Category: Health

“Cannibalism is one thing, but increasing longevity by eating human flesh….” – The X-Files

I’m not going to tell an AARP® joke:  they’re all pretty old.

David Sinclair isn’t a medical doctor, but he’s got a laboratory at Harvard© Medical School.  That’s the real Harvard®, not the Haarvard™ School of Witchcraft and Legal Studies I started a few years ago.  It was accredited by Madame Kim’s Korean Restaurant (located under the Vance’s Bowl-a-Rama in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  One of my students turned me into a newt.

But I got better.  (R.I.P. Terry Jones)

Anyway, Sinclair actually teaches at the real Harvard© and not my scam internet school beloved privately held institution of learning.  Dr. Sinclair is not a medical doctor, but is instead a PhD, which is troubling to me now – there was no real reason he should have checked me for breast cancer.  And do most of those checks really take an hour?  But as I watched a video of him chatting about the future, it struck me:  he looks just like Christian Slater.

He may look a lot like Christian Slater, but the good Doctor Sinclair looks sheltered.   I mean, who doesn’t have a three day cocaine, heroin, and tequila binge resulting in assault on a police officer and three months in the slammer?  Oh, only Christian?   

Anyway, Dr. Sinclair is mainly interested in longevity.  When I say mainly, he’s done research on longevity since the 1990’s.  Currently, he feels he has the reason that we age:  as we get older, our cells forget what it is that they should be doing.

What, a cell can forget?  How does that work?

DNA is a long strand in a cell.  How long?  If you stretched out a DNA strand, it would be (by most calculations I’ve seen on the Internet) over six feet long.  Obviously, just like Tom Cruise, your cells aren’t six feet long.  Therefore, the DNA has to be wound up to fit inside a cell.

Remember, sharing DNA with those you share DNA with can have consequences.  Just ask the governor of Virginia!

In a really neat trick, it’s not the just the DNA that determines what a cell does, it’s the way that the DNA is wound up in little knots to fit in the cell.  Since every cell has the same DNA, it’s not the DNA that determines what a cell does:  it’s how the DNA is coiled in a cell that defines what that cell does.  That available information on the coiled up bits of DNA is what makes a cell a nerve cell.   Or a skin cell.  Or, for you lucky people, a hair follicle.

Wait, that’s not true.  I have hair.  It’s just in my ears.  What gives?

The answer is simple.  The skin cells had the DNA originally coiled up to be skin cells.  But after a while, the winding became . . . not as good in a few of them, so skin cells decided that they wanted to start a hobby:  making hair.  So places that didn’t have hair in my 20’s, now have hair.  Just not where I wanted it – sure I feel the wind blowing through my hair still, but now it’s my back hair.

Fun Fact:  Lloyd’s of London® will not insure the Kardashian family against Velcro©.

Sinclair thinks that part of the key to having humans live to be 170 or longer is in resetting that mechanism so the DNA coils up correctly in the cell.  He suggests the reset might be possible, but it involves viruses, PEZ®, and painters scaffolding.  I kid.  Except for the viruses.  Dr. Sinclair has several theories on how this reset can be done, and, yes, one of them includes a virus.  Some of them involve drugs or supplements.  I’m not planning on selling supplements here (though I hear that can be lucrative if you’re in talk radio) but you can look up his advice on supplements.  Remember, he’s not a doctor, at least not the medical kind.

