Walking in Sunshine

The Vegetarian Myth

2011-06-24T10:41:00.000-07:00

Over the past two decades, I've tried to get vegetarians, and especially vegans, to rethink their diet. I've told them that humans are adapted to eat eggs, fish, shellfish, and meat; that if they didn't eat these foods, they were threatening their future health and well-being. I don't think I was at all successful, perhaps because I've never been a vegetarian myself. I hadn't been a true believer. And vegetarianism/veganism is a belief system.

Then I read Lierre Keith's The Vegetarian Myth: food, justice, and sustainability. It is a clarion call to vegetarians and vegans from a former vegan who followed their dietary tenets religiously for 20 years,and in the process destroyed her health and probably reduced her lifespan.

But this book is not just for vegetarians. It is written for all of us because it is about food and what our diets, no matter what we eat, are doing to the soil of the Earth, which is also the soul of the Earth.

Lierre Keith is a passionate writer who makes you feel her pain and despair. She desperately wanted the vegan lifestyle to be the salvation not only for herself, but for Earth and all its living organisms. But after 20 years, and near death, she finally realized that her diet was killing her. And when she began to really study the process of food acquisition, Keith also realized that the vegan diet was killing the Earth. Instead of being Earth's salvation, it was Earth's doom.

This may sound overly dramatic, but once you read her book and digest all the research she has done, you will realize that I have only stated the basic facts.

As a biological anthropologist, I can state that we have known since at least the mid-1980s that the origins of agriculture began a destructive process which is only accelerating. Humans are not meant to live on a grain-based diet. When grains are the primary source of nutrition, health is compromised. Just this week (6/18/2011), another study was published detailing the decline and fall of health with the rise of agriculture: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110615094514.htm

Keith approaches the reader as a fellow traveler who wants to do the right thing, and who guides the reader to see the truth even when it conflicts with deeply held beliefs. The major divisions of the book are directed at Moral Vegetarians, Political Vegetarians, and Nutritional Vegetarians. She concludes the book with a plea to Save the World.

As a Moral Vegetarian, Keith states that, "...I had bet my whole moral system--and built my whole identity--on the idea that my life did not require death." Factory farming of animals is a terrible, destructive process. But so is destroying marshes, grasslands, and forests to grow more grains. What about all the killing of those ecosystems to provide the wheat and corn and soy for the vegan's diet? What about the destruction of topsoil? Is that really morally better than eating eggs and fish?

"Find a small wild spot somewhere, the edge of a parking lot, the tree outside your window, and watch. Really watch. This is what you will see: everything is eating and then being eaten, and through it all life endures. This is no hierarchy, only hunger. And it's through our hunger that we participate in the cosmos, in an endless cycle of life, death, and regeneration."

Political Vegetarians believe that their diet will preserve resources to feed the world's hungry. If there are no cows to feed, then more people can be fed. They believe things like: "...a 10-acre farm can support 60 people growing soybeans, 24 people growing wheat, 10 people growing corn and only two producing cattle." Keith responds, "Set aside the fact that a diet of soy, wheat, or corn will result in massive malnutrition--along with fun stuff like kwashiorkor, pellagra, retardation, blindness--and ultimately death." Such a farm will also destroy the soil.

"It is not my project to try to feed every human being that we can produce while we chew the planet to the bone. I'm not asking, How many people can be fed? but a very different question: How can people be fed? Not, What feeds the most people? but What feeds people sustainably? We need a full accounting. The absolute bottom line is: what methods of food production build topsoil while using only ambient sun and rain? Because nothing else is sustainable." [italics in original]

As for Nutritional Vegetarians, "The first myth of the nutritional vegetarians--that we aren't meant for meat--is another fairy tale filled with inedible apples." This myth is the result of research on foraging populations misclassifying all gathered foods (primarily collected by women) as plant foods. Much of what was gathered were actually animal foods: fish, shellfish, "insects, grubs, reptiles, small mammals." The plant foods were primarily nuts, fruits, berries, and tubers. Grains? Not so much.

As Keith points out, citing the extensive analysis of the physical and dental health of foraging populations done by Weston Price in the early 20th century, populations eating a traditional foraged diet were extremely healthy. When they switched to a grain-based Western diet, their health, and especially that of their children, declined. "Of course the food with the most minerals are marine foods, which is why the healthiest people Price found were coastal-dwelling fishing peoples."

Lierre Keith concludes her book with a radical plea to change the world. This may be the most difficult chapter of the book since it requires the most of reader. Keith does not believe that small, incremental change will be able to solve the food production problems. It will require massive, radical change. Since even small changes disturb most individuals, I have grave doubts that the radical changes Keith wants such as the end of agribusiness, the revival of small family farms, eating locally, and massively reducing the human population, will occur until we are left with no choice. At which point, it probably will be too late for us.

I strongly urge everyone to read this book. If nothing else, it should make you think about dirt, our precious topsoil, in a whole new way.

Educate Girls for Peace and Prosperity

2010-11-04T13:56:00.000-07:00

To slightly modify a popular song:

Let there be peace on Earth and let it begin with Tea.

Why tea? According to Greg Mortenson writing in Three Cups of Tea, in the mountainous villages of Pakistan they have a saying: “The first cup of tea we share, we are strangers. The second cup of tea we share, we are friends. But with the third cup of tea we are family.” When we meet as strangers, we need to take the time to find out what we have in common, to build bridges. When we meet as friends, we strengthen those bridges and begin to develop plans together. When we meet as family, we recognize ourselves as members of the same close group and will work for our common good.

The goal, then, is to take the time to get past our differences and to broaden our definition of family.

Returning from a failed attempt in 1993 at summiting K2 in the Himalayas, Mortenson became disoriented and lost. He was rescued by a Pakistani family living in an extremely poor, isolated mountain village. After recovering in their home and sharing the symbolic three cups of tea, Mortenson discovered that what the people of the village most desired was a school for their children. When Mortenson returned to the United States, he devoted himself to trying to raise enough money to build the school. He eventually succeeded and, with the help of a generous benefactor who provided the initial endowment, created the Central Asia Institute (CAI). As of 2010, the CAI has built over 130 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. https://www.ikat.org/

Three Cups of Tea details Mortenson’s trials, tribulations, and successes building schools in Pakistan. The story continues in Stones into Schools with Mortenson’s efforts to build schools in Afghanistan amidst the fighting and threats from the Taliban. The schools the CAI helps fund and build differ in many ways from other schools in these countries. They are not religious schools. Any girl who wishes to attend may do so. In fact, many of the schools are built just for girls. This is especially important in Afghanistan where the Taliban prohibited the education of all females. The village people choose where the school will be built, donate the land, and provide significant labor resources to build the school. In this way, the school is firmly embedded in the community. It is part of the larger family.

As the schools were being built, Mortenson discovered that the adult women also craved opportunities for education. CAI now supports dozens of women’s educational cooperatives in the two countries. When women achieve more education, they are better able to have successful pregnancies and prevent infant and child mortality. This leads to having fewer children with the results that the women remain healthier and that more resources are available for the fewer children in the family. Educated women are also able to obtain better jobs and/or develop their own businesses, thus improving the economic standing of their families. Improved living conditions lead to less conflict. Therefore, the CAI (and many other NGOs) view the education of women as a critical step in achieving peace in conflict-torn nations.

A friend of Mortenson’s is quoted in Three Cups of Tea as saying that he fully expects that Greg will one day win the Noble Peace Prize. Perhaps he will. In the meantime, Mortenson was recently honored [October 29-31, 2010] with the International Peace Award during the annual Peace Colloquy in Independence, Missouri. http://www.cofchrist.org/peacecolloquy/ He joins a list of distinguished recipients. http://www.cofchrist.org/peaceaward/honorroll.asp

As we enter the winter holiday season and thoughts to turn charitable donations, I would like to suggest donating to the CAI. If true peace is ever to come to Afghanistan and Pakistan it will probably be in large measure from those girls and women educated with the help of the Central Asian Institute. https://www.ikat.org/how-to-help/

Wellbeing: Research Shows that a Lower Tax Rate Won’t Necessarily Make You Happy

2010-11-01T13:09:00.000-07:00

The Gallup Organization has just published a new book: Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements by Tom Rath and Jim Harter. The five essential elements are presented in a fast 100 pages. The remaining 100 pages or so are devoted to the worldwide research Gallup undertook that provides the support for the first 100 pages.

In brief, the five essential elements are: Career Wellbeing, Social Wellbeing, Financial Wellbeing, Physical Wellbeing, and Community Wellbeing. If one wishes to have overall wellbeing, these five elements need to be optimized. A chapter is devoted to each element giving helpful tips for increasing your wellbeing in that particular element.

These tips can be summarized as follows:

Focus on your strengths.

Do work that you love.

Have a good friend at work.

Spend several hours each day with people who make you feel good.

Good experiences and donating to others improve your wellbeing more than “retail therapy.”

Automate bill paying and saving.

EXERCISE!

Eat right: lots of colorful fruits and veggies.

Get enough sleep: at least 7-8 hours.

Contribute to your community.

All this seems pretty straightforward, and we probably are aware of all these tips. So where do you rate? You can find out here, if you buy the book and get the code: http://www.wbfinder.com/home.aspx

If you don’t want to do that, the website does have some other useful info.

However, the book does rate cities, states, and countries on three criteria of Wellbeing: 1] percentage Thriving; 2] percentage Struggling; and 3] percentage Suffering. The highest ranks will obviously be filled with those having the highest percentage of their population Thriving.

Based on Gallup’s research, the top 10 countries from 1 – 10 are Denmark (82% Thriving), Finland (75% Thriving), Ireland (72% Thriving), Norway (69% Thriving), Sweden (68% Thriving), Netherlands (68% Thriving), Canada ((68% Thriving), New Zealand (63% Thriving), Switzerland (62% Thriving), and Australia (62% Thriving). The United States comes in at #19 with 50% Thriving.

Now, what is quite interesting about the Top Ten Thriving Countries is that except for Ireland and Australia (Australia’s tax rates work out to be about the same as that of the US), all of them have higher tax rates; generally, significantly higher tax rates, than does the United States. See the table below based on OECD 2005 data.

Another fascinating tidbit, is that all of the Top Ten Thriving Countries also have universal healthcare.

As Arsenio Hall used to say: “Things that make you go hmmmm….”

So, it looks like the Top Ten are using their higher tax rates to provide their citizens with the kind of infrastructure and benefits that improve Wellbeing.

It gives you something to think about before the elections.

Adolescence: Dependent Wasteland or Preparation for Adulthood?

2010-09-09T11:28:00.000-07:00

This blog post continues the discussion first presented in Teens and the BioSocial MisMatch: the period of adolescence does not match the biological development of teens. An excellent book on this topic is Escaping the Endless Adolescence: How We Can Help Our Teenagers Grow Up Before They Grow Old by Joseph A. Allen, PhD and Claudia W. Allen, PhD. Based on their years of experience working with troubled teens, the Allens have concluded that many of the difficulties of adolescence are due to parental and societal efforts to control teens by keeping them in a dependent, childlike state rather than encouraging teens to develop independent, adultlike behaviors.

Many high school administrators are among the worst offenders in this regard. I have been shocked to hear principals and school counselors refer to young adults aged 16 to 18 as “kiddos” or “boys and girls”. Is it any wonder they react poorly to the rules and regulations of schools and fight back with disruptive behavior. What adult appreciates being spoken to by a supervisor in a belittling manner? If we want teens to be cooperative and behave in more mature ways, wouldn’t it be wiser to treat them more as adults and less as preschoolers?

As the Allens point out, if teens do not always act in mature ways it “…may well be partly brought about by living with developing capacities that are near adultlike, while moving about in a world that on a day-to-day basis treats one largely as a big child.” (p.128) When the adults change their behavior, changes in teen behavior will follow.

How do we get teens to behave in a more responsible manner? By giving them choices based on the level of maturity shown in their behavior. If a daughter wants a later curfew, then she needs to demonstrate responsible behavior (e.g. doing school work and chores) for a period of time that gives her parents confidence that the she is ready to handle a later curfew. “Freedom should be linked to behavior.” [p. 136, italics in original.] First the behavior improves, then more freedom is given.

