You're refering to the Hudson Bay Company, I presume. I didn't know they were still around in ANY form, but a sad decline to mere department stores...!!
Honey has no magical antiseptic powers, either; the key anti-bacterial ingredient is sugar (some bacteria die in an all-sugar environment). Straight sugar works better, and unlike honey, is unlikely to harbour contaminants. Clostridium is sometimes found in honey, and isn't exactly a great thing to get inside a wound.
Which is why I've sometimes described the retina as "a piece of your brain that sticks out of your forehead":)
As a dog breeder, I'm rather more accustomed to looking at retinas than the average non-medico, thanks to peering over the ACVO's shoulder during routine eye exams on my breeding stock (since there is hereditary blindness in dogs). An oddity I and my vet ophthalmologist have both noticed: in the Labrador Retrievers of 25 years ago, the typical tapetum in black or yellow specimens was a rich royal blue, or rarely, dark green. But over the past couple decades these colours disappeared, and now the typical tapetum is light green to yellowish (even when the pigment-restricting chocolate gene is not present). ???!!
A friend had testicular cancer, which caused elevated levels of some hormone more commonly associated with pregnancy. First time thru the mill, his paperwork got a little confused and they tried to send him to the maternity ward!
Goes to show how a one-result-fits-many-possibilities test could go completely awry:)
Related oddity: if I get the light bouncing around my eyes just right, I can see my own retina -- blood vessels, optic nerve, and all, presumably as reflected by the backside of the lens. Interesting to look at.
When I was a kid (and sometimes to this day:) I'd amuse myself watching the strings of junk cells that float around inside everyone's eyes, and got fairly good at making them move in any desired direction. I could even see the nucleus in some of 'em. One string was Y-shaped, and at age 50 is still in the same place, to be seen even to this day if I care to do so.
During routine eye exams, your retinas may be imaged and the image archived for comparison with future images, because CHANGES in the retina typically indicate the onset of a potentially-blinding condition (and some can be treated if caught early enough).
While this is a good thing for your ocular (and general) health, presumably such info *could* be acquired and misused by a malicious gov't, by someone bent on beating a biometric ID system, etc.
I suppose one could seal the DNA inside plastic, but then you've got to make sure it doesn't break off, etc, etc. -- Sounds like the goal is mainly to stop the short-term fraud, rather than provide durable authenticity verification. (Or if maybe it's a solution in search of a problem. I can't get at TFA at the moment.)
For longterm ID, and simple durability, it might be better to insert a microchip during manufacturing (so it's protected within the ball itself), which could be read by anyone with a scanner. If the chip outputs the right sequence, it's authentic; if not (or if it's absent), it ain't. This tech is already in common use for pet and livestock IDs.
AOL has never been a bastion of email reliability... frex, for years there were problems with certain blocks of AOL addys where all mail over 20k in size, or with an attachment of ANY size, simply vanished. One of the former maintainers told me that wasn't supposed to happen, and was clearly a bug, but didn't know where the problem could be.
And like most "protect the users from [whatever] at all costs/ie. protect ourselves from complaints about [whatever]" efforts, they've occasionally gotten right draconian, with predictably shitty results.
Personally I loathe whitelists, since 1) often as not the receiver never gets a notice, let alone your email, and 2) some people use it as an filter to let them ignore email that, say, reports a bug in some project they do. (I've seen that so many times that now when I encounter a coder using a whitelist, I just assume they're a nutjob, and move on.)
I *can* see this being utilized well, IF it were confined to known spammers: if a stupid user signs up for spam, have the spammer pay the provider (in this case AOL) who has to deliver their shit. However, one suspects that in fact some bean counter took a gander at how many mailing lists come down the pipe every day, and how many of 'em come from big corporate interests, and decided here was a revenue stream just a-waitin' to be tapped.
As to spam control, howcum our little BBS's homegrown filter is almost 100% effective (at most one or two spams slip through per year), yet the big commercial spamblockers are not??
And most of us still haven't seen any of these "upgrades" the telcos paid to do, er, were paid to do.... ah, hell, the stuff they're fucking us over for on our bills, that we don't get to use anyway!
I haven't seen a spam (nor a virus) that *actually* came from a real AOL address in 6 or 7 years. The occasional spoof, yeah, but not the real thing.
