The most dangerous thing you’ll do all day

A study in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise conducted by scientists at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana analyzed the lifestyles of more than 17,000 men and women over about 13 years, and found that people who sit for most of the day are 54 percent more likely to die of heart attacks.

That is a very shocking statistic.

Similar research actually dates back to 1953, when British researchers found that (sitting) bus drivers were twice as likely to die of heart attacks as (standing) trolley operators.

It doesn’t matter how much you exercise or how well you eat. If you sit most of the day, your risk of leaving this world clutching your chest—whether you’re a man or women—as much as doubles.

This is going to cause a re-thinking in desk height. I’m going to push my chair back and kneel on a pillow. But then I’ll probably debelop knee joint problems.

Researchers don’t know why but suspect an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase (LPL), which breaks down fat in the bloodstream and turns it into energy. Researchers found that standing rats have ten times more of the stuff coursing through their bodies than laying rats. It doesn’t matter how fit the rats are; when they leave their feet, their LPL levels plummet. It is believed the same happens in humans.

See this article formore info

Bad Food + Bad Habits = Bad Health. Any Questions?

A recent report from an American Stroke Association conference tells us that strokes are rising dramatically among young and middle-aged Americans while dropping in older people, a sign that the obesity epidemic may be starting to shift the age burden of the disease.

The numbers improved for people over 65. Strokes dropped 25 percent, but still represent the highest numbers at 300 per 10,000 hospitalizations. For males 15 to 34, there were about 15 stroke cases per 10,000, and for girls and women in that age group there were about 4 per 10,000.

I hesitate to present these numbers here because admittedly they look pretty small. And if people look at the numbers as small it is doubtful they will see any urgency in changing their habits.

Health professionals have been pointing out the causes of stroke for years as bad food and lack of exercise. In the past we have accepted the higher chance of stroke as a part of the aging process, brought on by years of high calorie and high cholesterol intake coupled with an increasing lack of exercise. Then we are forced to rely on medical science to correct our abuse.

Now, we discover we are falling victim to these bad habits at a much younger age. What has changed? Fifty years ago our youth ate better quality food and got more exercise. Today’s youth eat more processed foods and are less physically challenged.

How can we be aware of the causes of stroke and yet do nothing to prevent it? Certainly, the family dynamic has changed over the past fifty years. We are seeing an increase in the number of single-parent homes which results in a decline in home cooked meals and thus convenience foods are on the increase and our schools no longer push physical activity as part of their regular curriculum.

Convenience food is not inherently dangerous to our health. It’s the manner in which it is processed. A large portion of processed food comes from fast food restaurants who, despite their claims of making a healthier product, continue to serve us meat that has been so fully injected with antibiotics and growth hormones that there is no way these chemicals are not finding their way into our bodies. Vegetables found in grocery stores, if we eat them, are genetically modified to make them bigger and more resistant to the heavy use of pesticides. Then they are injected or sprayed with stabilizers to give them a longer shelf life and picked before their time to ‘ripen’ on the long trip to the grocery store. All of these factors lessen their natural ability to develop the nutrients we think we are getting.

Is the use of all of these chemicals and processes connected to our increasing waistlines and poor health? No one seems to be able to conclusively connect those dots and corporate agriculture is certainly not going out of their way to find out. It would cut into their profits.

Additional Side Effects

1 - Health costs continue to rise for everyone because not enough people are keeping themselves healthy.

2 - CAFO’s – Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations – increasing in size and number because people eat meat,

• pollute adjacent streams due to the large amount of concentrated effluent,
• inject large amounts of antibiotics and pesticides into our food supply due to overcrowding at these facilities,
• support environmental degradation through growing feed which uses intensive methods which uses excessive fertilizer and pesticides.

3 - Processed food adds about three-fourths of the salt we eat, especially tomato sauce, soups, condiments and canned foods.

The bottom line is that corporate profits continue to increase, our waistlines continue to increase, environmental pollution continues to increase, our health decreases, our life-expectancy decreases.

In my opinion, this formula is a very poor substitute for quality of life. Is convenience really a good reason for this to continue?

If we expect to reverse the spread of stroke we need to grow more of our own food, eat less meat and more vegetables, and exercise more. All of this is within our power and everyone will benefit from it.

Wiping out world's most lethal diseases

Scientists at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute and Northwestern University have experimentally determined three-dimensional protein structures from a number of bacterial and protozoan pathogens, which could potentially lead to new drugs, vaccines and diagnostics to combat deadly infectious diseases, a Northwestern release said Tuesday.

Some of the structures solved by the researchers come from well-known organisms like the H1N1 flu virus and those that cause plague, cholera and rabies, the release said.

“By determining the three-dimensional structure of these proteins, we can identify important pockets or clefts and design small molecules which will disrupt their disease-causing function,” Peter Myler of SeatleBioMed and the University of Washington said.

“Each solved structure provides an important piece of new knowledge for scientists about a wide variety of diseases.”

The structures solved by the researchers are immediately made available to the international scientific community through a National Institute of Health-supported Protein Data Bank, providing a “blueprint” for development of new drugs, vaccines and diagnostics, Northwestern said.

This was written by postroad at Good Shit.

No Smoking Area

Have you ever thought about how destructive smoking tobacco is? Is it true that smokers just ignore the warnings because they stubbornly reject anyone ‘telling them what to do’ even for their own good?

I don’t want to pass judgment on anyone. That is not what is at issue in this post. I have known several people, friends and relatives, who have died from one or more of the many diseases caused by smoking tobacco. It is painful, for those of us who love them, to watch them go through this very preventable form of suicide.

The reasons for starting to smoke are varied, none of which I personally will ever understand completely.

What got me started on this is the following set of anti-tobacco ads I stumbled across posted on the website allhotstuff.net. These are just a few and many more are at the site. I hope these will leave some lasting impression on everyone. It is also my hope that they will be enough to stop smokers and wannabe smokers. Not only for the sake of their own health but maybe more importantly for the sake of their loved ones.

You are loved. Please stop killing yourself.