However, learning to make wise choices needs to begin in childhood. Waiting until adolescence makes it much more difficult. For instance, let a preschooler decide what he wants to wear. So what if it doesn’t match? The only person who is going to care is the parent. And isn’t a little parental embarrassment (that no one else will probably notice) worth it if by the time the boy is an adolescent he knows how to make wise clothing choices without any parental input? And if the parent is still choosing his clothes when he is 13, what does that say about the parent’s desire to control and even inhibit the growth of the teen?

Communication with teens can be a huge issue. A way to solve communication problems is to speak to teens as one would to an adult friend or colleague. If you speak to a teen in a way that you never would to a friend, you, the adult/parent, have a problem that you need to fix. When you change your style of communication, it is probable that your relationship with the teen will improve. Again, this type of communication should begin with young children. Waiting until they are teens makes it much more difficult for the parent to change his/her communication style.

Treat your children, even toddlers, with politeness and respect. Really listen to what they have to say. Children who constantly demand a parent’s attention probably are not getting enough of the proper kind of attention. Again, think about your friends and how you treat them when you converse. If you are not treating children and teens in the same way you do your friends and colleagues, then you should not be surprised if you have problems with them.

What if you are doing all these things, but your teen still seems listless, apathetic, uninspired? It is probably because the teen feels her life is pointless; that she does nothing to contribute to something outside herself. This is when it is time to find a way to challenge your teen. “Teens thrive on challenge and need as much of it as we can provide.” [p. 177, italics in original.] The current educational system provides little in the way of life-enhancing challenges. Trying to stay awake (most high schools begin far too early for the adolescent biological clock), fight boredom, and get a good grade do not make for the type of challenges that will stimulate teens and encourage their success. They want to be challenged in ways that will make a meaningful difference in the world of adults. Education has to change if students are going to thrive and survive the many years it takes to get their high school diplomas and college degrees. “If we accept that at least a two-year college degree is going to be important to thriving in the workplace of the twenty-first century, then our current system is an abject failure for more then [sic] 80 percent of the teens moving through it!” (p. 197) [Also see my blog post Schools Should Spotlight Student Strengths for more of my thoughts on education.]

One program the Allens highlight appears to achieve a great deal of success with troubled teens through providing appropriate challenges: Youth Action Project http://www.youthactionproject.org/ Teens volunteer and do meaningful work that makes a difference in someone’s life. It is the type of work adults would do if the teen weren’t there.

Adolescence should be a time where teens take on increasing responsibilities, develop independence, and achieve adulthood. If this is not happening, it is up to the adults (parents, teachers, administrators, coaches) to rethink how they are treating and interacting with the teens. Adult changes in their own behavior are necessary before we will see productive changes in adolescent behavior.

Schools Should Spotlight Student Strengths

2010-08-23T12:46:00.000-07:00

My previous blog post discussed how No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is destroying American education, making the lives of teachers and students miserable. This post will discuss changes that should be made to eliminate that misery, leading to happier students and teachers, and better education outcomes.

Children are born with an eagerness to learn, an over-riding desire to attain mastery of their world. But something happens once they begin school. Learning becomes a chore. It’s now work and no longer fun. Who or what is to blame for this? Some might say it’s the teacher’s fault. Others might say it’s the parents’ fault. And certainly there are teachers who do not enjoy what they are doing; and parents who do not care.

However, as NCLB has forcefully demonstrated, it is a structural problem embedded within the way in which schools are organized and evaluated. To fix education maybe we will have to let NCLB continue on its merry way to destroying our current educational system. When every drop of creativity has been drained from the system; when every spark of excited enlightenment has been extinguished; when all that remains are the droning students and teachers slogging through the wasteland of the required, testable data bits; when we’ve completed our plunge to the bottom of the list of industrialized nations with educated, knowledgeable citizens, then perhaps changes that revitalize education will be made.

We’ve known what part of the problem is for decades; at least since the 1964 publication of John Holt’s seminal book How Children Fail (which I read in 1971 when it was still one of the hottest books in education): if we focus on weaknesses, what students are doing wrong, students become disengaged. Some teachers and schools tried to make the needed changes, but the public school system as a whole refused to change, and most public schools that had tried to change drifted back to the status quo.

The status quo may have been OK when most individuals worked in jobs that were rote and limited in scope. Teaching that was rote and limited in scope was, perhaps, adequate preparation for those jobs. But those jobs are being outsourced to computers and cheaper labor in other countries. Public schools are “preparing” students for jobs/lives that no longer exist. In the real world, both present and future, students will need to be innovative and creative thinkers who are self-motivated. Public schools are not preparing them for this world.

Since focusing on a student’s weaknesses leads to failure and disengagement, we need to focus on a student’s strengths. If we can get students engaged by facilitating their strengths, they will learn to compensate for any weakness. And it may turn out that a perceived weakness does not really exist when the student is engaged in a creative, affirming endeavor.

Encouraging creativity is also key to developing individuals who will be successful in the world outside the classroom. This cannot be accomplished if schools are focused on testing or assessing every activity.

What education should provide and what students need include:

· Focus on Strengths

· Encourage Intrinsic, not Extrinsic Motivation

· Provide an Environment where Creativity Flourishes

Check out these websites and videos for schools that are getting the elements of a 21^st century education correct:

· Purnell School

· Puget Sound Community School

Choosing a class at PSCS

· Sudbury Valley School

Summerhill, the Granddaddy of this type of school

How Summerhill works

No Child Left Behind: Weapon of Mass Destruction

2010-07-19T11:59:00.000-07:00

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation is rapidly destroying the public education system in the United States. This is the overall message of Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Ravitch, a professor of education and former Assistant Secretary of Education, was initially a strong supporter of NCLB; but over the years, as she’s seen the actual outcomes of the NCLB legislation, Ravitch has changed her mind.

The stated purpose of NCLB is to make sure that all children are proficient in reading and math. Proficiency is determined by scores on state-created standardized (multiple choice) exams. Schools whose students fail to show progress are penalized by loss of students to charter schools, loss of federal funding, firings of administrators and teachers, and even having the school shut down. The actual end results of these goals and measures according to Ravitch are: teaching to the test; lowering the percentage score needed to pass state exams; cheating by administrators and teachers; and rampant fear among staff members. I’m surprised the student dropout rate and staff turnover rate are not higher than the already high rates that exist. Who would really enjoy attending or working in such schools under these conditions? “Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing children, shaming educators, and closing schools.” (p. 111)

A recently-published article, “Ten signs you work in a fear-based workplace”,

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38206989/ns/business-bloomberg_businessweek/

highlights the current situation for most schools. Teachers are micro-managed and threatened, all to produce dubious student test results of progress towards proficiency.

Most of those going into the teaching profession want students to obtain new knowledge and to learn to think critically. Unfortunately, as Ravitch points out, “[NLCB] ignored the importance of knowledge. It promoted a cramped, mechanistic, profoundly anti-intellectual definition of education. In the age of NCLB, knowledge was irrelevant.” (p. 29) When knowledge is irrelevant and standardized test scores are the only measure of effectiveness, any teacher who opposes the narrow focus of NCLB is punished, and even forced out of her chosen profession. “Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves?” (p. 67).

All the pressure to make the grade is on the teacher. If a student doesn’t show progress or proficiency, it is the teacher’s fault. According to Ravitch, “NCLB neglected to acknowledge that students share in the responsibility for their academic performance and that they are not merely passive recipients of their teachers’ influence. Nowhere in the federal accountability scheme are there measures or indicators of students’ diligence, effort, and motivation…These factors affect their school performance as much as or more than their teachers’ skill.” (pp. 162-63) And what about the parents? “…in the eyes of the law, the responsibility of the family disappears.” (p. 163) I agree with Ravitch that, “Something is fundamentally wrong with an accountability system that disregards the many factors that influence students’ performance on an annual test—including the students’ own efforts—except for what teachers do in the classroom for forty-five minutes or an hour a day.” (p. 163) “None of us would want to be evaluated—with our reputation and livelihood on the line—solely on the basis of an instrument that is prone to error and ambiguity.” (p. 166)

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation entered into the high-stakes education sweepstakes in a big way. Initially, they poured millions into the small schools concept, certain that this would be the magic bullet. Gates admits in a recent article [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38282806/ns/business-bloomberg_businessweek/] that this hasn’t really worked as planned. But his new idea will surely work: reward successful teachers (those whose students achieve proficiency) with big bonuses, while firing unsuccessful teachers. Right, like that won’t lead to cheating. Or, as Ravitch points out, the current myth is that we can have schools “…made up exclusively of superstar teachers… This is akin to saying that baseball teams should consist only of players who hit over .300 and pitchers who win at least twenty games every season; after all, such players exist, so why should not such teams exist? That fact that no such team exists should give pause to those who believe that almost every teacher in almost every school in almost every district might be a superstar if only school leaders could fire at will.” (p. 184) The fallacy of the myth of superstars is highlighted by research which shows that most teachers ranked ‘best’ in a particular school one year were not the best in a subsequent year. “In other words, being an effective teacher is not necessarily a permanent, unchanging quality…Apparently, the test scores of their students reflected something other than what the teachers did, such as the students’ ability and motivation, or the characteristics of a class or conditions in the school.” (p. 186)

The disturbing conclusion one draws from Ravitch’s analysis is that the true purpose of NCLB is to destroy the public education system and replace it with private, charter, and religious schools, none of which would be required to take the lowest-functioning and/or most troubled students. As it stands, under NCLB, students in low-testing schools can opt out to attend a different school of their choice. But as Ravitch notes, “The regular public schools will enroll a disproportionate share of students with learning disabilities and students who are classified as English-language learners; they will enroll the kids from the most troubled home circumstances, the ones with the worst attendance records and the lowest grades and test scores.” (p. 220) And what will be the outcome for these public schools? They will be closed due to the inability of the teachers to raise test scores. “Privatizing our public schools makes as much sense as privatizing the fire department or the police department. It is possible, but it is not wise.” (p. 221) “Deregulation contributed to the near collapse of our national economy in 2008, and there is no reason to anticipate that it will make education better for most children…Education is too important to relinquish to the vagaries of the market and the good intentions of amateurs.” (p. 222)

Our students are not educated when we only teach to the test. Teachers are not considered professionals when they are micro-managed and threatened. If we want the United States to maintain its place in the world, we need to understand that, “Not everything that matters can be quantified. What is tested may ultimately be less important than what is untested, such as a student’s ability to seek alternative explanations, to raise questions, to pursue knowledge on his own, and to think differently. If we do not treasure our individualists, we will lose the spirit of innovation, inquiry, imagination, and dissent that has contributed powerfully to the success of our society in many different fields of endeavor.” (p. 226) Since NCLB drives out those teachers who are most capable of treasuring individualism, it may already be too late.

Teens and the BioSocial MisMatch

2010-06-26T09:42:00.000-07:00

Teens in the 21^st century are at a point of extreme mismatch between their biological maturity and their social maturity. The mismatch for girls actually begins in the tween years (9 – 14), while for boys the mismatch may not become a problem until age 16 or so. The mismatch is easier to track with girls because they have a definite biological landmark: menarche.

In the 19^th century, girls did not reach menarche until they were about 16.5 years old. By the time they were 18 or 19, they were probably married with their first child on the way. Biological development was in sync with social development. [Girls do not become fully fertile until around 18 months after menarche.]

Beginning in the 20^th century, the age at which menarche occurred gradually dropped, while the age at which a teen was considered an adult rose. Now in the first decade of the 21^st century, girls reach menarche at an average age of 12.5 years, fully 4 years younger than 150 years ago, but they are generally not considered to be adults for another 8 years or so. And the current average age at first marriage for women is 26 years.

While the average age at menarche is 12.5 years, the range is about 9 – 14 years: those same tween years. It should be no wonder that younger and younger girls are dressing and acting like their older peers. A girl who reaches menarche at age 10 is fertile by age 12. Her hormones are pushing her to mate and reproduce, with unfortunate consequences given how out of sync she is with the currently-accepted age for social maturity.

