entertaining fluff and the FDA

Today I tested the rule that I can't eat anything out of a cardboard box, and it turns out that it's still true, but I got to eat a bowl of cereal, which was kind of fun. I used to like cereal.

In closely related news, I sort of learned what goes into marshmallows, in case I come across anyone who can eat leftover one-ingredient cereal covered in melted marshmallows.

In other news, the following headline was splashed all over everywhere today:

Perchlorate Levels in Food Safe for Most, FDA Says

The article failed to address what exactly those other people are supposed to eat or drink instead, or even who's at risk, but I suppose it did make it pretty clear that some of us are considered expendable. So thanks, FDA, and remind us, why do we pay you?

empty roads, NIH, and the FDA

Today I learned that if you drive home on Grant at 10:30 at night, the traffic pattern doesn't remotely resemble its daytime parking-lot configuration.

So you know, I'm not quite sure, but I may have used multiple words in the previous sentence incorrectly because I've been out partying. It was a rager, too - we sat around and talked for five hours in a row, and we even listened to some music for a while.

Despite a minor reaction-impairment, I'm still going to report that the government is trying to kill us. The National Institutes of Health's Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction has outsourced some of its work to a contractor with ties to and funds from 50 chemical companies, and here's a quote about what the contractor has to say for itself:

Signed by company founder Elizabeth Anderson, the letter stated that Sciences International "serves the private sector, including many trade associations, on a wide range of health and risk assessment issues. However, we are different from most other consulting firms in that we also currently serve government agencies," which, the letter said, gives the company "a unique credibility to negotiate with regulators on behalf of our private sector clients."

Not to be outdone, the FDA has rules that will make it approve a last-resort-for-humans antibiotic for use in cows, whose immune systems we screw up by keeping them in feed-lots, and the drug is going to lose its efficacy as a result, and on top of that, there are perfectly good other antibiotics already in use with cows that work fine.

Well, I suppose that came off as quite the bummer, but I had a lot of fun tonight, so I'm finding it fairly hilarious. Oh, the irony. I think I need to go to bed.

death by odds and plastic

Today I learned that alcohol will kill you, but only by raising your risk of colon and liver cancer by 20% while decreasing your heart attack risk. (Note that we are not stooping to the level of the article by saying it increases the risk by a fifth.) In that I'd rather have a heart attack than screw around with chemotherapy, I'd better start drinking.

But not out of plastic bottles. The FDA decided that maybe they should look at all the studies on bisphenol A instead of just the two long-term ones funded by the plastics industry, and thus, maybe bisphenol A will kill you. If the FDA is worrying about it, it'll definitely kill you.

inversion layers and government entities

Today I got to wondering if there was an inversion layer (a layer of warmer air sitting over a cooler one) that was holding in the pollen earlier this week, and what I think I learned was why outdoor allergens seem to bother me less after about 11 am, when the breeze picks up.

Now, keeping in mind I learned this from part of a discussion of radio wave propagation on a ham radio site and I could be wrong about this and the allergens, I'm pretty sure that if you detect the following conditions, you have an inversion layer:

• a very clear sky,
• dead still air, and
• a warm or hot temperature.

The inversion layer can start the night before if similar conditions are present, and they are present a lot around here, just not in the afternoon, so maybe that's why I feel better in the afternoon.

In other news, the FDA said something highly unbelievable about marijuana, and the CDC sponsored a study on chronic fatigue. (Maybe the FDA should hand marijuana studies over to the CDC, seeing as there's a link to schizophrenia.) Anyway, I'm pleased somebody is learning something about chronic fatigue, even if the results, as presented by this article, sound as though they weren't quite sure what they learned. (Not that I should talk, with the ham site and the allergens.)

The results, published in more than a dozen reports and commentaries in the April issue of the journal Pharmacogenomics, released yesterday, suggest that many cases of chronic fatigue have links to a handful of brain- and immune system-related genes that either harbor small mutations or are working abnormally for other reasons.

What I get out of this sentence is that this study was really important and found malfunctioning genes. They have no idea why the genes malfunction, which is fine. They can study that next.

same old, same old and two surprises

Today I learned that I'm enough better that I can sort through my old clothes and decide to throw most of them away. It turns out that a lot of them were kind of raggedy anyway from the last laundry contamination episode. I gotta stop having these, although this one is by far the hardest to wash out.

Also, the FDA agrees that mercury isn't completely safe for everybody, and a man who looks like he was painted brown reported for Fox News that speculation is entirely to blame for oil prices.

snake accidents, post-breast-cancer fatigue, and death in a bag of sugar

Today I learned that if you watch a 4' snake crawl along the top of a cinderblock wall, wobbling a little, the snake could screw up and fall off. It makes a louder-than-expected thump when it hits the ground, even accounting for it landing on an aloe plant. (The snake was fine -- it didn't even look embarrassed while I laughed my ass off as it slithered away.)

