The After Time: The Future of Civilization After COVID-19

In this special episode of the Science Salon podcast, the last of 2020, Dr. Michael Shermer offers some reflections on 2020, starting with race and the Black Lives Movement, putting it into perspective from other books he read this year, along with podcast guests who appeared in 2020, such as Shelby Steele (in Science Salon # 139). Dr. Shermer recently read Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste and Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Anti-Racist, and offers some thoughts on them, along with other issues competing for our attention of ills troubling society, including class conflicts, income inequality, lack of education, anti-Semitism, far-left illiberalism, far-right xenophobia and bigotry, and religious indoctrination. Everyone thinks that their particular focus is the only one that matters, but broad reading can put each into perspective. Dr. Shermer then reads his essay of the podcast title (originally published on August 31, 2020 in The American Scholar and expanded on here and in an upcoming issue of Skeptic magazine).

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Waste Milk Could Be Used To Capture Carbon Emissions Out Of The Air

 from The Optimist Daily

The premise of carbon capture technologies is simple: remove the greenhouse gas from the air and store it somewhere safe or turn it into something useful. So far, though, developing such technologies at scale has proved rather tricky. One of the main challenges has been finding the right material that can bind to carbon atoms released into the atmosphere.

But scientists at Clarkson University claim that they have recently discovered a promising — though unsavory — candidate that can do the job well: waste milk. The unpleasant-sounding research, which was published in the journal Advanced Sustainable Systems, has the potential to not only help us control carbon emissions but also prevent food waste that often contributes to them.

An estimated 50 million gallons of perfectly-good surplus milk goes to waste every year.Instead of pouring it down the drain, the Clarkson researchers found milk to be a good source of activated carbons — the porous material that sticks to carbon. Since so much of it is wasted, milk is both cheaper than other sources explored as well as more environmentally friendly.

“Powdered milk can be converted into advanced activated carbons with the right porosity and surface chemistry to adsorb the CO2,” said study coauthor Mario Wriedt, “allowing much better control than with the current materials used for this process, like coconut shells or coal.”

Using waste milk to help advance carbon capture technologies seems like the perfect opportunity for dairy farms to reduce their infamous footprints of greenhouse gases. At the same time, it could also help increase farmers’ incomes as they would be able to sell more of their products.

Psychological Risks with COVID‑19 Vaccines

 BY ROBERT E. BARTHOLOMEW & KATE MACKRILL

The news media have an important role to play in the current race to vaccinate enough people in the United States and around the world, so that we can reach the all-important goal of attaining herd immunity — the key threshold whereby a sufficient number of people have been inoculated and are immune to infection. When that tipping point is reached, person to person infection is expected to become much less likely. By current projections, American immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci projects that the United States could reach the early stages of herd immunity by late March, 2021.¹ The biggest impediment to attaining it is what the World Health Organization describes as “vaccine hesitancy” — the reluctance of people to get vaccinated. Even before the pandemic, the WHO was warning that vaccine hesitancy was a significant threat to world health.²

A major problem in maintaining public confidence in the safety of the vaccines that are being rolled out are reports of allergic reactions in health care workers shortly after being inoculated. The first reports appeared in England and involved two persons with a history of allergic reactions. More recently, two patients in Alaska were affected and more can be expected. Health authorities have been quick to point out that none of these cases were life-threatening. […]

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The Big 3 Rules of Breathing: Nose, Belly, Exhale, Repeat

 by Brian Johnson, from the Optimizer E-zine

In our last couple editions, we've talked about your breathing. How about a quick look at the THREE simple rules of optimal breathing? Here they are:
   1. Breathe through your nose
   2. Into your belly
   3. And exhale slightly longer than you inhaled

1 + 2 + 3 = Magic. How about a quick inventory then a closer look? First, the quick inventory:

   1. You breathing through your nose? (Most people don't. Go look around and/or in the mirror. Do you see a mouth gaping open?)
   2. Do you breathe deeply (yet calmly) into your belly? (Most people don't—especially if you breathe through your mouth!)
   3. And, is your exhale slightly longer than your inhale? (This is the fastest way to relax!)

Now, for the closer look:

Rule #1. Breathe Through Your Nose (EXCLUSIVELY!) When? All day. Every day. (Including while sleeping and training.) Why? Here's the basic idea.

– First: Your nose filters, humidifies and conditions air in ways your mouth simply can't.

– Second: Know that we NEVER used to breathe through our mouths except for the most extreme instances of physical exertion. (Think: Lion chasing you.)

– Third: When you breathe through your mouth, you tend to "over-breathe" via short, shallow, fast breaths that disrupt the oxygen to carbon dioxide levels in your body. Although it might sound weird, it's the CARBON DIOXIDE that actually gets the oxygen out of your red blood cells and into your tissues and organs and you need to slow down your breathing (via your nose!) to get the CO2 right and, as a result, the O2 where you want it.

Rule #2. Breathe into Your Belly Fill up the lower part of your lungs. Flex your most underappreciated and underutilized muscle in your body. Get your diaphragm rocking!! Note: Don't take "big" breaths via your mouth into your chest. Take nice, mellow, quiet, DEEP breaths into your belly. Repeat. All day. Every day.

Rule #3. Exhale Slightly Longer than You Inhale. This is the fastest way to flip the flip the vagal switch and turn on your parasympathetic nervous system and R E L A X. Whenever you think about it: Exhale longer than you inhale. Squeeze your diaphragm. Get all that air out. Why? Well, did you know that breathing is responsible for 70% (!!!) of your body's detoxification? Elimination and sweat only take care of 30%. (Kinda surprising, eh?)

But, guess what? If you're not breathing right, you're not detoxifying fully. And, of course, you're not fueling your cells properly. Enter: Compromised vitality and increased potential of getting all the things you don't want.

Therefore: Nose. Belly. Exhale. Now that you know, Practice. Practice. Practice.

