Changes

There have been a couple of interesting and unexpected changes due to my new diet.  I thought I'd pass them along.

About six months before I retired I started to unconsciously shake my head a bit.  This is know as a tick and it's not considered to be harmful unless you can't stop it from happening -- that's what Dr. Google says.  Most of the time I was not aware that I was doing it and when I did notice I was able to control it.  I figured that it was part of getting old and thought no more about it.

But with the loss of weight and diet changes, the tick seems to have gone away.  A friend mentioned that I don't seem to do it anymore and while I hadn't noticed it, I had to agree.

One of the things that occurs with too much insulin in the blood stream, caused by too much carb intake is that the organs and torso area become fat.  Fatty liver disease is now common among non-drinkers and even children these days.  I suspect I also had some of this.  One of the other organs that gets fat is the tongue!  I used to bit my tongue on occasion in the recent past.  Of course as it swelled due to the trauma, I would usually manage to bite it again.  I've not had a bit tongue in months.  I do not miss it, it was unpleasant.  This fattening is one of the problems casing sleep apnea and poor breathing of heavy folks.

That's the latest word from the diet front.  Now, I'm off to make some Keto cookies!

A Run In with the Hell's Angels

Hmm, do they use the possessive apostrophe?   Not important to our snippet of a story, so do not worry dear readers.

It was this morning, a Friday.  The week had flown by, it seemed like Tuesday or something to me.  I had to check my watch to be sure of the day. 

Fridays are early pickleball games.  I was on the freeway at 6:40 and heading east.  The traffic was busy.  This is not the busy direction and with the virus and all, it should have been lighter.  As a proxy for recovery, one might want to take note of that.  I was in the second from the right lane and heading down only a couple of miles.  I heard, then saw the chopper two lanes to my left.  I was going 70 or so.  The car doesn't really go much faster.

The Angel was doing better than that.  Perhaps with a devil may care attitude towards the laws and mores of a just and fair society, priding itself on inclusion and universal comfort.  But he was moving along quickly and passed me.  I'm not sure I've ever seen a real Hell's Angel in situ before.  I had a co-worker who played in a band that played in seedy bars.  They were entertaining one motorcycle gang one evening and then the word was passed that the Angels were going to arrive.  The other social group decided to vacate as the threat of non-peaceable interaction was afloat.

I moved over to the right lane and then into the exit ramp.  It's a long sweeper and dead ends at a light that you rarely catch as the cross street is a state highway.  Today was no exception and as I approached the red light, low and behold here was the Angel in the left hand right turn lane.  My lane too and I stopped behind him.

This was the chance to do a bit of studying.  He had the jacket on with his colors.  Classic Hell's Angels logo, recognizable world wide.  Then there was a pseudo Germanic world war two helmet which also had a sticker on it with the same logo.  One might expect a "Live Free or Die" sticker there too.  It it was there I couldn't see it.

The bike was a Harley, of course.  What was the old line?  "Better my sister in a whore house than my brother on a Honda."  It didn't make it to an advertising brochure, but was in general circulation at some point in my distant past.

Saddlebags - expected but not made of leather.  Looked like a synthetic, heavy nylon with a bit of droop to them.  The bike looked in good condition.  Nothing old or classical that I could see.

Moving down were jeans.  But they might not have been Levi's.  Seemed to have some cargo pockets on them.  A bit unexpected there, clean too, no wear or dirt at all.  And then finally we move down to the boots.  Surely heavy duty leather with chains and a "stomp on the world" look to them.

But no.  I'm startled.  He's is wearing some jogging shoes, trainers for you Brits, track shoes!  Not black either.  These were a surprisingly bright red colored.  High tops?  Nope, somewhat slipper like in design.  I was shocked, shocked.  Had these young fellows who fly the open road with impunity become joggers or civilized to this this extent?

Then the light changed and the turn arrow lighted and we had official permission to be on our way, to join the main road and get on  with our day's activities.  The Angel's bike made some noise at it got up to speed.  He carved into the turn and crossed a couple of lanes to head south down the highway.

My pickleball courts still lay to the east and I motored down to the left turn lanes at the first exit.  I braked gently to a halt to wait for another light change and for a few moments could see and hear the Angel move off down the road.

Catching Up

I see that I've been remiss in adding to this description of the great plague of 2020.  Let me try and catch up with what is happening and what the future in the short term might hold.

The data are still unclear as to what is really going on.  Was the lock down a good thing?  Hard to say and how would you measure it?  The official numbers in re the viral deaths are hopelessly jumbled.  So the concept of All Cause Mortality is the one number that is probably useful.

I was not familiar with the ACM until lately.  Oh, Barb has bandied it about a few times but it didn't really register with me as to its usefulness.  Then I got into some of the science being done around low carb diets and sodium intake and other factors.  Then the proverbial light went on.  In the area of epidemiology you can seek to assign weight to a variable by looking at ACM.  You group your data and then screen for something.  For example you look at sodium intake.  You hopefully are able to measure the actual amount of sodium ingested for a group, then subdivide the group by intake amount and over time you see who lives the longest.

