the-psoriasis-treatment

The figure below, from Brooks et al. (2005), shows a graph relating nitrogen balance and protein intake. A nitrogen balance of zero is a state in which body protein mass is stable; that is, it is neither increasing nor decreasing. The graph was taken from this classic study by Meredith et al.  The participants in the study were endurance exercisers. As you can see, age is not much of a factor for nitrogen balance in this group. Nitrogen balance is greater than zero (i.e., an anabolic state) for the vast majority of the participants at 1.2 g of protein per kg of body weight per day. To convert lbs to kg, divide by 2.2. A person weighing 100 lbs (45 kg) would need 55 g/d of protein; a person weighing 155 lbs (70 kg) would need 84 g/d; someone weighing 200 lbs (91 kg) would need 109 g/d. The above numbers are overestimations of the amounts needed by people not doing endurance exercise, because endurance exercise tends to lead to muscle loss more than rest or moderate strength trainin...

Let us say you are one of the gifted few who are able to put on 1 lb of pure muscle per month, or 12 lbs per year, by combining strength training with a reasonable protein intake. Let us go even further and assume that the 1 lb of muscle that we are talking about is due to muscle protein gain, not glycogen or water. This is very uncommon; one has to really be genetically gifted to achieve that. And you do that by eating a measly 80 g of protein per day. That is little more than 0.5 g of protein per lb of body weight if you weigh 155 lbs; or 0.4 per lb if you weigh 200 lbs. At the end of the year you are much more muscular. People even think that you’ve been taking steroids; but that just came naturally. The figure below shows what happened with the 80 g of protein you consumed every day. About 15 g became muscle (that is 1 lb divided by 30) … and 65 g “disappeared”! Is that an amazing feat? Yes, it is an amazing feat of waste, if you think that the primary role of protein is to build m...

I've had friends of mine try to get me into hydroponics before, but I haven't ever been truly interested until today, when @TheEconomist tweeted links to these videos on "vertical farming," the brainchild of Dickson Despommier, professor of public health in environmental health sciences at Columbia University. The magazine reports mainly on this urban-type agriculture as a way to bring local, sustainable food to places like New York City, the logistical problems, and what this might mean for battling climate change. There was also mention of how hydroponics allows for introduction of nutrients in the water, reduces need for fertilizing, and how it being a closed system recycles water. And, the interview (below) with Despommier speaks to how this idea could potentially turn the "parasitism" of cities into productive ecosystems. These are neat topics, although I still wonder about how realistic it is on a grand scale based on concerns about use of artifici...

Anyone who is keenly interested in having a better understanding of why we eat what we eat as human beings should take an hour or so to watch this introductory talk given by anthropologist Teresa Steele , of UC Davis, given at the California Academy of Sciences on the topic of evolution of the human diet. I found her talk fascinating, especially because I've been highly interested in how the use of fire and aquatic animals may have played a part in fueling human brain growth, so I ended up taking copious notes. I should note that there isn't anything new presented here, but Steele is excellent at presenting the chronology. If you don't have an hour to watch, then just see my notes below chapter by chapter from " Australopithecus to agriculture." Human diet is unique among apes Steele finds that diet is central to her research. "If we want to live, we have to eat," she says. Food is what ultimately supports demographic populations. One thing that is uniq...

The bar chart below shows the fat content of 1 sardine (38 g) canned in tomato sauce, and 2 fish oil softgels of the Nature Made brand. (The sardine is about 1/3 of the content of a typical can, and the data is from Nutritiondata.com. The two softgels are listed as the “serving size” on the Nature Made bottle.) Both the sardine and softgels have some vegetable oil added; presumably to increase their vitamin E content and form a more stable oil mix. This chart is a good reminder that looking at actual numbers can be quite instructive sometimes. Even though the chart focuses on fat content, it is worth noting that the 38 g sardine also contains 8 g of high quality protein. If your goal with the fish oil is to “neutralize” the omega-6 fat content of your diet, which is most people’s main goal, you should consider this. A rough measure of the omega-6 neutralization “power” of a food portion is, by definition, its omega-3 minus omega-6 content. For the 1 canned sardine, this difference is 5...

Nuts are generally seen as good sources of protein and magnesium. The latter plays a number of roles in the human body, and is considered critical for bone health. Nuts are also believed to be good sources of vitamin E. While there is a lot of debate about vitamin E’s role in health, it is considered by many to be a powerful antioxidant. Other than in nuts, vitamin E is not easily found in foods other than seeds and seed oils. Some of the foods that we call nuts are actually seeds; others are legumes. For simplification, in this post I am calling nuts those foods that are generally protected by shells (some harder than others). This protective layer is what makes most people call them nuts. Let us see how different nuts stack up against each other in terms of key nutrients. The quantities listed below are per 1 oz (28 g), and are based on data from Nutritiondata.com. All are raw. Roasting tends to reduce the vitamin content of nuts, often by half, and has little effect on the mineral c...

