Taking a ‘healthy’ view

Time to get outside more and experience those French Frissons

Awe-inspiring experiences, such as viewing works of art or overlooking a scenic vista, may have physical as well as mental health benefits, according to a new study. Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, found that the positive emotions triggered by these encounters can have an immune-boosting, anti-inflammatory effect that helps protect the body from heart disease, depression, autoimmune conditions, and other chronic illnesses. The study surveyed more than 200 young adults to rate the intensity of their feelings of amusement, awe, pride, compassion, contentment, joy, and love on a given day. They also took samples of subjects’ cheek and gum tissue to measure levels of the pro-inflammatory protein cytokine. Those who reported feeling awe, wonder, or amazement had lower levels of cytokine, a marker of good health. “That awe, wonder, and beauty promote healthier levels of cytokines,” study co-author Dacher Keltner tells Science Daily, “suggests that the things we do to experience these emotions—taking a walk in nature, losing oneself in music, beholding art —have a direct influence upon health and life expectancy.”

Taken from the February 20th edition of The Week Magazine.

A superbug that defies all antibiotics

And here we go again.
I do like the idea that we can circle back to older antibacterials to save ourselves, as we discussed here.

Is this Mother Earth ridding herself of a major pest?

Bacteria that can resist even the most powerful antibiotics are infecting livestock and people in China, raising the grave possibility that untreatable diseases could spread around the world. These superbugs are especially worrying because they have a mechanism that transfers drug resistance to other strains of bacteria. If their resistance spreads, it could trigger an antibiotic apocalypse, leaving doctors helpless to treat deadly infections. Until now, drug-resistant bacteria have remained susceptible to an antibiotic called colistin. But apparently this “last resort” drug has been so overused on livestock that some bacteria have developed a mutant gene to resist it. Researchers in China discovered the gene, known as MCR-1, in pigs and found that it had spread to a handful of hospital patients. What makes the mutation especially dangerous is that it is found on plasmids, DNA molecules that move freely between different bacterial strains. By riding on plasmids, the resistance gene can readily pass between common bacteria, such as E. coli, that cause pneumonia and bloodstream infections. Microbiologists warn that it may only be a matter of time before universal drug resistance is widespread and existing antibiotics are obsolete. “This isn’t going to happen overnight, and the number of infections that can only be treated by colistin is still relatively small,” study co-author Jim Spenser tells CBSNews.com. “But it highlights the urgent need for new treatments for these organisms and the limited time that we have to develop them.”

Taken from the December 11th edition of the Week Magazine.

A Good Week for:

Conscious consumption, after a British study found that roughly 15 percent of young adults do not know that pork comes from pigs and lamb comes from sheep. Some 20 percent believed that “fish fingers” are made from the fingers of fish.

I don't know what to say.

Taken from the December 4th Week Magazine.

Personalized Dieting

The December 11th edition of the Week is catching up with something we already discussed here. This is the second time I have heard about this, but no more information on how to get involved.

I read in a fashion magazine that models are using acid test strips to find out how acidic their urine is and then they eat something to help modify the ph level in their body. Is this similar? Meaning, can we, as lay people, do some simple testing with the tools already available to us to figure some of this out on our own? Or, I suppose the tried and true, elimination diets.

The way people metabolize food varies dramatically from person to person, so no one diet can work for everyone. That’s the conclusion of a new study that finally explains why a weight-loss plan that helps one person might do absolutely nothing for another. Researchers in Israel asked 800 healthy and pre-diabetic adults between 18 and 70 to keep a record of their meals, sleep, and exercise for one week. An analysis of participants’ gut microbes, along with continuous monitoring of their blood sugar levels, showed significant variations among people eating identical foods. “In some cases, individuals have opposite responses to one another,” co-author Eran Segal tells The Washington Post. For example, some people who ate supposedly healthful bananas or tomatoes experienced a sharp blood sugar spike, while having no adverse reaction to a glass of wine or a slice of pizza. The opposite was true for other people. In a follow-up study, Segal’s team created individually tailored diets based on people’s lifestyle, medical history, and other factors. Many of these customized diets were unorthodox, enabling some people to enjoy small amounts of alcohol, chocolate, or ice cream. The findings, researchers say, could transform the treatment of obesity, diabetes, and other conditions, and lead to personalized diet plans. “We think we know how to treat these conditions, and it’s just that people are not listening and are eating out of control,” Segal said. But “in many cases we were giving them the wrong advice.”

I didn't copy the picture the Week used with this article... I thought I'd use a picture of Foie Gras, a personal favorite, rather than pizza. I took the foie gras photo from the Dartagnan web site.

Soda linked to heart failure

Merry Christmas!

I will be filling up on sugary sweets today in direct contrast to this post...

And further discussion about why we should cut out all sodas from our diet. This blurb is also taken from the November 20th edition of the Week Magazine. (Once I post this, you see, I can recycle the magazine; I have been holding on to it for weeks so that I might share with you.)

The Week discussed this with it's readers previously and we blogged about it here.

I took this photo from here. Don't ask me why from this page, the image just appealed to me

Soft drinks and other sugary beverages have been shown to increase the odds of suffering high blood pressure, liver disease, stroke, diabetes, and obesity. Now a long-term Swedish study reveals that people with a daily soda habit may also be at higher risk for heart failure. The researchers followed roughly 42,000 men over 45 for 12 years, monitoring their diets and allowing for other risk factors. They found that the subjects who drank more than two sweetened drinks every day had a 23 percent greater risk of developing heart failure, which occurs when the heart becomes too weak to pump blood as well as it should. The study doesn’t prove that sugary drinks directly cause the condition, but the association suggests it’s wise to avoid those empty calories. Swedish men tend to be trimmer and fitter than their American counterparts, Duke University cardiologist Christopher O’Connor tells CBSNews​.com, which means the potential effects of sugary drinks “would be larger and faster here.”

Standing Fights Obesity

Taken from the November 30th edition of The Week Magazine:

It’s well established that a sedentary existence is bad for us and that regular exercise promotes better health. Apparently, new research reveals, we don’t even have to hit the treadmill to feel better; just standing up can have significant benefits, The Washington Post reports. A five-year study of more than 7,000 adults found that people who stood for at least 25 percent of their day displayed considerably lower risk of obesity—32 percent for men and 35 percent among women. Meanwhile, standing for half of the day reduced the likelihood of obesity among men by 59 percent, compared with 47 percent among women. It’s unclear from the data if standing directly reduces obesity risk or if people who are obese simply stand less. But the results offer another argument for logging some upright time. “Many of us have sedentary jobs and commute long hours,” says lead author Kerem Shuval of the American Cancer Society. “In general, the goal is to find any reason to get off your chair more often.”