How about a nice, deep, calm breath? In through your nose... Down into your belly... Out through your nose with a nice, long exhale. Ah...Here's to your Optimal Breathing!

It’s About Time!

by Marlene Harris, NSCA, CSCS 

Here’s what a health expert on the local morning news had to say about what we could be doing to protect ourselves.
   1). Get 7-9 hrs sleep daily: I suspect you’ve heard this one before. Much like your cell phone, your body can’t function well without proper recharging.
   2). Avoid/reduce processed foods (as in junk & fast foods): As we know, these foods offer no nutritional benefit and can contribute to inflammation in the body—both undesirable situations if you’re trying stay healthy and avoid viral attacks.
   3). Increase fresh vegetable and fruit intake: You’ve heard this one aplenty before too. Low in calories, high in nutrients and micro-nutrients that can block and/or crush viral invaders, more and more research is singing the praises of this often-ignored aspect or proper nutrition. Berries, broccoli, kale, & other leafy greens were specifically mentioned.
   4). Make liberal use of herbs and seasonings in your cooking: Specifically mentioned were garlic, Italian seasonings, onion, turmeric, black pepper, and ginger. Many herbs and seasonings have anti-viral and anti-bacterial properties.
   5). Sufficient/extra vitamin support: Yupper, it’s that micro-nutrient thing again. Vitamins C and D were specifically mentioned.
   6). Physical activity: Being that you’re reading this, I suspect I don’t need to elaborate on this one, so we’ll call it “enough said”.
   7). Get 20-30 min sunshine daily: Another time-honored mantra of health advice. Nothing new here either, but how often is this advice followed?

In sum, a few thoughts:
   1). We’ve all heard these bits of advice before, many, many times. How much better off might we be as a nation if we actually put them into practice, even if the attempts are modest?
   2). We’ve read/heard numerous articles about each of these topics. Mostly in singular it seems. However, put it all together and you get what? A healthy lifestyle…which leads me to ask: shouldn’t we be doing all this anyways, as normal courses of action?
   3). The news report that offered all this advice was the first one I’ve seen in a major news reportthat specifically said “do this stuff to bolster your immune system against COVID-19” since this whole event started. Better late than never, but not seeing this type of content, and often, seems like a glaring omission on the part of the news media.
   4). One final note: after the news segment on ways to preserve and enhance our health there was a commercial break. Remember items 2 & 3 on the list? Among the ads were pitches for fast food and junk food.

Garlic Power To Lower Lead Levels?

By Michael Greger, MD, NutritionFacts.org.

There are so-called chelation drugs that can be taken for acute, life-threatening lead poisoning. However, for lower grade, chronic lead poisoning, such as at levels under 45 μg/dL, there were no clear guidance as to whether these chelation drugs were effective. 

When they were put to the test, the drugs failed to bring down lead levels long term. Even when they worked initially, the lead apparently continued to seep from the patients’ bones, and, by the end of the year, they ended up with the same lead levels as the sugar pill placebo group. It was no surprise, then, that even though blood lead levels dipped at the beginning, the researchers found no improvements in cognitive function or development.

Since much of lead poisoning is preventable and the drugs don’t seem to work in most cases, that just underscores the need “to protect children from exposure to lead in the first place.” Despite the medical profession’s “best intentions to do something to help these kids…drug therapy is not the answer.” Yes, we need to redouble efforts to prevent lead poisoning in the first place, but what can we do for the kids who’ve already been exposed?
What about dietary approaches? Plants produce phytochelatins.

All higher plants possess the capacity to synthesize compounds that bind up heavy metals to protect themselves from the harmful effects, so what if we ate the plants? “Unlike other forms of treatment (e.g., pharmacotherapy with drugs), nutritional strategies carry the promise of a natural form of therapy that would presumably be cheap and with few to no side effects.” Reviews of dietary strategies to treat lead toxicity say to eat lots of tomatoes, berries, onions, garlic, and grapes, as they are natural antagonists to lead toxicity and therefore should be consumed on a regular basis. Remember those phytochelatins? Perhaps eating plants might help detoxify the lead in our own bodies.

These natural phytochelatin compounds work so well that we can use them to clean up pollution. For example, the green algae chlorella can suck up lead and hold onto it, so what if we ate it? If it can clean up polluted bodies of water, might it clean up our own polluted bodies? We don’t know, because we only have studies on mice, not men and women. There are simply few human studies to guide us.

However, one study did have some direct human relevance; looking at the effect of garlic on lead content in chicken tissues. The purpose was to “explore the possible use of garlic to clean up lead contents in chickens which”—like all of us on planet Earth—“had been exposed to lead pollution and consequently help to minimize the hazard” of lead-polluted chicken meat.

It worked! As you can see at 1:59 in my video Best Food for Lead Poisoning: Garlic, feeding garlic to chickens reduced lead levels in the “edible mass of chicken” by up to 75% or more. Because we live in a polluted world, even if you don’t give the chickens lead and raise them on distilled water, they still end up with some lead in their meat and giblets, but, if you actively feed them lead for a week, the levels get really high. When you give them the same amount of lead with a little garlic added, however, much less lead accumulates in their bodies.

What’s even more astonishing is that when researchers gave them the same amount of lead—but this time waited a week before giving them the garlic—it worked even better. “The value of garlic in reducing lead concentrations…was more pronounced when garlic was given as a post-treatment following the cessation of lead administration”—that is, after the lead was stopped and had already built up in their tissues. We used to think that “the beneficial effect of garlic against lead toxicity was primarily due to a reaction between lead and sulfur compounds in garlic” that would glom on to lead in the intestinal tract and flush it out of the body.

However, what the study showed is that garlic appears to contain compounds that can actually pull lead not only out of the intestinal contents, but also out of the tissues of the body, so the “results indicate that garlic contain chelating compounds capable of enhancing elimination of lead,” and “garlic feeding can be exploited to safeguard human consumers by minimizing lead concentrations in meat….”

