Slashdot Mirror

One of the reasons I write on social media is that the subconscious mind doesn't convey its knowledge in straight lines.

Maybe some people don't know this, but the five stages of grief model (formally Kübler-Ross) was basically a brilliant conversation starter. Constructive ways to talk about loss, grief, and death are relatively thin on the ground. Its half-century zeitgeist tenure was well deserved.

But the model itself is far from a physical constant of the universe, so I wasn't surprised that I got a memo from my subconscious mind right after pressing submit "you know, most people think this is a five stage model; it could even be that the only response your post gets is correcting four to five, and nobody even notices the central point."

Me to my subconscious: tell me about it.

I'm generally a stickler for precision when there's something to be precise about, but the "five" in five stages of grief functions as what linguists call a "bound lexeme". We've gotten into the habit, like the five senses (which are still the five main exo-senses, even though we've now added things like proprioception as interior senses; the bigger argument with "five" senses ought to involve its total exclusion of the entire category of wufullness—e.g. telepathy, premonition, and private messages from God about your true path in life, transmediated via the as-yet unidentified theochlorians, smack dab in the middle of the colour green, within a spectrum formed from a whole new photonic vibratory node physicists have yet to discover, though there's a flagrant clue in one of the 10^500 string theory universes, if we would just sit down and do the work).

My lexical mind still knows the difference between four/five stages of grief, but my semantic mind departed from this niggle long ago.

Then you see articles in major publications with headlines blaring: "The 12 reasons we should abandon the 5 stages". And suddenly the light dawns: Lego porn: it's a thing.

Oh, how that little number up front tickles our desire to stack conformable plastic bricks.

We used to think that young human males were particular prone to falling down antisocial rabbit holes, such as video gaming.

That was before we discovered social media. Now we know that young women fall down antisocial rabbit holes every bit as easily. As ever, men and women are mirror images, though often with the battery reversed.

In my first post, I pinned Lego porn onto a geek sub-tribe, implicitly male. My bad.

* The Five Love Languages
* 5 Ways Your Relationship Changes After Someone Cheats
etc.

All this appeals to a specific sub-tribe of cultural stereotype 'stress kitten'.

So some publication writes up a study of how psychopathic personality types are discovered to be very good as passing themselves off as thoughtful, introverted wallflowers on eharmony.

And of course this immediately triggers the stress kitten version of the 4.5 stages of grief, covered over by a think foam topping of wankette creme: "oh, but this isn't the boy I'm chatting with, because I don't go into those dark corners (because my desktop computer never runs porous security containers chock to the brim with malignant JavaScript downloaded from hither and yon)".

Yeah, right, sweetie pie. I guess that works for you.

When I go to mac donalds, I get a hamburger and a diet soda (I don't really care for the fries).
Makes sense for me, a 500-600 calorie meal. I't a nice lunch, tastes good (all beef, even MCD, is awesome this side of the world), and even has lettuce and tomato.

A standard McDonalds hamburger does not come with lettuce and tomato. Catsup, mustard, pickle, minced onions. Has 240 calories.

In your example, that double big mac has 700 calories.

A Big Mac has 530 calories. Not sure what a double Big Mac is since it isn't a standard part of McDonald's menu. By itself a Big Mac is fine now and then but people rarely eat just a Big Mac. Usually they have some fries and a sugar loaded soft drink too. This easily can get the meal over 1000 calories as you mention which is about half the daily caloric intake for an adult male.

Not a diet meal, but not that excessive. It even has a lot of lettuce, which is good against blood sugar spikes, esp. a good thing for most fat people.

No burger sold by McDonalds has "a lot of lettuce". It has at most a small piece (possibly shredded) the size of the bun. That is not a lot of lettuce using any reasonable definition of the word "lot". Furthermore to get enough fiber to actually affect blood sugar levels you would have to eat several cups of the stuff, far more than is in any McDonalds burger.

https://www.drfuhrman.com/dise...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Treating Type 1, Type 2, and Gestational Diabetes with Superior Nutrition ... With proper care, a type 1 diabetic can live a long and healthy life, with almost no risk of heart attack, stroke, or complications. Type 1 diabetics need not feel doomed to a life of medical disasters and a possible early death. With a truly health-supporting Nutritarian lifestyle, even the Type 1 diabetic can have the potential for a disease-free life and a better than average life expectancy. I find that when Type 1 diabetics adopt my high-nutrient dietary approach, they reduce their insulin requirements by at least one half. They protect their body against the heart attack promoting effects of the American diet style. They no longer have swings of highs and lows, their weight remains stable, and their glucose levels and lipids stay under excellent control. Even though the Type 1 diabetic will still require exogenous (external) insulin, they will no longer need excessive amounts of it. Remember, it is not the Type 1 diabetes that is so damaging, it is the SAD, the typical dietary advice given to Type 1s and the excessive amounts of insulin required by the SAD that are so harmful. It is simply essential for all Type 1 diabetics to learn and adopt nutritional excellence; they can use much less insulin, achieve a normal, healthy lifespan and dramatically reduce their risk of complications later in life."

