareness and to improve their ability to focus.
Richard Fernandez, an executive coach at Google and one of the leaders of the mindfulness movement, said the risks of being overly engaged with devices were immense.
“It’s nothing less than everything,” he said, adding that if people can find time to occasionally disconnect, “we can have more intimate and authentic relationships with ourselves and those we love in our communities.”
Google, which owns YouTube, earns more ad revenue as people stay online longer. But Mr. Fernandez, echoing others in Silicon Valley, said they were not in business to push people into destructive behavior.
“Consumers need to have an internal compass where they’re able to balance the capabilities that technology offers them for work, for search, with the qualities of the lives they live offline,” he said.
“It’s about creating space, because otherwise we can be swept away by our technologies.”
Source:
July 23, 2012
Silicon Valley Says Step Away From the Device
By MATT RICHTEL
Silicon Valley Worries About Addiction to Devices - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/technology/silicon-valley-worries-about-addiction-to-devices.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Canadian Medicine: Pesticide punch
News and views from the editors of Parkhurst Exchange
Wednesday, 15 June, 2011
Pesticide punch
Wading through the produce aisles
If you think apples don’t taste like they used to, you’re probably right. The Environmental Working Group (http://www.ewg.org/foodnews/) has just updated its list showing pesticide levels in 53 types of produce, and apples – formally No. 4 of their “Dirty Dozen” – now weigh in at No. 1!
Researchers at Purdue University in Lafayette, IN, analyzed 51,000 pesticide residue tests done over 10 years (2000-2009) by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Federal Food and Drug Administration. 98% of the apples tested contained pesticides out of over 700 samples. And most of the fruit and veggies under scrutiny had been washed and peeled, in order to represent more realistic eating conditions.
Others that made the Dirty Dozen were celery, strawberries and peaches – which contained 57 different chemicals – along with greens such as kale, lettuce and hot peppers – treated with as many as 97 pesticides.
If we stick to Canada’s Food Guide we’d consume a minimum of five servings of Mother Nature’s bounty every day. By choosing these from the least contaminated foods we’d ingest less than 2 pesticides. However, picking them from the Dirty Dozen would up our daily pesticide intake to 14 different chemicals – some of which are associated with nervous system disorders, chronic problems including cancer, endocrine system dysfunction, and lower intelligence levels in kids – who may (along with those in the fetal stage) be the most vulnerable to the synthetic residues.
There’s also evidence that the phosphorus-rich fertilizers used in fields have contributed to the toxic blue-green algae blooms in our freshwater lakes, reported to cause vision loss and difficulty walking in some people who’ve been in contact with it, but that’s another story.
When organic produce isn’t readily available -- at the market, or due to budgetary constraints – these lists could be your best shopping companions.
Milena Katz
If you think apples don’t taste like they used to, you’re probably right. The Environmental Working Group (http://www.ewg.org/foodnews/) has just updated its list showing pesticide levels in 53 types of produce, and apples – formally No. 4 of their “Dirty Dozen” – now weigh in at No. 1!
Researchers at Purdue University in Lafayette, IN, analyzed 51,000 pesticide residue tests done over 10 years (2000-2009) by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Federal Food and Drug Administration. 98% of the apples tested contained pesticides out of over 700 samples. And most of the fruit and veggies under scrutiny had been washed and peeled, in order to represent more realistic eating conditions.
Others that made the Dirty Dozen were celery, strawberries and peaches – which contained 57 different chemicals – along with greens such as kale, lettuce and hot peppers – treated with as many as 97 pesticides.
If we stick to Canada’s Food Guide we’d consume a minimum of five servings of Mother Nature’s bounty every day. By choosing these from the least contaminated foods we’d ingest less than 2 pesticides. However, picking them from the Dirty Dozen would up our daily pesticide intake to 14 different chemicals – some of which are associated with nervous system disorders, chronic problems including cancer, endocrine system dysfunction, and lower intelligence levels in kids – who may (along with those in the fetal stage) be the most vulnerable to the synthetic residues.
There’s also evidence that the phosphorus-rich fertilizers used in fields have contributed to the toxic blue-green algae blooms in our freshwater lakes, reported to cause vision loss and difficulty walking in some people who’ve been in contact with it, but that’s another story.
When organic produce isn’t readily available -- at the market, or due to budgetary constraints – these lists could be your best shopping companions.
Milena Katz
Reply
Canadian Medicine: Pesticide punch
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
A vegan bodybuilding experiment: Joshua Knox
Published on Dec 5, 2012
www.tedxfremont.com A fateful blizzard on a drive to Tahoe led to a conversation about food and nutrition, which inspired bodybuilder Joshua Knox, a Google employee, to go vegan for a week. One week turned into a 1.5 year lifestyle experiment with bodybuilding and diet.Source:
A vegan bodybuilding experiment: Joshua Knox at TEDxFremont - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKX-gNv0AwU
Pharma groups hope for diet drugs binge - FT.com
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As Christmas overeating gives way to under-fulfilled new year diets, the pharmaceutical industry’s appetite has been whetted for a fresh surge in business.
After years of caution and setbacks, several drug companies are preparing to capitalise on what they hope will be a surge in sales from prescription medicines linked to the growing global trend of obesity.
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“It has been a very challenged category, but there is a feeling we have to do something about obesity with the realisation that it is a medical epidemic,” says Peter Tam, president of Vivus, a California-based biotechnology company. Last autumn it launched Qsymia, the first weight loss drug to win US regulatory approval in 13 years.
In the coming weeks, Arena, another West Coast biotech, is set to launch its drug Belviq after receiving authorisation. A third, Orexigen, is preparing to submit for fresh regulatory approval for its experimental medicine Contrave after previous rejections.
“There has been a very significant and rather sudden shift in the views of the regulator over the past year,” says Simos Simeonidis, senior biotech analyst with Cowen. “Companies had been laying off staff and putting products on hold. Now there has been a resurgence and a lot of investor interest.”
Weight loss drugs have long been viewed with suspicion by healthcare specialists both because of their limited efficacy and the risks of side effects – factors which continue to haunt the field. Qsymia’s weight loss impact is slightly more than 10 per cent and Belviq’s less than 6 per cent – both when tested in ideal conditions with strong medical supervision.
Surgery more effective
Alongside diet and exercise, popping a pill may appear to be the easiest and most painless way to lose weight, writes Andrew Jack. But recent studies suggest that intrusive surgery is a more effective – and potentially even more cost effective – approach.
Prescription medicines, let alone over-the-counter drugs, are a lucrative business, sold on the back of consumer demand to tackle rising levels of obesity. Yet the side effects and low efficacy leave many specialists unconvinced of their value.
With obesity rates continuing to rise, such approaches have rarely led to any significant and sustained amount of weight loss. Furthermore, it may be many years before medical complications appear, making insurers reluctant to pay for drugs. They often limit their use to those who are already severely overweight, by which time reversal may be still more difficult.
In such extreme cases, bariatric surgery to physically reduce the size of the stomach and cut the appetite has offered considerable promise. It has won endorsement by institutions including the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the UK government’s medical watchdog that frequently rejects medicines for not being cost effective.
Even less palatable experimental options – so-called “transpoosians” – are also demonstrating promise. They involve the transplant of faecal matter from other individuals to boost bacterial flora in the guts, which are now seen as important in determining obesity.
While surgery is costly, complicated and places pressures on cash-strapped hospitals, its long term impact could yet outweigh the vast amounts spent today on medicines with limited impact.
