Category Archives: Health

Food Preferences

Stop calling them allergies.

Yes, I think that, while some people have serious health issues, much of this is just fad.

[Update a while later]

I should note that I’m allergic to tree nuts, but it’s never been life threatening, as far as I know. It’s just that if I eat them, the linings of my mouth and throat itch.

One more point. I’m not normally into censorship, but I think that the “Food Babe” moron should be banned from the Internet.

Paleolithic Sleep Patterns

Apparently, sleeping all night isn’t a modern industrial invention:

The volunteers also slept continuously. They would toss and turn like everyone does, but they almost never woke up for a concerted window in the middle of the night. This contradicts a growing idea, popularized by historian Roger Ekirch, that sleeping in eight-hour chunks is a modern affectation.

Ekirch combed through centuries of Western literature and documents to show that Europeans used to sleep in two segments, separated by an hour or two of wakefulness. Siegel doesn’t dispute Ekirch’s analysis; he just thinks that the old two-block pattern was preceded by an even older single-block one. “The two-sleep pattern was probably due to humans migrating so far from the equator that they had long dark periods,” he says. “The long nights caused this pathological sleep pattern and the advent of electric lights and heating restored the primal one.”

Interesting. Also some good advice for better sleep.

Nutrition Guidelines

Tom Vilsack: “I wish there were scientific facts.”

Pro tip to Vilsack. An “informed opinion” not based on scientific facts is an uninformed opinion.

And here’s a nice bit of illogic:

Lawmakers also noted that federal nutrition guidelines could be considered a failure because of the country’s high obesity rates. But Burwell fought back, arguing that obesity would be much worse had the guidelines not been in place.

“We are on the wrong trajectory, but would the trajectory have been worse?” Burwell said, acknowledging there was an obesity problem.

Since it was the original crap low-fat guidelines from the government that caused the problem, no, there’s no reason to consider them a success, or to not end the insanity.