Category Archives: Health

Stress is . . . all in your head

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Here’s a thought for a Monday morning (UPDATE: Spiked Online, link no longer good):

[A]ccording to Angela Patmore, author of Truth About Stress, the ubiquitous term “stress” is “bogus and illogical”. . .

Patmore started researching the concept of stress in the 1990s, while working at the University of East Anglia with a team of World Health Organisation scientists. A meta-analysis of the clinical literature on stress showed that there were “literally hundreds of different definitions [of stress], some of them opposites, some of them irreconcilable and all of them felt to be ‘the correct one’ by somebody or other.”

Patmore’s real beef is with the “stress management industry;” she says the number of “stress councillors” in the U.K. ballooned by 804 percent between 1991 and 2003, becoming “a multi-million-pound industry . . . that is entirely unregulated.”

And it’s not having any positive effect on peoples’ well-being. In fact, the British are worse off than ever: stress has “overtaken back pain as the single biggest cause of long-term sickness absence.”

No word on whether the incidence of back pain in the U.K. has decreased :-D

But back to the concept of stress itself. So, okay, it’s not a pinned-down, clinically understood condition. Then what is it? In the eye of the beholder? Is it any sort of physical or emotional discomfort?

I’m guessing that the roots of the whole stress meme can be traced to the 1950s-era classification of personality types, and the corollary (which appears to be standing up sixty years later) that so-called Type A individuals are more prone to heart attacks.

Friedman’s discovery caught our imaginations because it validated something we tend to believe is true, anyway: that our state of mind affects our bodies.

So the stress management movement is our crude and fumbling attempt to dampen down our Type A tendencies. We want to be laid back, let life roll off our feathers. We’ll live longer if we do, we tell ourselves.

Yet I agree with Patmore that there’s something pitiable about all the stress-related hand-wringing. We really can take it too far, can’t we. And, after all, dealing with discomfort (I’ll use that word!) isn’t that hard. If something bothers you, set aside some time to feel it fully — don’t stuff it. Otherwise, just take a couple of deep breaths and relax.

Oh, and if the bothersome-ness is a signal that you need to change your life, then you’d better change your life. But that’s between you and your soul/God/unconscious — not your stress management councillor — isn’t it.

How ya’ going to keep them down on the farm

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Now that they’ve decided corporate agriculture is cleaner?

I suppose this was inevitable. First, the incidence of infections from food-borne pathogens is decreasing. For example in the U.S., between 1996 and 2004, E. coli O157:H7 infections are down 42 per cent (betcha didn’t know that, did you!!!) (What? We’re not dropping like flies??? Shocking.)

2. This can possibly be attributed to a systematic approach to establishing food handling standards dubbed “Hazardous Analysis and Critical Control Point” (HACCP).

Okay, fine. But

3. Here’s how the above-linked article (from CBC News) [UPDATE: link no longer good, sorry] concludes:

The HACCP approach would never work if you had 10 million farms, 50,000 small feed mills, and 10,000 small processors. What allows HACCP to succeed is the much-demonized size and reach of modern agriculture. A big, mechanized operation like Natural Selection Foods can invest in record keeping, sanitation, delivery vans in a way that smaller ones would find worse than onerous.

Alrighty then. That’s quite a statement. “Worse than onerous.”

Would they really?

Personally, I’d like to hear what some actual small farm operators have to say on that topic. Until then, Strauss comes across, to me, like someone who found something provocative to write and liked it so well he didn’t worry much about whether it could be backed by facts.

(P.S. While tinkering with this post, I found a website of vintage audio where you can listen to a 1918 recording of “How Ya Gonna . . .” sung by Harry Fay.)

I’ll have some OJ with that

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I’m a non-breakfast person. I’m not hungry when I wake up. I drink a single mug of coffee. A glass of orange juice. Then several hours later, I have something to eat.

Turns out I’m on the cutting edge of a trend.

“No clear evidence shows that the skipping of breakfast or lunch (or both) is unhealthy, and animal data suggest quite the opposite,” wrote Mark Mattson, a neuroscientist at the National Institute on Aging — and possibly the ultimate anti-breakfast iconoclast — in the medical journal The Lancet last year. Advice to eat smaller and more frequent meals “is given despite the lack of clear scientific evidence to justify it.”

Mattson hasn’t eaten breakfast in 20 years, since he started running in the mornings. He says he’s healthy and has never felt better.