Undoubtedly one of the big differences between life today and in our Paleolithic past is the level of stress that modern humans face on a daily basis. Much stress happens at work, which is very different from what our Paleolithic ancestors would call work. Modern office work, in particular, would probably be seen as a form of slavery by our Paleolithic ancestors. Some recent research suggests that organizational power distance is a big factor in work-related stress. Power distance is essentially the degree to which bosses and subordinates accept wide differences in organizational power between them (Hofstede, 2001). (Source: talentedapps.wordpress.com) I have been studying the topic of information overload for a while. It is a fascinating topic. People who experience it have the impression that they have more information to process than they can handle. They also experience significant stress as a result of it, and both the quality of their work and their productivity goes down. Recent...

The figure and table below are from Vieth (1999); one of the most widely cited articles on vitamin D. The figure shows the gradual increase in blood concentrations of 25-Hydroxyvitamin, or 25(OH)D, following the start of daily vitamin D3 supplementation of 10,000 IU/day. The table shows the average levels for people living and/or working in sun-rich environments; vitamin D3 is produced by the skin based on sun exposure. 25(OH)D is also referred to as calcidiol. It is a pre-hormone that is produced by the liver based on vitamin D3. To convert from nmol/L to ng/mL, divide by 2.496. The figure suggests that levels start to plateau at around 1 month after the beginning of supplementation, reaching a point of saturation after 2-3 months. Without supplementation or sunlight exposure, levels should go down at a comparable rate. The maximum average level shown on the table is 163 nmol/L (65 ng/mL), and refers to a sample of lifeguards. From the figure we can infer that people on average will p...

Let me start this post with a note about Scooby , who is a massive bodybuilder who has a great website with tips on how to exercise at home without getting injured. Scooby is probably as massive a bodybuilder as anyone can get naturally, and very lean. He says he is a natural bodybuilder, and I am inclined to believe him. His dietary advice is “old school” and would drive many of the readers of this blog crazy – e.g., plenty of grains, and six meals a day. But it obviously works for him. (As far as muscle gain is concerned, a lot of different approaches work. For some people, almost any reasonable approach will work; especially if they are young men with high testosterone levels.) The text below is all from an anonymous commenter’s notes on this post discussing the theory of supercompensation. Many thanks to this person for the detailed and thoughtful comment, which is a good follow-up on the note above about Scooby. In fact I thought that the comment might have been from Scooby; but...

Maintaining a healthy body mass index, or BMI, is one of the most important ways to help you live longer, according to a new study published in the December issue of New England Journal of Medicine . BMI is not a perfect measure, but it is one of the simplest for estimating body weight. It is calculated by weight in pounds divided by height in inches squared and multiplying the number by 703, or by weight in kilograms divided by height in inches squared. What’s your BMI? Find out using this free calculator provided by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, of the National Institutes of Health. The study’s findings support an optimal BMI in the “normal weight” range of 20 to 24.9, which is generally associated with the lowest risk of death from all causes including chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. The association was strongest among participants who were younger than 50 years old. A BMI of 25 or more was associated with the highest mortality risks. The ...

Gale Prince Food safety pioneer Gale Prince , the "Dean of safety recalls," addressed a room full of food scientists at our local Cactus International Food Technologists (Cactus IFT) chapter dinner at the Fiesta Resort conference center in Tempe, Arizona. He spoke about food recall trends, how to enhance food safety progam, and gave us some details on the proposed FDA Food Safety Modernization Act. He began his talk by introducing us to the growing number of recalls in the United States. "Food safety has become a frequent topic for the media," he said. If you look at a 20-year trend, reccalls at retail have increased exponentially. Gail shared a graph of the trend and also details a few examples he's been involved with over the years. The USDA has had a number of meat recalls, which Prince shows us picks up during the summer months of May through August. He says it is partly due to people cooking outside (such as at 4th of July) on the grill, who often leave the...

Pressure cooking relies on physics to take advantage of the high temperatures of liquids and vapors in a sealed container. The sealed container is the pressure-cooking pan. Since the sealed container does not allow liquids or vapors to escape, the pressure inside the container increases as heat is applied to the pan. This also significantly increases the temperature of the liquids and vapors inside the container, which speeds up cooking. Pressure cooking is essentially a version of high-heat steaming. The food inside the cooker tends to be very evenly cooked. Pressure cooking is also considered to be one of the most effective cooking methods for killing food-born pathogens. Since high pressure reduces cooking time, pressure cooking is usually employed in industrial food processing. When cooking meat, the amount of pressure used tends to affect amino-acid digestibility; more pressure decreases digestibility. High pressures in the cooker cause high temperatures. The content of some vitam...

