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.

Since the big storm a couple of weeks ago, the ski conditions have been great. Over the past week, the Sun has been out almost every day, changing the trend of a ski season with overcast skies all winter. I’ve been making good use of my season’s pass at Sunshine Village, and I’ve met some excellent people on the slopes this year. This past week in particular, has been really fun. I put together a video slideshow (~48MB) with a selection of photos from the past week. Its a pretty big file, so you’ll want either a fast Internet connection, or a lot of time, to download it. If you’re using Microsoft Windows and you don’t already have the free QuickTime Player, you will need it to view the slideshow. Its worth having anyways, so install it if you don’t have it. If you’re on a Mac, don’t worry, you already have Quicktime.

You’ll notice that some of the images are a little blurry. Thats because someone–*cough* Maryke *cough*–has their camera set to low-resolution mode. Sorry about that.

Blue skies and loose powder at Sunshine today, following a week of nightly snowfall leaving 46cm of pure fun all over the mountains. This day was beyond words; see a few images from today here.

Just when it seemed that the ski season was dwindling down, Sunshine starts getting pounded with new snow. With well over 20cm of new snow, conditions are superb. The temperatures are cold enough at high elevations that the snow isn’t sticky, as one would normally expect for spring conditions. Delirium Dive, right now, offers some of the best skiing that I’ve had all season:

The Banff weather forecast predicts more precipitation for the next 4 days, so Easter weekend should be excellent all around. This year, the closing date at Sunshine is May 22nd.

Apple has been in numerous headlines for their overly aggressive legal tactics, usually when they’re trying to silence people from speculating about their upcoming products. This is a new low, however.

Apparently 3rd-grade student Shea O’Gorman, of San Francisco, wrote a letter to Apple with some of her ideas on how the company could improve its iPod Nano product. Apple replied with some legalese, harshly stating that Apple does not accept unsolicited product ideas.

Shea’s mother’s description of the girl running into her bedroom to hide is a perfect description of how it usually feels to ask questions of Apple. Hilarious.

Hilarious, and also kind of disgusting. The publicity from the event, since her Mom was on the local TV news, has prompted Apple to say that they are considering changing their corporate policy with regards to letters from children. That’s decent of them. It wouldn’t be surprising if the new policy turns out to be to move directly to litigation against the children’s parents, instead of writing nasty letters.

For the past week or so, temperatures have been climbing and snow has been turning to slush in the Banff/Lake Louise area. This weekend, it was 8 degrees Celsius at Lake Louise. The snow conditions are very good, for spring, with about 1.5m of snow base left. Early Saturday morning it was super crusty, but by 10:00am it had softened up to provide great ski conditions at Lake Louise. The resort is mostly empty, too, so there are no line-ups anywhere. Its warm enough that the resort is hosting live music on the patio at Kokanee Cabin, making an excellent apres-ski atmosphere on sunny afternoons.

From what I’ve heard, Norquay is pretty much finished for the season, with only a couple of runs remaining open. Sunshine and Lake Louise have only closed a couple of runs each, with both resorts offering over 100 runs to its sparse population of spring skiers. I’ve heard that the snow in the backcountry is excellent, but avalanche dangers are fairly high, depending on the microclimate and underlying terrain.

For nearly a year, I leased a server for hosting websites, mail and DNS for web projects and consulting clients. It was expensive, but I thought it was necessary because I needed maximum control over the environment in order to run whatever web apps I needed and to create custom configurations to meet the needs of my clients. Then I discovered DreamHost.

DreamHost is a web hosting company that leverages open source software and mad geek skillz to bring you almost all of the benefits of having your own leased server environment, but for shared hosting prices. This is a company that really gets it when it comes to web technologies. They understand that their users know that vhosts, DNS entries and open source software does not incur the costs that most hosting companies charge for, so they include these things for free, even in their cheapest package. It’s over the top.

While you can’t directly control Apache directives, the sysadmins have created a full featured setup that lets you achieve pretty much anything that you would want to do anyways. For example, you can use their custom-made and very functional control panel (included free with all plans) to setup a vhost with your choice of these server-side environments and/or services:

• Full Shell and/or FTP access
• Ruby on Rails
• Perl/CGI via mod_perl
• PHP4, running as CGI or not
• PHP5, running as CGI or not
• A MySQL host with unlimited databases
• Frontpage extensions
• .htaccess password-protected directories
• Quicktime and/or RealAudio/Video streaming servers
• Jabber instant messaging
• IMAP and/or POP3 services, with virtually unlimited user accounts
• Automatic “one-click” installation of numerous popular open source programs, like WordPress, phpBB, Joomla! CMS, Gallery, MediaWiki, Webcalendar and more…

Their cheapest plan ($7.95 USD/mo) includes 1TB of bandwidth, 20GB of disk space, unlimited MySQL databases, 75 shell/ftp users, 3000 email accounts and unlimited extra domain and sub-domain hosting. As if thats not enough, as an incentive for sticking with them, they increase your bandwidth quota by 8GB per week and your disk quota by 160MB per week.

The icing on the cake is their referral program: they give you $97USD for everyone that you refer to their service (if they sign up), or 10% of what your referred customers pay plus 5% of what their referred customers pay.

My only concern with this company is whether they can afford to stay in business at these prices, and whether they can keep upgrading their infrastructure at a rate that matches the customer growth that they are surely experiencing. Having said that, I encourage anyone who is either looking for new hosting or wants a better deal on their current hosting to check out DreamHost.