Category Archives: science

Tomatoes vs cancer: Fight!

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Actually we don’t know whether I even have cancer, but we do know that I have tomatoes!

Today I walked briskly for about an hour (burning 650 calories, according to my pulse watch.) This is supposed to be a good thing (see my earlier entry on this topic). Then again, I usually do that on Saturday anyway.

Unfortunately, it turns out that today it is vegetables that cure cancer, more exactly tomatoes and broccoli. And there are limits.  They go somewhere before broccoli. I find it impossible to believe that a merciful God would intend broccoli as human food, at least for regular use. It may not be as poisonous as it looks and tastes, but that’s the most credit I will give it.

“The only treatment that approached the tomato/broccoli diet’s level of effectiveness was castration” according to the article. That makes sense – it is also the only treatment that surpasses the tomato & broccoli diet on a scale of pure horror and revulsion…

Actually, the connection may be closer than that. “Another recent Erdman study shows that rats fed the tomato carotenoids phytofluene, lycopene, or a diet containing 10 percent tomato powder for four days had significantly reduced testosterone levels.” Yeah. Significantly reduced testosterone levels may help in consuming broccoli too, I guess. It is the archetypal spinster food, after all. Eat broccoli, avoid men, live till you are 90 and donate your fortune to a pet cemetery.

Even tomatoes and I don’t have the most cordial relationship. I have (repeatedly) been told that when I was little, I enthusiastically grabbed my first tomato and bit into it. Then I declared: “Tomatoes taste best in fresh air” and went outdoors and threw the tomato as far as I could. Which was at the time not very far, and it was found not much later. My brothers will probably not let that story go until we are old. If we grow old at all. Old age may be the source of many complaints, but most still prefer it to the alternative.

During my long walk I thought a bit, although not much. Here is an overview of what I thought:

So, in order to outpace cancer and various other common but grisly deaths, you have to walk briskly. The study drew a line at 3 hours a week, but this was probably more for practical reasons (there are probably not enough Americans who walk 7 hours a week to be statistically significant). So probably the more the better.

Now in addition to this, you are to eat lots of tomato and broccoli. But you can not eat sugar, sugar is poison (again).  Some fats are healthy (this year) but that does not much help me, since I get violently ill if I eat more than a few grams a meal of any fat. Actually I may be able to eat slightly more milk fat than other fats, but it is hard to say. My main source of fat is cheese, and it is not like I eat pounds of the stuff. Anyway, for now suffice it to say that I can’t eat fat and am not supposed to eat sugar (unless I am willing to die a grisly death).

Well, if all I can eat is veggies, and I am traipsing around the countryside every day, at least I won’t get aggressive prostate cancer from overweight. On the contrary, I will probably end up as something closer to a walking skeleton. Perhaps I could get a part time job showing medical students the various bones of the human body?

We already found out that sitting might kill me, but on the other hand Meditation can Boost the Immune System. So, meditation without sitting? Perhaps I should meditate while walking. Actually, that is something I occasionally do, but it tends to be less deep than classic meditation, for the obvious reason that one does not want to fall into a ditch or get run over by a car or stumble over roots.

There sure are a lot of things to do and not do if one wants to avoid an untimely death! And not least, Do Not Worry! For on the day you do that, you shall surely die. Or at least raze your immune system to the ground or something.

***

At this point, we are pretty close to what the ancient called “reductio ad absurdum”. Trying to live a healthy life can be so stressful that it kills you.  Later in the day, I listened to the latest weekly broadcast from Happy Science NZ. To my amusement, this week’s short lecture by Master Okawa was how to achieve definite health.

It is really a miracle that you can create illness in your body by the power of your thoughts, says Okawa. Even an ordinary person has this amazing power, to create illness. About 70% of illness is created this way, with the power of the mind. Despite this, people seem unable to create health. Isn’t that strange? Perhaps you really want to be sick, so you have an excuse for your failures. But if you want to be healthy (or only 30% sick, I guess), you should focus on thinking bright, positive thoughts. Reflect on yourself to get rid of hate and accusation. Practice gratitude to bring happiness into your life. Hold on to healthy habits. Make a life plan that is in accordance with the will of Heaven.

Mind you, I am not a big fan of the “if you had faith, you would not be sick” theology. But Okawa’s estimate that about 70% of illness is self-inflicted in one way or another seems reasonable. In our civilization, “lifestyle diseases” and stress-related illnesses are dominating the charts, massively so. So until further notice, I will continue to take my walks when feasible, eat tomatoes when feasible, and live with brightness and gratitude in my heart, hopefully for the remainder of my life, whether it is 6 months or 60 years. So far I’m planning for the latter though.

