Great public service announcement, Vinnie Jones teaches CPR:

Sitting for long periods of time is looking pretty harmful. I’ve read other reports that suggests the 8 hours in the chair pretty much negates the hour in the gym, perhaps not for sports, but for long-term health (and for sports I’m sure the glute deactivation, hip flexor tightening, and back rounding don’t help). I have toyed off and on with the idea of a treadmill desk, but in the end I just don’t want to sink the money or space into a treadmill.

So a standing workstation has looked like a nice compromise, and today I put one together. I wanted cheap and easy, so I built something to sit on top of my workbench rather than my office desk, because the workbench is already higher, and I know I can build something that looks nice enough for the workshop, but not really nice enough for the office. Here it is:

Cost about $90, almost all of that in 3/4” pipe nipples (8) and floor flanges (12). The MDF shelves are 16” x 36” by 3/4”. The legs have a flange on one end and rubber feet on the other end, and the flanges screw into the bottom of the unit. The uprights between the first shelf and the second shelf have flanges on both ends. In all cases, you thread the flanges onto the pipes really tight and then you screw all the flanges to the shelves. The top shelf is set slightly to the back relative to the bottom shelf.

I don’t think I’ll want to stand all day, so I’ll probably move from my office to the workshop periodically.

Rock solid, very happy with it. Posting this from it right now.

P.S. I also bought this wireless keyboard/mouse combo ($45) to keep in the workshop, and this router ($70) to get better wireless coverage in my house. Pleased with both so far.

Interesting piece on how detrimental all that sitting is to your health. Even if you exercise:

In 2009 Dr Peter Katzmarzyk and colleagues at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center published an influential longitudinal paper examining the links between time spent sitting and mortality in a sample of more than 17,000 Canadians (available here). Not surprisingly, they report that time spent sitting was associated with increased risk of all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality (there was no association between sitting and deaths due to cancer). But what is fascinating is that the relationship between sitting time and mortality was independent of physical activity levels. In fact, individuals who sat the most were roughly 50% more likely to die during the follow-up period than individuals who sat the least, even after controlling for age, smoking, and physical activity levels. Further analyses suggested that the relationship between sitting time and mortality was also independent of body weight. This suggests that all things being equal (body weight, physical activity levels, smoking, alcohol intake, age, and sex) the person who sits more is at a higher risk of death than the person who sits less.

Time in the gym does not reverse time in the chair. Sounds like lots of breaks from sitting is the way to go, if not a treadmill desk.

Turns out the Wakefield study wasn’t just wrong, it is now found to be fradulent, but not before doing tremendous damage:

The now-discredited paper panicked many parents and led to a sharp drop in the number of children getting the vaccine that prevents measles, mumps and rubella. Vaccination rates dropped sharply in Britain after its publication, falling as low as 80% by 2004. Measles cases have gone up sharply in the ensuing years.

In the United States, more cases of measles were reported in 2008 than in any other year since 1997, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 90% of those infected had not been vaccinated or their vaccination status was unknown, the CDC reported.

“But perhaps as important as the scare’s effect on infectious disease is the energy, emotion and money that have been diverted away from efforts to understand the real causes of autism and how to help children and families who live with it,” the BMJ editorial states.

Vaccinate!

Core77 has some great shots of Bespoke Innovations custom prosthetics, along with an interview with designer Scott Summit.

Wow, Hollywood had brainwashed me too. I had no idea that drowning doesn’t look like drowning:

The Instinctive Drowning Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D., is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents) – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening (source: CDC).

Definitely click through. Fascinating, and the stuff of parental nightmares. (via kottke)

Interesting insights into why we need to dream. Get good sleep!

Information is Beautiful just put out a great tool, Snake Oil? The Scientific Evidence for Health Supplements. Here’s a little more about it.

Crutches suck, and somebody finally did something about it:

The lower leg is completely unloaded, your thigh bears all that weight, and you can keep your hands free and your armpits unchafed.

Wired is running a great story on why it sucks for all of us that the anti-vaccine movement continues to gather steam. Long and fascinating, but if you’re pressed for time here’s my crude, one-sided, nutshell attempt:

Consider: In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever. And the number of people who choose not to vaccinate their children (so-called philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise.

…

That may not sound like much, but a recent study by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the impact can be devastating. The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California’s kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.

…

Ah, risk. It is the idea that fuels the anti-vaccine movement — that parents should be allowed to opt out, because it is their right to evaluate risk for their own children. It is also the idea that underlies the CDC’s vaccination schedule — that the risk to public health is too great to allow individuals, one by one, to make decisions that will impact their communities. (The concept of herd immunity is key here: It holds that, in diseases passed from person to person, it is more difficult to maintain a chain of infection when large numbers of a population are immune.)

