Health and fitness

Last week’s nef event on shorter working week, which I blogged about a few days ago, is now available to watch via the LSE channel. Enjoy.

Matthew Yglesias is puzzled that women still want liposuction even if the fat comes back in other places. That doesn’t surprise me. If you had a pill that just induced redistribution of fat from unwanted places, a lot of people would take that pill. What strikes me about the study is the sheer weirdness of fat sort of migrating from you belly to your … triceps? Seriously?

It turns out, Dr. Leibel said, that the body controls the number of its fat cells as carefully as it controls the amount of its fat. Fat cells die and new ones are born throughout life. Scientists have found that fat cells live for only about seven years and that every time a fat cell dies, another is formed to take its place.

This seems like an obstacle not just to successful liposuction but to fat reduction by diet or exercise. How does anyone lose fat? Googling around, it looks as though there is some controversy about whether you can lose fat cells, or just make the one’s you’ve got smaller. Hmmm, learn something new every day. [click to continue…]

Ezra Klein has a bloggingheads diavwossname in which he makes – among other points – pretty much the same point he makes at the end of this column. Namely, a good diet isn’t a function of not eating a huge amount on Thanksgiving. It’s a matter of eating a little better consistently. But then he goes on to note that it’s surprisingly hard to get people really to get this, never mind actually doing it. (The major problem not being convincing people they can enjoy Thanksgiving, but making them appreciate that minor bits of diet discipline can make a major difference.) If so, it seems to follow that people are more clueless about diet than exercise. Because very few people think it makes sense to get up one morning, notice you haven’t exercised for years, and try to fix that by going to the gym for 8 hours. You could injure yourself pretty bad, true. Apart from that, one day won’t matter. But somehow the diet fix (the quick make or break) seems to have a certain fetishistic appeal. That carton of Ben & Jerry’s killed my diet! No weight-lifter ever thinks skipping bench-press for one day caused his pectorals to shrivel. Bodies don’t work like that. Or are there people out there so luckless in the metabolic department that whenever they gain a few pounds, even from a single big meal, their body sort of ratchets up and locks at that level? I do recognize that people have metabolic ‘set points’, and some folks are less lucky in that regard. Are there metabolic types such that every higher weight becomes a set point? If so, I feel sorry for you. For the rest: Happy Thanksgiving! Eat a lot! (It’s fun, and sociable!)

But you knew that already.

So what do you think: are significant numbers of people more confused about how eating works than are confused about how exercise works, in that they mistakenly believe in the quick make or break strategy?

Reading the current US debate on health care from the outside is pretty dispiriting. It is an example of what happens to rational debate in circumstances of inequality where vested interests and partisan pundits can distort discussion by throwing loads of noise, fear and disinformation into the conversation. Still, that’s no reason not to try to have a conversation about which principles ought to obtain, and I think for that it is hard to beat Ronald Dworkin’s paper “Justice in the Distribution of Heath Care”, _McGill Law Journal_, 38 (1993), pp. 883-98 (though I’m looking at the reprint in Clayton and Williams eds _The Ideal of Equality_ ).

Dworkin’s “central idea”:

bq. … we should aim to make collective, social decisions about the quantity and distribution of health care so as to match, as closely as possible, the decisions that people in the community would make for themselves, one by one, in the appropriate circumstances, if they were looking from youth down the course of their lives and trying to decide what risks were worth running in return for not running other kinds of risks. (C&W, 209)

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The responses to my recent post about Breast Cancer Awareness Month were interesting. One commenter suggested that instead of addressing specific issues or charities, it would be better to “focus our energy on political action for good national health insurance“. I’ve seen this argument made before, specifically about breast cancer awareness. While you certainly won’t get any arguments from me against better health insurance (I hate hate hate hate the system in the US and I’m among the privileged who at least has health insurance), I’m not convinced that that’s the only issue at hand when it comes to achieving adequate levels of awareness and preventive care.

First, should we give up on incremental action in other realms until the overall health care system gets figured out? Second, even if we do achieve major gains on that front, will that really take care of all associated concerns? Unlikely. One way to approach this is to see whether people in countries that have good universal health care are all educated about various illnesses and preventive measures. The answer is likely no, which suggests that there is room for awareness campaigns. [click to continue…]

First, may I say the triptans are a marvelous class of drug? When you’re wading through a 5 day migraine and liquids, not to mention solid food, are a distant memory. When the right side of your brain wakes you up every hour or two to pound a little harder on the left. When you haven’t been able to complete a sentence for days, but that’s just fine as you can’t leave your house to find any humans to talk to and you wouldn’t be able to find your way back home anyway. When you know, you just know that there’s one last zomig in the house if only you could find it. And then you do.