We have seen this previously here and here. Scary if we are not absorbing this information (and yet I am siting as I write this!)

Richard III DNA tests uncover evidence of further royal scandal

Latest genetic tests reveal another break in the male line, potentially undermining the legitimacy of the entire House of Plantagenet.

A painting of King Richard III by an unknown artist from the 16th Century Photograph: NEIL HALL/Reuters

When scientists revealed last year that an adulterous affair had apparently broken the male line in Richard III’s family tree, they vowed to investigate further.

But rather than clear up the mystery, their latest genetic tests have uncovered evidence of another royal sex scandal. This time, the indiscretion could potentially undermine the legitimacy of the entire House of Plantagenet.

The skeleton of Richard III, the last Plantagenet king, was discovered under a car park in Leicester in 2012. His identity was confirmed through his mitochondrial DNA, passed down through the maternal line from his sister to two relatives alive today.

But further DNA tests soon uncovered evidence of a family secret. It emerged when researchers at Leicester University compared the Y chromosomes of Richard III and five anonymous male relatives of Henry Somerset (1744-1803), who claim descent from Edward III, the great great grandfather of Richard III.

Since the Y chromosome is passed down from father to son, it should look the same in the descendants of Henry Somerset, the 5th Duke of Beaufort, and Richard III. But genetic tests found no sign of a match. Somewhere in the family between Richard III and the Somersets, at least one man had been cuckolded.

Speaking at the Science Museum in London on Wednesday, Turi King, a geneticist working on the case, revealed her team’s latest attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery. A man called Patrice de Warren, who lives in France, had come forward for genetic testing. He could trace his male line back to Richard III through the illegitimate son of Geoffrey, Count of Anjou (1113 - 1151).

King knew that if de Warren’s Y chromosome matched that of Henry Somerset’s, then the affair that broke the male line must have occurred between Edward III and Richard III. But if his Y chromosome matched Richard III’s, the male line was broken between Edward III and the Somersets.

The test result found neither. “De Warren’s Y chromosome doesn’t match Richard III or Henry Somerset, so somewhere along the line there’s been another false paternity event,” King told the Guardian. “It’s opened up the mystery even further.” Since the false paternity rate is around 1-2% in any generation, she said the result was not particularly surprising.

For all the scientists know, Patrice de Warren carries the ‘true’ Plantagenet Y chromosome, and those found in Richard III and the extended family of Henry Somerset were inherited from another man. “The problem is that we cannot say where the break occurs. All it tells us is that we have to keep looking, and that is what we are doing,” said Kevin Schürer, a genealogy expert at Leicester who is working on the case.

More likely than not, the freshly-discovered break in the male line occurred in the 22 generations that separate Patrice de Warren from Geoffrey, Count of Anjou. But if that branch of the tree is found to be intact, the consequences for the monarchy’s history become far more intriguing.

“If that turned out to be the case, and this is pure speculation, then there must have been a break between the Count of Anjou and Richard III. Which means that before we raise questions about the legitimacy of the Yorkist kings and the Lancastrian kings, there are questions higher up the line, raising doubts about nearly all of the Plantagenets,” said Schürer.

The latest findings do not impact on the modern monarchy at all, says King, because there are so many twists and turns in the way the throne is handed over. But depending on where the breaks happened, they could recast a crucial period in the history of the monarchy, affecting the Stuarts, the Tudors and the Windsors.

The investigation is not over yet. Schürer and King now want to test the Y chromosomes of other de Warrens in the US and Australia, and men in the extended Duke of Beaufort family, an option that has clear advantages over the alternative of exhuming lots of dead bodies and testing those. “The idea is to have a pincer movement and tackle it on a number of different fronts,” said Schürer. “We’re not going to give up the quest.”

The latest findings form part of a new exhibit at the Science Museum which describes the scientific discoveries around the life, death and DNA of King Richard III. The exhibit, which includes a 3D printed skeleton of the king, opens Wednesday, the day before the reinterment of his remains in Leicester.

I found this article at the Guardian, here.

Ian Sample, science editor
@iansample
Wednesday 25 March 2015 16.15 EDT Last modified on Thursday 26 March 2015 07.18 EDT

The Toxins in Your Body

I caught up on some reading...

What do you suppose this means to future generations and the study of families?

Everyday products are “contaminating our bodies” with toxic chemicals, said Nicholas Kristof. Two mainstream medical organizations have recently issued independent warnings about chemicals found in such products as pesticides, plastics, shampoos and cosmetics, food-can linings, and flame retardants in furniture. The toxins, says the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics, are linked to breast, prostate, and uterine cancers, genital deformities, obesity, diabetes, and infertility. The doctors’ group also warns that “exposure to toxic chemicals during pregnancy and lactation is ubiquitous,” with pregnant women having at least 43 different chemical contaminants in their bodies. Today, “babies are born pre-polluted,” says the National Cancer Institute, with the resulting cancers and fertility problems showing up decades later, in adulthood. The chemical industry insists there’s no causal proof that the 80,000 new chemicals it’s introduced into the environment cause damage, and U.S. regulators simply assume that these substances are safe unless proven otherwise. So for now, “experts say the best approach is for people to try to protect themselves” by minimizing their exposure to pesticides, plastics, and other chemicals. It’s the best we guinea pigs can do.

Taken from the December 11th edition of the Week. Written originally by Nicholas Kristof in the The New York Times.

Herb is still in Boxhorn

I have had difficulty figuring out the name of the town in Germany Herb references, but I think he use the French name for Mainz, Germany. I can't be certain.

I can't even find Hinkley on Google maps; not even an eyeball search near Utica!

Could this photo have been taken while Herb was wondering thru the countryside?

If Harry has been accepted to Cornell, why would that be poor luck? I am dying to know what was going on for him all the while.

