Tag: nutrition

Random Thoughts: Stuff We Know That’s A Lie

The List of Health Fallacies Continues to Grow

Being mumble mumble years old, I’ve lived through dozens, perhaps even hundreds of claims about what is or is not good for your health, only to see many of those claims turn out to be blatantly, even ridiculously wrong. The latest is the standing desk. That’s what got this train of thought started.

A few years ago someone had one of those “Aha!” moments. People who have a sedentary lifestyle generally have shorter life spans and poorer health than those who are physically active, they thought. So that must mean that sitting at a desk in an office all the time must be bad for your health, they thought. So we need to throw all of our traditional desks and chairs out and get desks that make us stand up all the time. You’ll burn more calories, get more exercise and generally it will improve your health. And almost immediately many people jumped on the bandwagon, especially the desk manufacturers who saw the opportunity to scam sell standing desks to company managers who dearly love to torment and torture their employees and otherwise make their lives a living hell.

(Sidenote: Even worse is the abomination known as the walking desk. This is a desk where you not only have to stand up, but it also has a treadmill built into it so you have to walk while you’re trying to work. There is a special circle in Hell just for people who come up with this kind of crap. At least I hope there is. Right alongside of the same bunch who came up with the “poverty simulator” the school district I worked at forced all employees to attend where underpaid school employees who were, in fact, already poor, were forced to pretend they were even more poor for an entire afternoon.)

But those of us who have ever worked in the grocery store or retail store environment would have immediately laughed you out of the room if anyone had bothered to ask us. One of the leading causes of workman’s compensation claims by employees at grocery stores and other retail businesses is physical injury caused by… Guess what? Yeah, standing for prolonged periods of time. Lower back injuries, knee injuries, ankle and foot injuries, deep vein thrombosis, other circulation problems… The list goes on and on. New studies indicate that working at a standing desk does nothing to improve cardiovascular health and can even cause significant health problems.

So standing/walking desks join a long list of other nonsense that have made their way into the “it’s good for you” world of nonsense. Here are a few others.

Coffee has long been claimed to cause all sorts of health problems ranging form sleeplessness to cancer. While it will indeed keep you from sleeping, the rest is complete nonsense. We now know that moderate coffee consumption has many significant health benefits. It seems to help to prevent some types of cancers. It seems to prevent or at least delay or make less serious some kinds of dementia.

Stretching before exercising? Doesn’t seem to do any good at all. It might feel good, might seem to make sense in a way, but in actual clinical studies it did not reduce the number of injuries when done before strenuous exercise. In fact, in some cases stretching before doing proper warmups sometimes actually caused injuries.

Milk? All that stuff about how good it is for you? Yeah, well… Sorry, no. Milk does provide a lot of nutrition, but all of that nutrition can be obtained from other sources easily. You don’t need milk. You certainly don’t need it for bone health. In fact, studies have shown that people who consume large amounts of milk actually have more fractures and bone health issues than those who drink little or no milk.

How about cholesterol? Eating foods high in cholesterol has little or no effect on your blood cholesterol levels so avoiding those foods does little or nothing to reduce your blood cholesterol levels. The reason why is that your body needs cholesterol. Needs it so much that it makes its own. There are some exceptions for some people with a particular genetic heritage, but generally speaking dietary cholesterol has little or no effect on blood cholesterol. A diet high in saturated fats can increase your blood cholesterol, but except for a minority of people who have that specific genetic situation, eating foods high in cholesterol has little or no effect on blood cholesterol.

We all know that a glass of wine occasionally is a good thing, right? Wrong. So many people bought into that nonsense that even my doctor was advising me to have one or two drinks a week even though I can’t stand the stuff. He, and they, were wrong. A more careful examination of the data used to indicate that there was some kind of health advantage to drinking certain types of alcohol like red wine has proven that those benefits were illusory. All that guff about the antioxidants in wine being good for you? Yeah, the problem with that is that for you to get enough of those antioxidants to do any good you’d have to drink gallons of the stuff every day. What it boils down to is that there is no health benefit from even moderate consumption of any type of alcoholic beverage, and alcohol consumption at any level causes an increased risk of cancer.

But enough. I’m getting bored and I’m sure you are too.

Coming Up!

Yes, I’m still alive. Yes, I’m still fiddling around with stuff, but I’ve been so busy with gardening and other summer stuff I haven’t had time to do much writing. Plus my laziness index seems to have gone up significantly lately, so there’s that.

I’ve got several projects in the works. I’m building an 8 legged robot because why not.

I’ve also decided I hate my bedroom clock so I’ve decided to build my own clock radio using a clock module I got from Ukraine that uses some kind of Cold War era electro luminescent numeric display salvaged from some kind of old Russian hardware and an AM/FM radio kit that comes as a bare circuit board that I have to put together myself because, well, also why not?

I still need to get my off center fed dipole up before the snow flies. I like the mag loop antenna a lot but I need the OCFD not just for amateur radio but also for short wave broadcast band listening. And to get that up I have to dig a hole to put in a 16 foot post, pour cement and… I did mention I’m lazy, right?

The great nutrient collapse

The atmosphere is literally changing the food we eat, for the worse. And almost nobody is paying attention. Source: The great nutrient collapse

I don’t lead off these epistles with links to outside sources very often, but this one at Politico, of all places, is a wee bit scary and it’s something that effects all of us because it’s about our food.

So here’s the background: We’ve known for some time that the nutrient density in the plants we eat has dwindled over the last century. Concentrations of minerals, vitamins, etc. in plants has been shrinking. Our produce, on average, now has fewer nutrients per kilo of plant material than it had when the measurements first began. It’s been assumed that there were two reasons why.

First, our farming techniques have changed drastically over the last hundred years. We’ve moved to “industrial” farming, which relies on heavy applications of artificial fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. By dramatically altering the environment the plants grow in, we’ve also alters the chemical composition of the plants.

Second, over the centuries we’ve bred plants to grow faster, produce more fruit or grain, and to produce fruits that last longer after picking and which are tough enough to tolerate rough harvesting and shipping conditions. When selecting plants for these traits, we’ve often ignored things like the nutrient content of the plant and flavor. So we’ve ended up with plants that produce fruit that can be stored longer, is easier to harvest, etc. but which is lower in nutrients and flavor.

But that isn’t all that’s been going on, it seems. Apparently increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere seem to have played a significant role in decreasing the nutrient levels in plants.

Maybe… The thing is, this is difficult to test for. The testing requires extensive, difficult to accomplish, and rather expensive experiments, and while there are scientists who would like to do the testing, it has been difficult to get funding to actually do it.

As of right now I don’t think the science is actually settled. The preliminary testing that has been done tends to support the belief that increased atmospheric CO2 levels can indeed result in lower nutrition levels in the plants. But there is still a lot we don’t know. We also don’t know how serious of a problem this may be. A  lot more testing and experiments need to be done to answer all of the questions that need answers.