Links for Monday, August 20, 2018: non-sugar carbs are fine, paint your rooftop white

It turns out eating about half your calories as carbohydrates is associated with the longest life

This isn't surprising. But it's just so hard for this kind of data to survive in a world filled with Bulletproof Coffee and other B.S. Good dietary advice is sooooooooo boring: eat a modest amount of carbohydrates. Avoid processed sugars. Don't drink too much alcohol. Avoid animal proteins and fats. If you read that last two lines without nodding off, you're either really invested in dietary information, or you're a registered dietician. It doesn't have the zing of "Wheat Belly." *Sigh*

White rooftops are a sneaky good way to combat climate change

What a weird thing to post to a health blog. But climate change has health consequences. As in, killing hundreds of thousands of people consequences. And I can speak from experience: we installed white shingles on our house in 2014, and we saw an immediate reduction in summertime heating bills of about $80/month (!). 

Rose wine has a seedy underbelly

But it all tastes like Diet Cherry 7-Up to me.

Kiwi bikes to the hospital to have labor induced

The New Zealand Minister for Woman and Associate Minister for Transport and for Health tied together her two roles in government in a nice, tidy little bike ride. When I first read the headline, I thought she'd gone by bike after having her water break or after the onset of contractions. But alas, she was off for induction. Still, this represents a rare combination of toughness and media savvy. I love the part where she says the gas-powered wheelchair wouldn't fit everyone in the family, so they had to ride bikes. She was obviously not talking about an adult Tonka Toy.

Most of us have plenty of vitamin D. And Michael Holick apparently has plenty of money from trying to convince you otherwise

This is such a bummer. The Endocrine Society (I'm a member) has positioned itself as the kinder, gentler, more conservative (that's old-timey conservative, not Rush Limbaugh conservative) alternative to AACE. But they're as vulnerable to the actions of their members as any other group:

"Dr. Holick’s crucial role in shaping that debate occurred in 2011. Late the previous year, the prestigious National Academy of Medicine (then known as the Institute of Medicine), a group of independent scientific experts, issued a comprehensive, 1,132-page report on vitamin D deficiency. It concluded that the vast majority of Americans get plenty of the hormone naturally, and advised doctors to test only patients at high risk of certain disorders, such as osteoporosis.

A few months later, in June 2011, Dr. Holick oversaw the publication of a report that took a starkly different view. The paper, in the peer-reviewed Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, was on behalf of the Endocrine Society, the field’s foremost professional group, whose guidelines are widely used by hospitals, physicians and commercial labs nationwide, including Quest. The society adopted Dr. Holick’s position that “vitamin D deficiency is very common in all age groups” and advocated a huge expansion of vitamin D testing, targeting more than half the United States population, including those who are black, Hispanic or obese — groups that tend to have lower vitamin D levels than others."

Any supplement that gets an enthusiastic recommendation from Dr. Oz should be receivee with immediate, extreme skepticism. 

Links for September 11, 2017: insect burgers, lessons from the PURE Study, death row food, and plastic in the water

I'm not bothered at all by the thought of insect larvae burgers. Are you?

For reasons I can't figure out, Swiss law allows use of only mealworm larvae, house crickets and migratory locusts. But apparently they taste fine:

The burger itself has little white specks of rice inside with traces of carrot, paprika, chili powder and pepper. After a hesitant bite, the main flavors that come out are the spices. The texture is curious, a bit like a meaty falafel with a crunch. An aftertaste lingered — but maybe that was just my subconscious playing tricks.

Sales are apparently brisk in a very limited release so far. 

See also: Chapul cricket bars, which are delicious, and the Impossible Burger.

Marion Nestle points out what we already know about the PURE Study (that's Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology): Fruits, veggies, and legumes are good for us.

And refined carbohydrates and sugar are bad. The study's "high fat" diet didn't even approach the amount of fat that most of us eat (18-30% versus 35% in the US), so it's impossible to really say what the study proved in regards to fat intake. 

See also: David Katz on PURE, James Hamblin on PURE.

On death row, food rivals porn as an obsession for inmates.

Text below, in case you want to avoid reading the grisly details of a murdered family:

The second-most-prevalent obsession is food. Longo says he actually has two photo collections: nude women and gourmet cuisine. His letters to me are filled with food cravings: "a salt bagel with a full plain cream cheese schmeer from Einstein or Brueggers — toasted, of course"; "a cinnabon with a good cup of coffee"; "a pizza"; "honey-dripping baklava." To make the institutional meals more palatable, the men sometimes hold death-row dinner parties. Several inmates will pass their trays down the row to one cell — frequently, to Longo's. He'll combine all the food together, add commissary-bought items like hot sauce, peppers, and shredded cheese, then rebuild the plates "Cadillac style," as it's called, and send the trays back.

How all this plays into the choice of a last meal, I don't know.

