Life is Healthy

This week all the Spaniards were Doctors, which I was a little apprehensive about given the profession. As it turned it out it was a great group of people and personalities.

It was good to see the formula working as it should. I have to say I think everyone gave 100% this week which helps enormously. I found myself getting quite tired though too, which is unusual, and on Thursday I had such a bad headache (no, alcohol wasn't the cause)!?

We got up to all sorts of things and the competitive edge came out like a Samurai sword when we played Scattergories, hehe (it didn't help I messed up the scores on the last round, oops) but I did learn that rust is a colour and houses do fly! So it was educational too.

The karaoke went very well and the party I thought may never end, and for some I dont think it did!! Dylan made his debut of the year and everyone seemed to like him which was nice, but then he let himself down by getting drunk at dinner time!

So I guess I'm looking forward to my next Doctors program, they have a lot to live up to!
Keep up the good work guys, its nice to know were in safe hands.

To see the time we shared simply click the folder below

Vaughan Town - Gredos - Program 81

I'd like to point out an interesting post from Peter at Hyperlipid. He discusses a paper that uses a novel technique to look for immune activation in the gut in response to wheat gluten. For the nerds: they challenged patient gut biopsies with gliadin fragments (gliadin is one of the proteins that make up gluten) and looked for expression of interleukin-15 (IL-15), a marker of activation of the innate immune system. The innate immune system is an old system (evolutionarily speaking) that predates the antibody-producing "adaptive immune system" and nonspecifically defends against pathogens.

Biopsies from 5 out of 6 patients showed an IL-15 response to at least one gliadin fragment. The implication is that the majority of people have an immune response to wheat, even if they don't have Celiac disease. The reason they aren't diagnosed as Celiac patients is they don't have circulating anti-gliadin antibodies (and they presumably don't yet have severe structural damage to their intestinal tract as judged by biopsy or endoscopy), but as the paper shows, people can react to gluten without producing antibodies via the innate immune system.

As someone who regularly does Western blots, I can say I'm not impressed by the quality of their data, but if this is confirmed more solidly and on a larger scale it would be HUGE. As you know if you've been following the blog, the small intestine has a lot of important functions: besides absorbing nutrients and secreting enzymes, it also plays an important role in regulating satiety and insulin secretion by the pancreas and overall insulin sensitivity. It's not an organ you want to damage.

Like many other Apprentice-watchers I am somewhat mystified by the continued presence of Michael Sophocles. But on a recent visit to the BBC I found the following transcript from the final show, which I think reveals everything.


INT. BOARDROOM – DAY.

SIR ALAN

Michael – why should I hire you?


SOPHOCLES
Sir Alan, I’m a good Jewish boy.


SIR ALAN

Are you?!


SOPHOCLES

Well, half-Jewish. I never knew my gentile father though. My mother said that he was driven to suicide in the 1980s when his range of cheap personal computers was ruthlessly undercut by Amstrad. Amstrads had crappy 3” disk drives for fuck’s sake, yet everyone bought them instead. You killed my father. Well now you’re “fired”.

SIR ALAN

You’re not half-Jewish.


SOPHOCLES

I am! I am! I’m half-Jewish!


SIR ALAN

You’re not half-Jewish. You’re 100% Jewish.


SOPHOCLES

You killed my father!


SIR ALAN

No Michael. I am your father.

SIR ALAN

That’s right – you’re sired. Sired by me.


SOPHOCLES

COME ON!

[NAME DELETED]

Um, is it even worth mentioning that I won this task? No? OK, I'll just fire myself. Frances - could you call me a cab please?

Part One (in which running is harder than walking)

Yesterday, my oldest son and I went running.

He is a couch potato and I want him to get fit and get moving.

I used to be a runner but stopped shortly before my surgery in 2006 and have not run since.

S. balked at this proposal at first but I stood firm. Then we saw Run Fatboy Run and he came around (he adores Simon Pegg. And the 'slacker turns long distance runner and gets the girl' theme really appealed to him. Whatever works, I figure).

We did Week One of a beginner's run/walk programme. We ran for one minute and walked for two minutes for a total of twenty minutes (we also did ten minutes of walking to warm up and cool down on each end). Even though I walk almost every day (and sometimes quite briskly), I really felt it (I was also running in a pair of really crappy old shoes which I threw in the garbage when I got home). It's hard to imagine that there was a point in my life when I was able to run for more than an hour and that I once finished a half-marathon.

And S., who had started by saying that he can walk faster than I run (which is true), was panting pretty hard at the end and asking "are we done yet?" Every few seconds.

