Maggie's Farm

Yet one more manufactured, over-hyped  crisis is being debunked.

Nowadays you can define anything you want as pathological. And this whole new fashionable category of "at risk" silliness expands things to include everybody.

For example, at middle-age I am "at risk" for obesity. Not wanting to be fat, I decided not eat carbs and I do a tough daily workout. It's not too complicated.

Prosperous nations have lots of fat people. More of them than poor nations, although poor nations have plenty of them too. The reason is that humans have a weakness for carbs. Thus being trim and fit is a sign of self-control, but being heavy is a time-honored sign of prosperity.

If you want to see fat people, go to Disneyworld and get grossed out. There are Americans there so fat that they have to ride around in motorized chairs, like King Kamehameha. God bless 'em. The world needs more fatties, in my opinion. It means people have plenty to eat, but I don't like to have to look at them. To be evenhanded, however, I find anorectics even more disturbing.

I happen to feel that excess fat in women is unattractive, slovenly, and unsexy. Somewhat less so in men: some stout men are cool, like Teddy Roosevelt was. Anyway, we have been subject to much brouhaha about obesity in recent years. Big health crisis, etc.

You have surely read the news that being overweight is not such a big deal, from a medical standpoint. Even the WSJ covered the story, amusingly. Obesity - and that means much more than ordinary fatness and pudginess - is often quite benign.

And being overweight is fine, from a health standpoint.

Just like the the AGW fad and all such fads that governments are suckered into, there is fat money to be made from the obesity silliness. Follow the money: you know that somebody always wants some of yours. Careers. Respect. Pensions. Fat City.

Fact is, when I was an intern in NYC, I saw plenty of skinny, athletic guys in their 40s come into the ER and crap out with massive heart attacks. Also, skinny guys with insulin resistance. The reasons to be relatively thin are to be fully functional - and aesthetic. If an American lady wishes a decent sex life, it behooves her to be trim. Not so in some countries, however, where they prefer us gals Biggie-Sized.

Here's a good food story, from the Englishman:

His typical breakfast order from Pete's Grille in Baltimore, Maryland:

Start with three [white bread] sandwiches of fried eggs, cheese, lettuce, tomato, fried onions, and mayonnaise; add one omelet, a bowl of grits, and three slices of French toast with powdered sugar; then wash down with three chocolate chip pancakes.

According to his autobiography, growing up, lunch also consisted of 1 pound of pasta, 2 large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo and 1,000 calories of energy drinks. Dinner’s another pound of pasta and a whole pizza and 1,000 calories more in energy drinks. No food hang-ups with him. He gets it. Food is fuel, not endowed with magical or evil effects.

What a fat slob he must be, bet he can barely get up from the sofa to get to the fridge, something ought to be done to prevent our youths ending up like him...

Let's all be relaxed and tolerant: being fat is a "life-style" choice. Let them eat cake.

Addendum: At Pajamas, Fast food restrictions fatten government

Here's an answer. Are men's nipples "sensitive"? Yes they are. Gals take note, for when in a playful mood.

There's a book with that title too: Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini

How many of you fellows out there are on statin medicines, like Lipitor or the others? Raise your hands.

Well, it's a good idea to take them. It may turn out to be a good idea even if your cholesterol and triglyceride levels are in the normal range.

Why? Because the way they seem to reduce arterial disease leading to heart attack and stroke may not be just - or even mainly - so much by altering cholesterol and triglyceride blood levels, but by stabilizing the endothelium (inner lining) of arteries. Here's a technical paper on the subject. One quote: 

Several clinical trials including Heart Protection Study (HPS), Collaborative Atorvastatin Diabetes Study (CARDS) and Treating to New Targets (TNT) Study have suggested that statins can offer protection to patients with normal lipid levels through various nonlipid-lowering effects.

The inflammation, clots, and plaque on arteries are the main cause of terrible events. American males already have visible arterial disease in their 20s. I saw it and touched it when doing autopsies in medical school, in young people who died of other causes.

Everybody dies. Statistically, if you reach maturity and don't die in a car crash, the odds are that half die of cancer and half of heart/arterial disease. So, if you can postpone that arterial disease, you get to die from a cancer.

That's today's cheery medical news.