If garlic is so effective at pulling lead out of chickens’ bodies, why not more directly exploit “garlic feeding” by eating it ourselves? There had never been a study on the ability of garlic to help lead-exposed humans until 2012.

The study was a head-to-head comparison of the therapeutic effects of garlic versus a chelation therapy drug called D-penicillamine. A group of 117 workers exposed to lead in the car battery industry were randomly assigned into 1 of 2 groups and, 3x a day for 1 month, either got the drug or 1/8 of a teaspoon of garlic powder compressed into a tablet, which is about the equivalent of 2 cloves of fresh garlic.

As expected, the chelation drug reduced blood lead levels by about 20%—but so did the garlic. The garlic worked just as well as the drug and, of course, had fewer side effects. “Thus, garlic seems safer clinically and as effective,” but saying something is as effective as chelation therapy isn’t necessarily the whole story. Remember that chelation drugs can lower blood levels in chronic lead poisoning, but they don’t actually improve neurological function.

After treatment with garlic, significant clinical improvements in neurological functioning were seen, including less irritability, fewer headaches, and improvements in reflexes and blood pressure. These improvements were not seen in the drug group after treatment with the chelation therapy drug. As such, garlic was safer and more effective. “Therefore, garlic can be recommended for the treatment of mild-to-moderate lead poisoning.

There are also some human studies on vitamin C. Check out Can Vitamin C Help with Lead Poisoning?.

Food As Medicine: Science Says: “Wow! It Works!”

from Brian Johnson’s “Optimizer” e-zine

In our last couple of editions, we talked about the wisdom of addressing root causes of health issues rather than merely treating the symptoms of those issues. Now I'm ready to deliver on my promise to share the underlying research on food prescriptions that Dr. Mark Hyman shares in his brilliant book Food Fix. Note: If you want to understand one of (if not, as Mark says THE) fundamental ways to change the world, read this book.

So, let's flip open our copies of the book to page 56. The good Dr. Hyman tells us: "Not too long ago a group of doctors and public health experts at Massachusetts General Hospital noticed something striking: Many of the patients who routinely showed up in the emergency room requiring the most medical services were also the patients who seemed to be the most nutritionally vulnerable. They were patients with heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and other largely food-related chronic diseases. For hospitals and health insurers, these are among the highest-cost, highest-need patients. Working with a local nonprofit group called Community Services, the doctors decided to launch a study to see whether providing these patients with nutritious meals would have an impact on their health care outcomes."

Dr. Mark continues: "The researchers recruited Medicaid and Medicare patients and split them into groups that either received nutritious meals or did not receive nutritious meals. What the study found was astonishing. The patients who had nutritious meals had fewer hospital visits, ultimately resulting in a 16 percent reduction in their health care costs, and that was after deducting meal expenses. The average monthly medical costs for a patient in the nutrition group shrank to about $843—much lower than the roughly $1,413 in medical costs for each patient in the control group."

Pause for a moment and reflect on that. Provide people with nutritious food and, even after accounting for the cost of that food, your health care costs decline by a notable 16%. Now 16% may not seem like much, but let’s put that in perspective, if we could take 16% off the projected 95 TRILLION DOLLARS we will spend in the US alone over the next 35 years, that would save us 15.2 TRILLION DOLLARS.

Of course, that's just the economic impact. Consider the Energy and quality-of-life impact those nutritious meals created for the patients and their families.

Dr. Mark continues: "Another group of public health experts in Philadelphia studied what happened when a nonprofit group called the Metropolitan Area Neighborhood Nutrition Alliance (MANNA) delivered healthy meals to people with diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic diseases. Over twelve months, the patients in the nutritious meal group visited hospitals half as often as a control group and stayed for 37% less time. Ultimately, their health care costs plummeted more than 50%, or $12,000 a month per patient.

According to the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research, the sickest 5% of patients account for 50% of overall health care costs in the United States. This means that providing healthy meals to the sickest provides a big return on investment. The problem is that insurance will pay for expensive hospital stays but not for food that could literally save billions in health care costs. This must change."

I typed that last part with a sigh. It was impossible for me not to recall the sugar-laden, processed-food dominated food tray my brother sent to me during one of HIS hospital stays as he was fighting cancer. Not only does insurance not cover prescriptions for healthy food, but the very place we go to heal ourselves often serves some of the WORST foods on the planet. This must change. Starting with our own food choices. TODAY.

Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being

Why are so many humans religious? Why do we daydream, imagine, and hope? Philosophers, theologians, social scientists, and historians have offered explanations for centuries, but their accounts often ignore or even avoid human evolution. Evolutionary scientists answer with proposals for why ritual, religion, and faith make sense as adaptations to past challenges or as by-products of our hyper-complex cognitive capacities. But what if the focus on religion is too narrow? Renowned anthropologist Agustín Fuentes argues that the capacity to be religious is actually a small part of a larger and deeper human capacity to believe. Why believe in religion, economies, love? Fuentes employs evolutionary, neurobiological, and anthropological evidence to argue that belief — the ability to commit passionately and wholeheartedly to an idea — is central to the human way of being in the world.

The premise of the book is that believing is our ability to draw on our range of cognitive and social resources, our histories and experiences, and combine them with our imagination. It is the power to think beyond what is here and now in order to see and feel and know something — an idea, a vision, a necessity, a possibility, a truth — that is not immediately present to the senses, and then to invest, wholly and authentically, in that “something” so that it becomes one’s reality. The point is that beliefs and belief systems permeate human neurobiologies, bodies, and ecologies, and structure and shape our daily lives, our societies, and the world around us. We are human, therefore we believe, and this book tells us how we came to be that way.