And I check the headers, because back when spam truly from somejerk@aol.com was common, AOL was good about yanking abusive accounts (usually within 30 minutes of being reported), which made it worth the effort to get 'em killed.
From TFA, I got the impression that this applies only to large commercial senders.
If there was no way for AOLers to receive free mailing lists without the list owner jumping thru hoops/paying thru the nose, methinks the screams from AOLers themselves would nix such a scheme in a hurry. So I expect anything the individual AOLer has whitelisted would be exempt (frex, free mailing lists).
"Game vendors have to learn that it's NOT ACCEPTABLE for them to treat customers' computers like their personal property and feel free to wantonly vandalize them at will."
Maybe someone whose system is damaged by copy-protection malware should file *criminal charges* for vandalism. -- You'd file criminal charges if some punk heaved a rock through your front window; why should *wilfully* damaging a PC's functionality be any different? For that matter, might this fall under an existing law that makes it a federal offense to do so? Just because it's a commercial product rather than a virus shouldn't make any difference.
Yeah, I've noticed the same thing. Lots of people aren't really aware of what, nor how much they eat in the course of a day; they only remember the "one big meal" and not all the other stuff. This is a problem especially for people who are depriving themselves of nutrients through an unnaturally restrictive diet; they get so they crave "forbidden" foods, then eat compensatory stuff without really thinking about it. (Frex, someone on a low-fat diet eats a bunch of "sugar free" donuts, forgetting that flour has about the same calories as sugar.)
What I've observed is that all this "healthy eating" of the past 20-odd years is the real culprit, by restricting protein and fat in favour of more carbohydrates, which in turn screws with the insulin metabolism and makes people more prone to store fat. Funny how obesity was much less common back in the olden days when regular ol' meat and potatoes was still the norm, and no one thought about a "healthy diet". And back then, obese children were almost never seen. Now, obese children (even preschoolers) are common!
Back to the "but I only ate lettuce" problem... I know a guy who swears up and down (and even found a therapist who validated this nonsense) that when he had his first big bout of depression, he went into "human hibernation" and that's why he gained 30 pounds in a month even tho he ate "almost nothing, less than 100 calories a day!" Okay... so where did the 100,000 surplus calories REQUIRED to lay down 30 lbs. of fat come from -- the fat fairy?? But I've watched how he eats... fast food almost exclusively, always orders two of everything, and eats ALL of it... then claims he only had one little meal. Hmm.... I think I see the problem. The fat fairy is turning his food invisible!;)
As to willpower -- you don't need willpower if your body feels satisfied by what you eat; you'll just naturally stop eating when you've had enough. But protein deficiency will make you hungry all the time, and eating refined carbs before noonish will make you munchy all day. Avoid those two situations, and better "willpower" will magically be yours.
Re:Heat engines and the conservation of mass
on
Obesity Contagious?
·
· Score: 1
Another thing most people don't understand is that somewhere around 80% of calories *used* go to nothing but maintaining metabolic processes. This is not alterable; it's the minimum energy required to make the most basic chemical processes happen *at all*. Making and breaking chemical bonds (which is all the metabolism really does) takes a fixed amount of energy for each transaction. It is not possible to gain weight if your caloric intake is at or below the minimum energy required.
If you aren't using calories for these required metabolic processes, you are in a state called "dead", and have no further use for calories, stored or otherwise.:)
It's much like how an engine, no matter how it's tuned, always requires a certain minimum of fuel to keep running at all, even at its lowest idle. Provide less fuel than that, and it sputters a while, then dies altogether.
People on extreme low calorie diets, and those with NO body fat, go into a state of catabolism (destructive metabolism) where rather than the body living off daily intake and its own stored fat in the normal way, it is forced to live primarily off muscle. This is very inefficient, AND is hard on the system (hormones, which require a certain amount of fat just to create, stop working; kidneys are stressed; heart muscle can be damaged -- most anorexics don't actually die of starvation; they die of their heart giving out).
Low calorie/low fat diets have become a fad with some dog breeders, and one result of keeping dogs bone-thin is that early male infertility has become rampant (average onset of infertility has dropped from 11.5 yrs to 9 yrs). Another observed effect is premature aging. [I'm a professional dog breeder/trainer with 36 years experience... to well back before fads were a problem. And my college major was biochemistry.]
So... no, your body CAN'T suddenly decide to store "all those calories", because they are required elsewhere simply to keep you alive.
