Later On

From a food producer’s point of view is obesity good? or bad?

More specifically, from a food producer’s point of view, who is the better customer: an obese person? or a person of normal weight (or underweight, for that matter)?

It’s obvious on the face of it that the obese person consumes more food—and thus contributes more to the food producer’s bottom line. To a food producer, obesity is a feature, not a bug.

So I would guess that there has been a perhaps-unconscious search for ways to encourage and even develop obesity—an inchoate search for foods that best produce obesity (like hog farmers carefully select feed for their pigs for rapid weight gain) and foods that best trigger repurchase (i.e., are addictive). Along with those is a quite-conscious effort to get people to consume more food. The food producers must move product, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, etc.

I’m just sayin’. Lots and lots more obese people than there used to be. Cui bono?

If I were doing any home projects that involved woodfinishing, I would certainly consider one these sanders. Man, the technology has really advanced since I did this sort of thing.

The use of parasites in medical treatment is not new: leeches have been used for centuries and are still in active use because they are tremendously effective at what they do. Maggots delicately remove dead flesh from wounds, leaving living flesh alone. And hookworms seem to treat autoimmune diseases well.

Bob Grant has an interesting article in The Scientist on using roundworms to treat autism:

In 2005 the Johnson family was at its breaking point. Lawrence, the family’s 13-year-old son, was diagnosed with autism at age two and a half, and his parents had valiantly coped with his illness for the ensuing decade.

Throughout his childhood, Lawrence’s disorder progressed along the typical path: he would not engage in pretend play like other children, he repeated himself incessantly, his interests were very restricted, and he was frequently agitated and anxious.

By his teenage years, Lawrence had veered into the dangerous realm of self abuse. He smashed his head against the wall dozens of times a day. He bit himself until he bled. He gouged at his eyes and tore at his face. A normal school experience was virtually impossible. He couldn’t walk a single block from the family’s Brooklyn brownstone without kicking and screaming when a traffic light changed at the wrong moment or streets were crossed in an unacceptable order. “If people haven’t actually experienced those symptoms of autism, they’re the killer,” says Stewart, Lawrence’s father. “They’re the things that destroy families.”

Over the years, the Johnsons tried several treatments to curb Lawrence’s violent and disruptive outbreaks. They started with applied behavior analysis when he was young, and attempted interventions ranging from dietary modifications to music therapy. Lawrence took every pharmaceutical that could potentially treat his problems—antiseizure medications, serotonin-reuptake inhibitors, atypical antipsychotics, lithium, and others in various combinations.

Some of these treatments offered the family momentary reprieves from what Stewart calls Lawrence’s “freak outs.” But any improvements in the boy’s behavior were usually short-lived. “Of all of them, the only one that gave us a brief respite was risperidone [a potent antipsychotic], and that actually did, for a brief window, stop his agitation and aggression,” Stewart recalls. But after a year or so, the drug stopped working. While still on risperidone, Lawrence began to gain weight rapidly and his daily bouts of violence and aggression returned.

When traditional pharmacotherapy failed, Stewart began to search outside the medical establishment for ways to help his son. “Lawrence was somebody who had had several trials of other medicines that have been well studied and really hadn’t gotten a therapeutic response,” says his doctor, Eric Hollander, then the head of Mount Sinai Medical Center’s Seaver Autism Center in New York City.

But Stewart, a portfolio manager in Manhattan, eschewed unproven and potentially dangerous alternative autism treatments, such as chelation therapy or intravenous hydrogen peroxide, to which some parents fall prey. Instead he employed a scientific approach, combing Web sites like PubMed and MedLine for published literature on promising treatments. “A large part of my free time and a lot of time I should have been sleeping was given over to researching what, if any, ways there are to try and get a handle on some of these symptoms,” Stewart notes. “I wasn’t looking to cure autism. I was looking for a way to make our lives bearable.”

His search would lead him to an idea that, on its face, might seem just as farfetched as some of the alternative autism treatments Stewart calls “junk science.” He discovered the work of a trio of physician/researchers at the University of Iowa who had successfully treated patients with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis using a nematode parasite found in the intestines of pigs—Trichuris suis, the pig whipworm. Both are autoimmune disorders in which the immune system essentially attacks the intestinal walls. Stewart also found data that pointed to a link between some autism symptoms and inflated levels of proinflamma​tory cytokines, an apparent result of the immune system attacking glial cells in patients’ brains.¹ Putting these bits of information together, Stewart wrote a short review paper and presented it to Hollander. His central hypothesis was that parasitic worm infection would modulate Lawrence’s immune system and calm inflammation that was causing his disruptive behaviors. . .

