Having watched the documentary on GMO foods, which reveals that those in charge of food safety in this country have treated with scorn the simple request that products made with genetically modified organisms be labelled as such, I have little faith that the Food and Drug Administration will not grant the request of the dairy industry to to alter the definition of "milk" to include chemical sweeteners such as aspartame and sucralose without putting "Low Calorie" or "Reduced Calorie" on the label. The artificial sweeteners would still be included in the ingredient list on the packaging, but the main label, that which most people read, would give no hint that the product was artificially sweetened.
I say that even "low calorie" is disingenuous. "Artificially Sweetened" or "Contains Sucralose" (Aspartame, whatever) ought to be in large, bold print on the package. Once upon a time, "no sugar added" was synonymous with "unsweetened." Now we must drill down to the small-print ingredient list to find out this important information, and more than once I've been caught and ended up at home with a useless product. It is as if the surgeon general's warnings were printed on the inside of cigarette packages.
In the spirit of Fruitless Fall, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Food, Inc., Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal, and similar stories about problems in our food supply, I present Genetic Roulette: The Gamble of our Lives (H/T DSTB).
I'm always a bit skeptical of one-sided documentaries, especially of the scary and countercultural kind. But this look at the unforeseen consequences of the introduction of Genetically Modified Organisms into our diet, environment, and social structure is well-done and contains much food for thought, including the rise of herbicide resistance, decreasing yield, suppression of academic freedom, and the devastation visited on third-world farmers. I had to watch in bits and snatches because the film is an hour and 25 minutes long, but I found it well worth the time invested.
Here's hoping my nephew will accede to the suggestion that he take on, as a school project, a balanced investigation of both sides of these claims. If he does, and gives his permission, I'll report the results here.
Check out Janet's great article at Power of Moms!
No Time for a Break: The Art of Resting when Parenting is Non-Stop
I knew the importance of rest going into motherhood, but for some reason, my beautiful and demanding son didn’t know that Sunday was my day off. He somehow missed the memo that on this “day of rest” he should sleep through the night, take long naps, not need to nurse on my bleeding breasts, and not cry so that I can be refreshed and a good mother for the remainder of the week
Often as mothers we are either working or feeling guilty that we’re not working (and sometimes both at once!) We need to learn to rest guilt-free because rest isn’t restful if we’re feeling guilty!
Trust me (the objective, unbiased proud, excited mother), you'll want to read it all.
It's been more than a decade since a family tragedy forced me to look into how childbirth has changed in America since our chlidren were born. It's still a major concern of mine, and so I read with heightened interest this profile of Suzanne Davis Arms in the May/June 2011 issue of the University of Rochester's Rochester Review. (Yes, I realize that is two years ago. Any regular reader of this blog knows I'm behind in practically everything.)
A few things made the article particularly interesting, beyond the basic subject.
- Arms is a University of Rochester (alma mater of three of the four people in our family, and of my brother as well).
- Betsy Naumburg, quoted in the article, was one of the doctors when Porter worked for the UR's Family Medicine Center.
- Arms wrote Immaculate Deception: A New Look at Women in Childbirth in 1975. Although I hadn't read it, her book clearly influenced the attitudes and options that were prevalent when our children were born in the late 70's and early 80's. Her revised edition, Immaculate Deception II: Myth, Magic, and Birth came out in 1995, not long before my forced re-entry into the world of childbirth. Perhaps if I had read it then, I would have been forewarned of the return of over-medicalized childbirth.
Yesterday I had a dentist appointment, and while I was there I had a revelation in their restroom.
Sitting on the counter was a mug full of disposable, single-use toothbrushes, individually wrapped and pre-loaded with toothpaste.
When I spoke with our dentist, she said that she had gotten the idea from orthodontists, whose patients often come to the office without having had the opportunity to brush their teeth. But I saw quite a different use for them.
