Lift Up Your Hearts!

 Healing through Exercise:  Scientifically-Proven Ways to Prevent and Overcome Illness and Lengthen Your Life, by Jörg Blech  (Da Capo Press, 2009)  Originally published as Heilen mit Bewergung (S. Fischer Verlag, 2009)

We all know exercise is good for us, right?  So who needs yet another book telling us so?

Knowing what we should be doing is one thing, but actually doing it is another, and Healing through Exercise provides motivation in spades.

Beware the cure that is marketed as a panacea, we are told:  if it claims to fix all ills, it’s probably a fraud.  That’s sound advice, but Jörg Blech makes a convincing case that simple, regular exercise is as close to a cure-all as we’ll ever find.  Whether the issue is heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, cholesterol, hypertension, Alzheimer’s disease, back pain, cancer, impotence, ADHD, depression, brain development, immune system health, stress overload, or “old age,” moderate, regular exercise is essential—and in some cases even sufficient—for preventing illness and restoring health.  We’re more familiar with the preventative side, but Blech cites study after study showing how exercise can even reverse existing damage.  It’s never too late to take advantage of the benefits of exercise.  (Note to self:  this should be incentive to get started at any age, but never an excuse for procrastination.)

The specific studies and amazing results showing the power of exercise to heal are too numerous to detail, although as usual I’ve provided some teasers below.  I highly recommend that everyone find and read a copy of this book, especially if you are young, old, middle-aged, or have children.

The bottom line?  Get moving!  It’s critically important, the best thing you can do for your physical and mental health.  Get your children moving!  It’s essential for the development of their brains as well as their bodies.  It doesn’t need to be onerous.  Thirty minutes of moderate exercise (such as brisk walking, jogging, or bicycling) five times per week seems to be the threshold at which all sorts of wonderful effects begin.  Make that 60 minutes, and throw in some light strength training a couple of days per week, and you will be giving your body and mind a real treat.  Furthermore, the effect is cumulative, so every little bit of action you add to your day will make a difference.

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According to the evolutionary biologists, we have to rethink the old view of exercise:  movement is by no means just a useful added way to improve our health.  In fact, it is absolutely necessary for the human body to work normally.

You can debate all day about the value of an evolutionary perspective, but whether you say “evolved” or “designed,” we surely weren’t meant to spend most of our days sitting.

In the United States, children grow up in a world that leaves no time and no room for physical activities.  For most of the baby boomers, it was common either to walk or to ride a bicycle to school.  In these days, kids are moved around in minivans, and teachers have a hard time advocating walking days.  Once in school, students will rarely be challenged physically because many school systems struggle to finance a physical education program worthy of the name.  At recess, video games and other gadgets have taken the role balls and skipping ropes used to occupy.  The idle members of generation XXL spend their youths indoors, and they would rather travel online than by foot.  Granted that some ten-year-olds design impressive Web pages, but many have difficulties climbing, jumping, or pitching a ball.

The abandonment of exercise is a global trend affecting not only kids growing up in American suburbia but also youngsters living in walkable areas of Europe.  Wilhelm Nieblung has a doctor’s office in the idyllic Black Forest.  As he puts it:  “Many children in our town are not able to balance backwards.”

In [the] early years, while the brain downsizes and develops at the same time, it is extremely important that a child has sufficient physical exercise.  Good coordination of the body helps to preserve nerve cells in the brain and promotes their wiring to each other.  Evidence indicates children need a certain minimum amount of exercise to develop a brain malleable or plastic enough to adapt to ever-changing environments.

Children can develop their mental abilities properly only if they do enough running, jumping, and physical playing as well.  Motor and cognitive skills develop in unison and stimulate each other within the brain.  Researchers in the field of neuroanatomy at the University of Bielefeld sum up what that means for parents, children, and teachers:  “Learning needs movement.”

If we train our motor abilities by exercising, at the same time we strengthen regions of the brain that are important for paying attention and other cognitive capabilities.  Playing sports makes us smarter, and all children can benefit from this effect.

Physical activity not only enriches chemistry in the gray matter; it also alters the structure of the brain.  First, exercise promotes the production of new nerve cells in the hippocampus….  Second, exercise creates new synapses, thereby establishing and maintaining the vast network of connected nerve cells in the brain.

The brain of an active creature produces especially high numbers of nerve cells that can be used to process … new stimuli.  The new cells mature into fully functioning neurons when they are challenged with new tasks.  In the absence of such challenges, it is thought, a big portion of the new nerve cells die before long.  And in the absence of physical activity, the production of new nerve cells largely ceases.

Alzheimer’s is a disease that strikes with age….  Besides age, there are other risk factors.  It may not be a good omen when family members have suffered from Alzheimer’s because that suggests a genetic predisposition to it.....  These factors are hard to change … but there is another way to postpone the onset of the disease or to prevent it altogether:  activities such as brisk walking or bicycle riding….  Older men aged 71 to 93 who walk at least two miles every day cut the risk of Alzheimer’s in half, compared to people the same age who walk only a quarter of a mile per day.

William E. Kraus at the Duke University Medical Center has found that a certain type of exercise is especially good at keeping lipoproteins in check:  longer spells of moderate exercise seem to be more beneficial than shorter, more intensive workouts.

Exercise is … a proven and reliable remedy for people with hypertension, although this is not widely appreciated.  [F]requently the treating doctors are to blame, says Hans-Georg Predel of the Sports University in Cologne, Germany.  He has made the sobering observation that physicians “often don’t consider the effectiveness of an intervention without drugs and that they lack a sufficient expertise in prescribing lifestyle changes.”

If you, like me, have been subjected to regular bone-density (DEXA) scans since reaching a certain age, you will be interested to note that some countries—Germany is one—no longer pay for the procedure on the grounds that bone density measurements have been shown to be useless for preventing broken bones in the elderly.  So have drugs prescribed for osteoporosis.  What does help?  Exercise.

Time and again, trials of menopausal women have confirmed that moderate aerobic and strength training make the spine stronger.  And in order to reduce hip fractures, walking seems to be the best medicine.

Although exercise is one of the most potent and effective remedies in existence, it plays only a small role in medical-school training.  For this reason, American doctors rarely recommend exercise.  Even though some doctors do prescribe exercise, physicians can make a much greater profit with drugs and operations.  Faith in the power of medicine is another reason why people tend to underestimate the value of exercise.  The number of back surgeries has increased dramatically in recent years, while pills for high blood pressure and drugs to lower cholesterol have sales in the billions of dollars.  This fuels the medical industry and might meet the expectations of many patients, but it still amounts to nothing more than tinkering with the symptoms.

Even when doctors are willing to use the new science of healing through exercise, they often find that patients would prefer an invasive procedure and drug regimen, rather than the supposedly silly advice of bicycling 30 minutes a day.

The sun is shining, the air is cool, and I need to go for a walk.  See ya!

I am thankful for the baby formula that is available today.

I know.  Me, the Notorious Despiser of Artificial Baby Feeding, thankful for infant formula.  But it’s true.

If I believe that formula is vastly overused and overrated as a baby-feeding alternative, and I do, nonetheless I still recognize that there are times and conditions under which babies simply cannot be fed in the normal way by their mothers.  In the very old days, the available choices were (1) find a wet nurse, or (2) die.

As time went on, various substitutes for mother’s milk were tried, but by the mid-20^th century we had only gotten as far as evaporated cow’s milk + water + corn syrup.  It must have worked, at least sort of—that’s what I was fed as an infant.  Perhaps there’s a good reason they started month-old babies on solid food back then.  Can I blame many of my problems on inadequate nutrition during a critical time of brain growth?  That and growing up in a haze of tobacco smoke must cover a multitude of sins—or at least personality quirks. 

If today’s infant formula still can’t meet the high standards of breast milk, it sure comes a whale of a lot closer than what was available 50 years ago.  And if baby formula is overused, that’s all the more reason to be thankful that it has become so much better for babies.

Moms are happier.  Babies are happier and healthier.  That's a lot to be thankful for.