Meanwhile, Wyeth, now part of Pfizer, is still fighting claims of heart valve defects and other problems linked to Fen-Phen, a combination of diet drugs withdrawn in 1997 for which it earmarked reserves of $21bn to cover settlements. Regulators subsequently pulled Abbott’s drug Meridia, and – in Europe – both Servier’s Mediator and Sanofi’s Acomplia, which was linked to suicidal feelings.
Only one prescription weight loss drug has remained on the market in the US: Roche’s Xenical, approved in 1999 and also now sold over-the-counter by GlaxoSmithKline as Alli. It appears relatively safe, but only modestly effective and brings unpleasant side effects including oily stools. That has limited its commercial success and frustrated attempts by GSK to find a buyer.
Mr Tam suggests that fresh interest in diet drugs by US regulators began in 2007 with studies on the significant impact of bariatric surgery in reducing not only obesity but related mortality. In recent months, he says high-level scientific meetings coupled with public discussion led by Michelle Obama, the US first lady, may have proved important in urging a more receptive attitude towards medicines.
For now, larger western pharmaceutical companies remain reluctant, with little in their late-stage pipelines except for Novo Nordisk of Denmark, the specialist diabetes company. It is currently testing expanded use of its injectable treatment Victoza for weight loss.
Japanese companies have proved more active: Eisai partnered with Arena and Takeda with Orexigen. Mr Simeonidis suggests this may reflect that until recently the investments in weight-loss biotech companies were “a free option” given high scepticism and low valuations. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see more involvement from big pharma now.”
For now, Mr Tam says Vivus is rebuffing alliances. “We have preferred to shake off suitors and do it alone to maintain value for our shareholders.” But he foresees the prospect ahead of using direct-to-consumer advertising and a larger scale sales force to market Qsymia to doctors – something likely to require a big pharma partner.
The path will not prove easy. Vivus had to agree a tight monitoring programme with US regulators to track each user, notably to avoid the risk of its use by pregnant women, since Qsymia can cause birth defects. The more aggressively any of the new diet pills are marketed, the greater the risks of misuse, failure to ensure the drug is accompanied by diet and exercise and danger of consumer disappointment.
Gary Palmer, chief medical officer in the US for Eisai, which will co-ordinate Belviq’s launch for Arena, says: “We are still considering whether to use direct-to-consumer advertising. Our approach will start with specialists. This is about being responsible and educating the physicians.”
Concerns linger about safety. Sidney Wolfe, head of the health research group at Public Citizen, a US consumer watchdog that has fought approval of the new drugs, wrote recently: “Obesity is unquestionably a serious public health concern, but that doesn’t give the FDA licence to ignore the scientific evidence.”
European regulators, stung by their recent bad experiences with Acomplia and Mediator, remain sceptical and have so far not approved the newer drugs. And many health insurers in the US remain cautious about reimbursing a medicine with modest efficacy and only potentially very long-term benefits – leaving consumers to pay out of pocket.
Donny Wong, head of metabolic disorders at Decision Resources, a market research agency, predicts rising obesity will increase demand in the years to come. But he warns: “Expectations are really sky high. Patients are expecting at 55 years old to go back to their ideal weight at 20, with a 15-20 per cent loss that is unachievable. They will very rapidly become disappointed.”
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Pharma groups hope for diet drugs binge - FT.com
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Why Bodybuilding at Age 93 is a Great Idea: Charles Eugster at TEDxZurich - YouTube
Published on Nov 27, 2012
Of the recent changes that the human race has experienced, the increasing population numbers are especially dramatic and worrying coupled with the frightening great and continuous increase in obesity and the resultant diabetes pandemic. A particular amount of attention has been given to the rapid and continuing growth of longevity.
Yet our knowledge of the aging process is still very limited as what we observe is the result of a health-destroying lifestyle. Retirement creates invalids. Chronic disease is rampant in old age resulting in such enormous medical costs that should present trends continue, together with the diabetes pandemic, some countries could become bankrupt. Diabetes is already an international public health issue and inactivity is one of the biggest killers. The loss of wasted human potential and wealth is already immense.
Successful aging requires work, diet and exercise. The huge mental and physical potential of the aged remains unexplored. Bodies can now be rebuilt at any age and a new life started. Beauty kings and queens in the 80-year-old category or a beach body at the age of 94 are not impossible. We will all, regardless of age, have to take greater responsibility for our own health in order to confront the immense challenges confronting the human race.
Successful aging requires work, diet and exercise. The huge mental and physical potential of the aged remains unexplored. Bodies can now be rebuilt at any age and a new life started. Beauty kings and queens in the 80-year-old category or a beach body at the age of 94 are not impossible. We will all, regardless of age, have to take greater responsibility for our own health in order to confront the immense challenges confronting the human race.
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Source:
Why Bodybuilding at Age 93 is a Great Idea: Charles Eugster at TEDxZurich - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGgoCm1hofM
Monday, December 24, 2012
McDonald's Food Mummy Art Show - Update
McDonald's Food Mummy Art Show by Ben Campbell — Kickstarter
The project is to fund and enhance an art show featuring a wide variety of work created with and inspired by McDonald's Food. Conceptually, the reason behind the show is to comically highlight the parallels between Ancient Egypt, McDonald's Food, and Modern Society. Some of the more interesting pieces include a hamburger that is over a year old and a life sized mummy made of McDonald's food. Also I would like to incorporate different cultures based off of different fast foods like Taco Bell Aztecs, Pizza Hut Pompeii, and scurvy Pirates made from Long John Silver's.
A short explanation of the reasoning behind the show is as follows.
1. Ancient Egypt was preoccupied with achieving a form of immortality through odd customs such as constructing pyramids and mummification.
2. Modern society is preoccupied with achieving a form of immortality through odd customs such as celebrity status and the construction of corporations.
3. McDonald's is highly representative of American culture, even iconic.
6. And finally, if we don't learn to laugh at ourselves future generations are going to do it for us.
Currently I have two McDonald's food mummies completed and would like to make many more. Other works include preserved hamburgers in commercial plastic cases, McDonald's food skulls, and large scale paintings. The funds generated here will be used to purchase more materials and to pay for gas to haul everything from place to place. Since I am based in Texas, the first shows will be within the state with later shows taking place across the country. If you are interested in booking the show for your gallery or you have any questions, feel free to ask.
Just in case some of you are unsure or on the fence about supporting this project, I'll talk a bit more about myself and what I would hope to accomplish with this and more in the future.
At my core I'm a joker who likes to get people thinking, always have been, always will be. With this Ancient McDonald's Food art show I feel that so far I have done just that and can carry it much further as it and my career develops. I've noticed when people begin to take themselves less seriously and can experience the humorous connections between what were once considered harsh realities, they become open and aware of newer, more vibrant solutions. As such I would like to bring my brand of humor to fields such as pop, geek, and internet culture.
By funding this project you will also be helping me lay the foundation for other really cool endeavors that will more directly impact the world around us in a positive manner as well. Apart from art, sociology, and pop culture I'm really drawn towards engineering, computer science, and architecture. Some of my particular interests include constructing efficient and beautiful geodesic domes for habitation/agriculture, robotics for agriculture, video games that harness our creativity into real world solutions, and all manner of manufacturing.
Lastly I'd like to give away pretty much all of the funds I will have acquired throughout my life and let the people decide how to use them through a social network I'm working on to allow the best, most logical, realistic, and ethical solutions (regardless of who came up with them) to become funded and brought into reality. This idea I feel could truly harness the internet for the betterment of the world at large and addressing potential cataclysms in ways we would be hard pressed to do otherwise.