…

All you have to do to get the measles is to inhabit the airspace of a contagious person within two hours of them being there.

…

The frightening implications of this kind of anecdote were illustrated by a 2002 study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in.

P.S. The immunocompromised are particularly hosed by the unvaccinated.

I weaned myself off Ibuprofin as a pre-game ritual. Good thing, it turns out, as it looks like it does more harm than good.

NYTimes, Pathogens in Our Pork, on the appearance of MRSA in our food supply:

We don’t add antibiotics to baby food and Cocoa Puffs so that children get fewer ear infections. That’s because we understand that the overuse of antibiotics is already creating “superbugs” resistant to medication.

Yet we continue to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal feed so that piglets stay healthy and don’t get ear infections. Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.

Attempts to change this have been blocked by agribusiness, as you can only pack animals into crowded, unsanitary conditions if you pump them full of antibiotics.

My Great Fake Bake Experiment by Daniel Nester:

After the session, I spend the rest of the day meeting with students. They compliment my darkening tan. Later, while lunching at a nearby bar, I notice that every waitress and prepster’s skin glows from lamp-born UV radiation. I sing along to Steve Miller Band’s “Jet Airliner,” a song I can usually only tolerate in the summer. Perhaps it’s because my face is emitting its own sultry heat.

If Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi could see me now, he’d compliment me on my tan, just as he did our president-elect shortly after the election.

Bonus, I learned a bit of new(ish) slang: tanorexia.

Discover Magazine’s top 100 stories of 2008, number 62: Researchers Discover Why Wound-Licking Works.

From DNA is not Destiny by Ethan Watters (emphasis added):

In recent years, epigenetics researchers have made great strides in understanding the many molecular sequences and patterns that determine which genes can be turned on and off. Their work has made it increasingly clear that for all the popular attention devoted to genome-sequencing projects, the epigenome is just as critical as DNA to the healthy development of organisms, humans included. Jirtle and Waterland's experiment was a benchmark demonstration that the epigenome is sensitive to cues from the environment. More and more, researchers are finding that an extra bit of a vitamin, a brief exposure to a toxin, even an added dose of mothering can tweak the epigenome--and thereby alter the software of our genes--in ways that affect an individual's body and brain for life.

The even greater surprise is the recent discovery that epigenetic signals from the environment can be passed on from one generation to the next, sometimes for several generations, without changing a single gene sequence. It's well established, of course, that environmental effects like radiation, which alter the genetic sequences in a sex cell's DNA, can leave a mark on subsequent generations. Likewise, it's known that the environment in a mother's womb can alter the development of a fetus. What's eye-opening is a growing body of evidence suggesting that the epigenetic changes wrought by one's diet, behavior, or surroundings can work their way into the germ line and echo far into the future. Put simply, and as bizarre as it may sound, what you eat or smoke today could affect the health and behavior of your great-grandchildren.

I've wondered before (although perhaps not on this weblog, can't remember) how much of all medicine rests on the placebo effect. How many treatments would simply stop working if the placebo effect were suddenly erased from our minds? Consider this, from the article 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense:

Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

Stop reading now if you don't want me to ruin certain treatments for you, because faith is everything...

Still here? Okay... I was discussing this with my neuromuscular therapist friend yesterday, and she mentioned a few interesting studies, one which showed that of the "alternative" pain management techniques, acupuncture appeared to be the most effective. However, another study showed that fake acupuncture (sticking in needles randomly?) is pretty much just as effective as real acupuncture. Did some Googling, found a bunch of references, but I particularly liked this one: Sham Acupuncture More Effective Than Sugar Pill in Easing Arm Pain.

First question that leaps to mind: what do you use as a control group if you're studying the placebo effect? :-)

Fight Age With Muscle:

...sarcopenia ["the loss of muscle mass that occurs naturally -- and inevitably -- with age"] creeps by in imperceptible increments, stealing a fifth of a pound of muscle a year, from ages 25 [!] to 50, and then it picks up a dreadful, yet still mostly silent, velocity.

Barring disease, you die by wasting away. Hit those weights! « via Supertraining »

Interesting, but ultimately irritating article, on how there's little evidence exercise results in fat loss. Sure, exercise ALONE won't do the trick, and yes, obviously exercise will make you hungrier, so if you keep blindly obeying your body's every dietary impulse, you're hosed (although you'll have more muscle underneath all your fat). But it is certainly possible to change your body composition through a multi-pronged attack:

• Exercise hard. Intervals and strength training. If it's not hard, it's not working.
• Stop eating crap. You can eat a lot, but it has to be good food, no simple carbs.
• Keep at it until it becomes a habit. In my experience, this can take many months, and the impulse to backslide never fully goes away (I've been into this four years now, and donuts don't look any less appealing to me now than ever).

