Brent Kearney

On Friday evening, I attended a talk on health and nutrition by Dr. Mitra Ray. Here is what I got out of it:

Dr. Ray earned her Ph.D. from Stanford Medical School, where she studied cellular physiology and biochemistry. From her personal experiences, she became motivated by an intense desire to understand health and disease, and now promotes a perspective that contradicts the approach of modern medicine. As opposed to “Health Care”, she says that modern medicine is closer to “Sick Care”. Dr. Ray details her perspective in her book, From Here to Longevity.

The problem with the modern medical approach, driven by the pharmaceutical industry, is that it tends to treat the symptoms of illness rather than the causes. It works against our genetics, in an effort to suppress the expression of our “bad genes”. A much more effective approach, she argues, is to help promote the expression of our “good genes” through healthy diet and lifestyle choices.

She argues that a central cause of illness of all sorts is the weakening of our cellular DNA by excessive free radicals in our bodies. These free radicals can be minimized by maintaining a healthy PH balance in our blood, achieved by a diet high in alkaline foods, namely, fruits and vegetables. Without this balance, our cells break down, and we effectively age faster. Studies of our DNA have shown that we should be able to live 120 years. Age 60 should be considered half way , but today it is considered near the end. Children are now dying from heart disease.

The health sciences have been too focused on vitamins and minerals, ignoring hundreds of thousands of other nutrients in fruits and vegetables. These other nutrients are collectively referred to as phytonutrients. Dr. Ray argues that phytonutrients are equally as important to our health as the common vitamins and minerals. It is for this reason that vitamin supplements are probably ineffective — they lack the companion nutrients that the body needs to absorb and make use of them. The only good source of phytonutrients is fruits and vegetables.

These are some tips that I picked up during the talk:

• Eliminate bread and pasta from your diet. According to Dr. Ray, our bodies have a natural reaction to stop eating when we’ve had enough food, but this reaction does not occur when we eat bread or pasta. This is why we tend to over-eat pizza, but we never over-eat broccoli. We haven’t evolved the same feeding shut-off mechanism for breads, but millions of years of evolution has given us this capability for fruits and vegetables. Furthermore, the benefits from grains and breads, such as dietary fiber, can be found in greater abundance in fresh vegetables anyways.

  Bread and pasta also cause a spike in your blood-sugar level, which stimulates the production of insulin. The result is that you’ll experience an energy crash, and also likely the carbohydrate from the bread or pasta will get converted to fat.

• Don’t eat for 3 or 4 hours before bed time. Eating late meals reduces the quality of your sleep. Sleep is essential for your bodies regeneration and repair of its cells. If you are digesting food, you won’t be regenerating. Dr. Ray actually claimed that your body can do only one thing at a time: digest or regenerate. I doubt that its so black-and-white, but I can imagine that less energy would go to regeneration if its being used on digestion.

• Fruit and vegetables should be your main staple. Dairy products, meats and other foods should be consumed in moderation.

• Use food supplements instead of vitamin pills. Supplementation is a good idea, because fruit and vegetables today have diminished concentrations of nutrients over a few decades ago. This is probably due to the overuse of soil and/or pesticides and/or genetic modifications to the plants themselves.

  Vitamin supplements have unnaturally high doses of vitamins, stripped of the phytonutrients that your body needs. They can actually be toxic to your body, and most of them will pass right through you. Dr. Ray actively promotes a food supplement product called “Juice+”, which she sells via MLM. Personally, I recommend Greens+, which you can order online from various sources or pick up at your local health-food store.

  Dr. Ray also advocated the use of Omega3 fatty acid supplements.

• Waistline measurement is the most effective indicator of overall health. Make a fist, and take a look at it. That is approximately the size of your stomach; your meal portions should never exceed this volume. Waistline body fat indicates that you are eating too much, not exercising enough, or both.

  Dr. Ray didn’t distinguish between men and women here though, which I think is a mistake. Men tend to accumulate fat on the waistline first, women, the hips. Either way, the point is that excess body fat, when there is no famine around the corner, is an indication that you’re doing something unhealthy.

• Look into Yoga. It is one of the healthiest forms of exercise that you can find.

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In Part 2, I introduced the dojo.io.bind() function. In this breif post, I’ll expand on it slightly with a couple of remarks.