Any amount helps, even $1 but if you want to really help me out I have some fantastic pieces that would fit well with any serious art collector. So if you're interested check it out, grab a piece of my art, and enjoy the ride.
Also for those unfamiliar with Kickstarter, you will only be charged if the full funding amount is reached. It's all or nothing, so you don't have to worry about your money going towards a project that will fizzle out. And besides that I intend on pursuing and developing this project no matter what happens with this Kickstarter, it would just make things go a bit quicker.
Thanks for your time,
-Ben
The project is to fund and enhance an art show featuring a wide variety of work created with and inspired by McDonald's Food. Conceptually, the reason behind the show is to comically highlight the parallels between Ancient Egypt, McDonald's Food, and Modern Society. Some of the more interesting pieces include a hamburger that is over a year old and a life sized mummy made of McDonald's food. Also I would like to incorporate different cultures based off of different fast foods like Taco Bell Aztecs, Pizza Hut Pompeii, and scurvy Pirates made from Long John Silver's.
A short explanation of the reasoning behind the show is as follows.
1. Ancient Egypt was preoccupied with achieving a form of immortality through odd customs such as constructing pyramids and mummification.
2. Modern society is preoccupied with achieving a form of immortality through odd customs such as celebrity status and the construction of corporations.
3. McDonald's is highly representative of American culture, even iconic.
4. McDonald's food doesn't decompose if left to dry out. Seriously, just google it. As such archaeologists from the future will be digging this stuff up thousands of years in the future. Especially if something cataclysmic happens to our society.
5. The questions. What could that something cataclysmic be? How can we prepare for it? Do we still want to invest in distractions and brainwashing instead of real solutions and in each other?6. And finally, if we don't learn to laugh at ourselves future generations are going to do it for us.
Currently I have two McDonald's food mummies completed and would like to make many more. Other works include preserved hamburgers in commercial plastic cases, McDonald's food skulls, and large scale paintings. The funds generated here will be used to purchase more materials and to pay for gas to haul everything from place to place. Since I am based in Texas, the first shows will be within the state with later shows taking place across the country. If you are interested in booking the show for your gallery or you have any questions, feel free to ask.
Just in case some of you are unsure or on the fence about supporting this project, I'll talk a bit more about myself and what I would hope to accomplish with this and more in the future.
At my core I'm a joker who likes to get people thinking, always have been, always will be. With this Ancient McDonald's Food art show I feel that so far I have done just that and can carry it much further as it and my career develops. I've noticed when people begin to take themselves less seriously and can experience the humorous connections between what were once considered harsh realities, they become open and aware of newer, more vibrant solutions. As such I would like to bring my brand of humor to fields such as pop, geek, and internet culture.
By funding this project you will also be helping me lay the foundation for other really cool endeavors that will more directly impact the world around us in a positive manner as well. Apart from art, sociology, and pop culture I'm really drawn towards engineering, computer science, and architecture. Some of my particular interests include constructing efficient and beautiful geodesic domes for habitation/agriculture, robotics for agriculture, video games that harness our creativity into real world solutions, and all manner of manufacturing.
Lastly I'd like to give away pretty much all of the funds I will have acquired throughout my life and let the people decide how to use them through a social network I'm working on to allow the best, most logical, realistic, and ethical solutions (regardless of who came up with them) to become funded and brought into reality. This idea I feel could truly harness the internet for the betterment of the world at large and addressing potential cataclysms in ways we would be hard pressed to do otherwise.
Any amount helps, even $1 but if you want to really help me out I have some fantastic pieces that would fit well with any serious art collector. So if you're interested check it out, grab a piece of my art, and enjoy the ride.
Also for those unfamiliar with Kickstarter, you will only be charged if the full funding amount is reached. It's all or nothing, so you don't have to worry about your money going towards a project that will fizzle out. And besides that I intend on pursuing and developing this project no matter what happens with this Kickstarter, it would just make things go a bit quicker.
Thanks for your time,
-Ben
Coffee: a caffeinated chronicle
A brief history of coffee
According to legend, the first cup of coffee came into being in a most magical way. A goat-herd named Kaldi glimpsed the energizing effects of the unique, bright red berries in his flock and took it upon himself to test it out. Such revitalization inspired Kaldi to take the berries to a Muslim holy man. Scared, the holy man tossed them into a fire. Roasted beans were separated from the embers, ground, and dissolved in hot water, creating—you guessed it—the world's first cup of coffee.
Coffee beans are derived from several species of the Coffea shrub—most commonly C. canephora and C. arabica. These plants may grow up to 5 feet tall and produce beautiful glossy, dark green leaves. The leaves then ripen to yellow, red, and finally black. Coffea plants are native to Ethiopia, Sudan, and Kenya, and subsaharan Africa. Today, Brazil, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Colombia are the world leaders in coffee production, raising seedlings in nurseries before transferring them outdoors when they are between 6 and 12 months old.
Each berry contains two seeds. It may be surprising to you that these seeds are white. Only when roasted do we see—and smell—the recognizable coffee bean (what I thought were little balls of wood when I was younger). Roasting occurs when the internal temperature of the bean reaches 200º C (392º F), causing caramelization, or starch breakdown, which browns the simple sugars. Acids and oils within the bean weaken, creating its characteristic bitter flavor. Caffeol, one such oil, is generated at 200º C and is largely responsible for coffee's flavor.
The coffee buzz
As you know, the energizing effects of coffee are due to caffeine, this nifty little chemical:
As you know, the energizing effects of coffee are due to caffeine, this nifty little chemical:
In the plant world, caffeine is a natural pesticide, protecting Coffea, tea plants, and other foods from certain insects.
In the animal world, caffeine is a drug. A stimulant drug, to be precise.
Inside the body, the chemical adenosine circulates at very high levels. Adenosine is a nucleoside with two main roles:
1. Attached to a ribose sugar, it comprises one of the four constituents of the DNA backbone.
2. Attached to three phosphate groups, it exists as ATP, the energy currency of a living cell.
In addition to these roles, adenosine also acts as an inhibitory neurotransmitter, believed to play a role in suppressing arousal, promoting sleep, and even inducing torpor in hibernating animals. Levels of adenosine increase throughout the day, which may explain why we become increasingly sleepier with each hour after awakening.
Caffeine is unique because it is both water- and lipid-soluble, allowing it to pass the blood-brain barrier and enter the nervous system. In the brain, caffeine works to counteract, or antagonize, the effect of adenosine. Because caffeine and adenosine have similar chemical structures, caffeine (below, red) can bind to adenosine receptors without activating them. In other words, caffeine is a competitive antagonist of adenosine. In this way, the sleep-inducing effect of adenosine (below, white) is blocked, promoting our lovely "coffee buzz."
Caffeine has a half-life of ~5 hours, meaning that after 5 hours, half of the caffeine you ingested has been metabolized; after 10 hours, 1/4 of the caffeine is still there—hence potential for a sleepless night if consumed too late in the day.
MUST...HAVE...COFFEE...
Caffeine addiction is not difficult to attain. In response to blocked adenosine receptors, the body will make more. In turn, your body requires more caffeine to block the additional adenosine receptors. A person must drink more coffee, then, to obtain the same degree of wakefulness.
Effects of caffeine include:
• Increased heart and respiratory rate
• Enhanced fatty acid breakdown and promotes free fatty acids in the bloodstream
• Raised blood pressure
• Increased stomach acid
• Increased urination (a diuretic effect)
• With very high levels can cause a jittery feeling, nervousness, agitation, ringing in the ears, and release of adrenaline
Withdrawal symptoms include headache, irritability, difficulty concentrating, drowsiness, and pain in the stomach and joints. Keep in mind: while these symptoms appear within 12-24 hours of withdrawal, it should all be over after one to five days. Willpower is key!