An important aspect is getting enough micronutrients and fiber, which were not mentioned in your post (but you may well do).

He also has a book out on it:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/...
"This New York Times best seller offers a scientifically proven, practical program to prevent and reverse [type 2] diabetes -- without drugs. Diabetes does not have to shorten your life span or result in high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney failure, blindness or other life-threatening ailments. In fact, most type 2 diabetics can get off medication and become 100 percent healthy in just a few simple steps. This book offers no compromises, it is the most aggressive and effective approach to reverse obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and heart disease; which typically accompany type 2 diabetes. The information about Type 1 diabetes is simply life saving. It is a must read for every diabetic, as well as any nutritionally-aware person wanting to understand the failure of conventional medical care for diabetic treatments and the "no-brainer" of using nutritional excellence, not drugs."

Another aspect of this may be gut bacteria. You don't drink diet soda by any chance?
http://www.prevention.com/heal...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesa...

Ongoing research on vitamin D deficiency and diabetes:
http://www.nih.gov/news/health...

BTW, in general, I've heard that exercise, while good for our health, does not help with weight loss because we just eat more afterwards to make up for it. What controls weight in the long term is what we eat, especially micronutrients and fiber, but also good fats and some other things.

Anyway, thanks for the informative post! Glad you found an approach that works for you. Good luck. I helped manage my mother's diabetes for a time (including for a time after my father died giving her injections three times a day and monitoring blood glucose with finger sticks four times a day) and it was not easy (she had dementia and could not do it herself, and even denied she had diabetes sometimes). As you point ou

Any google search will provide any info that you'd be interested in reading. Here are some pages that you may want to read:
gut-and-weight-loss-connection
A Hidden Trigger of Obesity: Intestinal Bugs
New Study Reveals Bacteria Could Prevent Obesity and Weight Gain

There is loads of information regarding this. Don't trust me, go find the info yourself. But my point (and I'm assuming that ruir has the same point) is not that the food sits in the gut and causes the weight gain, but that improper digestion of foods leave the body in an improper shape.

There's also a few good Ted talks related to this concept:
Jeroen Raes (not sure why I can't find this on ted.com)
Heribert Watzka
Jonathan Eisen

That's only relevant if the object needs to be (or can be) lifted with that motion. If it needs to be lifted in a different way, it will involve different muscles. This motion is especially difficult for most people. Again, if a twist is needed, that is also going to be a problem.

It should also be noted that OSHA's sister agency recommends no more than 35 lbs. This doesn't mean most people can't do it, but that it's far more likely to lead to injury, especially if done frequently..

http://www.prevention.com/food/healthy-eating-tips/gmo-foods-linked-weight-gain
"As part of a long-term project studying the health effects of GM foods -- crops that have had their DNA modified to resist pesticides and drought -- researchers from Norway fed food containing GM corn to one group of rats and food containing non-GM corn to another group. Over the course of 90 days, the rats on the GM-corn diet grew fatter and ate more food than the rats on the non-GM diet. The researchers also noticed that rats got fatter when they ate fish that had been raised on GM corn."

What's the likelihood that Purina rat chow and Purina monkey chow (yes they exist) are made with cheaper GMOs? The article suggests also that food grown these days may be less nutritious in terms of micronutrients than in the past (due to depleted soils and different high-yield varieties of crops), and so creatures need to ingest more calories to get the same amount of needed micronutrients.

Another factor is "Supernormal Stimuli" of carefully crafted food to appeal in the strongest way to human desires like the American-style fast food you mention:
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose"
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X

See also, "How to escape The Pleasure Trap!":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

But I agree with the article's author when David Berreby writes: "The trap is deeper than that, however. The 'unifying logic of capitalism', [Jonathan C K ] Wells continues, requires that food companies seek immediate profit and long-term success, and their optimal strategy for that involves encouraging people to choose foods that are most profitable to produce and sell -- 'both at the behavioural level, through advertising, price manipulations and restriction of choice, and at the physiological level through the enhancement of addictive properties of foods' (by which he means those sugars and fats that make 'metabolic disturber' foods so habit-forming). In short, Wells told me via email, 'We need to understand that we have not yet grasped how to address this situation, but we are increasingly understanding that attributing obesity to personal responsibility is very simplistic.' Rather than harping on personal responsibility so much, Wells believes, we should be looking at the global economic system, seeking to reform it so that it promotes access to nutritious food for everyone. That is, admittedly, a tall order. But the argument is worth considering, if only as a bracing critique of our individual-responsibility ideology of fatness."