In short, you gotta work for it. And not only is the work hard, but it's grossly unfair. It is not a level playing field. The work is harder for some (many) than others. For a lucky few, exercise produces a high. It hurts and requires willpower to see it through, but it also feels GOOD. It's even ADDICTIVE! For the rest of us, it's just torture, no corresponding rush or high, and this NEVER changes (although it does get easier). This is why it's important to find a sport you enjoy, as the fun of participating distracts you from the torture of exercising, and training for your sport gives you a purpose beyond fitness in the abstract.

Then there's the metabolic lottery. Insulin responses vary, how and where bodies store fat varies, the amount we crave crap varies. If you're one of the many who crave simple carbs and are prone to fat storage, then you're in for a lifetime of constant vigilance if you don't want to be fat. Believe me, I wish it were otherwise! I've read with some hope anecdotal reports that if you follow an evolutionary fitness-style diet your body will stop craving garbage, but in my experience that is not the case.

You have to want to be athletic more than you want to watch TV. You have to want to be athletic more than you want donuts. And for many, that's a very tough sell. In short, the good news is that it's possible. The bad news is that it's hard, and while it gets less hard over time, it never gets easy.

I love Mark Sisson's blog, and really enjoyed this thought-provoking piece of his: Training is No Guarantee of Health. It's anecdote and opinion, but Mr. Sisson is a very smart guy, and a lot of it simply rings true for me. Not surprisingly, some members of the Triathlon Forum were quick to object.

Generally I find exercise research fairly straightforward, and nutrition research a quagmire. My recent readings on soy are no exception. First, I read this T-Nation article, The Soy Conspiracy, which certainly sounds damning. It's an interview with Kaayla Daniel, author of The Whole Soy Story. But then Syd Baumel's critique of the book gave me pause. Especially since he's not one-sided, as evidenced by his piece, Should We be Scared of Soy?. I don't eat too much of it anyway, so you're on your own deciding this one. :-)

To satisfy my sweet tooth, I've come to increasingly rely on Splenda (sucralose) sweetener. Usually just a packet in my oatmeal in the morning, or a packet in some plain yogurt. Not a big deal, but as sucralose is increasingly finding its way into a variety of products, I wondered as to its safety. After googling "splenda", you don't have to scroll down very far to get to pages from one of its more vociferous critics, Dr. Joseph Mercola. Not really sure how to take his stuff though, given how many hits a search for "mercola" and "quack" returns. So you've got Mercola on one side and Michael Fumento on the other side. Who to believe? Ultimately I found The Truth About Sucralose by Cy Willson at T-Nation to be the most persuasive. The best course of action is certainly to avoid all sugar and artificial sweeteners, but I'm not ready to pull my sweet tooth just yet. So for me, Splenda it is. For now.

Never one to mince words, a bit from De Vany's Eating the Evolutionary Fitness Way post:

Seventh, you are compromising your long-run health and accelerating the rate at which you age. You are also turning your body into a sugar burner and in the long-run this will lead to a decline in your lean muscle mass. Your career will suffer. You will not have the energy to sustain a long and productive career. You will be sick more often. You will be tired and bored with life. And you will eventually become obese, ill and earn less income.

His follow-up, It's Not Paleo is also interesting.

Shee-it (emphasis added):

Last year, patient care director Colleen Becker decided to check the numbers. She looked at a daily hospital census—about one-third of the 900 patients weighed 350 pounds or more.

Startled, Becker checked another date, then another.

The numbers were consistent. On some days, half the patients were obese. Some weighed 500 pounds or more.

"We ran the data again to make sure we weren't hallucinating," Becker said. "We weren't. So we had to somehow figure out the appropriate supplies, equipment, training and care for the patients we're dealing with."

So here's an idea: tax credits for fitness. To qualify, if you're fit, your doctor gives you a form you can attach to your return at your annual checkup. I'm betting any economic loss in tax revenue would be offset by the reduced obesity-related burdens on our health care system (the economic damage goes far beyond hospitals buying reinforced beds and such).

Jane Brody's perspective on recent studies that might otherwise lead you to load up on the fat and drop the supplements. Love the dog anecdote:

Since the dog had no idea what the capsules were for, or even that he was getting them (they were hidden in a meatball he swallowed whole), I knew there was no placebo effect.

