There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.
–Unknown
After the catastrophe that was yesterday’s loss of all my writing (catastrophe to me; relief to some.) I am going to try again on the subject of idiocy that gets thrown about over the holidays.
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.)
Ensam är stark. “Alone is strong.”
–Swedish Proverb
Forgive the long silence. I cracked my head on a wall last week and writing has been difficult till now.
My favorite Swedish proverb is actually Det finns inget dåligt väder, bara dåliga kläder. “There is no bad weather, only bad clothing.” However there’s no doubt that the Swedes are standing alone just now; they are certainly also standing strong.
Some of you may remember a previous post, where I directed you to the website of Sam Feltham. Mr. Feltham conducted a little personal experiment whereby he over-ate an incredible number of calories worth of fat for twenty-one days straight. He did not eat carbohydrates, and he ate sufficient, but not excessive, protein. He changed nothing else about his lifestyle for those twenty-one days.
By “overeat” I mean that he consumed more than 5,700 calories a day.
The Gospel According to Nutritionist Fatphobes says that he should have put on more than 16 pounds. What actually happened is that his mean weight on day 21 (he weighed morning and evening and averaged the two, to try and get around the up-to-5 pound daily weight shift that everybody sees) was 2.8 pounds higher than on day 1. Not only that, but his waist shrunk by 1.18 inches.
No real gentleman weighs more than 300 pounds.
–William Howard Taft
It’s been all over the news the last few days: William Howard Taft, our 27th president and later supreme court justice, struggled with his weight just like you and me, the lowly peons, do.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
–Martin Luther King, Jr.
I had intended to write another post about information from the last Scientific American article. I also plan another recipes post. But my attention was drawn last night to this article, and the stupidity involved was so spectacular that I couldn’t let it pass without a comment.
It really makes me depressed, and what makes me depressed isn’t the behavior of the McDonald’s patrons. Instead it’s the spectacular ignorance of human nature displayed by the designers, analyzers and reporters in question. It’s so stupid that I sat here for a few seconds just now trying to decide if I even had the heart to discuss it.
Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.
–Albert Einstein
I picked up an issue of Scientific American while in the airport recently. I’ve gone to doing all my travel reading on electronic devices, for convenience. But, inconveniently, there are those long periods on flights when one cannot use electronic devices, even if they aren’t cell phone capable and have everything about them that transmits turned off. I’m very tempted at this point to go off on a tangent, but I’ll show some rare self-restraint and come back to the main point. Continue reading I’m an American, Scientifically
It is easy to confuse a fantasy for a reality.
― Duop Chak Wuol
For your reading pleasure, a deconstruction of an insane article on Health.com, by Tom Naughton
Ask Me How It Happened 