A new supervillain: Wheat

I got a link from Facebook to a interesting 10 minute talk on how wheat is bad for you.  There are no shortage of videos on the net about weight loss and how to live of course but this one seemed pretty legit especially given recent conversations I have had with people who are attempting to cut wheat out of their diets or at least drastically reduce consumption.  The trick with evaluating the truth of these sorts of claims is usually figuring out where the money is.  The video in question suggest you check out the link to the book which has a huge ass webpage explaining how great the program is and how important it is that you buy now.  Well gee, hyuck, if some dude on the internet says so, I better buy now!

Thing is, there is no guarantee that just because somebody is making money off a scheme that they are wrong.  I could sell a book using questionable marketing tactics that tells everyone to get one hour of exercise a day and eat nothing but green vegetables and it would undoubtedly make them healthy and slimmer - nothing wrong with the technique.  The devil is in the details and I expect that the people promoting the 'wheat is the only thing wrong with your diet' propaganda are partly right and partly wrong.  Eating stacks of Starbucks cakes, fast food burger buns and commercial cookies is obviously awful for you - the sugar, the wheat, all bad.  Eating a multigrain loaf of bread is unlikely to be an issue as long as the rest of your diet is reasonable.  Attributing nearly every possible ailment to wheat consumption is a great way to boost your 'don't eat wheat' diet program but not particularly truthful.

I recall the mantra of In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

Eat food.
Mostly plants.
Not too much.

Where food is something that doesn't come with an ingredients list.  If they have to list the ingredients then it isn't food.  If you can't tell what the ingredients are, it isn't food.  Follow that very simple formula and you can't go too wrong.  People can live and be healthy on everything from a pure meat diet like the Inuit from northern Canada to vegetarian or omnivorous diets all over the world.  The trouble comes from 'food' made in factories and the attendant Metabolic Syndrome, diabetes, and obesity.  Cutting down wheat consumption is probably a great idea for lots of people but we shouldn't confuse it with the obvious, simple solution of making sure we eat food.  You want to be healthy?  Eat this.

Liability at school, once again

It seems that I have been breaking the rules while volunteering at Elli's school.  I have been doing my Milk Monitor and Board Games Club duties without having filled out the mandatory Police Record Check Form which requires me to pay $17 so that the police can tell the school that I am not a convicted criminal with a history of underage victims.  Just to be clear, I can walk around the school without a Record Check, I can volunteer at various school events, raise a child, babysit, run other children's events, and any manner of other child centric things without a Record Check but I cannot stand in the lunchroom near several other staff members and sell milk.  This is of course because this Record Check nonsense has nothing to do with protecting the kids and everything to do with the dread spectre of liability.

Not only do I have to cough up the cash for it but I also have to wait 6 to 8 weeks for the Record Check to be completed.  Of course this means that all the new volunteers at the school can't legally volunteer for a couple months after they find out about this which means cancelling a bunch of school programs until 2012.  As usual the people involved find themselves desperately trying to balance the liability requirements with the reality that none of the volunteers is going to do anything wrong and that the regulations designed to 'protect' the children are just making their lives worse.  I can almost see the desperate wish of the administration:  "Just volunteer, do your job and don't under any circumstances let me know that you haven't completed your Record Check!"

All I ask is that I be told what work needs to be done and allowed to do the work and the regulations deny even that at every turn.

Madness in the Mediterranean

While I have a lot of sympathy for the Occupy The World protesters (if not necessarily all the things they ask for) I find myself feeling exactly the opposite way about the Greek protests.  Their economy is a shambles and their country came within a whisker of having to default on their loans, withdraw from the EU, go back to their own currency, and witness catastrophic inflation and massive economic collapse and yet they are violently protesting the very measures that are plugging the holes in the dam.

