Robert Paterson's Weblog

Jay - My best friend - March 2000 - March 2011

See you in my dreams Jay until we join each other in the universe.

Activity vs Exercise - More...

Just found this:-

Here is the conclusion - "We know there's a gene in the body that causes heart disease, but it doesn't respond to exercise no matter how often or how hard you work out," he says. "And yet the activity of the gene becomes worse from sitting—or rather, the complete and utter lack of contractile activity in your muscles. So the more nonexercise activity you do, the more total time you spend on your feet and out of your chair. That's the real cure."

Here is the set up - "Do you lead an active lifestyle or a sedentary one? The question is simple, but the answer may not be as obvious as you think. Let's say, for example, you're a busy guy who works 60 hours a week at a desk job but who still manages to find time for five 45-minute bouts of exercise. Most experts would label you as active.

But Marc Hamilton, Ph.D., has another name for you: couch potato. Perhaps "exercising couch potato" would be more accurate, but Hamilton, a physiologist and professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, would still classify you as sedentary. "People tend to view physical activity on a single continuum," he says. "On the far side, you have a person who exercises a lot; on the other, a person who doesn't exercise at all. However, they're not necessarily polar opposites."

Hamilton's take, which is supported by a growing body of research, is that the amount of time you exercise and the amount of time you spend on your butt are completely separate factors for heart-disease risk. New evidence suggests, in fact, that the more hours a day you sit, the greater your likelihood of dying an earlier death regardless of how much you exercise or how lean you are. That's right: Even a sculpted six-pack can't protect you from your chair.

Make no mistake: "Regularly exercising is not the same as being active," says Peter Katzmarzyk, Ph.D., Hamilton's colleague at Pennington, the nation's leading obesity research center. Katzmarzyk is referring to the difference between official exercise activity, such as running, biking, or lifting weights, and so-called nonexercise activity, like walking to your car, mowing the lawn, or simply standing. "A person may hit the gym every day, but if he's sitting a good deal of the rest of the time, he's probably not leading an overall active life," says Katzmarzyk.

You might dismiss this as scientific semantics, but energy expenditure statistics support Katzmarzyk's notion. In a 2007 report, University of Missouri scientists said that people with the highest levels of nonexercise activity (but little to no actual "exercise") burned significantly more calories a week than those who ran 35 miles a week but accumulated only a moderate amount of nonexercise activity.

In 2009, Katzmarzyk studied the lifestyle habits of more than 17,000 men and women and found that the people who sat for almost the entire day were 54 percent more likely to end up clutching their chests than those who sat for almost none of the time. That's no surprise, of course, except that it didn't matter how much the sitters weighed or how often they exercised. "The evidence that sitting is associated with heart disease is very strong," says Katzmarzyk. "We see it in people who smoke and people who don't. We see it in people who are regular exercisers and those who aren't. Sitting is an independent risk factor."

"Humans sit too much, so you have to treat the problem specifically," says Hamilton. "The cure for too much sitting isn't more exercise. Exercise is good, of course, but the average person could never do enough to counteract the effect of hours and hours of chair time."

Chairs - A Major Health Risk!

Got your attention? We all know that we should take more exercise - but "exercise" as a stand alone thing is like porn versus lovemaking. 

We are designed to be "ACTIVE". 

This is how we are designed to "sit". A highly active position that demands that we make adjustments all the time.

This is as good - a standing desk - I am thinking of getting this.

For our problems with the chair extend beyond the home now.

500 years ago only Kings had chairs. The rest of us stood, sat on a stool or bench or squatted. No one sat like this at home and few sat all day like this:

I sit like this for hours and hours every day.

For most humans, sitting for long periods is in evolutionary terms a brand new thing.

So I am on the lookout for ways around this.

My own choice will be a standing desk I think. But here is a great article on many things that you and I can do to make us more "active" in the modern workplace.

We live longer but are also disabled longer - Morbidity vs Mortality

We congratulate ourselves in the developed world on our mortality-related statistics (e.g. life expectancy), but our morbidity picture is increasingly abysmal. As Eileen Crimmins, AARP Chair in Gerontology at the University of Southern California and co-author of the study examining morbidity and life span, observes, “There is substantial evidence that we have done little to date to eliminate or delay disease while we have prevented death from diseases. …At the same time, there have been substantial increases in the incidences of certain chronic diseases, specifically, diabetes.” In a short ten year span, we’ve lost on average a full year of healthy life (slightly more for women) – life without one or more of the major diseases that constitute the most common causes of death in the U.S.: cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. (I wonder what the picture would look like if you added other common chronic and debilitating conditions like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.)