 

Killer commute?

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I’m not normal! Not exactly news, I guess, but here is another example. Perhaps.

OK, this is baffling to me, but evidently ordinary humans can recognize themselves in it:

“Your Commute Is Killing You: Long commutes cause obesity, neck pain, loneliness, divorce, stress, and insomnia.”

Now admittedly this is from Slate, which I rank slightly below the Watchtower in unbiased science. It is one of those places dissatisfied leftists congregate to reinforce their discontent. (Actually, there are no happy, content leftists. That would be a contradiction in terms: Happy people naturally want to conserve their current happy life and all it entails, which would automatically make them conservative, literally so.) So unless you feel good watching leftists whine and despair, it may be wiser to go closer to the source. Luckily they are meticulous in linking back.

Long commutes ‘bad for marriage’: Swedish study (theLocal.se).

Now, arguably Sweden is also a place stuffed with leftists, at least by conservative American measure. But the Swedes are leftist mostly out of habit. The social democrats, when they rule at all, are the ones trying to stick to the past. Sweden is a country of “after the revolution”, although a quiet and bloodless revolution, where the former revolutionaries are now the ones defending status quo. Anyway, you may notice that taking one step closer to the source, the claim of utter and pervasive evil is toned a bit down.

The Swedish  article also have the hilarious comments, as can be expected. “I actually prefer long commutes. It gives me more time to spend with my girlfriend and less time around that seething bitch that I married.” “This is why I quit my job and went on welfare 20 years ago. My marriage is too important to me to jeopardize it.” (These are almost certainly facetious, as they play on popular stereotypes in Scandinavian humor. Your humor may vary.)

In all fairness, the Slate article also draws on other studies, among them one of 900 Texan women who liked sex best (what? NOT going to church?) and commute least.

The most surprising was the finding that time spent on commute is actually worse than time spent at work when it comes to reducing motivation for exercise and healthy eating. I had expected them to be equal at most. After all, for the majority who don’t have manual labor, we still come home from work with the feeling that we have worked all day and want to rest. It takes an effort of will (or fear, I suppose) to come home from work and change into your sweater.

(By the way, after the commute home from work today, I spent 10 minutes on the exercise bike and took a 45 minute fast walk. See previous entry for why.)

Now, if you were to see me on the street, you would probably mistake me for an ordinary human. I don’t radiate light in the visible spectrum, honest, nor do I have wings.  But once again I have to pick the opposite side from your average human: I love my commute and wish I had more of it. Well, except when I have diarrhea.

Part of it is that I use bus instead of car, I suppose. This means I can concentrate on the things I don’t always take the time to do at work or at home: Checking Facebook and Twitter, and especially reading Kindle books on my high-resolution cell phone. In fact, I have been known to lug along paper books in some cases, but I currently have a backlog of unread Kindle books, so that goes here. On the commute home from work I also habitually nap – so habitually in fact that I have set an alarm to avoid driving past my stop! (That was mostly a problem when this commute was new to me though. These days I usually wake up when we leave the Europe road, basically Interstate. The road standard is rather different.)

As I said back when I was preparing my (so far) last move, I seriously considered a two hour commute. The reason was that you could rent a house of high standard up in the valleys at a very affordable price. It was even theoretically possible for a one-person household to buy a house up there, which it hardly is here. And the two hour commute I counted as a benefit, not a problem. (This is even more the case today, when I finally have the go-ahead to work from home the days my digestion is haunting me. But even before, it was like 1 day a month most of the time.)

Four hours a day for reading and napping? That sounds great. Of course, that would mean that much less time writing my journal and playing City of Heroes, but I think that is a good trade. I already find myself playing less computer games than I did.

Now, I have from numerous sources that City of Heroes is better than sex, but I am not sure how it stacks up against spending time with your kids. My impression is that most adults are rather less enthusiastic about this than are the kids, but that does not mean God or Evolution won’t punish them if they fail to do it, I suppose. We are after all descendants from those whose kids were not eaten by predators and did not fall into rivers, so there may be some implicit genetic contract here.

But for the few actual singles in the world who are not monks, commute seems a lot less threatening than it does to the Slate crowd. Or perhaps it is just me. I doubt I am quite that unique, though.

 

Outpacing cancer and such

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“I guess exercise really is important.” Yeah, and more so for us guys, perhaps.

In case you didn’t know (I didn’t) and couldn’t guess, walking briskly for several hours a week drastically reduces the dangers from prostate cancer. While doing so, it also happens to drastically reduce mortality from pretty much anything else (except getting run over by bikes, I strongly suspect).