Continue reading. It’s a lengthy article, with a lot of specific detail, and includes a video.

UPDATE: And here’s a long, interesting article by Amy Harmon in the NY Times about two college students in love, both being on the autistic spectrum.

Sometimes it’s difficult to understand the reasoning, if any, behind some of the GOP positions. Take their sturdy defense of environmental mercury, for example. Paul Krugman comments in the NY Times:

Here’s what I wanted for Christmas: something that would make us both healthier and richer. And since I was just making a wish, why not ask that Americans get smarter, too?

Surprise: I got my wish, in the form of new Environmental Protection Agency standards on mercury and air toxics for power plants. These rules are long overdue: we were supposed to start regulating mercury more than 20 years ago. But the rules are finally here, and will deliver huge benefits at only modest cost.

So, naturally, Republicans are furious. But before I get to the politics, let’s talk about what a good thing the E.P.A. just did.

As far as I can tell, even opponents of environmental regulation admit that mercury is nasty stuff. It’s a potent neurotoxicant: the expression “mad as a hatter” emerged in the 19th century because hat makers of the time treated fur with mercury compounds, and often suffered nerve and mental damage as a result.

Hat makers no longer use mercury (and who wears hats these days?), but a lot of mercury gets into the atmosphere from old coal-burning power plants that lack modern pollution controls. From there it gets into the water, where microbes turn it into methylmercury, which builds up in fish. And what happens then? The E.P.A. explains: “Methylmercury exposure is a particular concern for women of childbearing age, unborn babies and young children, because studies have linked high levels of methylmercury to damage to the developing nervous system, which can impair children’s ability to think and learn.”

That sort of sounds like something we should regulate, doesn’t it?

The new rules would also have the effect of reducing fine particle pollution, which is a known source of many health problems, from asthma to heart attacks. In fact, the benefits of reduced fine particle pollution account for most of the quantifiable gains from the new rules. The key word here is “quantifiable”: E.P.A.’s cost-benefit analysis only considers one benefit of mercury regulation, the reduced loss in future wages for children whose I.Q.’s are damaged by eating fish caught by freshwater anglers. There are without doubt many other benefits to cutting mercury emissions, but at this point the agency doesn’t know how to put a dollar figure on those benefits.

Even so, the payoff to the new rules is huge: up to $90 billion a year in benefits compared with around $10 billion a year of costs in the form of slightly higher electricity prices. This is, as David Roberts of Grist says, a very big deal.

And it’s a deal Republicans very much want to kill.

With everything else that has been going on in U.S. politics recently, the G.O.P.’s radical anti-environmental turn hasn’t . . .

Continue reading. Does anyone understand the GOP?

We made this pan-roasted duck breast recipe again, and I made a bigger supply of Essence because we like it so much. It’s trivially easy to make:

Essence (Emeril’s Creole Seasoning)

• 2 1/2 tablespoons paprika
• 2 tablespoons salt
• 2 tablespoons garlic powder
• 1 tablespoon black pepper
• 1 tablespoon onion powder
• 1 tablespoon cayenne pepper
• 1 tablespoon dried leaf oregano
• 1 tablespoon dried thyme

Combine all ingredients thoroughly and store in an airtight jar or container.

Yield: about 2/3 cup

Recipe from New New Orleans Cooking, by Emeril Lagasse and Jessie Tirsch. At the link are inexpensive secondhand copies that run $1.

I think I’ll have that dry rub on hand at all times. Right now I’m thinking it would work really well on a pork chop.

Because I don’t use so much, I use “teaspoon” where the recipe says “tablespoon”. It still makes a good amount, just one-third as much.

LA County regularly locks up the wrong people, but most of them are released within a few days or weeks, though some are doubtless still there, shouting things like, “You have the wrong Franklin P. Adams!” (for all the good it does). It’s unfortunate that LA County has also been found to routinely beat jailed people for no reason at all, just because the deputies in charge are poorly trained and/or were assigned that duty as punishment.

Robert Faturechi and Jack Leonard report in the LA Times:

Hundreds of people have been wrongly imprisoned inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department jails in recent years, with some spending weeks behind bars before authorities realized those arrested were mistaken for wanted criminals, a Times investigation has found.