Coffee may make you lazy?
A study published online Wednesday in Neuropsychopharmacology found that "worker" rats—those who naturally worked harder for reward—were more likely to avoid hard worker when treated with caffeine or amphetamine.
Cocker and colleagues from the University of British Columbia created a rat cognitive effort task (rCET) which allowed rats to choose between an easy or hard task—rats who completed the hard task were doubly rewarded with sugar pellets.
Those deemed "worker rats," when treated with caffeine or amphetamine, suddenly slacked off; conversely, "slacker rats" worked harder under amphetamine (but not cocaine).
Grad student Jay Hosking interprets these results in terms of human needs. "For some of us, coffee really does the trick for those long hours in the middle of the day, but for other people it makes them too jittery or aroused to concentrate on their work."
Cocker PJ, Hosking JG, Benoit J, and Winstanley CA (2012). Sensitivity to Cognitive Effort Mediates Psychostimulant Effects on a Novel Rodent Cost/Benefit Decision-Making Task. Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology PMID: 22453140
Is Exercise Harmful for Some People? | Healthland | TIME.com
For some healthy people, exercise may actually increase heart risk, according to a paper published this week in the journal PLoS One.
The review of six previous studies on exercise found that working out worsened at least one measure of heart risk — blood pressure, insulin level or levels of HDL cholesterol or triglycerides — for about 10% of people. About 7% of people declined on at least two measures.
The lead author of the paper, Claude Bouchard, a professor of genetics and nutrition at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University, told the New York Times that the finding was “bizarre.”
At the same time, the data, involving 1,687 people, showed that about 10% of people saw outsized gains in at least one measure of heart disease risk — some patients improved 20% to 50%. For other participants, exercise-related rewards ran the gamut, from none to some to significant benefits.
One of the authors of the study was on the committee that provided the scientific evidence underlying the government’s official exercise guidelines for Americans, which recommend at least 150 minutes per week of moderate activity.
The implication here is that the government’s physical activity guidelines are based on rather weak scientific data. The Times’ Gina Kolata writes:
The problem with studies of exercise and health, researchers point out, is that while they often measure things like blood pressure or insulin levels, they do not follow people long enough to see if improvements translate into fewer heart attacks or longer lives. Instead, researchers infer that such changes lead to better outcomes — something that may or may not be true.
Some critics have noted that there is no indication that those who had what Dr. Bouchard is calling an adverse response to exercise actually had more heart attacks or other bad health outcomes. But Dr. Bouchard said if people wanted to use changes in risk factors to infer that those who exercise are healthier, they could not then turn around and say there is no evidence of harm when the risk factor changes go in the wrong direction.
Still, the findings are no excuse not to exercise. For one thing, it’s still not clear why some people had adverse responses to working out. The results couldn’t be explained by how fit participants were (or later became), how strenuously they exercised, whether they were taking medications for blood pressure or cholesterol, or their age, race or gender. “I suspect the most important explanation here will be genomics,” Bouchard told the Boston Globe.
Researchers said it’s important to figure out who will benefit from exercise and who won’t, if we want to able to prescribe exercise individually for better health. “Identifying the predictors of such unwarranted responses and how to prevent them will provide the foundation for personalized exercise prescription,” they wrote.
But for healthy people, experts agree that exercise is a benefit overall. It improves mood, makes you stronger and preserves physical fitness as you age.
So, for now, the authors recommend that people continue exercising as before. If you’ve been sedentary and are starting a new exercise regimen, however, it would be a good idea to check in regularly with your physician to monitor measures of heart health.
The New York City Soda Ban, and a Brief History of Bloomberg’s Nudges
The New York City Soda Ban, and a Brief History of Bloomberg’s Nudges
Nothing like a tall, cool drink in the heat of summer, right? Not if it's a sugar-sweetened soda, and not if you're in New York City.
By Alice Park | @aliceparkny | May 31, 2012 | 7
Dorling Kindersley / Getty Images
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is hoping city residents will drink a lot less this summer — less soda, that is.
On Wednesday the famously public health-focused mayor proposed a ban on the sale of large-sized sugar-sweetened beverages — that includes sodas, sweetened teas and coffees, energy drinks and fruit drinks. If approved, the proposal, which is slated to take effect as early as next March, would prohibit restaurants, delis, sports arena vendors, movie theaters and food carts regulated by the city health department from selling sugary beverages in sizes larger than 16 oz. Fines for failing to downsize could be as high as $200.
The ban would apply to food service establishments selling bottled as well as fountain drinks; retailers would have to remove 20-oz. soft drink bottles from their shelves, and delis and restaurants offering self-service fountains wouldn’t be able to give customers cups larger than 16 oz. The ban wouldn’t affect convenience stores or grocery stores and wouldn’t apply to diet drinks, fruit juices, dairy-based drinks like milkshakes or alcoholic beverages.
“Obesity is a nationwide problem, and all over the United States, public health officials are wringing their hands saying, ‘Oh, this is terrible,’” Mr. Bloomberg told the New York Times. “New York City is not about wringing your hands; it’s about doing something.”
During his tenure, Bloomberg has done a lot, initiating several controversial public-health measures, many aimed at reducing obesity by encouraging people to adopt healthier lifestyles. Critics have disparaged him as Nanny Bloomberg for it, but many of the mayor’s sweeping policies have inspired policy makers across the country to do the same. Among his recent actions:
2002: Bloomberg banned public smoking in the city’s bars and restaurants, following the lead of cities like Aspen, Colo., Beverly Hills and San Luis Obispo, Calif., which were the first to bar patrons from lighting up in restaurants and other enclosed public places
2005: At the mayor’s urging, New York became the first city to force restaurants and other food vendors to phase out the use of artificial trans fats, which have been linked to obesity and heart disease. The initiative inspired other cities, including Philadelphia and San Francisco, to pass trans-fat bans of their own. Now entire counties and states are considering regulations that would take the fats out of their food.
2008: New York became the first city to pass a law requiring food service providers to post calorie counts on menus. Seattle and other cities subsequently passed similar laws, and a federal law requiring any restaurant chain with more than 20 locations to publish calorie counts on their menus went into effect this year.
2010: In his first swipe at the soda industry, Bloomberg proposed barring people from using food stamps to purchase sugary sodas. The U.S. Department of Agriculture rejected the proposal saying it would be too difficult to enforce.
2010: Bloomberg urged state legislators to pass a soda tax that would allow the state to collect an additional penny per ounce of sugared soda sold; it failed to pass.
2011: The mayor banned smoking in most outdoor areas in the city, including public parks, plazas and beaches. San Jose, Calif., adopted a similar ban this year, and Boulder, Colo., policy makers are also considering limiting smoking outdoors.
Salt is also on the mayor’s hit list. He wants packaged food makers and restaurants to reduce sodium by 25% in an effort to lower rates of high blood pressure and heart disease.
Improving New Yorkers’ health and eating habits has been one of Bloomberg’s signature missions as mayor. The city subways are plastered with public health messages, such as the graphic anti-obesity advertisements that show a sugary soda turning into fat as it’s poured into a glass. (In March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched its own series of graphic advertisements: a national anti-smoking campaign.)
Studies are mixed on whether drastic public-health measures like Bloomberg’s can actually change behavior. Some show that people consume less in restaurants where calorie counts are available, for example, than where they aren’t, while others show that people actually tend to consume more when provided with such information. And low-income populations, which tend to have higher rates of obesity and health problems to start with, appear to be the least affected by such changes.