He admits his studies are still preliminary. But already his findings have attracted a cadre of followers who started to skip breakfast once they heard of his results. Meanwhile, a diet plan that involves breakfast skipping — the Warrior Diet — is attracting followers worldwide.

Being Balanced, the article (from the Toronto Star) [UPDATE: link no longer good] later quotes other “experts” listing all the nutrients you miss if you don’t eat that bowl of fortified cereal on the morning, blah blah blah. And experts saying that if you skip breakfast you’ll overeat later and end up fatter than before.

Well, guys, how about this: everybody’s biochemistry is unique. What works for one person might not for another. Layering roof brain chatter over something as fundamental as the signals one’s body sends when its hungry or needs a certain type of food isn’t the answer & never will be . . .

Is dirt our friend?

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In the Washington Post (registration required), Thomas Bartlett has an article on raw milk.

A couple years ago, I participated in one of the cow-boarding programs mentioned here, using the milk mostly to ferment kefir. The potential dangers of drinking it were always in the back of my mind. How could they be not? We’ve been conditioned to idolize perfect sterility — and that’s what pasturized milk is, in theory. Perfectly sterilized.

The problem is, our bodies didn’t evolve in a sterile world, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we one day realize that we need exposure to microbes to be healthy. Even, sometimes, the very microbes we most fear.

Children who live around pets, for instance, and are therefore exposed to immune-system-challenging dander, are less likely to develop a whole host of immune system-related reactions. There’s a tale — floated by the anti-vaccine crowd but nowhere that I can find substantiated by references — that the devastating polio outbreaks in the mid-Twentieth century were caused by excessive cleanliness; the story goes that back when children were exposed to the polio virus as infants (by playing on the ground and eating dirt, basically) they became mildly sick but then developed the immunity to protect themselves from more eggregious forms of the disease later on.

Who knows, really. I find one of the statements by the pro-raw milk people in Bartlett’s article pretty persuasive however: the problem of microbe-contaminated milk might better be addressed through proper handling and storage of milk, rather than boiling the piss out of it.

For more check out the Weston Price foundation, which has information on other traditional foods that we should all probably be eating.

Settling oneself

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When I was younger, I let my emotions drive my choices (often to my eventual sorrow, sigh) and I suppose I still do to some extent but at least now I make an effort to engage my emotional responses as consciously as I can — part of which involves trying to free them such that they flow their courses more easily, reveal themselves more fully & thereby reveal also the contours of the landscape their flowing paints.

Since I’m by nature a kinesthetic person this involves paying close attention to where feelings lodge. Lately I’ve also jettisoned the distinction between purely physical feelings — e.g. pain or tension — and emotions. My working theory is that there is no difference, really: the physical body acts as a tangible map of the emotions; physical sensations are simply a more intense inclination of the map’s contours.

So I look for tools that help me bridge through my body to the emotions beneath it, and here’s one of the best I’ve found: a book of exercises that combine yoga and the stimulation of accupressure points. Awkward title, unfortunately — Acu-Yoga???? — but I can forgive that; it’s one of the most valuable books I own.

Whether the techniques described in the book actually “do” anything is, of course, entirely a matter of speculation. Perhaps the exercises are more a way to ritualize a routine of auto-suggestion and physical relaxation.

But it works. And that’s all that matters, isn’t it.

Regrow your teeth?

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Looks like it’s actually possible. Via CBC.ca:

The treatment, called low-intensity pulsed ultrasound, massages the gums to stimulate jaws, encourage growth in the roots of teeth and aid healing in dental tissue.

“If the root is broken, it can now be fixed,” said Dr. Tarak El-Bialy of the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry. “And because we can regrow the teeth root, a patient could have his own tooth rather than foreign objects in his mouth.”

Bring it on :-)

More migraine options

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Glenn Reynolds insta-blogged yesterday about this gadget, that uses a magnetic pulse to stave off a budding migraine.

There’s also this, which I found out about through my friend Dave Harney, who publishes Rochester Healthy Living: an FDA-approved device you wear on your front teeth at night to reduce jaw clenching. The company claims in trials, 82 percent of the device users had a 77% average reduction in “migraine events.”

Here’s the manufacturer’s website.

Here are some interesting facts about the link between headache and jaw clenching (one caveat: these aren’t sourced . . .):

* [The j]aw clenching muscles of migraine sufferers are 70% larger in volume and generate significantly higher bite forces that control subjects . . .

*Tension-type headache patients contract their temporalis muscles (clench their jaw) during sleep, on average, 14 times more intensely that asymptomatic controls.