Continuing with the Thanksgiving/Good New Days series, today (and every day) I am thankful for smoke-free restaurants, homes, airplanes, offices, grocery stores, and even bowling alleys!  This is a societal sea-change that is most definitely for the better.

You youngsters simply cannot imagine what it was like.

Smoking was everywhere.  Not that you would have noticed, because you probably would have grown up with one or both parents smoking in your home.  Even the rare families with no smokers owned ashtrays and allowed visiting friends to smoke; the social pressure to do so must have been tremendous.

At work, at play, in the theater, at a restaurant, on a bus, on a plane, in the hospital.  There was no escape.

Outdoors was the best place for breathing, if there weren't too many other people around.  School was relatively safe, if you stayed away from the teachers’ lounge and could get through the day without needing to use the bathroom.

Even our doctor smoked.

Go to college?  Your roommate was likely to be a smoker, and that was not considered grounds for requesting a switch.

Get a job?  Smoke polluted your air space, unless you were one of the lucky few who shared a room with one of them new-fangled computin’ machines.  They were too valuable to be subjected to damaging smoke particles.

Who knows?  Maybe it was the increasing use of computers which began to tip the balance in favor of non-smokers.  The events did parallel one another.  But smoke-free living didn’t just happen:  much work, money, and lobbying were poured into this personal environmental cleanup action.

When it comes to tobacco smoke, now is a much better time to be living than 50 or even 25 years ago.

Temple Grandin (HBO, NR)

Why are you reading this post when you could be rushing to your nearest video store (is that phrase as passé as "dialing a phone number"?) and grabbing a copy of Temple Grandin?  It would be trite to say that this is one of the most amazing and inspiring movies I have ever seen, though it is.  It would be understatement to say that Temple Grandin is an incredibly amazing and inspiring person.

"Highly functioning autistic" doesn't begin to describe this brilliant visual thinker—and university professor—whose humane designs have revolutionized livestock handling.  My introduction to Temple Grandin was through her TED lecture, The World Needs All Kinds of Minds.  That's a good place to start, but don't miss the movie.  (As far as I can recall it is completely grandchild safe.)

Normally I don't care for the DVD special features that make you watch the entire movie again to hear the commentary; I love learning about how the movie was made, but prefer it in condensed form.  Here it's well worthwhile taking the extra time, because unlike many DVD commentaries, there's very little inanity—and most of all because one of the commentators is Temple Grandin herself.

It was a little disconcerting to note how well I understood some of her problems; enough so that I took this autism spectrum self-test I found in Wired.  The results were as I suspected:  I'm not close to the diagnostic level, but well above average.

I'm looking forward to reading some of Grandin's books, having ordered The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's, and Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals from our library.

"Harm reduction," a new term to me, though not a new concept, is a controversial approach to social problems, in which illegal, immoral, or otherwise harmful behaviors are attacked, not at the root, but at the branches:  distributing condoms to slow the spread of AIDS, needle exchange programs for drug addicts, and legalized prostitution, for example.  It is palliative care: attempting to ameliorate the symptoms of an apparently incurable social disorder.

Whether you approve of the idea or think it only exacerbates the problem—like Needle Park in Zurich, one of Switzerland's early experiments, which succeeded in reducing AIDS infections and drug-related deaths, but attracted addicts and professional drug dealers from all over Europe—the following story is heartwarming.  It brings to mind Mother Teresa, who, if she couldn't cure the ills of the lowest and the poorest in Calcutta, at least gave them the touch of a loving hand, and a clean, safe, comfortable place in which to die.

Meera Bai's story has a title shocking in itself:  Why I Help Addicts Shoot Up.  A nurse, she works at Vancouver's InSite:  "a safe, health-focused place where people inject drugs and connect to health care services – from primary care to treat disease and infection, to addiction counselling and treatment."

InSite has been shown to be a successful public health initiative in more than 30 scientific research reports published in peer-reviewed medical journals. Such reports demonstrate that InSite users are more likely to seek long-term addiction treatment and to stay off the street, than users who choose to inject outside. The HIV rates in [Vancouver's Downtown Eastside] are on par with many African nations. Such blood-borne diseases are spread by sharing needles—something that is banned at InSite. And instead of using puddle water from urine-soaked alleys, participants are provided with sterile water, which reduces various kinds of horrific infection.

Clean supplies, safe rooms, friendly staff supervision during injection and compassionate nursing care help injection drug users to learn how to value their bodies, and thus themselves, even as our society generally tells them they are worse than useless. The choice to stop using drugs is a decision that many addicts cannot even imagine making, but InSite provides reachable steps toward a healthier life, offering participants a chance at redemption of both body and soul.

It's where I choose to work as a nurse—and as a Christian. Trying to follow the command of God to seek out and care for those in need of mercy has led me to find grace and pass it on among these people in the streets of the Downtown Eastside, the very definition of a marginalized population.

Something about seeing people at their lowest and most desperate, half-clothed from turning tricks for drugs while hating themselves for it, opens into a profound level of intimacy. I am blessed to enter the darkest place of people whose sins are far more public than those of the rest of us. Constant humiliation makes the people I work with especially vulnerable, and vulnerable in almost every way: to violence, to exploitation, to false hope and finally to despair. When allowed into these dark places, it is my privilege, and that of all InSite staff, to communicate worth and love instead of judgment and scorn.

The day nurse asks me to keep an eye out for a specific participant—a regular who comes in several times a day. She hadn't been seen yet. Later that night, the woman finally comes in, and she's beaming. "I went to see my daughter today! And I didn't use all day! F---, soon I'm gonna get off this s---!" We break out in applause and cheers, celebrating her triumphs with her—as she mixes her drugs to take in a few minutes in our facility. Other participants in the room are excited as well; two of them come over to hug her.

Another regular later chats with me in the treatment room as I dress his abscess, trying not to cringe away from the overwhelming odour he emanates. "It would have been my anniversary with my wife today, if she hadn't gone missing. We've both been down and out, but she took care of me out here. Now, I got nobody to talk to. This is the first human touch I've had today." I look up, startled. I am wearing gloves, holding my breath, cleaning his sores with a 10-inch sterile Q-tip. Even this, my deficient attempt to heal, is taken as love by a man desperate for human connection. I am ashamed.

I finish dressing the wound, clean up, remove my gloves and give him a hug. I hop up on the treatment bench next to him and we sit together and talk for another 15 minutes: about life, love and faith. He says goodbye, and then asks for a referral to an exit program. I give it to him. He knows the referral is merely one point along our journey together, and that I will listen to his story whether he goes to the program or not. As a Christian, I know that his life is part of God's real story of redemption. InSite is one of the few places where I get to hear it openly spoken, with trust, without judgment.

Well, it's beyond "fair use" to quote the whole article!  I do recommend reading it all, though.  (H/T John Stackhouse)

 

I wrote about xylitol when I discovered it in Japan four years ago, and that remains one of my most popular posts.  Although I did not experiment further with xylitol as a sugar substitute, I continued to use it as a dental rinse, swishing a small spoonful around in my mouth after brushing my teeth at night.

Until I started worrying about the fact that the xylitol I had was made in China, that is.  Chinese manufacturers were caught substituting poisonous substances for more expensive, safe ingredients in toothpaste and children's toys, as I wrote about in 2007, and later in baby formula, candy, and other products containing milk.  I wrote to the manufacturer of my xylitol, seeking reassurance, but received no answer.

So I got lazy, and simply eliminated the xylitol rinse from my tooth-cleaning routine.  That was a year ago, and six months later the dental hygienist wondered what was going on:  my gums, which had been healthy for years, were now a mess.

The only change in my routine had been that I was no longer using the xylitol.  Chastened, I decided to assume diligence and responsibility on the part of the manufacturer, and resumed my nighttime rinsing.

This week I returned to the dentist and the hygienist was wowed by the positive changes and return to health of my gums.

Did xylitol make the difference?  It's hard not to come to that conclusion.^*  At any rate, I don't intend to repeat the experiment if I can help it, even though it still feels strange to rinse my mouth with something sweet, especially without brushing my teeth afterwards!

