Life is Healthy

From the US Centers for Disease Control website:

Since the mid-seventies, the prevalence of overweight and obesity has increased sharply for both adults and children. Data from two NHANES surveys show that among adults aged 20–74 years the prevalence of obesity increased from 15.0% (in the 1976–1980 survey) to 32.9% (in the 2003–2004 survey).

As starvation progressed, fewer and fewer things could stimulate the men to overt action. They described their increasing weakness, loss of ambition, narrowing of interests, depression, irritability, and loss of libido as a pattern characteristic of "growing old".

I had my regular oncologist appointment today.

The thought occurred to me, as I readied myself to go, that I am feeling healthier these days than I did before my diagnosis.

It took cancer to get me to take care of myself.

I have recurring dreams.

And while I don't remember all of my dreams, there are some that stay with me very vividly. I don't believe that all of my dreams have great meaning (and some make so little sense when I wake up that I don't even try to ascribe meaning to them) but sometimes, I really feel that my dreams relay messages from my sub-conscious.

I still occasionally have a dream that I am back in university. It's time to write exams, only I haven't been to class (OK some of this did actually happen in real life). In fact, I had no idea that I had even signed up for that particular course.

It's very stressful.

In a recent version of the dream (and I have had this one more than once), I have had to quit my job and go live with my parents, since I have just found out that I did not complete high school. In this dream, I can't even find the school office to get a copy of the class schedule. As the end of the school year approaches and exams loom, I realize that I have not attended a single math class (I don't even know where the classroom is).

At the most stressful periods of my working life, I found myself back in grade school (it is not fun being the only adult in Grade 4).

When I was pregnant with my first child, I dreamed that I gave birth to a chicken. I was horrified. I knew that I was supposed to love that chicken and I was wracked with guilt that, instead, I was repulsed by it. I was especially terrified at the prospect of breast-feeding the chicken.

Several months later, I dreamed that I gave birth to a golden retriever. I took that as a sign that I was making progress in my mental preparation for motherhood. I still didn't know how I would breastfeed a puppy but at least the creature in the crib was mammalian (and the thought of cuddling with it did not freak me out. I have never really liked birds).

In the year before my cancer diagnosis (my last year of working crazy hours), I dreamed that I had inherited a house. After living in it for some time, I would always discover that the house had another floor to it, one I had not known existed. This attic didn't always look the same but it was always beautifully furnished, dusty and fairly vast. My feeling upon discovering it was always wonder, mixed with a lot of fear and some excitement.

I took that one to mean that there was some aspect of my past that needed exploring. Perhaps I was also telling myself that I was neglecting some part of who I was.

More recently, I have been having a dream that is likely related to the unexplored house. In this one, I am staying at a large hotel. It always looks different and the location and reason for travel also vary. But in every dream, I get locked out of my room and I can't find my keys (this is something that happens to me almost every time I travel. And I lose keys all the time). I spend the rest of the dream wandering the halls, trying to find the front desk or, if I succeed in getting a new key, I can no longer find my room. All the hallways and every floor look exactly the same. Or the numbers have disappeared from the doors. Or I get my key to work in a lock, only to find that door opens to an empty room (or one with someone else in it. I have had this happen in real life, except that in the dream, I am the only one who seems to be bothered).

It's not a panicky dream (like the school ones), just a frustrating one. Perhaps I am just feeling stuck and not sure how to get to where I want to go (and unsure of what the destination should be).

I think dreams can tell us a great deal about ourselves, if we can actually figure them out.

Thoughts? Feel free to psychoanalyze me or share dreams of your own in the commments.

A version of this was cross-posted to Mommybloggers.

MM wanted to lose the last 10 to 12 pounds. She has been at the same weight for the past couple of years despite already eating quite well (she's a vegetarian). MM is a middle-aged woman who found out she has a small brain tumor recently. Her quest to live everyday to the fullest includes losing the last 10 pounds.

She recently joined 24-Hour Fitness and has been amazed to lose six pounds in the first two weeks already! 24 Hour Fitness has about 400 clubs across the US. See her quest to lose the 10 pounds.