Still, Bloomberg and the city’s health department cite New York’s rising life expectancy as proof that the measures are working.
Beverage makers, not surprisingly, are critical of the new proposal, calling it “zealous” in a statement. “There they go again,” Stefan Friedman, spokesman for the New York City Beverage Association, told the Associated Press.
“The New York City Health Department’s unhealthy obsession with attacking soft drinks is again pushing them over the top. The city is not going to address the obesity issue by attacking soda because soda is not driving the obesity rates.”
The Coca-Cola Company also defended its products, noting that their beverages contain calorie information. “The people of New York City are much smarter than the New York City Health Department believes,” it said in a statement. “We are transparent with our consumers. They can see exactly how many calories are in every beverage we serve…New Yorkers expect and deserve better than this. They can make their own choices about the beverages they purchase.”
Whether or not it’s responsible for the obesity epidemic, studies show that sugared beverages are a major source of extra calories that can contribute to weight gain.
The ban wouldn’t prevent a customer from ordering several small-sized sugary drinks, of course, or from helping themselves to refills at a fountain, but Bloomberg is hoping that at least at movie theaters and baseball stadiums, the inconvenience of carrying the additional cups will be enough to curb New Yorkers’ sugared drink habit.
The New York City Board of Health needs to approve the measure before it can take effect, which seems likely given the board’s support of the mayor’s previous public health efforts — and because all the members were appointed by Bloomberg. If the mayor has his way, residents and visitors to New York may soon be feeling thirsty for more.
Alice Park is a writer at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @aliceparkny. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/05/31/bloombergs-soda-ban-and-other-sweeping-health-measures-in-new-york-city/?iid=hl-article-mostpop1#ixzz1whfMN9JK
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The New York City Soda Ban, and a Brief History of Bloomberg’s Nudges | Healthland | TIME.com
Truth About Salt
Salt, We Misjudged You
Joon Mo Kang and Susie Choi
By GARY TAUBES
Published: June 2, 2012
Oakland, Calif.
THE first time I questioned the conventional wisdom on the nature of a healthy diet, I was in my salad days, almost 40 years ago, and the subject was salt. Researchers were claiming that salt supplementation was unnecessary after strenuous exercise, and this advice was being passed on by health reporters. All I knew was that I had played high school football in suburban Maryland, sweating profusely through double sessions in the swamplike 90-degree days of August. Without salt pills, I couldn’t make it through a two-hour practice; I couldn’t walk across the parking lot afterward without cramping.
While sports nutritionists have since come around to recommend that we should indeed replenish salt when we sweat it out in physical activity, the message that we should avoid salt at all other times remains strong. Salt consumption is said to raise blood pressure, cause hypertension and increase the risk of premature death. This is why the Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines still consider salt Public Enemy No. 1, coming before fats, sugars and alcohol. It’s why the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has suggested that reducing salt consumption is as critical to long-term health as quitting cigarettes.
And yet, this eat-less-salt argument has been surprisingly controversial — and difficult to defend. Not because the food industry opposes it, but because the actual evidence to support it has always been so weak.
When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.
“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”
While, back then, the evidence merely failed to demonstrate that salt was harmful, the evidence from studies published over the past two years actually suggests that restricting how much salt we eat can increase our likelihood of dying prematurely. Put simply, the possibility has been raised that if we were to eat as little salt as the U.S.D.A. and the C.D.C. recommend, we’d be harming rather than helping ourselves.
WHY have we been told that salt is so deadly? Well, the advice has always sounded reasonable. It has what nutritionists like to call “biological plausibility.” Eat more salt and your body retains water to maintain a stable concentration of sodium in your blood. This is why eating salty food tends to make us thirsty: we drink more; we retain water. The result can be a temporary increase in blood pressure, which will persist until our kidneys eliminate both salt and water.
The scientific question is whether this temporary phenomenon translates to chronic problems: if we eat too much salt for years, does it raise our blood pressure, cause hypertension, then strokes, and then kill us prematurely? It makes sense, but it’s only a hypothesis. The reason scientists do experiments is to find out if hypotheses are true.
In 1972, when the National Institutes of Health introduced the National High Blood Pressure Education Program to help prevent hypertension, no meaningful experiments had yet been done. The best evidence on the connection between salt and hypertension came from two pieces of research. One was the observation that populations that ate little salt had virtually no hypertension. But those populations didn’t eat a lot of things — sugar, for instance — and any one of those could have been the causal factor. The second was a strain of “salt-sensitive” rats that reliably developed hypertension on a high-salt diet. The catch was that “high salt” to these rats was 60 times more than what the average American consumes.
Still, the program was founded to help prevent hypertension, and prevention programs require preventive measures to recommend. Eating less salt seemed to be the only available option at the time, short of losing weight. Although researchers quietly acknowledged that the data were “inconclusive and contradictory” or “inconsistent and contradictory” — two quotes from the cardiologist Jeremiah Stamler, a leading proponent of the eat-less-salt campaign, in 1967 and 1981 — publicly, the link between salt and blood pressure was upgraded from hypothesis to fact.
In the years since, the N.I.H. has spent enormous sums of money on studies to test the hypothesis, and those studies have singularly failed to make the evidence any more conclusive. Instead, the organizations advocating salt restriction today — the U.S.D.A., the Institute of Medicine, the C.D.C. and the N.I.H. — all essentially rely on the results from a 30-day trial of salt, the 2001 DASH-Sodium study. It suggested that eating significantly less salt would modestly lower blood pressure; it said nothing about whether this would reduce hypertension, prevent heart disease or lengthen life.
While influential, that trial was just one of many. When researchers have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of them, they’ve continued to support Dr. Stamler’s “inconsistent and contradictory” assessment. Last year, two such “meta-analyses” were published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.” The second concluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”
The idea that eating less salt can worsen health outcomes may sound bizarre, but it also has biological plausibility and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, too. A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the
kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.
With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.
Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time. In the United States, for instance, it has remained constant for the last 50 years, despite 40 years of the eat-less-salt message. The average salt intake in these populations — what could be called the normal salt intake — was one and a half teaspoons a day, almost 50 percent above what federal agencies consider a safe upper limit for healthy Americans under 50, and more than double what the policy advises for those who aren’t so young or healthy. This consistency, between populations and over time, suggests that how much salt we eat is determined by physiological demands, not diet choices.
One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension, except for the fact that four of these studies — involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure — reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range. Effectively what the 1972 paper would have predicted.
Proponents of the eat-less-salt campaign tend to deal with this contradictory evidence by implying that anyone raising it is a shill for the food industry and doesn’t care about saving lives. An N.I.H. administrator told me back in 1998 that to publicly question the science on salt was to play into the hands of the industry. “As long as there are things in the media that say the salt controversy continues,” he said, “they win.”
When several agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, held a hearing last November to discuss how to go about getting Americans to eat less salt (as opposed to whether or not we should eat less salt), these proponents argued that the latest reports suggesting damage from lower-salt diets should simply be ignored. Lawrence Appel, an epidemiologist and a co-author of the DASH-Sodium trial, said “there is nothing really new.” According to the cardiologist Graham MacGregor, who has been promoting low-salt diets since the 1980s, the studies were no more than “a minor irritation that causes us a bit of aggravation.”
This attitude that studies that go against prevailing beliefs should be ignored on the basis that, well, they go against prevailing beliefs, has been the norm for the anti-salt campaign for decades. Maybe now the prevailing beliefs should be changed. The British scientist and educator Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin’s bulldog for his advocacy of evolution, may have put it best back in 1860. “My business,” he wrote, “is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.”