December 11 [1918]

Dearest Mother,
As long as we stay in this village I’m afraid I’ll have to confine my letters to a plain statement that I am well. Nothing has happened here in the past hundred years. There is absolutely nothing to do from one weeks end to the other. Nearly every day there are a few sick men to be moved enough to keep two or three cars moving – and that is all. When it isn’t raining too hard I go out in the afternoon for a four or five mile walk cross-country. That’s only three or four times a week because on the other days it pours rain. In between it drizzles. I don’t believe there’s a worse climate anywhere in the world.

The last Post I got – three or four days ago was for October 19. Probably October 26th will be here in a few days and I can read that article about the Battle of the Marne that Dad wanted me to see.

Yesterday’s French newspaper said our Army Corps – the 21st French – is to go into M??, Germany, but we have no orders about it. It seems so funny to read in the paper of where one is going because up to about three weeks ago no information on troops movements could be given. The best information we’ve had from headquarters was to the effect that we’d probably be here two or three months, so I don’t know which to believe. For myself, I’d rather go than stay here, because this is certainly the dullest place I’ve ever seen. Hinkley, that little place near Utica where I worked in the summer of 1916 was lively compared to this.

The days are very short now. Even at half past three one can’t see to read. We have supper at four thirty so that leaves a long, long evening. Some one [sic} ought to set up a moving picture theater here. I’d patronize it regularly for one.

Be sure and keep me posted as to how Harry makes out. He’s been playing in hard luck, poor kid.

With best love to you all.
Your affectionate son,
Herb

1918 December report

Herb got a promotion! Herb got a promotion! Now he is a Corporal. Only one in the unit. I'm so proud.

Herb visiting Clervaux

December 10th

Dear Mother,
This is the town about three miles away. It gives a good idea of the country. It’s still raining.
With love,
Herb

Hanging in Boxhorn, Luxembourg

I don't know anything about Harry attending Cornell.

Can you imagine being one of the 'peasants' Herb talks about? Criticizing them for 'swiping most anything not tied down'? I can't imagine the deprivation these people have suffered during the many years of war. Makes me think of refugees fleeing civil war in current times. An awful existence.

Here we see the route that Herb has taken to get to this point:

December 4^th [1918]

Dearest Mother,

There have been two letters from the family this past week and the mail is now beginning to come in quite regularly as the lines of communication become established.

We are still in the same little village in Luxembourg and it is insufferably dull. How I do wish I could get back to work. Of course there is very little to do here. There are no longer wounded to carry and not very many sick.

We had a very nice dinner Thanksgiving day roast chicken, hashed browned potatoes, sweet crackers, apple pie and cocoa. The crackers and cocoa were donated by the Red Cross at Sedan where the Lieutenant had been to get some spare parts. Getting the chicken and the apples was quite a job. These people here didn’t want to sell at first, because they say money is of little use to them, but they nearly fell over themselves trying to trade for coffee. There has been practically no coffee here since the war; what there was cost about seven dollars a pound. Naturally these peasants couldn’t pay it, so they’ve had to make a substitute out of roasted barley. And so far about five pounds of coffee we got eleven nice chickens – cheap enough.

The Red Cross also donated a sweater and a pair of socks all around.

It continues to rain here practically all the time. However the priest in whose house three of us are staying keeps a good fire for us. I’m feeling quite fit as usual.

All the peasants do all day long is sit around the fire – and go to church about four times a day. The church going doesn’t do them much good seemingly because they’d swipe most anything not tied down.

While we’re settled down here I’m trying to catch up on my correspondence. For the last two months we had moved so much that I wrote to no one but you and Karolyn and I owe a good many letters.

In your last letter was Tom’s address. I must write him this week. I’m very glad to hear the old boy is getting along nicely.

My congratulations to Harry on getting in at Cornell. I suppose that will keep him right on regardless of the Armistice. I hope so because I think it will be a good thing for him

I think I wished you all a Merry Christmas in the last letter. Well it will be my last away from you all, I hope.

Your affectionate son,

Herb.

And here is a Google map view of Boxhorn. My goodness, wouldn't it be wonderful if I could find the priest's house using Google maps? My goodness technology can be a wonderful thing.

Herb has made it to Luxembourg

Well, I have been asleep at the wheel again.... I thought I had posted all the letters, but alas, I had only made it through the 19th of November. So, we continue our journey with Herb the following week:

November 27 [1918]

Dearest Family,

Today finds me in a small town in northern Luxembourg. I can’t say that I like it very much though I have a nice comfortable room in the village priest’s house. After the wonderful welcome we had every where in Belgium this country is sort of an anti-climax. In Belgium, the people couldn’t do enough for us. Even the smallest villages had some attempt at decoration in honor of the advancing troops and all the people were only too glad to take us into their houses. In the towns there were regular celebrations and being with the advance guard division we came in for them all. All the Belgians in the country through which we passed spoke French and were very friendly to the French troops whom they look upon as their deliverer. Here in Luxembourg things are quite different. The common language is German though a few speak French. That of course leaves me out of it because I have no German at all and am quite helpless. The usual sentiment, too, is pro-German. The government is pro-Ally because that is good policy or the people have to accept us but they don’t do it because they like us overly well. Any way they are suspicious of all soldiers on general principles because the Germans used to steal from them. The priest speaks French with a German accent and is nice to us from motives of policy but I strongly suspect him of being pro-German. However he keeps fire in all our rooms so I shouldn’t be too harsh on him I suppose.

During all our trip through Belgium the weather was wonderful. It just was cold, to be sure, below freezing point most of the time but clear and bracing. Just like the good winter weather home, in fact and a great relief after the rain and dampness in France. Just as soon as we truck Luxembourg that changed and we have had three days of very disagreeable rainy weather. The country is very pretty, mountainous and well wooded. The roads are wonderful though the frequently almost double back on themselves in winding around through the steep hills.

There have been several deliveries of mail this past week but no letters from you or Karolyn. I had one letter from Nellie Graham and one from Mr. Friedman. Mrs. Friedman is working in Washington on the Labor Board now. They have a baby son but Mrs. F didn’t say when it was born. His name is Francis Lee.

There is no news about what is going to happen to us. Perhaps we shall find out before long. With best love,
Your affectionate son + brother
Herb.





I wonder who the priest was. I wonder if one could ever know/find out.

What a wonderful vision - of people welcoming the troops. I suppose we have seen it imagined in plenty of movies.

I am reading a book right now in which the father comes home from WW1 shell shocked. I wonder if Herb ever suffered from shell shock.

