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Sep. 2nd, 2019 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. I need to make breakfast, do laundry and possibly go grocery shopping again. (I slept in until around 8:30.) But am procrastinating. It's over cast today -- okay that's an understatement, it's overcast and threatening to rain. No, not Dorian -- that's still way South of us, somewhere just past the Bahamas, apparently it devastated the Bahamas.
2. English Majors Rejoice Employers Want You More Than Business Majors
I shared this on FB. I have a friends locked FB page and not that many people I've friended -- who are mainly made up of Family members, college friends, Fandom friends, and Church Members. I'm starting to regret friending the family members and church people -- should have just kept it to fandom and college friends. At least most of the former co-workers have disappeared. Still have one remaining.
Father's Retired Brother (Salesman): I can't think of one meaningful thing I learned in my business courses, other than perhaps learning later that most of them had no clue about the reality of the business world.
However, one of the most important skills I needed was to be able to communicate. It's the one skill that was always VERY important. Over the course of a career, those were educated in how to communicate tended to do well. Those that didn't know the basics were ALL quickly gone. Didn't matter how many degrees they had, if they couldn't read and write at a high level, gone baby, gone.
Me: I wish that were true everywhere. I work in an organization with a lot of engineers -- and a high percentage of them cannot write and read well. They are good at math just not communicating. It's highly frustrating.
Retired Mother's Brother-in-Law (Engineer): While this article is very good and informative the headline is still misleading it says "English Majors rejoice", when in fact you will see that they are still in the lower half of the chart of people that are under employed. (He annoyingly tags his successful engineer daughter and salesman son-in-law).
Me: It says business majors not engineers...we all know engineers are in hot demand.
Then cousin who is a retired engineer posted a t-shirt pic that stated "I'm an Engineer", "I'm not Arguing, I know I'm Right".
Cousin: The best engineers know to admit when they are wrong.
Me: If only there were more of them. (I did not post that. I restrained myself, you'd be proud.)
2. There's a post on FB that the first person to live to the age of 150 years of age has already been born. (Honestly, who wants to live that long? I'm personally hoping to check out around my 80s. Life is frigging painful.) With the response, please let it be Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
Uhm, unlikely. She's fighting pancreatic cancer. That has a very low survival rate.
With our luck it will be Trump or Putin or one of the other nasty leaders out there - who are probably energy vampires and unkillable.
3. The Modern Triumph of the Periodic Table of Elements --
The modern drive for elements has brought new pitfalls, such as new forms of scarcity. Wood, the substrate of an earlier era, may not be a miracle material, but at least it’s easy to get. Today’s technology is vulnerable to disruptions of supply chains that extend to the corners of the Earth. China is the dominant supplier of rare-earth metals, a group of 17 elements used in advanced magnets, batteries, and other devices. A single Virginia-class attack submarine in the U.S. Navy uses almost 5 tons of them.
If the free market is working efficiently, impending shortages of elements should be corrected by rising prices, which discourage consumption while encouraging more production or the development of substitutes. As the market saying goes, the cure for high prices is high prices. Biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, famously lost a bet to economist Julian Simon when he predicted in 1980 that the prices of chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten would rise over the following decade. All five got cheaper.
But there are reasons not to trust the market entirely. One is national security. If war threatened to break out between the U.S. and China or Russia, no price would be high enough to entice those foes to supply the U.S. war machine with raw materials. War is often the result when a country can’t get the natural resources it needs. Resource-poor Japan occupied Manchuria before World War II to get its iron ore. Germany, lacking in just about every resource but coal, sought Lebensraum—literally, “living room”—to grab cobalt, copper, iron ore, petroleum, rubber, tungsten, and bauxite for aluminum. The Axis powers eventually lost in part because the Allies cut off their access to those critical raw materials.
Saleem Ali, an environmental planning professor at the University of Delaware, argues for an international treaty to prevent a repetition of “old colonial scrambles for wealth,” which he points out have occurred not only with minerals but also with sugar, spice, and vanilla.
Market forces can also respond too slowly. Yale’s Graedel, a professor emeritus of industrial ecology, estimates that it takes 15 to 30 years to bring a new mine into commercial production. Expedited permitting would help with that, he says, as long as it doesn’t open the door to abuses by mining companies. Ironically, the green economy depends on many elements whose production is anything but green. Without strong global standards, the free market could push production to the countries that do the least to protect the environment.
