Links for July 24, 2017: Athletes and their pee habits, mobile farmers' markets, and surgery as a placebo

Athletes are very resourceful at finding places to go when nature calls

Bill Walker at Kansas State (hail alma mater) was well-known for urinating into towels on the bench. He's not alone:

Mobile farmers' markets are hitting the road.

Food trucks are a surprisingly durable trend. So maybe it's no surprise. 

Surgery is one hell of a placebo.

You should still avoid it whenever possible. The average American has eight (8!) surgeries in his/her life. That's too many. 

This doesn't happen naturally.

Anabolic steroids are an integral part of the bodybuilding scene.

Why does this matter? Because they make people die young. An astonishing fraction of pro wrestlers, who also abuse performance-enhancing drugs in large numbers, die before age 60, and they die of things we associate with androgen abuse: liver cancer, suicide, risky behavior, and heart disease.

Michael Oher, subject of "The Blind Side," cannot pass a physical because of concussions.

I'm short on the long-term future of football in its current form.

Do Americans spend on health care just because we're a nation of consumers?

I'm skeptical. I hold out hope that Americans, if given the right version of price transparency, might spend less. But this series of graphs is pretty convincing to Tyler Cowen's argument:

ADDENDUM (7/24/17 11:28 AM): Is the President fit?

I suspect the headline is a double-entendre, but at least in terms of physical fitness, the answer is very clearly "no." But I'm not sure it matters that much, especially in the context of the swirl of controversy that surrounds the rest of the administration. 

Links for July 17, 2017: open streets, placebo diets, hair dyes and cancer risk, the sedgwick county CHIP, bad sleep and junk food, and the lengthening of your life with dietary choices

Open Streets ICT is coming. Are you ready?

Are diets just placebos?

Is your hair dye increasing your risk of breast cancer?

Hair products, conveniently, seem to never get the wrath that other "artificial" lifestyle products (artificial sweeteners, preservatives, herbicides) get. Does this study change that? I doubt it.

Have you seen the Sedgwick County CHIP?

That's Community Health Improvement Plan, which is even more delicious than what you were thinking of...

Sleeping poorly may make junk food seem a lot more appealing.

The data is still maturing on this topic, but it's starting to look pretty obvious that we should all sleep more, for reasons obvious and not-so-obvious. I can speak from experience. During my internship, one of the hospitals I covered had a cafeteria that was free--in unlimited quantities--to trainees. I fell into a nasty habit of 3 am cheesecake binges during my in-house nights on call. It was ugly...

This paper deserves to be mentioned much higher in the list, but I may have more to say about it later. So...for the one-thousanth time, we have evidence that dietary choices can prolong or shorten your life.

Using one of three diet indices, investigators publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine found that "[a] 20-percentile increase in diet scores (indicating an improved quality of diet) was significantly associated with a reduction in total mortality of 8 to 17%." For the sake of comparison, taking a statin medication for cholesterol in high-risk people is associated with about a fourteen percent reduction in mortality. And to stave off the angry emails, I know that the statin data comes from high-quality randomized trials, while the referenced dietary study is observational. But still.