94% of US tap water is contaminated by plastic fibers

I cannot find data on bottled water, but considering that most of it is packaged in plastic, I suspect it's no better. Why does this matter? Well, besides the ick factor, plastics have a notorious reputation in the endocrinology world as "endocrine disruptors," meaning that they exert a hormone-like effect on tissues. The most notorious chemical within plastics with this effect is bisphenol A, which among other effects acts as an estrogen mimic.

Links for July 25, 2017: Cooking oil, Saving lives in New Jersey by raising the smoking age, and the cult of statin denial

Which cooking oil should you use?

In the above and linked infographic (from the outstanding work of informationisbeautiful.net), look for oils with a big green bar, a small red bar, and no blue at all. Here's olive oil, which is generally recognized as being one of the best oils health-wise for cooking:

This dovetails nicely with the recent re-discovery that coconut oil isn't great for you (link here; look toward the bottom).

I've become a big fan of sauteeing with avocado oil, which you see at the top of the graphic, because of its high smoke point and high monounsaturated fat content. Don't take this as an endorsement of its health effects, though. Almost no data exists on the topic. 

New Jersey just raised its smoking age, and it will probably save lives. 

"About 90 percent of adults who become daily smokers report first using cigarettes before 19 years of age, and almost 100 percent report first use before 26, according to the IOM report."

Is denial of the benefits of statin medications a cult?

"We are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of our patients to Web sites developed by people with little or no scientific expertise, who often pedal 'natural' or 'drug-free' remedies for elevated cholesterol levels."

Whether or not these websites collectively reach the threshold of "cult," their message definitely causes people to die younger than they should. (link is subscription only)

Freedom from the vortex

Maybe you’re sick. Not throwing up or coughing up blood or having a fever, at least not most of the time, but you’re on a few medications, probably for diabetes or blood pressure issues or cholesterol, and your doctor picks on you to change your diet or be more active whenever you see her. Your medications cost a couple hundred dollars per month, and every second or third time you visit the doctor she adds another one, or replaces an old, cheap medication with a newer, more expensive one.

And maybe you weigh a few pounds (or many pounds) more than you want to. You’ve tried a few diets, mostly Atkins-type stuff, or low-fat, or calorie counting, and you’ve lost weight a few times, but each time the weight eventually came back.

Maybe you’re tired all the time. You feel bad when you get up in the morning, you are fatigued and achy all day, and you don’t sleep well at night. Your doctor thinks you might be depressed, and you’ve tried a couple medications for it, but they don’t seem to help.

And maybe you worry about money. You spend a lot of it on medications, and you go through the drive-through a few times a month even though you promise yourself that you won’t, and you end up working longer hours than you want to because you need to make sure the bills get paid.

Maybe you worry about the environment. You worry that our habits are putting your kids’ futures at risk, and you worry about it, but you aren’t sure what to do. A couple of times you’ve clicked the button to buy carbon offsets when you flew somewhere, but mostly you just try to ignore the problem.

And maybe it hasn’t occurred to you that these are all different manifestations of the same problem. You read that right. There is a very good chance that your diabetes is just another manifestation of the same set of problems as your weight and your fatigue and your money issues and even climate change.

We’re gonna talk about how. This blog is about your health, but not in the way that you’re used to talking about it with your doctor. It's not about the “blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol,” kind of health that makes you feel like a gadget someone is tinkering with. It’s more about the “What do I look forward to when I get out of bed in the morning?” kind of health. Or the “What can I do today to make sure I’m happier tomorrow than I was yesterday?” kind of health. Health as freedom: freedom from false choices, freedom from medications (not all of them, but some of them), freedom from the, *ahem*, Bravo Sierra that passes for medical advice from celebrities and celebrity doctors. I’m talking to you, Dr. Oz.

You’re not going to see click-baity posts on this blog about some new supplement or cellulite-destroying cream. You’re going to see posts on how you can take control of your life back. I’m not talking about a life jacket to protect you from the evil, swirling vortex of drug companies, subsidized faux-food, and carbon-spewing cars and factories. I’m talking about the freedom of learning how to swim your way out of that vortex altogether, put your feet on dry land, and walk away. All those people wrapped in spandex and padding away on a commercial gym’s treadmill under creepy fluorescent lights: do you think they’re free? They sure don’t look like it to me. You, with dry feet, having sprung once and for all from the vortex and now walking one foot in front of the other toward a happier, healthier life: that’s what freedom looks like.

I intend to be your guide along this path to medical freedom. I want to teach you a new way to think about your health; a way that allows you to make decisions that are your own and that will get you out of the vortex. You know the last time you had a bad cold, and you felt guilty for taking all the healthy days you had before that for granted, and you wondered when you would finally feel normal again? Remember how you said to yourself that you’d never take a healthy day for granted again? Once you claw your way out of the vortex, you won’t. And it will be because you MADE that next healthy day. You will have made it yourself, with your own hands and feet and decisions. If you believe me, I’ll see you at the next post.