A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Independent Investigator in Health Policy Research and the author of “Why We Get Fat.”
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on June 3, 2012, on page SR8 of the New York edition with the headline: Salt, We Misjudged You.
THE first time I questioned the conventional wisdom on the nature of a healthy diet, I was in my salad days, almost 40 years ago, and the subject was salt. Researchers were claiming that salt supplementation was unnecessary after strenuous exercise, and this advice was being passed on by health reporters. All I knew was that I had played high school football in suburban Maryland, sweating profusely through double sessions in the swamplike 90-degree days of August. Without salt pills, I couldn’t make it through a two-hour practice; I couldn’t walk across the parking lot afterward without cramping.
While sports nutritionists have since come around to recommend that we should indeed replenish salt when we sweat it out in physical activity, the message that we should avoid salt at all other times remains strong. Salt consumption is said to raise blood pressure, cause hypertension and increase the risk of premature death. This is why the Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines still consider salt Public Enemy No. 1, coming before fats, sugars and alcohol. It’s why the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has suggested that reducing salt consumption is as critical to long-term health as quitting cigarettes.
And yet, this eat-less-salt argument has been surprisingly controversial — and difficult to defend. Not because the food industry opposes it, but because the actual evidence to support it has always been so weak.
When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.
“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”
While, back then, the evidence merely failed to demonstrate that salt was harmful, the evidence from studies published over the past two years actually suggests that restricting how much salt we eat can increase our likelihood of dying prematurely. Put simply, the possibility has been raised that if we were to eat as little salt as the U.S.D.A. and the C.D.C. recommend, we’d be harming rather than helping ourselves.
WHY have we been told that salt is so deadly? Well, the advice has always sounded reasonable. It has what nutritionists like to call “biological plausibility.” Eat more salt and your body retains water to maintain a stable concentration of sodium in your blood. This is why eating salty food tends to make us thirsty: we drink more; we retain water. The result can be a temporary increase in blood pressure, which will persist until our kidneys eliminate both salt and water.
The scientific question is whether this temporary phenomenon translates to chronic problems: if we eat too much salt for years, does it raise our blood pressure, cause hypertension, then strokes, and then kill us prematurely? It makes sense, but it’s only a hypothesis. The reason scientists do experiments is to find out if hypotheses are true.
In 1972, when the National Institutes of Health introduced the National High Blood Pressure Education Program to help prevent hypertension, no meaningful experiments had yet been done. The best evidence on the connection between salt and hypertension came from two pieces of research. One was the observation that populations that ate little salt had virtually no hypertension. But those populations didn’t eat a lot of things — sugar, for instance — and any one of those could have been the causal factor. The second was a strain of “salt-sensitive” rats that reliably developed hypertension on a high-salt diet. The catch was that “high salt” to these rats was 60 times more than what the average American consumes.
Still, the program was founded to help prevent hypertension, and prevention programs require preventive measures to recommend. Eating less salt seemed to be the only available option at the time, short of losing weight. Although researchers quietly acknowledged that the data were “inconclusive and contradictory” or “inconsistent and contradictory” — two quotes from the cardiologist Jeremiah Stamler, a leading proponent of the eat-less-salt campaign, in 1967 and 1981 — publicly, the link between salt and blood pressure was upgraded from hypothesis to fact.
In the years since, the N.I.H. has spent enormous sums of money on studies to test the hypothesis, and those studies have singularly failed to make the evidence any more conclusive. Instead, the organizations advocating salt restriction today — the U.S.D.A., the Institute of Medicine, the C.D.C. and the N.I.H. — all essentially rely on the results from a 30-day trial of salt, the 2001 DASH-Sodium study. It suggested that eating significantly less salt would modestly lower blood pressure; it said nothing about whether this would reduce hypertension, prevent heart disease or lengthen life.
While influential, that trial was just one of many. When researchers have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of them, they’ve continued to support Dr. Stamler’s “inconsistent and contradictory” assessment. Last year, two such “meta-analyses” were published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.” The second concluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”
The idea that eating less salt can worsen health outcomes may sound bizarre, but it also has biological plausibility and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, too. A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the
kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.
With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.
Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time. In the United States, for instance, it has remained constant for the last 50 years, despite 40 years of the eat-less-salt message. The average salt intake in these populations — what could be called the normal salt intake — was one and a half teaspoons a day, almost 50 percent above what federal agencies consider a safe upper limit for healthy Americans under 50, and more than double what the policy advises for those who aren’t so young or healthy. This consistency, between populations and over time, suggests that how much salt we eat is determined by physiological demands, not diet choices.
One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension, except for the fact that four of these studies — involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure — reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range. Effectively what the 1972 paper would have predicted.
Proponents of the eat-less-salt campaign tend to deal with this contradictory evidence by implying that anyone raising it is a shill for the food industry and doesn’t care about saving lives. An N.I.H. administrator told me back in 1998 that to publicly question the science on salt was to play into the hands of the industry. “As long as there are things in the media that say the salt controversy continues,” he said, “they win.”
When several agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, held a hearing last November to discuss how to go about getting Americans to eat less salt (as opposed to whether or not we should eat less salt), these proponents argued that the latest reports suggesting damage from lower-salt diets should simply be ignored. Lawrence Appel, an epidemiologist and a co-author of the DASH-Sodium trial, said “there is nothing really new.” According to the cardiologist Graham MacGregor, who has been promoting low-salt diets since the 1980s, the studies were no more than “a minor irritation that causes us a bit of aggravation.”
This attitude that studies that go against prevailing beliefs should be ignored on the basis that, well, they go against prevailing beliefs, has been the norm for the anti-salt campaign for decades. Maybe now the prevailing beliefs should be changed. The British scientist and educator Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin’s bulldog for his advocacy of evolution, may have put it best back in 1860. “My business,” he wrote, “is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.”
A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Independent Investigator in Health Policy Research and the author of “Why We Get Fat.”
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on June 3, 2012, on page SR8 of the New York edition with the headline: Salt, We Misjudged You.
David Katz, M.D.: Soda, Supply, and Demand: Can We Share a Taste for Change?
There are good reasons -- both upstream and down -- why Mayor Bloomberg should want to ban the sale of enormous sodas in New York City.
The distal, downstream reasons are dire health outcomes aided and abetted by soda consumption: obesity, diabetes, and even heart disease, cancer, and stroke in children as well as adults. This toxic tide is well documented, as is the important contribution the empty calories and copious sugar of soft drinks (and related sugar-sweetened beverages that often do a better job of hiding their nature under an evocative name like "sports" drink) make to it.
The proximal, upstream reasons are that people buy enormous sodas in enormous quantities because one, they tend to think more for less is a bargain; and two, they like it!
Mayor Bloomberg presumably has concluded that these are not likely to change, and the only way to get past them and deal with those downstream consequences and their costs is to take the decision out of your hands and into his own, at least partially.
Perhaps he's right, and that's why debate is spirited on both sides of the "Should we ban big sodas?" divide. (My closest colleagues are divided on the issue.)
But I am more sanguine on removing these upstream impediments to healthful change. I think a prod to common sense, and a well-tended meme could do the job. The first of these upstream barriers is obsolete nonsense that doesn't withstand the meanest application of common sense; and the second can be fixed by nurturing our nature.