One of the most annoying aspects of overseas airplane travel (after the expense, lack of sleep, and forced minimal movement for hours on end) is the difficulty of brushing one's teeth. It's bad enough to have to negotiate the tiny lavatory, hoping the plane doesn't lurch as you attempt to spit into the diminutive sink. But schlepping a travel toothbrush in your carry-on luggage, and toothpaste in the TSA-approved clear, plastic, quart-sized, zip-lock bag, and negotiating their interaction within the confines of the aforementioned lavatory—well, let's just say it's enough to make many people forego dental hygiene on long flights.
Enter the single-use, preloaded toothbrush: Light. Individually wrapped. No hassle from the TSA. Brush and toss. Brilliant.
There's only one problem. You can order these NiceTouch toothbrushes from practicon.com. However, since they expect you to be a dentist, the minimum order is 144. (I so wanted to say "gross!" but that doesn't fit with toothbrushes, unless you drop yours on the lavatory floor while trying to brush your teeth on an airplane.) So either you must plan a lot of travel, or go in with a lot of travelling friends, or have a nice, friendly dentist who will get some for you.
If you succeed, remember this caveat from our own nice, friendly dentist: they really are for one use only. They're not made well enough to stand up under repeated use, and have been know to fall apart in very uncomfortable ways.
I'm looking forward to brushing my teeth on my next trip to Switzerland.
Don't you love what you can do with statistics and charts? This chart is from a great article in the New England Journal of Medicine: Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates. For a less scholarly report on the data, see this Reuters article.
The article begins like this.
Dietary flavonoids, abundant in plant-based foods, have been shown to improve cognitive function. Specifically, a reduction in the risk of dementia, enhanced performance on some cognitive tests, and improved cognitive function in elderly patients with mild impairment have been associated with a regular intake of flavonoids. A subclass of flavonoids called flavanols, which are widely present in cocoa, green tea, red wine, and some fruits, seems to be effective in slowing down or even reversing the reductions in cognitive performance that occur with aging.
One day, while apparently bored in a Kathmandu hotel room—I'm guessing it was night, or cloudy—the author, Franz H. Messerli, began to think.
Since chocolate consumption could hypothetically improve cognitive function not only in individuals but also in whole populations, I wondered whether there would be a correlation between a country's level of chocolate consumption and its population's cognitive function. To my knowledge, no data on overall national cognitive function are publicly available. Conceivably, however, the total number of Nobel laureates per capita could serve as a surrogate end point reflecting the proportion with superior cognitive function and thereby give us some measure of the overall cognitive function of a given country.
The results astonished him, though perhaps he should not be surprised: he is Swiss.
There was a close, significant linear correlation (r=0.791, P<0.0001) between chocolate consumption per capita and the number of Nobel laureates per 10 million persons in a total of 23 countries. When recalculated with the exclusion of Sweden, the correlation coefficient increased to 0.862. Switzerland was the top performer in terms of both the number of Nobel laureates and chocolate consumption. [emphasis mine]
The only possible outlier ... seems to be Sweden. Given its per capita chocolate consumption of 6.4 kg per year, we would predict that Sweden should have produced a total of about 14 Nobel laureates, yet we observe 32. Considering that in this instance the observed number exceeds the expected number by a factor of more than 2, one cannot quite escape the notion that either the Nobel Committee in Stockholm has some inherent patriotic bias when assessing the candidates for these awards or, perhaps, that the Swedes are particularly sensitive to chocolate, and even minuscule amounts greatly enhance their cognition.
Which perhaps explains why I need to eat more chocolate than Porter does, he being 1/4 Swedish.
Dr. Messerli reports regular daily chocolate consumption, mostly but not exclusively in the form of Lindt's dark varieties.
The above quotations were all from the NEJM article; the final ones from Reuters.
Messerli ... said that despite the tongue-in-cheek tone, he does believe chocolate has real health effects—although people should stay away from the sweeter kinds.
"[D]ark chocolate is the way to go. It's one thing if you want like a medicine or chemistry Nobel Prize, ok, but if you want a physics Nobel Prize it pretty much has got to be dark chocolate."
