Fat Cell Switcheroo*

Humans, mice — indeed all mammals — have two types of fat cells in their bodies; white and brown. White fat cells store energy. In contrast, brown fat cells dissipate energy as heat, thus counteracting obesity. Much to the chagrin of humans living in industrialized societies, most fat cells in our (adult) bodies are white fat cells. While this trait served our kind well throughout our evolutionary history, we now face a vast abundance of inexpensive, easily accessible, high energy content foods. This, combined with our body’s tendency to want to store up energy for times when food is scarce, leads to obesity and its accompanying adverse health effects. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have more brown fat cells and less white fat cells?

 

The “Second Brain”*

I studied T’ai Chi for a year and enjoyed it immensely, I hope to go back to it when my back is better. A fellow class mate had introduced me to Mantak Chia, a master of Taoist philosophy and healing. I sincerely hope that Western medicine, which I believe is just starting to open itself up to Eastern/Chinese medicine, will continue to open its mind to and absorb the immense genius of these Arts.

 

My First Guest Blogger Writes About… The Wad of Fat: A Secret Every Woman Needs to Know

I am honored to have Elise LeQuire as my first guest blogger. Here she shares her unfortunate experience with the gross insensitivity that many breast cancer patients face from the medical establishment. Elise is a highly experienced freelance Science Writer and a member of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW). You can learn more about Elise’s extensive experience at http://www.eliselequire.com/.

The Wad of Fat: A Secret Every Woman Needs to Know

For women diagnosed with breast cancer, perhaps facing mastectomy, there is a dirty little secret out there we need to know in advance, before surgery. It’s called the wad of fat. Listen up.

 

Today’s Pet Peeve – HFCS

OK, today my pet peeve is high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). I always buy non-HFCS containing whole grain bread for myself and my husband, and I refuse to buy the commercially available HFCS containing breads. Even the whole grain varieties of these breads have HFCS as one of the first ingredients! I usually buy bread at Trader Joe’s or Fairway, but yesterday I wasn’t able to get to one of these stores and I really needed bread. So I went to the A&P down the block. I had looked for non-HFCS containing breads before and hadn’t found any. I searched the whole aisle again, and found not a single one. I have no doubt that for many years, HFCS has provided a cheap filler that allowed big companies to make much more bread with the same amount of grain, and charge the same as if the breads did not contain HFCS. I imagine that even with today’s commodity prices, this economic advantage for the companies still holds. The price of corn has skyrocketed, but the price of wheat has also, so I guess it evens out. Apparently, HFCS gets a bad rap in the media, in that it is generally popular to blame the ubiquity of HFCS for the obesity epidemic in the US. In a New York Times article from 2006, several expert scientists clarified the issue, saying that there is no hard scientific evidence linking HFCS consumption and obesity, and that it is no worse than refined white sugar. So how good is refined white sugar for you? The simple question is, then, that there are delicious breads that do not contain HFCS, so why put it in?

 

The Whole World’s Getting Fatter

I was just listening to the BBC World Service discussing the obesity trend in Australia. As in the US and so many other wealthy nations around the world, this trend will bring a veritable tsunami of health problems. On the program, they mentioned that health officials in Australia believe that for the first time in many generations, the current younger generations will at some point begin to die off at a younger age than their parents did, specifically due to complications from obesity. Again, the excesses of our “I want it all and I want it now” society manifest themselves in real time and real bodies. There is no question that the quest for unsustainable levels of productivity and wealth influence everything in our society, including the portion sizes in fast food restaurants, which have grown significantly since the 1970s, along with our collective girth. In previous entries, I’ve written about the huge quantities of cheap meat that the fast food industry has arranged to have access to is contributing not only to obesity but to global warming as well. In poorer countries with tremendous wealths of natural resources, businesses and even individuals are clearing huge swaths of rainforest in order to raise more livestock and crops. And when people around the world object to this activity, the governments of these poor countries accuse those in wealthier countries of wanting to deprive their citizens of the very excesses that are causing all the problems mentioned above. There’s just no thought involved. Only greed. I hope at least some of the poor governments that want to improve the quality of life for their citizens take the lessons of excess in the wealthier countries of the world to heart, and build a smarter society. Is it too much to ask of human beings? I sincerely hope not.

