BatFlattery

Pretty impressed with the BBC’s Truth About Food programme: lots of scientific rigour brought to bear on some food myths that are prevalent in our unfortunately not-always-rational popular culture.

The one I really enjoyed looked at the food myth that annoys me the most: the “detox diet”. They took two groups of young, urban party-type girls, and put one on a detox diet and the other on a normal diet for a week. Result, predictably, was that the detox diet had absolutely no effect, apart from making the detox group feel really awful.

Another complete waste of time is drinking two litres of water a day to improve your skin.

But it’s not all about debunking unscientific nonsense. They also looked at some more evidence-based diet ideas, which include eating spinach to prevent or reverse macular degeneration, and eating tomatoes to protect against skin cancer. The trials proved their effectiveness.

Pretty good stuff! You can watch all the programmes on the website.

Today, driving past Kenwood House, the stately home on Hampstead Heath, I saw that barefoot doctor chappie from the telly, getting out of a black Audi TT in a cloud of cigarette smoke. He wasn’t barefoot. Obviously.

Further to this post, I need to report that I have officially Given Up on this diet. It doesn’t work for me. After weeks of losing absolutely zippo, the last straw was when I gained three kilograms on Monday. So I’ve stopped.

Reading the message boards at Seth’s site, it seems that there isn’t much success among those who only need to lose a few pounds: the big successes come from very overweight people or people who have a huge problem with food cravings. Allthough I did notice a reduction in appetite, I was obviously making up the calories I wasn’t eating, from the oil. Since I notice a similar reduction in appetite if I exercise properly, and since exercising makes me feel good and a lot more energetic anyway, I’m just making sure I get up earlier in the mornings so that I get the exercise out of the way first thing: no more excuses or trying to find the time later in the day. And it feels great to sit down to work, already exercised and showered, and ready to hit the day hard.

“A Geordie stroke victim woke from a coma speaking like a Jamaican islander.

Lynda Walker spent all 60 years of her life with a thick Geordie accent – but she now suffers from “foreign accent syndrome”.

…when she regained consciousness after a stroke in March last year, her family and friends were convinced she sounded like she was speaking Jamaican patois.”

Foreign Accent Syndrome

You may have heard of this new diet, the Shangri-La diet. I read about it on the Web and was intrigued. I’ve successfully used the Atkins diet in the past, but found it too difficult to maintain, so the weight has crept back on…

Anyway, this one sounded like a cool hack of the body’s appetite system. I read the author’s research and found myself impressed. So I started it a couple of weeks ago. The idea is that you take either a tablespoon of sugar dissolved in water, or a tablespoon of oil, twice a day, with at least an hour between it and any food or drink (except water) on both sides. That’s it. I started off with the sugar water in the morning and oil in the evening, but now I just take oil twice a day, it’s much easier and quicker.

Does it work? Absolutely no doubt. Most of the time I feel no hunger, and no interest in food. I used to constantly snack at home, but now, after a few trips to the fridge out of habit, I look at food, shrug, and carry on. I only eat lunch now, no breakfast, no dinner, except the odd yoghurt or piece of fruit. And it’s hard to explain, but you actually see food objectively. Last night I had a few spoons of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, and then put the tub back. Before, if I managed not to eat the entire tub after dinner, I felt I was doing well. I just wanted the taste, and that was enough. The craving for food is just gone.

The one slight hitch was the oil. The theory depends on using oil that is tasteless. In the US, it seems that extra-light olive oil (not extra-virgin) is entirely processed and has no taste. After a long search I found extra-light oil here, but it has a slight taste. The label says it has some virgin oil; apparently EU regs require this. But then I tried Floro sunflower oil. Perfect; virtually no taste.

Update: I’m not doing this diet any more; it doesn’t work for me.

One of my favourite current authors, the very insightful and well-researched Malcom Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, in debate about the relative merits of the American and Canadian healthcare systems:

If you look at the level of medical innovation in the world in the last 25 years, virtually everything comes from America. Absent America, medicine in the world is in the dark; it is retarded; it is at a level that all of us would find unacceptable. What is happening right now is that all these cheap single-payer systems are essentially poaching. They are cherry-picking off the American system. The American system is pumping money into research, has got this free market system which is incredibly dynamic and incredibly innovative. Everyone else just sits back and cherry picks all of the things we come up with. What happens if there’s no America tomorrow? What happens if we junk our system? Where does medical progress come from?

Which is something I’ve often thought myself. The day the Democrats get their NHS in the US of A, G-d forbid, will be a dark day for medicine.

A former professor of OB-GYN at a London hospital has admitted that a number of aborted babies survive the drug-induced labour that constitutes late-term abortion, because doctors fail to follow guidelines that require their hearts to be stopped while still in the womb:

“They can be born breathing and crying at 19 weeks’ gestation,” he said. “I am not anti-abortion, but as far as I am concerned this is sub-standard medicine.”

God forbid anyone should be anti-abortion, of course, but am I alone in finding it a tad – just a tad, mind – disturbing that in one operating theatre, doctors could be fighting to save the life of a premature infant, while in an adjoining one, a breathing, crying baby results from a deliberate inducement of premature delivery? And one must wonder how the staff manage to instantly switch from trying to end the baby’s life, to trying to save it, as they are required to do. Does it even happen?