Mr. Weber Loves Hoagies

Here's Mr. Weber savoring his 2010 hoagie. Mr. Weber loves hoagies, but he only eats one, any deli meat actually, once a year. Here's hoping this memory carries him to December 2011.


________

How Would You Keep Medicare Afloat, Or Would You?

Medicare covers about 46 million elderly and disabled Americans at a cost of about $500 billion. It's straining to pay that bill. Unfortunately, costs continue to rise along with number of beneficiaries (as baby boomers retire).

President Johnson signed Medicare into existence in 1965 as an amendment to the Social Security Act. It's a single-payer system covering about 80% of a patient's costs.

If you had to choose one method to keep Medicare afloat financially, which would it be?
________

Unsafe Levels Of Toxic Chromium Found In Drinking Water

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) tested tap water in 35 cities across the US; 31 had detectable levels of the carcinogenic metal called hexavalent chromium (chromium-6), 25 had levels thought to be unsafe. (Erin Brockovich famously and successfully petitioned for the cancer-stricken residents of Hinkley, California whose water was contaminated with chromium-6.)

California set the unsafe level in drinking water at 0.06 parts per billion (ppb). Here were the top 5 contaminated cities:

• Norman, Oklahoma: 12.9 ppb
  
• Honolulu, Hawaii: 2.00 ppb
  
• Riverside, California: 1.69 ppb
  
• Madison, Wisconsin: 1.58 ppb
  
• San Jose, California: 1.34 ppb

Here's how the other cities rated:


Click to enlarge.

Hexavalent chromium (Cr-6) is not the same as trivalent chromium (Cr-3), the latter employed as a dietary supplement to improve glucose metabolism and regulate body fat. Cr-6 is a strong oxidant linked to stomach and gastrointestinal cancers. Although the two can interconvert: Cr-3 becoming Cr-6 in the presence of chlorine, Cr-6 to Cr-3 in acid conditions.

What to do? We could regulate the industries that discharge Cr-6 into the environment. But that would cause a hardship for the industries. Maybe we could monitor discharge from big industries and exempt small ones, similar to the Tester Amendment on the food safety bill. After all, small industries care more about the public. They don't discharge toxins into the environment.

Maybe we should forego any regulation - just keep government out of people's business. Let water companies distribute any water they like.
________Bix is asking for coal in her stocking.

Full Lunar Eclipse

Last night:



At first, there was an enormous white ball low in the sky. It got smaller as it rose but was still full, illuminating almost like daytime. Slowly it became a sliver and everything darkened. I thought that was it. By the next hour there was a spectacular orange ball in the sky. Things on the ground glowed red. What a treat! (I tend not to sleep much.)
________

Hans Rosling: "We Have Become An Entirely New Converging World"

Dr. Hans Rosling tells the story of the world since 1810 in 4 minutes using an animated graph that plots life expectancy against wealth. Amazing:¹



Rosling co-founded the Gapminder Foundation which developed the Trendalyzer software used in the graph above. Google loved Trendalyzer so much it acquired it in 2007. They employ it in their new Public Data Explorer.

I love seeing the world advancing along the health-wealth trend line. But I can't help wondering if that will mean more meat consumption, which will mean more industrial livestock farms with their attendant pollution, resource depletion, and ethical dilemmas.

Is he right? Will "everyone be able to make it to the healthy wealthy corner?" I love his optimism.
________¹ The clip is from a BBC program, "The Joy of Stats."

Nights Before Christmas

The twelth day of Christmas, nightfall, my neighbor had just turned on his snowman.


________

Congresswoman DeLauro Is Bound And Determined To Get Her Single Food Safety Agency

Great news:

DeLauro Reintroduces Single Food Safety Agency Legislation, Food Quality News, Dec 17, 2010

She did this back in 1999 and periodically since.

Remember, the Food Safety Modernization Act currently going through Congress only addresses FDA's oversight. (But it's still needed.) There are up to 15 discrete agencies which in some way regulate food.

The current bill doesn't specifically address meat and poultry since those are under USDA's umbrella, as are egg products ... but not eggs:

"The FDA is responsible for egg safety when eggs are still in the shell, but the USDA takes over once they are broken. In addition, the FDA is in charge of chicken feed safety, while the USDA is responsible for the chickens."

