No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
–Albert Einstein
Anymore, I can’t resist the ads that pop up on my screen inviting me to investigate some surefire way to lose weight. I almost always know what I’ll find, and I’m always excited that it might be good fodder for the blog. Since I’m regularly researching health news now, the ads come fast and furious no matter what I’m doing.
Plus, I like to blow up online calculators.
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldiers knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
–Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Before we begin, calm yourself by watching the video delicious sardines. I took it at an aquarium in Japan. It’s called the Sardine Tornado, which would be a great thing for Aquaman to be able to create, if you ask me.
“Poirot,” I said. “I have been thinking.”
“An admirable exercise my friend. Continue it.”
–Agatha Christie
In the last post we asked the question: WHY? Why so much sugar in a recipe when it wasn’t necessary for taste or texture?
Today I have a new “why.” It comes from this article, a form of which has come out on every major American news agency going. If you don’t care to read it all, I’ll summarize: you should now brush your baby’s teeth with fluoride toothpaste so he won’t get a cavity before he’s five, like most kids do.
WHY? Why should I give fluoride to a small child? Why has the cavity situation grown so dire that kids are developing them that young? I want to give the American Dental Association the benefit of the doubt. I can’t imagine it’s fun for a dentist to treat a five-year-old’s cavity, so I understand the dentists’ perspective here.
Tom Naughton has put his recent speech at Springfield college up on Youtube. This is 45 minutes that are worth your time, as he explains how we went from a nation where people knew pretty much what to eat from experience and common wisdom, to one that is disgustingly fat and sick after The Anointed told us all how to eat; and why we’re going back again.
It’s an easy watch/listen (throw it on while you’re doing the dishes or something if you don’t have time to sit and look at it).
The reason is that you eat too many foods that are high in “calories,” which are little units that measure how good a particular food tastes. Fudge, for example, has a great many calories, whereas celery, which is not really a food at all but a member of the plywood family, provided by Mother Nature so that mankind would have a way to get onion dip into his mouth at parties, has none.
― Dave Barry
How are we all feeling today? In the Christmas spirit?
Well, never fear. A number of helpful news agencies have published some gobblitigook that will pull you out of that mood as fast as you can say Kris Kringle.
Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.
–Laurence J. Peter
You knew it would happen. Thanksgiving is over, and now we must be subjected to a slew of articles about how to lose that holiday pound. Some of this advice is even packaged in implications designed to make you feel guilty: if you/us big fat Americans didn’t eat all this meat and all this fat at the holidays and get all fat and lazy and gorge yourselves/ourselves on fat and meat the whole world would be a better place.
…High cholesterol levels are really a symptom, not a cause of cardiovascular disease. Not understanding this fact, a lot of people take medicine to try to lower their LDL cholesterol levels artificially. Attempting to control through medication the enzymes that produce elevated cholesterol is analogous to playing pool with a rope.
–Dr. Doug McGuff
Let’s review.
We’ve already discussed how both LDL and HDL are lipoproteins that carry cholesterol around the body. LDL carries it to areas damaged by inflammation; HDL carries it back out.
When LDL particles are big and fluffy in size, they can easily be carried away by HDL and they are not so susceptible to oxidation, human “rusting,” that damages them and you. Very small LDL, sometimes known as VLDL, is very susceptible to oxidation and cannot be easily carried away by HDL. (Of course all this is very simply put.)
A good decision is based on knowledge, not numbers.
–Plato
In the previous post we discussed some important foundational ideas when talking about cholesterol. Today we’ll start going into all this just a bit deeper, starting with what all those numbers mean and why I say that your total cholesterol number is meaningless for you, personally.
Continue reading The Earth is Flat and Cholesterol Will Kill You
Ask Me How It Happened 