For those who have everything: Personalized thumbprint rug

I have been a little remiss recently with my blogging. Sorry about that...

I found this, though, the other day, in the November 13th edition of The Week:

"Forget selfies." With his Thumbprint carpets (from $3,500), New York rug designer Joseph Carini "has found a new way to satisfy the demand for self-immortalization," said Carson Griffith at The New York Times. A digital image of the customer's actual fingerprint is first blown up to room size, then sent to traditional weavers in Nepal who produce an exact replica in an all-natural rug made in the customer's choice of colors and materials. Though humility might prompt some potential customers to consider Carini's other carpets instead, there's "something magnetic about the undeniably personal nature of the Thumbprint rugs — and the digital-meets-analog precision with which they're made." 

$3,500 for a 6x6 foot carpet at carinilang.com. The Week sourced this information from the New York Times.

I thought this tidbit was a fun combination of family history (sorta) and fiber art.

Looking at their web page... this carpet is similar to some of the things I have been thinking about and one thing I have done, as discussed here.

In collaboration with the Street Artist Elik.
This carpet was a part of our Back Against the Wall: Graffiti Show. 

1918 - November Report

A busy month moving about for the 580th.

I couldn't even include all the towns the 580th visited in my Google Map search/mapping.
I assume they drove given they have all those ambulances.

Happy Thanksgiving 2015

Let's put out a prayer for all people fleeing violence that they may find peace, happiness & prosperity. I am so thankful at how easy and peaceful my life is and I wish that for everyone.

War and Pizza

This is a podcast episode worth listening to, from Radiotopia's 99% Invisible. I had long time ago heard that the reason we have some much processed food was because the military needed foods that could be shipped overseas during World War II and rather than have those companies go out of business, they shifted to marketing toward the American house wife. The tack the advertisers took was to make life easier for housewives, but we know how that all turned out.

This is even more interesting... that there had to be a commercial component to the food they developed so that if we should go to war again the commercial companies had the technology already and could ramp up easily.

Honestly, this is disgusting. I hope it gives me the incentive to eschew the processed foods even more. But, my goodness, that seems to mean so much time in the kitchen... we should all be shopping the perimeter of the super market; never go through the interior aisles.

Another thought... if processed food can last for up to 3 years, why are we throwing away food if it is past it's freshness date printed on the package? Sounds like another reason to waste and buy more, doesn't it? I never listened to those dates any way, actually, and haven;t (yet) suffered.

And, WTF - no studies on the long term effects of this frankenfood? WTF!!?! It makes me sick. Literally, I am sure.

Where is that affordable chef/cook when you need her/him?

Households tend to take pantry food for granted, but canned beans, powdered cheese, and bags of moist cookies were not designed for everyday convenience. These standard products were made to meet the needs of the military.

Food and combat have been intertwined ever since the earliest military rations. Ancient Sumerians rode into battle with barley cakes and beer. In the 11th and 12th Centuries, Mongols preserved their meat by storing it under saddles, using salt from the horses and the weight of riders as a mobile preservation technique.

Drying, salting, smoking and pickling were the go-to methods until 1795, when the French government held a contest to find a new preservation technique. A chef Nicolas Appert came forward with canning, which revolutionized food preservation.

During World War II, however, the United States realized there remained a need for preserved food production to ramp up more quickly in times of crisis, and started investing heavily in food technologies.

In the 1950s, the Combat Feeding Directorate was established at the Natick Soldier System Center on a US Army Base in Massachusetts. Today it remains the epicenter of the modern military diet.

The primary purpose of the Natick Center is to overcome the challenges inherent in food: it spoils, grows mold, or it loses flavor. And their food scientists have come up with inventions like the MRE (Meal Ready-to-Eat).

MREs come packaged with chemical heaters to warm food, oxygen scavengers to prevent spoilage and carefully-concocted meals made to be edible for years after their creation date.

MREs may also contain condiments and side dishes, all the various packets tucked into a lightweight pouch and designed to survive in any climate.

One of the Natick Center’s current goals is to finally grant a longtime wish from servicemen: pizza on the battlefield. They hope to have a shelf-stable pizza, which would last for years without refrigeration, available to the military by 2017. And, soon after that, in your grocery store.

As a means of cost reduction, and as way to readily tap the private sector during wartime, the government has forged a series of public/private partnerships with commercial food producers. The military’s technology and influence can be seen in effectively every grocery aisle.

Many military innovations make their way, in some form or another, into American kitchens. TV dinners, freeze-dried coffee, semi-moist cookies, and condiment packets, were all developed to feed soldiers, sailors, and pilots stationed remotely.

While all these processed and packaged foods have become familiar fare for the American household, most of these products are made to last far longer than the average civilian would need.

There haven’t been many studies about the long-term health impacts of the specific food technologies pioneered by the military, but whether its good for us or not, in the years to come, pizza is moving out of the freezer section and onto room-temperature shelves.

Reporter Tina Antolini, host of the podcast Gravy, spoke with Anastacia Marx de Salcedo, author of Combat-Ready Kitchen; Stephen Moody, the Director of Combat Feeding at the Natick Soldier Research, Development, and Engineering Center and Louisiana-native Ben Armstrong, who spent five years in the United States Marine Corps.

'Healthy' foods differ by individual

Holy crap - and here some scientists are finally pulling it all together. How fascinating. And how can I get involved?

Discussions of personalized diet plans based on research of the individual and their microbiome. The rest of us are doing all these protocols of eliminating and reintroducing foods and recording how we feel, but this uses blood and fecal samples to indicate what is going on. I would love to hear some of the stories from the participants.

I took this article from Cell Press. "'Healthy' foods differ by individual." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 19 November 2015. .

Ever wonder why that diet didn't work? An Israeli study tracking the blood sugar levels of 800 people over a week suggests that even if we all ate the same meal, how it's metabolized would differ from one person to another. The findings, published November 19 in Cell, demonstrate the power of personalized nutrition in helping people identify which foods can help or hinder their health goals.

Blood sugar has a close association with health problems such as diabetes and obesity, and it's easy to measure using a continuous glucose monitor. A standard developed decades ago, called the glycemic index (GI), is used to rank foods based on how they affect blood sugar level and is a factor used by doctors and nutritionists to develop healthy diets. However, this system was based on studies that average how small groups of people responded to various foods.

