In this bbc report on cancer risks, women and men are put in different category:
I consider this a progress. Next level of differences are in different ethnic groups. And once we have all our genomes sequences, we shall know our risks by genome types.
However, everything is a leap of faith. So take the report as true if you are willing to believe in today’s statistical method. Otherwise, disregard it and go on living your way of life, whatever it might be.
There are two days in the week about which and upon which I never worry … Yesterday and Tomorrow. – Robert Jones Burdette
Once awhile I become motivated and energetic. I usually just sit down and watch them pass by. – Author Unknown
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. – Mark Twain
Rule number one is, don’t sweat the small stuff. Rule number two is, it’s all small stuff. – Robert Eliot
Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower. – Hans Christian Anderson
I love this essay “The Truth Wears Off” by Jonah Lehrer published by New Yorker.
People often equate truth with usefulness, perhaps because we are in America. If we take the view of William James’ Pragmatic theory of truth, then perhaps usefulness is the truth.
We often apply ideas we commonly agree as useful, but we do not know for certain what the reason is. For example, “we feel better and are more energized when we spend time outdoors.” Is this truth or merely usefulness?
“The truth of an idea is not a permanent property and it does not lie in it. The truth happens to an idea” (William James).
We are in an era of ideas (truths) overload. Some ideas are very true to some people (such as Seth Roberts “Effect of One-Legged Standing on Sleep“), but may seem ridiculous to others. I do not doubt that Seth Roberts one legged standing works for him to achieve better sleep, but many other methods may work just as well.
Focus was important for productivity in the past. It is perhaps essential today, otherwise we will all get lost in the piles of “truths” google search provide us.
I am a garden dweller. We have a very small city garden, which is good enough to do some gardening. The river front city park is 5 minutes walk from my home. We consider that a big garden to walk in.
It is known that we feel better and are more energized when we spend time outdoors.
Recent Science Daily News reports:
In recent years, numerous experimental psychology studies have linked exposure to nature with increased energy and heightened sense of well-being. For example, research has shown that people on wilderness excursions report feeling more alive and that just recalling outdoor experiences increases feelings of happiness and health. Other studies suggest that the very presence of nature helps to ward off feelings of exhaustion and that 90 percent of people report increased energy when placed in outdoor activities.
To read the article, click the link here.
I myself experience that gardening is by far the best way to lower blood pressure naturally. Whenever I have reading of bp 135/85, after spending one hour in the garden weeding or dead heading, the reading is almost guaranteed to go below 120/80. Hot and sunny days are the best.
Why do we feel better spending time outdoors? I think the sun, green plants and physical activity are the reasons.
Most people equate the sun to Vitamin D level in our body, but I think it is more than that. On a grey day, regardless how much Vitamin D we take, my mood always goes down.
Germaine Greer in her book “The Change” writes that a garden is the best alternative therapy for women going through change. “Though low back pain and gardening go together, gardeners feel much better for gardening, back pain and all. The effect is so like the “mental tonic” effect of HRT that we may be justified in suspecting that there are volatile estrogens in living plants that do not survive in treated plant material.”
To improve the mood, walking outdoors is just as good.
Unfortunately, Montreal gets cold fast. By November I feel too cold to go out walking. Creating an indoor garden with grow lights is to experiment whether we can experience some of the aliveness we feel outdoors.
Last year we had the goal to place more houseplants for the purpose of cleaning the indoor air. We had 13 in total and they are:
3 mother in law’s tongue
1 English ivy (Hedera helix)
6 Money Plants (Epipremnum aureum)
1 peace lily
1 Christmas cactus
1 Madagascar jasmine
Unfortunately, after three months staying in a transparent plastic bag (the idea is to put the plants in a micro bio-dome so they recycle water, oxygen and carbon dioxide), only the following plants survived:
1 mother in law’s tongue
1 English ivy
5 Money Plants
1 peace lily
1 Christmas cactus
70% survival rate is not all that bad. However, the ones doing good are only English ivy and money plants.
