Category: Health

So, is it okay to start complaining about how my pants are getting a little loose, or how I need to buy a new belt?

I think we’re still going to discourage Katherine from doing it.

Dr Bischinger said: “With the finger you can get to places you just can’t reach with a handkerchief, keeping your nose far cleaner. And eating the dry remains of what you pull out is a great way of strengthening the body’s immune system.
“Medically it makes great sense and is a perfectly natural thing to do. In terms of the immune system the nose is a filter in which a great deal of bacteria are collected, and when this mixture arrives in the intestines it works just like a medicine.
“Modern medicine is constantly trying to do the same thing through far more complicated methods, people who pick their nose and eat it get a natural boost to their immune system for free.”

(via InstaPundit)

After a week and a half in Faerie, split between the bountiful table of the In-laws and the business dinners and lunches of my management meeting, the big weigh-in this morning came out to …

… the same as I as on the 13th of th emonth, before we took off. Huzzah! And I don’t feel like I starved myself or missed all sorts of keep foodstuffs. Yeah, I didn’t have seconds of a lot of things, and didn’t snack, and didn’t order as much dessert as I might have otherwise, but, heck, I can (obviously) do without.

And now that I’m back on my regular schedule/food, I should be back on track losing weight, instead of simply holding steady … 🙂

Mmmmm. Chicken tikka was a staple of ours when Margie and I last went to Britain on our own. Turns out those “colors not found in nature” that it sometime sports may be unhealthy as well as unnatural.

Random tests ordered by Trading Standards officers in Surrey suggest 57% of Indian restaurants in the county use “illegal and potentially dangerous” levels of dyes to give the sauce its distinctive orange-red hue. […] Out of 102 curry houses sampled, only 44 were using the colourings within legal limits. One restaurant, in Woking, was using four times the legal limit of colouring in its curry. Trading standards now plans to test every curry house in the county.
The tests focused on the use of three specific chemicals – Tartrazine (E102), Sunset Yellow (E110) and Ponceau 4R (E124). The Hyperactive Children’s Support Group believes all three are linked to hyperactivity in children. The colourings, which are only dangerous if taken excessively over a prolonged period, have also been linked to a string of other medical conditions in tests.
Tartrazine, a dye made from coal tar, is banned in Norway, Finland and Austria. As well as being used in a variety of cakes, soft drinks and sauces, some egg manufacturers feed it to their chickens to make their yolks extra yellow. But scientists believe it can cause blurred vision and purple skin patches and is particularly hazardous for asthmatics and anyone allergic to aspirin.
Sunset Yellow is also banned in Norway and Finland but elsewhere is used in juices, sweets and sauces. Scientists have linked it with chromosome damage and kidney tumours as well as abdominal pain, hives, nausea and vomiting.
Ponceau 4R, which is illegal in the USA and Norway, is believed to cause cancer in animals.

Jeez. Whatever happened to having to worry about kitchen conditions when you visited a restaurant?

(via BoingBoing)

The legend on the side of the can of Pepsi One says, “Tastes more like a Regular Cola.” Which I always scoffed at …

… until I started drinking a lot more diet stuff. And, yeah, it actually does, in comparison to, like, Diet Pepsi.

I had someone last night, and someone else this morning, both observe that I looked like I’d lost weight. And other people around them said, “Yeah, I noticed that, too.”

I’ll be damned.

Quoth Margie, watching me key in foods I’ve eaten to my database: “You know, Dave, I haven’t said this enough but, I’m really proud of you and your Geek Diet.”

Thanks, love.

Started out last Saturday at 238 lbs.

Weighted in this morning — after breakfast — at 233.

I am, frankly, flabbergasted. (And, yes, I realize that these are probably the easiest and fasted pounds. Still …)

For the last week, cumulative, I was almost 2000 calories below my target, even including the Very Nice Dinner we went to last night. And I don’t feel like I’ve been fasting or cutting myself off from All That’s Good and Tasty. I’m just … aware.

One week at a time.

UPDATE: For those insterested, I’ve ended up using BalanceLog to track stuff — supplementing from sites like this for foods that aren’t in its database.

First time out at lunch since I started the new regimen. Hit Tokyo Joe’s (which finally has a web site, launched coincidentally, today). I ordered the usual thing (regular white chicken bowl, white rice, spicyaki sauce, with veggies), and picked up a nutrition sheet.

Alas, their sheet doesn’t include cholesterol and sodium info (the latter’s probably pretty high, as with most Asian cooking). Sent off an e-mail to the CEO asking about the missing info (though I was able to extrapolate it from the info they did give).

And then the walk back. Now, I’ve prided myself on walking at lunch, but that’s about 10 minutes each way of vigorous strolling (nose in book, Belle-like). With quick eatnig, I’m back at my desk in a little over half an hour.

Today I decided to stretch that exercise, fill out the entire lunch hour.

Good news is, I found a route to take around Denver West that covers that time period.