Both economics and geopolitics will drive the world toward greater reuse of elements. Recycling will be built into the design of products. That will favor the elements that are most adaptable. “Carbon, which can be as soft as graphite or as hard as diamond, may be the material of choice,” Jamais Cascio, a research fellow at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Palo Alto, Calif., wrote in 2012. “Instead of worrying about minimizing carbon outputs, we may find ourselves working to maximize carbon inputs,” he added.
The value of the world’s output keeps going up in terms of dollars per ton—more value for less mass. But Buckminster Fuller was wrong. Technological progress isn’t ephemeralization. It’s invention—and there’s no clearer example of invention than the exploitation of Mendeleev’s table of elements.
4. Diet Advice Changes Minute By Minute -- How are we Supposed to figure out to eat .
It’s fair to ask why nutritionists can’t seem to make up their minds. Are eggs good or bad for us? Will coffee kill us or make us live longer? Should we believe the people pushing a low-carb, high-fat diet, or those extolling the exact opposite? Is it better to join Team Ketogenic or Team Mediterranean?
In fairness, nutrition is a relatively new — and not very well funded — field, so there are substantial built-in limitations. Most of our scientific nutritional advice comes from two types of research. Observational epidemiological studies track the general eating and health habits of hundreds of thousands of people over many years, to see who lives and who dies. (That’s largely how science demonstrated the strong association between smoking and lung cancer.) Randomized control trials attempt to isolate the role of one particular food by comparing small groups of people eating it against those in a placebo/control group.
The most sobering insight I gained during my reporting six years ago came from Stanford University nutrition professor Christopher Gardner, who specializes in randomized trials and confessed to me that he was suffering a professional midlife crisis. The overarching problem is that observational studies are essentially too big and randomized trials are too small. It’s impossible for an observational study to prove that the people enrolled in it lived longer or died sooner because of, say, their coffee intake, versus any number of other dietary, health, or genetic factors. But Gardner told me that when he or other scientists try to isolate the effect of a particular food in a randomized trial, they find “one little thing at a time never makes a difference.”
It would be great if scientists had the funds and stamina to run a host of massive, long-term randomized trials trying to isolate and test every possible dietary combination — and the public had the patience to wait for the definitive findings. Since that’s not going to happen, we’re doomed to more servings of contradictory advice.
If the foundational job of medicine is “first, do no harm,” nutritionists and public policy leaders have often fallen short over the years. A recent paper in the journal Science, written by Harvard researchers Walter Willett and David Ludwig and two colleagues, offers a catalog of mistakes in the history of nutritional advice in this country, going back to a boomlet of fear about diet-related disease following President Eisenhower’s heart attack in 1955. The Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health in 1988 identified cutting fat from the American diet as the “primary priority for dietary change.”
Three years later, the US Department of Health and Human Services called on the food industry to produce thousands of new “processed food products” that would be low in fat. The industry was only too eager to comply, flooding supermarket shelves with SnackWell’s and other too-good-to-be-true processed foods that typically replaced the fat with heaping amounts of sugar. Our concept of a healthy diet has been continually clouded by industry and advocate profiteering, which has led to boxes of sugary Froot Loops sporting the American Heart Association’s seal of approval and buckets of greasy KFC chicken carrying the imprimatur of the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation.
On one level, our war on fat was successful. In the 1970s, the proportion of fat in the average American diet was 42 percent of total calories. Today, it is 34 percent. In a larger sense, it has been an abject failure. While fat consumption has gone down, the percentage of calories from carbs has seen a huge jump. Over the same period, probably not coincidentally, the rates of obesity and diabetes have exploded. As the Science paper points out, that spike has contributed to the first nationwide decrease in life expectancy since the flu pandemic 100 years ago. There’s a lot of harm going around.
What made that Science paper especially interesting is that it was jointly written by experts from different nutrition camps. Dr. Walter Willett, a nutrition professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the world’s most cited nutritionist, has overseen the Nurses’ Health Studies since 1980. Tracking the eating and health habits of a quarter-million nurses, it is the granddaddy of observational studies. Willett was furious during the 1980s and ’90s when people demonized good fat — the kind found in avocados, nuts, and olive oil — along with the bad fat in Big Macs and pepperoni pizza. He became an evangelist for the moderate Mediterranean diet: low in saturated fats (but high in healthy fats) and high in whole grain carbs, vegetables, and fruits, with a good amount of protein.
