Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Mr. Tutt from Health Hack, posted a link to this lengthy piece on the paleo diet compiled by Sam Hoxie of Creighton University Medical School. I’ve been adhering to a philosophy of eating suggested in Protein Power which generously takes from the theory of the Paleo Diet, which basically asserts that we should be emulating how our prehistoric ancestors ate. The theory goes that our bodies evolved to thrive on the kinds of foods that we were able to eat over hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of agrigulture – mainly hunted animals and with some wild fruits and vegetables thrown in as occasional supplements. In the 10,000 or so years since agriguculture took hold in a large portion of the population, humans have not had the time for their genetic makeup to change enough to handle a very different diet based primarily on grains with meat as an occasional supplement (although today for developed countries meat is now affordable enough to have regularly).

What interested me, of course were the “counterpoints” that are discussed in the piece. In other words the reasons for NOT eating a paleo-like diet. Many of these arguments seem logical on the face of it, but if you think about it, most don’t hold much water, or are just irrelevant. Here are some counterpoints to the counterpoins:

1. Sustainability: this is definitely an interesting dilemma. I often wonder whether organic methods would provide more sustainability, but I don’t know the answer to that. Still, I’m not sure if it is relevant exactly. The question of something being healthy for the individual and sustainable for the planet if everyone ate a particular way are two seperate issues. I wrote recently about new efforts to produce meat in the lab without actually raising cattle, but that’s in very early stages…
2. Plenty of people develop cardiovascular disease and diabetes who are also in the normal weight category. Their premise is that obesity causes these diseases, but the alternate view (of which the Paleo and other similar diets adhere to) is that obesity is simply another symptop of insulin resistance, which is the real culprit that leads to diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and host of silimilar problems. While eating less and exercising does lower insulin levels and thus improves these problems, it doesn’t always solve the underlying issue. But also, they never really talk about why one would opt for the caloric control model other than that’s what is recommended by most nutritionists. Why would doing this be “better” than living in a way that, supposedly, our bodies were designed to eat?
3. Study: while they call this study “recent,” I’m curious why in the 5 years since I’ve been low-carbing and reading all the battles in the press about low-carb pro and anti, that I’ve only now heard of this study? I’m curious to actually read what it has to say, but so far this is the only study that I’ve ever heard of that has something bad to say about low-carb. Yet, Atkins has been around for 30+ years, so you would think there would be some more evidence that such diets were bad for you over the long haul. I’m all for having scientific studies on these issues, but as we all know, just pointing to a study doesn’t necessarily mean it holds water. It has to be peer reviewed, and even then often from what I’ve seen the conclusions sometimes ignore the obvious because they preconceptions of the authors refuse to consider a possibility that they don’t want and so dismiss results that don’t fit those preconceptions.
4. McDougall: I’ve heard of McDougall, but I can’t place where exactly. Anyway, a couple of points. First, the Zone isn’t a low-carb diet, as far as I can tell, it is way too high in carbs. It may be higher protein than what is recommended by nutritionists, but the amount of carbs that are consumed on such a diet can be harmful for those who are insulin resistant. Secondly, the whole Japanese issue was tackled I think, in Protein Power. The problem with his argument is that it ignores the fact that when Japanese come here and adopt our diet, they are also adopting a new lifestyle, which may increase stress. They also may be eating a diet that has just as many carbs here, less fish, more junk food, etc. Epidemiological studies that purport to prove what healthy eating is by looking at different populations are notoriously unreliable because they just can’t account for all the variables from one population to another. Much more reliable, but still shakey is looking at the same population and making conclusions based on a range of diet and lifestyle variables. McDougall’s quote “If high-protein diets, which means meat, egg, and dairy products, were so good for us then people who subsist on these foods (most Americans) would be the thin and healthy, and vegetarians would be fat and sick. In general, the opposite is the case.” belies some real problems with logic. He doesn’t seem to understand that people who eat based on the concepts of a “high protein” diet, are also not eating all the refined carbs and sweets that “most Americans” eat. As for vegetarians, I’ve seen many an obese vegetarian. Now, when it comes to vegans (perhaps this is the group he really means to talk about because he includes dairy as part of his collection of “high protein” foods), I would agree that most are skinny. In my mind, though, this is not because their diet is somehow better. Skinny does not always equal healthy and in fact until the latter half of last century it was equated with the opposite!