« via Health & Fitness Blog »

My diet philosophy really couldn't be simpler, so I tend to focus more on exercise here. But if you're looking for a laundry list of good foods, there are certainly worse resources than this list of 14 so-called "Superfoods". Actually, coincidentally, the list (if you include the alternates) comes pretty close to describing my diet. A few specific notes:

• Broccoli is one of the few vegetables my kids will choke down, so we eat it a lot (relatively).
• I finally found a recipe that makes spinach edible. As bonuses, it includes pistachios, craisins (of all things), olive oil, and blue cheese (sadly not on the list).
• Psyched to see blueberries on the list. Berries of all kinds are one of the best things about summer.
• Clementines, currently in season and irresistable, help get me through the berry-less winter.
• For oatmeal, I keep hearing the less processed, the better (surprise). Take an extra 60 seconds to cook the non-quick-cook variety.
• Mmmm, nuts make the cut. Fantastic that this is not an entirely low-fat, low-calorie list. I love a swab of cashew butter as a mid-morning snack.
• I've lately been making salmon sandwiches instead of tuna. Tuna has that mercury thing working against it, and I vaguely recall Alaskan salmon being relatively pure. Happily, that's the kind they can, it's cheap, and the cans are huge so it makes a ton. Caveat: once it's mixed with mayo and celery (or however you do it) it's quite similiar to tuna, but it's pretty unappealing right out of the can. Smells kinda gross, and it often looks like they just threw the whole fish in the hopper. There's always skin (which I don't mind) and often bones, including big ol' sections of spine. I have yet to find any eyeballs, at least.
• Soy for the boys? Maybe not so much. Much talk about it lowering testosterone, and I know women going through menopause that swear by its estrogen-boosting effects. A 30-second search didn't turn up anything authoritative though, and as usual I expect "moderation in all things" to be a fine policy.

I've read in a bunch of places how caffeine enhances athletic performance. But a recent study suggests it can hamper heart blood flow:

Heart blood flow was 22 percent lower in those who exercised in normal air pressure and 39 percent lower in those who exercised in the high-altitude chamber, the researchers report.

Dr. Kaufmann (presumably the doc behind the study) says:

"We now have good evidence that, at the level of myocardial blood flow, caffeine is not a useful stimulant. It may be a stimulant at the cerebral level in terms of being more awake and alert, which may subjectively give the feeling of having better physical performance. But I now would not recommend that any athlete drink caffeine before sports."

« via Health & Fitness Blog »

If you have a desk job, you're supposed to take breaks every once in awhile, especially if you do RSI-prone work. Those breaks are a great time to sneak in a little fun, maybe some balance training, grease the groove for pull-ups stretch, etc.

I was always forgetting to take my breaks until I found RemindMe, a free service that will send you IMs at specified times and days. You can set them to repeat every weekday, which is perfect. You can also IM their bot for one-off reminders, or to repeat the most recent reminder some time in the future. Very handy.

Update: Now I use Workrave.

From 18 Tricks to Teach Your Body:

#5: Forget Sudafed. An easier, quicker, and cheaper way to relieve sinus pressure is by alternately thrusting your tongue against the roof of your mouth, then pressing between your eyebrows with one finger. This causes the vomer bone, which runs through the nasal passages to the mouth, to rock back and forth, says Lisa DeStefano, D.O., an assistant professor at the Michigan State University college of osteopathic medicine. The motion loosens congestion; after 20 seconds, you'll feel your sinuses start to drain.

All I want to know is, what the hell is "osteopathic medicine"?

Unrelated, unless you're an Ear/Nose/Throat doctor, here's a fellow that invented one of those ultrasonic "stop the neighbor's dog from crapping in your yard" things, but that targets loitering teenagers instead. How is it possible that the teenager invention works, but the dog invention is useless (trust me, I know)?

Interesting article in the November 2005 issue of Outside Magazine, The Shatter-Proof Skeleton by Roy Wallack. The bottom line is that doing low-impact exercise exclusively will waste your skeleton away, and you lose lots of calcium when you sweat:

Scientists have long known that low-impact exercises fail to trigger the body to fortify bones, but another significant discovery, often overlooked, is just how much precious bone-sustaining calcium leaches from the body via sweat. Besides the fluids and sodium we lose while hammering the pavement, pumping iron, or playing a pickup game, an additional 120 milligrams or so of calcium is sweated out during every hour spent exercising. And unless you replace that missing calcium with the right foods, it ain't coming back. So even those who go for high-impact sports like skiing and running can face a calcium deficit—and an increased potential for broken bones.

A good read. There are plenty of impact exercises for the lower body, but I wonder if we should all be hitting heavy bags for the upper body? Probably.

146 Reasons Why Sugar Is Ruining Your Health. If only I couldn't think of 146 desserts that just wouldn't be the same without sugar.