Aubrey de Grey Next up at H+ @Caltech this afternoon was the famous and fast-talking Aubrey de Grey, who provided a response to previous talks by Michael Rose and Stephen Coles. This is my take as how I understood the arguments. It was, admittedly, a bit hard to follow. What we heard from Rose and Coles, explained de Grey, was that we have an exponential rise in deaths and then, we have what de Grey called, a "weird leveling off." So, he said that as we get older, the data point to the fact that we eventually do reach a plateau in old age when mortality rates decline (passing the "aging phase" into a "biological immortality phase"), an argument of which Coles vehemently disagrees with. He also said that it would probably not be a plateau like the type that Rose discussed in his talk , and as he showed in fruitflies. Basically the data are sparse in these older populations, so there's no way we can really know what to expect. "We definitely need mo...

Michael Rose, evolutionary biologist Michael Rose is an evolutionary biologist, of University of California at Irvine, who knows how to sum up the complexity of aging. He told us at H+ @ Caltech that aging is just a normal process of natural selection. It's obviously a "big picture" view versus a cellular or molecular view. But to prove his point, he decided to trick natural selection and produce fruitflies that live five times longer than the average. The trick? Take the fruitflies that can reproduce in old age, which still have most of their physiological function, and repeat. Pretty simple. Eventually, you get longer-living fruitflies selected for late-life reproduction. And he shared data on how this all worked. From the fruitfly data, Rose then explained, we can learn a bit about why humans age in the way they do, with pressures of reproduction playing in as a major factor. Also, we can make use of data on the flies and other animals that suggests that species enter ...

Stephen Coles "Death is an imposition on the human race and can no longer be tolerated" - Alan Harrington With Harrington's quote,  Stephen Coles  opened his talk on whether or not there is a maximum limit to human lifespan at H+ @ Caltech in Los Angeles. As a biogerontologist, Coles studies old people, as well as old yeast, microscopic worms, flies and primates. Each of these species have lifespan limits, and, indeed, he answers, there is a maximum number of years that humans live. However, he adds, the more we understand aging, and the diseases that kill us, it is possible to extend life's max limit. "All bets are off if we can do something about it," Coles said. Although, he explains that the entire process of aging is so complex that it is sort of like the blind men touching the elephant because, if your blind, it has a different shape depending on where you're touching. Putting together the pieces that make up aging is the AMMG , which has met se...

Natasha Vita-More There have been quite a few interesting subjects discussed at H+ @ Caltech today regarding the future of the human experience in light of exponential increases of information, artificial intelligence and medical breakthroughs. But what's to become of humanity's long tradition of creating art and design that is used to express ourselves, as a way to communicate who we are, that exists as a projection of our own personas? This afternoon, cultural strategist and designer  Natasha Vita-More  discussed the question she is contemplating, "Will we wear technological interfaces as a means of expression, or will the technologies wear us?" In this new age of using digital avatars, or creating virtual personhoods, it is unclear how human-technology interfaces are going to change what we think of when we consider on our own personas. Vita-More discussed briefly her work in developing a prototype of a future body, a " Primo Post Human ," and how we may ...

Robert Tercek At H+ at Caltech (#hplus) this morning,  Robert Tercek  gave us an introduction to humanity as we know it and how a sudden increase of information will transform it forever. "The process of improving human life has always been governed by information," Tercek said. Now we're in this new information transformation age , or what he calls living in the era of B.S., or "before singularity." Just as electricity, vaccines and plumbing once radically changed health of humans in history, we will eventually gain the knowledge to completely change the way we think about health, as well as radically increase the human lifespan in the future. It will happen by using anti-aging therapies like those posed by Aubrey de Grey, as well as other scientists, increasing knowledge about the human genome, or in other ways never before thought. Plus, these huge increases of info are changing life as we know it in other ways; for example, the way we use energy today. ...

Loss of muscle mass is associated with aging. It is also associated with the metabolic syndrome, together with excessive body fat gain. It is safe to assume that having low muscle and high fat mass, at the same time, is undesirable. The extreme opposite of that, achievable though natural means, would be to have as much muscle as possible and as low body fat as possible. People who achieve that extreme often look a bit like “buff skeletons”. This post assumes that increasing muscle mass through strength training and proper nutrition is healthy. It looks into body fat levels, specifically how low body fat would have to be for health to be maximized. I am happy to acknowledge that quite often I am working on other things and then become interested in a topic that is brought up by Richard Nikoley , and discussed by his readers (I am one of them). This post is a good example of that. Obesity and the diseases of civilization Obesity is strongly associated with the diseases of civilization, o...