Last time, I sent data to my PHP script by putting all of my data in the URI:


var myUrl = 'myscript.php?var1=foo&var2=bar';


There is a prettier way of doing this. You can use the content parameter to send your data using GET, like so:

dojo.io.bind(
	url: 'myscript.php',
	content: { var1: foo, var2: bar },
	error: errorFunction,
	load: resultFunction
);

As you can see, content takes a string of arguments enclosed in curly brackets, the arguments separated by commas. The arguments are key: value pairs, separated by colons.

The second remark I wanted to make about dojo.io.bind() was in regards to error handling. In the above example, I delegate error handling to a function named “errorFunction()”. This function is automatically sent 2 parameters: type, and errorObject.

The “type” variable always contains “error”. The manual has this to say about errorObject: The errorObject is transport specific, but should provide details about the type and details of the bind failure. Should indeed. If you are lucky, you will be able to access an informative error message by accessing errorObject’s “message” method, like so:

errorFunction(type, errorObject)
{
   alert("io.bind() failed: " + errorObject.message);
}

In my experience so far, the error messages can be less than informative. For example, I received the generic message:


"XMLHttpTransport Error: undefined undefined".


I’m told that there are 3 parts to the errorObjects.message, and the latter two are presently unused. In every case that I got this error, there turned out to be a problem with the PHP script itself. I debugged the problem by turning on error logging for the script, watching the server logs, and by adding a PHP function that emailed me debugging information when the script executes.

Sometimes however, errorObject.message gave me some very useful output for debugging. Be careful what you do with these messages though — you may not want your web visitors to see what it spits out!

Nubella Health & Nutrition News is reporting on two studies of over 120,0000 coffee drinkers over a 20 year period. They conclude that even excessive coffee drinking — 6 or more cups per day — carries no increased risk of heart disease. In fact, the opposite was true: excessive coffee drinkers were shown to have a slightly lower risk of heart disease.

These studies come in the wake of a recent Harvard study that identified a coffee metabolizing gene that is apparently absent in some people. Those without it are at higher risk of heart disease when they drink coffee. Given the results of the 20-year, 120,000 person study, one could probably conclude that the absence of this gene is rare.

Previous studies show health benefits, rather than risks, of drinking coffee. These studies, however, fail to take into account the effects that coffee drinking may have on sleep, and the consequences of that.

A new study published in The American Journal of Physiology – Endocrinology and Metabolism turns traditional thinking about lactic acid, a.k.a. lactate, on its head. Athletes and their coaches have long fought to reduce the amount of lactic acid found in the blood, believing it to be only a toxin produced by tired muscles. As it turns out, lactate is actually a key source of energy for muscles and the heart, provided that your cells have enough mitochondria to process it.

The heart even prefers lactate as a fuel, Brooks found.

Mitochondria are the inter-cellular mechanisms that produce energy; the more of them you have, the more efficiently you’ll be able to oxidize lactate into energy. This study apparently links the process of anaerobic metabolism with aerobic metabolism – lactate is produced in the former, and burned off in the latter.

If I understand the results correctly, the implication of this study is that atheletes should be striving to maximize their mitochondria concentration instead of focusing on lactate reduction. Producing more lactate during training will encourage the body to produce more mitochondria to process it. So a focus on high-intensity workouts, followed by rest/recovery periods, would probably be optimal for acheiving maximum training benefit.

In preparation for my first race, I started paying attention to how much time it takes to run, and how much distance I cover when I run. I’ve been running for awhile, but never competitively, so these things didn’t matter before. I signed up for the shorter 5km race next month, because I thought it would be easier to run a shorter distance for my first race. Well I discovered that I typically run farther than that! The trail to get to the trail where I normally consider the starting point for my run, was 3km long. So what I normally considered my warm-up stretch is actually more than half the distance of the race that I’m training for. Perhaps I should switch to the 10km “eduro” run…

Perhaps not though — the numbers are a cruel coach. The best time last year for the 5km race was just under 23 minutes. I measured my run today, and it took me over 28 minutes to get to 5km, with a 335m elevation gain and loss. I’m optimistic that this can improve a lot though, because the first 10 minutes I was in warm-up mode, where I typically start at about 1/3 normal speed, and gradually increase the pace until I feel warmed up enough to push it harder. Next time, I’ll start the clock after the warm-up phase. Can I bring my time down by 5 whole minutes though?

My resting heart rate today is 60bpm.