During a recent conversation, Willett assures me he is still very much on Team Mediterranean, even as others who started in his camp have moved away from animal products entirely. Although he agrees that a plant-based diet is best for our environment, he says, “I don’t advise that everybody go on a vegan diet. Veganism is very, very hard to sustain.” Instead, he advises a “flexitarian” diet, which is mostly plant based but allows for some limited animal products. It ends up looking a lot like the Mediterranean diet, just with a few more restrictions.
Dr. David Ludwig, his coauthor and fellow Harvard professor of nutrition, comes at things differently. As the co-director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and an endocrinologist who has seen tens of thousands of patients, Ludwig says, “You become practical. You basically want something that works.” Doctors “have been telling people to eat less and move more for decades,” he says, yet here we are in the midst of a full-blown obesity crisis.
Although he ate a conventionally healthy diet — low fat, whole grains, fruits and vegetables — during his 20s and 30s, Ludwig found that he was gaining a pound or two every year. By 1995, he was a 37-year-old who had reached the cutoff for being classified as overweight. “As an obesity researcher, it was a little bit of an identity crisis,” he says. After coming across some older studies on the negative effects of carbohydrates, he cut way back on processed carbs and quickly dropped 20 pounds.
Now 61, Ludwig has seen similarly positive results restricting carbs with many of his patients. “We’ve come a long way in the last 20 years to realize that processed carbohydrates seem to have a negative metabolic impact,” he says. Even some unprocessed carbs are traps. When you eat a white russet potato, which he points out digests incredibly fast and has been hybridized to make the perfect french fry, your blood sugar shoots up — almost as if you had just downed a giant Slurpee.
Ludwig now alternates between a moderately low-carb diet and the incredibly low-carb, high-fat ketogenic diet. When carbs are digested into the bloodstream, they turn into a sugar called glucose. Ketosis happens when the brain is deprived of glucose and gets its energy by burning fat stores instead. Famously embraced by techies in Silicon Valley, keto is today’s hottest diet (displacing gluten-free). There are different versions of keto, but all ban carb-rich foods — even whole grain breads, legumes, starchy vegetables, and many fruits — and emphasize high-fat foods, like fatty cuts of meat, avocados, and vegetable oil. Ludwig concedes that when he’s on the keto diet, his meals are less enjoyable. But because the diet gives him greater mental clarity and hunger control, he finds more pleasure during the long stretches between meals.
Both Ludwig and Willett practice what they preach and have been able to maintain their slim frames for decades. So whose diet is healthier?
Dr. Safi Khan was the lead author of a meta-analysis published in the Annals of Internal Medicine this year. It reviewed nearly 300 randomized controlled trials to determine the effect certain diets, vitamins, and supplements had on the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death. What did it find? “Don’t bother with multivitamins,” Khan tells me. “You’re wasting your money.” As for a low-fat vs. Mediterranean diet, the meta-analysis suggested that neither has much of an impact. However, he acknowledges his confidence in that finding is lower than in the one about multivitamins, given the limited availability of good data specific to those diets.
For a true comparison, we’d need a respected researcher to do a rigorous, randomized head-to-head study comparing people eating a high-quality, low-carb diet and people eating a high-quality, low-fat diet. That’s exactly what Christopher Gardner did last year. The Stanford nutritionist — the same one who told me in 2013 that he was suffering a professional midlife crisis — worked with colleagues on a study closely tracking the eating habits of more than 600 people for a full year. Half of the participants were assigned to a low-fat diet, the other half to a low-carb diet. Regardless of their assigned group, all participants were prodded to eat only good stuff: lots of veggies (ideally from farmers markets) and as little added sugar and refined grains as possible. Gardner and his colleagues wanted to see which diet had better results, and to determine if they could predict which would be a better fit based on certain genetic or biological markers.
Here’s what they found: In the low-carb group, some participants lost 40 to 60 pounds while others gained 10 to 20. And in the low-fat group? Just about the same wide variation. Neither diet was better, and researchers had no success in predicting who would do better on one versus the other.
All of this suggests that your co-worker who won’t stop yapping about how keto will change your life might be completely right. Or he could be entirely wrong.
This much we know: No diet will work for everyone.
If this absence of clarity is enough to trigger your own midlife crisis, don’t despair. The good news is that, despite all the disagreements about whose diet is better, there does seem to be an emerging consensus about what the essential components are to any good diet.
