Well, that's settled. I believe I'll never again do a tri-tip roast on the grill, except when camping. Here was last evening's dinner preparation before heading off to the oven.
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Archives for 2008
Traveling: The Perfect Time to Fast
I have found over the last year that my absolute favorite time to fast is while traveling, either by car or through those awful airports.
For one — especially when on a long drive — you eliminate any sort of discomfort from whatever food might do to you gastrointsestinaly. For another, it just makes the trip easier, as you don't have to worry about when and where to eat, like, damn, wish we'd have gone there, at that exit back there. And most applicable to driving, it really shortens the trip when you don't have to stop for an hour to sit down at a restaurant to eat — since I almost never do fast food joints, even the healthier choices some now offer.
Here's a photo I snapped the other day at a refueling pit stop.
That's the line at the Subway sandwich shop inside the gas station. I note that's the big thing, now: fast food joints at all the major gas stations. You'll be better off with some nuts, jerky, or even pork rinds.
It's really mind altering, this Paelo way. It seems to far off, now, to be obsessed about food all the time. No sooner would a meal be complete and I was thinking of the next one.
Spoiled & Pampered Animals
Epidemic Influenza and Vitamin D
This is the first of what may turn out to be two or more posts on Vitamin D today, and the focus is epidemiology. The next one will be a doozie, but this is an excellent set up.
I had not known the background of Dr. John Cannell of the excellent resource, the Vitamin D Council until I stumbled upon this amazing account over the weekend.
You’re best off reading that, which might require 15 minutes of your time, but here’s a few excepts to wet your appetite.
In early April of 2005, after a particularly rainy spring, an influenza epidemic (epi: upon, demic: people) exploded through the maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane where I have worked for the last ten years. It was not the pandemic (pan: all, demic: people) we all fear, just an epidemic. The world is waiting and governments are preparing for the next pandemic. A severe influenza pandemic will kill many more Americans than died in the World Trade Centers, the Iraq war, the Vietnam War, and Hurricane Katrina combined, perhaps a million people in the USA alone. Such a disaster would tear the fabric of American society. Our entire country might resemble the Superdome or Bourbon Street after Hurricane Katrina.
It’s only a question of when a pandemic will come, not if it will come. Influenza A pandemics come every 30 years or so, severe ones every hundred years or so. The last pandemic, the Hong Kong flu, occurred in 1968 – killing 34,000 Americans. In 1918, the Great Flu Epidemic killed more than 500,000 Americans. So many millions died in other countries, they couldn’t bury the bodies. Young healthy adults, in the prime of their lives in the morning, drowning in their own inflammation by noon, grossly discolored by sunset, were dead at midnight. Their body’s own broad-spectrum natural antibiotics, called antimicrobial peptides, seemed nowhere to be found. An overwhelming immune response to the influenza virus – white blood cells releasing large amounts of inflammatory agents called cytokines and chemokines into the lungs of the doomed – resulted in millions of deaths in 1918.
I had not known this. It’s not the influenza that actually kills you, but your own immune system’s overblown response to it. So what happened in 2005 in Cannell’s ward in the hospital?
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Parents: Stop Killing Your Children Slowly
I think this angers me more than anything else. I want to slap parents silly when I see kids constantly chowing down on cereals, drinking those poisonous "fruit juices" in boxes marketed to imbecile parents as "healthy,' cookies, sweets non-stop, and then, when it's time for a meal — even if it's a remotely healthy meal — the kids either don't want to eat, or they want mac & cheese, pizza, or some other awful crap.
Just go to a local mall sometime, and any mall in America will do. You'll see it: the lines at Jamba Juice (don't be a moron: that garbage isn't remotely healthy), Cinnabon, cookie stands, Cold Stone, you name it.
Karen gets it. As does Dr. Mercola.
Some breakfast cereals currently being marketed to U.S. children are more than half sugar by weight, according to Consumer Reports.
A single serving of 11 popular cereals, including Kellogg's Honey Smacks, can carry as much sugar as a glazed doughnut. And some brands have even more sugar and sodium when formulated for the U.S. market than the same brands have when sold in other countries.
Post's Golden Crisp and Kellogg's Honey Smacks are both more than 50 percent sugar by weight, while nine brands are at least 40 percent sugar.
Reader Jim sent me this video this morning.
Easy Ways to Stop Childhood Obesity
It was bad enough when it wasn't so bad that most kids weren't getting fat already — they were only being set up for it in future life by destroying their insulin sensitivity, in addition to being ushered by their own parents and grandparents into the sugar crack house so they'll have a lifelong addiction to the stuff and will eventually get fat. But now, kids are getting fat early, visibly so, and their parents are doing nothing.
I can only conclude that parents don't care, and, I think a lot of the fat ones want their kids to join them in their misery.