 

Super Size Me (Sony, 2004, PG-13)

When Morgan Spurlock was growing up, his mother made the family's meals at home; they ate at restaurants only on very rare, special occasions.  Once a common scenario, it is no longer true for Fast Food America.

Spurlock, young, healthy, and in fine physical condition, turned himself into a human guinea pig to investigate the health effects of fast food:  For 30 days, he ate at McDonalds, and only McDonalds, three meals a day, every day.  His progress (regress) was evaluated and monitored by three doctors, who expected to see no more problems from his change of diet than a moderate rise in his triglyceride levels.  Instead, nearly every aspect of his physical and mental health disintegrated rapidly; it took him more than a year to recover from his month-long binge.

Super Size Me is a dramatic condemnation of the fast food industry, and even more so of modern America's eating habits.  However, it would have been more effective, if less dramatic, had Spurlock have eaten reasonably instead of deliberately (and sickeningly) gorging himself at every meal.  He conflates problems of food quality and food quantity, muddying the results.

The movie is somewhat interesting, but I'd rate it worse than PG-13 for sexual content and language.  Unlike some reviewers, I don't find the graphic bariatric surgery to be a problem, but I wouldn't watch it while eating.

The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge (Penguin, New York, 2007)

Neuroplasticity.

The idea that our brains are fixed, hard-wired machines was (and in many cases still is) so deeply entrenched in the scientific establishment that evidence to the contrary was not only suppressed, but often not even seen because the minds of even respectable scientists could not absorb what they were certain was impossible.  Having been familiar since the 1960s with the work of Glenn Doman and the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, the idea that the human brain is continually changing itself and can recover from injury in astonishing ways did not surprise me. In fact, the only shock was that in a 400 page book on neuroplasticity and the persecution of its early pioneers I found not one mention of Doman's name. But the stories are none the less astonishing for that.

In Chapter 1 we meet woman whose vestibular system was destroyed by antibiotic side-effects.  She is freed by a sensor held on her tongue and a computerized helmet from the severely disabling feeling that she is falling all the time, even when lying flat.  That's the stuff of science fiction, but what's most astounding is that the effect lingers for a few minutes after she removes the apparatus the first time, and after several sessions she no longer needs the device.

Chapter 3, "Redesigning the Brain," on the work of Michael Merzenich, including the ground-breaking Fast ForWord learning program, is worth the cost of the book all by itself.

Sensitive readers may want to steer clear of Chapter 4, "Acquiring Tastes and Loves," or risk being left with unwanted, disturbing mental images.  But it is a must read for anyone who wants to believe that pornography is harmless, or that our personal, private mental fantasies do not adversely affect the very structure of our brains.

The book is less impressive when it gets away from hard science and into psychotherapy, as the ideas become more speculative, but the stories are still impressive.

Phantom pain, learning disabilities, autism, stroke recovery, obsessions and compulsions, age-related mental decline, and much more:  the discovery of neuroplasticity shatters misconceptions and offers hope.  The Brain that Changes Itself is an appetizer plate; bring on the main course!

For those who want a sampling of the appetizer itself, I'm including an extensive quotation section.  Even so, it doesn't come close to doing justice to the depth and especially the breadth of the book.  I've pulled quotes from all over, so understand that they are out of context, and don't expect them to move smoothly from one section to another.

Neuro is for "neuron," the nerve cells in our brains and nervous systems. Plastic is for "changeable, malleable, modifiable." At first many of the scientists didn't dare use the word "neuroplasticity" in their publications, and their peers belittled them for promoting a fanciful notions. Yet they persisted, slowly overturning the doctrine of the unchanging brain. They showed that children are not always stuck with the mental abilities they are born with; that the damaged brain can often reorganize itself so that when one part fails, another can often substitute; that if brain cells die, they can at times be replaced; that many "circuits" and even basic reflexes that we think are hardwired are not. One of these scientists even showed that thinking, learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off, thus shaping our brain anatomy and our behavior—surely one of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century.

In the course of my travels I met a scientist who enabled people who had been blind since birth to begin to see, another who enabled the deaf to hear; I spoke with people who had had strokes decades before and had been declared incurable, who were helped to recover with neuroplastic treatments; I met people whose learning disorders were cured and whose IQs were raised; I saw evidence that it is possible for eighty-year-olds to sharpen their memories to function the way they did when they were fifty-five. I saw people rewire their brains with their thoughts, to cure previously incurable obsessions and traumas. I spoke with Nobel laureates who were hotly debating how we must re-think our model of the brain now that we know it is ever changing. ... The idea that the brain can change its own structure and function through thought and activity is, I believe, the most important alteration in our view of the brain since we first sketched out its basic anatomy and the workings of its basic component, the neuron.

In Chapter 2, Building Herself a Better Brain, a woman with such a severe imbalance of brain function that she was labelled mentally retarded put her own experiences together with the work of other researchers to design brain exercises that fixed the weaknesses in her own brain ... and went on to develop similar diagnostic procedures and exercises for others.

The irony of this new discovery is that for hundreds of years educators did seem to sense that children's brains had to be built up through exercises of increasing difficulty that strengthened brain functions. Up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. Then in the 1960s educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum, because they were too rigid, boring, and "not relevant."   But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. For the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and a level of auditory brainpower unfamiliar to us now. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 the debaters would comfortably speak for an hour or more without notes, in extended memorized paragraphs; today many of the most learned among us, raised in our most elite schools since the 1960s, prefer the omnipresent PowerPoint presentation—the ultimate compensation for a weak premotor cortex.

Here are several (but not enough!) from my favorite chapter, "Redesigning the Brain."

[As] they trained an animal at a skill, not only did its neurons fire faster, but because they were faster their signals were clearer.  Faster neurons were more likely to fire in sync with each other—becoming better team players—wiring together more and forming groups of neurons that gave off clearer and more powerful signals.  This is a crucial point, because a powerful signal has greater impact on the brain.  When we want to remember something we have heard we must hear it clearly, because a memory can be only as clear as its original signal.

Paying close attention is essential to long-term plastic change. ...  When the animals performed tasks automatically, without paying attention, they changed their brain maps, but the changes did not last.  We often praise "the ability to multitask."  While you can learn when you divide your attention, divided attention doesn't lead to abiding change in your brain maps.

Somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of preschool children have a language disability that makes it difficult for them to read, write, or even follow instructions. ... [C]hildren with language disabilities have auditory processing problems with common consonant-vowel combinations that are spoken quickly and are called "the fast parts of speech."  The children have trouble hearing them accurately and, as a result, reproducing them accurately.  Merzenich believed that these children's auditory cortex neurons were firing too slowly, so they couldn't distinguish between two very similar sounds or be certain, if two sounds occurred close together, which was first and which was second.  Often they didn't hear the beginnings of syllables or the sound changes within syllables.  Normally neurons, after they have processed a sound, are ready to fire again after about a 30-millisecond rest.  Eighty percent of language-impaired children took at least three times that long, so that they lost large amounts of language information.  When their neuron-firing patterns were examined, the signals weren't clear. ... Improper hearing lead to weaknesses in all the language tasks, so they were weak in vocabulary, comprehension, speech, reading, and writing.  Because they spent so much energy decoding words, they tended to use shorter sentences and failed to exercise their memory for longer sentences.

[Five hundred children at 35 sites] were given standardized language tests before and after Fast ForWord training. The study showed that most children's ability to understand language normalized after Fast ForWord.  In many cases, their comprehension rose above normal.  The average child who took the program moved ahead 1.8 years of language development in six weeks. ... A Stanford group did brain scans of twenty dyslexic children, before and after Fast ForWord.  The opening scans showed that the children used different parts of their brains for reading than normal children do.  After Fast ForWord new scans showed that their brains had begun to normalize.

Merzenich's team started hearing that Fast ForWord was having a number of spillover effects.  Children's handwriting improved.  Parents reported that many of the students were starting to show sustained attention and focus.  Merzenich thought these surprising benefits were occurring because Fast ForWord led to some general improvements in mental processing.

"You know," [Merzenich] says, "IQ goes up.  We used the matrix test, which is a visual-based measurement of IQ—and IQ goes up."

