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Archive for June, 2013

Buh bye Google Reader!

Posted in Administrivia on June 29, 2013 | 5 Comments »

Ok, this is it. You have a little more than a day to save your feeds out of Google Reader. You should save your feeds even if you switched to a service like Feedly which used your Google creds to get your feeds directly (i.e., without exporting).

Feedly (or similar services) will probably eventually let you export your feeds, but right now, some of them don’t. So if you wind up having Feedly (or similar services) issues in the near term, you’ll be stuck with that service until they add exporting to their feature list. So make sure your service has export capability before you lose the ability from Google.

If you need to export, follow these directions from LifeHacker and export your feeds! LifeHacker also has some recommendations for readers that match various interests, so if you’ve really procrastinated, they’ve got some good readers to try.

Me, I’ve not found “the” reader for me yet. Digg has some issues yet, so while I’ll keep my eye on them, they aren’t there yet. Feedspot looked like an interesting late entry, but they kept crashing my browser yesterday. Not cool! So for now, I’ll probably be using The Old Reader or InoReader. Both have export support (InoReader’s is better) so I figure I can always switch, if need be, as the alternative Reader market continues to improve (one hopes!).

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A smoothie for Grok

Posted in Ancestral health on June 25, 2013 | 2 Comments »

God bless those folks who want to follow a Paleo-TM diet. Vinegar isn’t paleo, but hydrolyzed fish protein powder is.

Paging Alanis Morissette.

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Quote of the day

Posted in Ancestral health, QOTD on June 25, 2013 | 4 Comments »

Research botanist Arthur Haines thinks paleo in general and Mark Sisson in particular are off the mark regarding grains:

I feel articles that state we should avoid all grains all the time are incorrect (and miss some key points). Observations of living peoples stand in contradiction to the statement all grains are bad. …

I understand [Sisson] may be attempting to create a simple message for people who do not have nutritional literacy, but this message can cause people to avoid foods that have been shown to be part of many healthy people’s diet (sometimes as a staple). Grains are paleo, they were eaten by several different paleo hominids. Simply because the United States has chosen to consume large amounts of a highly allergenic grain that does not mean all grains are bad.

These days I find myself somewhere between WAPF and Paleo-TM. I think it’s prudent to cut back or minimize things like sugar or flour, but I’m not convinced about eliminating all grains and legumes.

HT Evelyn via Facebook.

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If obesity is the question, could processed food be the answer?

Posted in Food industry, Obesity on June 22, 2013 | 16 Comments »

That’s what David Freedman argues in this month’s Atlantic. In fact, he says that the “real food” movement — represented by Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, and friends — is not scalable:

If the most-influential voices in our food culture today get their way, we will achieve a genuine food revolution. Too bad it would be one tailored to the dubious health fantasies of a small, elite minority. And too bad it would largely exclude the obese masses, who would continue to sicken and die early. Despite the best efforts of a small army of wholesome-food heroes, there is no reasonable scenario under which these foods could become cheap and plentiful enough to serve as the core diet for most of the obese population—even in the unlikely case that your typical junk-food eater would be willing and able to break lifelong habits to embrace kale and yellow beets.

Like Hank Cardello (a former food industry insider), Freedman argues that the answer is to work with the processed food industry, not against it:

Popular food producers, fast-food chains among them, are already applying various tricks and technologies to create less caloric and more satiating versions of their junky fare that nonetheless retain much of the appeal of the originals, and could be induced to go much further. In fact, these roundly demonized companies could do far more for the public’s health in five years than the wholesome-food movement is likely to accomplish in the next 50.

I am sympathetic to both Cardello’s and Freedman’s argument (be sure to read the whole article), even if it’s seemingly quite the Catch-22. Can something be both disease and cure?

Ultimately, the food industry can be the source of “fresh, local, unprocessed meals … sold as cheaply, conveniently, and ubiquitously as today’s junky fast food.” But for that to happen, there will need to be a market for it.

Then again, Freedman suggests that there’s a good reason to go with the food industry:

given the food industry’s power to tinker with and market food, we should not dismiss its ability to get unhealthy eaters—slowly, incrementally—to buy better food.

I don’t agree with Freedman’s calorie in vs out frame (e.g., when he compares Bittman’s corn & bacon dish to a Whopper), but his arguments re the processed food industry are, pardon the pun, definitely food for thought.

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Quote of the day

Posted in Obesity, QOTD on June 22, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Dr. David Katz thinks obesity is more like drowning than a disease:

Disease is when the body malfunctions. Bodies functioning normally asphyxiate when breathing carbon monoxide, drown when under water for too long, and convert surplus daily calories into body fat. Perfectly healthy bodies can get obese. They may not remain healthy when they do so, but that is a tale of effects, not causes.

So he’s concerned the AMA’s recent move is likely to lead to them astray of their Hippocratic oath to first do no harm:

If calling obesity a disease makes us treat the condition with more respect, and those who have it with more compassion, and if it directs more resources to the provision of skill-power to adults and kids alike, it’s all for the good. But if, as I predict, it causes us to think more about pharmacotherapy and less about opportunities to make better use of our feet and our forks, it will do net harm. If we look more to clinics and less to culture for definitive remedies, it will do net harm. If we fail to consider the power we each have over our own medical destiny, and wait for salvation at the cutting edge of biomedical advance, it will do net harm.

Me, I suspect the AMA’s move is more semantics than anything and only codifies something that’s been mainstream thought for a while.

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Quote of the day

Posted in Obesity, Public health, QOTD on June 19, 2013 | 3 Comments »

So the AMA has decided to recognize obesity as a disease — against the recommendations of the committee they asked to look into the subject.

My response? What Aeon mag’s David Berreby said in the conclusion of a piece published earlier this week:

Today’s priests of obesity prevention proclaim with confidence and authority that they have the answer. So did Bruno Bettelheim in the 1950s, when he blamed autism on mothers with cold personalities. So, for that matter, did the clerics of 18th-century Lisbon, who blamed earthquakes on people’s sinful ways. History is not kind to authorities whose mistaken dogmas cause unnecessary suffering and pointless effort, while ignoring the real causes of trouble. And the history of the obesity era has yet to be written.

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Quote of the day

Posted in Ancestral health, Public health, QOTD on June 18, 2013 | 8 Comments »

Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman thinks we pretty much need “socially acceptable coercion” to deal with our evolutionary preferences for gluttony and sloth:

When you walk into a train station and there is a staircase and an escalator, your brain always tells you to take the escalator. Given a choice between a piece of cake and a carrot, we always go for the cake. It’s not in your best interest, but it’s probably a very deeply rooted evolutionary instinct. …

If we want to practice preventive medicine, that means we have to eat foods that we might not prefer, and exercise when we don’t want to. The only way to do that is through some form of socially acceptable coercion.

Lieberman said in a talk at Harvard’s TED equivalent (Harvard Thinks Big — below) a year or so ago that as we can’t change our biology, we need to change the environment in which we live. Hmmm. Not so sure that the latter is easier!

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