But he does have some advice that’s certainly (mostly) free to pursue, and probably harmless:

• Be cold. Apparently The Mrs. is right that the air conditioning should be set at 54°F in the summer, since being cold appears to activate mechanisms that reduce inflammation.  We also keep Stately Wilder Manor cold in winter.  Sometimes when your author is writing in winter I actually rub two verbs together to keep warm.
• Be hot. Not like supermodel hot, but actually physically warm.  If you’re both, you probably get bonus points.  Saunas have been documented to lower blood pressure and much lower death rates.  I don’t have a sauna, but I have a hot tub (I keep it warm by burning $100 bills) and I’m in it 4 or 5 times a week.  I can’t keep it at 175°F like the Finnish people do, but I imagine that 104°F is close enough.
• Work out.   This isn’t news, since this has been done to get people healthy since at least the time of the Roman Empire.  But it appears that higher intensity workouts, stressing the body increases the body’s aging defenses.  Sinclair suggests high intensity interval training.
• Fast. This actually saves you money, since you’re not spending money on food when you do it.  I wrote a bit about fasting here (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water) and think it’s something that I think would benefit most people.  Fasting appears to lower blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, and lower inflammation.  The downside?  You’re fasting.
• Don’t eat so much protein. This is the tough one.  Sinclair noted that too much protein causes lower levels of NAD – heh hehe heh heh, he said “NAD” – and NAD is a nucleotide called “nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide” that decreases as you age.  NAD is one of Sinclair’s main keys to aging.  But I like steak.  I’m not sure that I want to live to 170 without steak.  Plus, if I’m not supposed to eat carbs, and now not supposed to eat protein, what’s left?  Sticks of butter covered in grass clippings?

Not only do you have to set your cake on fire, you can’t eat it.

Again, those are (mostly) free to do, and in some cases put money back in your pocket.

Observationally, the things on the list are things that suck.  We want to be at comfortable temperatures, sitting on the couch with chocolate and steak smeared faces.  We want to live in malls, comfortable and cocooned against all discomfort.  But longer life appears to be triggered by being uncomfortable.  Since you’re not happy when you’re uncomfortable, that means time goes more slowly.  So not only do you live longer, it also feels like you’re living longer.  You might live to 170, but it feels like 1,700 years.

But what about the other things that kill you besides growing old?

In the past week, it looks like (fingers crossed) there’s a breakthrough against cancer.  Despite cancer being utterly curable in mice for, oh, decades, this particular cure uses the body’s own immune system to eat the cancer cells.  I’m betting this has about 1 chance in 10 of working, but that’s better news than any cancer news in recent memory.  Ruth Bader Ginsburg seems to not need this, though.

Remember, the Supreme Court is just regular court with sour cream and tomato.

If we cure cancer and aging, we’re home free, right?

Well, there are still things like dementia, liver failure, kidney failure, diabetes, and heart disease.  Certainly following Dr. Sinclair’s suggestions will help with some of these, but it’s not likely it will help with all of them.  I’m not trying to be pessimistic here, but solving all of the body’s problems isn’t as easy as jumping in the hot tub with a supermodel or avoiding steak.

For a long life to be worth it, it should be one where I don’t live from year 70 to year 140 as a rambling, dementia cursed old man.  And Dr. Sinclair’s dad, who is now 80, has been following Sinclair’s advice and is still quite active.

Or was it Dr. Sinclair’s advice after all?  It could have been Christian Slater.  And always remember my motto:

Shoot now, ask Christian Slater.

Here’s a video of Dr. Sinclair, if you want to check either my facts or the Christian Slater resemblance.

“No.  That’s not fair.  ‘Cause I’m a victim, too.  Was a victim first, before him.” – Fargo (TV)

Columbus learned quickly that even discovering a new continent wasn’t enough to hide from the student loan debt collectors.

In a previous post Global Obesity, Axel Rose, and at Least One Orphan Joke I talked about how the world and Axl Rose were both getting fatter, and pointed out some of the reasons for it.  In the comments, Ricky correctly noted that perhaps I’d skipped the biggest reason people were getting fatter:  they had to control what was going down their throat.

Of course he was right.  If you’re overweight (and I include myself in that), it’s because PEBCAP.  PEBCAP means, of course, that the Problem Exists Between Chair And Plate.  And one rule I learned at my own expense is that there is no number of cookies that I can eat that will make me not want to have more cookies.

Did Pavlov think about feeding his dogs every time he heard a bell?