On stress and obesity, evolutionarily, eating more when stressed makes a lot of sense, because historically stress probably means you are uncertain about where your next meal is going to come from, so best to stock up now if you can, which means it is more likely you will survive to have and raise children later on.

Maybe that is not the best study in the world, but you seem to me to be ignoring the context here. I was originally responding to a comment that included stuff on asthma, allergies, and fibromyalgia. The page I am citing and the references covers many allergies, and fibromyalgia in that context (fibromyalgia in practice perhaps often being a catch-all phrase for joint pain which can have multiple causes). Also, you are just out of hand dismissing an MD's report on his own decades of clinical experience. And that experience is also reflected by reports by others, if you look around. It is just not extremely profitable or easy advice to give in this society, compared to pill pushing and surgery selling.

By the way:
"The relation between vitamin D deficiency and fibromyalgia syndrome in women"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21894355

And:
"5 Ways To Control Fibromyalgia With Diet: New research shows that picking these foods may ease pain"
http://www.prevention.com/node/27278
http://www.prevention.com/health/health-concerns/5-ways-control-fibromyalgia-diet/5-veg-out
"Some researchers speculate that oxidative stress may be a cause of fibro symptoms. Oxidative stress occurs when the body doesnâ(TM)t produce enough antioxidants to battle cell-damaging free radicals in the body. Most fruits and veggies are packed with important antioxidants, like vitamins A, C, and E, which fight free radicals to keep your body normalized. Certain studies also show a raw, vegan diet can improve symptoms, but thatâ(TM)s difficult for most people to follow. If you do choose to eat meat, though, opt for a small portion of grass-fed beef. "It is an excellent source of iron and vitamin B12, both nutrients which are extremely important in keeping your pain-processing nervous system healthy," says Holton."

Of course, they don't cite their studies; some other studies are mentioned here:
http://www.beyondveg.com/cat/links-out/raw-research.shtml

So, be skeptical of new information. But how about being skeptical about old information, too? And maybe going a bit further and looking around for yourself at a new idea (or an old one that was forgotten or driven out socially)? It's not very scientific to just dismiss all new ideas for lack of enough evidence (for example, what kept us from LENR (Cold Fusion) for two decades because some hot fusion scientists at MIT could not replicate an experiment in a week or two where success would have jeopardized their own livelihood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoskepticism
http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Pathological_skepticism
http://pesn.com/2011/12/27/9601994_History_of_MITs_Blatant_Suppression_of_Cold_Fusion/

The scientific enterprise in our society is so messed up in so many ways, as reflected in the quotes I collected here; one example:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased searc

Maybe that is not the best study in the world, but you seem to me to be ignoring the context here. I was originally responding to a comment that included stuff on asthma, allergies, and fibromyalgia. The page I am citing and the references covers many allergies, and fibromyalgia in that context (fibromyalgia in practice perhaps often being a catch-all phrase for joint pain which can have multiple causes). Also, you are just out of hand dismissing an MD's report on his own decades of clinical experience. And that experience is also reflected by reports by others, if you look around. It is just not extremely profitable or easy advice to give in this society, compared to pill pushing and surgery selling.

By the way:
"The relation between vitamin D deficiency and fibromyalgia syndrome in women"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21894355

And:
"5 Ways To Control Fibromyalgia With Diet: New research shows that picking these foods may ease pain"
http://www.prevention.com/node/27278
http://www.prevention.com/health/health-concerns/5-ways-control-fibromyalgia-diet/5-veg-out
"Some researchers speculate that oxidative stress may be a cause of fibro symptoms. Oxidative stress occurs when the body doesnâ(TM)t produce enough antioxidants to battle cell-damaging free radicals in the body. Most fruits and veggies are packed with important antioxidants, like vitamins A, C, and E, which fight free radicals to keep your body normalized. Certain studies also show a raw, vegan diet can improve symptoms, but thatâ(TM)s difficult for most people to follow. If you do choose to eat meat, though, opt for a small portion of grass-fed beef. "It is an excellent source of iron and vitamin B12, both nutrients which are extremely important in keeping your pain-processing nervous system healthy," says Holton."