As this study showed, we also spend less of our life fully mobile. Just ten years ago, the average 20-year-old man would experience 3.8 years of his life with impaired functional mobility – “the ability to walk up ten steps, walk a quarter of a mile, stand or sit for 2 hours, and stand, bend or kneel without using special equipment.” Today that number is 5.8 years. Women fare even worse. Ten years ago, that number was 7.3 years and has since risen to 9.8 years. That’s almost ten years of one’s life without basic mobility. Yes, there’s much more to life than the ability to walk up stairs, but I can’t call this an ideal. We’re not talking about a freak accident here that couldn’t have been helped. This trend represents broad and gradual systemic decline – the kind of impairment that is almost always preventable by effective and consistent lifestyle intervention.

Call me callous (or not), but I think we’re shockingly blasé about the constraints people are routinely living with at the end of their lives. We’re physical beings, of course. I understand that bodies don’t last forever. Nonetheless, the fact that we’re losing so much ground in only a decade’s time should constitute a five-alarm fire.

via marksdailyapple.com

On PEI, the average man is helpless by 65 and lives 9.7 years before he dies.

THIS is the great cost to him, his family and to society.

Mortality is not the issue - we all die. Morbidity is. Morbidity is something we can choose to deal with. But at the moment - we don't even have it on the radar.

Packaged food raises levels of bisphenol A

Forgoing packaged foods such as canned soups and vegetables could dramatically lower levels of a hormone-disrupting chemical that has been linked to myriad health problems, including birth defects, autism and reproductive issues, according to a study released today.

In the study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, five Bay Area families were asked to eliminate packaged foods from their diets and store food only in glass or stainless steel containers. After only three days, levels of the chemical bisphenol A in the subjects' urine dropped by more than 60 percent, researchers found.

via sfgate.com

This kind of news makes me wonder even more about how we look at Food Safety.

Currently all the systemic risks such as are highlighted here are off the table.

But really the issues is this. Most people rely on processed food rather than cook from raw. Partly this is to do with the structure of our system. There is NO LOCAL food anymore. So most of what we buy is by definition processed.

So we then lose the culture of food making. Fewer and fewer people even know how to cook. So the cycle intensifies.

The result is - a systemic reduction in our health and in our ability to be social. For it is around the table that we do our social grooming.

So what to do?

Buy real food. Cook it not as a chore but as a gift and eat together. The more of us who do this, the more of us will be healthier and also happier.

Paleo - My Inner results

I saw my Dr today - My blood work will be ready in about 2 weeks - very interested to see how I am doing internally.

The one result we could see today is my blood pressure. 116/74 - The blood pressure of a healthy 25 year old. I am 60.

Yes it's nice to lose weight. But that is only the surface. My knees that have been so bad that I have considered surgery are now fine. My bladder is not waking me up in the night - going to be interesting to see my PSA soon. 

I am thinking also of getting a blood sugar monitor to see my levels after meals. My bet is that they are very stable.

It is great also to have a Dr who is interested in this and very supportive.

The Future of Manufacturing is Local

The monolithic single-industry model has evolved as manufacturers see the benefits of being smaller and paying attention to how patterns of consumption, ownership and use are shifting.

An example of this might be a company like Anchor Steam Brewery, which started as a saloon in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood in 1896. The scent of hops tells you you’re in the Potrero neighborhood, where they’re still brewing beer and producing small-batch bourbon. Today’s consumer, says Anchor’s Keith Greggor, “is much more likely to back the local guy.” Or there’s recent arrival Jamieson Leadbetter, a fourth-generation baker whose grandfather gave him this advice when he decided to continue the Portland, Me.-based family business in San Francisco: “Pick your community well. You’re not there solely to make money; you’re there to play a larger role.”

Alex RumanDespite the higher costs, 4th-generation baker Jamieson Leadbetter opened his bake shop in San Francisco.

Times have changed. So has business, and it’s time to rethink, and indeed rebrand, American manufacturing.

As Mark Dwight, who started SFMade in 2010, explains, “For decades we have developed a culture of disposability — from consumer goods to medical instruments and machine tools. To fuel economic growth, marketers replaced longevity with planned obsolescence — and our mastery of technology has given birth to ever-accelerating unplanned obsolescence. I think there is increasing awareness that this is no longer sustainable on the scale we have developed.”