The mismatch is just as difficult for boys. In the 19^th century, a boy often would have been apprenticed by age 13, learning to do productive work. By the time he completed his apprentice-ship in his late teens, he would have been able to support himself, and maybe also a wife. In the first decades of the 20^th century, many young teens left school early to help support their families, despite compulsory schooling laws mandating attendance until age 16. However, the enactment of child labor laws in 1938 in the United States made it difficult for young teens to do productive, paid work.

As with girls, a boy’s age at biological maturity was declining at the same time that the age at which society considered him socially mature was increasing. Gluckman, Beedle, and Hanson (Principles of Evolutionary Medicine) believe “…this mismatch plays a role in teenage depression, acting-out behavior, drug abuse, and suicide.” [p.237]

The psychosocial mismatch of the 21^st century is the result of unintended consequences of what were otherwise positive changes. Age at biological maturity declined because children are healthier and better fed. Enactment of child labor laws protected children from exploitation. Age at social maturity increased because our society has become more complex, requiring more years of education to achieve success.

Our educational system has changed little since the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Yes, students now learn keyboarding instead of typing, but the overall structure and content has changed very little. The result is that biologically mature teens are locked into a structure that treats them as if they were children because society is not yet ready for them to be adults. In fact, the current educational structure may actually encourage social immaturity, thus exacerbating the problem. Biologically mature teens behave like children because we want them to still be children. The result is that due to this mismatch, many teens make unfortunate decisions with life-changing consequences.

The Simple Key to Better Health

2010-05-26T13:27:00.000-07:00

There are many things that you can and should be doing to make sure you are as healthy as possible. But, frankly, most of you will resist doing them for one reason or another. You won’t really change your diet because, “I can’t live without bread!”; or “Cheesy fries are SO good!”; or whatever. Maybe you will try to add a few more fruits and veggies, but give up anything you love? No way!

And what about exercise? You know you need to get more, but your life is so busy! Where can you fit it in? You could park at the back of lot so that you’d at least get a little exercise at the office or the store, but hey, “I’m running late!”; or “The bags are so heavy!”; or whatever.

Recent research has shown that adequate sleep (8 – 10 hours) is necessary to consolidate learning and to reboot our immune system which gives our bodies a chance to heal and fend off invaders. But we live in a 24/7 society. Who has time to sleep?! So much to do; so many places to be. So…not enough sleep.

We’ve become a pill-popping, easy-fix society. Normally, I am against this. But there is one case where I no longer think we have a choice; where popping the pills may be the best and simplest key to better health.

Those of you who’ve read my newsletters and blogs over the years probably know where I am headed with this. Yes, the simple key to better health is taking more vitamin D3 pills. You can do this in, what, 30 seconds? I think you can manage to fit that into your busy schedule. And the cost is reasonable. Give up a can of soda and you’ve paid for about one week’s worth of pills [2000 IU/day].

Now, your skin is capable of making vitamin D, but… But unless you have very light skin and can spend about 10 minutes/day between 10 am and 3 pm in the sunlight, making adequate levels of vitamin D via your skin is going to be difficult. The range of skin color is large and as each shade darkens, the length of time needed to spend in the sun increases. If you have very dark skin color, you will need to spend around 6 hours in the sunlight. Unless you have an outdoor job and expose your skin without sunscreen or clothing (say, like a life guard), getting enough sun exposure is just not feasible for most of us. And the dermatologists would have a fit anyway.

In addition, making vitamin D via skin exposure to sunlight only works during April – October in northern latitudes. During the winter months, you are draining your stores so that by February, you are running on empty. The easy fix to this problem is to take vitamin D pills year round.

Some of you might think you can get enough vitamin D from food sources, but this is not the case. The best food source is fatty fish such as sardines, but that will give you only about one-quarter of what you need daily. I do eat sardines daily, but I also take a supplement. Milk is not a good source of vitamin D for multiple reasons, but primarily because it provides so little per glass compared to what your body actually needs. Skip the milk and take the pills.

Back in the early 1990s when I first began doing research on vitamin D deprivation, the literature stated that 20 ng/mL was the normal (and presumably adequate) level of 25 OHD (the baseline form of vitamin D used in your body). By the late 1990s, the optimal level was raised to 32 ng/mL. It has been going up ever since as researchers discover more and more health issues related to vitamin D deprivation. The optimal level is now at 60 ng/mL. This level is impossible to achieve with the current RDIs of 200 IU [children and young adults] or 400 IU [adults over 50] or even 800 IU [senior citizens]. The minimum daily dose recommended by most researchers in the field is now 2000 IU/day for older children and adults. During the winter months, you will need more. If you are confined inside or are a senior citizen, you will need more year-round. Vitamin D is fat soluble, so if you are overweight, your fat cells are pulling 25 OHD out of your blood stream, preventing it from doing its job. This means that you will also need to take more vitamin D year-round than may be true of someone who is slimmer.

Because vitamin D is fat soluble, pills should be taken with healthy-fat foods. For instance, I take my pills in the morning with my real egg salsa omelet. You might want to take yours with a handful tree nuts such as cashews. Current researchers do not recommend taking cod liver oil. Cod liver oil contains significant levels of vitamin A in addition to vitamin D. Vitamin A acts as an antagonist to vitamin D limiting its effectiveness. Also, excessive doses of vitamin A are harmful. Therefore, it is better to take a vitamin D pill that is not combined with vitamin A. It should also not be combined with calcium. If you and/or your doctor feel you need more calcium, it is probably because your vitamin D levels are much too low. When vitamin D is optimized, the body can function properly with around 500 mg of calcium/day. Getting too much calcium in supplements can also be harmful.

For those who want to know more, a recent book, The Sunlight Solution by Laurie Winn Carlson, PhD, provides a good source of information on the history of vitamin D deprivation and research, and on current research along with all the various health issues related to vitamin D deprivation. [Full Disclosure: Dr. Carlson devotes two pages to the discussion of my article: Health Disparities: Reframing the Problem. 2003 Medical Science Monitor 9 (3): SR9-15] After reading the book, you will probably want to spend more time in the sun and will definitely want to take more vitamin D.

Vitamin D is not a panacea. Taking a couple of pills each day will not magically change your life, nor will it solve all your health problems. However, if you are reluctant or unwilling to make the type of changes that take more effort (e.g. diet, exercise, sleep), taking vitamin D supplementation will at least give your body and your health a fighting chance. If you decide you want to learn more about these other aspects of your health, in addition to further information on vitamin D, you can order my book: Walking in Sunshine: LifeStyle Changes to Make for a Bright, Healthy Future.

ConservaDams

2010-05-19T12:13:00.000-07:00

Watch out! Change is coming. Are you comfortable in your little niche? Watch out! Your niche may disappear. In fact, it is probable that all our current, comfortable niches will disappear in the next 10 – 20 years. What will you do? For many who are conservatives, the answer is to build walls and dams that they believe/hope will protect their niches. Some of these walls and dams are literal (the southern border fence) while others are figurative (banning ethnic studies). But all will ultimately fail. The flood of change that is happening cannot be dammed.

I think many conservatives would like to return to a pre-industrial world that somehow included all the gadgets of the 21st century. Of course, that’s impossible. The reason we have 21st century technology is precisely because of the changes wrought by industrialization, one of the most important of which is massively increased population density.

Back in the distant and conservative past, when change was so slow that your niche seemed to last forever, population density was extremely low. You would have lived in groups of 25 – 50, separated from other such groups by a many-days walk. The stone tools of the Lower Paleolithic showed no change for about one million years: Conservative Heaven.

Then groups became more mobile, meeting up with other groups, exchanging ideas. And tools changed, became more sophisticated. But those changes lasted almost one million years, too. Oh, Happy Conservatives!

During the Middle Paleolithic, human brain size reached its current capacity and tools became more sophisticated yet. These changes lasted around 250,000 years. Joy in the Conservative World!

But then climate change forced groups into smaller regions, requiring that they interact more. New ideas sprang forth and we entered the Upper Paleolithic. Humans weren’t any smarter than they had been, they were just experiencing the benefits of increased population density: more diversity and exchange of ideas leading to new inventions. Of course, compared to the Present, change was still slow, so perhaps conservatives would find this world to their liking.

Yet more climate change pushed more populations closer together, and in some areas led to the development of agriculture and settled populations. In short order, population density increased dramatically, and by 5000 years ago we had the first urban centers. With urban centers came bureaucracy (big government) and taxation: the two evils against which many conservatives rail.

Hmmm…so the world to which these conservatives must wish to return is a pre-agricultural one since urbanization requires and results from the development of agriculture. I don’t know about you, but I can’t quite see those conservatives giving up their current lifestyles to live the life of foragers, even if that is the only lifestyle consistent with an anti-big government, no taxes stance. Even the Amish are reliant on big government to provide roads to market towns and police and fire fighters for protection; all of which are funded by taxes.

The conservatives, who cannot go back and do not want to go forward, are busily building their dams to protect their niches. In Texas, they are trying to build a textbook dam that will keep within its walls only the information they want their children to learn. But the flood of knowledge will breech the walls of that dam.

In Arizona, the dam builders hope to stem the tide of ethnic change that is flooding over the state. One law after another is passed in an attempt to build the dam walls higher and higher. But these dams, too, will fail.

Change will happen no matter how much we might fear it or fight it or build dams against it. And it will happen at a faster pace than ever before. The population of the United States has more than doubled since 1950, the year to which those conservatives hiding behind their dams appear to wish to return. From 1950 to 2010, Arizona’s population increased almost 900%!! No wonder there are furious attempts to put up dams to stem this flood. But just as the New Orleans’ levies were no match for category 5 Katrina, conservadams will be no match for the 21st century’s flood of change.

Population growth is everywhere. From 1950 to the present, the world population has almost tripled. Most of this increase in population (in both the US and the rest of the world) lives in densely-populated urban centers. While this can create many problems, it also has beneficial results.

Higher density populations mean more contacts with more diverse individuals which can lead to an increased exchange of ideas resulting in more creativity and a snowball effect of technological and social change. The globalization of interconnective technologies has accelerated this change. As more of the world’s population becomes better educated, the pace of change will race ahead.

Trying to hold onto the past, to stay safely behind our dams, will not succeed. As the Red Queen states to Alice in Through the Looking Glass, "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

If we refuse to run at all, the future will pass us by and we will be left in our little niche, cowering behind our dam; if the flood of change hasn’t destroyed the dam and swept us away.

Display Some Adaptability: The Wisdom of Jack and Bobby Shaftoe

2010-04-21T08:40:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite authors, the novelist Neal Stephenson, created a family that epitomizes the virtues of adaptability: the Shaftoes. The Shaftoes were first introduced in Cryptonomicon, but we discover their ancestor, Jack Shaftoe, who displayed amazing, resilient adaptability, in the Baroque Cycle novels (think Captain Jack Sparrow on steroids). Whenever the 20th century Shaftoes (Marines and marine salvage operators) encountered a problem or crisis, their signature phrase and action was to “display some adaptability.” This is good advice for all of us.

Change happens. [Feel free to insert a more colorful term for ‘change’.] How we respond to that change indicates how adaptable we are. One would think we would all be pretty adaptable since we are the descendants of those who survived prior changes. But that is the thing about change: it changes. Techniques/behaviors/physiology that worked, or at least didn’t hinder, in the past may well be less than optimal today.

Some changes require fast action: your house is on fire, run, call 911! But many changes give you a chance to pause and think about how you could best adapt to the change. Here the techniques/behaviors/physiology of the Shaftoes can provides us with some useful guidelines.

• Be aware of your surroundings. Don’t go through life on autopilot. Change is less likely to take you by surprise.
• Become acquainted and make friends with those who come from backgrounds/cultures that differ from yours. You can learn a lot from them and they may provide you with needed contacts when change occurs.
• Try out new things and learn new skills. You never know when they will come in handy.
• To emphasize the previous point: Never Stop Learning! The ability to learn is key to displaying some adaptability.
• Get plenty of exercise: stay in good shape. Change is easier if you are healthy and fit.
• No matter how much change flattens you, if you use your brain and get help from your friends, you can survive, and even thrive, when change occurs.

