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Take Your Vitamins, On Pain Of Pain
dacap writes "The American diet continues to deteriorate. In the news is the exacerbation of bone disease from a deficiency of vitamin D. Too little vitamin D also causes muscle pain and joint problems. How is it that we let something so easily remedied affect us? Details are in USA Today. The ultimate solution to this and many other health-related problems that techies suffer is a proper diet coupled with a multivitamin supplement and regular exercise. Too bad that these choices are so unpopular. A sound mind and sound body go together."
Translated:
"Americans are, as a whole, fat, unhealthy, lazy, arrogant bastards"
(I'll go find some exceptions in a few minutes)
Just drink about a litre of milk a day. You'll be fine.
How about sunbathing between 08.00-10.00 a.m. Exposure to sunlight is one of the main sources of vitamin D
Even in high school physical education hardly any time was spent on learning about caring for your body. You'd learn various sports, spend a bit of time learning to dance and a little bit of time learning how to not knock up a girl. No time that I can recall was spent on learning how to stretch or how to build a meal that has all the nutrients you need. I've learned a lot of these things on my own but most of the other engineers I work with never did and just bitch and moan that they're sore after 30 minutes of water skiing, don't have any energy while pounding a Big Mac, fries and a gallon of Coca-Cola into their mouths.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
That's the spin in the article but there's no evidence given of any factor that has changed. Or even numbers to support a rise in rickets.
My guess is that a combination of kids' drinking less milk in favor of Mountain Dew and Big Gulps and their spending less time outside makes up a large part of the problem, but who knows? Clearly, a lot of it is simply that the UK and northern US simply get so little sun that the risk is always there.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Well, benefits of milk are largely contested. Generaly, only north americans drink milk during their mature life. Montignac's last book (I never read any of his books) discuss the milk myth.
;-)
On the multivitamin issue, these are really "dangerous" if taken everyday. This was the result of an study I made many years ago. The reason is simple, multivitamins added to normal meal might give you too much of liposoluble vitamins and makes you sick ! (liposolubles are elements that goes in the body fat and stays and accumulates there, may eventually generate problems...)
I guess the trick is easy, just eat a balanced diet. (but what is balance ?
Animoog.org
how people who spend hours and hours working on a machine to make it pur like a kitten and run at its peak efficiency can eat garbage, fatty, high-carb food. and on top of it, not exercise.
WHAT YOU PUT IN YOUR BODY, IS EQUIVALENT TO WHAT YOU GET OUT!
It's like putting a 486SX with 8MB RAM in a cluster of decent machines and expecting it to do the same amount of work. I doesn't happen.
Lots of water, vitamins, no fatty foods, moderate exercise = better quality of life, self-esteem, etc.
And speaking as someone who has lost 40 lbs. in the last year, I can attest to that.
Get paid to code OSS
Fat people need to consume just as much as ever.
Eventually they die, and need
Fat caskets
But, before you die, you should relax:
Fat Vacations
And of course they need a community to be a part of:
Their own Internet 'Fat Portal'
You can blame Margaret Thatcher for stopping children's milk in our schools way back when if you want, but the problem is far more serious than that, I think. With all the faddy and medically unproven diets such as Atkins being bandied about, how many parents are foisting those diets on thier children without any idea of the effects? I will not be at all suprised if medical disorders developed by bad diets in childhood are going to become as much of a problem for the health services as smoking related illnesses are now.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Reading the artical to the end I discovered the worry is because 9 out of every 1 million babies (mostly black) babies have problems due to lack of vitamin D. This isn't all that significant. Not saying that people shouldn't get more vitamin D, but it looks more like some people need to make sure they get enough. (Dark skinned people don't make as much vitamin D)
If you eat anything even approaching a reasonable diet, you don't need vitamin tablets (barring things like anemia). In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if people let themselves or their children eat crappier diets because they're "making up for it" with a pill.
(and yes, I do survive on chips and McD's $1 cheese sticks. Bite me)
Good thing that I use the Equate version of Slim Fast. I drink 2 for breakfast and 1 for lunch... I omit the 30 min. of exercise though. Each can has about a third of all needed vitmains and minerals. Of course, I always wonder how much of those go down the toliet. Well, I mainly stick to it because it is cheaper and "healthier" than anything else I could pick for myself to eat for lunch. It's either that or McDonalds... Hey, I do spoil myself every now and then.
Yes, we should exercise more, and yes, we should eat better, but it looks like vitamin D deficiency is mainly a problem with kids because their bones are still growing and forming.
:-).
I suppose it's a nice frame to hang a discussion of diet and exercise on, but the issue itself doesn't seem like it applies to most of us.
Being in Southern California, and being outdoors way more than 45 minutes a week, it would appear that I'm taken care of for this problem. Pity that doesn't make me any lighter
From my viewpoint, the real problem is that exercise strikes me as a mindless waste of time and effort. I watch people in gyms mindlessly walking to nowhere or pulling stuff on machines until they sweat and ache, and to be honest it sounds like a miserable, dumb and unproductive way to spend time.
Exercise and better diet strike me as a lot of pain for little gain. The negative effects on one's life show up immediately and the positive ones take huge amounts of time to appear. So it's all too easy to give up and say it's just not worth it.
That explains the problem; as of yet I have not come up with anything like a solution. But perhaps this statement of the problem will give people some ideas.
D
Another article bought and paid for by the Dairy Councel. Just my 2 cents
You mean I can't just cut all the bread out of my diet and get healthy eating nothing but beef and cheese? I have to eat vegetables and go for walks!?