Willett, Ludwig, and Gardner all agree on these three recommendations:
1. Dramatically reduce (or eliminate) added sugar.
2. Dramatically reduce (or eliminate) refined grains and processed carbs (and processed meats).
3. Fill your plate with as many vegetables as possible (though not white potatoes!), favoring the green, leafy stuff and other non-starchy varieties as well as those providing healthy fat, like avocados.
If you follow those principles for the bulk of your meals — while also getting regular exercise and good sleep, and of course not smoking — you should be most of the way there. At that point, if you want to join one of the big diet teams, or form your own, have at it. It probably won’t matter much.
5. How to Actually Listen to Music
During my hour-long commute home from work, when I’m too tired to even listen to podcasts, I listen to music. More often than might be healthy, I listen to Lana Del Rey, as she cycles through her doomy refrains about how her life is over, she’s filled with poison, she’s running like mad to heaven’s door. With their frothy melodrama, Lana’s songs tend to match my postwork mood so precisely that it doesn’t feel like listening at all. I don’t have to concentrate or pull myself in. I am already there. Listening, for most of us, doesn’t feel like doing anything. It’s more of a sensation than activity, a dreamy, ill-defined feeling stretching through us. We’re often not aware we are doing it, or even fully conscious. We literally—when we forget to shut off the television or our Spotify playlists—do it in our sleep.
But sometimes I wonder what would happen if we listened harder, or better, or more rigorously. This might seem exhausting. Am I incapable of relaxing? Probably. But music scholars insist that if we listened to music the way a musician would, understanding how notes trigger feelings, how tones take on their own textures and meanings, then we might experience something more visceral and expansive. We could push deeper into every song.
I reached out to various musicians and music scholars to gather some insights about how nonmusicians like myself could select and listen to music more intentionally. Below is a quick, beginner’s guide to what I learned.
2. English Majors Rejoice Employers Want You More Than Business Majors
I shared this on FB. I have a friends locked FB page and not that many people I've friended -- who are mainly made up of Family members, college friends, Fandom friends, and Church Members. I'm starting to regret friending the family members and church people -- should have just kept it to fandom and college friends. At least most of the former co-workers have disappeared. Still have one remaining.
Father's Retired Brother (Salesman): I can't think of one meaningful thing I learned in my business courses, other than perhaps learning later that most of them had no clue about the reality of the business world.
However, one of the most important skills I needed was to be able to communicate. It's the one skill that was always VERY important. Over the course of a career, those were educated in how to communicate tended to do well. Those that didn't know the basics were ALL quickly gone. Didn't matter how many degrees they had, if they couldn't read and write at a high level, gone baby, gone.
Me: I wish that were true everywhere. I work in an organization with a lot of engineers -- and a high percentage of them cannot write and read well. They are good at math just not communicating. It's highly frustrating.
Retired Mother's Brother-in-Law (Engineer): While this article is very good and informative the headline is still misleading it says "English Majors rejoice", when in fact you will see that they are still in the lower half of the chart of people that are under employed. (He annoyingly tags his successful engineer daughter and salesman son-in-law).
Me: It says business majors not engineers...we all know engineers are in hot demand.
Then cousin who is a retired engineer posted a t-shirt pic that stated "I'm an Engineer", "I'm not Arguing, I know I'm Right".
Cousin: The best engineers know to admit when they are wrong.
Me: If only there were more of them. (I did not post that. I restrained myself, you'd be proud.)
2. There's a post on FB that the first person to live to the age of 150 years of age has already been born. (Honestly, who wants to live that long? I'm personally hoping to check out around my 80s. Life is frigging painful.) With the response, please let it be Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
Uhm, unlikely. She's fighting pancreatic cancer. That has a very low survival rate.
With our luck it will be Trump or Putin or one of the other nasty leaders out there - who are probably energy vampires and unkillable.
3. The Modern Triumph of the Periodic Table of Elements --
The modern drive for elements has brought new pitfalls, such as new forms of scarcity. Wood, the substrate of an earlier era, may not be a miracle material, but at least it’s easy to get. Today’s technology is vulnerable to disruptions of supply chains that extend to the corners of the Earth. China is the dominant supplier of rare-earth metals, a group of 17 elements used in advanced magnets, batteries, and other devices. A single Virginia-class attack submarine in the U.S. Navy uses almost 5 tons of them.
