New research suggests that eating curry regularly is more effective at preventing the onset of Alzheimers than any current drug regimen. The article I’m linking to also notes that India has one of the lowest incidences of Alzheimers globally. I found this on the excellent boingboing.net. Hamiltons of the Yule extraction should make note of this and eat your curries – it’s in your genetic makeup, which we know from our great grandparents, so get busy with the indian food.

Jesus. It’s no revelation that modern industrial society is poisoning us in ways obvious and subtle. New research shows the stuff in rocket fuel is found in overabundant quantities in lettuce and milk. I eat salads comprised of amongst other things red and green leaf lettuce 2 times a day, usually 6 days a week. Because of the diabetes there’s not much I can do about this, I need sustenance and this rocket fuel stuff is less likely to kill me in the short term than high blood sugars will, but …shit! I’d love to get my hands on the decision makers who allow this stuff to be dumped into our water supply.

When I moved to NY I had to give up most of my exercise equipment – there simply isn’t enough space in my cottage for the array of equipment I had in my basement in Maine. I kept my weight bench and stored it here in NY, but everything else went. Tearing a muscle in my abdomen kept me from exercising for all of September and October, and it’s only now that I’ve felt good enough to workout again. But what to do for a workout? It’s gotten too chilly (and dark) to run, and too cold out in the barn to lift weights.

I’ve mentioned in the past my minor interest in exercise equipment hooked up to videogame machines. Along those lines, I went out and bought a Dance Dance Revolution dance pad, and I’ve been dancing away in the evenings. It’s a surprisingly effective cardiovascular workout. I have to constantly remind myself of this fact when I’m working out since I feel like a complete ass doing it. But what can you do – it’s actually superior to using an exercise bike, though a bit harder on the knees and ankles. And the equipment stows neatly away behind the shelving in my office. My only complaint aside from the embarrassment factor is that mostly the music that comes with the games is just plain bad, there are no tracks on the cd’s I have that I would actually listen to if I weren’t playing this game. I’ve also discovered that true to the stereotype, I have no rhythm. It does feel great to be working out again though. It’s depressing how quickly my hard earned physique has faded – I used to rattle off 75-100 crunches a night and could do 3 sets of 30 pushups easily. 2.5 months off and I can barely do 2 sets of 15 crunches and 2 sets of 20 pushups. That’s the bad news, the good news is I know what it will take to get me back to where I was, and I know I’ll have no problem doing it, it will just take some time.

…I’m not quite dead yet! Another trip to the docs this week, more prepscriptions (an anti-inflamatory this time) and more theories about what’s been going on. Short version: fainting/passing out – bad reaction to the antibiotic. Abdominal pain: combination of ecoli infection which is now almost certainly gone, and a muscle tear somewhere in my abdominal region, this last item leading to the anti-inflamatory. As you can imagine, I’m much relieved, though since the diagnosis and prognosis have been wrong once already on this I’m still a little apprehensive. I’m waiting on lab test results and also have to go back in for bloodwork and a followup visit, all of which I hope will ultimately lead to a clean bill of health.

Meanwhile I am definitely feeling much better, and the doc even cleared me to return to exercising and even better, drinking coffee 😉

So…this place is going to be quiet for a while, sorry to say. I’m getting sicker rather than better, starting to think something else is going on with my health beyond the initial diagnosis. I had fainting spells this weekend and the worst attack of whatever it is that ails me on Friday night. The dizzyness seems to come and go and the fainting spells where I literally had to fall down have only happened twice so far, but as you might imagine they were freaky scary. Meanwhile I can’t get in to see a doctor no matter what I try, the best I’ve managed is an appointment for this coming Monday. I now think I can’t wait that long and am heading back to the emergency clinic this afternoon as soon as the dizzyness passes. Assuming nothing dramatic happens I’ll post here with details on what happens from that.

Yahoo has a story about a new alternative to LASIK eye surgery that’s just been approved for use in the US. Some of the potential downsides actually sound scarier than the ones with LASIK, but alternatives are always good and if they can solve the potential degeneration issues this could be a great solution, especially if it’s cheaper than LASIK. Basically they implant a lense in your eye in this technique.

I’m always on the lookout for replacements for the starches I can no longer eat. Spaghetti squash or julienned zuchini have replaced pasta, for example, and cauliflower has replaced mashed potatoes. But I’ve struggled to find a satisfying replacement for rice in asian cooking. Until this weekend, anyway. When I was in New York a month or so ago, I noticed an atkins-friendly meal on a chinese take out joint’s menu that mentioned mung bean sprouts in place of rice. I tried it this weekend and it’s great, finally something satisfying to lay my chinese food down on top of. Mung bean sprouts are already found extensively in chinese cooking, so they’re a natural fit. I also suspect this will be good with indian food though, I’ll test that sometime in the next week or so. They’re relatively inexpensive too, and easy to prepare, I just steam them for 10 minutes or so.

News like this really freaks me out. The article covers how a chemical used in the manufacture of teflon which is very likely a carcinogen is in all of our bloodstreams to a troubling level. Did you ever chuckle at the romans, who used lead pipes and drinking vessels and got addle-brained as a result? 1000 years of technological advances and we’re not much better apparently. But hey, go ahead and vote for the republican agenda with it’s preference for reduced government oversight of big business. Who knows what other lovely cocktails they’ll manage to expose us to.

In my ongoing quest to perfect my approach to managing my health issues, my doctor and I agreed 2 months ago to try doubling the dosage of Niacin that I take daily. The goal was to further reduce my triglycerides. The good news is it worked, cutting them by a third and bringing them into a comfortable range. The bad news is, it also scoured my system of 1/4 of the HDL I had been getting the two previous tests, dropping me to 30 from 39 – I have been struggling desperately to get that number up over 40 so this was a major bummer. Back to 500mg Niacin twice daily instead of 1000mg, and possibly this means some form of statin for me in the coming months, something which I have been trying really hard to not do. Sigh. One step forward, one back.

Have you noticed how most produce now has a tiny little sticker on it these days? Like me you probably figured they were just a convenience for the staff at the checkout. As with many things, it turns out that there’s more to it than that. Those little stickers provide both routing information and details on how the produce was grown. Check the link for more details.