Shermer and Fuentes also discuss:

• what it means to “believe” something (belief in evolution or the Big Bang is different from belief in progressive taxes or affirmative action),
• evolution and how beliefs are formed…and why,
• evolution of awe, wonder, aesthetic sense, beauty, art, music, dance, etc. (adaptation or exaptation/spandrel?),
• evolution of spirituality, religion, belief in immortality,
• Were Neanderthals human in the “belief” sense?
• human niche and the evolution of symbolism/language,
• evolution of theory of mind,
• how to infer symbolic meaning from archaeological artifacts,
• components of belief: augmented cognition and neurobiology, intentionality, imagination, innovation, compassion and intensive reliance on others, meaning-making,
• dog domestication and human self-domestication,
• Göbekli Tepe and the underestimation of ancient peoples’ cognitive capacities,
• the development of property, accumulation of goods, inequality, and social hierarchy,
• gender role specialization,
• monogamy and polyamory, gender and sex, and continuum vs. binary thinking,
• violence and warfare,
• political and economic systems of belief, and
• love as belief.

Agustín Fuentes is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is an active public scientist, a well-known blogger, lecturer, tweeter, and an explorer for National Geographic. Fuentes received the Inaugural Communication & Outreach Award from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, the President’s Award from the American Anthropological Association, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Inconvenient Truths About Fat Loss

by Tom Venuto from the Burn The Fat E-Zine 

Fat loss can be frustrating at times. You lose fat more slowly than you think you should, your progress stalls completely, it feels like your metabolism is broken, you do cardio but it doesn’t help, or life gets in the way. Some things that interfere with your fat loss efforts are out of your control. In many cases, the frustration is self-inflicted because you don’t yet understand or are not yet willing to admit the truth about how fat loss and human bodies work.

Sometimes the facts are unpleasant. There are truths you may not want to hear, but they’re things you need to hear. As Carl Sagan once said, “Better the hard truth than a comforting fantasy.” When you learn the truth about fat loss, and accept it, you still might not be happy about it, but its only then that real change starts to happen.
In this post, you’ll learn some of the most inconvenient fat loss truths. If you understand, accept, and respond to these in the right way, you will break through any past barriers and forge on to the lean body you want.

1. Too much healthy food can lead to weight gain: Fat loss happens when you achieve a calorie deficit. Yet not all diets ask you to count calories. Some diets are based on the premise that all you have to do to lose weight is to eat certain foods – namely the unprocessed, nutrient-dense foods, and avoid others – the processed, nutrient-sparse foods.

Guidelines urging you to eat unprocessed foods are well-intentioned on two levels. One is because less processed foods make you healthier. The other is because processed foods are usually more calorie-dense and hyper-palatable, so focusing on eating healthier foods usually does help you control calories, and that helps with fat loss.

However, there are always many frustrated dieters screaming, “I’m eating healthy, but not losing any weight!” Why does this happen?  Because you’re eating too much healthy food! Healthy foods are not calorie-free. Too much of anything, even healthy foods, will get stored as fat.You don’t get an unlimited all-you-can-eat pass. Ever.

For some reason, this fact does not register in the brains of many health food eaters.
Many foods with a reputation for being healthy, especially fats like avocado, natural peanut butter and olive oil, are incredibly calorie dense and easily overeaten into surplus levels. Making it worse, the popularity of keto-type diets has normalized eating more fat, including things like coconut oil, which is perceived by some people as healthy but adds hundreds of extra calories to their diets in a snap. 

The truth is, eating healthy foods doesn’t get you lean. Eating healthy foods gets you healthy. A sustained calorie deficit gets you lean.

2. You eat more calories than you think: Almost everyone eats more than they think. Why? Because almost all of us are bad at estimating how many calories are in our food. It’s very difficult to eyeball a food portion and correctly guess the calories (darn near impossible in restaurants). The only sure-fire solution to underestimating calorie intake is to weigh and measure food and track the calories and macros (protein, carbs, and fats).

In a NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine) study which found that so-called “diet resistant” people did not have slow metabolisms, they also discovered the real cause for the lack of weight loss: The subjects underestimated their calorie intake by 47%! That’s not a minor mistake – that’s a massive “make you or break you” kind of mistake! The researchers said, “The failure of some obese subjects to lose weight while eating a diet they report as low in calories is due to an energy intake substantially higher than reported, not to an abnormality in thermogenesis.”

To be fair, we should acknowledge that there are some clinical explanations for short term diet resistance. For example, undiagnosed and untreated thyroid disease could cause difficulty with losing weight. Certain medications can stimulate appetite or decrease calorie burning. And there are a handful of medical conditions that can hinder fat loss efforts.

In this study however, people with these issues were excluded, so these exceptions were ruled out. Lack of weight loss wasn’t caused by slow metabolism, thyroid problems, or medication, it was caused by eating too much food.

It’s important to know that we’re not saying frustrated dieters are dishonest about how much they eat. They’re simply not aware that they eat so much because it’s so hard to guess the calories in meals, and so easy to lose track over time.

3. You burn less calories than you think you do: The overestimation of calories burned is just as alarming as the underestimation of calories eaten. In the NEJM study, the subjects not only under-estimated their food intake by 47%, they over-estimated how many calories they burned by 51%! Think for a minute about the impact of both put together.

In a different study, researchers from York University in Toronto had a group of test subjects exercise on a treadmill for 25 minutes at either a moderate or intense level. After the exercise, they were asked to estimate the number of calories they burned and create a meal containing that many calories.

This study was also cleverly designed in the way they used different groups, including some individuals who were not trying to lose weight. There were four types of participants in the study:
1. Normal weight
2. Overweight
3. Trying to lose weight
4. Not trying to lose weight

Every subject did a poor job trying to estimate calories burned, with one group (overweight, not trying to lose weight), doing a terrible job: They overestimated their calories burned by 72%!