In case you were wondering, the date on Messerli's article is October 10, 2012. I guess they couldn't wait six more months.
We watched the first half of the PBS documentary Half the Sky last night. (Quarter the Sky?) The conclusion is tonight. I highly recommend it, but not for grandchildren. Here's the trailer.
The shows will be available for one week at PBS video (maybe not in Europe, sorry). Here is the link for Part 1. I'll update with Part 2 when it is released, which should be tomorrow. And here's Part 2.
Note on flu shots: This year they're pushing the intradermal shot. Personally, I think it's because they can use a lower dose, and therefore make the supply go farther. But they're hyping it as less painful ("90% smaller needle"). No matter how many times I told him needles don't bother me ("I gave blood yesterday!"), the nurse practitioner who administered the shot kept emphasizing the small needle and consequent reduced pain.
Based on a sample size of two, I'm here to say that that is bunk. Both Porter and I agreed that the intradermal shot hurt more than a regular injection, not less. I hope our grandkids appreciate the sacrifice. :)
Last Saturday was the opening concert for the Orlando Philharmonic's 20th Anniversary season. Pausing only briefly to wonder how the "new kid on the block" can be twenty years old already—I've done that several times already, the latest being only last month, with the first of our nephews to leave the teenage years behind—I'll just say that Maestro Christopher Wilkins once again began the season with a blockbuster program guaranteed to fill the house. One work: Mahler's Third Symphony. No intermission. Nearly 110 minutes long. The first movement alone is longer than the entirety of Beethoven's Fifth. The orchestra did a great job, but I have to say that they were upstaged by the members of the Florida Opera Theatre Youth Program. Some of those kids were as young as seven, they were highly visible on a platform well above the orchestra, the part that they had to sing was brief and late in the symphony, and they did not fidget. They sat still, they kept their hand in their laps most of the time, and they at least appeared attentive. In short, they did better than me.
I was not familiar with Mahler's Third; it's not programmed often, and I can see why: the orchestra is much larger than that required for most performances, and there's a large chorus as well. E-X-P-E-N-S-I-V-E. I'm glad the OPO took the plunge to offer it. I do have to say, however, that—unlike Mahler's First, which was love at first hearing for me—this one may take a little more exposure for me to appreciate. I found most of the movements reasonably enjoyable, but the sixth and last was interminable. I don't think that had to do with the fact that we'd been sitting for so long as that to my ears it didn't seem to get anywhere. Slowly.
Still, it was a good experience, quite possibly once-in-a-lifetime. We don't even have a copy of Mahler's Third in our extensive music library, though that of course could be remedied.
I know that most of you are waiting for more important posts, with vacation pictures and grandchild adventures, but tonight you get the Blue Light Blues. I saw this article in the Hartford Courant while on vacation; the link here is to Harvard Health Publications, but it's the same text.
In case you needed one more thing to worry about, all that after-hours screen time is exposing you to excessive blue light. And blue light at night is bad.
At night, light throws the body's biological clock—the circadian rhythm—out of whack. Sleep suffers. Worse, research shows that it may contribute to the causation of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.
But not all colors of light have the same effect. Blue wavelengths—which are beneficial during daylight hours because they boost attention, reaction times, and mood—seem to be the most disruptive at night. And the proliferation of electronics with screens, as well as energy-efficient lighting, is increasing our exposure to blue wavelengths, especially after sundown.
Did you catch the bit about energy-efficient lighting? Those highly-touted compact fluorescent bulbs and LED lights put out more blue light than incandescent bulbs. Being green can make you blue, too.
The article offers some suggestions for reducing blue light exposure:
- Use dim red lights for night lights. Red light has the least power to shift circadian rhythm and suppress melatonin.
- Avoid looking at bright screens beginning two to three hours before bed.
- If you work a night shift or use a lot of electronic devices at night, consider wearing blue-blocking glasses.
- Expose yourself to lots of bright light during the day, which will boost your ability to sleep at night, as well as your mood and alertness during daylight.