If the free market is working efficiently, impending shortages of elements should be corrected by rising prices, which discourage consumption while encouraging more production or the development of substitutes. As the market saying goes, the cure for high prices is high prices. Biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, famously lost a bet to economist Julian Simon when he predicted in 1980 that the prices of chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten would rise over the following decade. All five got cheaper.
But there are reasons not to trust the market entirely. One is national security. If war threatened to break out between the U.S. and China or Russia, no price would be high enough to entice those foes to supply the U.S. war machine with raw materials. War is often the result when a country can’t get the natural resources it needs. Resource-poor Japan occupied Manchuria before World War II to get its iron ore. Germany, lacking in just about every resource but coal, sought Lebensraum—literally, “living room”—to grab cobalt, copper, iron ore, petroleum, rubber, tungsten, and bauxite for aluminum. The Axis powers eventually lost in part because the Allies cut off their access to those critical raw materials.
Saleem Ali, an environmental planning professor at the University of Delaware, argues for an international treaty to prevent a repetition of “old colonial scrambles for wealth,” which he points out have occurred not only with minerals but also with sugar, spice, and vanilla.
Market forces can also respond too slowly. Yale’s Graedel, a professor emeritus of industrial ecology, estimates that it takes 15 to 30 years to bring a new mine into commercial production. Expedited permitting would help with that, he says, as long as it doesn’t open the door to abuses by mining companies. Ironically, the green economy depends on many elements whose production is anything but green. Without strong global standards, the free market could push production to the countries that do the least to protect the environment.
Both economics and geopolitics will drive the world toward greater reuse of elements. Recycling will be built into the design of products. That will favor the elements that are most adaptable. “Carbon, which can be as soft as graphite or as hard as diamond, may be the material of choice,” Jamais Cascio, a research fellow at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Palo Alto, Calif., wrote in 2012. “Instead of worrying about minimizing carbon outputs, we may find ourselves working to maximize carbon inputs,” he added.
The value of the world’s output keeps going up in terms of dollars per ton—more value for less mass. But Buckminster Fuller was wrong. Technological progress isn’t ephemeralization. It’s invention—and there’s no clearer example of invention than the exploitation of Mendeleev’s table of elements.
4. Diet Advice Changes Minute By Minute -- How are we Supposed to figure out to eat .
It’s fair to ask why nutritionists can’t seem to make up their minds. Are eggs good or bad for us? Will coffee kill us or make us live longer? Should we believe the people pushing a low-carb, high-fat diet, or those extolling the exact opposite? Is it better to join Team Ketogenic or Team Mediterranean?
In fairness, nutrition is a relatively new — and not very well funded — field, so there are substantial built-in limitations. Most of our scientific nutritional advice comes from two types of research. Observational epidemiological studies track the general eating and health habits of hundreds of thousands of people over many years, to see who lives and who dies. (That’s largely how science demonstrated the strong association between smoking and lung cancer.) Randomized control trials attempt to isolate the role of one particular food by comparing small groups of people eating it against those in a placebo/control group.
The most sobering insight I gained during my reporting six years ago came from Stanford University nutrition professor Christopher Gardner, who specializes in randomized trials and confessed to me that he was suffering a professional midlife crisis. The overarching problem is that observational studies are essentially too big and randomized trials are too small. It’s impossible for an observational study to prove that the people enrolled in it lived longer or died sooner because of, say, their coffee intake, versus any number of other dietary, health, or genetic factors. But Gardner told me that when he or other scientists try to isolate the effect of a particular food in a randomized trial, they find “one little thing at a time never makes a difference.”
It would be great if scientists had the funds and stamina to run a host of massive, long-term randomized trials trying to isolate and test every possible dietary combination — and the public had the patience to wait for the definitive findings. Since that’s not going to happen, we’re doomed to more servings of contradictory advice.
If the foundational job of medicine is “first, do no harm,” nutritionists and public policy leaders have often fallen short over the years. A recent paper in the journal Science, written by Harvard researchers Walter Willett and David Ludwig and two colleagues, offers a catalog of mistakes in the history of nutritional advice in this country, going back to a boomlet of fear about diet-related disease following President Eisenhower’s heart attack in 1955. The Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health in 1988 identified cutting fat from the American diet as the “primary priority for dietary change.”