The subjects who were trying to lose weight did better, but still failed to accurately estimate their calories burned and eaten. In all the participants from all four groups, there was a range of calories burned estimation error between 280 and 702 calories per day.

4. One weekend of overeating can cancel out a whole week of dieting and training: Most people believe the cliché, “You can’t out-train a lousy diet” is more or less true. At the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, a study was designed to find out whether a “lousy diet” on weekends specifically, was causing weight loss failure.
Prior to this study, the best evidence for weekend eating causing fat loss plateaus or weight gain, came from the National Weight control Registry (NWCR). NWCR research had found an association between lower weekday to weekend diet consistency with weight loss relapse.

People who maintained the same eating patterns on weekends as weekdays were more likely to maintain their weight during the subsequent year. The newer study was a randomized controlled trial with a large sample size, and it ran for a whole year. It measured compliance to diet and exercise during the week as compared to the weekend, as well as changes in body weight during the week as compared to the weekend.

Over the entire 52 weeks, what they discovered was that both test groups – a calorie restricted group and an exercise group – successfully adhered to their calorie deficit on the weekdays. On the weekends, however, calorie restricted participants stopped losing weight and exercise participants actually gained weight.

The study was the first controlled trial to confirm what the NWCR had reported observationally and what we always suspected: weight gain does happen on the weekends more than the weekdays and it’s because of increased calorie intake on the weekends. Things go awry because most people have different eating schedules, patterns or habits on the weekends than on weekdays.

Calorie intake was highest on Saturdays – about 236 calories more than on weekdays, mostly from fatty foods. A couple hundred calories more on Saturday doesn’t seem like much, and of course it’s possible to eat more on some days than others and still have a weekly deficit.

But the excess calories most people eat on weekends are not a part of deliberate, controlled refeeds, built into a weekly plan to maintain an overall deficit. The weekend excess most people eat is overlooked and adds up over time.

Just this barely noticeable increase in weekend food intake could cause a weight gain of nearly 9 pounds if you didn’t catch it and let it go on unchecked all year long. Of course, some people indulge even more than others from Friday night through Sunday, so the fat gain could be even higher. Note that weekends come around 52 times a year.

Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

 Apollo’s Arrow offers a riveting account of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic as it swept through American society in 2020, and of how the recovery will unfold in the coming years. Drawing on momentous (yet dimly remembered) historical epidemics, contemporary analyses, and cutting-edge research from a range of scientific disciplines, bestselling author, physician, sociologist, and public health expert Nicholas A. Christakis explores what it means to live in a time of plague — an experience that is paradoxically uncommon to the vast majority of humans who are alive, yet deeply fundamental to our species. Featuring new, provocative arguments and vivid examples ranging across medicine, history, sociology, epidemiology, data science, and genetics, Apollo’s Arrowenvisions what happens when the great force of a deadly germ meets the enduring reality of our evolved social nature.

Shermer and Christakis discuss:

• the replication crisis in social science and medicine,
• determining causality in science and medicine,
• how we know smoking causes cancer and HIV causes AIDS, but vaccines do not cause autism and cell phones do not cause cancer,
• randomized controlled trials and why they can’t be done to answer many medical questions,
• natural experiments and the comparative method of testing hypotheses (e.g., comparing different countries differing responses to Covid-19),
• the hindsight bias and the curse of knowledge in judging responses to pandemics after the fact,
• looking back to January 2020, what should we have done?,
• comparing Covid-19 to the Black Death, the Spanish Flu, and other pandemics,
• bacteria vs. viruses, coronaviruses and their effects, and why viruses are so much harder to treat than bacteria,
• Bill Gates’ TED talk warning in 2015 and why we didn’t heed it,
• treatments: hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, Vitamin D.

How civilization will change:

• medical: coronavirus is here to stay — herd immunity naturally and through vaccines,
• personal and public health: handshakes, hugs, and other human contact; masks, social distancing, hygiene,
• long run healthier society (e.g., body temperatures have decreased from 98.6 to 97.9),
• economics and business,
• travel, conferences, meetings,
• marriage, dating, sex, and home life,
• entertainment, vacations, bars, and restaurants,
• education and schools,
• politics and society (and a better understanding of freedom and why it is restricted),
• from pandemic to endemic.

Nicholas A. Christakis is a physician and sociologist who explores the ancient origins and modern implications of human nature. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, where he is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, in the Departments of Sociology, Medicine, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistics and Data Science, and Biomedical Engineering. He is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, the co-author of Connected, and the author of Blueprint.

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How A City Of 2.5 Million Ensures Everyone Has Access To Healthy Food

from “The Optimist Daily” e-zine

In a nation characterized by abundance, it’s baffling that some 10.5 percent of households in the US suffer from food insecurity. This fact becomes even more stupefying when we consider that an estimated 30 to 40 percent of America’s food supply winds up in the trash. With this in mind, we ask the question: how can we ensure that everyone in America has access to healthy food? To help us find an answer, let’s take a trip down south to the city of Belo Horizonte in Brazil.

Belo Horizonte is a city of 2.5 million located roughly 275 miles north of Rio de Janeiro. It is an industrial and technological hub that has stark socioeconomic divisions, including high rates of poverty, which is not so different from many cities in the US. Despite this, Belo Horizonte has managed to effectively eliminate hunger in the city thanks to a pioneering food security system that requires less than 2 percent of the city’s annual budget.

In 1993, the city enacted a municipal law that established a citizen’s right to food and created a commission of government officials, farmers, labor leaders, and others, tasked with a mandate to “provide access to food as a measure of social justice.”

As described by Yes! Magazine, Belo Horizonte’s food security system now comprises 20 interconnected programs that approach food security in sustainable ways. They connect food-producers directly to consumers (eliminating retailer markup); offer healthy, fresh food at fixed, low costs at several restaurants popular, or “popular (public) restaurants”; provide food directly to schools, daycare centers, clinics, and nursing homes, shelters, and charitable organizations; establish farmers’ markets and stands to allow farmers to sell their goods directly to residents; regulate food prices for 25 specific items, which must be sold at 20-50 percent below market price; create food banks to distribute unused produce from those markets; and establish community and school gardens, in addition to providing nutrition education.