The fact that a visual component of the IQ went up meant that the IQ improvements were not caused simply because Fast ForWord improved the children's ability to read verbal test questions.  Their mental processing was being improved in a general way.

This is just a sample of the benefits that made me want to rush right out and buy Fast ForWord, even if it were to cost as much as the insanely-expensive Rosetta Stone German software I'm also tempted to buy.  From the description, it sounds like something everyone could benefit from for mental tune-ups.  Unfortunately, the makers of Fast ForWord are even worse than the Rosetta Stone folks about keeping tight control over their product:  as far as I've been able to determine, you can only use it under the direction of a therapist (making it too expensive for ordinary use), and even then you don't own the software but are only licensed to use it for a short period of time.  :(  It works, though.  We know someone for whom it made all the difference in the world, even late in her school career.

Merzenich began wondering about the role of a new environmental risk factor that might affect everyone but have a more damaging effect on genetically predisposed children:  the continuous background noise from machines, sometimes called white noise.  White noise consists of many frequencies and is very stimulating to the auditory cortex.

"Infants are reared in continuously more noisy environments.  There is always a din," he says.  White noise is everywhere now, coming from fans in our electronics, air conditioners, heaters, and car engines.

To test this hypothesis, his group exposed rat pups to pulses of white noise throughout their critical period and found that the pups' cortices were devastated.

Psychologically, middle age is often an appealing time because, all else being equal, it can be a relatively placid period compared with what has come before. ... We still regard ourselves as active, but we have a tendency to deceive ourselves into thinking that we are learning as we were before.  We rarely engage in tasks in which we must focus our attention as closely as we did when we were younger.  Such activities as reading the newspaper, practicing a profession of many years, and speaking our own language are mostly the replay of mastered skills, not learning.  By the time we hit our seventies, we may not have systematically engaged the systems in the brain that regulate plasticity for fifty years.

That's why learning a new language in old age is so good for improving and maintaining the memory generally.  Because it requires intense focus, studying a new language turns on the control system for plasticity and keeps it in good shape for laying down sharp memories of all kinds.  No doubt Fast ForWord is responsible for so many general improvements in thinking, in part because it stimulates the control system for plasticity to keep up its production of acetylcholine and dopamine.  Anything that requires highly focused attention will help that system—learning new physical activities that require concentration, solving challenging puzzles, or making a career change that requires that you master new skills and material.  Merzenich himself is an advocate of learning a new language in old age.  "You will gradually sharpen everything up again and that will be very highly beneficial to you."

The same applies to mobility.  Just doing the dances you learned years ago won't help your brain's motor cortex stay in shape.  To keep the mind alive requires learning something truly new with intense focus.  That is what will allow you to both lay down new memories and have a system that can easily access and preserve the older ones.

This work opens up the possibility of high-speed learning later in life.  The nucleus basalis [always on for young children, but in adulthood only with sustained, close attention] could be turned on by an electrode, by microinjections of certain chemicals, or by drugs.  It is hard to imagine that people will not ... be drawn to a technology that would make it relatively effortless to master the facts of science, history, or a profession, merely by being exposed to them briefly. ... Such techniques would no doubt be used by high school and university students in their studies and in competitive entrance exams.  (Already many students who do not have attention deficit disorder use stimulants to study.)  Of course, such aggressive interventions might have unanticipated, adverse effects on the brain—not to mention our ability to discipline ourselves—but they would likely be pioneered in cases of dire medical need, where people are willing to take the risk.  Turning on the nucleus basalis might help brain-injured patients, so many of whom cannot relearn the lost functions of reading, writing, speaking, or walking because they can't pay close enough attention.

[Gross motor control is] a function that declines as we age, leading to loss of balance, the tendency to fall, and difficulties with mobility.  Aside from the failure of vestibular processing, this decline is caused by the decrease in sensory feedback from our feet.  According to Merzenich, shoes, worn for decades, limit the sensory feedback from our feet to our brain.  If we went barefoot, our brains would receive many different kinds of input as we went over uneven surfaces.  Shoes are a relatively flat platform that spreads out the stimuli, and the surfaces we walk on are increasingly artificial and perfectly flat.   This leads us to dedifferentiate the maps for the soles of our feet and limit how touch guides our foot control.  Then we may start to use canes, walkers, or crutches or rely on other senses to steady ourselves.  By resorting to these compensations instead of exercising our failing brain systems, we hasten their decline.

As we age, we want to look down at our feet while walking down stairs or on slightly challenging terrain, because we're not getting much information from our feet.  As Merzenich escorted his mother-in-law down the stairs of the villa, he urged her to stop looking down and start feeling her way, so that she would maintain, and develop, the sensory map for her foot, rather than letting it waste away.

Brain plasticity and psychological disorders:

Each time [people with obsessive-compulsive disorder] try to shift gears, they begin ... growing new circuits and altering the caudate.  By refocusing the patient is learning not to get sucked in by the content of an obsession but to work around it.  I suggest to my patients that they think of the use-it-or-lose-it principle.  Each moment they spend thinking of the symptom ... they deepen the obsessive circuit.  By bypassing it, they are on the road to losing it.  With obsessions and compulsions, the more you do it, the more you want to do it; the less you do it, the less you want to do it ... [I]t is not what you feel while applying the technique that counts, it is what you do.  "The struggle is not to make the feeling go away; the struggle is not to give in to the feeling"—by acting out a compulsion, or thinking about the obsession.  This technique won't give immediate relief because lasting neuroplastic change takes time, but it does lay the groundwork for change by exercising the brain in a new way. ... The goal is to "change the channel" to some new activity for fifteen to thirty minutes when one has an OCD symptom.  (If one can't resist that long, any time spent resisting is beneficial, even if it is only for a minute.  That resistance, that effort, is what appears to lay down new circuits.)

Mental practice with physical results:

Pascual-Leone taught two groups of people, who had never studied piano, a sequence of notes, showing them which fingers to move and letting them hear the notes as they were played.  Then members of one group, the "mental practice" group, sat in front of an electric piano keyboard, two hours a day, for five days, and imagined both playing the sequence and hearing it played.  A second "physical practice" group actually played the music two hours a day for five days.  Both groups had their brains mapped before the experiment, each day during it, and afterward.  Then both groups were asked to play the sequence, and a computer measured the accuracy of their performances.

Pascual-Leoone found that both groups learned to play the sequence, and both showed similar brain map changes.  Remarkably, mental practice alone produced the same physical changes in the motor system as actually playing the piece.  By the end of the fifth day, the changes in motor signals to the muscles were the same in both groups, and the imagining players were as accurate as the actual players were on their third day.

The level of improvement at five days in the mental practice group, however substantial, was not as great as in those who did physical practice.  But when the mental practice group finished its mental training and was given a single two-hour physical practice session, its overall performance improved to the level of the physical practice group's performance at five days.  Clearly mental practice is an effective way to prepare for learning a physical skill with minimal physical practice.

In an experiment that is as hard to believe as it is simple, Drs. Guang Yue and Kelly Cole showed that imagining one is using one's muscles actually strengthens them.  The study looked at two groups, one that did physical exercise and one that imagined doing exercise. ... At the end of the study the subjects who had done physical exercise increased their muscular strength by 30 percent, as one might expect.  Those who only imagined doing the exercise, for the same period, increased their muscle strength by 22 percent.  The explanation lies in the motor neurons of the brain that "program" movements.  During these imaginary contractions, the neurons responsible for stringing together sequences of instructions for movements are activated and strengthened, resulting in increased strength when the muscles are contracted.

Talk about unbelievable.

The Sea Gypsies are nomadic people who live in a cluster of tropical islands in the Burmese archipelago and off the west coast of Thailand.  A wandering water tribe, they learn to swim before they learn to walk and live over half their lives in boats on the open sea. ... Their children dive down, often thirty feet beneath the water's surface, and pluck up their food ... and have done so for centuries.  By learning to lower their heart rate, they can stay under water twice as long as most swimmers.  They do this without any diving equipment.