So we added 2 more English ivy (one with broader leaves) and Money plants respectively. We are trying new plants such as Spider plants (Chlorophytum comosum), Wandering Jew (Zebrina pendula), Money Tree plant (Pachira aquatica), Arabian Wax Cissus (Cissus rotundifolia), Angel Wing begonia and Silver spotted philodendron (Scindapsus picta ‘Argyraeus’)
3 English ivy
3 Wandering Jew
1 Spider plants
8 Money Plants
1 Money Tree plant
1 Arabian Wax Cissus
1 Angel Wing begonia
1 Silver spotted philodendron
1 mother in law’s tongue
1 peace lily
1 Christmas cactus
All in all, we have 22 house plants in total, plus a few cuttings growing in water in jars. English Ivy, wandering Jew, angel wing begonia and money plant can all grow in the water.
This year we are not using humidifier. With more house plants and hang-drying the laundry, the air humidity seems to be quite balanced.
I breathe much better this fall/winter. Usually starting end of August until May, I have hard time breathing. This year, I gave in and started using Nasonex occasionally. So I am not sure whether the effect comes from Nasonex or from more house plants or both. One thing that is sure is that having green inside the house helps brighten up mood on a grey day.
Canadians are often proud of their public Medicare system as compared to the U.S. by citing that the average longevity is higher here than down south. However, I often hold the view that we live longer because we do not get the Medicare our neighbours get due to rationing. So it is like a forced clinical inertia. I had not gone to a clinic for 8 years until last year. The clinical experience of last year was so bad, I will probably forgo another 8 years.
It is good to see that I was not alone. The NYtimes has published an article titled when doing nothing is best medicine. In this article, Doctor Danielle Ofri quoted an essay published in The Journal of the American Medical Association called “Clinical Inertia as a Clinical Safeguard”. The authors postulated that doctors who tend toward inertia might actually benefit their patients by protecting them from overzealous medical intervention.
They focused on three common medical conditions — diabetes, elevated cholesterol and hypertension — for which there are established clinical guidelines for doctors to follow and “quality measures” that evaluate medical care. For all three illnesses, “lower is better” is the dominant mantra.
But while “lower is better” is probably true for large populations, that is not always the case for individual patients. In fact, there are some clinical trials in which aggressively lowered blood sugar or blood pressure has been associated with higher rates of dying.
One of my brothers is a doctor. He says that medicine today is still only 20% science and 80% art. However, most doctors come off as if they think medicine is 100% science. If you have symptom, we must find it and treat it. Of course, every “thing” a doctor does also has side effects.
Unfortunately, every action we do towards health, such as changing diet, choosing exercise programs or deciding whether to take supplements or not, we are all advised to consult our physicians before hand. I guess we should just forgo this advice?
this blog was cross published on 1greatday.
What we ate for lunch this year has changed as compared to last year (here). We are now eating soup for lunch.
What typically in our soup is as follows:
Mung bean (pre-cooked)
Tofu
Potatoes (one medium or two small ones)
Carrots
Sweet potatoes (half of large or one small)
Green vegetables (variables among broccoli, zucchini, Chinese mustard green, sweet pepper).
Soup is cooked without any salt. Miso is added for flavour and to populate gut flora.
Soup is eaten with half of avocado each.
A woman cannot remember where she parked her car at a Costco parking lot. That part of her memory has just crashed. She is now getting quite angry at herself. She has a cart full of stuff she bought. She knew that she came by car and she knew the look of her car. She is a middle aged woman.
My husband said that young people are not smarter. But they know that they are not smart enough to remember where they park so they use smart phones and their apps to find their parked cars.
I still do not have a smart phone. Actually I do not have a cell phone here in Canada. I have one whenever I am in China. I live 9 months in Canada and 3 months in China. The reason I have a cell phone in China is probably because I feel less secure there. Eventually, I may need a smart phone not for the need of phone conversations, but for the need of their apps.
But for now, I am using whatever knowledge that is available today to keep my mind alert, my neurons least damaged. There are not a lot of different things one can do. But the ones we know we should do are difficult to follow everyday.
1. Cardio Exercise. Any thing that is good for the cardiovascular system is good for the brain. Your brain needs to be supplied with blood all the time. Cardio exercise cuts down the risk of having a stroke.
2. Neurobic Exercise. Mental exercises designed to keep brains more alert. Get out of your auto-pilot mode and get into the mindful mode.
3. Eat less. Constantly keep your stomach full is definitely not good for your brain. When we eat too much, we get sleepy.
Where I come from long long time ago (China), everyone has a tea cup in their hand with green tea leaves in it. The hot water is in thermal bottles not far way from them. Everywhere you go, the bus station, the train station, the gas station all provide hot water.
