Maggie's Farm

A non-technical book about heredity. Enjoyable read, with lots of stories.

“Extraordinary...This book is Zimmer at his best: obliterating misconceptions about science with gentle prose. He brings the reader on his journey of discovery as he visits laboratory after laboratory, peering at mutant mosquitoes and talking to scientists about traces of Neanderthal ancestry within his own genome. Any fan of his previous books or his journalism will appreciate this work. But so, too, will parents wishing to understand the magnitude of the legacy they’re bequeathing to their children, people who want to grasp their history through genetic ancestry testing and those seeking a fuller context for the discussions about race and genetics so prevalent today.”

—The New York Times Book Review

An innovative Miami-Dade program shows the way.

Fixed. 

Utopian ideas never cease to find appeal

Doomsday scenarios never cease to find appeal

They spend more, and get more. What the Prescription Drug Debate Gets Wrong. Price controls on pharmaceuticals might save Americans money in the short term—but at the potential cost of millions of lives.

I suspect this is correct, and has to do with the intensity of the demand on the heart. Many things are thrown into the "cardio" category which use the heart, of course, but make no constructive demands on it. Walking, hiking, speed walking, swimming, and jogging are like that.

HIIT exercises, on the other hand, do stress the heart because of the intensity of all kinds of sprints. 30-60 second maximum sprints of any form are good stressors. So is moving heavy weights. Heavy, not light weights. Sets of deadlifts reaching up to 70% of your max is a serious stressor on the heart. When you finish each set, you feel it in your heart. And you feel a bit dizzy from that stress.

What true cardiac training does is to stress the heart to the point that it is forced to build its muscle and to grow new arteries. Those new arteries can save your life when others get blocked up with gunk. If your breath can keep up with your exertion, it's not real cardiac training: it is endurance training.

What most people term "cardio" is endurance maintenance and endurance training. These are important in life, but have little or no heart consequences for the otherwise healthy.

Here's the article (via Instapundit):  Weight lifting better for heart health than running, new study finds

Our Maggie's Fitness for Life program (heavy powerlifts, endurance cardio, HIIT cardio, calisthenics) incorporates all fitness aspects: Muscle and Bone strength, Endurance, True cardio, and Athleticism. We are convinced that's a balanced program for vigor for all ages.

 A new book: The Beautiful Cure: The Revolution in Immunology and What It Means for Your Health

This is not news, although everybody is talking about it because it is in The Times: How a Low-Carb Diet Might Help You Maintain a Healthy Weight - Adults who cut carbohydrates from their diets and replaced them with fat sharply increased their metabolisms.

Not only that, but we now know that dietary fat appears to have minimal to no correlation with cardiovascular disease in normal people.  We do know that being even mildly overweight is a significant risk factor for cardiovascular disease (along with breast cancer, arthritis, diabetes, Alzheimer's, etc etc.).

Addendum: If you are working on body-building with heavy weights 4 days/wk (few if any of our readers are doing that), you need to eat a lot of everything you can get your hands on just to maintain your weight, and even more to build muscle mass.  

Some reasons to prefer choice in medical care.

It's about the Flexner Report on medical education

What was it, anyway? Is it done?

I have only heard Scott Adams discuss "talent stacks" in reference to himself or to Donald Trump. (By the way, he is not a Trump supporter, just an admirer of his skills.)

Adams' point, if you have not heard him, is that there can only be one Tiger Woods who possesses a single world-beating talent, but you can move towards your hopes and dreams quite well if you have a good-sized talent stack of "pretty good" talents and abilities.

By "talents," he seems to mean mainly natural gifts like social skills and social instincts, IQ, appearance, curiosity, comfort with novelty and adventure, adaptability, interpersonal style, sense of humor, athleticism and physical grace, observational skills, communicative skills, and so forth, as they are matched and combined with acquired skills.

We also noted that Adams does not discuss flaws. Sadly, we can be blessed with a decent talent stack but be cursed with a few unfortunate or even one fatal flaw which act as anchors on our lives. People have deficit stacks too, but they are not fun to talk about.

Here's an enjoyable Adams interview: 

In the fitness post yesterday, we mentioned getting up from a chair. Indeed, for a variety of reasons (arthritis, poor posture, overweight, lack of strength or mobility) this can become difficult for some. 

Another common, basic maneuver which can become difficult without fitness is getting up from the floor without assistance. If you need to sit on the floor to do a task, or to read a book to a grandkid, you do not want to get up like a cripple.

