Dave's Place / Metamusing

I’m a bit behind, granted. I have a good excuse – came down with pneumonia and it really knocked the stuffing out of me. I’m just starting to feel myself again after fighting this off for three weeks, and I’m still fighting a cough and dealing with fatigue issues. Anyway, I made two resolutions this year: To get back on track with my diet and exercise regimen, and to follow an example I set myself several years ago with my buying habits.

The diet and exercise resolution has turned out to be easy thanks to the bout of pneumonia. My weight had been creeping up and by this fall I was over 180 for the first time in a number of years, something I had begun to worry about. Stomach issues and a generally slacker attitude to exercise had me off my regimen for almost all of the summer and fall, so I figured, time for a new years resolution to address it. Pressures off now though – I’m down under 170 for the first time in at least 4-5 years. I just need to keep it off. As soon as my stamina is back it’s back on the exercise regimen, possibly adding in running, which I haven’t done regularly since I left Maine.

The second resolution is inspired by a successful resolution from years ago. At that time I had gotten addicted to buying books off of Abe books, ebay, and Amazon, and my to-read pile was growing faster than my read pile was decreasing. I resolved to only buy a book after I had finished at least one, and to generally focus on bringing down the number of books in the to-read pile. It worked. I still have a huge to-read pile (>20 books) but it no longer grows and it’s no longer close to 100 books. This year I’m applying these principles to videogames, because my to-play pile is like 15 games at this point and maybe higher. I’ve resolved to not buy a new game unless I finish one, and to focus on finishing off games I’ve left partially completed. I have this terrible habit of starting whatever new game I acquire, playing it obsessively for a week or two until the next game comes, then moving on, rarely finishing anything. No more! I’m working my way through games at a rapid clip, and not opening anything still in the shrinkwrap until I knock games off the list. So far it’s working – I’ve finished 4-5 games since the year began, and this was with me unable to play games for two weeks thanks to the pneumonia.

I’m such a hopeless nerd.

I’ve also put myself on a budget. Mint.com rocks for helping you see where you spend your money. I spend too much of mine on games, and that’s stopping as well.

Anyway, to sum up a rambling post, figure on a lot of  ‘Game finished’ posts from me, especially over the next couple of months, as I focus on a game at a time instead of flitting from game to game.

…it more than likely has poop in it. Ok not exactly, but basically equally disgusting – a recent study found that nearly half of soda fountain equipment had coliform bacteria infestations.  Coliform is normally associated with fecal material. There are more details here on the Huffington Post, but the takeaway should be clear – don’t drink fountain drinks.

Susan and I had a great Saturday. We started the day by heading north to Brattleboro, VT, where we stopped for coffee and lunch fixings at the local coop. Then we headed East on route 9 to the Pisgah State Forest in NH, where we went on a ~7 mile hike along the Pisgah Mountain ridgeline. It was a beautiful day and the views from the ridgeline were great. By the time we hiked out we were exhausted. We headed further east to Keane, NH, where we stopped for coffee and watched the ‘Freedom Party’ crazies chatter a bit incoherently about their dissatisfaction at a small rally in the heart of Keane. After that we headed south to Greenfield, MA, and visited Greenfield Games. Last stop before home was dinner and drinks at The People’s Pint. I love that place!

All in all we had a fantastic day. The only downers were Soolin, who had to hike with her lead on because of her still-healing hotspot from last weekend, and my sore body which apparently wasn’t quite recovered from last week’s adventure. By the time we got to the car my ankle was super sore.

trail map and links to a gallery of pictures below. One note on the trail map – it’s slightly inaccurate because I had to manually edit the trailmap. If anything, the hike was a bit longer on the southern end of the trail than is represented below because the gps lost signal for a bit while we were in the deep forest towards the SW end of the trail.

Trail Map

Image gallery

You can checkout the image gallery here. Below is a sample image to give you a sense of it:

Still playing around with trailguru and other tools to post maps into my site. Here’s yesterday’s walk courtesy of trailguru.com:

5 years ago when I first started experimenting with a low carb diet to control my blood sugars, it was a controversial idea. My doctor and my trainer at the ADA both argued against it, the ADA person quite vigorously. There’s a saying in diabetes management that you should learn to eat to your meter, and my meter was saying this was working great, so I ignored them. Ultimately I won over my physician – he could see how well this was working from my 3 month blood tests. The ADA rep never came around. Anyway I mention all this because the results of a Duke University study confirm what I already knew – this approach works best for controlling sugars.