I know that many of you have read Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle. Are there any guidelines you would add to this list? Please add comments.

And don’t forget to Display Some Adaptability!

Color It Bright

2010-04-06T12:59:00.000-07:00

Let’s say that one of your New Year’s Resolutions was to be healthier. It is now three months down the road. How is that resolution going? Maybe you made some changes, but now you’ve slipped back to old habits.

Change is difficult, especially if you are trying to make big changes. And it may be unclear what would be the best way to change. So let’s start small with a simple dietary change. This change is called Color It Bright.

The biggest mistake that most individuals make when cooking at home or eating out is to have a meal where all or most of the food is in a similar, boring color palette of white, cream, tan, brown. A palette of that color scheme often means fried food (high fat) is present. But the biggest problem is that the nutrient content of such a meal is poor.

For instance, look at this picture of a typical restaurant southern fried chicken dinner. Note that the color scheme is blah: brown fried chicken and fried okra; brown pinto beans; cream/brown corn bread; and creamy coleslaw. BORING!!

Fried chicken dinner with pinto beans, fried okra, coleslaw, and cornbread.

This meal will fill you up and will provide you with some protein, but it is high in fat and low in vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients that are needed for good health. If most of your meals are in the blah, boring color palette, this needs to change.

The best meals are those where two-thirds to three-quarters of the foods you eat are brightly-colored fruits and vegetables: the deeper, the richer the color, the better. If you cook/boil your vegetables until they are a pale imitation of their fresh or frozen state, then you are cooking out the good stuff. It is best to eat fruits and vegetables raw or steamed.

Some of you may be saying, well I have a pretty colorful meal because I eat yellow corn with my chicken. Sorry, but corn is not a fruit or vegetable. It is a grain, so it doesn’t count towards the two-thirds to three-quarters total of brightly-colored, nutrient-dense fruits and vegetables. Nor does yellow cheese count as a colorful food. This is just a saturated-fat version of white milk.

The picture below provides you with a better example of healthy eating. Note that about half of the food on the foil is brightly colored. The other half will be grilled tilapia: an excellent low-fat source of protein, which makes the 50/50 balance acceptable.

For meat and potatoes fans, there are also healthier, colorful options such as shown below. In place of nutrient-poor white potatoes, substitute bright orange sweet potatoes. Make sure the meat portion is only one-third or less of the meal. Add another brightly-colored vegetable, and you are good to go.

Salads are an excellent way to get lots of fruits and vegetables into your meal, but only if richly-colored leaves are used. As noted above, creamy coleslaw is a big no-no. This is also true of salads primarily based on iceberg lettuce. Most leaves of iceberg lettuce are so pale that they contain only the idea of green, not the reality, as is obvious in this salad shown below. Yes, it does include a bit of a bright spot with the few tomato pieces; but otherwise, it is strongly tilted towards the boring end of the eating palette.

On the other hand, the salad shown below hits the right, bright spot for dining pleasure. The leaves are richly colored. There are broccoli florets and cherry tomatoes. And only about one-quarter of the salad is the pale tilapia. You could add some julienned carrots for even more color and nutrition.

Here is another excellent choice: Thai chicken salad which is three-quarters spring greens and spinach and one-quarter grilled chicken.

What about dessert? Pink frosting on confetti cake doesn’t count. Sorry. But you can still make your sweet tooth happy with a beautiful bowl of mixed berries; and get tons of great nutrients in the bargain.

Let’s not forget breakfast. Most of you probably consider breakfast a bowl of cereal with milk. Not a good color scheme. You may add fruit to the cereal, which is better. But the fruit needs to be at least 50% of what is in the bowl to make it a good balance. Or, you could have 25% fruit mixed with cereal, and also eat half a grapefruit.

For those not into cereal, a better option overall is an omelet made with the entire egg, not just the whites. There are lots of good nutrients that your body needs in the yolk. The spinach omelet shown below packs a good and colorful nutrient punch, but could be even better if tomatoes were included.

So make the easy change to eating nutrient-rich meals:

Color It Bright and you will be Eating Right!

Living Green

2010-03-04T14:24:00.000-08:00

Spring is coming. I hope. It is hard to tell here in the Midwest where snow storms have seemed endless this winter. But I fully expect to see trees budding out and the crocus peeking up later this month. The stark winter branches will eventually be hidden by green.

Which brings me to the topic of this blog: What does it mean to live green ? How do we manage to minimize our impact on the environment? Will using green products do it? Will recycling? Will sizing down? What should we do? Three authors come to rather different conclusions about the best ways to live greener lives.

Our first protagonist, Doug Fine, author of Farewell, My Subaru, is a self-described adventure journalist who traveled the world from hot spots (Rwanda) to cold spots (the Arctic Ocean), sending in reports to NPR and other publications. A few years ago, he decided to try living totally off the grid: provide his own power, raise his own food. He chose as the setting for this adventure New Mexico, for its relatively mild climate and plentiful sunshine. Farewell, My Subaru is the humorous story of his eventually fairly successful attempts to go green. Along the way, he gives up his Subaru for a diesel pickup powered by cooking grease; installs solar panels and a windmill for power and running water; and raises goats for their milk (yoghurt, cheese, and ice cream, anyone?). While I recommend reading the book, you can get a taste (feta?) of Fine’s life from this video clip:

While Fine’s choices seem to be working for himself and his family, how many others could make those same changes? Or would want to do so? New Mexico is not heavily-populated, but there is a reason for that. The ecosystem cannot support very many. So, although Fine’s story is impressive, it cannot really be said to provide much guidance for the rest of us.

Our second protagonist, Colin Beavan, author of No Impact Man, went off-grid in a completely different locale from Fine. Beavan and his family stayed put in their Manhattan apartment, but gradually reduced their use of resources to the absolute minimum. And I do mean absolute minimum. They quit using all disposable products. Think about that one. They tried to reduce their trash to zero, in part by having a composting bin in the kitchen. [From Fast Company, March 2003: “One of the more shocking measures of our ‘prosperity’ is the fact that the United States spends more on trash bags than 90 other countries spend on everything. In other words, the receptacles of our waste cost more than all of the goods consumed by nearly half of the world’s nations.”] Beavan and his wife bought only foods grown locally and seasonally(which pretty much meant a vegan diet): lots of time was spent at the farmer’s market. Their dietary choices were rather limited in the winter. The electricity was turned off. No late nights. Heating was “provided” by spillover from the surrounding apartments. Travel was by foot or bicycle. If clothing were needed, consignment stores were shopped. It was really amazing how minimal and no impact they were able to go. This video clip gives you some idea of the challenges.

Because Farewell, My Subaru had been humorous, I was expecting No Impact Man also to be written with a light touch. It was not. Beavan’s style is much more serious and well-researched (including a dense appendix of references and resources), as befits his academic origins. He has a PhD in electronic engineering. However, his story is just as compelling as that of Fine’s, maybe more so, because Beavan made his changes in a city of millions. Rather than uprooting himself to become a subsistence farmer in the wild west, Beavan and his wife kept their jobs, but dramatically changed their lifestyle. Whether or not others can go as minimal as the Beavans did is a serious question, but at least the possibility exists for others to follow in their ecological footprint. The last thing Fine should desire is for others to follow him to New Mexico to try to replicate his lifestyle since the end result would be increased environmental degradation.

This leads to our third protagonist, David Owen, author of Green Metropolis, the most scholarly book of the three. Owen is a writer for the New Yorker, which should give you some idea of his writing style. Green Metropolis is a paean to the virtues of Manhattan. One might think given how gloriously, ecologically green he views Manhattan to be that he and Beavan would be totally in sync and living very similar lifestyles in Manhattan apartments. But no. Owen lives with his family in an old house in a small town in Connecticut. Hmmm…

Owen’s main thesis is that it is only in dense urban centers, of which Manhattan is the prime exemplar, that humans can live truly green lives. The reasons for this are many and include the following. The dense integration of stores and housing allows residents to easily walk most places they need to go. Mass transit that is a short walk to and from any destination within the city is available for longer trips. Vertical structures with a small footprint are more efficient in their use of resources than are long, low structures. Overall, per capita resource consumption and trash accumulation is lower than in less dense environments. You can get a feel for the first chapter of his book from this video clip:

Owen evidently believes that if all humans lived in cities modeled after Manhattan, and if these cities had excellent mass transit along with policies that discouraged use of cars, the world would be a happier, greener place. He really loathes the urban/suburban sprawl of the Kansas City and Phoenix Metro regions, verbally shredding them throughout the book. Dubai and the new cities in China also get their share of the whip’s lash, in large part because they were not built on the Manhattan formula of dense business/residential integration and well-planned mass transit.

The world probably would be a greener place if humanity were confined to cities of skyscrapers on a few square miles of land. But this would require that natural selection work over time to shift the inborn desire of most individuals to live in an open area where they have long views to the horizon and some distance from their neighbors. If dense urban centers were natural for most humans, city residents would not have vacation homes in the country. They would not pack up and move to the suburbs as soon as they could afford to do so, like Owen and his wife did. And why did they move? Because they didn’t want to bring up their children in the city. They wanted their children to experience a more natural environment.

Owen may hate Kansas City and Phoenix for their sprawl, but it is that very sprawl that makes them feel like comfortable places to live for most individuals. However, I agree with Owen that they are definitely problematic environmentally since cars and all that goes with them are a necessity. I also agree with Owen’s statement that “Environmental changes that rely solely on willpower are doomed to fail.” We cannot all be like Colin Beavan and reduce our impact to near zero. Beaven wouldn’t be able to do what he did to the extent that he did it anywhere else in the United States but the dense urban center of Manhattan. Beavan went even further than Owen would consider necessary by eschewing elevators and mass transit. When Beavan said no electricity, he meant no electricity. But would the rest of us have his willpower and stamina?
So here is our conundrum. Most humans are better-adapted to suburban sprawl than high-density urban living. They can manage the urban jungle, but when given the opportunity, a significant portion of the population chooses to move to the edges, or further out. Returning to subsistence farming a la Doug Fine is not an option. The world is too populous for that. Only a tiny fraction of us have the willpower (or the location) to live the stripped-down life of Colin Beavan. And all of us cannot or will not move to Manhattan or similar cities in order to live David Owen’s version of truly green lives. Even he isn’t doing that.

Assuming that we do care about our planet and that we won’t just throw our hands in the air and give up, what should we do? What are you doing? I would really like to see some comments from readers posted below this blog. Maybe we can get a dialog going on this topic. It might not be easy being green, but do we really have a long-term option?

Brain Rules

2010-02-01T08:46:00.000-08:00

How many of you would like to achieve peak performance at home, school, and/or work? I will assume the answer is something like, “Well, Duh!” And parents probably want their children to achieve in school. Are you and/or your children achieving peak performance now? If not, what can you do?

John Medina, a molecular biologist/researcher, thinks he has the answers. He has gathered them together in his book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. The text of the book is a pretty easy, breezy read. But if reading seems like too much bother, Medina has included a DVD which is basically a video “Cliffs Notes” version of the text that is very amusing. Can’t (be bothered to) find a book? No worries. Medina also has a website [http://www.brainrules.net/] which provides the same material in yet other formats including tutorials and newsletters, among others. Medina wants to make sure you have no excuse for not getting the information on making the most of your brain.

For those of you who are unable to exert yourself beyond reading this blog, here are the 12 Rules as listed in the Table of Contents. (With my comments.)

Exercise
Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power. (Whoops! Better get up and dash to the bookstore or library after all!)

Survival
Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too. (Our brain is the result of our ancestors who were better able to survive and reproduce than the others in their group.)

Wiring
Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently. (Individual life experiences result in individual brain wiring patterns.)

Attention
Rule #4: We don’t pay attention to boring things. (SEX! DANGER! Not boring. Scary maybe. Emotionally charged for sure. Journal articles: not so much.)

Short-term Memory
Rule #5: Repeat to remember. (Looks like the advertisers have this rule down.)

Long-term Memory:
Rule #6: Remember to repeat. (Really short version: schools are doing it all wrong. Big surprise. What we are “teaching” students is that most “learning” is boring. Dissection labs, on the other hand...)