5. Excess: are you sure excess protein is excreted? My sense is it still needs to be digested and depending on what the body needs, it will be converted up to 50% as glucose, which then, if not needed, will be stored as fat. This is one reason why it’s still debated even in some low-carb circles whether eating too much protein may eventually slow weight loss. But the actual digestive process whereby protein is broken down, is very inefficient. It needs more energy than what protein provides in caloric needs (conversion to glucose), so probably eating just too much protein is not going to do much. Besides, protein has been showd to be a much more “self-limiting” macronutrient than either carbs or fat, so you are much more likely to stop at a “reasonable” level. But the other question we should ask is this – why do we need to limit ourselves to only what our body “needs.” Needs in what sense? To survive or to thrive? And this is going to vary a great deal depending on the individual, their activity level, their size, etc. The nutritionists suggest we only need a very small amount of protein, and we shouldn’t go over that amount but I think it’s much less an issue if we get more than enough because protein helps our body maintain it’s vital functions and parts. There has been no ill effects shown from those eating excess protein, except for the limited cases where a person has preexisting pathologies of the kidneys.
6. Water: yet again, this old saw is brought up. Yes, initial weight loss on most diets is mostly water. But someone who loses 50 lbs over a year (or more) is not losing 50 lbs of water! So why even bring this up when this is true of most diets?
7. Calories in vs. Calories out: again, this is the main battle cry of nutritionists – “The only way to lose weight is to use more calories than you consume. For most people this means a sensible, low calorie diet with regular aerobic exercise.” Says who? The problem with this thinking is that it does not work for “most people.” Or rather, it does not work long-term. Anyone can lower there caloric intake and exercise a lot and lose a bunch of weight. I’ve done this numerous times, but like many, the weight always came back. What this approach does not consider is that what we eat and our digestive process itself has an effect on this caloric balance. In other words, metabolism! Not only do different people burn calories at different rates, but you as an individual will burn at a different rate depending on how much muscle you put on (or take off). The added muscle needs more calories and uses them to maintain the muscle mass. In addition to this, there’s something called the “dynamic action of foods” which I alluded to above. This says that different foods (or really different macronutrients – carbs, fat, and protein), have different energy requirements in digestion. Protein is “inefficient” because it takes more energy to digest it that in provides the body. Carbs and fat are much more easily digested and so most of the calories they contain are used by the body either for energy or stored as fat. So a simple calories in vs calories out is really incorrect and incredibly oversimplified.
8. Toxins: toxins are a problem in our food supply in general, but I’m surprised that it’s brought up in relation to free-range meats. Cattle or other animals that are fed an unnatural diet of grain (and probably genetically modified grain), do not have some of the beneficial qualities of free-range/grass fed cattle. I agree that this is something to be concerned about, but where are the studies or the information about such toxins being in meat? Fat is supposed to be the carrier, but a lot of free-range meat is actually lower in fat than its farm-fed counterparts, and again, where are the studies backing this theory up?
9. Disease: the last point of the counterpoint section shows again a point that is made which really effects a very small number of people:
   

   “One of the strongest counterpoints to the Paleodiet is when the dietary recommendations it contains would directly worsen a pre-existing medical condition. Individuals with conditions like liver disease, renal insufficiency or kidney failure or certain metabolic disorders like phenylketouria (PKU) could be caused significant harm by the high protein content in the Paleodiet. As always, discuss any planned dietary changes with your medical doctor before beginning new eating habits.”

   PKU is exceedingly rare, and liver and kidney disease is not very common either. It goes with out saying that if you have a serious illness or condition like one listed above, you should learn as much as possible about what foods you need to be careful about ingesting. But this is like saying that “one of the strongest counterpoints to eating shrimp is that some people suffer allergies to shelfish.” If you go by that logic, than we would have an extremely limited diet, because for almost every food you could probably find someone who is allergic or at least claims to be.

