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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)
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
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!
Milk - especially cow's milk - should be taken in moderation or not at all. Many adults have some degree of lactose intolerance; the concentrated protien of milk (and other animal products) is detrimental to proper calcium balance; milk is commonly contaminated with pus and with drug residues; it's high in fat and low in iron. The high milk consumption in the U.S. is a marketing triumph, not a healthy habit.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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
Enough Vitamin A will kill you.
Polar animals store massive amounts of Vitamin A in their livers, for some reason. Scott, when exloring the Antarctic, actually died of a Vitamin A overdose from eating the livers of his huskies, rather than dying of lead poisoning (as previously believed). Not strictly relevant, I know, but if you're ever in a survival situation in the Antarctic, you might be glad I told you.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
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!?
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.
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.
It's interesting to note that much of what you see in the Atkins diet is now getting more respect, and nutritionists are starting (just starting) to question the validity of the much-vaunted "Food Pyramid." In more educated circles, the high-carb/low-fat pyramid is being questioned for its role in the current obesity epidemic in the US. Arguably, we are eating (as a nation) more low-fat products than ever before, but also far more low-deitary fiber carbs. We've also ignored the glycemic index, which is a crucial component of how quickly a given carbohydrate is processed by the body into a given blood sugar level.
Oddly enough, we love our processed foods, and don't seem to have any interest in oatmeal, fresh vegatables, and other low glycemic index foods. We also seem to have the massive fear of red meats, eggs, and other "instant heart attack" foods that were blamed for all manner of heart problems.
Instead of blindly bashing Atkins (which has demonstrated remarkable staying power over the last 10 years, and therefore hardly qualifies as a "fad diet" anymore), people would do well to do some serious research about nutrition, from people who don't have a specific product to sell.
Of course, that requires using your brain...
Tim