Sleep
Rule #7: Sleep well, think well. (Your brain has tons of work to do while your body is sleeping. If it doesn’t get this off-hours work time, your on-hours efficiency and effectiveness plummet.)

Stress
Rule #8: Stressed brains don’t learn the same way. (Too much stress prevents memory formation and can even kill memory cells. Kids with stressful home lives can’t learn.)

Sensory Integration
Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses. (Multisensory environments lead to better, more creative learning and result in better, longer recall than does learning in a unisensory environment.)

Vision
Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses. (A picture is worth… Are all these photos working? By the way, vision trumps because we are adapted to climbing and swinging from branches in trees where depth perception is critical.)

Gender
Rule #11: Male and female brains are different. (On average, men get the gist of a situation; women focus on details. Recognizing and working with these differences can give a fuller, better perspective to a situation.)

Exploration
Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers. (Hypothesis testing, problem solving, and risking failure are how we learn.)

In summary, Medina has provided much useful information in nice, bite-sized chunks. Explore Brain Rules in any of the diverse formats Medina has provided, and peak performance of your brain may be yours; if you make the effort.

Six Months in Sudan

2010-01-06T14:25:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Dr. James Maskalyk’s powerful, wonderful, disturbing, heart-rending book Six Months in Sudan. It took me only a day to read the book because I had trouble putting it down.

Dr. James Maskalyk is a Canadian physician who works with Medécins Sans Frontières (MSF or Doctors Without Borders). This book is based on the blog [http://www.sixmonthsinsudan.com/page/blog/]
he wrote while on his six-month tour of duty in Abyei, Sudan where he was the chief medical officer and sole physician for a small MSF-run hospital. The hospital had a dedicated staff, but minimal supplies, limited equipment, and a generator for electricity that could be used only a few hours each day.

Some of you may know of Sudan from the Darfur genocide. Abyei is not in Darfur, although it is near the far, southeastern corner of Southern Darfur. Abyei is in southcentral Sudan on the border between the warring factions of the North and South. While Dr. James (as he was known in Abyei) was in Sudan, Abyei was at an uneasy peace.

I think Canadians (and virtually any educated person from any country other than the United States) are geographically literate, so Dr. James did not spend a great deal of time “positioning” Sudan for the reader. However, in my experience, many, many people in the United States think of Africa as a country (even if they “know” it is a continent). This is the fault of the media and many educators who will say things such as: “Travel to China, India, and Africa is on the upswing.” But the more knowledgeable are aware that Africa is the second-largest landmass, a continent of 53 distinct countries where hundreds of different languages are spoken. Sudan is the largest African country at over 2.5 million square kilometers. It is larger in area than Alaska and Texas combined.

Arabic and English are the languages of education, government, and business. However, those living in towns and villages far from the capital of Khartoum or other major urban centers are more likely to speak one of the 400 or so local languages or dialects. This was certainly true in Abyei. Dr. James couldn’t speak Arabic let alone any of the local languages. This kept him at a distance from his patients that was in part bridged by interpreters, but more so by the fact that he so obviously cared about each patient.

And yet, Dr. James could do so little for so many of them. They arrived too late at the hospital. Or what they needed was unavailable. Or he lacked the equipment for a proper diagnosis. Or…

Healthcare should be a basic human right. Without it, the other rights hardly matter if you are too weak, too ill, starving, dying. The situation is even more dire in war zones, or those, like Abyei, where peace has only a tentative hold. It is the mission of MSF and doctors like Dr. James to take healthcare to where it is most needed. Without their efforts the forgotten areas of the world would be even harsher and grimmer places.

I strongly encourage you to read Six Months in Sudan. The beginning of a new year is a good time to learn something new, especially about one of the forgotten places of the world. Dr. James’ story will move you, perhaps to tears; I hope to action.

Focus on the Future

2010-01-02T15:26:00.000-08:00

Welcome to a New Year and a New Decade! New beginnings mean we should think about the future. What are your goals, plans, desires, wishes, wants, needs? This is not the time to focus on what might have been. Nor is it the time to live only in today. The past provides guidance for the present, which allows us to plan for the future.

Thinking about the future means thinking about your health. If you don’t think about your health, your future may be Hobbesian: “poor, nasty, brutish, and short…”

Scientists tend to be future-oriented, even those such as paleontologists and archaeologists who study the past. They study the past to understand how the present was formed and to predict what the future might be. Failing to think about the future can have disastrous consequences, as the Maori of New Zealand discovered.

The Maori arrived in New Zealand around 800 - 1000 years ago to discover a land of wondrous and seemingly unending bounty. After a months-long voyage at sea, it must have seemed that they landed in paradise. Numerous species of flightless birds, the moa, some taller than 10 feet, lived in large colonies throughout the islands. The shores were home to large populations of seals. Having never encountered humans before, these animals had no fear and were thus easy prey.

The Maori probably brought with them the usual Polynesian domesticates such as pigs and chickens, but given such natural bounty, it appears no effort was made to retain them since there is no archaeological evidence of pigs and chickens in New Zealand prior to European settlement. Unfortunately, another animal that arrived with the Maori did make its presence felt: the rat. Within a few hundred years, the combined depredations of the Maori and the rat drove the moa, the seals, and most other large-to-medium-to-small-sized animals to extinction, or to bare survival in rat-and-human-free refugias. There was one other animal that arrived with the Maori, the dog. After the collapse of the ecosystem, dog and rat became the Maori’s primary dietary meat sources. The Maori also subsisted on tubers that were considered delicacies in New Zealand, but were starvation foods elsewhere. They were able to fish and collect shellfish, but life in New Zealand became nasty, brutish, and short. Paradise was lost.

There are those who believe that we should live only for today because we do not know what tomorrow brings. In the midst of bounty, planning and/or saving for the future probably seems foolish. I imagine it seemed that way to the original Maori. Who thinks about your children’s grandchildren and the life they will have? There is plenty now. Won’t there always be plenty in the future?

Most humans have difficulty thinking about and planning for the future. This is probably what makes the discussion of global climate change so fractious. The future-oriented scientists clearly see the problem and have plans of action to help ameliorate it. But those individuals who are not future-oriented see only that life is much the same as it was a few years ago, and so believe that there is no great need for concern. Let tomorrow take care of itself.

This same lack of concern for tomorrow also means that the non-future-oriented are more likely to put their health at risk. They say, “I feel fine today. What I am doing [sitting on the couch] and what I am eating [junk food] must be OK because I am able to do my job, pay my bills, and have fun. Life is good. I don’t need to change my life. Besides, change is difficult, and no fun.” Perhaps. But then type 2 diabetes and heart disease aren’t fun either. “Who cares? I don’t have those problems now. No one lives forever anyway.”

Those who live only in the present have a fatalistic outlook: the future is set and nothing can be done to change it. In contrast, the future-oriented individual believes that the future is full of possibilities and opportunities over which he or she has some control. Decisions made today will have repercussions for good or bad in the future.

It may be that whether or not one is future-oriented is an inborn personality trait. If so, it will indeed be difficult for those without this trait to plan and make the changes in their lives that will lead to a healthy life many years down the road. In that case, they may need to view the future as next month, or next week, or even tomorrow in order to begin to change.

You need to take care of yourself now so that you will be able to make the most of the opportunities the future brings. Start the New Year and the New Decade out right by deciding to make the changes that will result in this being your best year and best decade yet.

See you in a bright, wonderful future!

'Tis the Season

2009-12-09T08:23:00.000-08:00

It’s that time of year when we start thinking about the health and well-being of ourselves and those we love. As one year ends and another begins, we think about what we’ve accomplished, what we still want to do, and what we need to change.

To help you achieve your goals, you may wish to purchase a PDF copy of my book Walking in Sunshine: LifeStyle Changes to Make for a Bright Healthy Future at this link:
http://www.anthrohealth.net/ahbook.htm

Learn how your individual biology, behavior, and the environment in which you live interact to affect your health and well being. Discover why: adaptations matter, walking is the best exercise, sunshine is necessary, proper diet = better health, natural parenting is effective parenting, and much more.

Walking in Sunshine includes the Flexibilities appendix: color photos and directions detailing each movement in the sequence of stretches that scientific research has shown will help you prevent heart attacks, strokes, and osteoarthritis. Feel and act younger, move more gracefully, lose the achiness. Get flexible and live longer. Flexibilities can also be purchased as a separate PDF copy at this link:
http://www.anthrohealth.net/ahflexbooklet.htm

Walking in Sunshine: LifeStyle Changes to Make for a Bright Healthy Future will help you and your loved ones improve your lives. In addition, a PDF copy is environmentally green. Better your lives while helping the environment.

‘Tis the Season! May you have a wonderful life full of health and well-being.

Gut Check

2009-11-25T12:44:00.000-08:00

Over the past few weeks there has been a lot of media coverage on the new guidelines for mammograms and breast self exams. Analysis of scientific research indicates that mammograms can do more harm than good. This is not what anti-breast cancer crusaders like the Susan G. Komen Foundation want to hear. Women are worried and confused because they have been told that they must have mammograms to detect and prevent breast cancer. Now the scientists are saying that is not the case and that, in fact, they can be counter-productive.

For every women correctly diagnosed with cancer after a mammogram there are significantly more women who endure the trauma of a false positive reading. They have no disease but undergo what turn out to be needless breast biopsies where they run the risk of a lung puncture from a poorly-performed needle biopsy. Unless a woman has a family/genetic history of breast cancer, the odds of her getting it prior to age 70 are actually quite low.

No one wants to be the one to tell the average 40-year-old woman without a family history of breast cancer to stop getting mammograms and then find out 3 years later that she developed breast cancer. But, again, the odds of her developing it are low. The cancer foundations and some health professionals appear to be operating under the “better safe than sorry” mantra while ignoring the fact that false positives can also lead to a sorry situation.

In 2002, Gerd Gigerenzer, author of Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You, pointed out that the general public and many medical professionals do not really understand statistics. This lack of understanding leads them to judge inaccurately the actual risks and benefits of health screenings.

According to Gigerenzer, the vast majority of physicians who participated in the research described in his book cannot accurately determine risks and benefits when these are presented in the form of probabilities. (e.g. There is a 25% risk reduction in death from breast cancer with mammography.) Only when the results are presented in the form of natural frequencies do the risks and benefits become clear. (e.g. 1000 women got mammograms each year for 10 years and 1000 women did not. At the end of 10 years, 3 women in the first group and 4 women in the second group died of breast cancer.) If we and our physicians cannot accurately determine risks and benefits when they are presented as probabilities, we could be unnecessarily risking our health. How many of the 997 women who got mammograms each year for 10 years also had false positives during that time? How many experienced the trauma, pain, and potential negative outcomes of the additional testing required to rectify that false positive?

Rather than relying on mammograms (and other types of screenings) to safeguard their health, it would be better for women in their 40s and 50s to actively employ measures that we know can help prevent cancer. These measures include eating plenty of richly-colored fruits and vegetables; eliminating dairy and other saturated fats; getting plenty of exercise; sleeping around 8 hours each night; and taking a minimum supplement of 1000 IU/day of vitamin D3. More vitamin D supplementation may be required to get the blood levels of 25 OHD to the optimal level of 50 ng/mL.

By following these preventive measures all women, even those with a family history of breast cancer, will reduce their odds of developing the disease. And those without a family history will be able to ignore their guts and go with their brains in accepting the scientific data which states that we in the United States have been over-using mammograms. Look at the natural frequency data. Mammograms haven’t been as much help as we thought. Eat right, exercise, sleep well, and take vitamin D. That’s where the science is.

Eat for Health: A Review

2009-11-18T08:17:00.000-08:00

Dr. Joel Fuhrman (Eat for Health) is one of the major proponents of a predominantly vegetarian diet he calls nutritarian. At first blush, his diet is very similar to that which I have long promoted: eat lots of fruits, vegetables, and tree nuts while eliminating dairy and grain-based foods. Dr. Fuhrman also allows very limited amounts of eggs, fish/shellfish, and poultry, but would essentially eliminate red meat. It is at the level of protein intake that Dr. Fuhrman and Dr. Fuller differ. Dr. Fuhrman wants proteins to be essentially vegetable-based, while Dr. Fuller knows that humans also need animal-based proteins.