________
Helena Bottemiller at Food Safety News has a choice quote from Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla), who opposes the current food safety bill, but who has no qualms supporting one food safety agency:

"If you buy a cheese pizza, the Department of Agriculture is responsible for that. But if you buy a pepperoni pizza, it is the FDA. I may have them reversed. I do have them reversed. The FDA is responsible for cheese pizzas. How does that make sense?"

"It is a symptom of the disease in Washington," continued Coburn. "First of all, it is stupid. Second of all, it is inefficient. Third of all, it guarantees the two agencies are not going to be talking to each other."

"What do we have going on here? We have a mess."

________

The Pitfalls Of Testing

A wonderful blog post on the sensitivity and specificity of testing:
Why Medical Testing Is Never A Simple Decision
by Marya Zilberberg
________

The Human Body Cannot Make Glucose

Only plants can make glucose from scratch.* Humans must eat the plants, or eat animals that ate the plants, to obtain glucose. And humans absolutely need glucose to survive. This simple sugar is the sole source of energy for our red blood cells and the preferred source for other cells. We are utterly dependant on plants for our existence. (Not to mention that they release oxygen in the process of manufacturing glucose - oxygen that we also need to survive.)

* And some algae like seaweed, and some bacteria.

Glucose is a molecule with 6 carbon atoms bound together. Humans cannot harness the immense amount of energy needed to get 6 carbon atoms to bind together. Plants, however, can. It's quite a feat actually. They harness the energy from the sun to do this.

Plants take in carbon dioxide, string together 6 carbons to make glucose for their fuel (starch is just a chain of glucoses), and give off the excess oxygen.

Humans take in the oxygen given off from plants and use it to extract the energy from those bonds within the glucose molecule. (One pathway to extract that energy is called glycolysis. I'll return to glycolysis later.) The waste product, if you will, from our energy-extraction process is carbon dioxide. We exhale it. This is the same carbon dioxide that the plant takes in to make glucose - it needs those carbons. Humans and plants have a cyclical relationship.

At night, plants respire just like us. They use oxygen to extract energy from the glucose they made during the day, giving off carbon dioxide in the process.

One last point...

There is a process our bodies evolved to supply glucose in a pinch. It's called gluconeogenesis ... the new making of glucose. Since we can't make glucose from scratch, this process allows us to reassemble preformed 3-carbon and 4-carbon molecules to make the 6-carbon glucose. These precursor molecules' carbons were bound via photosynthesis, via plants' harnessing of energy from the sun. We still can't isolate ourselves from this fuel that plants make - that we eat.

Gluconeogenesis is essentially the glycolysis pathway (recall above) in reverse - not quite though. It uses different enzymes (enzymes make it go), and where glycolysis provides us energy by breaking down glucose, gluconeogenesis uses up energy. From where does the energy come to reassemble those precursors for gluconeogenesis? From plants!

Glucose From Fat?

If we eat too much glucose, we convert some of it to fat for storage. Since we can make fat from glucose, can we make glucose from fat? No.

When we disassemble the fat (fatty acid chain), we're left with a small 2-carbon molecule. Recall that gluconeogenesis requires at least a 3-carbon molecule.
________

Ethical Food Choices

Jury duty has taken me away. In the meantime, here's a quotation from a book I'm reading, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter:

"[This is], in both magnitude and severity, the single most severe, systematic example of man's inhumanity to another sentient animal."

Can you guess what "this" is?
________
Difference Between Ethics And Morals

WiseGeek describes the difference between ethics and morals, for which I was grateful:

"Morals define personal character, while ethics stress a social system in which those morals are applied.
...
So while a person’s moral code is usually unchanging, the ethics he or she practices can be other-dependent."

Examples:

"It may be helpful to consider a criminal defense lawyer. Though the lawyer’s personal moral code likely finds murder immoral and reprehensible, ethics demand the accused client be defended as vigorously as possible, even when the lawyer knows the party is guilty."
...
"Another area in which ethics and morals can clash is at the workplace where company ethics can play against personal morality."

________

Are Exemptions In The Food Safety Bill Justifiable?