What’s particularly impressive about the food security program is that it has managed to keep feeding its people despite the fact that Brazil has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, which only increased the number of people in need of fresh, healthy food. Building upon existing infrastructure, the city increased the number of open-air markets and supported restaurants that could help distribute food to those in need.

As mentioned earlier, Belo Horizonte’s food security program only requires 2 percent of the city’s annual budget, a relatively small amount considering both the health and financial benefits that come with feeding residents with healthy food. And by taking care of citizens’ food needs, those same citizens can then use the money they would have been spent on food to take care of other basic needs, which could be an absolute life-saver during the coronavirus pandemic.

No Purveyor Of Unhealthy Foods Wants The Public To Know The Truth

by Michael Greger, M.D., from the Nutrition Facts e-zine

In 2011, Denmark introduced the world’s first tax on saturated fat. “After only 15 months, however, the fat tax was abolished,” due to massive pressure from farming and food company interests. “Public health advocates are weak in tackling the issues of corporate power. A well-used approach for alcohol, tobacco, and, more recently, food-related corporate interests is to shift the focus away from health. This involves reframing a fat or soft drinks tax as an issue of consumer rights and a debate over the role of the state in ‘nannying’ or restricting people’s choices.” I discuss this in my video The Food Industry Wants the Public Confused About Nutrition.

“The ‘Nanny State’ is a term that is usually used in a pejorative way to discourage governments from introducing legislation or regulation that might undermine the power or actions of industry or individuals…Public health advocacy work is regularly undermined by the ‘Nanny State’ phrase.” But those complaining about the governmental manipulation of people’s choices hypocritically tend to be fine with corporations doing the same thing. One could argue that “public health is being undermined by the ‘Nanny Industry’…[that] uses fear of government regulation to maintain its own dominance, to maintain its profits and to do so at a significant financial and social cost to the community and to public health.”

The tobacco industry offers the classic example, touting “personal responsibility,” which has a certain philosophical appeal. As long as people understand the risks, they should be free to do whatever they want with their bodies. Now, some argue that risk-taking affects others, but if you have the right to put your own life at risk, shouldn’t you have the right to aggrieve your parents, widow your spouse, and orphan your children? Then, there’s the social cost argument. People’s bad decisions can cost the society as a whole, whose tax dollars, facilities, and human resources have to care for them. “The independent, individualist motorcyclist, helmetless and free on the open road, becomes the most dependent of individuals in the spinal injury ward.”

But, for the sake of argument, let’s forget these spillover effects, the so-called externalities. If someone understands the hazards, shouldn’t they be able to do whatever they want? Well, “first, it  assumes individuals can access accurate and balanced information relevant to their decisions…but deliberate industry interference has often created situations where consumers have access only to incomplete and inaccurate information…For decades, tobacco companies successfully suppressed or undermined scientific evidence of smoking’s dangers and down-played the public health concerns to which this information gave rise.” Don’t worry your little head, said the corporations. Yet, “Analyses of documents…have revealed decades of deception and manipulation by the tobacco industry and confirmed deliberate targeting of…children.” Indeed, it has “marketed and sold [its] lethal products with zeal…and without regard for the human tragedy….”

“The tobacco industry’s deliberate strategy of challenging scientific evidence undermines smokers’ ability to understand the harms smoking poses” and, as such, undermines the whole concept that smoking is a fully informed choice. “Tobacco companies have denied smokers truthful information…yet held smokers [accountable] for incurring diseases that will cause half of them to die prematurely. In contexts such as these, government intervention is vital to protect consumers from predatory industries….”

Is the food industry any different? “The public is bombarded with information and it is hard to tell which is true, which is false and which is merely exaggerated. Foods are sold without clarity about the nutritional content or harmful effects.” Remember how the food industry spent a billion dollars making sure the easy-to-understand traffic-light labeling system on food never saw the light of day and was replaced by indecipherable labeling? That’s ten times more money than the drug industry spends on lobbying in the United States. Its in the food industry’s interest to have the public confused about nutrition.

How confused are we about nutrition? “Head Start teachers are responsible for providing nutrition education to over 1 million low-income children annually…” When 181 Head Start teachers were put to the test, only about 4 out of the 181 answered at least four of the five nutrition knowledge questions correctly. Most, for example, could not correctly answer the question, “What has the most calories: protein, carbohydrate, or fat?” Not a single teacher could answer all five nutrition questions correctly. While they valued nutrition education, 54 percent “agreed that it was hard to know which nutrition information to believe,” and the food industry wants to keep it that way. A quarter of the teachers did not consume any fruits or vegetables the previous day, though half did have french fries and soda, and a quarter consumed fried meat the day before. Not surprisingly, 55 percent of the teachers were not just overweight but obese.

When even the teachers are confused, something must be done. No purveyor of unhealthy products wants the public to know the truth. “An interesting example comes from the US ‘Fairness Doctrine’ and the tobacco advertising experience of the 1960s. Before tobacco advertising was banned from television in the US, a court ruling in 1967 required that tobacco companies funded one health ad about smoking for every four tobacco TV advertisements they placed. Rather than face this corrective advertising, the tobacco industry took their own advertising off television.” They knew they couldn’t compete with the truth. Just “the threat of corrective advertising even on a one-to-four basis was sufficient to make the tobacco companies withdraw their own advertising.” They needed to keep the public in the dark.

The trans fat story is an excellent example of this. For more on that, see my videos Controversy Over the Trans Fat Ban.

More tobacco industry parallels can be found in Big Food Using the Tobacco Industry Playbook, American Medical Association Complicity with Big Tobacco, and How Smoking in 1959 Is Like Eating in 2016.