Both of us recognize that humans are primates and that chimpanzees are our closest living relatives. Therefore, we both look to the chimpanzee diet for guidelines as to what our ancient ancestors ate. However, Dr. Fuhrman seems to conflate the diet of the gorilla with that of the chimpanzee. He also ignores a major difference we have with our fellow apes and the implication that has for human diets: our much larger brains.

Gorillas eat a lot of leafy vegetation; they are vegetarians. Chimps eat very little leafy vegetation. The major components of the chimp diet are fruits and nuts, but they also eat as much animal-based protein as they can find: ants, termites, eggs, monkeys, bush pigs, etc. Dr. Fuhrman combines the gorilla’s leafy diet with the chimp’s fruits and nuts and concludes that this is the proper diet for humans. In the wild, generally the only time chimps eat leaves is when they eat meat (except for certain unpalatable leaves eaten to remove intestinal parasites). Chimps and humans do not have the same ability that gorillas have to process large quantities of leafy vegetation through their guts.

Archaeological evidence shows that hominin (humans and their ancient ancestors) brains did not begin to enlarge until animal-based protein (primarily fish/shellfish and water fowl eggs) became a larger component of the diet. These foods are excellent sources of omega-3 fatty acids, necessary for proper brain growth, development, and function. Some plant-based foods such as tree nuts and flax seeds do provide omega-3 fatty acids, but research shows that these are not a good source: humans (and other mammals) cannot efficiently convert the plant-based fatty acids into the forms required for use in the brain. With the development of agriculture and an increasing reliance on plants in human diets, the size of human brains has actually decreased over the past 10,000 years.

In chapter 13 of Eat for Health, Dr. Fuhrman has an entire section inveighing against eating fish and shellfish because of mercury contamination. Mercury is a problem in large, long-lived fish. However, it is not a problem in shrimp and sardines, and other small, short-lived varieties. Is it worth relegating fish and shellfish to a very minor part of your diet if it also means that you are not providing your brain with enough omega-3 fatty acids?

Overall, Dr. Fuhrman’s book is full of good advice for those who are overweight and have chronic health problems. However, his nutritarian program is too close to that of a vegetarian/vegan if you want to have an optimally functioning brain. A few modifications will bring Dr. Fuhrman’s plan into line with Dr. Fuller’s Premier Nutrition Plan [http://www.anthrohealth.net/AHNews%20V6N7.htm]: a plan that keeps you healthy and brainy.

Flexibility for Life

2009-10-31T08:42:00.000-07:00

When I was 32 I realized that I was not as flexible as I had once been. This disturbed me because at that time my grandmother was having increasing difficulty moving. Her shoulders were becoming stiff and inflexible. She needed a knee replacement. My grandmother was only 75. I loved her dearly, but I didn’t want to have the same problems with my body. From that point, I put together a series of joint movements I call Flexibilities; and I began doing them every morning when I first arose.

Over the next several weeks, I noticed that not only was I becoming more flexible, but I felt less achy and stiff when I awoke each morning. Doing the movements in the morning meant that I felt loose, alert, and ready for the day ahead. I walked a little taller with a bounce in my step.

Through the intervening years, I’ve continued to do the flexibilities each morning. On those days that for some reason I do not do the movements, I feel a little off. I’ve also found that if I do not do the flexibilities first thing in the morning, I am less likely to do them at all that day.

In addition to doing the joint movements, I do two other things to aid joint health. Each day with my breakfast (blueberries and bananas, tomato salsa omelet, and grapefruit juice) I take a vitamin D3 supplement. Vitamin D3 is vital for skeletal and muscle strength (and many other aspects of health). For lunch I eat water-packed sardines. Sardines are a super food: they are a great source of protein, calcium, vitamin D3, and omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 fatty acids help reduce joint inflammation (along with many other benefits).

Following this program for over two decades, I have great flexibility, no signs of osteoarthritis, and good overall health. Two research studies provide support for my anecdotal experience.

The first, published about one year ago by UC San Diego researchers, found that flexing joints prompts chondrocytes (cartilage cells) to produce a lubricating substance that keeps the joint surfaces smooth. The more the joint was flexed, the greater the percentage of chondrocytes that produced lubrication, keeping the glassy surface of the joint smooth. Joints that are not flexed produce very little lubrication resulting in an erosion of the smooth cartilage and, eventually, the pain of osteoarthritis.

The second study was published earlier this month in the American Journal of Physiology. These researchers in Texas and Japan found that an individual’s degree of flexibility could be positively correlated with that individual’s degree of arterial flexibility. That is, the most flexible adults had the best arterial condition and the lowest risk for having a heart attack or stroke. Those adults with the greatest joint stiffness were at highest risk of suffering from a heart attack or stroke.

Do you want to live a longer, healthier life? Then you need to add daily flexibilities to your routine. If you would like a PDF copy (for $3.00) of my Flexibilities booklet which includes photos and directions for each movement, click here. http://www.anthrohealth.net/ahflexbooklet.htm

Genes are not Paint Pots: Part 2 Polygenic Traits

2009-10-23T10:49:00.000-07:00

Articles on genetics make it seem that every trait is a single gene trait. Single gene traits are easier to understand and seem easier to manipulate. I imagine that most geneticists would be thrilled if all our traits were caused by single genes. Unfortunately for them, that is not the case. In fact, for most traits of interest multiple genes are involved. They are polygenic traits: the result of the interaction of multiple forms of multiple genes with the environment in which that individual and/or his/her ancestors live/lived. The proportion of genes to environment varies with each trait. In most cases, we really have no idea of the true proportion. Regardless, it is important to remember that these traits are not simple and, therefore, we are a long ways from being able to fully understand and manipulate them.

Polygenic traits exhibit continuous variation: there are no distinct boundaries between one form of the trait and another. Unlike the blood type example from the Part 1 blog [below] where one is either Type A or Type O, polygenic traits can seem like blends. Some examples of polygenic traits include: height, weight, intelligence, hair color, and eye color. Adults are not 5’, 5.5’, or 6’ tall with no heights between. Height is continuously distributed. Although we say a woman is blond or brunette, we know that the range of variation within each category is large. Another example of a polygenic trait is skin color.

Geneticists have spent years trying to figure out the genetics of human skin color. They’ve found genes that affect skin color, but they have not yet been able to fully explain the genetics that produce the variation we see. Nor can they confidently predict what color the offspring will be of parents with markedly different skin colors. If genes were paint pots, this should be easy to do. Take one very dark parent and one very light parent, and the offspring should be halfway between. Sometimes this looks to be the case, but the children can range in skin color from light to dark. There is no way to tell ahead of time. I know a couple where the wife has very dark skin color and black hair, while the husband has very light skin color and blond hair. One child has medium brown skin color and wavy brown hair while the other child has very light skin color and tightly curled blond hair.

Some geneticists have talked about parents choosing their baby’s traits. If traits were of the single gene variety this might barely be possible. But with polygenic traits, it is not going to happen. At least, not in the foreseeable future. If you look a great deal like your mate, your child may look a great deal like you. But it isn’t guaranteed. [See the Part 1 blog below.] If you and your mate are quite dissimilar in looks, each birth will be an unexpected mix of traits. Your child will not be a blend. Genes are not paint pots. And that is a great thing because we do not know what the future will bring. The more variation there is in your offspring, the better the chance that they will do well in that unknown future.

Genes are not Paint Pots: Part 1 Genetics and Genealogy

2009-10-01T13:35:00.000-07:00

Even though everyone graduating from high school is supposed to have taken biology, there is still much that remains misunderstood among the general public about many topics in biology, including genetics. Mendel would be so disappointed.

Prior to Mendel’s research with pea plants in the mid-1800s, it was assumed by everyone that offspring were a blend of their parents’ traits. Mendel found that this assumption was false. Purebred tall pea plants crossed with purebred short pea plants did not produce medium-sized offspring. They produced tall offspring. Traits did not blend. The world changed! NOT! No one even paid any attention for about 50 years. And then, it was only a few scientists (who became geneticists) who really noticed.

To understand this better, let’s start with a simple Mendelian (single gene trait) example: ABO blood type. You get half of your chromosomes (23) from your mom and half (23) from your dad. Both sets of chromosomes have the same genes, BUT they may have different forms of those genes. In our example, your chromosome #9 from your mom contains the ABO blood type form O. The one from your dad is A. Your blood type is not a blend of O and A. It is A (because A is dominant over O). But your genotype is AO.

Now, it is years later and you are ready to have a child. Your mate is blood type O. That means your mate has a genotype of OO. Due to the randomness of meiosis (cell division that produces gametes: eggs or sperm), your gamete contains the O form from your mom. Your mate also provides an O, so your child will have blood type O and genotype OO. Not only is your dad’s gene for ABO not passed on to his grandchild child, neither are any of the nearby genes on that chromosome. And if your dad’s chromosome #9 did not undergo recombination during meiosis (exchanging material with the other chromosome #9s), all your dad’s genes on that chromosome are absent from his grandchild child. It is possible, although improbable, that your child contains chromosomes and genes ONLY from your mother. It is also possible, although improbable, that the only chromosome your child inherited from grandma is #9. There is no blending of the grandparents’ traits in the grandchild.

What this means is that in only two generations, traits can be lost from a family line. In our example, you know who your parents are, but it is possible that the traits of one of your parents will not be evident in your child, which is your parent’s grandchild. The big point? Genetics and Genealogy do not match.

Maybe you are really into genealogy and have a family tree dating back a couple of hundred years. You know who your ancestors are. But you decide it would be cool to have genetic testing done too. SHOCK!! According to the genetic testing, you do not have any Native American ancestry. But you know that your mom’s grandmother was Sioux. You have a picture of her! What gives?!
What gives is that since genes don’t blend, they can be lost to subsequent generations. Also, current genetic testing is only able to look at a subset of all your genes. Maybe your maternal grandma’s genes that you did inherit aren’t in that tested subset. Who knows?

Genetic information provides additional insights to your ancestry, but is not a substitute for genealogy. You need both types of information to fully understand your personal past.

Takeaway message: If you read an article, or see a show that states, “Based on genetic testing, there is no evidence that Population A is in the ancestry of Population B” remember that not all genes get passed down to all descendants, and that genetic testing only examines a subset of genes. Contrary to what that genetic test showed, it is quite possible that Population A is indeed in the ancestry of Population B. Genetics and Genealogy are different, complementary ways of knowing the past.

Brainercise

2009-09-16T13:36:00.000-07:00

At ever-increasing rates, the population of the United States is becoming overweight and obese. There are two simple explanations for this: lack of exercise and too much high-calorie, low-nutrition food. These are obviously important factors. Exercise and a high-quality, properly-portioned diet need to be at the top of anyone’s weight-loss agenda. But these two factors may be related to two other interacting factors: learning and sleeping.

The brain uses about 20% of the body’s energy budget to maintain itself and to process information. When learning a new task, particularly a difficult one, the brain uses more energy. Once the task is learned, the energy level drops back to baseline. Researchers have found that the best way to consolidate learning, to put it into long-term memory, is to get a good night’s sleep.

Obtaining adequate levels of sleep has many beneficial outcomes. I’ve discussed this topic in some detail in an issue of AnthroHealth News: http://www.anthrohealth.net/AHNews%20V7N1.htm But in this blog I am bringing up a different benefit: weight loss. Researchers have found that individuals who obtain an adequate night’s sleep (around eight hours) are less likely to have weight problems. The reason given for this is that inadequate sleep and/or sleep disruption also disrupt the hormones that control appetite. If appetite is not suppressed, over-eating results.

This sounds reasonable, but I am proposing a different, additional connection. Too many Americans do not want to learn anything new, particularly if it is difficult. There is even an entire class of American citizens who are proud that they know very little. Charles P. Pierce’s Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free describes this group in disturbing detail.

Learning new, challenging things uses more energy and requires more sleep for the new thing to actually stick. Failure to really learn anything new (as opposed to the process of cramming and regurgitating where anything “learned” is quickly lost) puts no energy demands on the brain, so an individual thinks he/she needs less sleep. Less sleep results in hormone disruption leading to loss of appetite suppression and obesity.