According to #1, I need to stay up for at least another two hours, but that's not going to happen. I'll try to do better tomorrow. For now, I'll go to bed feeling happy that my bedside clock has a red display.
They say a pound a week is a pretty good rate of weight loss, but today I lost a pound in six minutes.
Unfortunately, I've gained it all back by now, since the people who took my blood encouraged me to drink a lot tonight.
Did I say six minutes? That's all it took from needle-in to needle-out. However, from home to home was over two hours. At the first bloodmobile I tried, the computer went down. After waiting 45 minutes or so, with no progress in sight, I took my paperwork and drove to another site.
It seems there's always something they don't like about my paperwork, and this time it was my travel—never mind that at my last donation, just two months ago, this had posed no difficulty at all. (At that time, it was something entirely different.) "Exactly when, and for how many days, were you in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and France in the past three years?" If this had been one grand European vacation, I might have had the dates readily to hand. But it was a struggle to remember, since—I'm amazed to say—I've made the trip a lot. Fortunately, the lady with veto power over my ability to donate blood lightened up once she concluded that none of those countries is, or ever has been, in the United Kingdom....
Having read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, I was acutely aware that the consent form I signed gives the blood bank pretty much unlimited rights to use my blood as they see fit, which is somewhat unsettling, I will admit.
I hadn't intended the adventure to take up most of the afternoon, but the time actually passed rather quickly, as I had brought with me Made to Stick, by the authors of Switch. Guilt-free reading time, a bottle of water, a movie ticket, and two chocolate chip cookies—and all it cost was two hours and a pint of blood. Plus I may save someone's life, which isn't a bad deal, either.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (Broadway Paperbacks, 2011)
I was a kid who'd failed freshman year at the regular public high school because she never showed up. I'd transferred to an alternative school that offered dream studies instead of biology, so I was taking [a community college biology class] for high-school credit, which meant that I was sitting in a college lecture hall at sixteen with words like mitosis and kinase inhibitors flying around. I was completely lost.
But it was in that biology class that Rebecca Skloot first heard the name: Henrietta Lacks.
Henrietta died in 1951 from a vicious case of cervical cancer. ... But before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been striving to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta's were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.
By the mid-1970's, when I was working in the University of Rochester's Analytical Cytology Laboratory, the HeLa cell line, as it was called, had been a standard research tool for over 20 years.
[The] cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson's disease; and they'd been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers. ... Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta's cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse.
"HeLa cells were one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years," Skloot's professor told her.
What he couldn't tell her, however, was anything at all about the woman behind the cells, Henrietta Lacks herself. The quest for that information would consume much of her life, culminating in this book.
Although The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has special interest for me because of my background in cervical cancer research, such inside information is hardly necessary for finding the book very difficult to put down. Skloot weaves together the story of Henrietta's famous and ubiquitous tumor cells and that of her short and difficult life in such a way that neither the science nor the sorrow becomes overwhelming. Henrietta's cells, holding an honored and essential place in modern biomedical research, contrast sharply with Henrietta's family, which could be the poster child for the poor and marginalized in our country. Reading about their lives in Clover, Virginia confirmed my conclusion that the smartest thing my great-grandparents did was to flee their own hometown on the other side of the Appalachians. Without a doubt, it was harder on Henrietta's family because they were black, but poverty, inbreeding, and, shall we say, non-traditional morals take their toll without regard to race.
The book leaves one with many questions, from medical ethics ("Will our descendants look upon those who profit from people's discarded cells—excised tumors, biopsies, blood taken for newborn testing—as we now look upon 19th century grave robbers?") to social justice ("How can we help someone whose whole community is dysfunctional?"). But I'm left with one especially pressing question, from outside of the book, as it were: How did the troubled teen that Skloot describes herself as end up an excellent and award-winning science writer? There's hope, even for the apparently dysfunctional.
Many thanks to my sister-in-law, the library book sale master, for this gem!