I suspect they are looking in the wrong place with regard to this adenovirus. Follow: The finding is that in chickens, adenovirus may cause a higher ratio of fat to muscle. I'm not sure what it does in other species, but in dogs adenovirus causes hepatitis, ie. an infection of the liver. Normal liver function is critical to protein metabolism. If protein metabolism is damaged, calories that were intended to build muscle conceivably might instead be stored as fat. Perhaps the researchers should be examining what the virus is doing to the liver and the *protein* metabolism, and consider it as a *system damaging* virus, rather than just looking at it as causing an increased proportion of body fat.
Also, in normal individuals, survivable virus infections are generally self-limiting (your immune system fights it off, and you recover). If someone became obese due to this virus, I'd expect to find that they have more serious root problems, such as an immunodeficiency disorder (or undiagnosed AIDS). Perhaps this could trigger hypothyroidism *in these predisposed individuals*, but this would be quite rare -- immunodeficieny tends to breed itself out of the gene pool, thanks to early cancer, infertility, and the like.
IOW, I don't think reasonably normal individuals have much to worry about.
Adenovirus [hepatitis] vaccine has been available for dogs for ~50 years. Don't know how similar the various adenoviruses are in that respect, but given this, likely it wouldn't be all that hard to develop a vaccine for humans (TFA did mention such a possibility).
And then we can put it to the test...
Re:Conservation of energy revoked?
on
Obesity Contagious?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Overweight people, dieting or not, are often malnourished *due to eating an unbalanced diet*. Most weight-loss diets unnaturally restrict some food group; how is anyone supposed to have a balanced intake if they're not permitted to eat, frex, anything containing fat? When you're deficient in some key nutrient, it makes you hungry, which kinda defeats the purpose. Fat isn't just a source of calories, it also supplies some key nutrients; how can a fat-free diet be 100% balanced?
[puts on pro dog breeder hat] Dogs, as a species, are pretty good at self-regulating their intake *provided they get enough protein and fat*. Put a normal dog on a low-fat or low-protein diet, and it will be hungry all the time, and will gobble everything it can get hold of. Put the same dog on a high-fat (animal or veg. fat, NOT chicken fat), high-protein, MEAT-based diet (chicken will NOT do), feed it free-choice, and it will quickly adjust to eating only as much as it needs... and if obese, will even lose weight.
Humans are not much different. Which is why a modified Atkins diet is the easiest and most effective for most folks -- just eat a normal balanced diet, all in reasonable quantities, but cut your carb intake in half.
Yes, some people (and dogs) have a faulty appetite regulation mechanism, but we're talking about biologically normal/typical specimens here.
I'd also like to know why at first only American adults were "infected", then later it started hitting teens, and in the past few years, now even preschoolers are becoming "infected". Why weren't all generations affected at a similar rate?
Maybe it's like that Star Trek disease that only infects grups, except lately it's mutated.;)
I'd suggest that such a person 1) take supplements as needed, and 2) more importantly, consider changing the balance of what they're eating.
Frex, to supply your daily need for about 60 grams of protein, AND in the correct amino acid balance, you can eat 3 ounces of meat (about 250 calories) -- OR you can eat beans and rice, but to get the same amount of protein AND the same amino acid balance, you need to eat a quantity of beans-and-rice that totals up around four times the calories as the same "protein value" worth of meat.
Re:Heat engines and the conservation of mass
on
Obesity Contagious?
·
· Score: 1
I think you missed the point (which admittedly the other reply didn't make all that well).
Yes, it's true that not everyone uses calories at the same rate, and even then it can vary depending on their activity level. I'm a good example of that -- when sedentary, I can use as little as 800/day. When active, I can easily chew through 5000/day.
But the point was that you only gain weight when you consume more calories than you USE, however many calories that may be, and no matter what your metabolism is like. If you need 3000/day but you eat 3100/day, you'll still gain weight, no matter what other factors are present.
And even tho some people will claim they ate almost nothing yet gained weight, that is physically impossible -- since every pound of fat requires about 4000 calories worth of surplus intake. (About 3200 calories stored as one pound of fat, plus some metabolic overhead to create that pound of fat.)