Picture from http://libcom.org/files/liveimages_foto-haber_yunanistanda-ofke-dinmiyor_r12162430[1].jpg

This isn't peaceful but belligerent demand for change but rather throwing molotov cocktails and gasoline bombs at police.  It is true that they have plenty to be angry about as their government is taking away money and rights that the Greeks thought they had for life and there is a very justified perception that the rich countries of France and Germany are the driving force behind these unpleasant changes.  That said, there is no logical basis for this protest.  At least the Occupy protesters are getting attention, being nonviolent and have achievable goals - the Greek protests are utterly hopeless.  What could they possibly get that would satisfy them aside from the rest of Europe pouring more and more money in an endless upward spiral into Greece?  They already know that down that road lies isolation and disaster as the EU will not put up with it.

So now they scream and shout and loot and burn and shut down the country for days to tell the government that instead of austerity they want catastrophe.  The demands that the government continue to pay out as it has always done are an impossibility; there is no way in which that can occur.  The solution now is to get the government to act quickly to resolve the situation as best it can and work to try to rebuild.  Here we have a disastrous example of fear of loss destroying any rational attempt at a solution.  The people of Greece fear losing their benefits and they fear a collapse but there is no appropriate weighting of those two things.  They are rushing into a burning building to recover a wallet left behind in a dresser drawer and they don't seem to see that the building is going to collapse long before they can get out again.

A book that matters

I just finished reading Willpower:  Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.  You should read this book, all of you.  Often I will recommend a book as a very good way to understand a topic or as very amusing but rarely would I suggest that a book could seriously improve your life.  This book could seriously improve your life.

I have always been intrigued by the subject of delaying gratification and self control and ever since I can remember I have taken these things to extremes.  The classic experiment in this field is the marshmallow test - give a child a marshmallow and tell them they can eat it but that if they do not eat it for 15 minutes they can have another one.  (I was the sort of kid who, upon receiving the second one, would ask if I could wait another 15 minutes to get a third.  I don't know that my level of saving and hoarding is actually beneficial, mind.)  The experiment showed that kids who waited for the second marshmallow had better lives by nearly any measure because self control is so critical to making good choices and ending up happy.  Willpower outlines very clearly what self control actually is in physical terms and how understanding the way that self control works allows us to understand why and when we make bad decisions so that we can avoid those situations.  The book won't tell you what choices to make but rather how to make sure that you are in a frame of mind to make the decisions required to live the life that you choose.

I really like that in Willpower the authors make it clear that losing self control isn't a moral choice but rather one that can be explained in medical terms.  It is a break from the mindset that people who can't control their spending / weight / compulsive internet usage are simply weak or bad.  Self control is shown to be something that is very much affected by our food, how long we have been awake, how many decisions we have had to make so far in the day and other environmental factors.  It is also something that we can practice becoming better at!  The book details ways in which we can practice self control and by doing so improve our willpower.  The book talks about David Blaine who is known for crazy feats of endurance and self control like sitting in a glass box without food for 44 days and how he prepares himself for such incredible tests of willpower.  He spends every part of every day utterly, totally regimented and does everything in precisely the correct way, allowing himself no deviation.  In short he prepares his mind for feats of self control in the same way athletes prepare their bodies for feats of strength.

So much of our society's ills can be traced to a breakdown of self control that I can't help but think that if everyone read this book and took the lessons to heart we would all be tremendously better off.  Accidents are usually preventable if people have the self control to prepare ahead of time.  Debt, addiction, and unhealthy life habits can be headed off at the pass if the person involved understands when they are most vulnerable to temptation and how to arrange life such that they have enough willpower left to make the correct choice when the critical time arrives.  Knowing what they *should* do is rarely the biggest problem for people, the issue is managing to do the right thing when the time arrives.

The book also talks about the benefits of religion in assisting with willpower.  It turns out that people can substantially improve their self control by outsourcing decision making to a higher power.  Rather than considering the pros and cons they can simply decide that "God doesn't want me to drink" and this helps them to do what they know they need to do.  The authors are agnostics but they do recognize the benefits such a belief set can have on self control.  It is of course a bit beyond the scope of the book but we should note that outsourcing your decision making to God also has the potential drawback that you might end up deciding that "God wants me to strap explosives to myself and kill random people" and avoid thinking about the pros and cons of that, which is somewhat less beneficial.