So yeah. Half an hour today. ^_^

(Actually I was aiming for one hour, but it began to rain after a quarter. Anyway, half an hour should be about right – the article mentions 3 hours a week. Of course, there is reason to doubt that I will do this every day, especially if I am not diagnosed with cancer. Then again, who knows. I used to walk like crazy for much of my life, and still do by American and modern Norwegian standards.)

***

On a vaguely related note, I woke up to a bulk e-mail from my “friend” Bill Harris, of Centerpointe Research Institute. These are the people from whom I bought the Holosync brainwave entrainment solution, my first of that kind and one of the best known. I mostly use LifeFlow these days, but I like to keep up with my old supplier. Plus, the almost daily e-mails make me appreciate LifeFlow and the Project Meditation that supplies it. You see, they are not only about Holosync. Far from it.

Today, for instance, brings the good news “Amazing non-toxic liquid kills cancer cells”. Which is probably true. I am sure clean water will do that under the right conditions, and probably various other substances. Not all cancer cells are robust enough to survive for long outside the body. Anyway, the lengthy e-mail does not offer any clue as to what this non-toxic liquid is, only that it is available over the counter. (Could still be water, I suppose, depending on the counter.) There are repeated links to one of his innumerable business friends, who will tell us more.

It is a very, very safe bet that if I were to follow the link, I would get a long and somewhat multimedia-based spiel about the awesomeness of the cancer-killing substance, which the health establishment does not want us to know, and still no hint as to what it is. To find out, we will have to buy some kind of report or something from Mr Friend, of which I assume Mr Harris gets a small percentage for sending the sheep for shearing. Not to say slaughter, if one is such a prime case of Darwinian evolution in action as to substitute this for actual medical treatment. Or long walks, I guess. For some reason the evil medical establishment seems to have no problem whatsoever with letting us know that we can actually walk away from cancer, heart infarct, stroke, diabetes etc at little or no cost to us and no income to them.

Then again, perhaps they know very few people will actually do it, even though it is free, harmless and pretty fun if you have an MP3 player.

 

Growing up

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I disagree a bit – kids do need to be looked after. But it is true that you have limited influence on who they become in the end: That will increasingly depend on their own decisions. Each child is an individual, whether you want it to or not.

I guess it had to happen sooner or later. Over the last years, I have noticed that I am beginning to grow up. It has kind of accelerated after I hit 50, it seems…

“Growing up” is really a very vague concept. When are you a grown-up? For much of history, childhood was very short, in so far as it existed at all. There were infants, and then there were small, stupid workers. But you generally were not considered grown-up until you were able to reproduce. That did not stop girls in particular from being married off as young as 5, although more commonly around 9 years old. The notion that pedophilia was wrong, rather than just impractical, is fairly new. The word itself was unknown a hundred years ago, but we have had some idea about this for longer than that. The ancient Greeks and Romans, however, did not. Judaism stood out in this area by not actually shipping the girls off for marriage until their first menstruation (which was generally later than today, due to less nourishing foods and vitamins).

Today, we have almost certainly gone too far in the opposite direction. People are now “kids” until they graduate from college, and are not expected to take responsibility for their own lives until then. (Kind of hard to do in a capitalist society without money, really.) Needless to say, most people won’t be celibate that long, but are discouraged from forming a family. By the time they take their place in adult society, they have a decade’s practice of fooling around. To everyone’s great surprise, some of them continue to do this after they marry and/or have kids, and acrimony ensues.

***

But there is another meaning of growing up, and that is internally. Some people don’t really much care about what happens inside their own mind, much less others, but in that case you would probably not be hanging out here. So…

Ryuho Okawa (of Happy Science fame) says that you are fully responsible for your own life from around the age of 30.  He bases this on both his own experience and Jesus Christ, neither of which started their religious work until the age of 30. Even then, one may notice, Jesus’ mother managed to get him to perform his first miracle by putting him in a situation where she would be regarded as a weirdo if he didn’t. Or that is one way of seeing it at least. He warned her at the time that she could not expect to have any say in his life anymore, and from what it seems, she didn’t after that one time.

It is a gradual thing though. We start shaping our own lives much earlier. Jesus asserted himself when he was 12 and stayed behind in the temple, although we don’t hear of any further such episodes. But for the rest of us too, it is common that some sense of identity awakens late in childhood or at the onset of puberty. In my case, I discovered my free will the summer when I was 15, I believe, shortly before leaving home for high school. So that was convenient. I read a small tract by Elias Aslaksen, a Norwegian preacher of Truth, where he convinced me that nobody can lift our hand to strike or open our mouth to speak. We are not responsible for what others do to us, but we are responsible for how we react. What we do depends on what we think, how we see that which happens to us. The way we see things can be completely opposite, depending on ourselves.

