— Bob-a-job-alog-a-roonie

We have IQ and EQ, so here’s a new one.

Assign people a score/value/symbol/whatever based on what they do when they are alone.

For example, some people are good at juggling, so clearly they have done a lot of juggling in their bedroom, perfecting it.

I presume some people practise pouting in the mirror.

Masturbation, of course, has to be in the mix.

Do people watch TV or work on their novel?

Do they have personal habits in private but not in public, like picking their nose?

Do they drink alone?

Are they messy or a clean freak?

So they talk to themselves? Sing in the shower? Meditate?

Do they sleep well?

I’m actually serious. The only way is to install cameras and give the patient months or something to forget they are there.

Research grants welcomed.

My considered opinion – getting plenty of regular sunshine (30 mins per day seems reasonable to me) without any protection is optimal for cardiovascular health. Maintaining some degree of a tan indicates you are getting enough. Tanned people are less likely to get melanoma, and people who get plenty of sunlight get less cardiovascular disease. The trick is simple – pay attention and don’t get sunburnt. Even if you do get burnt, the risks of melanoma seem to be easily outweighed by the benefits of lower blood pressure.

There is a reason why we call it a “healthy tan”.

People with low levels of vitamin D in their blood have significantly higher rates of virtually every disease and disorder you can think of: cancer, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, heart attack, stroke, depression, cognitive impairment, autoimmune conditions, and more. 

People with plenty of Vitamin D in their system are healthier. And we don’t get that from food, but from sunshine directly onto the skin.

Yet numerous studies have shown that Vitamin D supplements have no health benefits. So if Vitamin D is just an indicator for something else we need the Sun for, what is the other thing?

Turns out it is nitric oxide, a molecule produced in the body that dilates blood vessels and lowers blood pressure… the skin uses sunlight to make nitric oxide.

So get out there in the sunshine, because sunshine lowers blood pressure! But…

Wouldn’t all those rays  also raise rates of skin cancer? Yes, but skin cancer kills surprisingly few people: less than 3 per 100,000 in the U.S. each year. For every person who dies of skin cancer, more than 100 die from cardiovascular diseases.

Also:

outdoor workers have half the melanoma rate of indoor workers. Tanned people have lower rates in general. “The risk factor for melanoma appears to be intermittent sunshine and sunburn, especially when you’re young,” says Weller. “But there’s evidence that long-term sun exposure associates with less melanoma.”

Source: Outside

The Cancer Council of Australia says that most people maintain adequate vitamin D levels just by spending a few minutes outdoors on most days of the week. Yet in their Position Statement they admit Vitamin D forms in the skin as a result of exposure to the UVB wavelengths in sunlight, but there is limited evidence available on the amount of UVB required to maintain adequate vitamin D levels. 

And reiterate what I have shared above:

It should be noted that the benefits of sun exposure may extend beyond the production of vitamin D. Other possible beneficial effects of sun exposure that may not be related to vitamin D include reduction in blood pressure, suppression of autoimmune disease and improvements in mood.

In Australia each year there are 40,000 deaths due to cardiovascular disease, and it is impossible to know how many could be avoided with adequate sun exposure. And 1,500 deaths from melanoma, which is almost totally attributable to sun exposure.

(inspired by Movember…)

Let’s face it, there is a serious illness affecting women* worldwide, and it needs fighting. Millions of women are caught up in a cycle of buying new handbags, even though they already have one.

This cycle is speeding up. Once upon a time handbag fashions changed annually. Now it is every couple of months.

Problems:

• Not knowing which item is in which handbag – women often have 2 or 3 in concurrent regular use
• The poor husband looking for an item finds it particularly difficult
• Previous handbags take up a lot of shelf-space, causing larger homes to be built
• Generally the bags are imported, causing an outflow of our country’s cash
• Jealousy of others with better bags causes mean thoughts
• Money spent on handbags could be better spent on more enjoyable, locally brewed products

Solution:

Participating women acknowledge the problems, and commit to only purchasing one new handbag per year (that’s still a massive 60 in the average adult lifetime).

Handbag is only purchased during January and February (aka Baguary).

Any owned bag that hasn’t been used in 10 years should be donated to NZ, where it would currently be in fashion.

* men seem to get by with the same bag for years or even decades…

One of the main causes of death and disease is inflammation. Regardless of the contributing factors like being overweight or having clogged arteries, it is inflammation that ultimately gets you. And turmeric reduces inflammation, better than aspirin. See http://hplusmagazine.com/2014/05/01/turmeric-curcumin/

Given that I love curries – perhaps my favourite food – it is a no brainer to start adding turmeric to my diet.