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A recent paper in the journal Tissue Engineering suggests the possibility that meat could be produced in the lab by taking samples of animal muscle tissue and growing it out, as an alternative to the conventional method of raising cattle. While this is not a reality yet, it seems like this has been accomplished on the small scale, so if there was truly a market, it could be expanded into a real option for consumers in the not too distant future. Although it does seem quite futuristic, no? Then again, GM crops seem pretty futuristic as well.

I’m a bit torn on the whole idea. On the one hand it would do away with the claims that meat is bad for the ecology (something I feel is mainly true for factory-farmed meat, not more benign organic/grass-fed/free-range). On the other hand, the idea of meat grown in a lab is surprisingly weird. It’s odd how this is somehow more objectionable to one’s senses (well my senses anyway) than actually slaughtering a live animal, but I think it speaks to hundreds or thousands of previous generations who went out on the hunt. Not that I would be able to do that myself unless I was truly in survival mode, but it still seems more natural than cooking up meat in a lab, even if that meat comes from a cell of a real animal originally.

The scientists who created it suggest they could create a variety that includes more Omega 3 and less Omega 6 than the current meat we find in supermarkets. My question is how? Wild game and cattle that are grass-fed are supposed to have a significantly higher level of Omega 3 (and other great nutrients like CLA). Factory farmed meat get fed a diet of grains, something that are not part of the natural diet of a cow, but is dirt cheap and allows the cow to put on lots of weight (including a lot more fat mostly in the form of saturated fat). The question is how do you feed these cells? I don’t pretend to understand how you would do this in a lab, but my guess is that you’re not going to feed it grass OR grain, but something that can somehow be absorbed by the cells without a digestive track! How will this effect the meat is a big question mark. Will it taste, act, smell, and digest like real meat? I wonder!

In general, I’d rather not go messing with nature unless we’re damn sure that what we are replicating is a true replication, which seems a little unlikely when you are producing something in a completely different way than it is actually grown. My bet is still on the replication technology that was suggested in Star Trek The Next Generation (and I’m sure in many other places), that would basically create an exact digital copy of an original “pattern” of matter, be it meat, precious material, or live humans. But that technology is still fantasy despite some recent work in quantum mechanics that hint at some possibilities. This lab-grown meat may yet become the new GM crop, and we know how controversial that has become, despite the fact that it’s become ubiquitous in our food supply (at least as far as grains and soybeans are concerned).

I am curious to hear what others think about this possibility. Does it weird you out? If you are vegetarian, would you eat such a product, given it was proven safe and healthy for you? I’m curious in particular how vegetarians come down on this. There seem to be a collection of different reasons why vegetarians become vegetarians, including animal welfare issues, religious reasons, ecological reasoning, and even simply tastes issues. I myself only ate fish for about six years in my 20′s in an attempt to progress to be a vegetarian, which I could never quite do. I did this only because I had read it was more healthy, but when I started reading Protein Power and other books and information about nutrition that weren’t all just about low-fat, I decided that meat was a part of a healthy diet. I was able to make that logical decision even after not eating meat for 6 years that because my decision was based on health and I no longer believed the premise behind that decision, that I should reincorporate meat into my diet. So I just wonder how vegetarians would react to a meat that is offered in such a way that it might eliminate the premise behind their becoming vegetarian?

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Pocket Tunes is one of if not THE premier audio application for the PalmOS, and I’ve been using it since I bought my Treo 600 over a year ago. Normsoft, the company that makes it, comes out regularly with new releases with new features, all of which have so far been free of charge for me. Most of the updates I’ve seen have been more tweaking of features to make them work better. However, this morning, they have released a huge new feature that will enhance the utility of the Treo (and many other PalmOS devices) for many of us music fans.

According to their site:

I’ve written before about my experiences with Yahoo! Music. Just a couple of months ago, Yahoo! released a new subscription based service similar to Napster To Go and Rhapsody which allows users to listen to any of the 1 million albums in their library on demand on a PC and optionally download tracks onto a compatible portable device all for under $60 for an entire year – a price that seriously undercut the competition.”