But what distinguishes these children, for our purposes, is that they can see clearly at these great depths, without goggles.  Most human beings cannot see clearly under water because as sunlight passes through water, it is bent ... so that light doesn't land where it should on the retina.

Anna Gislén, a Swedish researcher, studied the Sea Gypsies' ability to read placards under water and found that they were more than twice as skillful as European children.  The Gypsies learned to control the shape of their lenses and, more significantly, to control the size of their pupils, constricting them 22 percent.  This is a remarkable finding, because human pupils reflexively get larger under water, and pupil adjustment has been thought to be a fixed, innate reflex, controlled by the brain and nervous system.

This ability of the Sea Gypsies to see under water isn't the product of a unique genetic endowment.  Gislén has since taught Swedish children to constrict their pupils to see under water.

The fact that cultures differ in perception is not proof that one perceptual act is a good as the next, or that "everything is relative" when it comes to perception.  Clearly some contexts call for a more narrow angle of view, and some for more wide-angle, holistic perception.  The Sea Gypsies have survived using a combination of their experience of the sea and holistic perception.  So attuned are they to the moods of the sea that when the tsunami of December 26, 2004, hit the Indian Ocean, killing hundreds of thousands, they all survived.  They saw that the sea had begun to recede in a strange way, and this drawing back was followed by an unusually small wave; they saw dolphins begin to swim for deeper water, while the elephants started stampeding to higher ground, and they heard the cicadas fall silent. ... Long before modern science put this all together, they had either fled the sea to the shore, seeking the highest ground, or gone into very deep waters, where they also survived.

Music makes extraordinary demands on the brain.  A pianist performing the eleventh variation of the Sixth Paganini etude by Franz Liszt must play a staggering eighteen hundred notes per minute.  Studies by Taub and others of musicians who play stringed instruments have shown that the more these musicians practice, the larger the brain maps for their active left hands become, and the neurons and maps that respond to string timbres increase; in trumpeters the neurons and maps that respond to "brassy" sounds enlarge.  Brain imaging shows that musicians have several areas of their brains—the motor cortex and the cerebellum, among others—that differ from those of nonmusicians.  Imaging also shows that musicians who begin playing before the age of seven have larger brain areas connecting the two hemispheres.

It is not just "highly cultured" activities that rewire the brain.  Brain scans of London taxi drivers show that the more years a cabbie spends navigating London streets, the larger the volume of his hippocampus, that part of the brain that stores spatial representations.  Even leisure activities change our brain; meditators and meditation teachers have a thicker insula, a part of the cortex activated by paying close attention.

Here's something completely different, and frightening.

[T]otalitarian regimes seem to have an intuitive awareness that it becomes hard for people to change after a certain age, which is  why so much effort is made to indoctrinate the young from an early age.  For instance, North Korea, the most thoroughgoing totalitarian regime in existence, places children in school from ages two and a half to four years; they spend almost every waking hour being immersed in a cult of adoration for dictator Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung.  They can see their parents only on weekends.  Practically every story read to them is about the leader.  Forty percent of the primary school textbooks are devoted wholly to describing the two Kims.  This continues all the way through school.  Hatred of the enemy is drilled in with massed practice as well, so that a brain circuit forms linking the perception of "the enemy" with negative emotions automatically.  A typical math quiz asks, "Three soldiers from the Korean People's Army killed thirty American soldiers.  How many American soldiers were killed by each of them, if they all killed an equal number of enemy soldiers?"  Such perceptual emotional networks, once established in an indoctrinated people, do not lead only to mere "differences of opinion" between them and their adversaries, but to plasticity-based anatomical differences, which are much harder to bridge or overcome than ordinary persuasion.

Think the North Koreans are the only ones whose brains are being re-programed?

"The Internet is just one of those things that contemporary humans can spend millions of 'practice' events at, that the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to.  Our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure—but so, too, by reading, by television, by video games, by modern electronics, by contemporary music, by contemporary 'tools,' etc." — Michael Merzenich, 2005

Erica Michael and Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University did a brain scan study to test whether the medium is indeed the message.  They showed that different brain areas are involved in hearing speech and reading it, and different comprehension centers in hearing words and reading them.  As Just put it, "The brain constructs the message ... differently for reading and listening. ... Listening to an audio book leaves a different set of memories than reading does.  A newscast heard on the radio is processed differently from the same words read in a newspaper."  This finding refutes the conventional theory of comprehension, which argues that a single center in the brain understands words, and it doesn't really matter how ... information enters the brain.

Television, music videos, and video games, all of which use television techniques, unfold at a much faster pace than real life, and they are getting faster, which causes people to develop an increased appetite for high-speed transitions in those media.  It is the form of the television medium—cuts, edits, zooms, pans, and sudden noises—that alters the brain, by activating what Pavlov called the "orienting response," which occurs whenever we sense a sudden change in the world around us, especially a sudden movement.  We instinctively interrupt whatever we are doing to turn, pay attention, and get our bearings. ... Television triggers this response at a far more rapid rate than we experience it in life, which is why we can't keep our eyes off the TV screen, even in the middle of an intimate conversation, and why people watch TV a lot longer than they intend.  Because typical music videos, action sequences, and commercials trigger orientating responses at a rate of one per second, watching them puts us into continuous orienting response with no recovery.  No wonder people report feeling drained from watching TV.  Yet we acquire a taste for it and find slower changes boring.  The cost is that such activities as reading, complex conversation, and listening to lectures become more difficult.

All electronic devices rewire the brain.  People who write on a computer are often at a loss when they have to write by hand or dictate, because their brains are not wired to translate thoughts into cursive writing or speech at high speed.  When computers crash and people have mini-nervous breakdowns, there is more than a little truth in their cry, "I feel like I've lost my mind!"  As we use an electronic medium, our nervous system extends outward, and the medium extends inward.

Ouch!

"Use it or lose it" is a common refrain in The Brain that Changes Itself, whether talking about specific knowledge and abilities, or the capacity for learning and the very plasticity of the brain itself.  (There is some hope given, however, that knowledge apparently lost is recoverable, even if its brain "map" has subsequently been taken over for another use.)  Do you worry, as I did, that these new discoveries mean that it really is possible to learn too much, that we need to save our brains for that which is most important?  That learning German will drive away what little I know of French?  Relax; that doesn't need to happen, although I must be sure to keep the French fresh in my mind or it will get shelved.

As the scientist Gerald Edelman has pointed out, the human cortex alone has 30 billion neurons and is capable of making 1 million billion synaptic connections.  Edelman writes, "If we considered the number of possible neural circuits, we would be dealing with hyper-astronomical numbers:  10 followed by at least a million zeros.  (There are 10 followed by 79 zeros, give or take a few, of particles in the known universe.)"  These staggering numbers explain why the human brain can be described as the most complex known object in the universe, and why it is capable of ongoing, massive microstructural change, and capable of performing so many different mental functions and behaviors.

I'm tired of typing.  Get the book.

Today's Mallard Fillmore comic inspired this post, which Li'l Writer Guy had actually been working on in the background ever since a conversation we had about the subject last night.

Mind you, I don't know any of the details of how it will work, and am only commenting on the theory that children should be covered on their parents' health insurance until they are 26 years old.

It shows the hazards of exposure to pop culture that I was tempted to respond to this idea with "WTF?"  Language I would never speak begins to look harmless as an acronym, and one commonly in print at that.  But I digress.

There are at least two issues here.  One is the need to address the health care gap many young people experience when they begin their adult lives.  An affordable source of insurance for those who are, as the Japanese so elegantly put it, "not in education or employment," opens up intriguing possibilities for self-directed learning, volunteer work, internships, and other ways of independent exploration that could better prepare a person for college, grad school, or a good career fit.  Too many people move mindlessly from high school to college to the workplace without gaining the life skills necessary to get the most out of them.