*Simple minimal voluntary jaw-clenching (of less than 30% of maximum effort) for 30 minutes (with two rest periods) still results in a headache for 63% of migraine sufferers. Jaw clenching during sleep can frequently exceed voluntary maximum.

I haven’t tried the device, but I plan to. Ever since I learned about it I’ve made a conscious effort to relax my jaw and that seems to be helping me avoid full-blown migraines. I really think there’s something to this one.

Blue Meanies Attack in Massachusetts

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Okay, this might seem contradictory, since I’ve blogged about how horrified I am that parents don’t feed their kids more nutritious food.

But banning fluffernutter sandwiches????

First of all, the “nutter” part of the sandwich is peanut butter, which is a source of protein, B vitamins, calcium, and Vitamin E. Granted, the fluff is empty calories, but how is it any worse than jelly?

Put the thing on whole wheat bread, sure. But ban it?

How is a fluffernutter sandwich any worse than the other crap they hand out from school cafeterias? Mac and cheese (white macaroni glopped with processed cheese food stuff)? Chicken finger (breaded deep fried chicken scraps)? “Pizza pockets” ( more white bread with a bit of ketchup and five molecules of cheese inside)?

I swear, they must hand out stupid pills to legislators right after election night.

This is also a terrific example of why you can’t rely on government to sort out issues that require focused, case-by-case, parental decisions. Sometimes you have to sugar things a bit to get kids to eat them. I dress up cooked carrots with sugar sometimes, to get my daughter to eat them. I use sweetened salad dressings to make green salads appeal to her.

I also favor keeping soda vending machines out of schools (especially at the grade school level). There’s no redeeming value to soda, except as an occasional treat.

But banning fluffernutter — that’s just silly. Do-good idiocy run amuck.

Lactic acid reflux

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If you’ve ever been sore a day or so after a workout, you’ve probably “known” that the cause of the pain was a build-up of lactic acid in your muscles.

After all, that’s what “they” always told us.

Well, turns out, “they” were wrong. (NY Times article; registration required.)

Not just a little wrong. Really, really wrong. Not only is lactic acid no culprit where post-exercise muscle soreness is concerned. On the contrary, lactic acid is a good thing.

Lactic acid is actually a fuel, not a caustic waste product. Muscles make it deliberately, producing it from glucose, and they burn it to obtain energy. The reason trained athletes can perform so hard and so long is because their intense training causes their muscles to adapt so they more readily and efficiently absorb lactic acid.

But here’s the part of this article (reported by Gina Kolata) that really made me roll my eyes. George Brooks, the guy that figured this out, was pilloried by other scientists.

Dr. Brooks said he published the finding in the late 70’s. Other researchers challenged him at meetings and in print.

“I had huge fights, I had terrible trouble getting my grants funded, I had my papers rejected,” Dr. Brooks recalled.

Look at those dates. The late 1970s. Some thirty years he has to fight for this.

I’ll tell you something. You hear all the time about how the public mistrusts journalists, and the public mistrusts Congress. Well, the public isn’t very well-served when scientists heap scorn on other scientists for challenging received wisdom, either.

And lest you think, “no big deal, it’s only muscle soreness,” may I introduce you to Gilbert Ling, a highly credentialed scientist who’s been arguing (also for decades) that one of our most treasured beliefs about human cells — that they are sacks of liquid that use a “sodium pump” to transmit molecules across their exterior membranes — is also totally bogus.

Ling furthermore claims that our erroneous assumptions about how cells work has perverted much of contemporary medical research.

Is he right? I don’t know.

Can we lay people trust other scientists to set aside their egos long enough to give his arguments the merit they deserve?

I’m not holding my breath.

/end rant.

The sky is more than pretty

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Blue light apparently delivers the wavelengths needed to regulate our circadian rythmns, according to research described in Science Daily.

Blue sky is a mixture of wavelengths dominated by short wavelength light that gives a blue visual sensation. According to Mark Rea, Ph.D., LRC director, the circadian system is essentially a blue sky detector.

“Blue sky is ideal for stimulating the circadian system because it’s the right color and intensity, and it’s on at the correct time for the right duration — the entire day,” said Rea.

LRC is the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

They performed a study in which they exposed elderly people to blue light, and found that the subjects slept more between midnight and 6 a.m.

We’re not meant to be indoors all day. No wonder so many of us aren’t getting enough sleep.

I wonder, also, about the effect of wearing sunglasses . . .