Trouble getting up off the floor or a chair? Here’s how to improve

The best:

There is a thing called "complicated grief," but I feel all grief is complicated. I do not believe that grief ever heals. 

I think griefs scab over, but it doesn't often take much to knock off the scab.  A long-term incapacitating depression after a loss is another matter, but I do not even think that a lengthy mourning is pathological. There is a lot of pain in life. It's part of the deal.

Dec. 14, 1799. Acute epiglottitis, easily cured today. The excruciating final hours of President George Washington

That's the title of this post, but I do not mean to restrict this little discussion to the workplace. The issue is that, wherever men and women congregate regularly, "chemical" attractions occur commonly.

These of course range from very mild to intense. It is difficult for people to focus on what they intend to do when there is a powerful attraction to a nice person of the opposite sex who is in regular proximity and contact.  I have had people say to me "Is there anything you can do to help me get rid of this crush on so and so? It's messing up my workout/job/tennis game, etc."

A colleague and I were talking about this recently, and he (jokingly) suggested that people in that situation should just jump into bed together and eliminate the romantic/sexual tension and eliminate the mystery. "Get it over with. It's just biology."  And of course their are rules about these things in the workplace.

In my view, such things are not necessarily a sign that a person is in a lousy relationship. Could be, but humans are designed to experience these things.

If a close friend confesses to you that some guy or gal at work or somewhere else is driving them nuts with desire, what would you say to them? Would you say"Grow up!"?

They’re a two-billion-dollar industry. But are assessments like the Myers-Briggs more self-help than science?

Very few exercises are pure forms of those four categories, but there are differences in emphasis which is why we recommend balanced programs of resistance, calisthenics, and cardio training to maintain or improve fitness.

Strength is the ability to move things which resist moving. Power is the ability to move things (including yourself) with speed and force. For example, bench press and rows are mostly strength exercises.  Powerlifts are power exercises: deadlifts, squats, military press, etc. in which bursts of speedy intensity are required. 

Where would we categorize pull-ups? I'd say Strength.

 What’s the difference between strength training and power training?

We have discussed cardio training at length. The main muscle it trains is the heart muscle. While any difficult exercise stresses the heart, only pure cardio training (HIIT via HIIT calisthenics/ aerobics class or sprinting intervals) gives the heart a specifically strength-building stress. 

So what about endurance?  If you are somebody who "gets too tired" from non-resistance activities, you have an endurance issue. It is not rare for very strong people to have poor endurance or for high-endurance people to be relatively-weak. We want both strength and endurance. Anything that is high-rep builds endurance but not strength or power: long-slow "cardio", high-rep (10-20) resistance work, calisthenics.

One caveat: Do not ever do high-rep (over 10) deadlift sets. The human body is made for low-rep heavy floor lifting (8 or fewer). If you can do over 8 deads, you need to increase the weight and reduce the reps.

Women put themselves through more then than they do now

Today, the only hard thing women do to look good is to work out. 

We're getting towards Brussel Sprout season. Delicious baby cabbages with a strange appearance in the garden.

A tip or two to make them better: People who grow them in their gardens leave them standing all winter and harvest as wanted. They taste better after frosts or coated with snow. If store-bought, throw them in the freezer for a couple of hours or days.  

Four favorite Brussel Sprout recipes:

Warm truffle brussel sprout salad 

Easy for Thanksgiving, Brussel Sprouts with bacon. Blanche the sprouts then finish them in bacon fat with chopped bacon in a frying pan.

Maple roasted Brussel sprouts 

A secret warm salad family recipe: Steam them (still firm, not mushy), cut in half, toss with pomegranite seeds, pecans, goat cheese, and a maple syrup vinaigrette.  Then try to tell me you do not like Brussel Sprouts.

Got any favorites?  Post in comments. 

Barbour waxed-cotton jackets are made for cool weather and cool drizzle, not for temperatures below 25 degrees (F). They are tough though, and can take a beating.  Their appeal is to tradition and style nowadays, while Gore-tex is more practical and cheaper, and take no breaking-in time.

Here is  On Barbour Jackets: Bedale vs. Beaufort vs. Border

Here is  How to re-wax your Barbour jacket - Barbour's step-by-step guide (with good music) 

And remember how to clean waxed cotton?  With a hose! 

F*ck Feelings

 The only self-help book you’ll ever need, from a psychiatrist and his comedy writer daughter, who will help you put aside your unrealistic wishes, stop trying to change things you can’t change, and do the best with what you can control—the first steps to managing all of life’s impossible problems.