Three years later, the US Department of Health and Human Services called on the food industry to produce thousands of new “processed food products” that would be low in fat. The industry was only too eager to comply, flooding supermarket shelves with SnackWell’s and other too-good-to-be-true processed foods that typically replaced the fat with heaping amounts of sugar. Our concept of a healthy diet has been continually clouded by industry and advocate profiteering, which has led to boxes of sugary Froot Loops sporting the American Heart Association’s seal of approval and buckets of greasy KFC chicken carrying the imprimatur of the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation.
On one level, our war on fat was successful. In the 1970s, the proportion of fat in the average American diet was 42 percent of total calories. Today, it is 34 percent. In a larger sense, it has been an abject failure. While fat consumption has gone down, the percentage of calories from carbs has seen a huge jump. Over the same period, probably not coincidentally, the rates of obesity and diabetes have exploded. As the Science paper points out, that spike has contributed to the first nationwide decrease in life expectancy since the flu pandemic 100 years ago. There’s a lot of harm going around.
What made that Science paper especially interesting is that it was jointly written by experts from different nutrition camps. Dr. Walter Willett, a nutrition professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the world’s most cited nutritionist, has overseen the Nurses’ Health Studies since 1980. Tracking the eating and health habits of a quarter-million nurses, it is the granddaddy of observational studies. Willett was furious during the 1980s and ’90s when people demonized good fat — the kind found in avocados, nuts, and olive oil — along with the bad fat in Big Macs and pepperoni pizza. He became an evangelist for the moderate Mediterranean diet: low in saturated fats (but high in healthy fats) and high in whole grain carbs, vegetables, and fruits, with a good amount of protein.
During a recent conversation, Willett assures me he is still very much on Team Mediterranean, even as others who started in his camp have moved away from animal products entirely. Although he agrees that a plant-based diet is best for our environment, he says, “I don’t advise that everybody go on a vegan diet. Veganism is very, very hard to sustain.” Instead, he advises a “flexitarian” diet, which is mostly plant based but allows for some limited animal products. It ends up looking a lot like the Mediterranean diet, just with a few more restrictions.
Dr. David Ludwig, his coauthor and fellow Harvard professor of nutrition, comes at things differently. As the co-director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and an endocrinologist who has seen tens of thousands of patients, Ludwig says, “You become practical. You basically want something that works.” Doctors “have been telling people to eat less and move more for decades,” he says, yet here we are in the midst of a full-blown obesity crisis.
Although he ate a conventionally healthy diet — low fat, whole grains, fruits and vegetables — during his 20s and 30s, Ludwig found that he was gaining a pound or two every year. By 1995, he was a 37-year-old who had reached the cutoff for being classified as overweight. “As an obesity researcher, it was a little bit of an identity crisis,” he says. After coming across some older studies on the negative effects of carbohydrates, he cut way back on processed carbs and quickly dropped 20 pounds.
Now 61, Ludwig has seen similarly positive results restricting carbs with many of his patients. “We’ve come a long way in the last 20 years to realize that processed carbohydrates seem to have a negative metabolic impact,” he says. Even some unprocessed carbs are traps. When you eat a white russet potato, which he points out digests incredibly fast and has been hybridized to make the perfect french fry, your blood sugar shoots up — almost as if you had just downed a giant Slurpee.
Ludwig now alternates between a moderately low-carb diet and the incredibly low-carb, high-fat ketogenic diet. When carbs are digested into the bloodstream, they turn into a sugar called glucose. Ketosis happens when the brain is deprived of glucose and gets its energy by burning fat stores instead. Famously embraced by techies in Silicon Valley, keto is today’s hottest diet (displacing gluten-free). There are different versions of keto, but all ban carb-rich foods — even whole grain breads, legumes, starchy vegetables, and many fruits — and emphasize high-fat foods, like fatty cuts of meat, avocados, and vegetable oil. Ludwig concedes that when he’s on the keto diet, his meals are less enjoyable. But because the diet gives him greater mental clarity and hunger control, he finds more pleasure during the long stretches between meals.
Both Ludwig and Willett practice what they preach and have been able to maintain their slim frames for decades. So whose diet is healthier?
Dr. Safi Khan was the lead author of a meta-analysis published in the Annals of Internal Medicine this year. It reviewed nearly 300 randomized controlled trials to determine the effect certain diets, vitamins, and supplements had on the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death. What did it find? “Don’t bother with multivitamins,” Khan tells me. “You’re wasting your money.” As for a low-fat vs. Mediterranean diet, the meta-analysis suggested that neither has much of an impact. However, he acknowledges his confidence in that finding is lower than in the one about multivitamins, given the limited availability of good data specific to those diets.
