Taking niacin for your cholesterol? This stuff from GNC is awesome. I’ve been taking 500mg of Niacin 2x a day for years now. As daily pill regimens go it’s relatively benign, but the 10 minutes or so of hot flashes and flushing 20 minutes after you take the pill sucks. I thought the no flush version from GNC would be a gimmick, and it’s a good bit more expensive, but man, it’s worth it. No flushing, no itching, no hot flashes. Well worth $15-20 more a month. If you’re taking Niacin you owe it to yourself to try this stuff.

Man, I don’t know when folks will get the message and really start paying attention to this. I suspect not until the generation this article refers to ends up swamping the health care system as the bills come due for not paying attention to their condition. For those who don’t want to click through on the link, it’s an article covering how 2/3rds of the folks with type 2 diabetes are basically doing little or nothing to manage their condition, which will ultimately lead to serious health complications as they age. I’ve said this before, the end-game for folks with unmanaged diabetes is spectacularly unpleasant – the best you can hope for is a sudden heart attack, but you’re more likely to suffer kidney and liver failures along with possible blindness and limb amputation before you get there. They should do shock therapy for these folks in the way they did for smoking when I was young (this is a healthy lung, this is the lung of a 20 year smoker, and hey, take a look at the guy with the hole in his throat). For what it’s worth, I’m not in that 2/3rds category.

One of the reasons I really wanted to get into a house this year is the lack of space my current place has. One of the casualties is my weight bench, it simply won’t fit in the cottage, so I lost access to it during the cold months. I used free weights all winter, but missed some of the exercises I used to do, especially the bench press. Now that it’s warmer I’ve been out in the barn lifting weights every night as I had been until it got too cold, and man am I unhappy with how far I’ve regressed. When I left off lifting in early December, I was doing three sets of 12 reps, pressing 130# plus the bar weight and starting to slip in 15 reps on the first and second set. My first session this year, 2 weeks ago, I couldn’t even do 3 sets of 5 reps at that weight. I’m up to 3 sets of 6 but still, how pathetic is that. I’m not yet sure how I’m going to address this next winter, but I do know I’m going to deal with it somehow, even if the damned weight bench ends up in my living room.

Stupid Medscape and their retarded scheme for enforcing site registration – I can’t puzzle out how to link to the article they published this week that summarizes recent research in clinical trials that indicated that consumption of as much as a gram of wheat albumin before eating reduced post prandial blood sugar levels by as much as 30%. This is the second trial in less than a month demonstrating consumption of specific compounds can lead to dramatic glycemic control. And it’s the second one in a month where said compound is something I can’t seem to actually lay my hands on. Anyone got a source of pure wheat albumin? It’s in wheat naturally but I can’t eat wheat products because the carb content causes dangerous blood sugar levels.

Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools weblog suggested using Zanfel Poison Ivy Cream as an immediate and effective cure for Poison Ivy and other similar ills. I’m skeptical but most folks seem to agree that it really works. Given the dog and the presence of poison ivy in the northeast I’m going to take the precaution of ordering myself a tube. Worth a look if you’ve struggled with poison ivy in the past, even at the pretty steep $40/ounce price point.

I eat 2-3 pounds of raw almonds a week, and perhaps as much as 5 pounds of nuts and seeds in total. Shocking isn’t it? They’re one of my primary sources of protein. This gets expensive – at close to $7 a pound for the good kind, almonds cost substantially more than almost any other protein source I could buy. I’ve been looking for ways to save myself money on this. My average weekly grocery bill comes in at about $150, of which about $50-60 is seeds and nuts. Happily, I discovered this ebay auction. With shipping they ended up costing me just under $4 a pound, a substantial savings, and the nuts were much fresher than anything I’ve managed to get outside of a Trader Joe’s. They’re smaller than the ones I usually eat, but if you have an almond habit like mine, this is definitely the way to go.

Now I just need to find equivalent bargains on pecans and sunflower seeds.

What’s old is new again. Recent research shows that consumption of a beverage that contains the herb Salacia Oblonga, which has been used as medicinally in India for ages, helped folks reduce their post-prandial blood sugars by more than 25%. That would easily bring me into ‘human normal’ range. I’m going to try and acquire some to test on myself.

[edit] So I’ve been looking for sources of this herb on the net and not finding anything, aside from an indian import/export site where you can bid on bulk lots of the raw herb. I’ve already been burned once importing a bunch of stuff from india so I’m a bit leery, on the other hand the idea sort of intrigues me. Anyone want to go in on a lot of Salacia that we’ll then process down into extract for ebay sales? We’ll make a killing, I promise! (mostly kidding, though Andrew, you’re a likely candidate!)