In other news, about a third of breast cancer survivors have lasting fatigue such that their norepinephrine (a stress hormone) levels rise more than expected when given a somewhat stressful task. Initially the fatigue comes from chemotherapy, but the lasting fatigue appears to come from the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems being out of balance. The sympathetic nervous system, the thing in charge of stress hormones and your fight-or-flight reflex, is an energy hog, and it makes people tired. The researchers mentioned they had another study going looking into whether yoga could help straighten these people out.

As someone who had to gain voluntary control over my fight-or-flight reflex, I can tell them now that yoga won't fix it. Lying on the floor doing relaxation exercises won't fix it. Exercise, something they're looking into, helps, but won't fix it either, particularly if you're fatigued enough that you can't do things like ride your bike for four hours at a time.

I was telling an EI about my experience with fight-or-flight the other day, and he said it must have been hard to be fearful all the time. I wasn't. I was depressed and sometimes anxious, and didn't process information or chemicals quickly.

Exposure to chemicals, even voluntary ones like chemotherapy, ramps up your fight-or-flight reflex gradually (if it does at all). You don't see it coming. If you constantly tried to fight or run, people might figure out that there was a problem with your fight-or-flight reflex. They don't. It's not obvious, and yoga isn't going to uncondition somebody's sympathetic nervous system unless there's something going on there that I haven't heard about.

Also, sugar and high fructose corn syrup will kill you. Sucrose is half glucose, which your whole body processes, and half fructose, which your liver handles. If you get too much fructose at once, your liver turns it straight into fat, which leads to a fatty liver, a key part of metabolic syndrome, which will totally kill you because then you'll get type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The trick is figuring out how much is too much, and no one wants to put a number on it. The best number I came up with was the amount of sugar the FDA thought typical Americans ate in 1986, back when we, as a nation, were not so wide. They said 40 lbs/year/person, which is 200 calories of added sugar per day. The USDA, considered much more reliable, said 75 lbs/year/person.

So I was going to figure that 200 calories of sugar per day is a reasonable upper limit -- that's like a quarter of a batch of cookies, which, after my initial 'I can eat cookies again' phase, is not something that will ever again occur here on a daily basis -- but then, toward the end of the article, it starts talking about cancer. Trying to handle all that insulin makes your cells go nuts and sometimes turn cancerous. Cancer started rising way before 1986, so we're unsafe at any speed.

trying to kill us

Today I learned that Chinese companies purposely spike their food products with chemicals to make them appear of higher quality. People are taking this opportunity to fuss mightily about the uselessness of the FDA for letting tainted food into the US, and I've fussed about them more than once here, but I don't see their ineffectiveness as the real problem. The real problem is that we buy food products from countries where soaking such things in chemicals sounds like a good idea.

I also learned that red wine vinegar is less acidic than white vinegar, and that technically (and cheaply) you can make white vinegar with no wine, just acetic acid in the right concentration. Neither of those facts tells me why some EIs swear red wine vinegar will decontaminate anything, but white vinegar won't. Maybe it's that natural vinegars have more kinds of acids, and that does something, but my resident chemist is asleep, and since us moldies have trouble with fermented products anyway, it may not even matter.

death in a can and big cats

Today I learned that tuna will kill you, in that Consumer Reports recently measured a higher mercury content in cans and pouches of tuna than the FDA did between 2002 and 2004, so it's definitely coming to get us. (I'm not very concerned about it because I stopped tolerating canned tuna five years ago, so it doesn't really look like food anymore.)

Also, there are a couple of bobcats who live around here, and since we moved the couch relative to one window, we've finally seen one -- or today we saw two -- while the neighbors have been seeing at least one bobcat around here for years. So couch position is more important than you would expect in wildlife viewing. Also, bobcats here are thinner than I was used to seeing in pictures; they look like big, elongated house cats.

warning: sick lady rambling

Today I learned that November is not only write-a-novel month, but write-a-blog-post-a-day month. I pretty much do that anyway, so that shouldn't be hard, and there are prizes and everything! Unfortunately, it's too late to sign up for the prize drawings, but since I imagine 30-day novels are of incomparable quality, this post ought to fit right in, so:

Today I learned Trader Joe's fragrance-free laundry detergent is harder to get out of things than borax was. Either that, or what with the pollution and all I'm going to feel like death warmed over no matter what, so no amount of beating my quilt to death on 'air fluff' is going to make much of a difference today. I'm still optimistically beating it to death in the hopes that I get to sleep with a blanket tonight. Sleeping sounds nice.