Of course, they don't cite their studies; some other studies are mentioned here:
http://www.beyondveg.com/cat/links-out/raw-research.shtml

So, be skeptical of new information. But how about being skeptical about old information, too? And maybe going a bit further and looking around for yourself at a new idea (or an old one that was forgotten or driven out socially)? It's not very scientific to just dismiss all new ideas for lack of enough evidence (for example, what kept us from LENR (Cold Fusion) for two decades because some hot fusion scientists at MIT could not replicate an experiment in a week or two where success would have jeopardized their own livelihood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoskepticism
http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Pathological_skepticism
http://pesn.com/2011/12/27/9601994_History_of_MITs_Blatant_Suppression_of_Cold_Fusion/

The scientific enterprise in our society is so messed up in so many ways, as reflected in the quotes I collected here; one example:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased searc

What about the hirez rig for supertaster?

In the process of getting over it I learned that a massive number of people suffer ( silently ) in North America and the UK from chronic insomnia. I don't mean an occasional night without sleep that is slept off the next day, but chronic troubles getting and staying asleep.

A large number of reasons are lifestyle related. Caffeine use, being over-weight, bad sleep habits, and the way many of us live our lives.

As the article for this thread shows a lot of Americans like to drink a lot of coffee.

Americans also take in a significant amount of "hidden" caffeine through iced tea beverages, chocolates, cocoa, soft drinks ( 2 sodas == 1 cup of coffee ) and other drinks. Often Americans will consume these significant caffeine sources at later times in the day when they would not dare to have coffee or hot tea.

Coffee, on a regular basis, over years is also very hard on the human stomach and contributes to an early decline in digestive power which leads to a tougher time getting the nutrients a human body needs.

It is also a very environmentally destructive crop, severely depleting the soil where it is grown. A friend told me that South American farmers call it the "Vampire Crop".

If you want a concentrated source of antioxidants without caffeine try taking a tablespoon of organic ( to avoid getting pesticide residues ) citrus zest ( finely grated peel - the part of the peel with the color ) a week:

http://www.prevention.com/article/0,5778,s1-3-71-1 08-5616-1,00.html?

Fresh aromatic herbs area also a good source of concentrated antioxidants and cancer fighters. Use basil. It is cheap in season. It is basically a weed, is easily grown in a garden or in a pot in an apartment.

Eating cruciferous vegetables like the broccoli in Chinese food ( yay! ) will give you plenty of antioxidants. Other cruciferous vegetables that help are cabbage, collards, kale, mustard greens etc.

If you have regular trouble sleeping either with falling asleep, staying asleep, spontaneously getting up early, or not feeling rested see either a neurologist or a pulmonologist to rule out physical causes. Sleep apena is the number one physical cause and is mostly due to the weight problem Oceania is experiencing. People accumulate so much excess weight that some of it ends up in the throat region with the result of tissue sagging downwards while they sleep temporarily blocking their flow of air. The flow is unblocked with the brain forcing a brief awakening, often many times a night, often without the person knowing. Being overweight is not the only cause of sleep apena, but it accounts for the vast majority of cases.

The methods used to treat sleep apena are not pleasant. Avoid surgery. It has been found to only be 25% effective. However, losing weight can be very effective from individual to individual.

Like I wrote earlier most of sleeplessness is lifestyle related.

In other areas of our lives bad habits and stress are keeping many, many people awake.

Only use sleep medications in the short term.

Many are addictive and many ( not all ) only provide benefits for several weeks, this is true even for many of the prescription drugs.

Cognitive therapy has proven to be more effective than drugs in managing insomnia over the long term. It is cheap, shows results quickly and can be often be done on one's own after a little help.

One of the best books about improving sleep, getting rid of insomnia and getting off of medication for sleep was written by a Harvard psychologist who developed and studied his program over the course 10 years.

It combines the most effective( and prove

He compared it to the morning after pill.

One poster did. A reply made the abortion comparison.

The morning after pill is just interventive birth-control. It has absolutely nothing to do with abortions.

Actually, some radical "pro-life" pharmacists are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills now, and some doctors refsuing to issue them in the first place.

(Of course it's a stupid idea that a competent adult needs a doctors permission slip to be able to buy medicine in the first place, except maybe antibiotics...)

"I have been reading today that there are Pharmacists in the US that refuse to prescribe the contraceptive pill to women."

I've never heard of anything like that....and I live in the South...

See this link.

http://www.prevention.com/article/0,5778,s1-1-93-3 5-4130-1,00.html

From the Intro:
In April, Julee Lacey, 33, a Fort Worth, TX, mother of two, went to her local CVS drugstore for a last-minute Pill refill. She had been getting her prescription filled there for a year, so she was astonished when the pharmacist told her, "I personally don't believe in birth control and therefore I'm not going to fill your prescription." Lacey, an elementary school teacher, was shocked. "The pharmacist had no idea why I was even taking the Pill. I might have needed it for a medical condition."

Shitdrummer