In a matter of minutes, my life turned around. Of course, in the heat of emotion this insight was often forgotten, but not permanently. Gradually, my power over my own body increased. It still does – it is still not complete, even at this age. I’d like to be able to say with Confusius (Analects chapter 2):
The Master said, “At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning.
“At thirty, I stood firm.
“At forty, I had no doubts.
“At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven.
“At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth.
“At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.”

Intriguingly, reception of Truth is what I am “specializing in” now, I guess. There is still so much Truth to absorb. But I really wish to arrive at having no desires that transgress what is right. At that point, I suppose I may call myself a grown-up, even spiritually.


The end of the world

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Even if the world ends today, we still want to protect you.

Rumors of the death of the world have so far been exaggerated. Although these days, for the first time in history, we may actually have the power to make the planet go Krypton in the manner depicted above. If Stephen Hawking is wrong about some small detail in his theory of black holes – which very few humans alive understand except Hawking – then the Large Hadron Collider at CERN could actually cause just such an event, where a microscopic black hole sinks to the center of the planet and eats it from the inside. It would be a spectacular sight, but we wouldn’t be around to see it.

So far, however, there is no sign of the end. I consider this a good thing. Some angsty teens may disagree. And also, evidently, a few of my fellow Christians. Or at least one old preacher who doesn’t want to die, which I can certainly understand. I’m afraid he is mistaken, though, if he thinks the experience of the Rapture as depicted in Christian tradition will be significantly different from death. There would still be a transition. It is not like you get taken in a spaceship to another terrestrial planet. Probably. There are some who think this is what happened to Enoch and Elijah, especially since Enoch wrote a book with numerous astronomical references. Or so I have been told. But that does not seem to be what is happening here. Nor is the elderly preacher putting his baby son in a rocket and sending him to a planet circling a white sun.  If you’re going to the phantom zone, you may as well die and become a phantom that way, you know.

And that, my dear reader, is what I have been thinking on today, while taking a walk and listening to Angela’s beautiful song, The End of the World. This was the song that inspired me to write my groundbreaking series of gray entries in June 2005, starting with “The Next Big Thing”, in which I proposed that the end of human history was near: Not in the form of a physical disaster, but by a total conversion of the human mind to a new and higher level, resulting in the extinction of the current way of thinking in the same way as the Neanderthals and others like them just fell by the wayside after our minds achieved symbolic thinking that we have today.

Back then, those who could not keep up – not only the Neanderthals but most branches of humanity at the time – suddenly disappeared, and we descend from those few who invented symbolic thinking and those who were able to learn it.  (For instance, almost all humans descend from the “genetic Adam” who lived 60 000 – 90 000 years ago, but the Khoisan people do not. They parted way with our ancestors at least 110 000 years ago. Of all human groups that lived up to 65 000 years ago, only they and we survive, it seems.)

The Neanderthals had larger brains than we have. The various human tribes that existed around the time of the Dawn of the Mind were for all purposes identical, as far as we can guess from the fossil record and from the traces of crude stone axes made everywhere. And yet, with the sudden outbreak of the human mind as we know it, some were endowed with it and others were… left behind.

When I wrote all that stuff on 18-23 June 2005, it was pretty vague to me still. I am not sure if I had yet found One Cosmos, it certainly had not impressed me if so. I had read a little Ken Wilber, but I think that is pretty much it. I was not sure whether it was just me and a couple others in the world who were “getting it” even at a mostly theoretical level. It seemed impossible that the Transition would happen for generations yet. And indeed, most of the New Age seems to be spiritual fog and magic in modern clothes. But there really are some people here and there, often hidden among the ordinary religious masses, who are “downloading” the higher consciousness. We are on our way. Though we are not there today, and almost certainly not in 2012.

But when the Transition comes, I hope “we” (though I may no longer be there bodily) will be able to protect as many as possible in the chaos and turmoil that follows among those “left behind”. It is not like those who ascend sit up there and laugh at the maggots who fry down below. Those who look forward to such an ascent are likely to get a very unpleasant surprise, I suspect.

 

Reading for understanding

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Madness is not the only danger in books. There is also the danger that something may be understood that can never be forgotten.

Having finished The Torah for Dummies, I’ve started on How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler (who wrote the original) and Charles van Doren.