The new study, led by Eran Segal and Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, found that the GI of any given food is not a set value, but depends on the individual. For all participants, they collected data through health questionnaires, body measurements, blood tests, glucose monitoring, stool samples, and a mobile-app used to report lifestyle and food intake (a total of 46,898 meals were measured). In addition, the volunteers received a few standardized/identical meals for their breakfasts.

As expected, age and body mass index (BMI) were found to be associated with blood glucose levels after meals. However, the data also revealed that different people show vastly different responses to the same food, even though their individual responses did not change from one day to another.

"Most dietary recommendations that one can think of are based on one of these grading systems; however, what people didn't highlight, or maybe they didn't fully appreciate, is that there are profound differences between individuals--in some cases, individuals have opposite response to one another, and this is really a big hole in the literature," says Segal, of Weizmann's Department of Computer Science and Applied Math.

"Measuring such a large cohort without any prejudice really enlightened us on how inaccurate we all were about one of the most basic concepts of our existence, which is what we eat and how we integrate nutrition into our daily life," says Elinav, of Weizmann's Department of Immunology. "In contrast to our current practices, tailoring diets to the individual may allow us to utilize nutrition as means of controlling elevated blood sugar levels and its associated medical conditions."

Moving Toward Personalized Nutrition

Compliance can be the bane of nutrition studies. Their outcomes rely on participants, away from the laboratory, rigidly following a diet and honestly recording their food intake. In the Weizmann study, the participants (representing a cross-section of Israel's population and all unpaid) were asked to disrupt their weekly routine in two ways: They were to eat a standardized breakfast such as bread or glucose each morning and also enter all of their meals into a mobile app food diary. In return, the researchers would provide an analysis of the participants' personalized responses to food, which relied on strict adherence to the protocol. Elinav and Segal say this proved to be a strong motivator, and participant meal reporting closely matched the biometric data obtained from their glucose monitors.

The individualized feedback yielded many surprises. In one case, a middle-aged woman with obesity and pre-diabetes, who had tried and failed to see results with a range of diets over her life, learned that her "healthy" eating habits may have actually been contributing to the problem. Her blood sugar levels spiked after eating tomatoes, which she ate multiple times over the course of the week of the study.

"For this person, an individualized tailored diet would not have included tomatoes but may have included other ingredients that many of us would not consider healthy, but are in fact healthy for her," Elinav says. "Before this study was conducted, there is no way that anyone could have provided her with such personalized recommendations, which may substantially impact the progression of her pre-diabetes."

To understand why such vast differences exist between people, the researchers conducted microbiome analyses on stool samples collected from each study participant. Growing evidence suggests gut bacteria are linked to obesity, glucose intolerance, and diabetes, and the study demonstrates that specific microbes indeed correlate with how much blood sugar rises post-meal. By conducting personalized dietary interventions among 26 additional study participants, the researchers were able to reduce post-meal blood sugar levels and alter gut microbiota. Interestingly, although the diets were personalized and thus greatly different across participants, several of the gut microbiota alterations were consistent across participants.

"After seeing this data, I think about the possibility that maybe we're really conceptually wrong in our thinking about the obesity and diabetes epidemic," says Segal. "The intuition of people is that we know how to treat these conditions, and it's just that people are not listening and are eating out of control--but maybe people are actually compliant but in many cases we were giving them wrong advice."

"It's common knowledge among dieticians and doctors that their patients respond very differently to assigned diets," he adds. "We can see in the data that the same general recommendations are not always helping people, and my biggest hope is that we can move this boat and steer it in a different direction."

The researchers hope to translate what was learned in this basic research project so that it can be applied to a broader audience through further algorithmic developments that would reduce the number of inputs that are needed in order to provide people with personalized nutritional reports.

---

Story Source:

The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Cell Press. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

OMG - so much to research now....

I was researching a branch of the tree and I came across this article in the Troy Times Record - The Times Record, 7 Dec 1959, Mon, Pages 18 & 37 - on Newspapers.com.

How unbelievable to get a glimpse in to the history of my family as told by a cousin. Now I just need to find the article which she read which compelled her to write in to the Times Record in 1959.

And I have a lot of leads here which might help me understand. I mean, this might be a female line, but to know when the family arrived in Troy? How wonderful.

Ehlers & Co

I am trying to do some research on another branch of my tree - the Ehlers, from Germany. In doing the research I am learning that perhaps my Father's family had interactions with my mother's family before my mother and family ever met. I always assumed my father's family was poor, but perhaps they had more money than I realized. They certainly seem to have been entrepreneurial... one 2nd great uncle was a jeweler, down the street from the famous Theodore B Starr, and the other was a furniture manufacturer's agent, Robert J. Ehlers Co.

My great uncle, Edwin Maher, worked for his uncle as a salesman. I learned that little tidbit on Edwin Maher's draft card for World War 1. I do not believe that he served in the war.



And here is an advertisement for the furniture exchange:



And here is a funny little question and answer about some hair combs. Perhaps Ehlers & Co was not making as high quality jewelry as TB Starr.

These folks are relative to Herb's wife, Florence.

Clean Up after the end is declared!

What fun to read this letter when the war is over!

Aunt Ada is his mother's sister. I still don't know who Nellie Graham is. Though, with a little research... I see in 1910 she is living within a block of the Lee family on 6th Avenue. But she is much older than Herb. Could she have been a baby sitter? A crush?

Herb is now in Plainevaux, Belgium.

Herb must be referring to Bouillon, Belgium as the town with only a few inhabitants. (And today, here is tripadvisors top 5 things to do in Bouillon!)

November 19, 1918

Dear Mother,
So many things have happened in the past few days. Our division has the honor to be the advance guard in one of the armies of occupation. Since the day before yesterday we have been in Belgian territory. So for there have been only two days of marching, to day [sic] we have been resting.

There has been very little damage done to the country hereabouts. Day before yesterday we stopped overnight in a town of perhaps three or four inhabitants that showed practically no traces of the German occupation. There were even electric streetlights not to mention shops well stocked with all sorts of things. Prices however were very high and were quoted in marks. We stayed overnight in what had been a German hospital, an immense building that had been an insane asylum before the war. It was still furnished with non hospital beds on one of which I had a very comfortable sleep.

Though some sort of mix up in orders a very laughable thing happened. The Section got ahead of the column and arrived in this town right after cavalry outposts. The nearest troops of the main column were two villages behind. We were of course the first Americans any of these Belgians had ever seen.