Joan Didion wrote that she came to regard her enemy, migraine, as a friend. Susan Sontag pointed out that describing illness with military metaphors has certain failings, not the least of which is to make ill people feel defeated. I don’t hold with making an ally of migraine, but I will grant you that the first day after the enemy decamps is a Red Letter Day. Today I am so full of vim and vigour that it seems a shame to waste all that energy on work. (Sadly I have so much to catch up on, I’ll have to.) The world is a bright, clear and shiny place today, even if my 401(k) is worth 53% less than what I’ve spent on it. So be it. Feeling like this, I could work until I’m 106, rather like that cheery nun who hasn’t cast a vote since Eisenhower, and who’s thrown her veil in the ring for Obama.

To business; why are triptans so expensive? Fair enough that nobody knows whether migraines are caused by bad chemistry or bad wiring. (Presumably it all looks the same at the molecular level.) So we’re not quite sure why triptans work so well for some people. But when they work, they are transformative within minutes. In Belgium, a month’s supply used to cost me about $100. Here in the US, my gold-plated insurer gives them to me more or less free. But someone’s making a lot of money either way, and migraine has such a huge impact on productivity/absenteeism that getting the cure for cheap would help hundreds of thousands of people and their employers. When did we invent this miracle drug, and will we be sharing the bounty any time soon?

I was talking to my Dad last week and he reminded me that it was seven years ago that day that my Mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Until then, I’d never made the connection between that event and the fact that October is breast cancer awareness month. As if there hadn’t been enough going on three weeks after 9/11, I now certainly had plenty to keep me up at night. Fast forward seven years and things are going well with my Mom. Although she’s never fully regained all of her energy since the treatments, overall she is back to being herself and has been for years now.

When all this came about, I was very grateful for having spent so many years in the US and how illness (or at least some types by now) is treated here versus many other countries, like Hungary, where my Mom’s diagnosis occurred. In too many cultures and communities, illness of all kinds remains a taboo. Not only is it not okay to tell people about it, often doctors won’t even tell patients their diagnosis. While awareness programs may seem superfluous to some*, it is important to remember that in many communities it is not only not the standard to talk and think about illnesses (and thus, for example, take preventive measures when possible), but it is a topic to be avoided outright due to associated embarrassment.

What struck me as I was talking to friends about my mother’s situation was how many among them had a close family member or friend who’d also had breast cancer. It was very helpful to hear about related experiences. But were it a taboo to discuss issues of this sort, I would have been left on my own to deal with the difficult news. Point being, there is value in talking about things of this sort at various levels: from contributing to prevention efforts to the emotional support that can come of it.

Recently, I received some notices about interesting pink-themed undertakings going on right now. One is a Pink group on the photo-sharing site Flickr that seems to be raising money for breast cancer awareness in various European countries. Another is an innovative idea by sociologist Dan Myers who has decided to wear pink every day for the month of October to raise awareness and collect donations. Support him if you can.

Of course, there are serious critical ways of looking at the pink ribbon campaign. For a couple of years now, I’ve had the book Pink Ribbons, Inc. on my book shelf, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Has anyone read it?

I’ve been thinking about a way to contribute to these efforts myself this year and I have an idea. I’m putting some finishing touches on it. I’ll post about it in a bit.

[*] A few months after my Mom’s diagnosis, I still remember that there was an article in The Daily Princetonian making fun of the ribbon campaign. Like I have done above, a response to that piece tried to explain why these do serve a purpose.

As promised, in honor of One Web Day, I’m posting information about one of my favorite Web sites and I encourage you to do the same, here or on your own blog. I’m always on the lookout for sites that make a difference in people’s lives and one such site is WalkerTracker. It is no exaggeration that it has had a direct impact on my everyday life as I have become a serious walking enthusiast and thus get more regular exercise now than I had ever before.