One of the very first concepts introduced – before I even got one Kindle dot into the book – is the difference between reading for information and reading for understanding. This is something I have written about before, as I have been introduced to the subject by the Catholic scholar A. G. Sertillanges, and before that more briefly by Ryuho Okawa, founder of Happy Science. Apart from them, and a reference to Sertillanges statement on the blog One Cosmos, I don’t think I have seen or heard this anywhere. Or if I did, it was well before I was ready for it, for no trace remains.

When I wrote about this myself a while ago, I compared the first to someone filling a container with a liquid, for instance pouring juice into a glass. The second sort however expands the container, for instance making the glass taller so it can hold more juice. The first is ordinary, the second is miraculous. But then, we are humans so miracles are not uncommon. At least not for those who wake up to the divine heritage, so to speak.

What Mortimer Adler writes about here seems actually to be an intermediate level of mind change, perhaps. The first change is just in the content of the mind, and the third change in its size. But to introduce another metaphor, you could say that reading for understanding puts more tools in your toolbox. I would say that expanding the capacity of the toolbox itself is yet another level, but let that rest for now. I think his brief introduction simply combines these advanced forms of reading (or listening, on some occasions).

His point is that if you understand perfectly what the author says, your mind and the author’s mind are of the same mold. You don’t understand more afterwards, you just know more. This is not the same thing! You need some knowledge to understand, but you don’t understand better infinitely as you pour on more knowledge. Past a certain point there is no noticeable gain in understanding by adding more and more examples.

When you don’t understand a book (but it presumably is understandable, which can not be taken for given in these days with self-publishing), you need to put more work into it. You can ask someone else to explain it, or read a book that explains it, but if they do so too well you still have not understood the original. When you by your own effort understands a book you did not, you have acquired new understanding. Your mind has leveled up, so to speak: You have a new way of thinking or seeing things that you did not have before. This is a pretty awesome thing to have happen to you.

(Also, this is mostly why I write these days. You have Google right there, you can know anything on Earth. What I want is to give you a glimpse of a different and hopefully higher perspective, another angle, a new dimension. The wonder and the glory and the stars in the sky. Still very much a work in progress, obviously.)

Mortimer Adler stresses that the author needs to have superior understanding compared to you. That is certainly true in a limited sense, namely within the context of the book. However, for the “mid-level” (one more tool in the toolbox) reading, you may well be the superior in a broader sense. Let me show this by an example:

If I were to write a book about the Norwegian language, I would be superior to most of my readers. I am, at the very least, a master of my mother tongue New Norwegian, the western and rural version of Norwegian, to the point that I feel confident mainly poets and highly trained academics can wield it better than I. However, the reader of my hypothetical book may be a world renowned linguist, fluent in more than a dozen languages from different language families and written in different scripts. By any sensible third party this reader would be my superior and have a vastly deeper understanding than I. Just not in the topic at hand.

This is just an example. What I really mean is that a person does not need to be a higher spirit, so to speak – a greater genius – simply in order to have an understanding you don’t. This is what I mean by saying that such learning adds to your toolbox.

In contrast to this, there is a third level. This is the one Sertillanges and Okawa writes about, the High Spirit, the Genius. What they do is open up our very capacity for new understanding. They add new dimensions to the container. You may have been fascinated by teachings that you found could make your glass taller, but you had no idea that it could also increase in radius. Then suddenly you see this, and everything changes. Nothing can quite become the same again.

So what M. Adler writes about is indeed reading for understanding, as opposed to just reading for information. But what I speak of in the last few lines is to read for revelation. And usually this does not even happen, but rather one just reads and the revelation presents itself. When the student is ready, and not before. Still, some places you are more likely to meet it than others.

May 17

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Another reason to dissolve the union between Norway and Sweden: You can only have so many hot blonde girls in one country before it grinds to a halt. So to speak.

Today is May 17th, Norway’s national day. Since I live in Norway – and indeed have never left the country even for a brief visit – I have the day off from work. It is kind of like a holy day, except for the holiness. Old people even go to church. New people are mostly atheists so only go to church on Christmas Eve or weddings, burials etc, but some of the most nationalist may possibly tag along to church today as well.

Norwegian nationalism is pretty tame, actually. You’d think not, given that we have twice turned down membership in the European Union, by referendum no less. Although the majority was somewhat less than in the referendum about continued union with Sweden, in 1905, when only 184 souls voted for continued union! (Of course, democracy was still pretty new by then and the whole “anonymous” voting was perhaps not fully implemented… not to mention the voting locales being decorated with Norwegian flags, stuff like that.)