Because although cookies are filled with enough sugar and carbohydrates to be banned by the United Nations as a poison illegal for use in modern warfare, they are tasty, tasty poison.

The intent of that post was to highlight some of the causes that were contributing to the global rise of obesity, plus make fun of Axl Rose.  In no way was it supposed to provide an excuse to give up and say, “Okay, that’s it.  I’m just going to live with being 500 pounds.  There’s absolutely nothing to be done about it.”  And if I choke to death on gummy bears, I hope that in my obituary it just reads, “John Wilder killed by bears.”

What do you call bears without ears?  B.

It probably will surprise exactly zero regular readers when I say that in life, there are no excuses that are valid other than:

• “I’m only five years old.”
• “I’ve just been hit by an asteroid.”

And even if you are five years old, quit making excuses.  That mill isn’t going to run itself.

The good news is that she just made foreman.

When it comes to nearly every circumstance you will ever face, your life will be better if you remember these four little words:

• There are no excuses.

There are two corollary statements to that:

• No one is coming to save you.
• No one wants to hear you whine.*

Misery and blaming the world for your problems isn’t what anyone wants to hear.*  That’s not to say that people won’t help you.  They will help you.  And that’s not to say that people won’t listen to your problems.  They will listen.  But what people won’t put up with is you having the same problem for years at a time and you taking no action to fix it.  People won’t put up with you constantly blaming everything else but you for your problems.

If you don’t like drama, don’t be executive producer of every episode.

Embedded in this is some great news.  Perhaps the best news that anyone will ever get:

You get to control your own life.  You get to make your choices.  You get to feel whatever you choose to feel.  You get to try your best.  And when you fail (not if, when) you get to try again.

And, you get to take credit it for it, and own it all.

*Except your ex.  They love hearing your pain.

“Because when the aliens come down to earth, they come inside raindrops, making the rain chubby.  Chubby rain!” – Bowfinger

Rumor has it that Axel Rose ate the rest of the members of Guns n’ Roses after their bus broke down while on tour and they were separated from food for several hours.

It’s the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so it’s a time when people traditionally gain weight like Christian Bale getting ready to star in a movie about as your mom.  On an annual basis, this had been my norm.  Up until about four years ago, January started a (fairly) simple routine where I’d work out really hard, and lose the weight I’d gained in December in a few weeks, or maybe even into February.  As I get older, the techniques of youth begin to not work so I have resorted to hacking off unneeded limbs until I get to an acceptable weight.  I mean, who needs both a right arm and a left arm?

Christian Bale lost weight down to 110 pounds (653 kilograms) to play the role on the right.  His diet was an apple and a can of tuna a day.  After a while, I’d probably include the label and the can for extra fiber. 

But it’s not just me that’s getting heavier over time.  Since it’s easier to think about why in a bigger picture manner than it is to think about the fasting (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water) and treadmill time I’ll be spending in 2020, I thought I’d think about what’s going on, globally, since it appears that the individuals that comprise humanity seem to be more globe-shaped every year.

Despite the world stereotype that the United States is filled with fat Americans, it’s not just the United States.  The entire world is pretty chunky now.  As you can see from the (pretty neat) embedded video, in 1975, the world wasn’t particularly fat.

The video only lasts about 40 seconds, so if you have a couple of Snickers® bars, your mom should be able to make it through the video.

From the video it’s obvious that the Soviet Union and the United States were pretty good at feeding their people, maintaining and obesity rate of somewhere between 10%-15%.  I’ll maintain that a well-fed society is going to have some natural variation in weight, and in order not to have malnutrition, some portion of the population (including your mom) is going to be obese.

Of note, the places in Africa and Asia where you’d expect starvation back in 1975 show less than 2% obesity.  Yup, science is proven right again – people starving to death rarely get obese.

If lifting weights was easy, it would be called “Your Mom.”

Fast forwarding to 1987, the very first country to increase to a greater than 20% obesity rate is Saudi Arabia.  At that point in time, Saudi Arabia was transforming into a very wealthy country based on oil money.  The next two countries to trip the 20% threshold were Libya (!) and the United States in 1992.

