Meatless Mondays

San Francisco recently declared Mondays as “meat-free!” This is a nonbinding resolution to urge schools and restaurants to offer “plant-based” food options every Monday.

Meatless Monday is a non-profit initiative associated with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Their goal is to reduce meat consumption by 15% in order to improve the health of people and the planet.

I’d love to see our hospital get in on this! 

Asking the wrong questions

Great letter from Dr. Dean Ornish to the NY Times in response to the recent news that Crestor (a statin currently used to treat high cholesterol) has been FDA-approved for use as a preventive measure in healthy people with no cholesterol problems in order to reduce chronic inflammation (as measured by levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) in the blood).

 Ornish points out:

The wrong question is being asked. It’s not: “Should Crestor be given to reduce inflammation?” It should be: “What is the cause of chronic inflammation, and what can be done to address these causes?”

As he and others have found, the causes of chronic inflammation are related to lifestyle: poor diet, not enough exercise, emotional stress, and social isolation.

I agree that we should invest in preventing these underlying causes... rather than spend billions on statins (and their side effects).

Power in pomegranates

Seems that food can be an addictive drug… but it can also be a medicine.

This study recently showed that phytochemicals in the seeds of pomegranates may block aromatase, the enzyme that converts androgen to estrogen. This is the same function of aromatase inhibitor drugs (Aromasin, Femara, and Arimidex) which many breast cancer patients take in order to stop estrogen from feeding tumor growth.

Obviously, pomegranates are not going to be replacing aromatase inhibitors anytime soon... but this may eventually have some implications for other estrogen-related processes (such as menopausal symptoms, bone density, and cancer prevention). 

We already know pomegranates are chock-full of antioxidants, but now research suggests they may have properties similar to aromatase inhibitor drugs by blocking the synthesis of estrogen.

Food as cocaine

This study recently came out finding that the development of obesity in rats (by eating a diet of high sugar and fat) led to the same changes in the brain as in cocaine or heroin addiction.

Obese rats (but not lean rats) developed compulsive-like feeding behavior and the down-regulation of dopamine receptors. The rats were unconcerned about any negative consequences from their food consumption… even painful stimuli (electric shocks to their feet) did not stop them from eating!

Researcher Paul Kenney said, "People know intuitively that there's more to [overeating] than just will power… there's a system in the brain that's been turned on or overactivated, and that's driving it at some subconscious level."

Another scientist, Dr. Gene-Jack Wang, describes the food we eat as similar to cocaine: "We make our food very similar to cocaine now. We purify our food. Our ancestors ate whole grains, but we're eating white bread. American Indians ate corn; we eat corn syrup."

Idea generation

“If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” 

~Albert Einstein

I have heard it said that it is our 20’s and 30’s when we are most creative, when we come up with most of our ideas, when we ask the new questions. Later in life is when we refine them, write about them, teach them.

I like how 12-year-old (!) Adora Svitak says in this TED Talk that the world needs more “childish thinking”… more unburdened free thought, more creativity, and more dreams of perfection.

Sin tax or bucks for broccoli

Interesting (and short ~3 minute) NPR news segment on structuring incentives to get people to eat better.

They talk about two methods to encourage healthier eating:

1.  Pay people to eat healthy food (“bucks for broccoli”)
2. Charge more for unhealthy food (“sin tax” on junk food)

Experiments have shown that with method #1, people buy more junk food (using money saved from the cheap healthy food). But when the junk food itself is more expensive (as in method #2), people actually buy less of it.

Why? Because people are more responsive to price increases than price decreases. It seems that charging more for junk food (i.e. tax on soda) will be more effective than subsidizing healthy food.

But then this article came out in the Wall Street Journal this week, reporting that there is no change in soda consumption in states with a soda tax compared to states without a soda tax. This could be explained by the fact that the soda tax was small and hidden... it might be a different story if the tax is large and noticeable.

This brings up some questions… should we pay people for their healthy habits and charge people for their unhealthy ones? Pay people to exercise? Subsidize yoga? Fine people for smoking? Charge people for unhealthy food choices? Apparently GE charges their employees who smoke an extra $625/year!

Learning to say no

I’ve been overcommitting to too many projects at work… my mentor’s advice:

“You have to learn to say no… if you are too cheap you’ll run around doing everyone else’s work for them. People will actually value you more if you are not always available to them.”

I think he’s right about that!

I’m not very good at saying no… is this a woman thing?