Now, I am not saying that all individuals who are overweight or obese are failing to adequately exercise their brains. Each individual has his/her own complexity of factors involved in weight issues. However, it is a real shame that there are humans who, despite having a large brain capable of learning complex ideas and activities, choose not to bother to use their brains to their highest capacity. It is frightening that so many individuals actually take pride in this failure.

In conclusion, if you want to lose some weight, in addition to getting exercise and eating nutritious food, you might try exercising your brain and then getting a good night’s sleep. I recommend doing it every day. Not only will you have the joy of learning something new, but you also may lose some weight.

Let me know if it works for you.

[Bed in graphic is from SLMetalWorks.com.]

Seasonal Immunity

2009-09-08T12:47:00.000-07:00

Labor Day has passed. Students should all be back to school now. The days are getting shorter. The leaves are beginning to change color. It is time to think about how to forestall illness.

Wow. What a downer, associating Autumn with illness; but, unfortunately, that’s the way it is. What’s the connection? Sunshine, or the lack thereof. More specifically, it is the reduction of UVB radiation striking the Earth as its angle relative to the Sun limits our exposure.

Now, what does reduced exposure to UVB radiation have to do with increased levels of illness? Isn’t UVB radiation a bad thing? As regular readers of my blog and newsletter know, no, UVB radiation is actually necessary to maintaining good health.

The cells of your immune system contain Vitamin D Receptors (VDR). This means that the optimal functioning of your immune system requires optimal levels of vitamin D in your blood. If your immune system is not optimized, you are more likely to become ill. Viruses and other pathogens will have relatively free rein in your body because your defense system is sub-par.

Unprotected skin exposed to UVB radiation activates the vitamin D system, increasing blood levels of vitamin D. However, numerous factors inhibit this natural system including: over-protection of the skin (see my blog “Dermatological Purdah”); dark pigmentation at high latitudes; old age; and life spent indoors. Current estimates are that the majority of Americans have sub-optimal levels of vitamin D and are, therefore, at high risk for having a sub-optimal immune system.

If Americans aren’t getting enough vitamin D the natural way, then they will have to use supplementation. The current US recommended levels are much too low to optimize vitamin D levels. Dr. Cannell, physician and vitamin D researcher living in California, recommends that children receive 1000 IU of vitamin D3/day for each 25 lbs of weight. He takes 5000 IU/day during the winter months. The minimum recommended dose for adults, according the Canadian Cancer Society, is 1000 IU/day, year-round. Dr. Vieth, Canadian vitamin D researcher, recommends a minimum daily dose of 4000 IU/day during the winter months.

As a child, teen, and young adult, I caught pretty much every pathogen that passed by me. It wasn’t until years later, when I began my research on vitamin D, that I realized that I suffered from sub-optimal levels of vitamin D. My two big fixes for the problem were to eat sardines every day and to move to Arizona. While this did work, after several years I ended up moving back to the Midwest to be near my family. The move resulted in having to tinker some with vitamin D supplementation to achieve optimization. What appears to work for me is this: every day I eat a can of sardines. In addition to providing several hundred IU/day of vitamin D, I also get a good dose of omega-3 fatty acids, calcium, and protein. However, in the Midwest, sardines do not provide enough vitamin D. Therefore, during the summer months, I take 2000 IU/day of vitamin D3. [I just do not get out enough in the sun during the summer to optimize my vitamin D levels naturally.] In the autumn, I increase this to 3000 IU/day, then to 4000 IU/day, and finally, during the depths of winter, to 5000 IU/day. While this does not prevent every cold, I am far, far healthier than I was during my previous sojourn in the Midwest.

While this dosing schedule works for me, you will need to develop one individualized for your own set of variables. Also, if you are on any medications, you will need to discuss it with your physician. Do not wait until the leaves have all fallen to begin optimizing your vitamin D levels. It takes a few weeks to achieve optimization. If you want to have the best chance to avoid the season of colds and flu, you need to begin now. Here’s To Your Health!

The Greatest Legacy

2009-08-26T09:09:00.000-07:00

Today, August 26, 2009, Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy died. Senator Kennedy spent his entire career attempting to make the United States (and the World) a place where everyone, not just the privileged few, would have a bright, healthy future.

The United States has become a much better, more open society thanks to the efforts of Senator Kennedy. A society where everyone has the opportunity to make contributions is one that is more creative and dynamic. One that will be able to continue to lead the world in the 21st century as it did in the 20th.

Unfortunately, there is a segment of US society that wishes to limit access; that wishes to maintain their status quo. Sadly, they do not appear to understand that societies that do these things stagnate, wither, and die. Creativity and change are necessary for a dynamic, growing society.

If the United States is to be the world leader that it has been in the past, more change, more opportunities for all its citizens will be required. The greatest legacy that Senator Kennedy would wish to leave to all citizens of the United States would be universal health care.

Tens of millions of Americans have either no or limited health insurance which means they receive inadequate health care. Failure to provide adequate insurance and health care to all of it citizens means that the United States is failing to reach for the future. As much as some of us might wish to hold on to the past, it slips away. If the United States is not to slip into the past, and become a has-been, a backwater, changes must be made.

The Greatest Legacy will be when the Congress passes the health care bill championed by Senator Kennedy. Then all the citizens of the United States will be given the opportunity to achieve a Bright, Healthy Future.

Brain Power

2009-08-18T11:17:00.000-07:00

US News and World Report just published an article on “America’s 10 Brainiest States.” Degree of braininess was based on population surveys concerning the following indicators of brain health:

· Eat a Healthy Diet:
o Low saturated fat and cholesterol
o Five or more daily servings of fruits and vegetables
o Daily intake of omega-3 fatty acids, especially from eating fatty fish
o Breast feed infants

· Exercise at least 30 minutes each day.
· Watch your weight.
· Do not smoke.
· Sleep around 7 - 8 hours each night.
· Mental Stimulation:
o Read every day.
o Play mentally challenging games.
o Learn new things.
· Get involved:
o Volunteer
o Join clubs
o Stay in touch with family and friends

State rankings were based on the analysis of these factors. You can read more about the methodology of the study here: http://www.lifesdha.com/brainindex/About--i-lifesDHA--i--Index-of-Brain-Health.aspx (Washington, DC was included as a state for the purposes of this research.)

According to the researchers, the top 10 brainiest states/polities are: District of Columbia, Maryland, Washington (state), Vermont, Connecticut, Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maine, and New Hampshire. The 10 lowest-ranking states are: North Dakota, South Carolina, Indiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Louisiana.

I found this distribution rather intriguing and wanted to explore it further, so I compared this ranking of state brainpower with the map of the Electoral College distribution from the 2008 Presidential Election.

All of the top 10 brainiest states are Blue States. All of the lowest ranking states, except for Indiana, are Red States. Further examination showed that of the top 25 brainiest states, only 7 (Georgia, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, and Alaska) are Red States. The other 18 are Blue States. And of those 7 Red States, all are in the West except for Georgia.

Now, as we know, Correlation does not equal Causation. But it is an intriguing distribution worthy of further thought.

A correlation that, in this case, does equal causation is that the indicators of brain health listed above match with the AnthroHealth Way to Health and Well-Being about which I’ve been writing since 2002. http://www.anthrohealth.net/aharchives.htm

So keep eating those sardines!

The Brain Health research website also includes a brief on-line survey you can take to see if you are living a brain healthy lifestyle: http://www.lifesdha.com/50-States/View-All-Rankings/tabid/330/Default.aspx

I want to hear what you think about the Blue State/Brainy State correlation, so please add comments to this blog.

Don’t Drink It!!

2009-08-07T14:29:00.000-07:00

New research has been published stating that drinking milk will help prevent coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke. Oh, please! That is like saying that red meat is heart healthy. Milk is loaded with saturated fat. Leave a glass of milk sitting on the counter and watch the clumps of fat appear. Saturated fat is NOT good for you.

Why would these researchers conclude that it is? Well, I did a little sleuthing and found out (surprise, surprise) that at least one of the researchers, Dr. Ian Givens, is associated with the British Dairy Industry [Centre for Dairy Research]. http://www.feedforhealth.org/default.asp?ZNT=S0T1O734

Givens et al. state that compared to men (in Britain) who did not ingest any dairy products, those who did drink milk or eat other dairy products were healthier. This research evidently has yet to be published in a journal, so I do not know how the study was conducted.

However, since the vast majority of adults in the world cannot process dairy products past weaning age due to lack of the enzyme lactase, it seems highly improbable that those adults who drink and eat saturated dairy fat (primarily those of northern European ancestry) would have less CHD and strokes than does the rest of the world’s populations.

On the up side, not all fats are bad for the heart. Omega-3 fatty acids found in fatty fish such as salmon and sardines are good for the heart. And the brain. [See my blog Vegging Out below.] And, according to new research, the eyes: eating foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids helps prevent age-related macular degeneration and blindness. http://ajp.amjpathol.org/cgi/content/abstract/175/2/799

So, forget the milk and cheese. They don’t do a body good. Instead, add sardines, salmon, and even walnuts to your diet if you are really interested in helping your heart and preventing strokes.

Salud!

Dietary Disorder

2009-07-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

I recently read an article written by a vegan (no animal products whatsoever) dietician who mentioned vitamin D supplementation. Unfortunately for herself and her readers, the information she gave them was inaccurate, even potentially harmful. She stated that vegans should not use vitamin D3/cholecalciferol since it came from animal sources. Instead, they should use vitamin D2/ergocalciferol which is from plant sources.

The idea that ergocalciferol (D2) is equivalent to cholecalciferol (D3) has been shown to be based on archaic, erroneous data as shown by the quote below.

“The case that vitamin D2 should no longer be considered equivalent to vitamin D3 is based on differences in their efficacy at raising serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D, diminished binding of vitamin D2 metabolites to vitamin D binding protein in plasma, and a nonphysiologic metabolism and shorter shelf life of vitamin D2. Vitamin D2, or ergocalciferol, should not be regarded as a nutrient suitable for supplementation or fortification.”

Check out this link for the full article as published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/84/4/694

It is impossible to get enough vitamin D from one’s diet to achieve the optimal level of 50 – 60 ng/mL of 25 OHD even if one were to properly eat foods with D3 such as sardines. Therefore, if one is going to avoid UVB exposure, then one must take vitamin D3 supplements with 1000 IU/day as a minimum dosage. More is probably necessary to optimize 25 OHD.

The article allowed for comments, so I commented on it as above. My comment was up for about two hours and then disappeared. The vegan dietician has both MPH (Masters of Public Health) and RD (Registered Dietician) degrees, so one would assume that she was trained in critical thinking and the scientific method. However, removing my comment does not support that supposition.

By removing my comment, she is denying her readers the opportunity to judge the validity of her own comments. She evidently also denies the validity of research published in one of the major journals in her own field.

Vitamin D3/cholecalciferol is absolutely necessary for optimal health. Using the plant-based form will not cut it. Hiding that information from one's readers does not alter the facts, but it does alter one's perceptions of the one doing the hiding.

Vegging Out

2009-07-22T19:15:00.000-07:00

The July, 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association has a position statement on vegetarian and vegan diets. Their position states that, “Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.” This is disturbing advice, especially since the ADA defines a vegetarian diet, “… as one that does not include meat (including fowl) or seafood, or products containing those foods.”

Brain growth is very rapid during infancy and childhood. Brain growth requires the fatty acids arachidonic acid (AA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). A healthy, well-fed mother provides these fatty acids in her breast milk. Infant formulas need to be supplemented with these fatty acids; not all of them are. Research has shown that breastfed infants have, on average, higher IQs than do formula-fed infants. Here’s the takeaway message: brain growth requires animal-based fatty acids, not plant-based ones.

Monkey species like capuchins that eat meat are smarter than ones that do not like howlers. Chimps and orangutans show more complex behaviors in the wild than do the vegan gorillas.