1) The notion that more -- measured in calories -- is better used to make sense. It made sense throughout the long sweep of human history during which calories were a rate-limiting commodity in the struggle to survive. It made sense even more recently when calories were still relatively scarce and hard to get, and physical activity unavoidable. It made so much sense, in fact, that we equated food/calories with security and success, and spoke of bringing home the bacon, being the breadwinner, and making dough.
It made sense THEN. But now, it makes as much sense as bringing coals to Newcastle!
Getting more of what you don't have enough of is a good thing. Getting more of what you already have too much of is anything but!
More calories and more sugar at no or little extra charge means getting fat and probably sick for free -- and winning the opportunity to spend a fortune trying to fix that! Come on folks, wake up and smell the SlimFast -- this is NOT a bargain anymore! In the modern era, nutrients per dollar -- vitality per dollar -- are far better measures of food value than volume or calories. More nutritious foods do not need to cost more, particularly when the right metrics are used -- but they are certainly WORTH more. It's past time for our culture to start acting accordingly.
2) Regarding the second, the fact that people like soda -- I'll start with the personal. I used to drink soda as a kid, being raised on a typical American diet until I was old enough to see the light and take matters into my own hands.
Since I first gave up soda (I have not had one in literally decades at this point), I have had several occasions to taste it -- whether on purpose or accidentally -- and had this basic reaction: yuck. When one doesn't drink soft drinks for some time and then goes back, they taste far more like what they are -- extremely sweet, highly processed and rather dubious concoctions -- than the treat we pretend them to be.
I don't dislike soda because soda isn't good for me. I dislike soda because I dislike soda! Once I gave my taste buds a soda-free holiday, they did the rest. They went through rehab, rediscovered their native predilection for native foods, and made it easy for me to avoid soda for the rest of my life. I don't like it. It's too sweet, too overtly "factory food."
But getting taste buds not to like something isn't enough. The rest of the job is getting them to like foods -- love foods -- that love you back. This, too, is within reach.
A large volume of research I have reviewed for several of the books I've written, 20 years of clinical practice, and personal experience convince me that taste buds are malleable little fellas: When they can't be with a food they love, they pretty readily learn to love the food they're with. And once they do, familiarity becomes a powerful reinforcing agent. We like what we know.
This can work for good, or ill. Bathe your taste buds all day long -- knowingly, or unknowingly -- in copious additions of sugar and salt, and you will come to prefer more and more of these. Dial down your exposures, and you can reverse-engineer this process, rehabilitate your taste buds, and come to love food far more likely to love you back.
Most of the evidence I've encountered -- both published and personal -- suggests that habituation to new and improved versions of foods and recipes happens in as little as two weeks, or even less. A good example is a transition from whole milk to skim milk.
If you like whole milk and try skim, it tastes a bit like dishwater at first. If you stick with skim milk for a few days, it becomes hard to remember what the problem was. Hang in there for a week or two, and you will register the taste and texture of skim milk as just... milk. Retry whole milk at this point, and it will make you think of wallpaper paste.
The same basic principle applies to all foods. And there is enormous opportunity to trade up choices within food categories, and derive stunning health benefits -- acclimation, but no real heavy lifting, required.
So here's the thing: If it takes only about two weeks to adjust to new and better foods, then what stands between us and the dietary promised land where we can all as a matter of routine love foods that love us back, is a hill only two weeks high. For far too long, we have been making a mountain out of this molehill!
But to climb it requires the coordinated efforts of the supply side, and the demand side.
For their part, food suppliers like to contend they are only feeding us what we want, just trying to keep the customer satisfied. But the reality is that they helped create the prevailing palate, and are now profiting mightily from feeding it. They share in the responsibility of rehabilitating it by providing reformulated products that are genuinely better for our health -- not products that merely pretend to be.
But the industry is right to note they can't sell what we won't buy! And the precautionary tales they cite -- the fate of McLean Deluxe or Alphabits cereal (nutritionally improved, only to fail commercially) -- are valid. If we want truly better food choices, we have to choose them when they become available!
So to change demand, we have to change supply; and to change supply, we have to change demand. This has "impasse" written all over it, and it's why we have been stuck on this side of the molehill for so long.
But I believe we can get over it. Imagine a program in which the "taste for change" is shared by both demand and supply. We might, for instance, develop a public service campaign to raise awareness in the population about the adaptability of taste buds, about that two-week-high hill of taste habituation, and about the need to give new and better-for-you products a trial period of a couple of weeks before reaching a verdict.
This campaign could, in theory, be timed to anticipate a whole new crop of better-for-you products released by major food companies -- just like movie trailers are released to build the buzz for a new movie. If you've seen a trailer and think you are going to love a movie, you don't walk out if the first few minutes happen to be slow going. You have expectations, and you give them a chance. By the end, you may well wind up loving the film. Could we perhaps cultivate the same "give it a reasonable chance" attitude about new and better-for-us foods?
Ideally, these products would be subjected to an objective measure of nutritional quality in the R&D phase so we could all be confident they are TRULY better for us, and not merely depend on the company saying so.
If we prime the public reception for such products, perhaps we would see robust sales when they are introduced. If people know to hang in there for a couple of weeks, they could adjust to the new formulations and actually learn to prefer them.
And if better-for-you products come to be preferred, it would encourage food companies to produce more of them -- and less of the alternative. Of course we are naturally, genetically adapted to like sweet -- along with salt, fat, calories, and variety. Predilections for all of these favored survival during the long sweep of human history before the advent of agriculture, and for some time afterward.
Human babies are born with a preference for sweet, and it's a good thing. They might otherwise turn up their tiny noses at the first, critical, life-sustaining substance: mother's milk, sweetened with lactose.
And that preference for sweet is preserved into adulthood -- because it leads away from poisons, which tend to be bitter, and toward the quickly available energy in honey and wild fruits. Our Stone Age ancestors who didn't like sweet might forego such sustenance, making them less likely to survive and reproduce. And let's face it: People who don't survive to reproduce make very poor ancestors!
But this is just our nature -- it ignores the power of nurture! Richard Dawkins, arguably the most influential evolutionary biologist since Darwin, argues brilliantly at the close of his seminal book The Selfish Gene that unthinking genes got us here -- but they do not control our destiny! Units of cultural transmission -- units of choice -- called memes can carry the day.
We can make health a prevailing cultural meme by replacing our unconscious adaptations with conscious choices. It's true, we are adapted to like sweet. But we are also adapted to be terrestrial -- yet can learn to swim, and to hold our breath under water. We are adapted to ambulate -- but can learn to ride a bike. Both require skills we can, by choice, obtain.
We can choose what we chew -- and swallow -- as well! We can replace the thoughtlessness of genes with the thoughtfulness of memes. We can make health a meme. But only by choice!
The current impasse -- junky foods feeding junk-loving palates -- was engineered, and can be reverse-engineered. The hill is not all that high, and the prize on the other side is truly great.
We can get there from here, but only if we acknowledge the interdependence of supply and demand, and share a taste for change.
-fin
Dr. David L. Katz; www.davidkatzmd.com
www.turnthetidefoundation.org
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Source:
David Katz, M.D.: Soda, Supply, and Demand: Can We Share a Taste for Change?
Mark Hyman, MD: The Last Diet You Will Ever Need
Why is it that we believe we can feed our bodies industrial, nutrient-depleted food-like substances empty of life and be healthy? How did we come to believe that food industry chemicals and processing could replace nature-made foods?
A hundred years ago all food was organic, local, seasonal, fresh or naturally-preserved by ancient methods. All food was food. Now less than 3 percent of our agricultural land is used to grow fruits and vegetables, which should make up 80 percent of our diet. Today there are not even enough fruits and vegetables in this country to allow all Americans to follow the government guidelines to eat five to nine servings a day.
