Here's a first draft view of an ErgoApron experiment from late 2020:

apron + velcro + keyboard + trackpad = flexible ergonomics

A recent study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology by Gidding SS, et al and Zhang Y, et al. showed that elevated BP and LDL cholesterol in young adults increased the risk for cardiovascular events later in life. How much later? The study followed people for an average of 17 years and noted 4,570 coronary heart disease events, 2,862 strokes, and 5,119 heart failure events out of 36,030 patients. They started at age 18 to 39 and then evaluated after age 40. That is a total of 12, 551 heart related events or 35% of that group had an event in 17 years of follow-up. If the LDL was less than 100, the risk was nullified. If the systolic BP was less than 120mmHg the risk was nullified, and if the diastolic BP or bottom number was less than 70 the risk was nullified. If a young adult had a BP of 130 vs 120 there was a 37% increase in risk for coronary heart disease. A diastolic BP of 80 vs. 70 was associated with a 21% increased risk of coronary heart disease.

The conclusion of this study was that this young population needs to be screened and treated aggressively. Unfortunately, that means adding medications earlier to treat numbers instead of directing care to reverse disease. Hypertension and high cholesterol are not reversed by medication. The mere fact that we are seeing younger people with lifestyle diseases earlier is a manifestation of lifelong poor eating habits. The norm to eat take out food and fast food multiple times a week is a relatively new phenomena. Younger people are exposed to highly processed foods from the time they start taking solid albeit soft foods. Children are wean to soft breads, cakes, processed vegetables and meats and dairy. Lack of jaw bone and muscle development as been associated with poor breathing habits and a much greater need for corrective orthodontics. Research estimates 7 out of 10 millennials are overweight or obese versus 50% of baby boomers.

We must start taking personal responsibility for this trend. It starts with recognizing that nutrition is the key to health and at the root of lifestyle diseases. Eating habits form in childhood. Sugary foods and drinks become the norm for sweetness. There is a huge fiber deficiency in teens and young adults leading to an abnormal microbiome. This is associated with abnormal calorie extraction from foods, abnormal cravings and a general inflammatory state. Excessive acne and being overweight is associated with increased hormonal intake from animal proteins and dairy. Colleges attract potential students by their array of fast food choices. Dinning hall cards are used on high salt, high fat foods. There is no education on healthy eating for the students. This results in the college weight gain of 10-30 pounds that is looked on as a right of passage. Many athletes are overweight and calorie restrict and binge to control their weight because of lack of education. There is no safe dose of fast foods.

People continue to eat poorly once out of school and often become more sedentary. They attempt to control their weight with low carbohydrate, high fat diets that are admittedly unsustainable resulting in “cheat days”. The end result is a high fat, high sodium, high calorie diet leading to cardiovascular disease.

This is clearly a reversible condition. If people were becoming sick because of bad water, there would be warnings not to drink the water. We are treating the food borne illness of hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia with medicine instead of cleaning up the nutrition. Health care providers from nursing assistants, to registered nurses, to physicians should be examples of good nutrition choices. I hear the excuse that the hospital cafeteria has poor choices as well. Vote with your dollars. Don’t eat in the hospital cafeteria. Bring food from home. Do not poison yourself in the name of convenience. Don’t be afraid to say that food causes lifestyle diseases and I am not interested. If you say it enough and remain consistent, people will get the message.

Take back your health and the health of your family. There is no room to settle when it comes to your health. If you need some guidance, check our our website at http://doctordulaney.com

We would love to help you and your family get healthy and remain healthy.

The New York Times ran a piece warning retirees thinking of moving overseas that Medicare will not cover their medical expenses in other countries. This is true, but the NYT piece never once pointed out that this is conscious policy, not something that just happened.

Readers of the paper may recall that it reports on trade agreements all the time. These trade agreements cover a wide range of issues, including things like enforcing patent and copyright monopolies and rules on Internet commerce and privacy.

If anyone in the United States in a position of power cared, then it would be possible to include transferring Medicare payments to other countries, to allow people to buy into other nations' health care system on the list of topics being negotiated. This doesn't happen because, unlike access to cheap labor for manufactured goods, there is no one in power who wants to make it easier for people in the United States to take advantage of lower cost and more efficient health care systems elsewhere.

While such a policy could potentially save the U.S. government an enormous amount of money on Medicare (costs in other rich countries average less than half as much per person), the health care industry would scream bloody murder if any politician attempted to implement free trade in health care services. "Free trade," as it is conventionally used in U.S. policy debates, just means removing barriers that protect less educated workers from foreign competition.

The New York Times, like other mainstream publications will not even allow free trade to be discussed in its pages in contexts where it might hurt the interests of the wealthy.

Dan Lyke:

Coinbase’s Newest Team Members Helped Authoritarians Worldwide Monitor Journalists and Dissidents:

This history, which Coinbase has now acknowledged it was aware of before the acquisition, has made Hacking Team a long-running target of criticism in cybersecurity and civil rights circles. In 2013, Hacking Team was named one of five Corporate Enemies of the Internet by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), an international nonprofit aimed at protecting journalists. Hacking Team’s collaboration with authoritarians may have been ideologically motivated rather than merely mercenary: Its founder and former CEO, David Vincenzetti, regularly signed emails with the slogan “Boi chi Molla”—an Italian Fascist rallying cry.

I have long had a hard time picturing what day, night and the shape of the terminator would look like on Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map. Well yesterday I wrote some code and now I know! It sort-of feels like two weird spirals turning in opposite directions. Video here.

Skip ahead about half way to see it with satellite imagery instead of flat coloring. That version is a little dark, so you'll want to full-screen it.

Anyway, Planet Flatland has a very strange sun, is what I'm saying.

This update will be in the next release of XScreenSaver but I figured I'd post the video now anyway, because it's neat.

