health
bioephemera | March 14, 2010One of my pet peeves is the idea that BMI provides an accurate indication of individual health. It doesn't. It's useful across populations (and may be useful to individuals to monitor progress), but when it comes to indicating which individuals are "healthier", BMI fails miserably - and our new Sciblings at Obesity Panacea do a great job of explaining why.
If, as a policy matter, we want to differentiate between the healthy and unhealthy - which is a big if, depending on how libertarian you are - let's make such assessments meaningfully, using a workout that proves general endurance and…
bioephemera | March 14, 2010
Only National Geographic would dare cross The Amazing Race with the mystery of conception to get. . . The Great Sperm Race:
Each of us was the grand prize in an ultimate reality competition, the amazing race a sperm makes on the road to fertilization. Millions of sperm compete while overcoming armies of antibodies, treacherous terrain and impossible odds to reach their single-minded goal. To illustrate the full weight of the challenge, Sizing Up Sperm uses real people to represent 250 million sperm on their marathon quest to be first to reach a single egg.
Obviously there aren't 250 million…
esiegel | March 10, 2010A bad day for your ego is a great day for your soul. -Jillian Michaels
One of the most popular exercises at the gym is the treadmill. And why wouldn't it be? Whether you're running or walking, it's a great way to get your heart rate up, get your body moving, and for many people, a great way to burn calories.
But however you use a treadmill, there's one extremely simple thing you can do to dramatically intensify your workout: incline it!
If you're an outdoor walker/runner, this is the equivalent of going uphill instead of over level ground. There are many physiological differences in walking…
pronald | March 10, 2010 For the 2010 Pi day bakeoff, I baked a Swiss chard-Gruyere pie.
Shown here is the backdrop to our garden:a mural on the side of our barn, painted with California poppies, rice plants, sunflowers and (look closely) a red double helix. Artist: Jim McCall, Elastic Media.
Here is the recipe:
First, gather as many ingredients as you can from your garden. In our garden, I found multi-colored swiss chard, Kale, chives, thyme and parsley.
Next, prepare the crust:
1 cup barley flour2 cups white flour
1 tsp salt
1 cup unsalted butter
1/2 cup unsalted margarine, frozen
grated rind of 1…
pronald | March 9, 2010Check out this great post by Mary M on biofortifed. In it she reviews a new research paper that describes how the use of Bt could potentially save the lives of millions.
You can download a video about the researchers and their work here.
From Mary's post: "For some people, a great deal of the conflama around genetically-engineered (GE) crops has to do with the presence of a pesticide in the plant material--mainly the Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt protein--rather than coating the surface of the plant as organic Bt sprays or chemical-style pesticides would. No matter how many times I explain…
razib | March 3, 2010I'm hearing about rumblings at 23andMe, and not in a good way. The company made a big splash a few years ago, and came highly recommended by friends (e.g., "They know their science, and have a bottomless pool of money"). This story at BNET got my attention though, and confirmed what many have been hinting at, or just telling me straight-up. Let's start the from the beginning. Back in late 2008 23andMe seemed absolutely untouchable. Here's Andrew Yates of Think Gene from then:
People, 23andMe isn't going anywhere. They are the Bill & Melinda Gates Sergey & Anne Brin Foundation,…
omnibrain | March 3, 2010Trying to lose weight? Need extra motivation? Don't want to spend 1000's on a diet program and personal trainer? Afraid of drugs or cutting big chunks out of your intestine? This might just be the most important diet craze to sweep the nation and solve our obesity problem. Read on to find out the secret to dropping those pounds...
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grrlscientist | February 25, 2010tags: neuroscience, health, medicine, health care, blindness, poverty, India, Pawan Sinha, TEDTalks, streaming video
Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops. Dr Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their…
aardvarchaeology | February 20, 2010Yesterday the parents of a 17-y-o Malmö boy who suffers from autism lost a case in the Swedish court of appeal, Hovrätten. They had sued their insurance company for not recognising their claim for compensation. The parents blame the boy's condition on common vaccines, which would have entitled them to insurance money, while the company holds that autism is almost always congenital and never caused by vaccines. The court found the science presented by the defendant convincing and ruled in the company's favour.
I'm glad that the judicial system values scientific knowledge. But I am saddened…
grrlscientist | February 14, 2010tags: food, health, healthy eating, healthy food, cooking, portion size, obesity, overweight, Jamie Oliver, TEDTalks, streaming video
In this affecting video, TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver shares powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., and makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.
Jamie Oliver is transforming the way we feed ourselves, and our children. Jamie Oliver has been drawn to the kitchen since he was a child working in his father's pub-restaurant. He showed not only a precocious culinary talent but also a passion for creating (and…
grrlscientist | January 27, 2010tags: health, medicine, TEDMED,health care, medical records, GPS, geography, geomedicine, Bill Davenhall, TEDTalks, streaming video
Where you live: It impacts your health as much as diet and genes do, but it's not part of your medical records. At TEDMED, Bill Davenhall shows how overlooked government geo-data (from local heart-attack rates to toxic dumpsite info) can mesh with mobile GPS apps to keep doctors in the loop. Call it "geo-medicine."