Dwight, who walks the walk as someone who make stuff right here in San Francisco as CEO of Rickshaw Bagworks, had initially started SFMade with the intention of creating a brand identity for the products produced within San Francisco city limits, something he calls “geographic ingredient branding.”

More easily understood as something akin to terroir, geographic ingredient branding emphasizes “pride of place,” which runs deep in cities like San Francisco and New York. “I saw this as a way to ‘brand’ the history, culture, personality and natural beauty of our city as a means to uniquely differentiate our local manufacturers,” says Dwight. “I coined the term ‘geographic ingredient branding’ as an emulation of successful technology ingredient branding campaigns such as ‘Intel Inside.’”

Joe MontanaRickshaw’s messenger bags can be ordered and customized online. Every bag is built to order and made in downtown San Francisco.

Rickshaw does both manufacturing and retailing out of its factory. Factory and online stores like theirs engage the customer base and replace the old wholesale model with a direct-to-consumer version that’s critical in protecting narrow profit margins. These are “hybrid models not characteristic of traditional manufacturing,” Sofis says.

Things made in places like San Francisco or New York command a desire-by-association (though I’m also sure creative individuals in less name-brand locals could adopt many of the business synergies and sustainable efforts discussed here). To be sure, there may be a higher cost of doing business in major metropolitan centers like these, but at the same time what gets made is largely driven by design and by consumer demand. Six-year-old Ritual Coffee Roasters, owned by Eileen Hassi, is emblematic of the city’s obsession not just with caffeine connoisseurship but with the particulars of sourcing, roasting, technique and myriad subcultures. The story of Timbuk2 bags (co-founded by Dwight, who now runs Rickshaw) is one of bicycle culture, which has expanded into a broader narrative of sustainable culture and transportation. With a local apparel company like Betabrand, the essence of San Francisco is conveyed in the very apace-with-technology concept of creating a new limited-edition product every week.

via opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

The era of the huge central factory or farm for that matter is ending.

Instead a new model of many small local units linked into a network is evolving.

The network will replace the hub.

Eggs!

Organic poultry far less prone to salmonella than conventional, study finds

A team of five scientists from UGCFS and several other schools collected and analyzed fecal, feed, and drinking water samples from both conventional and organic birds raised on various farms owned by the same North Carolina company. For two flock cycles, the team collected the samples when birds were both three and eight weeks old, and tested them for the presence of both Salmonella and antimicrobial-resistant salmonella.

Upon analysis, the salmonella rate among conventional birds was 38.8 percent, while it was only 5.6 percent among organic birds. Conventional feed was contaminated with salmonella 27.5 percent of the time, while organic feed was contaminated only 5 percent of the time. And shockingly, nearly 40 percent of the salmonella detected in conventional birds was resistant to six different antibiotics, while not a single organic bird was found to be contaminated with antimicrobial-resistant salmonella.

Poultry products are the primary vehicle by which salmonella gets into the food chain and causes serious disease outbreaks among humans. Many NaturalNews readers will remember the massive conventional egg recall that took place last year, for instance (http://www.naturalnews.com/029570_e...). And earlier that year, Consumer Reports discovered that roughly two-thirds of conventional chicken meat sold at grocery stores is contaminated with disease-causing bacteria like salmonella on a daily basis (http://www.naturalnews.com/028661_c...).

And the new study shows that the type of salmonella prevalent among conventional chickens is the antibiotic-resistant kind. Unlike the very few organic chickens that developed typical salmonella as part of the study, the conventional chickens were largely contaminated with a type of "super-salmonella" that does not respond to treatment. This mutant salmonella is clearly a result of growth hormones and antibiotics added to birds' feed and rearing regimens, as well as their filthy living conditions that foster disease growth.

Ultimately, the UGCFS study shows that conventional animal raising methods are dangerous, and represent a serious threat to human health. The organic birds in the study, which were still raised on a large-scale factory-type farm, had very low rates of disease compared to their conventional counterparts -- which means that pasture-based, small-scale farm chickens most likely fare even better with a virtually zero percent rate of salmonella and other serious illness.

via naturalnews.com

There! The risk is in the system.

Paleo - More than a Diet - A Sustainable Food System

A Local M.E.A.L. - Robert Paterson from nick battist on Vimeo.

This is one of several presentations given at lst week's LOCAL MEAL event in Charlottetown. All the speakers will be available here on the web site.