So if you gain one pound of fat, one way or another you consumed about 4000 more calories than you USED. It doesn't matter whether that's due to a virus, or laziness, or thyroid disease, or genetics, or shitty eating habits. Calories don't just magically appear from the air; no matter WHY you didn't use them all up, they still derived from a single source: you ATE them, and if your body is adding fat, you ate more calories than you *needed*.
I also wondered whether there was any attempt to investigate whether obesity might predispose one into becoming infected with an adenovirus.
And I'm reminded of this:
A few years ago lyme disease, which is spread primarily by bites from the deer tick, was being blamed for everything that went wrong in dogs (and later, in humans). Lyme vaccine was developed for dogs and became all the rage, despite evidence that the vaccine was worthless. Then someone thought to investigate antibody levels in an area (Minnesota, IIRC) where deer ticks are endemic, almost every dog and human has been bitten numerous times, and no one uses lyme vaccine. Turned out that 70% of the *healthy* canine and human populations already had lyme antibodies -- meaning 70% had ALREADY BEEN INFECTED AND HAD ALREADY RECOVERED, WITHOUT LASTING ILL EFFECTS. So much for the "lyme disease causes all these common problems!" theories...
Some posters in the blog liked the theory as a way to blame their own "sudden weight gain" on an external factor. I've known a number of folk who had such an issue, and in my observation there is a single common factor: each had reached the age of *full* physical maturity (which for most people is around age 30, and happens over a fairly brief period). Now, what happens when your body finally reaches full maturity? Your metabolism slows down (often exacerbated by a switch to a more sedentary lifestyle), so you need fewer calories. But most people keep right on eating just like they did when they were teenagers with a hollow leg, then wonder why they suddenly put on weight.
[laughing] That's why I thumb my nose at HTML standards, and write code that works more or less the same in *all* browsers, whether it's technically correct or not!
It could be worse. We could be making web pages in C !!!
Keep a brick by the bed. Sleep will never be far off.;) I had to wander off to bed myself. The livestock want to be fed at the butt-crack of dawn.
I did peek into your site... you've got unclosed tables (no/table tag) on http://home.comcast.net/~ssg_vlfs/index.html and all of its subpages that I looked at, making the entire page invisible to 100% compliant browsers.
Slashdot Mirror
You're refering to the Hudson Bay Company, I presume. I didn't know they were still around in ANY form, but a sad decline to mere department stores...!!
Honey has no magical antiseptic powers, either; the key anti-bacterial ingredient is sugar (some bacteria die in an all-sugar environment). Straight sugar works better, and unlike honey, is unlikely to harbour contaminants. Clostridium is sometimes found in honey, and isn't exactly a great thing to get inside a wound.
I prefer 'em corn-finished. Those grass-finished specimens just never taste as good. ;)
Which is why I've sometimes described the retina as "a piece of your brain that sticks out of your forehead" :)
As a dog breeder, I'm rather more accustomed to looking at retinas than the average non-medico, thanks to peering over the ACVO's shoulder during routine eye exams on my breeding stock (since there is hereditary blindness in dogs). An oddity I and my vet ophthalmologist have both noticed: in the Labrador Retrievers of 25 years ago, the typical tapetum in black or yellow specimens was a rich royal blue, or rarely, dark green. But over the past couple decades these colours disappeared, and now the typical tapetum is light green to yellowish (even when the pigment-restricting chocolate gene is not present). ???!!
A friend had testicular cancer, which caused elevated levels of some hormone more commonly associated with pregnancy. First time thru the mill, his paperwork got a little confused and they tried to send him to the maternity ward!
:)
Goes to show how a one-result-fits-many-possibilities test could go completely awry
Related oddity: if I get the light bouncing around my eyes just right, I can see my own retina -- blood vessels, optic nerve, and all, presumably as reflected by the backside of the lens. Interesting to look at.
:) I'd amuse myself watching the strings of junk cells that float around inside everyone's eyes, and got fairly good at making them move in any desired direction. I could even see the nucleus in some of 'em. One string was Y-shaped, and at age 50 is still in the same place, to be seen even to this day if I care to do so.
:)
When I was a kid (and sometimes to this day
Man, am I easily amused, or what?
During routine eye exams, your retinas may be imaged and the image archived for comparison with future images, because CHANGES in the retina typically indicate the onset of a potentially-blinding condition (and some can be treated if caught early enough).
While this is a good thing for your ocular (and general) health, presumably such info *could* be acquired and misused by a malicious gov't, by someone bent on beating a biometric ID system, etc.