Bad news is, even in the (sunny) 50° weather, I was getting sweaty, and that means I’m going to be sweating like a pig come summer if I do that, and I’d rather not bring a change of shirts or anything.

Still, 10+40 minutes of brisk walking is better than a poke in the gut with a sharp stick. We’ll see how it goes.

When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When you buy a new car, you start spotting all the other cars of that model on the road. And, by the same token, when you start doing diet/healthy/awareness things, you keep spotting stuff in that vein, be it humor or non-humor.

Heh.

Hopefully this obsession will dwindle into the background, and I can go back to nattering about more interesting things, soon.

Sick today. Probably still sick tomorrow.

Margie getting sick, too.

Kitten, not so sick. Oh, boy.

Forget about Mad Cow Disease. You’re in much greater danger from your kitchen.

Professor Anderson filmed more than 100 people preparing dinner and found that only two did not cross-contaminate raw meat with fresh vegetables.
It is not only people’s hands, though. Dish towels, sinks, refrigerator door handles and warm, moist, crevice-filled sponges are also breeding grounds for bacteria. “A sponge that’s been in use for no more than two or three days in a kitchen will harbor millions of bacteria,” said Elizabeth Scott, co-director of the Simmons Center for Hygiene and Health in the Home at Simmons College in Boston. That’s a problem, she said, “if you pick up the pathogen or a pathogenic E. coli, salmonella or campylobacter on the sponge.”
She added: “That means that any time you use the sponge to wipe up a surface you are potentially spreading those pathogens.”

So why are people a lot more likely to go bonkers over one cow in Washington?

“The basic reality is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different,” said Dr. Peter M. Sandman, a risk communication consultant in Princeton, N.J. “Risks that you control,” Dr. Sandman said, “are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your control. In the case of mad cow, it feels like it’s beyond my control. I can’t tell if my meat has prions in it or not. I can’t see it, I can’t smell it. Whereas dirt in my own kitchen is very much in my own control. I can clean my sponges. I can clean the floor.”
Dread is another factor, Dr. Sandman said. People can deal with sick stomachs, but they absolutely dread the idea of rotting brains.

Most people know about nuking sponges and changing their dish towels regularly. Most folks know about cutting boards, too — and a lot of what they know about those is wrong.

Professor Cliver’s other notable discovery involved cutting boards. “Somewhere along the line, wood got a bad name,” Professor Cliver said. Part of the blame, he said, must go to the rubber industry, which assailed wood cutting boards in order to promote hard rubber and plastic. In recent years, it has become conventional wisdom that plastic cutting boards are safer and easier to clean than wood cutting boards. Even the Food and Drug Administration says that plastic is less likely to harbor bacteria and easier to clean.
But in a study Professor Cliver conducted, he found that cellulose in wood absorbs bacteria but will not release it. “We’ve never been able to get the bacteria down in the wood back up on the knife to contaminate food later,” he said.
Plastic absorbs bacteria in a different way. “When a knife cuts into the plastic surface, little cracks radiate out from the cut,” Professor Cliver said. The bacteria, he said, “seem to get down in those knife cuts and they hang out. They go dormant. Drying will kill, say, 90 percent of them, but the rest could hang around for weeks.”

Dishwashing them doesn’t seem to do much good, either.

And while cooking food properly takes care of the food itself, the surroundings may already be contaminated.

In an experiment performed by Professor Anderson of Utah State University, she and her colleagues covered a chicken with a product called Glo Germ, which is invisible in daylight but visible when exposed to ultraviolet light. The chicken was given to a home cook, who was asked to prepare it. By the time the chicken was done, Professor Anderson said, the light revealed chicken juices everywhere — on the counter, in the sink, on cabinet handles, even on the sippy cup of the cook’s 2-year-old child.
Chuck Gerba, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of Arizona who has studied bacteria in home kitchens, said that he found that people who had the cleanest-looking kitchens were often the dirtiest. Because “clean” people wipe up so much, they often end up spreading bacteria all over the place. The cleanest kitchens, he said, were in the homes of bachelors, who never wiped up and just put their dirty dishes in the sink.

The one piece of advice that everyone seems to agree on, though, is just what your mother told you. Wash your hands in hot soapy water. Bet on it.

(via Cronaca)

Margie, as was mentioned briefly before, is suffering from a Serious Tooth Ailment, leading to great pain and general misery. It’s pretty clearly (as she describes it) an abcess. The inimitable Doctor Dave (not me, a family dentist friend) prescribed some amoxycillin, and she’s been regularly downing acetominophen with codeine. The pain comes and goes, but more of the former than the latter.

Yesterday she got a reference to a local dentist, who took $65 of her money to tell her that it was a tooth that had already had root canal done on it, and thus naught could be done. But the amoxycillin should be kicking in Real Soon Now, so have a nice day.

Visit with our own dentist is scheduled for next Thursday at home. Urk.

Not that she’s the only one slogging through pain this festive season, but it’s a not-happy time for her. I’m hoping the promised Real Soon Now turns out to be.