Still, we both agreed that it was hard work but not overwhelmingly so (I even think that S. was a little proud of himself) and that we would keep at it. I told S. that I expect him to finish the programme with me (in ten weeks we will be running for twenty minutes in two ten-minute increments) and then he will be off the hook.

By then, I am hoping that we will both be addicted.

He was asking yesterday about running a marathon. I think it would be fun to do a 5k together.

We'll see.

On Friday, we will go out and do it again.

Part Two (in which I am pretty)

It was well past D.'s bedtime last night when he asked if he could 'do' my hair. I couldn't resist.

Ever since I was a little girl, I have loved having my hair brushed. This hadn't happened for a very long time. My hair hasn't really been long enough for years and when it was, there wasn't anyone in my life who was interested in brushing it.

D. set to gently brushing (he was standing on the bed as I sat on it). As he worked, he would make comments:

"Tell me if I hurt you."

"S's hair tangles because it is curly."

"Your hair is like mine and S.'s is like Papa's."

"In the light, your hair looks golden."

and

"I like your hair, Mama."

After brushing, it was time to add some adornments. We both loved the end result:


I have been growing out my hair since it started growing back after the Adriamycin. What you see is the result of almost two years of persistence (I am sure that the current treatment regimen has slowed progress, too).

Recently, I have been thinking of giving up. I had very short hair in the months before my diagnosis and I keep coming across photos of myself with short hair in which I think I look pretty good.

But after last night I don't want to cut it any more.

And I've invested in all these cute little clips. Who knew I could wear them all at the same time?


Update on my heart situation: I just got off the phone with my oncologist. He's not really worried about the drop in my ejection fraction. We're going to proceed with next week's treatment as planned and he is going to book an echo cardiogram for me and see if it gives the same results.

People who would know have been advising me that such tests can produce inconsistent results and it seems that my oncologist agrees.

Cross-posted to Mommybloggers.

Man. Aerobics was tough this morning. One of the other girls in the class asked the aerobics instructor: "What? Are trying to train us for the police academy?" Full sit ups. Jumping squats.I thought I was going to die. But it was one of those workouts that you end up being glad you made it through. I know if I could workout like that everyday, I would really get somewhere in my fitness goals.

A high protein, low carbohydrate diet is most effective at reducing hunger and promoting weight loss, at least in the short term. Healthy, obese men were given two different diets during their stay in the Rowett’s specialised Human Nutrition Unit. Both diets had a high protein content (30% of total energy value of the diet) but they differed in the amount of carbohydrate: One diet was low in carbohydrate (4%) and the other contained a moderate amount of carbohydrate (35% total energy value).

“Our volunteers found both diets to be equally palatable, but they felt less hungry on the high-protein low-carbohydrate diet compared with the diet which contained high-protein but moderate amounts of carbohydrate,” said Dr Alex Johnstone, the Rowett’s weight-loss expert who led the study.

“Weight loss during the two four week study periods was greater on the high-protein low-carbohydrate diet, averaging 6.3 kg per person, compared with 4.3 kg on the moderate carbohydrate diet,” said Dr Johnstone.

An important part of this study was to unravel the physiological mechanisms behind this type of diet. It is known that when people eat low carbohydrate diets, within a relatively short time their body has to switch from using glucose as a fuel to using something different called ketone bodies. Ketone bodies are appetite-suppressing and they may have an effect on the appetite centres in the brain. It’s also well known that protein itself is very good at making people feel full-up.

“In this study, we showed that on the high-protein low-carbohydrate diet the volunteers became ketogenic within 1-2 days of starting this diet and so it may be that high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets are particularly effective because of the combined effect of the protein and the ketone bodies,” said Dr Johnstone.

“We showed that the volunteers on the ketogenic diet reduced their energy intake without increasing their hunger and this was a very important factor in their ability to stick to the diet.”

Dr Johnstone sounds a note of caution about her findings: “A paper published last year from the same study showed that low carbohydrate diets may have consequences for the health of the gut by dramatically reducing the numbers of particular types of bacteria. So we will be looking in more detail at the complex way in which we respond to changes in our diet before we can say whether low-carbohydrate ketogenic diets are a suitable tool for everyone who wants to lose weight.”

When the phase of the study which involved the volunteers finished in October 2004, it attracted considerable interest because of its celebrity volunteer, Cameron Stout, who lost just over 12 kg during his nine week stay at the Rowett Institute. At the time, Cameron mentioned his surprise at not feeling hungry during the study and said he had adjusted to eating smaller portions.

Source: ScienceDaily