I think I should take the book's advice to heart and try to do things to improve my self control.  A few months ago I decided to improve my posture and to consciously sit up straight and walk tall all the time but now I am looking for something new to do.  After a bit of considering I decided to refuse to watch porn for 6 months.  Being a pretty normal sort of 30 something male I usually watch porn regularly but in small doses and have done so for as long as the internet has been easily available to me.  I see absolutely nothing wrong with watching porn so long as doing so isn't being detrimental to the rest of a person's life but I do think that it is the sort of thing that is unnecessary and yet potentially challenging to cut out completely.  I will think of it as a couple of extras pushups every day for my willpower muscle.

Photo taken from Amazon.com  http://www.amazon.ca/Willpower-Roy-F-Baumeister/dp/1594203075

A picture

Check this picture out:

No, this is not a still from the Radiers of the Lost Ark scene when the ark is opened, but an absolutely magnificent image of southern Chile's Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano spewing lightning-topped ash. Wow. Ricardo Mohr's photo was selected as one of National Geographic's "Pictures We Love: Best of October."


The quote above and the picture are from boingboing.net, though they were just sharing it from elsewhere.  Holy crap, the world is awesome.  

Self Improvement

Recently I have been too addicted to my new game Glitch so I decided to order in some books for self improvement.  Michael Lewis is an author I enjoyed when I read his The Big Short and I found a few other books by him at the library, namely The Real Price of Everything and Liar's Poker.  I ordered them in from the library and when I went to pick them up I noticed something:  The Real Price of Everything is quite large enough to crush a small nation.  Also, Wendy had World War Z on hold too.

A good person with strong inclinations towards a better understanding of economics and the fiscal world would plunge right into the gigantic tome which contains wisdom from many famous economists like Kinsey and Adam Smith but instead I read the simple Liar's Poker.  It was a fun story of the shenanigans on Wall Street in the 80s and it reminded me of my adventures in medical sales - get in, make a bunch of money, get disgusted with the whole thing and leave.  Any guesses as to which bundle of knowledge I pick up next?  A hint:  It probably has more to do with the zombie apocalypse than monetary theory.

So much for self improvement.

Movember

Ziggyny reminded me of Movember. (The mustache growing fundraiser for prostate cancer and men's health in November.)  I find it a very strange sort of event because so much of what we are told about prostate cancer is completely backwards.  I am a bit torn because trying to raise awareness of health issues and get them recognized as general topics rather than hushing them up is a fantastic goal.  We as a society benefit hugely when we can comfortably discuss health issues instead of surrounding them with shame and a shroud of lack of information.  We do have to be careful exactly how we go about doing this though.  For example, I recently have seen several advertisements on bus stops and subway walls talking about prostate cancer and advocating that people like me go get tested.  We shouldn't listen to the posters because right now the treatments for prostate cancer are so unreliable in actually making us live longer and so reliable in their hideous side effects that pretty near nobody should be treated.  You should not be tested for ailments we do not have effective treatment for.

Of course I would love to have an effective prostate cancer treatment that doesn't leave huge numbers of people impotent or with serious urinary problems.  Research is definitely a good prospect since this is a widespread disease with no effective cure.  I won't be growing a mustache for Movember (though I will have facial hair as usual) since I generally refuse to take part in charity that pretty much revolves around me trying to wheedle money out of my friends.  If they want to donate to charities I heartily encourage it (Doctors Without Borders or the World Food Program are my favourites currently) but I don't like using a random event to try to pry money out of them.

Overall the Movember site is good and really covers a broad range of useful topics but they seem to avoid laying out the uncomfortable facts about prostate cancer treatment - probably because you aren't going to encourage trips to the doctor and screening if you tell people how bad the treatment really is.  "So, want to find out if you have a disease that has a treatment that regularly causes impotence?  No?"  That said, the general goals of education, positive lifestyle alterations and demystification are excellent.  Walking around barefoot got me into lots of interesting conversations where I was able to teach people all kinds of things that would normally never come up; mustaches in November would serve the same purpose it would seem.

So yes, eat better, go to the doctor and be tested for things when you need to and be open and honest about health concerns.  Just don't worry about prostate cancer, as it will either kill you or not and there isn't much to be done about it at the moment.