Among the best sources of the brain growth fatty acids are fish and shellfish. There is evidence that brain growth was spurred in our hominid ancestors when they began including fish and shellfish in their diets. If not for that dietary change, we would probably still be small-brained hominids dodging cheetahs on the savannas.

The fatty acids AA and DHA are also needed to maintain brain health throughout one’s life. Lack of these fatty acids leads to neurological disorders, even dementia.

Vegging out means sitting around passively doing little thinking, i.e. a couch potato (a relatively useless vegetable). If you don’t eat fish and shellfish your brain will veg out. If you want to do that to yourself, well… However, deliberately stunting your infant or child’s chances for healthy brain development…? How can the ADA really believe that vegging out is a good option for anyone?

Dermatological Purdah

2009-07-15T09:55:00.000-07:00

Once again, The American Academy of Dermatology Issues (AAD) has published a statement that, “The Academy continues to recommend that individuals protect themselves from UV exposure when outdoors, such as seeking shade whenever possible, wearing sunscreen and covering up with a wide-brimmed hat, long sleeves, pants and sunglasses.” This amounts to Dermatological Purdah: do not allow any skin exposure to the sun!

Evidently, the AAD would be thrilled if we returned to the fashions of the Edwardian era. Note the stylish summer wear of these two women. No sunglasses, but even better for concerned dermatologists, they are wearing gloves and carrying a parasol. What could be better for the AAD?! Let’s return fashion to the days of Fin de Siècle. No more worries: Skin will be smooth and untanned. Why live in the 21st century when the 19th will do so much better?

The AAD does admit that following their fashion purdah restrictions will mean that vitamin D supplementation will probably be necessary. However, they think that 1000 IU/day will be adequate. Adequate? Unlikely. It is estimated that at least 80% of the US population has inadequate levels of serum vitamin D. And the vast majority isn’t following purdah restrictions. 1000 IU/day is better than nothing, of course, but if you are already at inadequate levels (and the odds are that you are), and then you follow the AAD’s advice, 1000 IU/day will be nowhere near enough to optimize your vitamin D levels. Before deciding to undertake dermatological purdah, get you 25 OHD levels checked. Anything under 50 ng/mL means that you need to take a supplement. Vitamin D3 now comes in 2000 IU/day pills.

Think it isn’t that serious? Muslim women who practice purdah in Saudi Arabia (pretty darn sunny there) have dangerously low, even undetectable, levels of serum vitamin D. Edwardian women who practiced dermatological purdah had such high rates of flattened pelvic inlets that obstetricians thought that was what a normal pelvis looked like. Childbirth is hard enough with a normal pelvic inlet. Can you imagine what it was like in Edwardian times? Do you want to return to that era? I don’t.

Sure, you need to make sure that you don’t overdo sun exposure. But get real AAD, dermatological purdah is not the answer either.

It's About Time!!

2009-07-08T18:05:00.000-07:00

Way back in 1992, I began doing research on vitamin D deprivation. At that time, there were only a few other researchers looking at this topic. If anyone else thought of vitamin D at all, they figured it was a very minor problem resolved by drinking milk; and that it only affected bones. My research pointed to vitamin D deprivation being a widespread problem that affected multiple regions in the body beyond bones. But trying to get most of my colleagues to take this seriously was an arduous, disappointing process.

Between 1999 and 2001, I submitted grants to NIH trying to get funding to do a major research study on vitamin D deprivation among heavily-pigmented women. There was no interest in such research at that time. I wrote articles on vitamin D deprivation that have been widely cited, but still the issue wasn’t considered important enough for the NIH.

Part of the reason for this is the massive public relations campaign against sun exposure launched and carried out by dermatologists and their media friends. Yes, too much UVB exposure can be a problem; but not enough exposure is a much bigger problem. Only in the past year or so has the media finally, finally realized this. Now we are seeing articles on vitamin D deprivation and the importance of maintaining optimal levels of vitamin D if one wishes to avoid multiple health problems such as heart disease, cancer, auto-immune conditions, and, of course, keeping the skeletal system strong.

And FINALLY the NIH is going to fund a major study on vitamin D deprivation. It’s only taken almost two decades, but better late than never. This study will enroll 20,000 participants from throughout the nation. However, the group is limited to women who are 65 or older, or men who are 60 or older. Also, they need to be free of any major health problems. The study will be double blind in that participants and researchers will not know whether the participant is receiving actual vitamin D3 (2000 IU/day) or a dummy pill. The vitamin D dosage is also large enough that effects should be noticeable, unlike other recent studies where the dosage was much lower.

The study begins in January 2010 and will run for five years, so we cannot expect to read about results any time soon. However, It’s About Time! Maybe we will now see many other major research projects done on this important topic.

Just today a large cancer research study [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/07/AR2009070702252.html ] found that even after controlling for a variety of factors, African Americans had higher rates of adverse outcomes for breast, colon, and ovarian cancers than was true of European Americans. This study evidently did not look at vitamin D levels, but, as I pointed out in one of my articles (Health Disparities: Reframing the Problem. Medical Science Monitor 2003; 9 (3): SR9-15), vitamin D deprivation is the probable factor involved in this disparity [ http://journals.indexcopernicus.com/fulltxt.php?ICID=4712 ]

Meanwhile, there is no evidence that taking 2000 IU of vitamin D3/day causes problems; and there are many studies that indicate there are important benefits. So, take your vitamin D every day and you will be ahead of the curve when the NIH study is finally analyzed and published.

Culture of Success

2009-07-01T11:52:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point and Blink). This is a must-read book. You probably think you know why some individuals are successful and others are not, but you are probably wrong, at least according to Gladwell.

Why are the vast majority of successful Canadian hockey players born in January, February, and March? How do rice paddies and the way in which numbers are encoded in language relate to success in math for many East Asians? Why does the year in which someone is born lead to or inhibit that person’s chances for success? What is the 10,000 hour rule? How can deference to superiors lead to air disasters? Why would a culture of honor created hundreds of years ago and thousands of miles away still have an impact in the 21st century? Can the differences in academic achievement between rich and poor be as simple as the difference between summer vacations and year-round schooling?

These are some of the questions Gladwell raises and answers in his extremely entertaining and enlightening book. This is a book that so intrigued me that I didn’t want to put it down. I do not want to provide more detail about the book at this point because I strongly encourage everyone to read it for themselves. However, I would like to have a conversation on this blog with anyone who has read the book and wishes to discuss Gladwell’s insights further.

Examine the Fine Print

2009-06-23T16:38:00.000-07:00

You know that you need to read the fine print in contracts, but it may not have occurred to you that you also need to examine the “fine print” in scientific articles. Now, you may say, “I don’t read such articles anyway, so who cares?” Well, you should care because it is in this “fine print” that conclusions that affect your health can be “massaged” for particular purposes.

The fine print (some journals actually do use a smaller font size) occurs in the Materials and Methods, and Results sections of the article, and in the Acknowledgements. If the reader gets past the Abstract, s/he will probably read only the Introduction and Conclusion/Discussion sections. Few readers, other than those also doing work in the same field, will read the Materials and Methods, and Results sections. And even fewer will note who funded the research described in the article. For many types of research, this may not matter. But for research studies that affect our health, it matters a great deal.

For instance, if you see news releases proclaiming the benefits of dairy products, find the original article. You may have to get it through inter-library loan to avoid paying the high journal fees. Check the article to see who funded the research. The odds are that it was funded by the dairy producers in some form or other. Then you need to examine the fine print in the Materials and Methods, and Results sections. If you do not have a background in that field of research, it may be difficult to understand, so you will probably need to find a friend who can help. This effort matters because how the results are presented in the Abstract and the Conclusion/Discussion may not be fully supported by what is actually in the Results section. The conclusions may be massaged in a way that those funding the research would approve.

Certainly, not all research will have been massaged, but whenever new information on health issues is trumpeted in the news, be cautious in accepting the results. Examine the fine print.

Food Fight

2009-06-16T12:16:00.000-07:00

Do you need to eat grains and dairy for good health? Is a bowl of cereal with milk a good way to begin the day? Does every body need milk? The answer to all three questions is a big NO! The overwhelming majority of the world’s populations cannot handle milk after infancy: it causes acute gastric distress. Significant numbers of individuals also are sensitive to the gluten found in wheat, oats, and barley. Their health is sub-optimal when they eat grains.

But the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) either is unaware of these facts (hard to believe) or does not care. Why? Because they are more interested in maintaining the profitability of Agribusiness than in maintaining the optimal health of consumers. Yes, they are concerned about food safety which does, obviously, impact consumer health. However, beyond food safety is the issue of nutrient optimization; and it is here that the USDA’s hand-in-glove relationship with Agribusiness takes precedence over what is best for the consumer.

Over the past decades, the public has been indoctrinated into believing that grains and dairy are the basis of good health. First there was the Four Squares with grains and dairy each having their own square. Then there was the Food Pyramid with grains forming the foundation and dairy taking up a significant chunk of the upper levels. The current iteration is a revised pyramid with conical stripes running from base to tip called My Pyramid. This version is designed to take into account an individual’s gender, age, and activity level in designing a pyramid just for that individual. Or so says the USDA.

I tried using it when it was first posted online a few years ago. The results were not too surprising, or too different from prior recommendations, and included a daily intake of three glasses of milk. I decided to see what the results would be for other gender and age combinations. The biggest change was in daily calorie intake. One constant: no matter what age/gender combination I used, everyone was told he/she needed three glasses of milk each day. Hmm…

I would suggest that you try this for yourselves, but when I tried to log on to the site today, I got a “website cannot be found” message even though the USDA origin page shows that it was recently updated. Maybe the USDA is doing an upgrade? I don’t know. But keep checking so that you can try it yourself and let me know what you find out.

Feeling Groovy

2009-06-09T09:56:00.000-07:00

Walking is the best exercise. It is the exercise our bodies are adapted to do, so I am happy to see so many people out walking on beautiful days. However, I think that most of them are missing one of the other keys that makes walking the best exercise: being a part of nature.

I see people with a very determined set to their faces, listening to I-pods, and striding briskly along, looking straight ahead with a somewhat blank gaze. Others are so engrossed in conversation with their fellow walkers that they could be walking on a treadmill for all the notice they take of their environment. Then there are the dog walkers. One might think that they would be paying more attention to the environment since their dog certainly is. But that does not appear to be the case.

Now, if you are mall-walking, conversation and I-pods do make the activity more enjoyable. But if you are outside, going as fast as you can from point A to point B causes you to miss out on the additional rejuvenating aspect of walking. It isn’t just about the physical exercise, but also the emotional well being that being a part of nature can bring to your psyche.

When I was a child and visited my grandmother, we went on lots of walks. Grandma never seemed in a hurry to get anywhere. She would point out the beautiful flowers, the interesting architecture. She would stop to chat with friends, or even strangers. It was she who first told me to take time to smell the flowers. And we actually would stop to smell them.

So, yes, we do need the exercise, but sometimes we also need to slow down because life is moving too fast. Next time you take a walk outdoors, do so without any distractions and take the time to really look around you. Notice the beauty, feel the peace, and feel a little groovy.

Attitude Adjustment

2009-06-02T18:08:00.000-07:00

Like many of you, I used to turn on the news to listen to (maybe watch a bit) as I got ready for work each morning. I like having some background noise to remind me to keep moving. I was dissatisfied with the shows, and so kept switching among them. Finally, after one particularly acrimonious exchange between two guests that managed to rile me up, I decided that this was no way to begin the day.

Fortunately, on cable there are options. Since I am a scientist, I eventually settled on the science channel. There is a tad too much techno info for my taste, but there are facts and data aplenty, presented in a nice, neutral tone. As someone who loves learning new things, that works well for me. I don’t ignore the news, but I get my news during the day in online print (not video).

If you begin the day riled and disgruntled, you will likely have an unhappy, unproductive day. On the other hand, if you begin the day in a serene frame of mind, your day is more likely to go well.

I definitely begin my days with a much better attitude now that I’ve adjusted my “dial” from the news to something more appealing.

If your start to the day makes you irritable, figure out what might be contributing to your bad mood and try to eliminate it. Do something that buoys you up at the beginning of the day and your entire day will be better.

What have you altered or eliminated for a better start to your day?