I almost hate posting lately because I have nothing good to say. Once again, I'm sick. I've had a stiff neck since Saturday, and I still have a pain in my right side. I feel kind of queasy, too. I hope this is the last of the bugs I'm going to get this year.

For those of you who haven't been reading the comments, we've been having a spirited discussion about the diet and health of hunter-gatherers here. I brought up the Kuna indians in Panama, who are immune to hypertension, live a good long time, do not gain excess weight, and seem to have less cardiovascular disease and cancer than their city-dwelling cousins.

I was hungry for more information about the Kuna lifestyle, so over the last few days, I've dug up every paper I could find on them. The first paper describing their lack of hypertension was published in 1944 and I don't have access to the full text. In 1997, a series of studies began, headed by Dr. Norman Hollenberg at Harvard. He confirmed the blood pressure findings, and collected data on their diet, lifestyle and kidney function. Here's a summary:

The Kuna are half hunter-gatherers, half agricultural. They cultivate plantains, corn, cocoa, yucca, kidney beans, and several types of fruit. They trade for sugar, salt, some processed cocoa and miscellaneous other foods. They drink 40+ oz of hot cacao/cocoa per day, some locally produced and some imported. A little-known secret: the Kuna eat an average of 3 oz of donut a week. They also fish and hunt regularly.

In the first recent study, published in 1997, the Kuna diet is described as 29% lower in fat than the average US diet (56 g/day), 23% lower in protein (12.2 g), 60% higher in cholesterol, and higher in sodium and fiber. The study doesn't specifically mention this, but the reader is left to infer that 65% of their calories come from carbohydrate. This would be from plantains, corn, yucca, sugar and beans. The fat in their diet comes almost exclusively from coconut, cocoa and fish: mostly saturated and omega-3 fats.

In the next study, the picture is beginning to change. Their staple stew, tule masi, is described as being 38% fat by calories (from coconut and fish), exceeding the American average. In the final study in 2006, Hollenberg's group used a more precise method of accounting for diet composition than was used in previous attempts. The paper doesn't report macronutrients as a percentage of calories, and I suspect the reason is that they aren't consistent with the previous papers. They have retreated from their previous position that the Kuna diet is low-fat and describe it instead as "low in animal fat", leaving plenty of room for saturated fats from coconut and cacao.

I was able to find some clues about their diet composition, however. First of all, they report the meat consumption of the Kuna at approximately 60 oz per week, mostly from fish. That's 8.6 oz per day, identical to the American average. They also reported the fat content of the cacao the Kuna produce locally and brew into their favorite 40-oz-a-day drink. It's 44.2% fat by weight. The low-fat cocoa drinks they used to calculate macronutrient totals are made from imported cocoa (cocoa is defatted cacao powder), ignoring the locally produced, full-fat cacao. If we assume half the chocolate they drank was locally produced, that's about 30 additional grams of fat a day, bringing their total fat intake to 8g above the average American. I suspect the authors chose to ignore the locally-produced cacao to lower the apparent fat intake of the Kuna, even though the paper states they drank both regularly.

By putting together the pieces from the later studies, a new picture emerges: a diet high in fish and moderate in protein, high in unprocessed fat (especially saturated and omega-3), and moderate in mostly unprocessed carbohydrate.

Here's my biased interpretation. The Kuna are healthier than their city-dwelling cousins for a number of reasons. They have a very favorable omega3:6 ratio due to seafood, wild game and relatively saturated vegetable fats. Their carbohydrate foods are mostly unprocessed and mostly from non-grain sources. They also live an outdoor life full of sunshine (vitamin D) and exercise. The chocolate may also contribute to their health, but I doubt it's a major effect. They're healthier than industrialized people because they live more naturally.

Another lesson to be learned from the Kuna and other exceptionally healthy indigenous peoples is that the human body can tolerate a fair amount of carbohydrate under the right conditions. Peter discusses another example of this, the Kitavans, on his blog. 50% carbohydrate while sitting in front of a desk all day, eating corn oil and getting no exercise = bad. 45% carbohydrate while hunting, relaxing and preparing whole, natural food in the sun all day = good.