On the other hand, this is yet another instance of the bizarre phenomenon of extended adolescence.  Parents are not only paying for a college education for their children, but many are covering their graduate school expenses.  Worse, the schools expect this, and require information on parental income for scholarship applications.  (I think universities have some nerve mocking "helicopter parents" while freely expecting their money.)  Now the parents' insurance is expected to cover their children long after those children should be on their own.  We have come a long way, and not all for the better, from the days when teenagers—some of them quite young—routinely married, held responsible jobs, raised children, and supported families.  You can say all you want that it takes more education to acccomplish that in today's society, and I'll mostly agree, though I'll add that the amount of time given to acquiring that education is shockingly and unnecessarily high.  But in any case it cannot be good that we've removed a decade of strong, healthy, exuberant and enthusiastic youth from the years of independence and productivity.

Janet alerted me to Jamie Oliver; DSTB followed up with what is apparently a new show on ABC.  It starts next Friday, but the pilot was shown last night; fortunately it's available both at the show site and Hulu, so I was able to watch it.  Jamie's attempt to get the people of Huntington, West Virginia to take a healthier approach to eating has the faults of American commercial television (just as does Who Do You Think You Are?), but it's not bad and (so far) is not as over the top as what I've seen of his British shows.  If his personality is a little too dramatic for my taste, there's no doubting the sincerity of his preaching and his mission.  His gospel is good, fresh food, and in this episode he takes on school lunches.

[Excuse me, school meals.  The only meal these children eat at home is dinner.  In Oliver's unfeigned horror at the meals served at our public schools, he misses what strikes me as the more important point:  Why are all these children eating school food?  Why aren't they bringing lunches from home, and why, for Pete's sake, don't they eat breakfast before going to school?  If the schools are going to offer food, certainly it should be healthy food, but where are the parents?  There's absolutely no need to subject one's children to American public school food, good or bad.  The school lunch (and now breakfast) program does serve a useful purpose, making sure children whose parents can't provide meals for them aren't trying to learn on empty stomachs.  That's a good thing.  But somehow the whole system got skewed; I know that the goal of the school lunch program at our kids' school was to have everyone participate.  (We didn't.)  I saw not one lunchbox in the show.  I hope that while he teaches the adults how easy it is to put together healthy meals, he also teaches the kids how easy it is to make their own healthy lunches.  But that's another issue; I know I'm taking on a Great American Icon by dissing the school lunch program.]

My favorite character in the show was one of the school lunch ladies, appropriately named Alice.  She wasn't the one in charge, but as Oliver said, "It's obvious that the real boss is Alice," and "Alice is a force to be reckoned with."  There are some delightfully obvious similarities—but the real Boss, Alice Davis Porter Wightman, would have agreed with Jamie about the food.

One place I disagree with him is his incomprehensible aversion to pizza for breakfast.  Granted, the pizza the children were being served didn't look good for any meal, but I'll stake my recent breakfast pizza against anyone's milk-and-cereal or bacon-and-eggs:  Homemade crust; homemade "tomato sauce" which was not only tomato but a whole bunch of other veggies cooked so it still looked and tasted like tomato sauce (only better); green, red, and hot peppers; mushrooms; onions; garlic; and spinach.  Yes, it also had cheese and, yes pepperoni—but so what?  The balance was great...and so was the pizza.  Far more veggies than most American breakfasts—or British either, I'll bet.

As long as I can watch it on my computer, with a pause button and while doing other things, I think I'll enjoy checking out Jamie Oliver's progress in upcoming episodes.

In Defense of Food:  An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan (Penguin, New York, 2008)

I'm in the middle (okay, the beginning) of two rather hefty books at the moment, Susan Wise Bauer's The History of the Ancient World, and my latest review book from Thomas Nelson, The Chronological Guide to the Bible.  It's great to be reading the two of them together, though that means it will be a long time before I can review either one.

And now longer still, as the library e-mailed to let me know that I'd made it to the top of the waiting list for In Defense of Food.  Michael Pollan is shaping up to be the next John Taylor Gatto for me:  a modern author whose books I simply can't resist and can't put down.  Reading was the easy part; reviewing without quoting from every page is the difficulty. The book is bristling with my neon green and pink sticky notes.

C. S. Lewis, writing more than half a century ago about the unhealthy state of our sexual appetites, made this comparison with our approach to food:

The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body. Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want, it is quite true most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much. One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.

Or take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a striptease act—that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?

And indeed it has.  Americans are obsessed with food, simultaneously overweight and undernourished, eating more and enjoying it less.  Although the causes of our unhealthy relationship with food are many and complex, much is explained by the simple idea that we have abdicated our responsibility for what and how we eat in favor of the expert opinion of professionals.  Never mind that the experts change their minds dramatically with alarming and almost predictable frequency.  Reading In Defense of Food, I was struck by a feeling of  same song, next verse.  It's a strikingly familiar story to anyone who has considered the arenas of childbirth, medical care, education and even entertainment, in which we have ceded our rights and responsibilities to others.

The good news?  Our eating disorders are not our fault, but the cumulative effect of bad science, bad advice, and the biases of a whole lot of people in government, academia, and the food and medical industries who realize that there is much more profit in a Twinkie than a carrot.  The better news?  We can change.  We can take back the responsibility for our own food choices.

Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants.  Pollan begins with this succinct expression of how to eat right.  In the final section he fleshes out these thoughts with some practical suggestions, and in between he covers the dangers of nutritionism—regarding food as nothing more than a delivery system for nutrients—and why the Western diet appears largely responsible for what he calls the diseases of civilization.

I'm going to ignore most of my colorful sticky notes, but here are some favorites:

USDA figures show a decline in the nutrient content of the forty-three crops it has tracked since the 1950s.  In one recent analysis, vitamin C declined by 20 percent, iron by 15 percent, riboflavin by 38 percent, calcium by 16 percent....To put this in concrete terms, you now have to eat three apples to get the same amount of iron as you would have gotten from a single 1940 apple, and you'd have to eat several more slices of bread to get your recommended daily allowance of zinc than you would have a century ago.

Paul Rozin is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has dreamed up some of the more imaginative survey questions ever asked of American eaters; the answers he's collected offer a pretty good index to our current befuddlement and anxiety about eating....  In one experiment, he showed the words "chocolate cake" to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations.  "Guilt" was the top response.  If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of the French eaters to the same prompt:  "celebration."

A few years ago, Rozin presented a group of Americans with the following sentence:  "Assume you are alone on a desert island for one year and you can have water and one other food.  Pick the food that you think would be best for your health."  The choices were corn, alfalfa sprouts, hot dogs, spinach, peaches, bananas, and milk chocolate.  The most popular choice was bananas (42 percent), followed by spinach (27 percent), corn (12 percent), alfalfa sprouts (7 percent), peaches (5 percent), hot dogs (4 percent), and milk chocolate (3 percent).  Only 7 percent of the participants chose one of the two foods that would in fact best support survival:  hot dogs and milk chocolate.

Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma is a book well worth reading, but In Defense of Food is well worth buying, if only to be able to lend it out.  It's in my Amazon shopping cart even now.

The Omnivore's Dilemma:  A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan (Penguin, New York, 2006)

My limited knowledge of Michael Pollan prior to devouring this book was primarily his mantra for healthy eating:  Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants.  There's a lot of wisdom there — not that I'm very good at following it — but that phrase itself is not found in The Omnivore's Dilemma.  It is the beginning, however, of an excellent Pollan article in the New York Times, Unhappy Meals.

I'll admit I was expecting a diatribe, a full-force blast against agri-business and the factory farm, more along the lines of what we hear from the more strident vegans and animal rights activists.  Pollan, however, is much too skilled as a journalist and writer for that.  If his journeys lead him to both Food Hell and Food Heaven, they also show him that there is no clear, simple, and easy path to salvation when it comes to eating.

The Omnivore's Dilemma is Pollan's attempt to answer some important questions about the food we eat, which I have unfairly boiled down to: Where does the food that we eat come from, and how did it get from there to us?  His quest takes him through the horrifying house of cards that is industrial farming, ranching, and food processing, a vision that will either open your eyes or make you screw them tightly shut, because most of us don't have a lot of choice when it comes, for example, to eschewing the monoculture corn that finds its way into most of what we eat and much of what we don't.  The first of the four meals in the subtitle is of McDonald's fast food, eaten with his family but hardly "shared," as they each consumed a different choice of foods, all the while driving along the highway, as many fast food meals are eaten in America today.