A. Eat more curries, and choose those with more turmeric in them. The easiest way to achieve this would be to cook them myself, without the use of packet mixes. This is something I have always wanted to do, so now I allocate Sunday afternoons to this endeavour.

I’ll start with recipes from:

http://www.sbs.com.au/food/recipes/collections/curry
http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/recipe/easy-homemade-curry-pastes/

B. Add turmeric to non-curry dishes. For example, I will see if Nicola can add it to my roast potatoes:

Gordon Ramsay’s Roast Potatoes with Garlic and Turmeric
Crispy Turmeric Roast Potatoes

These bits of info – via New Scientist – are well worth committing to memory!

Blood transfusions are dangerous if the need is low!

Of people judged on arrival at hospital to have more than a 50 per cent chance of dying, those who had a transfusion of red blood cells were twice as likely to survive as those given no transfusion. But in arrivals judged to have less than a 6 per cent chance of dying, those who got a transfusion were five times as likely to die as those who did not.

Friday-itis

People who have non-urgent surgery on Friday have a 44 per cent higher risk of death than those who have it on Monday.

The risks are tiny, but who wouldn’t opt for a Monday op knowing this?

Pre-Op Shave

The shave, typically using a disposable razor, is more dangerous than any bacteria living in your hairs. Because the nurses are prone to cut you.

Hip Replacements

There are 200 types. Some are tried and proven. Choose them ahead of the “latest” un-proven sorts.

Check-ups

A regular check-up is important if you need to keep something monitored. But if you are in good health, harmful false diagnosis is as common as useful – there is no net gain in living longer or avoiding a heart attack:

Health check-ups have long been popular in the US. They have recently been introduced in the UK as a “midlife MOT” to be done every five years. They sound like common sense but check-ups are surprisingly controversial, because they look for illness in people who have no symptoms. This can lead to unnecessary worry and treatment.

The most recent trial into the effectiveness of general check-ups looked at nearly 60,000 Danish people offered annual checks for five years. Five years after this period, heart attack rates and overall death rates were unaffected

Full story here
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/a-hair-salon-gurus-next-big-thing-ending-the-12b-tyranny-of-shampoo/

Basically, this is how it currently works:

• You know you ought to wash your hair, so you buy the brand that sounds best. It might be what it claims to do (more bounce…) or that it matches your hair type (dry)
• Your hair is clean, but also dry – so you buy conditioner
• Your hair is now soft, but you have some dandruff
• You think the anti-dandruff product has an effect, but doesn’t cure it
• Try a different brand (without realising it might be the same company, same ingredients)

50% of people have dandruff. That means it is normal!

Almost all hair products contain what are basically chemical detergents. Ignore the packaging – typically when they boast natural ingredients they are negligible when you look at the list of ingredients. If you see words like sulphate near the top of the list, it isn’t going to be great for your hair.

sodium laureth sulfate, a chemical ingredient used in virtually all shampoos because it kills oils and leaves users with a squeaky-clean scalp. Problem is, that also dries out skin and hair follicles—a problem that most people treat by buying, without batting an eye, additional products like conditioners

Now the man who sold the Bumble and Bumble brand to Estee Lauder has come up with a detergent free shampoo that he says will be the new way. And get this, it is a cleansing creme. It doesn’t lather. You probably didn’t realise this, but a key reason for including sodium laureth sulfate in shampoos is that it lathers – and people equate that with cleaning. Even dishwashing liquid does it – the bubbles are to reassure you, they don’t actually aid in cleaning.

I have been using a non-lathering, non sodium laureth sulfate hair product for years. My hair isn’t great, but it is less problematic than ever before.

I worked this out all on my own a year ago…  for me the logic is quite crude – people who starve lose weight. A great (but unfortunate) example is those who go on hunger strikes.

I needed to lose a few kilos. Just 10 or so – I had a minor pot belly but otherwise I am reasonably slim. I knew that the problem was lack of exercise and too many carbs. I tried removing carbs from my diet, but it was useless. I finally understood why people struggle to give up sugar or cigarettes. So I decided to just not eat. It was easy to begin with, I just chose the days when I was hungover. I already felt like crap, so some tummy rumblings on top wouldn’t matter much.