That said, Norwegians like independence, but we don’t like attacking and occupying other nations. We’ll tag along when allies get involved in a war, but we would rather stay at home if we could. We haven’t even gotten back the couple provinces that Sweden kept when the union was dissolved. But we’ve bought a lot of the property there, and probably most of the booze.

Oh, right. We kind of just kept the land of the Sami, the reindeer-herding people up north, which we had annexed during the union years. But it was either that or let the Russians have them, Russia was really trying to expand back in the days. In recent years, the Sami have some token independence. I suspect if they really, really wanted full independence from Norway, they could have it. It is not like the area runs a surplus, exactly: It is mostly arctic tundra, or nearly so. If you don’t like reindeer or midnight sun, you are unlikely to have any errands there.

Of course, Norway enjoys a similar status in Europe as a whole. Except we also have mountains. Lots and lots of mountains. With reindeer on them. Plus Germans in particular tend to die easily here. They are just not used to nature being, you know, untamed. Mountains you fall down from, rivers that throw you off into a waterfall, seas with big waves, roads with sudden bends, things like that. I think more Germans than Norwegians may lose their lives to Norwegian nature some years, even though we live here all the time and they only visit as tourists, and then bring their own beer. (I am not sure to what extent the beer contributes to the casualties…)

Anyway, one more thing, although I have said it in earlier years at this time: May 17 is not actually our Independence Day. That is June 7, 1905. May 17, 1814 is our Constitution day. The logic seems to be that it does not matter whose king you have, as long as you have your own laws. And that is probably the truth. Just look at the Jews. They got their laws thousands of years ago and will probably still be a people of their own as long as there are humans on Earth. Hopefully that will be a long time yet.

Sitting kills! Perhaps.

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Don’t sit down with your computer if you value your life, says Daily Science. Happy Science disagrees, but only slightly.

I have written about this before, but Science Daily has rather a bunch of articles on the evils of sitting, especially in front of screens, and worst of all the TV. Since I consider the TV a tool of Evil, I am not surprised at the last part.  Not so sure about sitting in front of the computer screen though. I think it depends on what you do there.

But there seems to be an actual bodily mechanism that makes sitting hurt the body. Not just the back pains that are common among office workers these days, but there is also a link to heart disease, diabetic and other typical western lifestyle diseases.

Basically, sitting down causes the large leg muscles to shut down. These don’t simply keep us on our feet, but also function as a kind of internal organs: They are largely fat-powered, so they release chemicals that cause fat to be absorbed into muscles rather than drift around in the bloodstream making trouble. They also regulate the balance between “bad cholesterol” and “good cholesterol”.

(It is probably worth mentioning that some of the largest leg muscles are in the buttocks. If nothing else, at least every mention of healthy buttocks is likely to shift the article several pages up in Google.)

Some effects of sitting start at once, some gradually build up over time. You can reduce the damage from sitting by getting up now and then, at least every half hour is recommended. But you cannot eliminate all effects by getting up at certain intervals, just some.

Me, just to be sure, I get up every now and then from my boss chair in the home office and walk to the fridge and back…

***

When studies say that sitting increases risk of death regardless of whether you exercise, that does not mean exercise is pointless unless you remain on the feet all day.  It means that if you exercise and sit, you are worse off than if you exercise and just potter around. And you are worse off to the same degree that someone who does not exercise is still worse off sitting than just pottering around in the house or garden.

It is worth noticing that these studies mainly look at recreational sitting, not sitting as a job. Obviously the same bi0logical effects appear at work, but there is probably not a lot people can do in the current economy to pick a job with less sitting. It is advised to place some office equipment out of reach, but employers generally aren’t too fond of putting the printer far away. They pay you for the hour, but they don’t bear the expense when you get sick. Well, probably not. Here in Norway they do to some extent. My current employer has exercise equipment and organized (but voluntary) walks during work hours. You should probably not expect that in the USA, unless you work for Google or similar.

Now, the thing these reports don’t say, and which I am burning to know, is: What do these people do who don’t sit for two hours or more on an average day?

My best guess is that they have toddlers, in which case Evolution (or whatever your name for God) has probably thrown in some extra protection because, let’s face it, a toddler is not going to live long without parental supervision, or something very similar. The natural response to this is a divine decree that Chasing Toddlers Shall be Good for Your Health.

One study goes after television in particular, another lumps TV, computer and video games.  Sitting in front of these is evidently a shortcut to early death. But what about sitting with a book? Has anyone ever studied that? What about sitting in church?? Several studies show that people with high church attendance are less likely to die than people who boycott church. (The same effect holds true for at least some other religions, but church attendance is by far most common in the USA, so most reliable data are on this.)  How can sitting in the church keep you alive while sitting at home kills you?  Mysteries abound!