The wrongful incarcerations occurred more than 1,480 times in the last five years. They were the result of a variety of factors, including officials’ overlooking fingerprint evidence and working off incomplete records.

The errors are so common that in some years people were jailed because of mistaken identity an average of once a day.

Many of those wrongly held inside the county’s lockups had the same names as criminals or had their identities stolen — problems that took days or weeks for authorities to sort out.

In one case, a mechanic held for nine days in 1989 on a warrant meant for someone else was detained again 20 years later on the same warrant. He was jailed for more than a month the second time before the error was discovered.

In another instance, a Nissan customer service supervisor was hauled by authorities from Tennessee to L.A. County on a local sex-crimes warrant meant for someone with a similar name.

In a third case, a former construction worker mistaken for a wanted drug offender said he was assaulted by inmates and ignored by jailers.

“I’m with criminals, and I was a criminal to them,” said Jose Ventura, 53, who had never been arrested before.

The problems continue because of a breakdown not just by jail officials but by police who arrest the wrong people and by the courts, which have issued warrants that did not precisely identify the right people. . .

Continue reading. You should support humane treatment of prisoners because it’s the right thing to do, but you might also consider that you could, through some error, be among those prisoners even though you’ve been careful to do nothing wrong.

Generally speaking, Americans consume way too much salt. One of the things that helped me a lot in losing weight was first to lose salt shakers and other salt sources—and to cook my own foods, since processed foods are often saturated with salt.

Food companies, by the way, know perfectly well that excess salt can destroy your health, but the thing is, excess salt also makes the crap foods they create taste better, and salt (with fat and sugar) triggers an addictive response. Food companies are in business to maximize profits, not to ensure your health. Your health? That’s your problem.

I’m not condemning companies here, just pointing out what is obvious: that with the hypercompetitive capitalism now rampant in the US, your health is the least of a big company’s concerns. If you don’t see that, check out cigarette companies, who are eager to push their products onto people—and who vigorously fight any laws or regulations that hamper their selling to as many people as they can, especially their prime target: the young. The young, once addicted (and it happens fast with cigarettes) willl in all likelihood continue to be loyal customers throughout their (shortened) lives.

So it’s up to individuals to protect themselves from companies. We all get tricked from time to time, but we also can make take action against at least some threats, and avoiding salt is fairly easy once you set your mind to it.

You can also protect your children. Shari Roan reports in the LA Time how giving salty food to babies can create a lifelong addiction to salt with all the health effects that entails:

Feeding young babies solid foods such as crackers, cereals and bread, which tend to be high in salt, may set them up for a lifelong preference for salt, researchers reported Tuesday.

The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, suggests that efforts to reduce salt intake among Americans should begin early in life.

It is even possible, the authors said, that infancy contains a “sensitivity window” in which exposure to certain foods and tastes programs the brain to desire them in the future.

Americans’ fondness for salt, a source of dismay for health experts, is well known. A 2010 report from the Institute of Medicine concluded that the average intake of 3,436 milligrams a day for Americans over age 2 is more than double what is recommended, and that new government standards are needed to reduce the salt content in processed and restaurant food.

But little is known about the biology behind our love affair with salt. Researchers don’t even know what receptors are involved in tasting it. And though babies are born with a clear preference for sweet foods and an absolute distaste for bitter foods, they appear indifferent to salt in the first few months of life, said Leslie Stein, the lead author of the study and a senior research associate at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

“When you give 2-month-old babies salt water, they have no facial expression,” Stein said. “This could mean that the baby doesn’t detect the salt or just doesn’t give a hoot about it.”

To get at the issue, Stein and her colleagues first gave 61 healthy 2-month-old infants a mild solution of salt water . . .

Continue reading. The experimental results are quite interesting. From later in the article:

“It’s absolutely possible that exposure early on in life could change the way the salt taste signal is transmitted to the brain,” said Dr. James F. Battey Jr., director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, which funded the study. “The brain is very plastic at that time of life.”

Kiseido Go Server is a free site that allows playing Go over the internet in real time, unlike DragonGoServer.net, which accepts your move and then emails your opponent, who will reply at some point—perhaps now, perhaps later today, perhaps in a day or two. The KGS games are timed, and they offer both “free” games (no ranking computations) and “ranked” games. You download a little Java applet to your computer, and you play the games through that. (It’s an excellent app and works quite well for editing games.)

