Why you shouldn’t be doing it.
Category Archives: Health
A “Tenuous Grasp Of Science”
That’s certainly a polite way to describe these fools:
A half-liter of urine dumped in a 143 million-liter reservoir would get a urea concentration of about 3 parts per billion, according to Slate. (We calculated it would be a 50 nanoMolar solution.) Meanwhile, the EPA allows concentrations of arsenic in drinking water up to 10 ppb. Salt water has a salt concentration of around 35,000,000 parts per billion, or 600 milliMolar.
Do these morons have any idea how many birds poop in that lake every day? In drought-stricken California, that wouldn’t be just a firing offense — they’d be strung up. But I’ll bet he’s all on board with battling climate change.
As Glenn says, the nation is increasingly being run by chuckleheads.
Brain Dead, Or Just Resting?
Unsurprisingly, we don’t know as much about vegetative states as many think they do. Unfortunately, as with cryonics, a lot of the medical profession take the easy way out, ethically speaking.
Robosex
It does seem kind of inevitable. It will be a gradual transition.
Why Do We Eat?
It’s generally not because we’re hungry.
I can generally go all day without eating, and often do. There’s a lot of evidence that fasting has some of the benefits of caloric restriction, in terms of life extension.
I’d note, though, that the article seems to subscribe to the caloric theory of weight gain and loss. It doesn’t say what “high-density” foods are, energetically speaking, but not all are created equal. Eating fat doesn’t make you fat.
Rethinking Fat
Even NPR is starting to figure it out.
But note, that, as with climate “science,” dissenters have trouble getting published when they have actual science in opposition to the “settled” science in nutrition:
“Fat was really the villain,” says Walter Willett, who is chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. And, by default, people “had to load up on carbohydrates.”
But, by the mid-1990s, Willett says, there were already signs that the high-carb, low-fat approach might not lead to fewer heart attacks and strokes. He had a long-term study underway that was aimed at evaluating the effects of diet and lifestyle on health.
“We were finding that if people seemed to replace saturated fat — the kind of fat found in cheese, eggs, meat, butter — with carbohydrate, there was no reduction in heart disease,” Willett says.
Willett submitted his data to a top medical journal, but he says the editors would not publish his findings. His paper was turned down.
“There was a lot of resistance to anything that would question the low-fat guidelines,” Willett says, especially the guidelines on saturated fat.
Willett’s paper was eventually published by a British medical journal, the BMJ, in 1996.
And that was almost twenty years ago, and the junk-science FDA guidelines that probably killed my father in the seventies remain pretty much in place.
Sleep Deprivation
Does it partially explain the high failure rate of tech start ups?
SpaceX prides itself on its Silicon Valley culture. I hope they’re not driving people to the point at which they have an accident.
Terrible Nutrition Advice
The top five worst.
I agree with all of them. Eating fat doesn’t make you fat, eating cholesterol doesn’t increase your cholesterol, stick with saturated fat (not just butter, but egg yolks, and animal fats), not seed oils, and stop counting calories. Just eat what’s good for you, and avoid what’s bad.
This is even more junk science than climate science (and as I’ve noted in the past, this kind of nonsense probably killed my father in the late seventies). As I’ve also noted in the past, science that has public consequences tends to become politicized.
Macular Degeneration
My late aunt (by marriage, not a blood relative) suffered from this. I’m sure that it partially contributed to her eventual loss of the will to live.
The Debate On Health Care
No, it’s not over, your not-so-Highness, and we will not cease our dissent.
Oh, and for the record? The debate isn’t over on climate, either. Whenever someone tells me that the debate is over, it’s a pretty good sign that it’s wishful thinking, and that they’re losing it.