This is where I part ways with Daily Science and team up with Happy Science instead. (Happy Science is a new Japanese religion.) In their worldview, illness rarely begins in the physical body, unless you are run down by a car or some such. Typical lifestyle illnesses are instead caused by changes in your astral body, or aura body. Your mind gets poisoned and the body follows.

That seems like pure superstition, but the fact remains that placebo remains one of the most useful and potent forms of medication around, the standard against which all other medication is measured. In other words, what happens in people’s minds really DOES influence their bodies, all other things being equal. Things that cause negative thought patterns (like most TV channels and most video games) will have a completely different effect on the body than things that cause positive thought patterns (like benevolent religions, good books, or good friends).

If we strip the religious language, I think Happy Science really is scientific in this. Certain inactivities are worse than others, because they harm the will to live, while others strengthen it.

Or as myself  said to me this morning:  “If you don’t do anything meaningful, it is like calling the Angel of Death to say ‘I am finished here’.”

This is often easy to see with old people. Many look forward to their retirement, but when the time comes, it does not take long before they start feeling useless. After that, it goes downhill fast. They get sick, they complain, become pessimistic and either die early or linger in ill health for a long time. But grandparents who have small children living in the house often remain vital and healthy longer, and even a pet can substantially improve the health of many elderly. Intellectuals who read and write a lot also tend to live longer and healthier lives. And famously, gardeners live the longest lives of all.  Evidently being connected to life, encouraging life to grow, keeps the power of life flowing through the body.

So perhaps we should think of it this way:  If you sit down, you better have a reason for it!

 

Why liposuction sucks

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Maybe you did get fatter, but there are worse fates than being a little chubby.  Liposuction, for instance.

I readily admit that I don’t speak from experience this time. On the other hand, I have news for the average person. So please spare a little time if the topic interests you or anyone you hold dear. Or even an enemy, I guess, though I am not responsible for what you might do then. I desperately seek to not be an enemy and, if feasible, not have enemies.

If one has enemies, though, liposuction might be something one would wish for them.

This is not obvious. Body fat is bad, right? So having less of it should be good! Alas, it is not quite that simple.

Fat has a natural place in our body. Every cell in the body has some lipids (fat) in it, and it makes up a rather large part of the brain.  (The brain grows slowly though, so there is no need to fatten your kids excessively. Just don’t give let them grow very skinny.)

Besides being a building block, however, fat is also (and mostly) a fuel. The body burns it to get energy. But you already knew that.  This is the obvious reason why our body has “adipose tissue”, large collections of fat cells, storing lots of fat for the dry season that never comes these days. Until recently, this was the only way this tissue was viewed. It turns out there is another aspect as well.

Fat that is locked inside the fat cells is mostly harmless. Fat that floats freely in the bloodstream, however, is not. It causes inflammation. OK, that may be a slight exaggeration. What it does is increase the tendency toward inflammation. A small infection or just chafing can develop into a pretty big inflammation if there is lots of fat in the blood, but barely register if not. I am not sure whether there is yet a logical explanation for this, it is a fairly new discovery. I think I first read it last year.

When you eat more fat than you can burn off, the fat cells will quietly snatch fat molecules from the blood and store them away. In this way, they keep the blood fat down. In fact, the more efficient they are, the less fat in your blood, and the less infections of anything from gums to arteries, if all other things are equal. So a person who puts on weight easily can be very healthy. In fact, this is common. During the years of ballooning, you have few health problems.  But then…

When the fat cells reach their capacity, which varies with families and even individuals, bad thing begin to happen. Suddenly you become more prone to a lot of illnesses, from hangnails to diabetes. It seems that even cancer is more likely, although I am not sure how.

Some people don’t have a lot of fat cells and they reach their maximum while still looking thin. This is not a good thing: Even though they don’t look fat, in a sense they are, and they suffer fat poisoning. Another person with more fat cells could have continued to absorb fat from the blood for a long time and remain healthy.

Now you see why liposuction sucks:  You are left with fewer fat cells, and have less ability to absorb new incoming fat.  And most people who have had a liposuction regain the fat within a year or two!

If you have had liposuction and you change your lifestyle, exercising more than you eat, you actually have a kind of benefit from the surgery.  Since you are less heavy, you will be able to exercise more easily, with less pressure on your knees; these are hard pressed during many kinds of exercise, and more so the heavier you are. Exercise also feels more comfortable when you are not so big and heavy.