From Yale Psychiatrist (and author of Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation) Charles Barber on the above topic in The Wilson Quarterly, a quote:

The new neuroscience has emerged from the last two decades of formidable progress in brain science, psychopharmacology, and brain imaging, bringing together research related to the human nervous system in fields as diverse as genetics and computer science. It has flowered into one of the hottest fields in academia, where almost anything “neuro” now generates excitement, along with neologisms—neuroeconomics, neurophilosophy, neuromarketing. The torrent of money flowing into the field can only be described in superlatives—hundreds of millions of dollars for efforts such as Princeton’s Center for the Study of Brain, Mind, and Behavior and MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Psychiatrists have been in the forefront of the transformation, eagerly shrugging off the vestiges of “talk therapy” for the bold new paradigms of neuroscience. By the late 1980s, academic psychiatrists were beginning literally to reinvent parts of the discipline, hanging out new signs saying Department of Neuropsychiatry in some medical schools. A similar transformation has occurred in academic psychology.

A layperson leafing through a mainstream psychiatric journal today might easily conclude that biologists had taken over the profession.  “Acute Stress and Nicotine Cues Interact to Unveil Locomotor Arousal and ­Activity-­Dependent Gene Expression in the Prefrontal Cortex” is the title of a typical offering. The field has so thoroughly cast its lot with biology, and with the biology induced by psychoactive drugs, that psychiatrists can hardly hope to publish in one of the mainstream journals if their article tells the story of an individual patient, or includes any personal thoughts or feelings about the people or the work that patient was engaged with, or fails to include a large dose of statistical data. Psychiatry used to be all theories, urges, and ids. Now it’s all genes, receptors, and ­neurotransmitters.

Read Barber's whole essay here.

We have touched on the subject here and here. A few comments: He correctly describes the currents in Psychiatry today - the emphasis on the mechanistic view. Of course, this is just one view of the elephant, and you cannot eliminate the words "mind" or "soul." After all, the main role of current neuroscience is to understand "the mind." I try to take a balanced view. I am fascinated by the neurosciences, and I think our psychiatric medicines are Godsends for many. But, for many problems - let's use addictions as an easy example - I believe that a soul-change is needed, and is possible. I think it's best if we shrinks remain modest about our knowledge and our powers.

Another quote from Barber:

I have no problem whatsoever with physicians easing terminal peoples' path out of life with merciful doses of morphine, but I have great problems with the Brave New World of government rationing of medical care, and the hustling of people into death to save money as they seem inclined to do in the UK, Canada...and in Oregon.

Dr. Bob discusses. One quote:

We have, at last, arrived. The destination was never much in doubt — once the threshold of medical manslaughter had been breached, wrapped as always in comforting words of compassion and dignity, it was only a matter of time before our pragmatism trumped our principles. Once the absolute that physicians should be healers not hangmen was heaved overboard, it was inevitable that the relentless march of relativism would reach its logical port of call.

In my view, easy abortion was the first big step in the direction of removing the annoying inconvenience of a human life. Perhaps it would be most expedient - or utilitarian - to do us in the minute we stop paying income taxes...assuming our function is to serve the "common good." Or at the moment of our birth, because it is certain that we will become expensively ill someday.

And when it comes to medical treatment in general, I like TigerHawk's idea much better than any governmental idea. WallMart! Just as long as I have my own doc who knows me and cares about me first.

Addendum: Father of Canada's medical system rejects what he created. "Woops. I goofed. So terribly sorry."

We have posted in the past about the role of natural Vit D - and the role of Vit D supplement, in cancer prevention.

Here's a piece at Pajamas on the subject. The take-home message is, I believe, get tan but not burned.

It's good news, because those of us who are pasty-white Anglos look better with some healthy color.

With all of the traveling going on around here this June, I am prompted to remind our readers that it's a good idea to take a baby aspirin before any lengthy air, car, or rail trip. Especially men, who have more arterial disease at younger ages, and post-menopausal women (whose arterial disease - aka arterial deterioration - rapidly catches up to men unless they avail themselves of hormone replacement).

That little aspirin could save your life, because the inactivity is a set-up for Deep-Vein Thrombosis in the legs. Aspirin reduces the platelet aggregation which forms clots (which is also why it's used to prevent heart attacks - most Docs I know take one daily.)

Deep-vein thrombosis is enough of a problem, but the big problem is when it throws off a hunk of clot to your lungs. That is called a Pulmonary Embolism, and it can kill you in a most unpleasant way.

A friend of mine almost died from one, three days after flying home from Italy: it doesn't happen right away. It was a big-time medical mess.

Air travel health tips here.

Columbia's Brain and Mind Symposium has archived (on online video) a wonderful and relatively non-technical series of lectures by the world's greatest neuroscientists.

These talks were presented in 2004 as a part of Columbia University's 250th Anniversary. (h/t, Neurophilosophy)