I normally play only ranked games, and I just saw my rating go to 9 kyu—my first experience of single-digit kyu status.

The kyu ranks count backwards: 30 kyu is weakest, 1 kyu is strongest. The dan ranks, which are much stronger, count forward: 1 dan is weakest, 9 dan is strongest. The difference in rank varies, but generally speaking a difference of 1 (e.g., 12-kyu v. 11-kyu, or 1-dan v. 2-dan) means the weaker player gets the first move.

When you play the same opponent repeatedly, as in a club or family setting, the handicap is adjusted by one stone whenever one player wins three games in a row: the winning player gives up a handicap stone—or, if s/he has no handicap stones, the losing player gains a handicap stone.)

My recipes (the ones I make up myself, from what’s on hand) will occasionally include some exotic ingredient—goat butter springs to mind, but I’m sure there are others.

Keep in mind that I am making dishes from what I have on hand. The exotic ingredients are in my kitchen generally not because I got them for a recipe but because I thought they sounded interesting, so I got them and then simply use them in whatever I’m cooking. Then, when I blog the recipe, it looks as though I sought out an elusive, rare ingredient, when in fact I just stumbled across it in the store and brought it home to try—and trying it means using it in cooking, where it then appears in the recipe like a pearl among pebbles.

But the rarest of ingredients generally falls into a common category: a fat (goat butter), an herb (dried lavender), a starch (purple fingerling potatoes), a vegetable (bitter melon), a meat (squab), and so on. And you make a dish using the rare ingredient in its logical role (as oil, herb, starch, vegetable, meat, whatever).

That is, the ingredient comes first and then, once it’s on hand, I think up how to use it.

Of course, it sometimes works the other way around: I see a recipe that calls for a rare (or simply new to me) ingredient, decide I want to make it, and seek out the ingredient. But I like the other way—stumbling across some new food, then bringing it home and using it—better: much easier.

I encourage you to keep your eye out for unusual foods—that is, foods you’ve not had (a food unusual to you or me is likely to be the daily diet of some)—and when you find one, buy it, bring it home, and make a dish that uses it. Google is a tremendous help here, or you can just cook by analogy: purple fingerling potatoes are going to be cooked and consumed like any other potato, right? You know how to cook and how to eat them, so let’s have some. And then when you blog “Purple fingerling potatoes with goat butter” people will assume you’ve spent hours tracking those down instead of simply using what’s on hand.

My shave today is based on the Van Der Hagen Premium Shave Set: a bowl, brush, and shaving soap for $10.59 on Amazon. Quite a few beginning shavers go for this bargain approach, and I thought it was fitting to include a razor of the same stripe—the Lord L6.

Let me remove all suspense: I got an absolutely wonderful shave—total facial smoothness with no irritation at all. So expensive kit is not required.

Here’s how it went. First, I soaked the boar brush while I showered—along with four other (Omega) boar brushes I’m breaking in. Back at the sink, I first went through the four Omega brushes, working up a good lather with each, lathering my beard vigorously, then rinsing brush and beard and proceeding to the next brush. This break-in exercise of course prepped my beard to a fare-thee-well.

Once done with that, I washed my beard with MR GLO, rinsed partially with a splash, and worked up a lather with the Van Der Hagen brush using the soap and bowl shown.

I in fact got a pretty good lather. The brush is not very good—it lacks a center—but it worked, and the soap was okay. In fact, I liked the soap and bowl combo: the bowl fits well in the palm of my non-dominant hand and worked up the lather was a cinch and a pleasure.

The Lord L6 with a Zorrik blade did a good job on the stubble: the razor’s head is fine, and maintaining a good angle quickly erased stubble.

I have to admit that for the second and third pass, I shifted to one of the Omega brushes. They are simply better, but keep in mind this entire set-up—brush, bowl, and soap—was $10.59. And as a starting point, it works. (The first step up would be to get an Omega boar—you can secure an excellent boar brush for around $10, so that would indeed double your cost, but the brush would be MUCH better. And instead of spending the $10.59 on the Van Der Hagen set-up, get a good $10 puck of soap—from one of the artisanal vendors, say—and use a coffee mug or cereal bowl you have on hand, and you’ll be better off.)

After the third pass, a splash of Woods aftershave from Saint Charles Shave, and I’m ready for the Boxing Day sales—except I’m not going to them, or even near them.

Really, a terrific shaving result.