Skipping ahead, the fourth and final meal was as personal and local as Pollan could make it:  meat from the wild pig he shot himself, bread made with wild yeasts, produce from his garden, mushrooms gathered by his own hands, and more, all crafted into a gourmet feast that he shared at the table with friends, family, and good conversation.  With apparently honest and transparent struggles, he experiences both the attraction of vegetarianism and the joy of the hunt in preparation for what he called his Perfect Meal.  Not a meal for everyone, nor for every day, but a meal of grace, embodying the ultimate answer to his questions.

In between is Organic, what Pollan calls "pastoral food," in contrast to "industrial." This required two meals, because "organic" isn't what it used to be.  "Big organic," symbolized by the Whole Foods Market, has hit the big time.  It is proof that we do, after all, have some choice about where our food comes from.  That we can now buy organic food at Wal-Mart says a lot for the power of the consumer.  But this victory came at a price:  our 1960's-bred image of the small, family, organic farm remains only on the patently misleading pictures on the food packages.  In order to become a mass-market commodity, organic food has taken on many of the harmful practices of the industrial system, from migrant labor to "free range" chickens that never see the outdoors.  It's still a good thing — organic farming is much better for the land and produces food that is at least somewhat more nutritious — but has it lost its soul?

Joel Salatin would say it has.  The section on Salatin's Polyface Farm in Virginia is worth the price of the book all by itself.  This is Food Heaven on earth.  If you've seen the movie, Food, Inc., you've seen Joel and the wonder that is Polyface.  The Salatin family, beginning with Joel's parents, took an abused and exhausted plot of land and healed it ("We are in the redemption business"), turning it into a showpiece of truly sustainable agriculture.  It's all I ever dreamed of for the Ideal Farm, and more, one that produces a great deal of food while enriching, rather than depleting the land, and where the people, the animals, the plants, the smaller creatures, and the soil play out their interdependence to the advantage of all.  To add to my delight, the Salatins are also homeschoolers.

As many of us who have chosen to homeschool our children are in defending our educational way of life, Joel Salatin is perhaps a little too strident in his enthusiasm for his way of farming, not showing much concern for those of us who have no access to locally-grown food but still want to eat.  I know from experience that such is a common, though unhelpful, reaction when the rest of the world — and especially the government — seems determined to stop you from doing what you know is good, right, and healing for yourself, your family, and your community.  That is the position that small farmers are in today, much as homeschoolers were 30 years ago in the United States, and still are in many parts of the world.

Putting that defensiveness aside, however:  in all the areas in which I care so much for the local and the personal — homes, families, education, childbirth, businesses, farms, and more — no one path is right for everyone, and in diversity is our strength. 

Deciding whether [the future of food] should more closely resemble Joel's radically local vision or Whole Foods' industrial organic matters less than assuring that thriving alternatives exist; feeding the cities may require a different sort of food chain than feeding the countryside.  We may need a great many different alternative food chains, organic and local, biodynamic and slow, and others yet undreamed of.  As in the fields, nature provides the best model for the marketplaces, and nature never puts all her eggs in one basket.  The great virtue of a diversified food economy, like a diverse pasture or farm, is its ability to withstand any shock.  The important thing is that there be multiple food chains, so that when any one of them fails — when the oil runs out, when mad cow or other food-borne diseases become epidemic, when the pesticides no longer work, when drought strikes and plagues come and soils blow away — we'll still have a way to feed ourselves.

Michael Pollan is a superb writer, making The Omnivore's Dilemma a very welcome change from much that resides between book covers these days.  I doubt I'll ever get used to seeing certain four-letter words in print, but here they are context-appropriate, and best of all, rare.  There's no need for a grandchild or nephew warning, as by the time they are old enough to read this book (or, more to the point, old enough to want to read it), they will, alas, have already seen and heard things much more shocking.

Much of the content is, in itself, more shocking than a few Anglo-Saxon words could ever be.  But far from being the jeremiad I had expected, Pollan's careful investigations and respectful reporting make The Omnivore's Dilemma a book that everyone who eats should read.

Most of you can stop reading right now.  The Pap smear is not a subject of general interest, but I spent five years working in a cytopathology automation research laboratory, part of an attempt to make the reading of Pap smears easier and more accurate.  Thus the following headline was sure to catch my eye:  Should HPV Test Replace the Pap Smear?

The primary purpose of the Pap smear is the early detection of cervical cancer, it is argued, but testing for human papillomavirus is easier and actually does a better job, although it generates more false positives, especially in younger women.

[This] recommendation is based on a study that found that the human papillomavirus (HPV) test prevented more cases of cervical cancer than the conventional Pap smear. Results of the study were published online Jan. 19 in The Lancet Oncology.

The HPV test should become the screening tool of choice for women 35 and older, the researchers said. It could be done less frequently than the Pap test, which could be used only in women who have tested positive for HPV, they said.

What I find most interesting is the unmentioned, but logical implication that those who are at no risk of contracting HPV, due to the simple expediencies of virginity or faithful monogamy, can dispense with both tests—surely a course of action the medical industry would not wish to endorse!  Gastroenterologists have adopted a once-every-ten-year colonoscopy recommendation for low-risk patients, perhaps gynecologists should follow their example.

 Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall (Knopf, New York, 2009)

A book about running?  Not my thing.  On my daily walks (where by "daily" I mean five days a week and only when I'm not on the road) I've managed to work my way up to doing a quarter of my four miles at what could charitably be called a slow jog, but there my interest ended.  However, my nephew received Born to Run for Christmas, and I was curious enough to flip quickly through it.

Born to Run is a fascinating and groundbreaking book.  Actually, it's at least three books, interwoven, and it's no coincidence that when I perused it I couldn't decide if it was meant to be nonfiction or a novel.

The first thread—the tale of an ultramarathon race in the nearly-inaccessible Copper Canyon region of Mexico, featuring a bizarre cast of characters from a topnotch American ultramarathoner to primitive Tarahumara Indians to a couple of drunken 20-somethings who just happen to run really, really well—is a moderately interesting adventure story, though the bad language and "adult" content detracts from the tale and prevents me from recommending the book without serious reservations.  Perhaps worse is the "docu-drama," fast-and-loose-with-the-truth approach, in which the author reports as verbatim thought processes and conversations which he could not have known.  This technique works as fiction, but in this context damages the book's credibility.

Of less interest to me was the second, spiritual, thread, which extols traditional Tarahumara society as an unfallen Eden, and postulates that not running is—I kid you not—Original Sin, responsible for all mankind's problems.  You might find this thesis more intriguing if your idea of Paradise includes mad, adulterous, drunken orgies.

The final thread was by far the most interesting, and deserves better than to be commingled with the others.

• People were designed ("evolved," if you prefer), for long-distance running, from the intricate construction of the foot to our breathing processes and sweat glands.  We're not the fastest animals on earth, but our heat-dissipation mechanism is not dependent on respiration.  Between this advantage and our ability to work cooperatively, we can run down dinner, which is what our ancestors once did.  Now we have takeout, and an aversion to sweat.
• Mexico's Tarahumara Indians (the "Running People"), along with a few other dwindling tribes around the world, preserve this ability in their cultures, running ultra long distances with joy rather than pain and exhaustion.
• These primitive tribes are not freaks or savants; running ability is a learned skill, not a genetic mutation.  This joy is our birthright as human beings.
• High-tech running shoes have ruined both our feet and our running ability.  When it comes to running, less is clearly more.  Barefoot is best for the foot, although inexperience and difficult terrain can necessitate some form of protection, in which case a minimalist shoe like the Vibram Five Fingers or other thin-soled shoe is called for.  The Tarahumara run in sandals.  Even 50s-style Keds are better than the latest springy, gel-filled, microchip-embedded specialty shoes, which weaken the foot and encourage injurious running habits.
• If this inspires you to take up barefoot running, go slowly.  Your feet have been imprisoned since you were a toddler, and that weakness can't be overcome all at once.
• Contrary to what most of us believe—and what we are usually told—running is not something we must give up as we age, nor are we locked out of it if we're already old, overweight, and out of shape.  Long-distance running is a sport nonagenarians can enjoy, and one in which men have no competitive advantage over women.  One woman placed in the top ten of an ultramarathon even though she stopped at the aid stations to nurse her baby as needed!
• Good running is less about speed than enjoyment.  The joy is more in the journey than the goal, more in running than in winning.