Oh yeah, also,

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." -- R. Buckminster Fuller, 1970

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

The heart of a traditional Mediterranean diet is mainly vegetarian—much lower in meat and dairy than a standard Western diet—and uses fruit for dessert! So, it’s no surprise that those eating that way had very low heart disease rates compared to those eating standard Western diets. My video Mediterranean Diet & Atherosclerosis gives the lowdown on the link between the fats we eat and the health of our arteries.

A landmark study has been cited to suggest that all types of fat—whether animal or vegetable—are associated with the appearance of new atherosclerotic lesions in our coronary arteries, which feed our hearts. About 100 men were given angiograms at baseline and then again two years later, looking for the development of coronary lesions, all while monitoring their diets every year. Only about 1 in 20 eating lower fat diets had new lesions, compared to about 8 in 20 on more typical American diets of around 33% or more fat. But, when the researchers drilled down, only three types of fat appeared to increase significantly the likelihood of the appearance of new lesions: lauric, oleic, and linoleic. Lauric acid is a saturated fat found in coconut oil and palm kernel oil, which can be found in such junk foods as whipped cream and candy bars. Oleic comes from the Latin word oleum, for olive oil, but that’s not where the subjects of this study were getting their oleic acid: The top sources for Americans are cake, chicken, and pork, and linoleic comes mostly from chicken. So, the study really just showed that people eating lots of junk, chicken, and pork tended to close off their coronary arteries.

To see if major sources of plant fats like olive oil or nuts help or hurt, ideally we’d do a multi-year, randomized study where we’d take thousands of people, have one-third eat more nuts, another third eat more olive oil, and the final third do essentially nothing, and then see who does better. And that’s exactly what researchers did. The PREDIMED study took thousands of people in Spain who were at high risk for heart disease and were already eating a Mediterranean-ish diet, and randomized them into three groups for a couple of years—one group with added extra virgin olive oil, a second with added nuts, and a third group that was told to cut down on fat, but actually didn’t, so basically ended up as a no-dietary-changes control group. What happened to the amount of plaque in their arteries over time?

Whereas there was significant worsening of carotid artery thickening and plaque in the no-dietary-changes control group, those in the added-nuts group showed a significant reversal in thickening and an arrest in plaque progression. There were no significant changes in the added olive oil group.

“The richness of the plant-based MedDiet [Mediterranean diet] in potentially beneficial foods, such as fruit, vegetables, legumes, nuts, cereals, and olive oil, is believed to explain its cardioprotective effects.” However, these results suggest nuts are a preferable source of fat compared to olive oil and may “delay the progression of atherosclerosis, the harbinger of future cardiovascular events” such as stroke. Adding nuts appeared to cut the risk of stroke in half.

Note, though, they were still having strokes, albeit half as many. So, the nuts appeared to be helping. However, they were still eating a diet conducive to strokes and heart attacks. All three groups had basically the same heart attack rates, the same overall death rates. That’s what Dr. Ornish, a proponent of a mostly whole foods, plant-based diet, noted when he commented on the study: “There was no significant reduction in the rates of heart attack, death from cardiovascular causes, or death from any cause,” only that stroke benefit. But, hey, that’s not nothing. A Mediterranean diet is certainly better than what most people are consuming, but a diet based on whole plant foods may be even better, since it’s shown to reverse heart disease, not contribute to it. The authors of the study replied that they didn’t wish to detract from Ornish’s work, noting that Mediterranean and plant-based diets actually share a great number of foods in common. Yes, Ornish’s diet can reverse heart disease. The major problem with the Ornish diet, argued proponents of the Mediterranean diet, is that it doesn’t taste good, so hardly anyone sticks to it.

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If you’d like to learn more, I bring up the Ornish back-and-forth in my 2015 annual live review, Food as Medicine: Preventing and Treating Our Most Dreaded Diseases with Diet, and directly address the accusation that plant-based diets are marked by poor compliance for disease prevention and reversal. For a shorter overview on heart disease, check out How Not to Die from Heart Disease.

For more on the famous PREDIMED trial and the body of evidence surrounding Mediterranean diets, I’ve got a bunch of good videos for you:

• Why Was Heart Disease Rare in the Mediterranean?
• The Mediterranean Diet or a Whole Food Plant-Based Diet?
• PREDIMED: Does Eating Nuts Prevent Strokes?
• Which Parts of the Mediterranean Diet Extended Life?
• Do Flexitarians Live Longer?
• Improving on the Mediterranean Diet
• Best Foods to Reduce Stroke Risk

What might happen to the arteries of someone who goes on a low-carb diet? You don’t want to know. (But, if you’re really curious, see: Low Carb Diets and Coronary Blood Flow.)

What we eat doesn’t only have an impact on the structure of our arteries over the long-term (i.e., the thickening and narrowing described in the video), but the function of our arteries within hours of consumption. To see what your breakfast may have done to your arteries, check out:

• Eggs and Artery Function
• Walnuts and Artery Function
• Dark Chocolate and Artery Function
• Coffee and Artery Function
• Fatty Meals May Impair Artery Function
• Olive Oil and Artery Function

Note, though, the benefits of plant-based nutrition can be undermined by vitamin B12 deficiency if you don’t include a regular reliable source in your diet. See Vitamin B12 Necessary for Arterial Health.

In health,

Michael Greger, M.D.

PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my free videos here and watch my live, year-in-review presentations:

• 2012: Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death
• 2013: More Than an Apple a Day
• 2014: From Table to Able: Combating Disabling Diseases with Food
• 2015: Food as Medicine: Preventing and Treating the Most Dreaded Diseases with Diet
• 2016: How Not To Die: The Role of Diet in Preventing, Arresting, and Reversing Our Top 15 Killers