Ironically, just as mainstream science seems to be catching up to where I was 5 years ago, it’s also starting to conclude that sugar management is not the highest priority, at least not later in life – cholesterol and blood pressure is where the focus should be. My reading of this is that for the medium term, I’m still good to go with my current strategy. I’ll confess though – I’m starting to think I need to cave in and begin taking a statin of some kind. My cholesterol numbers have never been good, despite trying a huge variety of things to balance them over the last 5 years. I’ve avoided statins because when they first put me on them I had huge pain issues, to the point where I was waking up in the middle of the night shouting in pain. Also statins have become like aspirin – physicians are prescribing them at the drop of the hat for a ever broadening definition of who needs them. This has left me feeling like big money pharma is what is pushing the statin use, not actual health issues. I don’t know where I’ll end up on this, my guess though is I’ll try some statin this year to see how things go.

Here’s a report on a the results of a study indicating that folks following a low carb diet perform poorly on memory-based tests. This is serious stuff to me as I definitely have short term memory issues. The good news is re-introducing the carbs solved the issue in the folks participating in the study. The bad news for me is, I can’t without inducing blood sugar/cholestoral/heart disease issues! Oh, the dilemma: die young but witty and on top of my game, or live long and a bit dimly. For now I’m sticking with the low carbs.

Related links

• Low-Carb Diet Causes Memory Loss
• Low Carb Diet Is Bad For Thinking And Memory
• Low carb diets ‘can cause memory loss’

So now it’s turning up in infant formula, (90% of the major brands) and the FDA’s response is to change it’s categorization of acceptable exposure to melamine, without any research to back it up. We’re the ones who are sneering at Chinese food safety issues? This epitomizes the Bush White House’s approach to governance folks, and man does it ever piss me off. It pays to be extra careful about dairy products – as I predicted a couple of months ago, this stuff is going to be showing up in lots of unexpected places.

Broccoli is a superfood. Almost every week there’s another study pointing out some healthful benefit of eating it. I’ve been linking over to them fairly often. Today’s example is a study presented at a recent American Association for Cancer Research conference indicating broccoli may lower the cancer risk for current and former smokers.The lesson remains the same – eat your broccoli, raw or steamed (but don’t overcook it!), it’s fantastic for you.

No, I’m not talking about the razor blade in the apple type stuff. A reminder to folks as your kids wander about harvesting candy tonight: when companies make announcements like this (halloween candy from a particular manufacturer has no melamine problems in the US – it’s only the Canadian candy you have to watch out for) you should really watch out. I have no idea how pervasive the melamine poisoning really is, but it’s clear it’s in some and possibly many products that made it into North America. I remain concerned and if I had kids they wouldn’t be eating chocolate from anywhere I was remotely unsure of.

Susan’s a member of a local CSA farm, and she often picks up celeriac, which I’d never had until a month or so ago. Celeriac is the root of a particular kind of celery plant. It looks like a very large gnurled potato, but it has almost no starch content so it’s perfect for diabetics. You can prepare it much like you would prepare mashed potatoes, or you can dice it and steam, boil. or stirfry it and serve it as a side vegetable with your dinner. It’s great! It has a very mild celery taste, it’s versatile, and when you can find it it’s dirt cheap. Definitely worth trying if you’re looking to add some healthy variety to your diet.

That title pretty much sums up what recent statements by US federal health officials revealed, reported on here on US News & World Report’s website. I don’t have too much to add to this, just getting the word out. They don’t go into much detail in terms of causes of type 2 diabetes beyond the typical ‘sedentary lifestyle, obesity = higher incidence of the disease.’ The one aspect of it that I don’t think I’ve noted here before is how incidence rates are much higher in the poorer southern states than in the northern states. Education is a critical component of the disease that folks don’t seem to focus on as much – new drugs and approaches to treatment are great, but making sure kids are taught from a young age that fried twinkies + 2 quarts of soda + 6 hours of videogame daily = you’re going to be fat and get diabetes seems to be as big if not the biggest piece of the puzzle.

Lost in all the noise about the economic crisis we’re facing is that we may also be facing a crisis in our food supply. The same rationale of deregulating the financial markets appears to be impacting the oversite of our food supply as well, the chinese milk melamine tainting scandal being only the latest issue to crop up. This stuff is creeping out in the global food supply and it’s making me increasingly leery of processed foods. From numerous ground beef issues over the past couple of years, spinache, lettuce, tomatoes, and more, there’s a constant stream of news about tainted food, and with the global connectedness it’s really hard to track where this stuff turns up. What set me off about this today was news that Cadbury had to pull some of its chocolate off the market because they detected melamine in some batches of it and another vendor of creamer for coffee had to do the same. None of this particular scandal’s food has been detected in the US food supply as of yet but I’m not going to be surprised if it does, and increasingly I feel like folks are best advised to steer clear of processed foods. That frozen pizza won’t seem as convenient if it turns out the cheese was made with melamine, and that bag salad will stop seeming like a time saver if you end up ingesting ecoli because it had cow poop on it.

I should note I’m not really sure what to make of all of this. I read an analysis in the last couple of months that suggested the food supply has actually never been safer, it’s just that regional threats like ecoli outbreaks get more widely reported than in the past. At the same time though there’s overwhelming evidence that the Bush administration systematically went after regulatory systems, and it’s not clear to me what impact that had at the FDA and other government inspection and regulatory bodies that oversee the food supply. It seems better to be prudent than sick is what I guess it boils down to.

