Every week I collect many more interesting links than I can blog about, so I thought I’d include in Saturday posts links to interesting material on the Web.
Here are some things I found noteworthy this week:
(1) Chris Kresser has concluded that 2 food pyramids are better than one. His fat and carb pyramids could serve as a visual summary of our diet:
(2) US children who regularly buy school lunches are 29% more likely to become obese than those who bring lunch from home.
School lunch programs have to follow official US dietary guidelines, which favor the subsidized crops of wheat, corn, and soybeans. The USDA recently banned the potato from school lunches in an effort to get kids to eat more grains.
Since food toxins cause obesity, this outcome is just what we would have predicted.
(3) Giving nitrate to athletes causes their mitochondria to become more efficient.
Spinach is rich in nitrates. Popeye was right! Spinach does make you stronger.
(4) More China Study data: Ned Kock shows that fat is the safest macronutrient, animal food is safer than plant food, but that rice and vegetables are OK.
(5) Perfect Health Diet, the book, is “Paleo for engineers”. Accurate?
(6) Engineers, our video of the week is for you. When I first saw this thing, I thought it was a device for giving nightmares to young children.
Good thing Dr. Deans didn’t choose this for her kids’ nightlight! The blue lights are bad for melatonin.
via this link:
… and I thought the grasshoppers around were are big and ugly.
Mechnical stuff is fascinating.
I’ve not see the Corpus Clock & Chronophage before. Nerds rock! I also love blue LEDs.
Hah! Somehow I doubt the big bug clock would have gone over well with the toddler girl crowd at bedtime, though they would be into it if we saw it at, say, the science museum or something.
Interesting study came through on my pre-programmed NCBI searches today – low intensity blue-enriched white lite at 750 lux was equally effective to standard 10,000 lux therapy in treating seasonal affective disorder. I’ve seen some studies with 3000 lux blue light that weren’t impressive, so this is an interesting development!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21276222
Very interesting, Emily. Might be good for a psychologist’s office.
Now if they can give us a low-intensity one that produces vitamin D, I’ll never have to go outside!
My 12 year old thinks the clock is very cool. Not surprising really, he spent most of this morning
1. making very tiny implements from staples to:
2. capture mosquitoes and try to ‘milk’ their toxins
3. capture spiders and dissect them – verdict “abdomens easy, contain white squishy stuff, heads difficult”
then 4. zapping flies with the electric fly swat
“The face of the clock depicts time as a wave coming out from the center of the Universe.”
Such a great poetic sentence.
Thanks for the mention; loved the CC video!
to (3):
If spinach does the same like nitric oxid supplements (like AAKG/Citrulline) it actually does not make you stronger (like lifting more once) but gives you more anaerobic endurance (like lifting a moderate % of 1RM for more reps), not?
Anyways, that could explain why his thin upper arms were always so pumped after the spinach!
to (5): accurate, at least for THIS engineer. 🙂
Hi Franco,
Yes, I think you’re right on (3).
Your awensr was just what I needed. It’s made my day!