Yesterday we came up through a very beautiful mountainous country to this village where we are now billeted. The two sergeants and myself (by the way I have been made a corporal) have a very nice room with a fire for which the lady of the house supplies wood. She also gives us very nice apples – the first I have tasted in ages, in fact the only good apples I’ve seen since leaving the States.

It is pretty cold up here. Yesterday we even had a flurry of snow. Of course the moving is pretty difficult even with the cars but it won’t be very long before we arrive at our destination and can settle down comfortable for a while. That will be a relief because we’ve been hustled around from pull on to post for about two months. I expect that we shan’t see the mail man again until we do get settled.

In the last mail that came I had a letter from Karolyn telling me that she had been very sick but was getting better every day. However you’ll know all about that. What with the war being over and Spanish influenza raising havoc with the States conditions are reverse and it’s really more worthwhile for me to worry about you at home keeping well than for you to worry about me. I do hope that you can all escape it.

I forgot to say that I also had a letter from Aunt Ada, or did I tell you that before?

I suppose this is about the right time for me to send you all Christmas greetings so that you’ll have them in time. I’m hoping that the whole world will get a Christmas present in the form of a treaty of peace. Nothing could be nicer.

What has happened to Nelly Graham? You haven’t spoken of her in a long time. Remember me to her.
Your affectionate son,
Herb

First Mover...

** UPDATE 11/21/2015 ** I drove by the warehouse where I first saw the cyclops dog and it has been painted over!

Dang - my idea has been taken!
Well, maybe by the artist him/herself... I hope so.

While walking along Tchoupotoulas street in New Orleans I saw a wonderful graffiti on what looked like an abandoned warehouse. I took pictures.

And then later I found an even better example on the side of a truck.
>

So, I made myself a needlepoint canvas...

Finally the other day I finished the needlepoint. (The project traveled all through Turkey with me.)

But here is why I am bitching and moaning... Someone has made a sticker of the graffiti! I saw this the other day when I was back in New Orleans.

I saw this on the backside of a traffic sign - again on Tchoupotoulas.

Now I need to figure out what to do with the piece.

Genetic sleuthing helps sort out ancestry of modern Europeans

Oh my gosh - here I am sharing an article in real time...

Interesting stuff - and you can see the orginal here, taken from the Reuter's web site.

A skeleton dating from almost 10,000 years ago which was found in the Kotias Klde rock shelter in Western Georgia is seen in an undated picture courtesy of the University of Cambridge, in Cambridge, United Kingdom. REUTERS/University of Cambridge/Eppie Jones/Handout via Reuters

DNA extracted from a skull and a molar tooth of ancient human remains discovered in the southern Caucasus region of Georgia is helping sort out the multifaceted ancestry of modern Europeans.

Scientists said on Monday they sequenced the genomes of two individuals, one from 13,300 years ago and the other from 9,700 years ago, and found they represented a previously unknown lineage that contributed significantly to the genetics of almost all modern Europeans.

These individuals were members of hunter-gatherer groups that settled in the Caucasus region, where southern Russia meets Georgia, about 45,000 years ago, after our species trekked out of Africa to populate other parts of the world. At the time, Europe was populated by Neanderthals.

The Caucasus hunter-gatherers later became isolated there for millennia during the last Ice Age, the scientists said.

The thaw at the end of the Ice Age brought them into contact with other peoples, leading to the advent of a culture of horse-riding herders who swept into Western Europe around 5,000 years ago, bringing metallurgy and animal-herding skills, they added.

"Modern Europeans are a mix of ancient ancestral strands," Trinity College Dublin geneticist Daniel Bradley said. "The only way to untangle the modern weave is to sequence genomes from thousands of years ago, before the mixing took place."

Until now, only three such ancestral strands had been identified flowing from ancient populations.

The Caucasus inhabitants comprised a previously unidentified "fourth strand," said University of Cambridge geneticist Andrea Manica, noting that they contributed significantly not only to the ancestry of Europe but also to people in Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

Bradley called the finding "a major new piece in the human ancestry jigsaw." The Caucasus region is located at a crossroads of the Eurasian landmass, with nearby migration routes heading both west and east.

The Caucasus hunter-gatherers lived in caves and in small groups of probably no more than 20 to 30 people, University College Dublin archaeologist Ron Pinhasi said.

One of the two sets of remains came from the Kotias Klde cave near the village of Sveri in western Georgia and the other remains came from about 25 miles (40 km) away in the Satsurblia cave near the village of Kumistavi, Tengiz Meshveliani of the Georgian National Museum said.

The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)

What happens when you combine an axe-wielding microbiologist and a disease-obsessed historian?

Ha! On a recent 12 hour drive I listened to a podcast from Radiolab - one of my all time favorite radio shows - and Jad and Robert were discussing one of my favorite subjects: microbes. BUT, they were doing a story on the two scientists who discovered that an ancient medicine was the only cure for some of the super bugs that modern humans have 'created'. And, by way of this podcast, I get truly wonderful and never anticipated answers to some of the questions I posed in my previous post. Another example of truth is stranger than fiction; you can't make this shit up. Just wait and listen to the podcast.

Jad and Robert had a different, intriguing, question at the conclusion of their report... Because microbes evolve so quickly, maybe our old medicines will work again because the microbe's resistance to *that* medicine has evolved out because their is a new antibacterial to develop a resistance to.

In any event, the podcast gave the background story to the scientist's collaboration to find this cure made of onion, garlic, ox bile and wine. So fabulous. We discussed this story here. You can listen to the wonderful podcast here.

Fructose triggers cravings

Hmmm. When I did the 40-30-30 diet plan they had us add some fructose to some shakes; I assumed fructose is ok. Now, though, I use regular white sugar to make my probiotic Kombucha tea, but I have learned that the 'mother' changes the sucrose to fructose. So, does that mean I traded one sugary drink, soda, for another just as bad for me? (Well, maybe not just as bad, as it has the probiotic element... but shit.)

We have touched upon sugar and/or artificial sweeteners here, here, here and here.