I enjoy Jim Prevor's The Perishable Pundit. I don't always agree with him, but he makes some good points here about the Food Safety Bill which is inching its way through Congress right now:

Food Safety Bill Now Seems Likely To Pass With Exemption For Small Producers: FMI And NRA Refused To Join Ranks With The Produce Industry To Stop It. Final Bill Is An Attack On Wholesalers And Distributors
FMI: Food Marketing Institute
NRA: National Restaurant Association

The issue is whether the Tester Amendment which exempts small producers (less than $500,000 in sales during a 3 year period) creates a loophole that undermines the Bill's integrity. I think it does. Jim Prevor appears to think it does:

"... the size of the farm is not a relevant food safety characteristic. Same thing goes for the requirement that such small producers must sell more than half their production within the state they are located in or within 275 miles."

Note that almost half of a small producer's wares, which have been exempted via the Tester Amendment, may be sold non-locally (out of state and beyond 275 miles).

"... if you believe the bill is actually going to enhance food safety, then leaving small producers out of the loop poses enormous dangers to all producers — and the public."

Here he questions the link between food safety and selling directly to retailers, restaurants or consumers:

"In order to get the exemption from the food safety requirements, it is not sufficient to just be small or to sell locally; one also must sell directly to retailers, restaurants or consumers. ... The idea seems to be that if a buyer knows where the food is coming from, risk is reduced or eliminated.
...
But the restaurant or retailer 275 miles from the farm doesn’t necessarily know anything about his supplier. ... How many small retailers and restaurants [or consumers] have the knowledge to evaluate a farm or processor for food safety standards?"

Another good point he makes is that the Bill, with the Tester Amendment, discriminates against small family businesses that act as distributers.

If the Tester Amendment is not about protecting all small family businesses that sell perishables; if it's not about creating exemptions based on quantifiable food safety parameters; what is it for?

"... if one really believes these rules will enhance safety, they have to apply to everyone."

________

Mike Tyson: "I Became A Vegan"

Mike Tyson, on losing about 130 pounds:¹

"I became a vegan,” says Tyson. “Vegan is where no animal products. No livestock products. Nothing. I just did a lot of training and try to become more faithful in life. I wanted a different life. I felt like I was dying. I had an incident in life where I lost my 4 year old daughter in a tragic accident at home. I don’t know. I didn’t want to live anymore. So I said, that in order to go there, I had to change my life. I am going to change everything I dislike about myself. I changed everything that I was as a human being. I started that journey in October or November. … I don’t smoke anymore. I wanted to give up everything. I had to change my life. I didn’t have a problem with drugs or nothing. I had a problem with thinking. My thinking was broken. That was the solution of my broken thinking using drugs and living crazy. It was just the way I was thinking."

On the worst part about being 350 pounds:

"It was hard to wipe my butt… I was sweating like some kind of guy from a moon project or something. It was crazy… All the clothes you see me with now are clothes that I had 15, 20 years ago. (Host: Did you have the back fat and everything?) Oh man the back fat. The back fat is when it’s so bad, your ass looks like a board. It’s like boom. The back and ass is one. It’s not like the back goes down and the butt protrudes. No. It’s just straight down. And then girls were telling me I looked great. It has to be a money deal. It had to be."

Tyson this summer:
(Tyson was born June 30, 1966. He's 44 years old.)




Tyson last summer:


________¹ Mike Tyson On The Hangover: “I Was Doing That To Supply My Drug Habit”, Sports Radio Interviews, August, 2010.
Photo of Tyson at a soccer match in Peterborough, England in July 2010 (in tee shirt) from Lalate News.
Photo of Tyson in May 2010 (in dark suit) from TMZ.
Photo of Tyson in 2009 (in white shirt)from MuscleTalk.
Photos of Tyson in June 2009 (in grey shirt) from Lalate News.

High BMI Predicts Early Death

Body Mass Index (BMI) has been getting a bad rap. That's somewhat deserving since, as a measurement that relies solely on height and weight, it lumps together as fat anyone whose weight is high relative to their height. So, if you have a lot of muscle it may say you are obese instead of finely chiseled. Conversely, if you have a "normal" weight relative to your height, it says you are "healthy." It doesn't get skinny fat.

Still, as a gross indicator of health BMI is useful (although its terminology is unfortunate, e.g. "morbidly obese"). This study draws out its use. When you're looking at 1.5 million people, the exceptions I noted above become blurred:

Body-Mass Index And Mortality Among 1.46 Million White Adults, New England Journal of Medicine, December 2, 2010.