While I signed up right away and have enjoyed listening to a lot of music on my home and work computer, I did not have a compatible device. I have an iPod, but because Apple has it’s own iTunes Music Store, it’s unlikely that they would ever make their iPod compatible with a competing download service. It’s much more likely that Apple will simply start up their own similar subscription-based service that will only be iPod-compatible. It’s unfortunate that an open standard can’t be developed so that all devices will work with all services. Already licensing issues mean that certain countries get access to certain albums while others don’t, and of course certain services get access to labels that others don’t. Why do you need to have two seperate devices and subscribe to three different services so that you can listen to three albums that are on different labels? Each label might as well start selling their own proprietary format, each of which you need a different player to listen to. It’s ridiculous.

In any case, I have been looking at each new audio player that’s been announced recently to see whether it would be compatible with Yahoo! Music. But for me the other requirement is that it will play audio books from Audible.com. Unfortunately up until now, the only other device that seemed to play both Audible files as well as Yahoo! Music files was the AudioVox SMT5600 SmartPhone. Since I already have a Treo, this wasn’t a good choice. But my Treo will now allow me to listen to both of these types audio formats, as well as other MP3, WMA, and Ogg Vorbis files, and internet radio (streaming MP3) through PocketTunes, and Apple’s preferred AAC (but not it’s iTunes Music Store DRM Files) files via a different program (Aeroplayer), and RealAudio files with the Real’s player that’s included with the Treo 650. In other words, the Treo 650 (and other PalmOS devices) is, in large part due to companies like Normsoft, becoming more and more a convergence device for Audio (along with the many other areas of convergence).

Now that Audio is becoming is becoming such a major feature of this phone, it’s really key to start beefing up the storage. I have a 1GB card, of which 300MB is already filled up with maps, images, etc. I know one can find 2GB cards, but compared to my 40GB iPod, even 2GB seems paltry, not to mention these cards come at a big premium. I am hoping that at least the next version of the Treo includes an internal 4GB hard drive like the LifeDrive, or better yet, one of the larger 6GB ones that are making it into many of the mini audio players these days.

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Vienna 4th best place to live in the U.S.!

Money Magazine has come out with its top 100 places to live in the U.S and my town is #4 on the list. I knew there was a reason we moved here! To be fair, though, I’m sure lots of deserving towns were not in this list and many in this list are probably questionable. The problem is that the criteria are all weighted the same, whereas for different people some criteria will by far outweigh others. So while my town might be a great place for me to live, it’s probably not the right place for a whole lot of people. At least money lets you program your own criteria on their site (from a limited list) so that you can produce one that might be more customized to your own needs.

The other odd thing about how they judge towns in this article is that they do it based on the post office address. So while Vienna’s city limits comprise a fairly compact area, it’s official address stretches much further, encompassing some areas that are very different from the main parts that most people associate as Vienna. The same is true of all of these towns, so I’m sure this had a big effect. There could very well be incredible places to live, but their city name also encompasses areas on their outskirts that may have crime problems, or bad schools, or perhaps where the houses are astronomical in price.

Still, I can’t help but to be glad that my town won something like this. The last time I recall there was a big news story that featured Vienna was when Robert Hannsen was caught passing secret documents to the KGB via drop-offs in Vienna parks. Hannsen also lived in Vienna.

For anyone who is already a Vienna resident or who is thinking of moving here, a few weeks ago I set up a Yahoo! Group devoted to things Vienna. It still hasn’t quite gotten off the ground, but maybe this #4 placement will be the start of something?

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Back to blogging.

After the longest hiatus in months, I’m finally trying to get back to posting a bit more. Not that I’ve suddenly got a lot of time on my hands, but after a pretty hellish week where I was doing some work for my old job and working at my new job for a total of somewhere around 70 hours, I at least FEEL like I have a lot more free time! I’ve actually gotten some things around the house and yard done I’ve been wanting to do for WEEKS! My new job also has had be a bit busy, but now that I’m finally starting to get used to the new environment and develop a rhythm, I’ll actually get to take a short break once in a while and maybe not write per se, but at least get some things done that I otherwise would have put off till after work.