I suppose one could seal the DNA inside plastic, but then you've got to make sure it doesn't break off, etc, etc. -- Sounds like the goal is mainly to stop the short-term fraud, rather than provide durable authenticity verification. (Or if maybe it's a solution in search of a problem. I can't get at TFA at the moment.)
For longterm ID, and simple durability, it might be better to insert a microchip during manufacturing (so it's protected within the ball itself), which could be read by anyone with a scanner. If the chip outputs the right sequence, it's authentic; if not (or if it's absent), it ain't. This tech is already in common use for pet and livestock IDs.
AOL has never been a bastion of email reliability ... frex, for years there were problems with certain blocks of AOL addys where all mail over 20k in size, or with an attachment of ANY size, simply vanished. One of the former maintainers told me that wasn't supposed to happen, and was clearly a bug, but didn't know where the problem could be.
And like most "protect the users from [whatever] at all costs/ie. protect ourselves from complaints about [whatever]" efforts, they've occasionally gotten right draconian, with predictably shitty results.
Personally I loathe whitelists, since 1) often as not the receiver never gets a notice, let alone your email, and 2) some people use it as an filter to let them ignore email that, say, reports a bug in some project they do. (I've seen that so many times that now when I encounter a coder using a whitelist, I just assume they're a nutjob, and move on.)
I *can* see this being utilized well, IF it were confined to known spammers: if a stupid user signs up for spam, have the spammer pay the provider (in this case AOL) who has to deliver their shit. However, one suspects that in fact some bean counter took a gander at how many mailing lists come down the pipe every day, and how many of 'em come from big corporate interests, and decided here was a revenue stream just a-waitin' to be tapped.
As to spam control, howcum our little BBS's homegrown filter is almost 100% effective (at most one or two spams slip through per year), yet the big commercial spamblockers are not??
And most of us still haven't seen any of these "upgrades" the telcos paid to do, er, were paid to do.... ah, hell, the stuff they're fucking us over for on our bills, that we don't get to use anyway!
I haven't seen a spam (nor a virus) that *actually* came from a real AOL address in 6 or 7 years. The occasional spoof, yeah, but not the real thing.
And I check the headers, because back when spam truly from somejerk@aol.com was common, AOL was good about yanking abusive accounts (usually within 30 minutes of being reported), which made it worth the effort to get 'em killed.
From TFA, I got the impression that this applies only to large commercial senders.
If there was no way for AOLers to receive free mailing lists without the list owner jumping thru hoops/paying thru the nose, methinks the screams from AOLers themselves would nix such a scheme in a hurry. So I expect anything the individual AOLer has whitelisted would be exempt (frex, free mailing lists).
Quite possible; many prosecutors find that witch hunts help their careers more than does mere seeking after justice.
So at the very least, such a kid would be put on a list of "people to watch", as a future arrest prospect.
"Game vendors have to learn that it's NOT ACCEPTABLE for them to treat customers' computers like their personal property and feel free to wantonly vandalize them at will."
Maybe someone whose system is damaged by copy-protection malware should file *criminal charges* for vandalism. -- You'd file criminal charges if some punk heaved a rock through your front window; why should *wilfully* damaging a PC's functionality be any different? For that matter, might this fall under an existing law that makes it a federal offense to do so? Just because it's a commercial product rather than a virus shouldn't make any difference.
Yeah, I've noticed the same thing. Lots of people aren't really aware of what, nor how much they eat in the course of a day; they only remember the "one big meal" and not all the other stuff. This is a problem especially for people who are depriving themselves of nutrients through an unnaturally restrictive diet; they get so they crave "forbidden" foods, then eat compensatory stuff without really thinking about it. (Frex, someone on a low-fat diet eats a bunch of "sugar free" donuts, forgetting that flour has about the same calories as sugar.)
... then claims he only had one little meal. Hmm.... I think I see the problem. The fat fairy is turning his food invisible! ;)
What I've observed is that all this "healthy eating" of the past 20-odd years is the real culprit, by restricting protein and fat in favour of more carbohydrates, which in turn screws with the insulin metabolism and makes people more prone to store fat. Funny how obesity was much less common back in the olden days when regular ol' meat and potatoes was still the norm, and no one thought about a "healthy diet". And back then, obese children were almost never seen. Now, obese children (even preschoolers) are common!