I'm not sure what to think of the latest buzz that sitting for more than three hours a day takes two years off your life, particularly such statements as, "Sitting, it turns out, can shorten life expectancy almost as much as smoking can." As with many such generalized studies, I think it's making its splash long before there has been sufficient time for analysis and confirmation or contradiction. Be that as it may, it's clear enough that the human body is more designed for movement than for sitting on our hind ends for extended periods.
The articles I've read about this new study recommend that we watch less television, cut down our computer time, and walk to a colleague's office rather than sending an e-mail. Only the first is at all practical for those whose work involves the computer, and whose colleagues may be half a world away. Our hope, I assume, lies in taking frequent breaks to get up and move around, although the value of such behavior may be hard to sell to an employer who is more worried about productivity than longevity.
But as long as they're considering impracticalities, I'm puzzled by the obvious omission in the articles: Not one has addressed the long hours our children spend sitting in school, with less freedom of motion than an office worker with a swivel chair and the ability to walk at will to the bathroom. When was the last time you heard a serious suggestion to keep school time to under three hours? (Besides here, of course.)
Worse still, consider what we do to our children before school: The hours tightly bound in car seats, or confined in other devices, aka baby shackles. Little time spent on their tummies learning to become mobile. Day care and early school where mobility is discouraged in the name of education or just plain crowd control.
No wonder we don't care to get off our duffs.
So, the CDC wants all of the "baby boom" generation tested for hepatitis C, in a move reminiscent of school teachers who punish the whole class for the misbehavior of the few. I was planning on simply refusing the test, should our doctor suggest it, but now I have a better answer.
The Big Red Bus was at our church today, so we hopped on and donated, after the Eucharist. (Blood in, blood out.) As it happens, testing for hepatitis C is part of the "mini-physical" you get when you donate blood. Now if the doctor asks, I can say, "been there, done that." Several times over, as a matter of fact.
Study finds coffee-drinkers live longer
The bad news? Lots of cream and sugar could negate the effect.
The good news? Enjoy your coffee guilt-free. At least the coffee helps negate the effect of the cream and sugar. :) And remember, stress and guilt are bad for you, too!
I haven't read the book myself, but was thrilled to find this review of The Truth about Tummy Time: A Parent's Guide to SIDS, the Back to Sleep Program, Car Seats and More by pediatric physical therapist Stephanie J. Pruitt. It's about time someone from the medical profession admitted that Back to Sleep has led to a significant rise in physical problems and developmental delays in our children.
What I find especially interesting is that Back to Sleep is only part of the problem. See this article, Shackles for Babies, particularly the comments that follow from another pediatric physical therapist. Babies are being left on their backs during the day as well as at night, despite the known value of "tummy time." What's much worse, many are kept for hours on end in baby entertainment devices and rigid baby carriers that keep them in unnatural positions and do far more damage than leaving them on their backs, but free to move. Scary.
Even the strictest adherents of Back to Sleep can make a point of giving their babies freedom to move the rest of the hours of the day.
What's your gut reaction to this story?
There are more than 1,000 varieties of bacteria that live within the human gut, and an average person can have around 300 different varieties of the little critters living within them. Each type of bacteria not only supports one another but support your ability to digest food, stay healthy, and if your gut community is a bit off, perhaps gain weight or develop diabetes.
Or this one?
[The] often-overlooked network of neurons lining our guts that is so extensive some scientists have nicknamed it our "second brain". A deeper understanding of this mass of neural tissue, filled with important neurotransmitters, is revealing that it does much more than merely handle digestion or inflict the occasional nervous pang. The little brain in our innards, in connection with the big one in our skulls, partly determines our mental state and plays key roles in certain diseases throughout the body.
U.C.L.A.'s [Emeran] Mayer is doing work on how the trillions of bacteria in the gut "communicate" with enteric nervous system cells (which they greatly outnumber). His work with the gut's nervous system has led him to think that in coming years psychiatry will need to expand to treat the second brain in addition to the one atop the shoulders.
And from a much older source:
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. (1 Corinthians 12:21-26)