But if you don’t change your ways to a low-fat diet or plenty of exercise, you are left with more fat in your blood, and it will poison you in subtle ways, making you more prone to a wide range of diseases.  And most obvious, diseases of the circulatory system. So take care. Don’t let vanity be your doom.

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PS: One related but slightly different explanation of the mechanism may be more exact: When fat cells overfill and are about to burst, they release distress molecules of the “dying cell, cleanup crew required” type. This excites immune cells, who may then attack the wrong target.

Science is just now catching up to the fact that fat is more than just a “dead weight”, so there will likely be more exciting discoveries in the near future. May we all be there!

PPS: Read more at ScienceDaily. Also with nifty links.

Climate change of mind

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Now that I have your attention – it HAS got a little bit warmer, hasn’t it? Just not in the USA, according to a recent study.

Today I read an article in The Economist, about some scientists who had calculated that food prices were currently around 5% higher than they would have been without the global warming of the latest two decades.

This is a difficult thing to calculate, of course, and was probably wrong. There is a lot of marginal land that becomes worth farming if food prices stay high for a while, whereas if prices remain low, land may be laid fallow more easily. If prices should continue to rise, it may become economically viable to use new forms of agriculture, such as vertical farming. The world could easily feed 20 billion people if these were people who produced valuable goods and services, so that anyone would be bothered to grow the food to sell them. Facing a beggar bowl however does not motivate farmers to invest.

In fact, there is not a lack of food on Earth even today. There is a lack of money to buy food among some people, but less so than ten years ago, not to mention twenty or fifty. Today, obesity is a health risk to more humans than is starvation.

What we most need then, is not to reverse the physical climate change. I would not mind if we did something about that too, but it is not the most urgent. Rather, we should do something about the cultural climate. The climate of the mind, for each of us and for society as a whole.

For instance, we know that producing meat is in most cases far less efficient than growing plants. There are in fact some areas which are best used for pastures, but a large number of the meat animals in the world eat grain, soy and other food that is edible for humans.  While strict vegetarianism does pose some health challenges, most Americans and Europeans could halve their meat intake and halve it again without experiencing any discomfort. In fact, they would probably feel more energetic and enjoy better health and a longer life. And it would lower the food prices in the world, faster than reversing climate change would.

To permanently end starvation, however, there needs to be a culture change in the countries where starvation is widespread. There has to be an end to war and oppression in these places, so people again dare work without fear that their work will be stolen or destroyed by enemies. This is the fundamental requirement. There are various things that can be done after that, but this is what must be done first. You cannot grow food on a battlefield.

When I say that these countries need to change, you may hear it as “blame the victim”.  It is certainly true that the rich world could have dealt better with other parts in the past, and should do so in the future. But there will be no food to the starving by paying reparations to a dictator or by fanning the flames of war. There is only so much outsiders can do until the people themselves can agree on a philosophy of live and let live, at the very least. This is the task of religion, philosophy and art, to teach humans to live in this world without losing control of their own aggression. You cannot simply substitute money for any or all of these factors. There needs to be a widespread change of mind.

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As you can see, I do not wish to teach something that is entirely remote and out of our hands. There are things that people in poor nations have to do for themselves, and there are things we can do as a society, but there are also things we can do as individuals, even at our dinner table. These things are not different and separate. Whether it is in Norway or the USA or Congo, we all have to cultivate a mind that accepts other people as real and precious.

I think I mentioned when it happened, a few years ago. As I prayed the Lord’s Prayer, and came to the point “give us today our daily bread”, the Lord reminded me that I was not praying “give ME today MY daily bread”. This is the kind of awareness we need to have at the dinner table. What we choose to eat or not eat has effects on us, our families, our society, and the entire world.

Likewise when we come home from work and decide whether to sit down in front of the flat-screen or do some exercise, these decisions made by each of us has a profound effect on the national health care expense.

And of course, our energy use and transportation has some effect on the atmosphere. (Although not necessarily the way you think! For instance, if you are a meat-eater, biking actually causes more greenhouse gas emission than driving a small car, because of the large amount of greenhouse gas that goes into your food. Or to take another example, transport by ship and rail gives off very little CO2 compared to the mass and distance of transportation, so that buying something from halfway around the globe could cause less emissions than something made locally, if it was made more efficiently in the other place.)

There are a lot of things to learn, and there will be disagreement about details. This cannot be avoided. But we need a climate change of the heart, with much more warmth than before. Then we will surely find a way forward for everyone, starting at home and spreading around the world.