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the…
razib | January 25, 2010David Goldstein, a geneticist at Duke, has critiqued the current focus on large-scale genomwide associations before. Now he is taking to the next step, as his group has a paper out which suggests that the reason that association studies have been relatively unfruitful in terms of bang-for-buck is due to the fact that they're picking up "synthetic associations." Rare Variants Create Synthetic Genome-Wide Associations:
It has long been assumed that common genetic variants of modest effect make an important contribution to common human diseases, such as most forms of cardiovascular disease,…
cagapakis | January 25, 2010There's a funny article over at H+ magazine called "Get Naked: It's Good for Your Brain," telling us exactly that:
Clothing is crushing us! Trapped in tomb-like textiles, we exile our flesh from experiencing the environment. We atrophy the majority of our epidermis. If you put a plaster cast on a broken arm, the skin starves for Vitamin D; muscles weaken due to strangled range of motion; nerve synapses depress to a whimper of their former joy. Twenty-first century hominids shroud the entire skin palette, obliterating symbiosis with the planet except via face, neck and hands. (Burqa-clad…
razib | January 17, 2010One of the things about evolution you sometimes hear is that it has "stopped" for humans. Steve Jones, a British geneticist, is one of the more prominent public expositors of this viewpoint today. The key fact that most people latch on to is that infant and child mortality is very low, so the vast majority of humans reach the age of potential reproduction. Random genetic drift aside, evolution via natural selection does not necessarily need differential mortality as a necessary precondition (though this is obviously an efficacious mechanism from the viewpoint of evolution). All that needs to…
razib | January 16, 2010I was doing some exploring of the effect of a transition to agriculture on human height. Until the past few centuries humans were much shorter than they had been during the Ice Age. In the process I came upon some interesting data. Height, health, and development:
Adult height is determined by genetic potential and by net nutrition, the balance between food intake and the demands on it, including the demands of disease, most importantly during early childhood. Historians have made effective use of recorded heights to indicate living standards, in both health and income, for periods where…
razib | January 14, 2010Raising Kids May Lower Blood Pressure:
A new Brigham Young University study found that parenthood is associated with lower blood pressure, particularly so among women.
...
The study involved 198 adults who wore portable blood pressure monitors, mostly concealed by their clothes, for 24 hours.
The monitors took measurements at random intervals throughout the day -- even while participants slept. This method provides a better sense of a person's true day-to-day blood pressure. Readings taken in a lab can be inflated by people who get the jitters in clinical settings. It's a real phenomenon…
esiegel | January 8, 2010Darn it! I'm sick and tired of being a scarecrow! Charles Atlas says he can give me a real body. All right! I'll gamble a stamp and get his free book!
-Countless Magazine and Comic Book Ads
Last weekend, Abbie over at ERV proclaimed herself the fittest person on Scienceblogs, and one of my readers thought I might have something to say about that. I sure do; I'm going to tell you what -- as a complete and total amateur -- fitness means to me.
Fitness, for me, is about meeting your goals for your body and your life. What does that mean for you? Do you want to be able to run a marathon (or a…
razib | January 6, 2010I got interested in vitamin D a few years ago because I was trying to figure out a plausible explanation for why many of the genetic variants implicated in lighter skin seem to have risen in frequency relatively recently, 10,000 years ago, when modern humans have been extant at higher latitudes on the order of 30,000 years. So I started mooting the speculative idea that the switch to agriculture might have reduced vitamin D levels. Initially I assumed that rickets was the main issue, but over the past few years there has been a veritable explosion in the medical literature pointing to…
razib | January 6, 2010The Accuracy of Stated Energy Contents of Reduced-Energy, Commercially Prepared Foods:
The accuracy of stated energy contents of reduced-energy restaurant foods and frozen meals purchased from supermarkets was evaluated. Measured energy values of 29 quick-serve and sit-down restaurant foods averaged 18% more than stated values, and measured energy values of 10 frozen meals purchased from supermarkets averaged 8% more than originally stated. These differences substantially exceeded laboratory measurement error but did not achieve statistical significance due to considerable variability in the…
razib | December 31, 2009Yeah, you read that right. Overweight and obesity in urban Africa: A problem of the rich or the poor?:
Descriptive results showed that the prevalence of urban overweight/obesity increased by nearly 35% during the period covered. The increase was higher among the poorest (+50%) than among the richest (+7%). Importantly, there was an increase of 45-50% among the non-educated and primary-educated women, compared to a drop of 10% among women with secondary education or higher. In the multivariate analysis, the odds ratio of the variable time lapse was 1.05 (p<0.01), indicating that the…