I have a cousin, who told me that he spends about 600 us dollars a year in tea for a country that a lot of people’s yearly income is only that. He values tea a lot, for a good reason.
The recent study shows that one of the beneficial compounds found in green tea has a powerful ability to increase the number of “regulatory T cells” that play a key role in immune function and suppression of autoimmune disease. The compound is a polyphenol called EGCG, which is believed to be responsible for much of its health benefits and has both anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer characteristics.
There are many types of cells that have different roles in the immune system, which is a delicate balancing act of attacking unwanted invaders without damaging normal cells. In autoimmune diseases, which can range from simple allergies to juvenile diabetes or even terminal conditions such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, this process goes awry and the body mistakenly attacks itself.
Regulatory T cells suppress activation of the immune system and thereby maintain immune system homeostasis and tolerance to self-antigens.
Unfortunately, on this side of the world, tea drinking was a fad that has waned down drastically. If you have to boil water every time to make one cup of tea, you are not going to drink tea all day long. You walk into any regular Chinese family, usually they have 2-3 thermal bottles containing 3 liters of boiled hot water each ready to serve you tea. Drinking tea all day long has double benefits. One is from polyphenol and another one from water. Drinking 8 cups of tea a day, your intake of water is about 2 liters, in addition to the water contained in food, you shall have adequate water to function properly.
Some days you are happy; some days you are sad. You think it is all in your head. You read positive thinking books in order to influence your mind. Now they say, those little buggers you cannot see in your gut also influence your mood, according to this article “That anxiety may be in your gut, not in your head”
Each human body consists of about 100 trillium cells, but we carry about 1000 trillium bacteria (300 to 1000 different species) in our gut. We are walking cosmos to those creatures, sometimes harmonious and sometimes chaotic. . “These bacteria perform a number of functions vital to health: They harvest energy from the diet, protect against infections and provide nutrition to cells in the gut.” Every time we take antibiotic to cure one disease, we disrupt the balance of their life in the cosmos.
“Working with healthy adult mice, the researchers showed that disrupting the normal bacterial content of the gut with antibiotics produced changes in behaviour; the mice became less cautious or anxious. This change was accompanied by an increase in brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which has been linked, to depression and anxiety.
When oral antibiotics were discontinued, bacteria in the gut returned to normal. This was accompanied by restoration of normal behaviour and brain chemistry.”
“To confirm that bacteria can influence behaviour, the researchers colonized germ-free mice with bacteria taken from mice with a different behavioural pattern. They found that when germ-free mice with a genetic background associated with passive behaviour were colonized with bacteria from mice with higher exploratory behaviour, they became more active and daring. Similarly, normally active mice became more passive after receiving bacteria from mice whose genetic background is associated with passive behaviour.”
How to cultivate a healthy gut flora?
Make sure the food you eat is fresh (as opposed to rotten), cook your meat well, so you do not ingest unwanted bacteria into your gut.
If you are in a third world country, make sure you do not order uncooked food (such as salad, sushi) in restaurants. Peel your fruits. Never drink tap water. Do not eat shell fish as they are usually quickly cooked in order to preserve the tenderness, so the bacteria in them are not killed through cooking.
Eat food with probiotic bacteria in them, such as yogurt, miso and other fermented food. However, when eating a new type of fermented food, make sure you eat a very small amount at the beginning and slowly increase the quantity. Kimchi is a Korean fermented food and is claimed to have many nutritional and therapeutic aspects. However, if I eat too much after a long period of not eating them, I always get diarrhea.
The Western diet is way too clean, void of both good and bad bacteria. The first 5 years in the Western world, my gut flora were still very Chinese. The first time we went to China, my husband and I ate the same fermented vegetables. I was perfectly fine, he almost died with violent vomiting and diarrhea. Coca-Cola saved the day. However, afterwards, my gut flora became as Canadian as the Canada-born ones. We would eat exactly the same food as the rest of my family, every one else is fine except my husband and I. However, after 8 years of living in China for three months each year, we seem to have acquired more Chinese bacteria in our gut. We got sick less and less eating the local food. Have we become more Chinese?
related:
Researchers find link between common dietary fat, gut flora and heart disease
Do you really know who you are
Gut Feeling, Brain in the Gut
The Importance of Gut Flora
Protein