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One thing that you can use many digital cell phones for (not just Smartphones like the Treo 650) is as a modem for your computer. So you can travel around with your laptop and establish a connection anywhere you have a data signal – even in a moving train or car. I actually tried this out first way back about four years ago when I managed to get my old Motorola P280 to connect with a free ISP and connected it via it’s infrared port to my Sony Clie. I remember reading some email trying to browse the web a bit before it crashed. I only tried this a few times because back then the applications were just not very robust and even if they were, the speeds I was getting were glacial.

I never did try this with my Treo 600. I was perfectly happy to have a phone that could do many of the things I use the internet for. Plus I would have had to buy a cable or at least an additional piece of software.

One of the big things I kept hearing about when the Treo 650 first came out was the fact that Dial-Up Networking, or “DUN” (which basically means using your phone as a modem for your computer) was crippled for the Sprint (and later Cingular) versions of the phone. Specifically, you couldn’t use Bluetooth to connect your phone to your laptop. You could still get a cable or perhaps even do infrared, but infrared requires your phone’s infrared port is facing the computer’s, and it’s very easy for this connection to be broken if one moves slightly out of place. A cable of course means extra money, possibly software which costs yet more. Bluetooth is a wireless technology that allows the phone to communicate with the computer from up to 30 feet away. You do, however, need to buy a Bluetooth device for your computer in most instances. I bought one made by Belkin that slips into a USB port on my laptop. They can be had for $10-20 if you look around.

Of course, despite buying an unlocked version of the Treo 650 which didn’t have the limitations of the branded models, I still just never got around to getting DUN working on my phone. So, this weekend I got motivated for some reason and I set about trying to get this working and while I consider myself pretty technical, it really took me way longer than it should have. PalmOne provides a document that will get you started, but you still need information specific to your wireless carrier. In my case it was Tmobile. Specifically you need to know their APN (Access Point Number). For Tmobile in the U.S. it is internet2.voicestream.com. Voicestream used to be Tmobile’s name before they changed it about 3 years ago. Even after configuring everything precisely, I kept getting these vague error messages. Finally, I changed or reset something and at least it was trying to dial, but would tell me there was a hardware failure. I also had issues with comm Ports on my laptop, but eventually got that taken care of. After hitting my head against the wall for a while longer I finally posted a message to a TreoCentral.com forum asking for advice, and a response made me go back and check to make sure my APN was set correctly. Of course there was a typo! I had written “voicestram” instead of “voicestream.” I’m sure many of you techies have experienced this same sort of thing either with your software or hardware configurations: after struggling for hours on something that just doesn’t want to work, finally something occurs to you and you realize that there’s this really simple stupid thing that you’ve gotten wrong. It’s usually something very basic – enough to make you feel like an idiot!

In any case, I finally got it working and the speed did not seem all that bad, although I only used it to load up a couple of web pages. The one thing that concerns me a little is that when I spoke to Tmobile (when getting the proper APN), they told me that when I use this type of connection it counts as a call, not as data. This is a bit problematic in that I have an unlimited data package so I’m used to being able to pick up email, browse the web, etc., whenever I want. I have unlimited calling on nights and weekends, but during peak hours, I really have to watch my minutes. Recently we’ve been going over by a bit, which has resulted in some painful bills!

DUN is great when you really want to see and use the web in all its glory. It’s great to have a hand-held device where you can go check a web page from anywhere and not be encumbered by an actual computer, but there are also times when you really want to spend lots of time reading blogs, doing research, etc., and while you might have to use some minutes from your cell phone plan to use DUN, you also avoid having to pay for Wifi access. Wifi access can be very cheap, of course, or even free – I was getting all of this working this weekend from a Panera, which offers free Wifi at many of their locations – but it doesn’t come even close to how ubiquitous cell phone signals are. I could use DUN in the middle of a lake, or on a moving train, as I said. It can take a while to get set up properly, especially if you make dumb mistakes like me, but it really can be a very nice option for internet connectivity if you don’t mind the relatively slow speeds of 1-2 times that of a 56K modem…

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