Category Archives: Health
Just How Dumb Is Our Government?
There is no end of examples.
Sadly, it’s dumb because we’ve dumbed down the electorate.
Hunter-Gatherers’ Teeth
Did their diet prevent dental caries?
Red Meat Is A Superfood
More heresy, via Dr. Eades.
Triglycerides
So I heard about this story on the news this morning, and it sounded a little junk sciency:
“What’s exciting about this is it takes that to another place,” said Toni Pollin, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, who led the 2008 work. “Just as you’d expect from something that prevents coronary artery buildup, there is strong evidence that having [a gene mutation] reduces the risk of having a heart attack.”
Kathiresan and colleagues benefited from the revolution in genome technology, sequencing 18,666 genes in each of 3,734 people in their search for genes that appeared to be linked to triglycerides. Rare mutations in the APOC3 gene stood out.
Once they understood where to look, they searched for four mutations in that gene in more than 110,000 people. They found that people with any one of the mutations — about 1 in 150 people — were 40 percent less likely to have heart disease and had lower levels of triglycerides.
There is no doubt in my mind that that there is a genetic basis for heart-disease risk, but I am not seeing anything in this study that would indicate that trying to reduce triglycerides per se (as statins attempt to lower cholesterol) are doing anything but treating a symptom, and possibly a harmless one. The mutation reduces both triglycerides and heart risk, but doesn’t mean that high triglycerides increase heart risk per se, or that lowering them artificially will reduce it.
But for what it’s worth, since I went partially paleo, my triglycerides have become almost immeasurable.
Miles O’Brien
Life after the loss of an arm:
In my job as a science and technology correspondent, I have covered some of the advances in prosthetic technology in recent years. They are remarkable. But now that I am looking as a customer, I see shortcomings. The devices rely on actuators, which in turn rely on batteries. That makes these arms very heavy, less reliable, and not weatherproof. To make some of them work well, doctors need to move nerves to better connect them with sensors inside the robo-arms. Replicating what the human hand does is a very difficult problem for engineers, much harder than making an artificial leg. I have learned, though, that one hand—with all its dexterity, sensitivity, and opposable-thumb efficiency, along with something much more crude that has the simple ability to grasp—is all you need. For now, the split hook I wear is working well. I’m pretty sure that it’ll allow me, eventually, to return to the cockpit.
My prosthetist assumed I would like to have a cosmetic hand, one that has no real function but looks like the real thing, and so he made a mold of my remaining hand. An artist who produces fake wounds in Hollywood created a clear silicone mirror image. Then she sat with me for six hours, painting it, even embedding bits of hair snipped from my right arm. The result is haunting, and I don’t like looking at it. I’m not sure whom I would be wearing it for. I don’t feel the need to pretend or to make my presence easier on others.
The biggest problem I cope with is phantom pain. My arm has become a ghost, immobilized as if it were in a sling—which is where it was the last time I saw it. If I concentrate, I can move my imaginary fingers. The arm feels as if it’s been asleep and the circulation has just begun once again. First thing in the morning, it’s actually a pleasant, painless feeling. My arm is suspended, almost as if it is weightless. But as the day goes on, it feels as if it is progressively bound tighter and tighter, to the point of excruciating pain. In addition, my fingers often feel as if they’ve been jolted with surges of electricity.
He’s a mensch.
The Big Fat Lie
Another review of Nina Teicholz’s book
Because the importance of cholesterol as a risk factor for heart disease had been accepted as dogma, it was pretty well impossible to challenge it. For example, one of the outstanding nutrition scientists, David Kritchevsky, suggested in the 1980s that there should be a weakening of the recommendation on dietary fat and encountered hysterical opposition. Here is what he told the author:
“People would spit on us! It’s hard to imagine now, the heat of the passion. It was just like we had desecrated the American flag. They were so angry that we were going against the suggestions of the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health.”
This meant that anyone who had the temerity to challenge the official line was committing professional suicide. Applications for funds to support research, which might question the prevailing views on fat, were unlikely to be supported. Even if funds were obtained (eg from independent foundations) the researchers would find difficulty in publishing their results in scientific journals and they were rarely invited to serve on expert panels. By stifling opposition, the public was presented with what appeared to be a uniform scientific consensus.
Say, that sounds familiar somehow.
Mad Men Ads
Lileks (who has finally replaced the irreplaceable Jasper with a new puppie) has thoughts on the decline of advertising and the suckitude of the early seventies:
What’s the opposite of nostalgia? What’s the word for an exaggerated dislike of a particular time? I know I am nostalgic for things I did not experience, and only see through the pop-culture elements left behind, which communicate incomplete and occasionally misleading messages. But I have antipathy for things I experienced at the fringe of adolescence – not because it was a bad time, or I didn’t like them then, but because they seem now to be the products of a culture that was getting cheap and lazy; it was full of gimcrack baubles turned out by an exhausted system that tried to adapt to the times, but had no strength to put forth any ideas or uphold any ideas that went before. The period from 1967 to 1975, with some stellar exceptions, was just a horrible time for everything, and you can reduce it all down to one middle-aged balding dude with wet hair plastered over his head in brown polyester pants and a mustard-yellow shirt approving one thing after the other because the kids will go for it.
That’s a generalization. Somewhat. But. I’ve said this before: “Mad Men”’s exploration of the late 60s somehow avoids the fact that advertising in that era was horrible. Compare an issue of Life magazine from 1968 to its 1958 counterpoint – it’s as if style, color, art, romance, seduction, adulthood, and bright-eyed joy had been drained from the world. The ads weren’t about the product anymore; the ads were about the ads.
[Yes, I know it’s not fresh material — I’d gotten behind on my Bleatage.]
Tomatoes
Breeding better ones, through genetic modification.
So of course, the luddites will fight it.
Young Blood
Is the secret anti-aging ingredient oxytocin?
The new study provides a new hypothesis for how we get old. When people are young, they produce lots of oxytocin. On top of whatever psychological effects it may have, that extra oxytocin also tells stem cells to turn into muscle cells, keeping people strong. Young people might also produce GDF11 and other molecules at high levels, and in combination, they may keep all the organs young. And once those signals start to fade in old age, the body starts to fall apart.
Theoretically, giving old people compounds like oxytocin or GDF11 may cause their cells to act young again. The compounds could be the basis for an all-purpose treatment for the diseases of old age, from osteoporosis to heart disease to Alzheimer’s.
Theoretically.
Yes, theoretically. As he notes, this is only rat experiments. Nothing with humans yet.