If everyone acted like did before food came from the supermarket they'd be healthy. That means exercise, drink water, don't eat sugar, eat meat, vegetables, and fruit and that's a recipie for a healthy life.
The ultimate solution to this and many other health-related problems that techies suffer is a proper diet coupled with a multivitamin supplement and regular exercise. Too bad that these choices are so unpopular.
I hereby reject the notion that poor nutrition and lack of exercise are problems that "techies" suffer any more than other groups of similar composition (age, gender, education, etc.). Not all "techies" are anti-social pasty-faced overweight Jolt-drinking pizza-gobbling couch potatoes. In fact, I don't currently know any of those.
What does marital status have to do with the level of care one gives their child?
Not everyone can stay together. That doesn't mean they don't want to care for their children however.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
How is that supposed to increase your self-esteem really? If you already like yourself the way you are then it's not much of an incentive. And as for quality of life, I'm happy with mine the way it is. It should not be hard to understand that different people have different values when it comes to such things.
I remember Vitamin A, also. It may be both.
I hate it when people talk about raising kids, saying things like "Just substitute raisins for M&Ms and stuff like that".
First of all, did you know that dentists have found that the sugar levels in apples have been raised so high that apples are now rotting kids' teeth? Just because something is presumably "natural" doesn't mean it is necessarily good for you anymore.
Secondly, kids above 6 or 7 know that candy is bad for them, and that is one of the reasons they want it. I remember sneaking off school property to get to a corner store and buy some candy when I was a kid. Kids aren't so dumb that they'll believe that sweet fruit is the same sort of a treat as chocolate.
Thirdly, people have different tastes. I hate raisins, and don't like most berries, but I love chocolate, even the unsweetened bitter stuff. You're not giving the kids enough credit if you think that they'll blindly eat anything sweet.
As for basic ingredients, it's not always that easy. Many kids (as well as adults) have food allergies. Aside from that, there's the matter of what is healthy. Apparently fat in fish is a good thing, but fatty red meat is bad. Now both of these are probably much better than a McBurger, but it's not like it's completely obvious how to make a very healthy yet still appetizing and digestible meal.
As for the exercise, I agree that's important for everybody, but the more my parents pushed me to "get some exercise" the more I resisted. I think the reason is that: 1) they set a bad example, never exercising themselves, and 2) they would never explain why, they'd just order me to "go play outside". Playing outside also generally require someone to play with, whereas TV/computer/nintendo, whatever doesn't.
Raising a kid is hard, and not everybody is cut out to do it. Sure, a lot of parents can do better than they're doing, but it's not like the whole process is simple, and treating your kids as objects doesn't help.
With all the faddy and medically unproven diets such as Atkins
The 'faddy' and unproven LOW-FAT diets, pushed by quacks like Ornish and McDougal, are a principal cause of obesity worldwide. I have personally lost over 100 lbs on a low-carb, high-fat diet (similar to Atkins), which had the side effects of improving my blood lipids, lowering my blood pressure, eliminating several of the problems caused by previously uncontrolled blood sugar levels, and in general, greatly increasing my overhealth health.
The best part is that I'm not hungry all the goddamned time, like I was on low-fat, so I'm not having any trouble keeping it off these past four years.
Fortunately, despite the hue and cry of the low-fat superstition supporters, research is coming out showing that low-carb (high FAT) diets are a healthy and effective way to lose excess bodyfat and maintain a healthy weight. There is no such evidence supporting low-fat diets (Ornish did manage to prove that exercise was so good for you that it even reverses some of the damage done by his diet, but that's about it). There are several "studies" which show health improvements, but without exception, the health improvements are associated with a reduction in sugar and/or glycemic load of the diet -- although the low-fat idiots don't see the correlation.
As for 'depriving' children of cow's milk, there's another thing that has never been medically shown to be worth anything, and has been implicated in a number of diseases and dietary intolerances. Cow's milk might be ok for baby cows, but it has a nutritional profile substantially different from human milk, and there is no reason to expect it to be good for humans of any age.
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In all seriousness, cutting all the bread out of your diet is a good place to start for health improvement. Beef is ok, but not as your sole source of nutrition. Cheese is problematic, but not because of the fat.
About a week after I eliminated bread from my diet (over 4 years ago now), my hands quit hurting all the time, and the pain has never come back. (See Life Without Bread by Dr. Lutz)
Eliminating bread, potatoes, and sugar from my diet has tremendously boosted my health -- and made it a lot more fun to exercise!
And yes, (fresh, raw) veggies are good for you, and exersize is so good for you that it can even reverse some of the damage done by a high-carb (aka low-fat) diet (which is all that quack Ornish ever actually proved with his 'research').
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A few years ago, I went on a trip to Paris with a bunch of American games journalists. We went for dinner at a top Paris restaurant. To this day, I still cannot believe my ears when the American contingent, to a man, asked for cheeseburgers. To say there's a gap between European & American expectations of what good food is, is an understatement.
"Ultraviolet (UV) rays from sunlight trigger vitamin D synthesis in the skin" www.cc.nih.gov/ccc/supplements/vitd.html#sun
Vitamin D is one of the cheapest vitamins to purchase.
I take 400 Mg in the day and 400 at night.
Lots of the new respected doctors recommend it and from what I heard on NPR is that you can't overdose on it. You body will only use what it needs. Of course, you should do your own research on this to verify.
But a month's worth of D capsules are about 6 bucks. It's kinda hard to go wrong at that price.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...