In 1998, Saudi Arabia jumped to 25% to 30% of population being obese.  In 2000, the United States joined the Saudis, and Canada, Mexico, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Argentina and Chile all joined the 20% club.

Getting to 2014 (when the video ends) with the exception of Africa, China, India, (for major regions) and some smaller places here and there, the rest of the nations of the world have a greater than 20% obesity rate.  The world is officially ranked:  Mostly Chubby.

So, I’m officially not supposed to know that fat Bugs Bunny® is known to the Zoomers as Big Chungus.  Pugsley HATES it when I know something like that.  I even say “yeet” to really drive him nuts.

The title of the video is “How the World Became Obese”, and it’s a bad title.  The video shows where the world become obese, and it shows when the world became obese.  However, it never showed how the world became obese.  Heck, even how is a boring question.  How is just a matter of shoveling more Milky Way® candy bars into my body than my body needs for energy.  Thermodynamics is simple that way.

As a result, kids are objectively bigger now.  One kid on Pugsley’s 8^th Grade FB team was over 260 pounds.  On my high school football team, the heaviest guy was 218, and he was 6’4”.

To me, the question is:  why?

I don’t think you can pin the increase in obesity to a single factor.  Here’s a (likely incomplete) list of reasons we’re fatter:

Kidnapping is word that has such a bad connotation – my parents just called it a “surprise adoption.”

Wealth.  The world, as a whole, is wealthier now than at any time in history.  It’s no mistake that wealthy countries got fattest fastest.  Heck, we’re wealthy enough that Jupiter called and told Earth to get its own Netflix® subscription.

Inexpensive food.  While the world is getting wealthier, food is cheaper than at any time in history.  Farmers now have the ability to analyze in real time the missing nutrients for optimal plant growth, and apply the right amount of fertilizer to maximize profitability.  Just like nutrients are managed, moisture can be managed as well.  Finally, inexpensive herbicides and pesticides have kept bugs and weeds from getting fat instead of people.  Food costs for a family in the United States have dropped from about 17% of disposable income in 1960 to about 10% today.  Food is cheaper than your mother now.

Air conditioning and heating.  Yes, mankind has been heating shelters for warmth since at least 1973.  And that’s a long time.  But mankind also used to have to work for it, gathering and chopping up firewood, and that burns a lot of calories.  Air conditioning has been around at least since ancient Egypt (really), but it involved a lot of work, too.  Perfect temperatures all the time with little physical effort is certainly a new condition for humanity.  I don’t mean to brag, but I turned on my air conditioner before it was cool.

Improvements in transportation and logistics.  When I was a kid one winter day Ma Wilder asked me what fruit I’d like from the store to put on ice cream.  I answered, “Strawberries.”

Ma Wilder:  “Nope, not in season.”

Obviously, this led to a long discussion of what “in season” exactly meant.  Even when I was a kid, most things were available most of the time.  And, when I was a kid, that didn’t mean that you couldn’t get strawberries, merely that they’d be hugely expensive.  More often than not, Ma would just buy frozen strawberries instead.  That was okay with me, since they were packed in sugary syrup.  Just like blood is thicker than water, strawberry syrup is thicker than blood, so I have proof that ice cream is more important than family.  I apologize to those of you that were offended, that joke was just perpetuating a viscous cycle.

Today, most foods we eat don’t go “out of season.”  If it’s not the right time of the year in the United States for a food to grow, it’s the right time somewhere.  Perishable foods are produced year-round, and shipped with great speed to your supermarket.

In an early example of international food trade, 10,000 cases of Hellman’s® mayonnaise were on the Titanic, headed for Mexico.  The Mexicans were so upset that their precious mayonnaise was lost that they commemorate the day every year – Sinko De Mayo.