What most of us are left with is industrial food. And who knows what lurks in the average boxed, packaged, or canned factory-made science project.
When a French fry has more than 20 ingredients and almost all of them are not potato, or when a fast food hamburger contains very little meat, or when the average teenager consumes 34 teaspoons of sugar a day, we are living in a food nightmare, a sci-fi horror show.
The very fact that we are having a national conversation about what we should eat, that we are struggling with the question about what the best diet is, is symptomatic of how far we have strayed from the natural conditions that gave rise to our species, from the simple act of eating real, whole, fresh food. When it becomes a revolutionary act to eat real food, we are in trouble.
The food industry, which is the second biggest employer in America after the federal government, heavily influences the media and government agencies that regulate it (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration and Congress) and intentionally confuses and confounds us.
Low-fat is good -- so anything with a "low-fat" on the label must be healthy. But Coke is 100 percent fat-free and that doesn't make it a health food. Now we are told to eat more whole grains, so a few flecks of whole grains are sprinkled on sugary cereals. That doesn't make them a health food either.
The best advice is to avoid foods with health claims on the label, or better yet avoid foods with labels in the first place.
In the 21st century our tastes buds, our brain chemistry, our biochemistry, our hormones and our kitchens have been hijacked by the food industry. The food-like substances proffered by the industrial food system food trick our taste buds into momentary pleasure, but not our biology, which reacts, rejects and reviles the junk plied on our genes and our hormonal and biochemical pathways. We need to unjunk our biology.
Industrial processing has given rise to an array of addictive, fattening, metabolism-jamming chemicals and compounds including aspartame, MSG (monosodium glutamate), high-fructose corn syrup and trans fats, to name the biggest offenders.
MSG is used to create fat mice so researchers can study obesity. MSG is an excito-toxin that stimulates your brain to eat uncontrollably. When fed to mice, they pig out and get fat. It is in 80 percent of processed foods and mostly disguised as "natural flavorings."
And trans fat, for example, is derived from a real food -- vegetable oil -- chemically altered to resist degradation by bacteria, which is why modern cookies last on the shelf for years.
But the ancient energy system of your cells is descended from bacteria and those energy factories, or mitochondria, cannot process these trans fats either. Your metabolism is blocked and weight gain and Type 2 diabetes ensue.
Your tongue can be fooled and your brain can become addicted to the slick combinations of fat, sugar, and salt pumped into factory-made foods, but your biochemistry cannot, and the result is the disaster of obesity and chronic disease we have in America today.
No wonder 68 percent of Americans are overweight. No wonder that from 1960 to today obesity rates have risen from 13 percent to 36 percent and soon will reach 42 percent. Over the last decade the rate of pre-diabetes or diabetes in teenagers has risen from 9 percent to 23 percent.
Really? Almost one in four of our kids now has pre-diabetes or Type 2 diabetes? And 37 percent of normal weight kids have one or more cardiovascular risk factors, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol or high blood sugar, because even though factory food doesn't make them fat, it makes them sick!
It is time to take our kitchens and our homes back. Transforming the food industry seems monumental, a gigantic undertaking. But it is not. It is a small problem. In the small places in our lives, our shopping carts, the fridge, the cupboard, the kitchen and on our dining room table is where all the power is.
It is the hundreds of little choices, the small actions you make every day, that will topple the monolithic food industry. This century is littered with the bodies and institutions of fallen despots and despotic regimes -- from the fall of the Berlin wall to the Arab spring. There is no force more powerful than a small group of individuals with a desire to end injustice and abuse.
A very simple idea can break through the confusion and plant the seeds of a revolution. Our bodies were designed to run on real food. Our natural default state is health. We need to simplify our way of eating.
Unjunk our diet, detoxify our bodies and our minds and we heal. Simply choose foods such as vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, healthy oils (olive oil, fish oil, avocado and coconut oil), small amounts of whole grains and beans and lean animal protein including small wild fish, grass fed meat, and farm eggs.
There are no diets, no calorie counting, and no measuring fats, carbs or protein grams. None of that matters if you choose real, whole, fresh, live foods. If you choose quality, the rest takes care of itself.
When you eat empty industrial food with addictive chemicals and sugar, your body craves more, looking for nutrients in a dead food where none are to be found. Yet after eating nutrient dense fresh food for a few days the biological addiction to industrial food is broken, and in a few more days your cells begin to rejuvenate and you heal from the inside out.
And the side effects are all good ones: effortless weight loss, reversal of high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, clearing of brain fog, lifting of depression and fatigue and even better skin, hair and nails.
What is more important than what you take out of your diet is what you put in. Add in the good stuff and there won't be room for the bad. Mother Nature is the best pharmacist and food is the most powerful drug on the planet. It works faster, better and cheaper than any other pharmaceutical.
Whole, real food spiced up with a few super foods such as chia, hemp, parsley, cilantro, coconut and green juicing can beneficially affect thousands of genes, regulate dozens of hormones, and enhance the function of tens of thousands of protein networks.
Dinner is a date with the doctor. What you put at the end of your fork is more powerful than anything you will ever find at the bottom of a prescription bottle. The roadmap to health is simple: eat real food, practice self-love rather than self-loathing, imagine yourself well, get sufficient sleep, and incorporate movement into your life. The solution to our health crisis and obesity epidemic is not complicated.
Health and happiness are often just a few days away. Each of us has the capacity to make the small changes in our lives that will create big changes in our food landscape, our agriculture and even our government policies.
I hope you will use the power of your fork to be part of the start of a true food revolution.
Now I'd like to hear from you...
Have you changed your eating habits to include more real food?
What have you done to create a healthier diet for your family?
Have you eliminated MSG from your diet?
Mark Hyman, M.D.
Mark Hyman, M.D. is a practicing physician, founder of The UltraWellness Center, a four-time New York Times bestselling author, and an international leader in the field of Functional Medicine. You can follow him on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn, watch his videos on YouTube, become a fan on Facebook, and subscribe to his newsletter.
For more by Mark Hyman, M.D., click here.
Source:
Mark Hyman, MD: The Last Diet You Will Ever Need
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RE: calculating the percentage change in these pesticides brought about by processing= over 90%
McIntosh, Red Delicious, and Golden Delicious from two years of experimental spray programs using azinphos-methyl, chlorpyrifos, esfenvalerate, and methomyl were processed into frozen apple slices, applesauce, single-strength juice, and juice concentrate.
Residue levels were expressed as micrograms per 150 g of apple or the equivalent amount of apple product to calculate the percentage change in these pesticides brought about by processing. Producing single-strength apple juice reduced azinphos-methyl, chlorpyrifos, esfenvalerate, and methomyl residues by 97.6, 100, 97.8, and 78.1%, respectively.
Production of applesauce reduced all four compounds by ≥95%. Azinphos-methyl, chlorpyrifos, esfenvalerate, and methomyl residues were reduced in apple slices by 94.1, 85.7, 98.6, and 94.7%, respectively. Processing is shown to be very effective in reducing the levels of these pesticides.
Keywords: Pesticides; azinphos-methyl; chlorpyrifos; esfenvalerate; methomyl; apples; food processing; apple slices; applesauce; apple juice
source:
Reduction of Azinphos-methyl, Chlorpyrifos, Esfenvalerate, and Methomyl Residues in Processed Apples
M. J. Zabik,*† M. F. A. El-Hadidi,† J. N. Cash,‡ M. E. Zabik,‡ and A. L. Jones§
National Food Safety and Toxicology Center, Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, and Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48823