Fortunately Susan and I eat pretty danged healthy and we don’t eat all that much processed food, so here’s hoping our exposure to risk is as minimal as it seems.

Not as in missing my hometown, as in like, I have spent the past two days lounging about the house nursing a miserable cold. It’s not excruciatingly bad, it just features sniffles, headaches and a sore throat. Susan is suffering the same fate as I, which we’ve been debating. Is it better to both be sick at the same time, or in sequence so one partner can take care of the sick partner? We haven’t decided yet. Whatever we have has been making the rounds at the office. My weekly IT heads meeting had half the staff out sick yesterday, including me. Must be the time of year.

That’s right – I haven’t been to a dentist in over a decade, with the exception of an oral surgeon who removed my wisdom teeth about 6-7 years ago. I fell out of the practice of getting annual cleanings shortly after college when I moved away from my family dentist and didn’t have dental coverage during my early career. One way or another I always managed to avoid going until yesterday. The oral surgeon didn’t help things much back when I had my teeth removed, because he scoped out my teeth and commended me on them being in such good shape. Unfortunately they’d started to stain recently, and one stain in particular was driving Susan nuts, so after much cajoling I made an appointment.

The good news: no cavities. Brushing and flossing plus some help from genetics seem to have protected my teeth over the years, which I was greatly relieved about. The bad news: I have gum disease and have to go in for some serious under gum cleansing procedures which will apparently be pretty unpleasant. Once that’s done I have to go to the dentist every three months for a couple of years for followup cleanings which should entirely clear up the gum issues and protect my teeth for the long term.

The other good news is that the stains will all come off, and the dentist thinks I should consider a bleach treatment for them once the cleaning is finished, which should remove the yellow coloration. He also thinks I should get braces to fix my front teeth. I’m not sure on the braces but I’ll probably do the bleach treatment next spring since it seems to mean so much to Susan.

Anyway I’m not sure if there are any lessons learned. I avoided a decade of the discomfort of the dentists chair with seemingly little consequence, though I’ll reserve judgement and possibly sing a different tune after I’ve been through a couple of these undergum cleansing treatments.

Backpacker or backwoods camper? Check out this great post over on cool tools that has some handy links to recipes and sources of supply for freeze dried foods that can save you a bundle of money. This is especially great for diabetics whose choices are further limited by the high carb counts in most pre-packaged freeze dried foods.

Andrew pointed out to me that I ought to write up a recent study that showed a correlation between the presence of inorganic arsenic in urine and the incidence of diabetes in humans. Scary stuff – maybe it wasn’t the high fructose corn syrup after all, which is what I’ve been convinced is the primary cause of me developing type 2 diabetes in my mid-30’s. Here’s an article covering the research over on google, and here’s the article over on the Journal of the American Medical Association website.

Before I got Soolin, my awesome Golden Retriever, I spent a couple of years running regularly for my health. It was pretty great – I was as slim as I’ve ever been as an adult, and in absolutely superb cardio shape. I was running this ~4 mile loop at least 3 times a week, and sometimes as often as 5. The move to NY and Soolin moving in with me mostly got me out of the habit, though I’ve tried now and again to restart including this spring. I thought of this today because of this recent study from the Stanford University School of Medicine that basically concluded ‘running is really good for you, long term.’ It’s worth a quick look.

Eat your broccoli. It’s already well known that broccoli is great for you, with its high fiber content, high vitamin c content, suggestions that it’s an effective cancer fighter. Now there’s evidence that it may be really helpful for folks with diabetes and heart disease. Eating green veggies in general is fantastic for your overall health – making sure broccoli is a big part of the mix is even better. Fortunately I love the stuff, cooked or raw, and already eat a lot of it.

I knew the headline ‘Good Cholesterol dementia risk’ was going to be a problem when I saw it, and clicking through proved me right. Research in Europe suggests a link between a lack of “good” (HDL) cholesterol and poor memory functions. Anyone who knows me knows I have a terrible memory for details. What they may not know is I have a chronic problem with low HDL cholesterol. When I was first diagnosed with diabetes years ago, my HDL/LDL ratio was atrocious, and despite years of experimenting with various diet and drug regimens, the highest I’ve ever gotten my HDL is 20. Anything below 40 is considered a risk for heart disease. I’ve been as low as 12. The only good thing about all this is I probably won’t remember it’s a problem in a month or two

The article’s over here, for those who are curious.

Some time ago I linked to a research study suggesting that eating curries helps stave off the onset of Alzheimer’s. Now there’s evidence that it can also help combat the effects of diabetes and obesity. Specifically, compounds found in Tumeric, a spice often used in curries, show promise. There are more details over on sciencedaily.com if you’re curious.