Inexpensive fuel.  Increased production and fast transportation of refrigerated perishable food requires lots of fuel.  Moving people around in cars, buses, trucks, and airplanes requires lots of fuel.  Fuel is, even at $2.50 a gallon, historically cheap.  It’s so cheap, I’m thinking about filling my hot tub with kerosene instead of water, so I can get that freshly waxed smell all of the time.

The additional effect is that motorized travel is the standard.  Rather than walk to dinner, people drive, even for a few blocks in many cases.  Schedules become built around cheap transportation – rather than spend fifteen minutes walking, I’ll drive it in three – and the remaining twelve minutes I can do whatever I want to do.  Uber and other rideshare services probably add to, rather than subtract from this problem.

We walk less, bicycle less, and, in general, get less exercise walking around than at any time in history.

Infinite amusement exists.  When I was growing up, we had two televisions.  And they were small.  And there were only three channels – pretty much nobody counted PBS® as a channel.  When we said there was nothing on, there was (especially after they turned off the station for the night) really nothing on.

Now, when my entire immediate family is in the basement, (The Mrs., The Boy, Pugsley and I), there might be as many as 10 screens available to entertain us in the room.  I’ve been watching a television show and looked around the room to see The Boy checking his phone, me writing this blog, Pugsley on his computer, and The Mrs. on a tablet.

Available to us now instead of the three channels of my youth are hundreds of channels, thousands of movies on streaming services, and most of the knowledge of human existence along with pictures of billions of humans.  Some of these pictures even include clothed people, I have been told.

How could that not be the single most addictive thing in the history of mankind?  That’s far more interesting than learning how to skip a stone or catch a fish.  It’s certain that the Internet reduces physical activity in nearly every kid growing up today.

Hey!  I have a crazy idea – let’s go stare at our phones somewhere interesting this weekend!

Types of food consumed is changing.  150 years ago, a typical diet would have had whole-wheat bread made from four ingredients, whole milk, butter, onions, cabbage, beets, apples, plums, actual meat, fish, corn and potatoes – food with virtually no artificial ingredients.  And sugar would have been rare.

You know what you eat now, and it’s nothing like this list, at least for most people.

Food itself is changing. A million years ago we invented cooking.  10,000 or more years ago, we invented beer and decided farming was a good idea so we could brew more beer (Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer), which also added grains as a big staple food.  About 3,000 years ago, we began to change a single plant species, brassica oleracea, into over 21 different foods (LINK), and began to cultivate hundreds of other plants as well.  We were changing the food.

Five hundred years ago, Columbus took smallpox to the New World, but brought back syphilis, as well as corn and potatoes.  I guess it was a fair trade.  But our diet changed again.

In the 20^th Century, however, all of that changed.  Doritos© have more than forty ingredients.  French bread?  Four.  I wrote a little bit more about that here: (Doritos, Obesity, Addiction, and Nic Cage).  Now with replacing sugar with high fructose corn syrup?  Certainly the same thing, right?  Oh, they’re metabolized differently?  Nah, that shouldn’t matter.

Okay, I know I’d get in trouble if I didn’t include this one.

Work is changing.  As people innovate, jobs become less labor intensive.  Even small jobs have specialized mechanical tools to save labor.  Desk jobs are now more numerous, and they have changed, too.  Computers likely lower overall movement in an office – I haven’t seen a study to this effect, but I’m guessing that the average person sits twice as long at work in 2019 as compared to 1975.  I discussed that here (Sitting? Death. Get up. Neal Stephenson says so.)

Lower tobacco consumption.  Tobacco has the obvious negative issues, but it has some positive ones as well:  it helps keep weight down.  As tobacco consumption decreases, the stimulant/weight loss effect of tobacco disappears, and weight goes up.

None of these factors constitute an excuse – it’s an explanation for a global trend.  We actually live in the first time in human history when hunger is the exception, rather than the normal condition.  I certainly hope that’s a condition that we have for a long, long time.

If you are, like me, carrying more weight than you’d like – own it.  If you don’t own it, you’ll never do anything to change it.  Now where is that egg nog?