Taken from the May 22nd print edition of the Week Magazine:

Not all sugars are created equal. Glucose and fructose are simple sugars naturally found in fruit and have the same number of calories, but new research suggests there are important differences in how the body responds to these sweeteners. While glucose is absorbed directly into the bloodstream to produce energy, fructose—which is used to sweeten soft drinks and processed foods—is metabolized in the liver. The body reacts to glucose in the blood by producing insulin, which triggers feelings of fullness. “Fructose doesn’t stimulate insulin secretion, and if there’s no insulin, you don’t get the information that you’re full,” the study’s senior author, Dr. Kathleen Page, tells The New York Times. Consuming fructose also triggers more activity in areas of the brain involved in reward processing, which intensifies cravings for high-calorie foods such as candy, cookies, and pizza. Researchers do not recommend that people forgo fruit, since it provides fiber and nutrients and has relatively small amounts of fructose compared with soft drinks and processed foods. But researchers say it does make sense to limit overall sugar intake.

Infections can lower IQ

So, I was told that in older people, because urinary tract infections do not materialize with itching and burning, they can be over looked, but having the infection can mimic the symptoms of Alzheimer's. How scary is that? So, this finding does not surprise me. Disturbs me, but doesn't surprise me. (And any infection can have this effect on older people, it's the body fighting the infection that causes the problem, but other infections have other symptoms, so doctor's test for it. Doctors apparently do not test for a UTI unless the patient complains about burning and itching, or other types of symptoms.)

And then pile on a course of antibiotics and you are just up shit's creek without a paddle, as discussed here.

Taken from the June 12th print edition of the Week Magazine:

People who are hospitalized with an infection early in life can lose IQ points, new research suggests. Scientists analyzed the hospital records of 190,000 Danish men born between 1974 and 1994. Before taking an IQ test at age 19, about 35 percent of the men had landed in hospitals with serious infections, such as an STD or a urinary tract infection. The average IQ score of those subjects was 1.76 points below average. Those with five or more hospitalizations for infection had an average IQ that was 9.44 points lower than average. The more severe or recent the infection, the lower the score. Researchers theorize that inflammation caused by immune responses may damage the brain. “Infections in the brain affected the cognitive ability the most,” the study’s lead author, Dr. Michael Eriksen Benrós tells Forbes.com. But he said any infection severe enough to require hospitalization had a negative impact on IQ.

A child-size change of heart

Genealogy is what has done it for me - not that I will have children... But thinking about this endless chain of babies which links me to the very first humans. It's pretty magical and wondrous when you think about it.

I remember reading about happiness and what was concluded is that the best prediction of your feelings about a subject are those of other people... Again, the context was happiness, but if other people love/enjoy something, chances are you will too. Unless, I suppose one is an incredible outlier, but who are we kidding, we are all pretty much the same... unique, but not totally unique. (I feel like that graduation speech, everyone is unique, but not special! ha!)



Taken from the July 3rd print edition of the Week Magazine.

For years, I insisted I didn’t want children, said Michelle Goldberg. But life is full of surprises.

Twelve years ago, I penned an essay for a Salon.com series called “To Breed or Not to Breed,” about the decision to have children or not. It began this way: “When I tell people that I’m 27, happily married, and that I don’t think I ever want children, they respond one of two ways. Most of the time they smile patronizingly and say, ‘You’ll change your mind.’ Sometimes they do me the favor of taking me seriously, in which case they warn, ‘You’ll regret it.’” The series inspired an anthology titled Maybe Baby. It was divided into three parts: “No Thanks, Not for Me,” “On the Fence,” and “Taking the Leap.” My essay was the first in the “No” section.

So I felt a little sheepish when, a year and a half ago, the writer Meghan Daum asked me if I’d be interested in contributing to the book that would become Shallow, Selfish and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids. I wrote back to tell her that I couldn’t: My son had just turned 1.

My transformation didn’t begin with an unbidden outbreak of baby lust or a sudden longing for domesticity. It began, weirdly enough, when I learned about corpses becoming fathers. In 2011, I reported a piece for Tablet Magazine about the strange Israeli campaign for posthumous reproduction. Israel is the world capital of reproductive technology, and a legal group called New Family wanted to give parents who had lost adult sons the right to extract their sperm and create grandchildren. I have mixed feelings about making dads out of dead men, but I remember being seized by the realization that if my husband were to die young, I’d want to be able to do it to him.

Children, I suddenly understood, would hedge against the unthinkable fact of my husband’s mortality. Not long ago, I learned the Arabic word Ya’aburnee from a friend’s cheesy Facebook graphic. Literally “You bury me,” it means wanting to die before a loved one so as not to have to face the world without him or her in it. It’s a word that captures exactly my feeling for my husband. Part of the reason I didn’t want kids was because I feared they’d come between us, but if he were gone, I’d be frantic to hold on to a piece of him. Grasping this didn’t make me want a baby, exactly, but it started pushing me from “No” to, well, ambivalent.

My husband, Matt, was ambivalent, too. We were pleased with our two-person family, with our consuming careers, constant travel, and many tipsy nights out, all the things people say you lose when you become a parent. We met very young, the summer after my freshman year of college, and we’d never grown bored with each other. Sometimes we puzzled over what people meant when they said that marriage is hard work. We assumed it had something to do with parenthood.

As happy as I am with my marriage, I’m not by nature a cheerful person. Like a lot of writers, I’m given to tedious bouts of anxiety, depression, and self-loathing. I am introverted, and feel shattered if I don’t have time alone every day. Worse, from a parental perspective, I am impatient, easily undone by quotidian frustrations. As much as I love to visit faraway places, I’m often reduced to tears by the indignities of air travel. When I’m stuck in a taxi in traffic, I unconsciously shred my cuticles until my fingers bleed. I pictured parenthood as a clammy never-ending coach flight.

Also, there was my work. As a little girl, I had never imagined myself with babies, or, for that matter, with a husband. My vision of the future had involved an apartment in New York City, a cat, and a typewriter. I was sure children would get in the way of my ambitions—and, worse, that I’d poison them with my resentment.

I started looking online for stories about people who’d had children and then wished they hadn’t. I read about a famous Ann Landers reader survey from the 1970s, undertaken in response to a letter from a young couple who feared, as I did, that parenthood would ruin their marriage. “Will you please ask your readers the question: If you had it to do over again, would you have children?” they asked. She did, and received 10,000 responses. To her dismay, 70 percent answered no. A 40-year-old mother of twins wrote, “I was an attractive, fulfilled career woman before I had these kids. Now I’m an exhausted, nervous wreck who misses her job and sees very little of her husband. He’s got a ‘friend,’ I’m sure, and I don’t blame him.” This helped shore up my faith in our decision.

