Category: Stuff to Read

Holiday Decisions

Wait for that wisest of all counselors, Time.

― Pericles

Here’s hoping that none of you cared that I haven’t written another post till now, because you were so busy enjoying friends and family that you didn’t even notice!

Let’s talk about sugar and holiday gorging eating. I had some people over for Christmas and all around Christmas. It’s an important time of year for the line of work I’m in. And let’s face it: at Christmas people expect dessert. You simply cannot invite them over for a meal of just meat, maybe a vegetable or two ,and candy dishes full of cheese and pepperoni cubes instead of…you know…candy.

Of course on the day The Roommate and I actually celebrated Christmas–primarily by not eating sugar, resting quietly, and not having anyone over–we actually did have cheese and pepperoni slices in the fancy Christmas candy dishes. And almonds. The spicy ones. And we ate ham. Pounds and pounds of ham. I had a jar of pickled peppers in my stocking. The roommate had a can of roasted pecans under the tree.

Anyway, if one is going to swear off all sugar forever and ever, fine. But if one is going to ever allow it all, Christmas is the time.

Continue reading Holiday Decisions

Exercise

I believe that every human has a finite amount of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.

― Neil Armstrong

You probably know, if you read this blog, my basic stance on exercise. I’m agin’ it.

Well, not totally against it. I’m just against what is in vogue today, which is hours and hours of useless treadmilling/biking/jogging/running. All those things do are wear out your joints. Running can make you a better runner–but that’s it. It can’t make you a better jogger, a better dancer, a better swimmer, or help you improve your “cardiovascular fitness.” Take three devoted runners and three sedentary fat guys. Tell them you’ll test them in two weeks to determine their heart/lung rate when using an elliptical for 20 minutes. Tell the “fit” runners to just keep doing what their doing. Tell the fat guys to hop on the elliptical once a day for 20 minutes till the test, but otherwise behave normally.

The fat guys will pass your test, and the runners will not.
Continue reading Exercise

Knowledge, Not Numbers

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 Knowledge, Not Numbers

The Earth is Flat and Cholesterol Will Kill You

In scientific subjects, the natural remedy for dogmatism has been found in research.
–Ronald Fisher
One of the most pervasive myths out there is that having high cholesterol will give you heart disease, and that eating cholesterol gives you high cholesterol. Like all good myths, there is a kernel–a small kernel–of truth to this. But in the main I’m just going to tell you right up front right now: this is baloney.

Continue reading The Earth is Flat and Cholesterol Will Kill You

No Hospitality For Trouble

You can’t keep trouble from coming, but you don’t have to give it a chair to sit on. 

–New England Proverb

When I was visiting Brother #3 in this summer he asked me:

Is there anything your magic diet doesn’t help with?

We both laughed–it was meant in jest, and he himself had seen some real benefits from changing up his way of eating. But what I said and thought at the time is: No. It does help just about everything.

Even though you weren’t there at the time, I’d like to clarify that statement for you. By it, I do not mean that I think eschewing grains, sugars, and Frankenfats and eating lots of saturated fat and meat is a miracle cure of any ailment. There are three things I do mean:

Continue reading No Hospitality For Trouble

Everybody’s Different, Part 2

[Think] of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren’t you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren’t there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place . . . Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made.

― Steve Grand

Just a thought about how we are so much more than our atomized stuff, before we talk about that stuff.

Continue reading Everybody’s Different, Part 2

I’m an American, Scientifically

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

Cholesterol Mythology

Not really, and actually my cholesterol was 190 when I had the heart attack. 190, which isn’t that high.

–Mike Ditka

Guess who else’s cholesterol was well within the Mythical Safe Range when he had his first heart attack? Dwight Eisenhower, who was the ideal weight for his height and was very fit when his first heart attack hit at age 64. His cholesterol was 165.

So of course he was put on the now ubiquitous low-fat diet, which included lots of healthy whole grains like oatmeal and lots of margarine, almost no meat, and no fats but margarine and corn oil. What was the result of this amazingly healthy diet? Well, strangely he started gaining weight for the first time in his life. So much so that he kept cutting his food portions down till he was nearly starving: to no avail. Even more oddly, his cholesterol just kept going up and up. From 165 to 259. Just a couple days after Eisenhower got that highest reading, Ancel Keys got his face on the cover of Time for promoting the new “lipid hypothesis,” which blamed fat for everything and advocated, for the first time, a low-fat diet as the cure for all America’s heart disease problems.

Which, as we all know, has clearly been an incredible success, since Americans have no heart disease anymore.
Continue reading Cholesterol Mythology