In an effort to distract myself from myself, I learned that according to this site*, Mr. Rumsfeld, who just resigned as Secretary of Defense, is responsible for poisoning people with aspartame. Ok, keeping in mind that everybody knows somebody who gets a headache from aspartame, it's not clear to me that aspartame is any worse for the general population than perfume, which I believe I've said several times should only be handled by a hazmat team.

So, I completely agree that aspartame is evil, even if that article sounds like extremist nuttiness to me, just like the anti-fluoridation articles from the '90s. It'll all how you pitch it. Anyway, since today I'm just looking for distractions, I'm going to make up my own crackpot theory. Here it is:

Since there are a bunch of people who agree that aspartame is toxic but the FDA isn't taking it off the market, it's obvious that the government wants to poison some portion of the population. The people who consume the most aspartame-containing products are probably obese, so this is just the government's way of reducing the obesity epidemic.

I think we need to start an email campaign to get this important information out. But please, I'm far too humble to want my name attached to it, so you should probably attribute it to someone, you know, credible.


* "The Most Format & Content-Plagiarized Site On The Net," which, I'm sorry if I offend anyone, appears to me to be mostly populated with made-up, nutball conspiracy-theory bulls***. I'm just saying what it looks like to me.

oops

I read it in the news, and now it turns out it's wrong. I don't believe everything I read, but I thought I checked when the news media reported that the FDA banned Vegemite. I mean, the Boston Globe said it. Blegh.

Ok, well this was reported everywhere, so it must be right: being fat lowers your gas mileage.

more food

Today I learned that Vegemite is banned in the US because the FDA thinks it has too much folic acid in it. It says here that when they set the upper limit, they thought that too much folic acid could mask anemia from a vitamin B12 deficiency, which is reversible, while spina bifida is not.

In other news, a bus trap is a bunch of bars over a pit spaced so bus tires can go over, but car tires fall between. Technically I guess that's a car trap. Anyway, I think they use these things in Canada to make bus-only areas or shortcuts, and I can't find a picture (or confirmation) anywhere.

Also sugar is twice as dense as flour. This is important if you want to make a pound cake without a scale and cheat horrifically on your rotation diet.

mesquite trees and milk

Today I learned that pliers are a great tool if you have to pull up a whole bunch of spiny, inch-tall (2.5 cm) mesquite seedlings.

In other news, I think we all learned in school about Louis Pasteur, who figured out how to pasteurize milk so milk didn't kill kids in cities at the turn of the last century. Nowadays, what with regulations requiring inspections of dairies and better refrigeration, it sounds like it'd be safe enough to let some people get ahold of the raw stuff, which they would really, really like. The FDA is pretty sure it'll kill everybody, but the people who are drinking it don't appear to be all that dead. There aren't a zillion of them, but they aren't dropping in droves or we would have heard about it.

So in that article, a lady said she couldn't digest milk properly until she got some of the raw kind, and then she was fine. Now, I haven't been able to digest milk protein correctly for about 25 years, so I generally don't consider it a food, but I got two spoonfuls of ice cream a year ago so I could get a milk antigen, and it was yummy. And now I'm thinking it's only about a four hour drive round-trip to get to the.... That's a freaking long drive to spend $8 on a gallon of milk. Just if I tolerated it, I would have grounds to be really, really annoyed that I missed out on 25 years of ice cream.

world peace, toxic bathrooms, and things that'll kill you

It says here that major candy companies are going to reduce the amount of lead from unwashed Mexican chilis in spicy candies, which brings us to the quote of the day, even though it may only be my status as a former editor that allows me to find so much humor in the use of 'safe' instead of 'safer:'

"Untold hundreds of thousands of children will now be safe and have a better life," said Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, one of the plaintiffs in the suit. "Lead is poison."

Speaking of poison, the Belfast Telegraph published this article about toxic bathrooms in October of last year, and I missed it. The upshot is that cosmetics, shampoo, baby soap, shaving cream, toothpaste, and at least one product I'd never heard of contain toxic ingredients for which the (US) FDA is making noise about requiring warning labels.

The article mentions that chemicals get deposited in people's fat cells, livers, kidneys, and brains. People like to talk about the blood-brain barrier as though it would actually keep things separate, but it doesn't seem to work that well with chemicals. If you want another example, it says right here that THC, the 'most active ingredient' in marijuana, penetrates the blood-brain barrier, and that's why it causes all those funky central nervous system effects.

Oh yeah, and second-hand smoke will kill you.