From my first flip through the book until I reluctantly closed the covers, Born to Run reminded me of Ina May Gaskin's Ina May's Guide to Childbirth.  Both are stories of a natural, rewarding function (running/childbirth) lost to modern society through ignorance, laziness, and greed (people, podiatrists, and shoe manufacturers/parents, obstetricians, and lawyers).  (That's an oversimplification, but how much can you do in one sentence?)  Both postulate that the same medical and technological advancement that has worked miracles has also demonized and dehumanized physiological processes that generally work best with minimal interference.  And both bring us into contact with people who we will be tempted to shrug off as irrelvant to our own lives.

Thread 1 of Born to Run will lead you to believe that long-distance runners are folks with a masochistic obsession and a touch of madness, the sort who would bike a million miles, or climb Mt. Everest twice in Pittsburgh.  From Thread 2 you would get the idea that they are throw-back hippies, the vegan followers of some never-existed-before blend of paganism and imagined Eastern religion.  In other words, runners are Them.  Not Us.  Definitely Not Me.

But the joy of running is the birthright of nearly every human being on the planet.  Whether we have sold our birthright for a couch potato lifestyle, or it was stolen from us by greedy, deceiving, corporate shoe manufacturers, does not in the end matter.  The power to change is all ours.

Run.

More from the backblog . . .

The Strange Double Standards of Abortion  John Stackhouse muses on the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, vigilantism, and hypocrisy.

This past week, a teenager in Vancouver was arrested by police because friends of his had noticed a “hit list” of over 100 people posted on his Facebook page. When the police seized the Grade 12 student, they found an arsenal of knives, guns and batons.  That young man attends my son’s high school.

Suppose he lived next door. Suppose I read the Facebook page one evening because my son brought it to my attention. Suppose the next morning I saw him loading weapons in the trunk of his car. What would I do to stop him from killing innocent people?

 

Reflections on My Termination Peter Augustine Lawler, former member of the President's Council on Bioethics, considers what is lost by President Obama's approach to the moral issues of the day.

For Obama, a valuable Council does nothing but offer advice to the administration. The Bush Council was actually given the additional mandate of public education, of developing a national dialogue on controversial bioethical issues. It's with that Socratic second mandate in mind that President Bush chose for his first chairman a man trained in medicine, natural science, and the wisdom about being human embodied in the Great Books from Plato through Shakespeare to Genesis--Leon Kass. For Obama, it would appear, there's no need for such moral and political discussion or such "humanistic" guidance because the experts know the nonideological and objective answer to the key questions that face us in our high-tech and increasingly biotech world. Personal opinion is trumped by what the "studies show," and public opinion should be guided toward a consensus based on those studies.

For many of the bioethical issues that face us, there's no obvious, objective solution—meaning one that emerges from experts without real moral and political deliberation. That doesn't mean that the contending parties involved should be narrowly ideological or blindly fundamentalist. It's their duty to be and in fact they often really are guided by what we can really know through science. But as Socrates himself constantly reminded us, for the most reasonable of men and women the key questions often remain more obvious than their answers. There's no substitute, in a democracy, for thinking together about who we are before deciding what to do, and it's not "anti-science" to sometimes conclude that science alone doesn't resolve every dilemma we face about human freedom and dignity.

The rule of experts might be fine if they were philosopher-kings who had united in themselves not only technological power but perfect wisdom. But of course, it's much more clear that the human power over nature and human nature is growing faster than is our wisdom to use it well for authentically human purposes. The experts, we have to remember, very often hide their own personal opinions and ideological agendas behind their impersonal claims to merely be following what the studies say. We can learn from them, but as long as they fall short of perfect objectivity based on perfect wisdom, we shouldn't trust them. These days, the people, above all, should distrust meddlesome, schoolmarmish judges and bureaucrats (and presidents who enable them) who want to deprive them of the capacity of thinking for themselves.

 

State Slaps Dr. Do-Good  Insurance laws have a purpose, as most well-intentioned laws do.  What laws rarely have is common sense, something judges sometimes, but increasingly rarely, provide.

The state is trying to shut down a New York City doctor's ambitious plan to treat uninsured patients for around $1,000 a year.  Dr. John Muney offers his patients everything from mammograms to mole removal at his AMG Medical Group clinics, which operate in all five boroughs.  "I'm trying to help uninsured people here," he said.  His patients agree to pay $79 a month for a year in return for unlimited office visits with a $10 co-pay.

But his plan landed him in the crosshairs of the state Insurance Department, which ordered him to drop his fixed-rate plan—which it claims is equivalent to an insurance policy.

He says he can afford to charge such a small amount because he doesn't have to process mountains of paperwork and spend hours on billing.  "If they leave me alone, I can serve thousands of patients," he said.

The state believes his plan runs afoul of the law because it promises to cover unplanned procedures—like treating a sudden ear infection—under a fixed rate. That's something only a licensed insurance company can do.

The doctor's plan is no substitute for health insurance, since it doesn't cover anything he can't do himself, eliminating the catastrophic, big-ticket items that are the raison d'être for insurance.  People who are generally healthy might find $1000 plus per year a bit steep for simple office visits, but what could be wrong with offering fixed-fee services, as long as he's not the only game in town?

 

Unplugging Grandma Isn't the Problem The problem is getting Grandma care in the first place.  The article also debunks the much-thrown-about life expectance statistics.

[President Obama] has no plans, as he put it, to "pull the plug on Grandma."  The problem with government health systems is not that they pull the plug on Grandma. It's that Grandma has a hell of a time getting plugged in in the first place. The only way to "control costs" is to restrict access to treatment, and the easiest people to deny treatment to are the oldsters. Don't worry, it's all very scientific. In Britain, they use a "Quality-Adjusted Life Year" formula to decide that you don't really need that new knee because you're gonna die in a year or two, maybe a decade-and-a-half tops. So it's in the national interest for you to go around hobbling in pain rather than divert "finite resources" away from productive members of society to a useless old geezer like you. And you'd be surprised how quickly geezerdom kicks in: A couple of years back, some Quebec facilities were attributing death from hospital-contracted infection of anyone over 55 to "old age."

I had an elderly British visitor this month who's had a recurring problem with her left hand. At one point it swelled up alarmingly, and so we took her to Emergency. They did a CT scan, X-rays, blood samples, the works. In two hours at a small, rural, undistinguished, no-frills hospital in northern New Hampshire, this lady got more tests than she's had in the past decade in Britain—even though she goes to see her doctor once a month. He listens sympathetically, tells her old age often involves adjusting to the loss of mobility, and then advises her to take the British version of Tylenol and rest up. Anything else would use up those valuable "resources." So, in two hours in New Hampshire, she got tested and diagnosed (with gout) and prescribed something to deal with it. It's the difference between health "care" (i.e., going to the doctor's every month to no purpose) and health treatment—and on the latter America is the best in the world.

 

Daughter Saves Mother, 80, Left by Doctors to Starve  Speaking of unplugging Grandma . . .

Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex [England], is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding. The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients.  Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care pathway plan. They argue that while it is suitable for patients who do have only days to live, it is being used more widely in the NHS, denying treatment to elderly patients who are not dying.

Fenton was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia. Although [her daughter, Christine Ball] acknowledged that her mother was very ill she was astonished when a junior doctor told her she was going to be placed on the plan to “make her more comfortable” in her last days.  Ball insisted that her mother was not dying but her objections were ignored. A nurse even approached her to say: “What do you want done with your mother’s body?”  On January 19, Fenton’s 80th birthday, Ball says her mother was feeling better and chatting to her family, but it took another four days to persuade doctors to give her artificial feeding.