Looking back, the fact that my faith needed shoring up was a sign that something was changing. As I got older, the constant travel that once thrilled me became wearying. My work still meant a lot to me, but while I once thought that publishing a book would make me feel that I’d arrived, publishing two taught me that arrival is elusive. Where I’d once seen family and intellectual life in opposition, over time I started worrying that it was an intellectual loss to go through life without experiencing something so fundamental to so many people’s existence. Meanwhile, 35 was creeping up on me.

Matt and I went back and forth, and back and forth some more. We both felt like we were atop a fulcrum and could be pushed either way if only the other knew what to do. At some point, we decided that I’d go off the pill and see what happened.

For a few months, nothing did. I started to wonder if I were infertile, if biology had decided the issue for me. I wasn’t sure if I was disappointed or relieved by this. Then—in a development that shocked me despite being completely predictable—I got pregnant, and was immediately convinced I’d made an awful mistake.

Within a couple of weeks, the queasiness came on like a portent, though at the same time I longed for the drinks I couldn’t have. We had a trip coming up—my husband had work to do in London, and I was going to accompany him, then go to Israel and Palestine for work of my own. I wasn’t sure how I’d get through it, but I was determined to go, since it might be my last chance to travel for a very long time.

The first few days in London, I cried constantly. Then, one afternoon, I called my doctor in New York for the results of some routine tests. The news wasn’t good. My progesterone was low, which the doctor said could be either a cause or a symptom of a failing pregnancy. When we got off the phone, I was hysterical with worry over this pregnancy that I didn’t want at all.

Back in New York, I went immediately to the doctor, shaking as I waited to see the result of my 10-week ultrasound. When I saw the beating heart of the ghostly, paisley-shaped creature, I was, for all my qualms, hugely thankful. Over the next two weeks, I started to get a little bit excited about the baby. It helped that the sickness and sleepiness had lifted. When I returned to the doctor at 12 weeks—the end of my first trimester, and the danger zone for pregnancy loss—I was almost relaxed. But this time, the ultrasound showed no heartbeat.

I had never felt as sad about anything as I did about that miscarriage. Actually, sad isn’t the right word, since it suggests a watercolor melancholy, and this was jagged, putrid desolation. The only way to make the anguish disappear, I thought, was to get pregnant again. Before, I’d been baffled by some women’s animal desperation for a baby. Now that desperation took hold of me.

It took five months for me to get pregnant again—not a very long time, though it felt endless, and makes me so sorry for those condemned to spend years in that hideous limbo. I white-knuckled it through much of the pregnancy, terrified of seeing a still heart at each ultrasound.

Perhaps it says something about my pre-baby life that a lot of my metaphors for new motherhood were drug-related. Those endless hours my son and I spent in bed, alternately nursing, dozing, and staring, amazed, at each other, reminded me of the time I’d smoked opium in Thailand. Lugging him around on errands brought to mind the first few times I got stoned as a teenager, when doing normal things like going to school or the drugstore became complicated, strange, and full of misadventure. The oxytocin felt like ecstasy.

Why, I kept thinking, hadn’t anyone told me how great this was? It was a stupid thing to think, because in fact people tell you that all the time. In general, though, the way people describe having a baby is much like the way they describe marriage—as a sacrifice that’s worth it, as a rewarding challenge, as a step toward growing up. Nobody had told me it would be fun.

The fact that it was, of course, was largely a matter of my good fortune and privilege. Getting what a friend of mine calls “the good hormones,” instead of those that cause postpartum debilitation, is largely a matter of dumb luck. I also had a husband who was a full, enthusiastic partner; an established, flexible career; and, crucially, money to afford good child care. My son was (and is) sweet-natured and easy.

Certainly, it sucked sometimes. A purple-clad lactation consultant prescribed a regimen of round-the-clock feeding, pumping, and tea guzzling that, had I followed it, would have broken me in a day; her visit left me feeling crushed, inadequate, and then humiliated for not having stood up to her. I’d worried, throughout my pregnancy, that I would resent my son for taking me away from my work. Instead, I resented my work for taking me away from my son, which created its own sort of identity crisis.

For all that, though, my son’s first year was the best of my life. I learned that while travel with a baby isn’t easy, it’s doable. We took him to Malaysia, where I was speaking at a conference, when he was 6 months old, and then on a reporting trip to Panama a few months later. Both of these were countries we’d been to before; seeing them again with our son made travel feel new. He made staying home feel new too. When I was with him, the habitual churning of my mind eased. Instead of arguing with strangers on Twitter, I spent hours in neighborhood parks I’d barely noticed before. Ultimately, even my work life improved: The crisis motherhood brought on led me to refocus on more satisfying long-form writing. Something Louis C.K. said recently was true for me: “I realized that a lot of the things that my kid was taking away from me, she was freeing me of.”

Matt and I were so delighted by our baby that we started half-seriously mulling a second. I was now in my late 30s and assumed that if and when we resolved to go for it, it would take even longer than before. One night, thinking we needn’t work so hard to prevent a pregnancy that we might soon wish for, we didn’t use birth control. In the morning, we came to our senses, decided we weren’t ready, and vowed not to be so sloppy again. It was too late. Our daughter was born nine months later, almost two years to the day after her brother.

She is a wonder, but having two children in diapers actually is pretty hard, particularly when you live in a fourth-floor walk-up. There are evenings when my husband and I are too harried to say more than a few words to each other as we tag-team two bedtimes and then collapse in front of the television. I’m occasionally incredulous that I’ve ended up with exactly the sort of life I once publicly pledged to avoid.

Unlike Ann Landers’ survey respondents, I swear I don’t regret it, though sometimes I’m mortified when I think about how my 27-year-old self would regard the frazzled, stroller-pushing woman I am now. I try to figure out how to explain myself in a way that would be intelligible to her, but I don’t think I can. The best I can come up with is that before, there was one person in the world for whom I would use the word Ya’aburnee. Now there are three.

Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in NYMag.com.
THE WEEK
July 3, 2015

Herb Gets Another Promotion

Looks like some men were a little out of line. I wonder if Herb had a hard time when he took Louis Springer's rank.



and we find him later, here:



I wonder if they ever saw each other again, after the war.