WalkerTracker helps keep track of one’s daily steps encouraging a healthy lifestyle by offering all sorts of neat statistics and graphs of one’s step measures. Of course, one doesn’t necessarily need a gadget (i.e., a pedometer) or a tool such as this site to go out on walks, but I have found it extremely inspiring and motivating to be able to keep track of my steps and see the progress I make over time. My daily goal is 10,000 steps (that’s about 4-5 miles) and on average I’ve managed to come close to this each month since I’ve started in April, 2007. I’m excited to be averaging almost 12K this month. [click to continue…]

This blog post is a shameless plug for a friend’s book. But I wouldn’t be writing it if I didn’t believe that the book is a tremendous achievement, as well as being a very moving personal document. “Havi Carel’s Illness: The Cry of the Flesh”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844651525/junius-20 (“UK link “:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844651525/junius-21) is published tomorrow by Acumen. It is a philosophical meditation on the nature of and social meaning illness, disease and death. It discusses philosophical and psychological literature, Epicurus, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. But it is also a personal memoir, it is about Havi’s experience of being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, about what that meant for her presence in the world, about how she appeared in the eyes of others, and how she felt she appeared. It is about the encounter with medical professionals and their detached and external perspective on another’s catastrophe; it is about the varied reactions of friends, some of whom couldn’t maintain friendship. It is about how to confront the fact that all your assumptions about how your life is going to go: career, relationships, family, old age, can just be taken away. Havi was diagnosed with lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), a rare disease that affects young women, and for which the progosis is about 10 years from the onset of symptoms. The sufferer experiences a progressive decline in lung-function over that time. Life may be extended by a heart-lung transplant, but that’s, obviously, a difficult business.
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… and, increasingly, fat British too.

For Europeans, one of the really disconcerting things about visiting the United States is the size of the meals. Ok, there’s the phenomenon that the restaurant staff will let you take home what you don’t or can’t eat (and that’s an idea that many Europeans feel uncomfortable with), but there’s still the fact of the sheer volume of stuff that gets put on your plate. It seems it wasn’t always this way. Via someone in my del.icio.us network, I came across “this article on how portion sizes have changed”:http://www.divinecaroline.com/article/22178/49492-portion-size–now in the US over the past twenty years. And not only are American meals bulkier, they’ve also increased two or three times in calorific value. That can’t be good.

I first became aware of Dru because she was a member of the Bristol Flickr group, and I was looking to buy a camera. What better way of deciding than to look through other people’s photos, and see what the ones I liked were taken with? So there was Dru, a slightly mumsy, middle-aged woman with a young daughter and a Morris Traveller. In other words, extrapolating from the various signifiers, I’d formed an impression of what Dru must be like. Then I met her, at one of our monthly get-togethers, in the Royal Naval Volunteer. And then she spoke. “Bloodly hell!” I thought to myself, “you’re a bloke … or used to be.” A very quick update of my mental image of Dru took place.

It isn’t very often that people I know have their biography published. In fact, through not paying attention again, I’d failed to notice that Dru’s was coming out. Only when a friend send me “a link to the Guardian”:http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/relationships/story/0,,2275803,00.html , with the question “Is this Flickr Dru?” did I catch on. Well, “Becoming Drusilla”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/184655067X/junius-21 isn’t so much a biography as the record of a friendship, and what happens to it when one of the parties announces their desire to change sex.
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I’m reading an interesting book, Eye For An Eye, by William Ian Miller [amazon]. (I don’t know anything about him. I just grabbed this off the shelf.) It’s a discussion of lex talionis style justice systems – a somewhat unsystematic ‘antitheory’ of justice, the author styles it. Lots of quoting from Old Norse stuff and Babylonian stuff and ancient what-not. Very colorful. Here’s a bit that’s interesting, in a subsection on “Paying Gods in Bodies and Blood”. Maybe Kieran will have something to say.
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The BBC has a feature on my friend, the philosopher Havi Carel, and the way in which philosophy has helped her come to terms with the diagnosis of an incurable disease. Havi has a book _Illness_ (US, UK) forthcoming in September, in which she draws on her own experience and tries to give a philosophical account of the meaning and significance of illness.

We have an old (1909) children’s book, Fun & Fancy For the Little Ones. Which is not, actually, as grim as you would expect. The illustrations for "The Fishes Athletic Club" are alright. I just noticed there are ads on the inside cover (click for larger).

They marketed corsets for children under the brand name ‘Good Sense’? "These waists conform to the NATURAL BEAUTY of the human form as GOD made it, and are not made after "French" patterns."

I didn’t Photoshop that. And we don’t call em ‘saddlebags’ anymore, because that’s "French". We call ’em ‘freedom thighs’.

Well, I just thought I’d share that with you.