Back to the "but I only ate lettuce" problem... I know a guy who swears up and down (and even found a therapist who validated this nonsense) that when he had his first big bout of depression, he went into "human hibernation" and that's why he gained 30 pounds in a month even tho he ate "almost nothing, less than 100 calories a day!" Okay... so where did the 100,000 surplus calories REQUIRED to lay down 30 lbs. of fat come from -- the fat fairy?? But I've watched how he eats... fast food almost exclusively, always orders two of everything, and eats ALL of it
As to willpower -- you don't need willpower if your body feels satisfied by what you eat; you'll just naturally stop eating when you've had enough. But protein deficiency will make you hungry all the time, and eating refined carbs before noonish will make you munchy all day. Avoid those two situations, and better "willpower" will magically be yours.
Another thing most people don't understand is that somewhere around 80% of calories *used* go to nothing but maintaining metabolic processes. This is not alterable; it's the minimum energy required to make the most basic chemical processes happen *at all*. Making and breaking chemical bonds (which is all the metabolism really does) takes a fixed amount of energy for each transaction. It is not possible to gain weight if your caloric intake is at or below the minimum energy required.
:)
If you aren't using calories for these required metabolic processes, you are in a state called "dead", and have no further use for calories, stored or otherwise.
It's much like how an engine, no matter how it's tuned, always requires a certain minimum of fuel to keep running at all, even at its lowest idle. Provide less fuel than that, and it sputters a while, then dies altogether.
People on extreme low calorie diets, and those with NO body fat, go into a state of catabolism (destructive metabolism) where rather than the body living off daily intake and its own stored fat in the normal way, it is forced to live primarily off muscle. This is very inefficient, AND is hard on the system (hormones, which require a certain amount of fat just to create, stop working; kidneys are stressed; heart muscle can be damaged -- most anorexics don't actually die of starvation; they die of their heart giving out).
Low calorie/low fat diets have become a fad with some dog breeders, and one result of keeping dogs bone-thin is that early male infertility has become rampant (average onset of infertility has dropped from 11.5 yrs to 9 yrs). Another observed effect is premature aging. [I'm a professional dog breeder/trainer with 36 years experience... to well back before fads were a problem. And my college major was biochemistry.]
So... no, your body CAN'T suddenly decide to store "all those calories", because they are required elsewhere simply to keep you alive.
I suspect they are looking in the wrong place with regard to this adenovirus. Follow: The finding is that in chickens, adenovirus may cause a higher ratio of fat to muscle. I'm not sure what it does in other species, but in dogs adenovirus causes hepatitis, ie. an infection of the liver. Normal liver function is critical to protein metabolism. If protein metabolism is damaged, calories that were intended to build muscle conceivably might instead be stored as fat. Perhaps the researchers should be examining what the virus is doing to the liver and the *protein* metabolism, and consider it as a *system damaging* virus, rather than just looking at it as causing an increased proportion of body fat.
Also, in normal individuals, survivable virus infections are generally self-limiting (your immune system fights it off, and you recover). If someone became obese due to this virus, I'd expect to find that they have more serious root problems, such as an immunodeficiency disorder (or undiagnosed AIDS). Perhaps this could trigger hypothyroidism *in these predisposed individuals*, but this would be quite rare -- immunodeficieny tends to breed itself out of the gene pool, thanks to early cancer, infertility, and the like.
IOW, I don't think reasonably normal individuals have much to worry about.
Adenovirus [hepatitis] vaccine has been available for dogs for ~50 years. Don't know how similar the various adenoviruses are in that respect, but given this, likely it wouldn't be all that hard to develop a vaccine for humans (TFA did mention such a possibility).
And then we can put it to the test...
Overweight people, dieting or not, are often malnourished *due to eating an unbalanced diet*. Most weight-loss diets unnaturally restrict some food group; how is anyone supposed to have a balanced intake if they're not permitted to eat, frex, anything containing fat? When you're deficient in some key nutrient, it makes you hungry, which kinda defeats the purpose. Fat isn't just a source of calories, it also supplies some key nutrients; how can a fat-free diet be 100% balanced?