The Measure of a Life: Carl Sagan and the Science of Biography

 What is the measure of a life when it is gone? A newspaper obit? A magazine story? A potted television biography? How shall we capture the essence of that life? A list of accomplishments? Highlights and lowlights? Interviews with family, friends, colleagues, and critics? A womb-to-tomb narrative? And if that life was an epochal-shaping life, how is a contemporary biographer to put that life in perspective before the epoch is over? What tools should we use? Oral history interviews? Demographic and statistical data? Document analysis? What fields should we consult? Psychology? Sociology? Cultural history? Does the measure of a life depend as much on who is doing the measuring as it does on the measured life itself? Can we even get to the true core of a person? Can there be a science of biography?

In this tribute to Carl Sagan, Michael Shermer ponders the question of what the measure of a life is once it has gone. And if that life was an epochal-shaping life, how is a contemporary biographer to put that life in perspective before the epoch is over?

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Veteran's Day - November 11, 2020

 

Happy Veteran's Day to all the other veterans out there.

Although we haven't always been looked upon with pride and admiration, I am pleased to see the sentiment has changed, and Americans recognize and respect the sense of duty we all willingly gave to keep our country alive and free.

It was a deep privilege to be a part of something so important.

Please review these flashback links of my Navy life and the hardship of your servicemen and women during the Vietnam War. They say a lot about the time. VF51, of which I played a part shows up in the videos. 

These provide you with a hint of what we did while we served.

These are now just distant memories, 

but they still stir some very strong emotions.

Thank you for being there.

Vought F-8 Crusader

Bon Homme Richard CVA 31 ATTACK carrier 1970 Vietnam

McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II

F-4 video

Vietnam: Flight Deck Ops-Life aboard an Aircraft Carrier

USS Coral Sea (CV-43) - The Ageless Warrior

The most terrifying sounds of the Vietnam War

The Vietnam War Explained In 25 Minutes | Vietnam War Documentary

 Veteran's Day tribute

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

This lecture was recorded on October 6, 2010 as part of the Distinguished Science Lecture Series hosted by Michael Shermer and presented by The Skeptics Society in California (1992–2015).

Richard Dawkins, discussing his book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, begins by explaining that all of his previous books naïvely assumed the fact of evolution, which meant that he never got around to laying out the evidence that evolution is true. Dawkins also came to realize that a disturbingly large percentage of the American and British public didn’t share his enthusiasm for evolution. In fact, they actively abhorred the idea, since it seemed to contradict the Bible and diminish the role of God. So Dawkins decided to write a book for these history-deniers, in which he would dispassionately demonstrate the truth of evolution beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt. If Charles Darwin walked into a 21st-century bookstore and wanted to know how his theory had fared, this is the book he should pick up. As Darwin famously noted, “There is grandeur in this view of life.” What Dawkins demonstrates is that this view of life isn’t just grand: it’s also undeniably true.

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Break it Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union

The provocative thesis of Break It Up is simple: The United States has never lived up to its name—and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as Break It Up shows, the seduction of secession wasn’t limited to the South or the 19^th century. It was there at our founding and has never gone away.

Investigative journalist Richard Kreitner takes readers on a revolutionary journey through American history, revealing the power and persistence of disunion movements in every era and region. Each New England town after Plymouth was a secession from another; the 13 colonies viewed their Union as a means to the end of securing independence, not an end in itself; George Washington feared separatism west of the Alleghenies; Aaron Burr schemed to set up a new empire; John Quincy Adams brought a Massachusetts town’s petition for dissolving the United States to the floor of Congress; and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as a pro-slavery pact with the devil.

From the “cold civil war” that pits partisans against one another to the modern secession movements in California and Texas, the divisions that threaten to tear America apart today have centuries-old roots in the earliest days of our Republic. Richly researched and persuasively argued, Break It Up will help readers make fresh sense of our fractured age. Shermer and Kreitner discuss:

• what happens if Trump loses the 2020 election and refuses to leave,
• the possibility of the secession of California, Oregon and Washington,
• States rights vs. Federal power in issues like climate change, abortion, health care, etc.,
• how Native American tribes and nations governed themselves and what the colonists learned from them,
• how the 1^st colonial revolution was fought not to create a federation but to destroy one when Boston rebelled against the Crown-backed Dominion of New England,
• separatists movements throughout our history,
• Aaron Burr’s attempts to create a new nation he would head,
• spread of slavery to the west and Jefferson’s fear that it sounded like a “fire bell in the night,”

• why John Quincy Adams introduced a petition demanding the dissolution of the U.S.:

  “If the day should ever come, (may Heaven avert it,) when the affection of the people of these states shall be alienated from each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give away to cold indifference, or collisions of interest shall fester into hatred, far better will it be for the people of the disunited states, to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint.”

• how Southern states initially sought to expand the union of slave holding states, not secession,
• why reconstruction failed,
• the Civil War of the 1960s,
• Brexit, Texit, and Calexit,
• Russia support for American secessionist movements,

• James Madison’s observation (in Federalist Paper No. 51) about the problem all human groups/tribes/nations must solve:

  “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Kreitner’s summation of America’s irrepressible conflict “The ‘irrepressible conflict’ was not just between North and South, freedom and slavery; it reflected something even deeper. The truly ‘irrepressible’ conflict was between union and disunion, whose forces bringing American together and those tearing them apart.”

Richard Kreitner is a contributing writer to The Nation. He is the author of Booked: A Traveler’s Guide to Literary Locations Around the World. A graduate of McGill University, he has also written for The New York Times, Slate, Salon, The Baffler, Raritan, The Forward, and the Boston Globe. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

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The Scary Reason(s) You Might Want To Be Cautious With This Halloween Candy

from “Eat This, Not That”

The sweet stuff in your kids' trick-or-treat buckets may come with a bitter side effect. When eaten in large quantities (which in this case is anything over a mere 2 ounces, keep reading!), black licorice can cause serious health issues. This Halloween, you'll want to stay vigilant about the candy, whether you're looking out for your kids or just indulging your own sweet tooth.