The authors pooled data from 19 long-running studies - age range 19 to 84 years (median 58). A BMI of 22.5-24.9 was the reference category. Hazard ratios among women (men were similar) were:

• 1.47 for a BMI of 15.0 to 18.4
  
• 1.14 for a BMI of 18.5 to 19.9
  
• 1.00 for a BMI of 20.0 to 22.4
  
• 1.13 for a BMI of 25.0 to 29.9*
  
• 1.44 for a BMI of 30.0 to 34.9**
  
• 1.88 for a BMI of 35.0 to 39.9
  
• 2.51 for a BMI of 40.0 to 49.9

* For example, this is a 13% higher risk of death in overweight women.
** And this is a 44% higher risk of death in obese women, etc.

This study found the healthiest BMIs were between 20 and 25.

Note that those who were underweight also died earlier than expected. Any hazard ratio above 1.00 designates increased risk.

Seniors have more of a problem with underweight than other age groups. Since they also have more comorbidities it may have been their age and not their weight working against them. But the authors adjusted for age. Lead study author, Amy Berrington de Gonzalez:

"By combining data on nearly 1.5 million participants from 19 studies we were able to evaluate a wide range of BMI levels and other characteristics that may influence the relationship between excess weight and risk of death.

Smoking and pre-existing illness or disease are strongly associated with the risk of death and with obesity. A paramount aspect of the study was our ability to minimize the impact of these factors by excluding those participants from the analysis."

Here's the Institute of Health's BMI calculator. I can't embed it but clicking it will take you to it.



I'd guess the women in these photos represent BMIs of around 18 or less, underweight according to this scale. What do you think? Both women appear tall. (Left: Angelina Jolie. Right: Carla Bruni.)



Here's a photo of Shakira that looks like a BMI of around 22 or 23, normal weight. I think she's short? 5'1" or 5'2"?



Here's one of Ronald Mike Tyson that I think shows how BMI fails as a dependable anthropometric tool. What do you say his BMI is here?



________

Quitting Smoking Relieves Depression

A new study out of Brown University found that quitting smoking reduces symptoms of depression.¹ From Brown's press release:

"Researchers tracked the symptoms of depression in people who were trying to quit and found that they were never happier than when they were being successful, for however long that was.

The most illustrative — and somewhat tragic — subjects were the ones who only quit temporarily. Their moods were clearly brightest at the checkups when they were abstinent. After going back to smoking, their mood darkened, in some cases to higher levels of sadness than before.

Subjects who never quit remained the unhappiest of all throughout the study.

The ones who quit and stuck with abstinence were the happiest to begin with and remained at the same strong level of happiness throughout.

Looking at the data, [lead author Christopher Kahler] said, it is difficult to believe that smoking serves as an effective way to medicate negative feelings and depression, even if some people report using tobacco for that reason. In fact, he said, the opposite seems more likely — that quitting smoking eases depressive symptoms.

“If they quit smoking their depressive symptoms go down and if they relapse, their mood goes back to where they were,” he said. “An effective antidepressant should look like that.”

________ ¹ Time-Varying Smoking Abstinence Predicts Lower Depressive Symptoms Following Smoking Cessation Treatment, Nicotine & Tobacco Research, November 2010

Judge Orders GMO Beets Be Pulled From The Ground

Jody just sent this:

U.S. Judge Orders Destruction Of Monsanto GMO Sugar Beet Seed Plants, Globe and Mail, December 3 2010

A federal judge in California has ordered the removal from the ground of plants grown to produce seeds for genetically modified sugar beets.

In his decision, Judge White cited, “a significant risk of environmental harm.”

“The likely environmental harm ... is irreparable,” Judge White wrote.

The beet plants were genetically modified by Monsanto to resist their herbicide Roundup. Farmers may use Roundup liberally on Roundup-resistant plants.

Genetically modified seeds accounted for about 95% of sugar beet plantings this year.

Paul Atchitoff, of Earthjustice, an environmental law firm:

"The government's conduct is really outrageous. ... The court had just said in August the beets could not be grown and the government turned around and gave the industry the opportunity to grow them."

George Kimbrell, an attorney for the Centers for Food Safety:

"[Judge White's ruling is] a groundbreaking victory for farmers and the environment. ... This is the first time ever a federal court ordered an illegal biotech crop destroyed."

David Snively, general counsel for Monsanto:

"We believe the court's action overlooked the factual evidence presented that no harm would be caused by these plantings."

Click to enlarge.________Photo from USDA of geneticist Leonard Panella inspecting sugar beet plants.