Tag: heart disease

Salty Dog Blues

Let me be your salty dog

Or I won’t be your man at all

Honey, let me be your salty dog.

–Salty Dog Blues, the Morris Brothers version

I’ve been meaning to get to salt for a while and finally it’s time. Salt is an enormous issue in the world of food. Some people view salt crystals as little granules of plague; other people see it as a life-saver. There’s also confusion about salt and sodium. Simply put, salt is sodium and chloride together. One gram of salt has about 394 grams of sodium. As is usual here at askmehowithappened, we’re going to preface our discussion by just coming right out and saying it: Continue reading Salty Dog Blues

Mass Confusion

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are many confusing things in the world today. Just scroll through the headlines.

I know I’m confused. For example, I’m confused about why anyone cares if Alec Baldwin yelled at someone again? And I’m really perplexed about why anyone with the sense God gave a squirrel–celebrity or not–would take a picture of themselves naked and then put it into a “cloud” of digital information that is out of their own control. And why are people confused that nations who have been enemies for all of their existence are shooting at and invading one another? And those are just the first three questions that popped into my head after scanning this morning’s headlines.

Continue reading Mass Confusion

Sång till Norden

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.

Continue reading Sång till Norden

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