My diet evolved to where 2-4 mornings  a week I just skipped breakfast. Once you get used to feeling hungry, it isn’t too bad. I would then eat a large-ish lunch and regular dinner.

The key: every hour that I feel hungry, my body is going to take that as a signal to burn fat for energy. For me that might only be 10-15 hours per week, but that was enough to lose the kilos at a rate of about one per fortnight.

Now, this was all just my only doing – no science, no diet guide. And I figure many people already do this (especially women who just have a ciggy and coffee instead of breakfast), but few would admit that sometimes they starve themselves.

Here’s the science, full article at i09:

 …Most people associate fasting with juice cleanses or religious rituals — a torturous affair that lasts an entire day if not longer, and the sort of thing that should only be done a couple of times each year. But fasts can encompass any number of different strategies, including routines that simply limit the times when you eat each day, or on certain days of the week.

For example, there’s Alternate Day Fasting (ADF) and the Two Day Diet (also known as the 5:2 diet). We’ll get into these in just a bit, but what’s really starting to take off is dailyfasting — the practice of eating only during an 8-hour window of your choosing, and then fasting for the remaining 16 hours of the day.

While some might be inclined to cynically dismiss intermittent fasting as just another fad diet, the scientific evidence in support of daily fasting (or any fasting for that matter) is compelling. Restricting caloric intake for extended periods seems to do a remarkable job of staving off a number of health problems, while yielding some definite benefits.

…One hundred days later, the free-for-all group was a mess. They gained weight, developed high cholesterol, high blood glucose, and experienced liver damage and diminished motor control (ouch).

But as for the mice who practiced the intermittent fast, they weighed 28% less and showed no signs of adverse health. And what’s remarkable is that both groups ate the same amount of calories from the same fatty food. Not only that, the fasting mice also performed better on exercise tests — including a control group of mice who were eating normal food. (You can check out the study for yourself: “Extended Daily Fasting Overrides Harmful Effects of a High-Fat Diet: Study May Offer Drug-Free Intervention to Prevent Obesity and Diabetes“)

…It’s possible to extrapolate this to humans, too. Though anthropologists are not entirely sure how our paleolithic ancestors ate, it’s unlikely that they sat down for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Those are eating routines from a more modern era — and even then, it’s likely that only the wealthy could afford multiple meals in one day. In all likelihood, our ancestors ate one or two big meals a day. And that was it. Consequently, their bodies were likely both adapted for and accustomed to going for extended periods without food during much of the day.

Other studies point to similar conclusions. Take the work of Valter Longo, for example. Longo, who works out of the University of Southern California’s Longevity Institute, has studied the effects of intermittent fasting on IGF-1, an insulin-like growth factor.

When we consume food, this hormone keeps our body in “go” mode, where our cells are driven to reproduce and facilitate growth. This is great when we need it, but not so much when we’re trying to keep off the weight. Moreover, while it’s good for growth, it can also speed up the aging process. And in fact, Longo compares the effect to “driving along with your foot hard on the accelerator pedal.”

Intermittent fasting, on the other hand, decreases the body’s expression of IGF-1. And it also appears to switch on a number of DNA repair genes. Restricted feeding, says Longo, makes our body go from “growth mode” to “repair mode.”

…Her evidence suggested that fasting can increase HDL-cholesterol (that’s the good kind), while lowering triacylglycerol concentrations. Fasting had no effect on blood pressure. She concluded her study by suggesting that fasting can modulate several risk factors that are known to bring about various chronic diseases.

…

other research shows that intermittent fasting can offer neuroprotective benefits. Studies on humans show that it can help with weight loss and reduce disease risk.

And incredibly, there may even be a link to cancer. Another study study by Varady and M. Hellerstein on mice indicated that both caloric restriction and alternate-day fasting can reduce cancer risk and reduce cell proliferation rates.

Short-term fasting can induce growth hormone secretion in men (which is a problem for guys after they hit 30), it reduces oxidative stress (fasting prevents oxidative damage to cellular proteins by decreasing the accumulation of oxidative radicals in the cell — what contributes to aging and disease onset), and it’s good for brain health, mental well-being, and clarity.

And as a study published just last week has shown, restricting calories can also lengthen telomeres — which has a protective effect on our DNA and genetic material, which in turn helps with cellular health (i.e. it helps us extend healthy lifespan).

And for people who wish to maintain a ketogenic diet — a metabolic state in which the body is in a perpetual state of fat burning instead of carbohydrate burning — intermittent fasting is a good way to help the body stay in ketosis