 

Economic Diabetes or What’s Wrong With American Society Today

It can be summed up in one word: excess. Most people I know live with mountains of debt. Many people bought houses that were way beyond their reach in price, only to find several years later that their house is worth less than what they owe on their mortgage. How did things get so bad?

Have you ever been at a performance where the audience begins clapping in unison to encourage an encore? Sometimes, the pace of the clapping becomes faster and faster until it eventually disintegrates, because it reaches a point where it is just too fast to maintain uniformity. The chaos currently running through our economy is the metaphorical equivalent of the clapping at the point where it loses its order and becomes random before petering out. (I’m sure that there are other examples of this phenomenon in nature, and if anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them.) Too many people have been in a race to catch the sun, which would be analogous to the race to acquire more STUFF. You can run as fast as you can, and you may outrun a lot of people, but the truth is, no one can catch the sun. It will inevitably set and come up behind you. In a race to attain unattainable levels of wealth, people will increase the amount of risk they are willing to take. Combine that with the decreasing value of the US dollar, and you have one big, tragic MESS.

Another symptom of excess in our society is the size of food portions served in many of the nation’s most popular restaurant chains. Portion sizes served have increased several times in size over the past 30 or so years. The largest companies have conspired with meat and poultry farms to produce obscene quantities of meat at very low cost to our ever more greedy society. These farms are rife with animal abuse, filth, and pollution, and produce huge quantities of greenhouse gases. And now, a lot of poor countries want the same access to cheap, plentiful meat and are destroying their countries’ ecosystems to achieve this goal. The American obesity epidemic is analogous to the economic excesses which have caused our current “economic diabetes” crisis.

 

Economic Diarrhea

Here’s a parallelaphor for you: the problems in our economy, i.e. the subprime mortgage backed securities debacle, the “credit crunch”, etc, are like food poisoning working it’s way through one’s digestive system. All our economic problems stem from a basic leaving behind of the basics: don’t spend more than you earn, and don’t bite off more than you can chew. When one starts gorging on junk food (read: subprime mortgage backed securities), some of which may have been fried in rancid oil (again, read: subprime mortgage backed securities), one can become frightfully ill. The result is nasty bouts of vomiting and diarrhea (read: dizzying stock market gyrations, skyrocketing commodities prices, banks collapsing [oops, did I say that? I wasn't supposed to say that, was I? Forget it, I didn't say that]). When the greedy bastards on Wall Street said, “here, eat this (subprime mortgage backed securities), it’s really good!” and challenged eachother to a drinking contest with the most foul rotgut you can possibly imagine (more subprime mortgage backed securities), many who should have known better succumbed to the debauchery, all in the name of getting as drunk (rich) as possible. Now, banks don’t even want to lend to eachother because they don’t trust eachother (…dude, you made me eat that stuff, next time I throw up it’s going to be on YOU). And guess who will ultimately have to clean up the mess? US. The American Taxpayer. The Fed (read: the American Taxpayer) had to step in and save one of the worst offenders (Bear Stearns) from literally dying. In Bear Stearns case, they had lost so much money that unless they got a massive infusion of cash, much like a patient dying from food poisoning needs IV rehydration to survive, they would have died. But we saved them, even after what they had done. And we will pay for it by having to clean up their vomit and diarrhea (read: pay higher taxes and higher prices for food, energy, etc. as our dollars decrease in value). The only reason we saved them is so we wouldn’t have to clean up a lot MORE vomit and diarrhea (read: domino effect in the financial industry leading to catastrophic consequences rivaling the Great Depression). It’s just unbelievable what some people get away with.