I guess Jillian Michaels is upset that people (literally) aren’t buying her BS.
Category Archives: Health
Vitamin D
Do we actually need to get out in the sun even if we supplement?
Great. I supposed I should be taking nitric oxide, too, though.
The Case Against Carbohydrates
And this wasn’t another crap epidemiological study. It was controlled.
Aging
How old are we when we’re old?
I’m well into my sixties now, but I don’t feel old at all. Or at least, no more so than I did twenty years ago. In some ways, probably because of improved diet, I feel like I’m in better shape. I do need to work out, though. I’m planning a lot of business travel this year, and starting a new space venture, and I feel as up to it (perhaps more, given my experience) as I ever have.
Chinese-Restaurant Syndrome
Has MSG gotten a bad rap?
I’ve personally never had a problem with it. I used to keep it on hand, in fact, though I haven’t used it in decades.
[Update a few minutes later, after reading the whole thing]:
As Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth professor who has researched how to influence attitudes about vaccines, pointed out to me in an email, it’s hard for people to change their minds about personal health issues because it contradicts what they have perceived to experience in the past. “People who felt bad after eating Chinese food in the past may have blamed MSG … and thus resist information they encounter later about its actual effects,” he said. This may be the result of the availability heuristic, where people make judgments using the easiest information available, rather than looking for alternative explanations.
This could also explain peoples’ resistance to accepting new ideas about nutrition, when (e.g.) they’ve been told for decades to avoid fat.
[Update a while later]
Related: Half the people who think they have food allergies are wrong.
I’m pretty confident in my allergy to tree nuts. Even if no one tells me, I can tell when I’ve had them.
The Real Food Problem
I’ve been saying this for years. The problem isn’t coming up with enough calories; it’s about feeding people a healthy diet. But the calorie-counting insanity is going to cause poor health all over, not just in the West.
A New Year’s Tip
ObamaCare
Funny, all the smart people were telling me that if I opposed it, it was because I wanted people to die.
The Paleo Diet
Forget it; go neolithic.
I’ve never been orthodox paleo. Basically, I’ve just cut way back on processed foods. I’m back to my college weight, my cholesterol is a little high, but the ratio is good, and my triglycerides are almost unmeasurable. I’m supposed to worry because both my parents died fairly young (father at 55, mother at 68) from coronaries, but they both were overweight, had terrible diets, and were inveterate smokers. Every time I check my arteries, no issues are found.
Reproduction On Mars
Nadia Drake has the latest. We continue to not have a gravity lab to study this.
[Update after reading the whole thing]
They seem to be proposing a gravity lab (still unfunded), but they want to put it in lunar orbit. I see no reason to do this, other than to give the Gateway something to do; LEO (and probably in the ISS orbit) makes a lot more sense to me.