[puts on pro dog breeder hat] Dogs, as a species, are pretty good at self-regulating their intake *provided they get enough protein and fat*. Put a normal dog on a low-fat or low-protein diet, and it will be hungry all the time, and will gobble everything it can get hold of. Put the same dog on a high-fat (animal or veg. fat, NOT chicken fat), high-protein, MEAT-based diet (chicken will NOT do), feed it free-choice, and it will quickly adjust to eating only as much as it needs... and if obese, will even lose weight.
Humans are not much different. Which is why a modified Atkins diet is the easiest and most effective for most folks -- just eat a normal balanced diet, all in reasonable quantities, but cut your carb intake in half.
Yes, some people (and dogs) have a faulty appetite regulation mechanism, but we're talking about biologically normal/typical specimens here.
I'd also like to know why at first only American adults were "infected", then later it started hitting teens, and in the past few years, now even preschoolers are becoming "infected". Why weren't all generations affected at a similar rate?
;)
Maybe it's like that Star Trek disease that only infects grups, except lately it's mutated.
I'd suggest that such a person 1) take supplements as needed, and 2) more importantly, consider changing the balance of what they're eating.
Frex, to supply your daily need for about 60 grams of protein, AND in the correct amino acid balance, you can eat 3 ounces of meat (about 250 calories) -- OR you can eat beans and rice, but to get the same amount of protein AND the same amino acid balance, you need to eat a quantity of beans-and-rice that totals up around four times the calories as the same "protein value" worth of meat.
I think you missed the point (which admittedly the other reply didn't make all that well).
Yes, it's true that not everyone uses calories at the same rate, and even then it can vary depending on their activity level. I'm a good example of that -- when sedentary, I can use as little as 800/day. When active, I can easily chew through 5000/day.
But the point was that you only gain weight when you consume more calories than you USE, however many calories that may be, and no matter what your metabolism is like. If you need 3000/day but you eat 3100/day, you'll still gain weight, no matter what other factors are present.
And even tho some people will claim they ate almost nothing yet gained weight, that is physically impossible -- since every pound of fat requires about 4000 calories worth of surplus intake. (About 3200 calories stored as one pound of fat, plus some metabolic overhead to create that pound of fat.)
So if you gain one pound of fat, one way or another you consumed about 4000 more calories than you USED. It doesn't matter whether that's due to a virus, or laziness, or thyroid disease, or genetics, or shitty eating habits. Calories don't just magically appear from the air; no matter WHY you didn't use them all up, they still derived from a single source: you ATE them, and if your body is adding fat, you ate more calories than you *needed*.
Sure. But remember.... Eat the rich. The poor are tough and stringy.
I also wondered whether there was any attempt to investigate whether obesity might predispose one into becoming infected with an adenovirus.
And I'm reminded of this:
A few years ago lyme disease, which is spread primarily by bites from the deer tick, was being blamed for everything that went wrong in dogs (and later, in humans). Lyme vaccine was developed for dogs and became all the rage, despite evidence that the vaccine was worthless. Then someone thought to investigate antibody levels in an area (Minnesota, IIRC) where deer ticks are endemic, almost every dog and human has been bitten numerous times, and no one uses lyme vaccine. Turned out that 70% of the *healthy* canine and human populations already had lyme antibodies -- meaning 70% had ALREADY BEEN INFECTED AND HAD ALREADY RECOVERED, WITHOUT LASTING ILL EFFECTS. So much for the "lyme disease causes all these common problems!" theories...
Some posters in the blog liked the theory as a way to blame their own "sudden weight gain" on an external factor. I've known a number of folk who had such an issue, and in my observation there is a single common factor: each had reached the age of *full* physical maturity (which for most people is around age 30, and happens over a fairly brief period). Now, what happens when your body finally reaches full maturity? Your metabolism slows down (often exacerbated by a switch to a more sedentary lifestyle), so you need fewer calories. But most people keep right on eating just like they did when they were teenagers with a hollow leg, then wonder why they suddenly put on weight.
[laughing] That's why I thumb my nose at HTML standards, and write code that works more or less the same in *all* browsers, whether it's technically correct or not!
It could be worse. We could be making web pages in C !!!
Keep a brick by the bed. Sleep will never be far off. ;) I had to wander off to bed myself. The livestock want to be fed at the butt-crack of dawn.
/table tag) on http://home.comcast.net/~ssg_vlfs/index.html and all of its subpages that I looked at, making the entire page invisible to 100% compliant browsers.
I did peek into your site... you've got unclosed tables (no