For a true comparison, we’d need a respected researcher to do a rigorous, randomized head-to-head study comparing people eating a high-quality, low-carb diet and people eating a high-quality, low-fat diet. That’s exactly what Christopher Gardner did last year. The Stanford nutritionist — the same one who told me in 2013 that he was suffering a professional midlife crisis — worked with colleagues on a study closely tracking the eating habits of more than 600 people for a full year. Half of the participants were assigned to a low-fat diet, the other half to a low-carb diet. Regardless of their assigned group, all participants were prodded to eat only good stuff: lots of veggies (ideally from farmers markets) and as little added sugar and refined grains as possible. Gardner and his colleagues wanted to see which diet had better results, and to determine if they could predict which would be a better fit based on certain genetic or biological markers.
Here’s what they found: In the low-carb group, some participants lost 40 to 60 pounds while others gained 10 to 20. And in the low-fat group? Just about the same wide variation. Neither diet was better, and researchers had no success in predicting who would do better on one versus the other.
All of this suggests that your co-worker who won’t stop yapping about how keto will change your life might be completely right. Or he could be entirely wrong.
This much we know: No diet will work for everyone.
If this absence of clarity is enough to trigger your own midlife crisis, don’t despair. The good news is that, despite all the disagreements about whose diet is better, there does seem to be an emerging consensus about what the essential components are to any good diet.
Willett, Ludwig, and Gardner all agree on these three recommendations:
1. Dramatically reduce (or eliminate) added sugar.
2. Dramatically reduce (or eliminate) refined grains and processed carbs (and processed meats).
3. Fill your plate with as many vegetables as possible (though not white potatoes!), favoring the green, leafy stuff and other non-starchy varieties as well as those providing healthy fat, like avocados.
If you follow those principles for the bulk of your meals — while also getting regular exercise and good sleep, and of course not smoking — you should be most of the way there. At that point, if you want to join one of the big diet teams, or form your own, have at it. It probably won’t matter much.
5. How to Actually Listen to Music
During my hour-long commute home from work, when I’m too tired to even listen to podcasts, I listen to music. More often than might be healthy, I listen to Lana Del Rey, as she cycles through her doomy refrains about how her life is over, she’s filled with poison, she’s running like mad to heaven’s door. With their frothy melodrama, Lana’s songs tend to match my postwork mood so precisely that it doesn’t feel like listening at all. I don’t have to concentrate or pull myself in. I am already there. Listening, for most of us, doesn’t feel like doing anything. It’s more of a sensation than activity, a dreamy, ill-defined feeling stretching through us. We’re often not aware we are doing it, or even fully conscious. We literally—when we forget to shut off the television or our Spotify playlists—do it in our sleep.
But sometimes I wonder what would happen if we listened harder, or better, or more rigorously. This might seem exhausting. Am I incapable of relaxing? Probably. But music scholars insist that if we listened to music the way a musician would, understanding how notes trigger feelings, how tones take on their own textures and meanings, then we might experience something more visceral and expansive. We could push deeper into every song.
I reached out to various musicians and music scholars to gather some insights about how nonmusicians like myself could select and listen to music more intentionally. Below is a quick, beginner’s guide to what I learned.
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Date: 2019-09-02 05:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-02 09:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-02 06:46 pm (UTC)I'm an Engineer", "I'm not Arguing, I know I'm Right"... Cousin: The best engineers know to admit when they are wrong.
I think my father and brother who were both engineers would live by the slogan, but privately would say that the best engineers would admit when they didn't know what they were talking about!
ETA: Come to think of it, when my brother and I argued, I don't ever remember him saying he was wrong. Instead he'd say something like, "You know, you're right!"
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Date: 2019-09-02 09:53 pm (UTC)I think we'd all be better off if there were less engineers and more foreign language professors, personally.
ETA: Pesky uncle, who apparently has too much time on his hands.
I know that but why say English Majors Rejoice when you are still in the bottom half of the list. I never said anything about who was on top (smirk😁😁) I just go a little ballistic by titles that every one remembers without looking at the data. It is like every thing you see from religion, politics, gun laws, birth control, and sexual preferences. The title is so provocative and what people remember and want to believe is the title. The data says wait not so much.
Sigh. Poor baby. He's a rich retired Michigan Republican who test drove cars for Chrysler and shoots squirrels in his back yard with a pistol. Need I say more?