"Consumed occasionally and in moderation, it's unlikely you would experience any detrimental effects from black licorice," explains GP clinical lead Dr. Daniel Atkinson at treated.com, a U.K.-based healthcare service. "But if you were to eat too much black licorice over a sustained period of time—more than 50 grams a day for two weeks straight, for example—then you are risking your health for a number of reasons."

Why is black licorice so dangerous? It all has to do with glycyrrhizin, licorice root's sweet compound. "Glycyrrhizin decreases potassium levels and increases sodium levels in the blood," Dr. Atkinson explains. And while you'd have to eat a good amount of licorice to get to that point, it could have some scary side effects.

A drop in potassium levels could lead to an abnormal heart rhythm in addition to heart failure, high blood pressure, edema, and lethargy, according to the FDA. "Potassium plays an important role in the body. It helps us better transmit nerve signals, aids normal muscle function, plays a role in the balance of fluids, and has a number of other functions, too," says Dr. Atkinson. "The term for low potassium levels is hypokalemia. This can lead to heart palpitations, irregular heartbeat, weakened muscle function, or even high blood pressure."

How much black licorice is too much? While 50 grams, or two ounces, might sound like a lot of candy, it's not actually that difficult an amount to reach, especially if you're a licorice lover. "This isn't actually as much as it sounds," Dr. Atkinson says. "A serving of 8-10 small pieces is probably between 40 and 50 grams."

Are certain people more at risk for the health risks black licorice poses? Adults over 40 and parents of young children will want to be especially careful of how much licorice they and their children are eating.

"Children have a smaller body surface area, which predisposes them to a higher risk than adults," explains Dr. Raj Singh, a Nevada-based nephrologist. The FDA also warns that several medical studies have linked licorice consumption with health problems in adults over 40.

In fact, a review in the journal Therapeutic Advances in Endocrinology and Metabolism found that overconsumption of this polarizing candy is linked to high blood pressure and hypokalemic myopathy, or low-potassium-level–related metabolic muscle weakness.

"Individuals with high blood pressure, especially those taking diuretics or water pills such as HCTZ (hydrochlorothiazide), are at the most risk, as these medications force the kidneys to waste potassium in the urine, which can cause severe hypokalemia (low levels of potassium in the blood)," Dr. Singh explains. "Individuals with atrial fibrillation (a common cardiac arrhythmia) are at high risk as even minor fluctuation in blood potassium levels can trigger a fatal arrhythmia." If you have those particular conditions, you might want to check with your doctor about how much black licorice is safe in your case.

How can you prevent black licorice's adverse effects? Make sure to stay below the FDA's recommended limit of two ounces a day. Also, it never hurts to beef up your diet with some potassium-rich foods to make sure your body's potassium stores aren't depleted.

"Theoretically, consuming a diet high in potassium (vegetables, bananas) or drinking potassium-rich fluids such as coconut water or orange juice can protect against the potassium-lowering effects of black licorice and stabilize the cardiac membrane," says Dr. Singh.

If you do end up experiencing any licorice-induced symptoms, contact your doctor right away. Halloween candy is can be fun treat, but this is one variety you'll want to be wary of.

Respecting Nature, Respecting People

A Naturalist Model for Reducing Speciesism, Racism, and Bigotry

BY MARK W. MOFFETT

I find it ironic to be weathering out Covid-19 in Brooklyn given that I’m a biologist who thinks of rainforest as my native habitat. Still, I feel fortunate to be a witness to what appears to be a global sea change: The air has grown clearer until the sky can turn a crystalline blue typical of mountain vistas. The squirrels and now superabundant birds — even one fearless racoon — have stared at us through our 4^thfloor balcony window as if we were zoo animals. Already the stories are legend. Coyotes prowl San Francisco and mountain lions relax in downtown Boulder as if cities were their native habitat. Those who deny humanity’s footprint on nature point to the fact we can’t prove that people are the culprit behind climate change or species loss, but now it seems we’re actually doing the experiment. Can we turn our perceptions of nature around for good and put an end to the environmental crisis?

One way forward will be to recognize a fact of human psychology: Our abuse of nature is linked to the equally pressing concern of our age, social disintegration as a result of war, terrorism, and inequality. All are manifestations of a basic human drive to distinguish ingroups from outgroups. In this connection lies the key to deactivating the effects of both.

Kimberly Costello and Gordon Hodson, psychologists at Brock University, Ontario, Canada, had research participants read essays enumerating the humanlike traits of animals. Mere exposure to this perspective led even their subjects with the most entrenched prejudices to think more kindly not only of other species, but of immigrants — to regard them more as equals — despite the fact that the essays had mentioned nothing about humans.¹

I registered what appeared to be such a link myself when I traveled to Socotra, remote chunks of land, the largest 50 miles across, 250 miles off Yemen’s shore. Whereas the only other archipelagos with comparable biological diversity, the Galapagos and Hawaii, have experienced terrible species loss since human contact, there’s no sign that Socotra’s goat herders have driven species to extinction despite occupying those islands since the time of Christ.² Socotra has remained ecologically intact because of how tribal elders orchestrated the movements of people and goats to reduce habitat destruction. In Socotra, I was struck, always, by the spiritual connection between herder and goat. Herders, who knew their individual animals well, would cradle the animal to be slaughtered. They would caress it, sing to it. The goat’s sacrifice wasn’t taken lightly. To eat isn’t to be superior. As remarkable as the Socotran respect for animals and nature was their nonviolent behavior toward each other. While war devastates Yemen’s mainland, until very recently no weapons were permitted on the archipelago. […]

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