There are problems with a lot of this kind of thing.  For example did you measure the actual intake, are the subgroups similar enough to draw conclusions, an issue might be that in one group they all smoked and in another alcohol consumption was very high or low of just different?  If you can't control these other things then you can't in good faith conclude that the mortality is due to sodium intake.

What you see with these studies is a U shaped curve with mortality on the Y axis and intake of sodium on X axis.  Your mortality is high if you have not enough sodium and lower if you have the proper amount and tending to climb as you have too much.  The bottom of a U curve can drop below the 1.0 line, which is the probability of death being "average."  If it drops below 1.0 then you could conclude that a certain amount of the sodium would be protective of life.

Sodium is an interesting one and I didn't choose it randomly.  We've been told about the horrors of salt for a long time by our health betters.   They still sell low sodium this and that at the grocery.  I understand that excess sodium intake will cause blood pressure to rise a bit and if that's a problem, then low sodium stuff may be useful and important.  But the ACM curve for sodium is quite interesting.  If you get none, you die.  Sodium is used for a lot of basic bodily functions and without it, it's certain death.  So the low sodium intake area of the ACM curve is quite steep.  The it lowers quite dramatically as the intake approaches 4.0 grams per day.  Note that this is still more than the recommended daily amount which I think is about 2.5 grams per day.  Now you might wonder how steeply the curve rises as sodium intake increases.  If you eat 4.5 are you much worse off?  How about 7.0 -- three times the recommended amount?  The actual curve, estimated, is a very small rise as the intake increases.  Basically as long as you get to 4.0, any excess is not a big problem, certainly less than not eating enough.

I just looked at a video where a doctor mentioned that there was a doctor doing research in the 60s and 70s, gave rats about 100 times the amount a person might eat, found out blood pressure was up and published.

Sadly, the federal government was looking to help folks out about this time and Sen. McGovern, see previous posts, thought the rat data was directly of value when applied to humans. So that's where the US recommended amount came from.  It seems to be complete crap at this point, but this stuff changes slowly if at all.

If you are eating very few carbs then this is important to you as a lack of insulin will cause the body to dump salt.  One of the reasons that starting a keto diet will cause rapid weight loss is this, the salt goes and then excess water goes too.  This is not always a good thing as you still need the sodium and when on Keto, you are encouraged to be busy with the salt shaker.

I seem to have gone well off the rails here.  But we were talking about Covid data and it does apply somewhat.  The news is full of officials who are classifying any death with Covid as a death caused by Covid.  Rampant rumor abound as to federal payments for Covid health issues, etc.   It seems there is financial motivation to do that.  Ok, fine, I understand monetizing death, but it does make it more difficult to craft future public policy if the data are polluted.  But the ACM will really determine if the virus caused a lot of excess deaths or not.  I did see a graph for Sweden which showed about 47,000 deaths as of June 5.  The average deaths for Sweden in a year about about 90,000.  It looks like they are above the curve a bit.  I suspect that more deaths occur in winter than summer, so there may be excess deaths there.  Sweden did not lock down to the extent of other countries.  It might have been a better response, but it is easily apples and oranges - Stockholm is not New York, for example.  But  certainly there are not three times the deaths in Sweden than in a usual year.

This is getting long and I'm not sure I have a point to make, but the above stuff has been running through my head while sitting the recliner and wishing for more general access to the world.  Pickleball is back on!  Yeah!  And I've been getting lots of golf in.  My life is back to normal for the most part.  We are still cooking a lot.  The grocery bill is huge, but the restaurant bill is tiny.  The food is better, but we have more kitchen duties.  We have worked out a routine, so the cooking and cleanup is not a big deal.  The dishwasher is getting a workout, however.

It's Getting Different

The county has put us under an eight pm to five am curfew for a week or so.  Is this adding insult to injury?  Life was starting to get back to normal for us.  Well, to be honest, it's been getting better for me.  Barb is still curtailed for most of her recreational activities.

But for me golf is a go and pickleball getting there.  A lot of the pickleballers are being very cautious of playing with "strangers" and are reluctant to split up family teams.  We are not sitting near each other.  Interestingly about four of the PBers have been tested for the virus and no one has contracted it. 

There is supposed to be 50 cases or so in Livermore with a population of about 100,000.  It's not widespread assuming the numbers are reasonably correct.

I have some golf tomorrow and I'm excited to play.  I've made some changes and they seem to be useful.  But contact with the enemy is the true test of a great plan.  I'll report back with any results of note.

So we are supposed to shelter in place.  There has been a lot of police cars positioned around the various malls.  There is an outlet mall near the driving range.  Lots of highend clothes and hand bags, etc., and there was a police car there this morning.  I don't think rioters like to get up early, so it seemed to be a wasted effort.  They probably should have been getting some sleep instead. 

No rioting or protests have happened locally yet.  The curfew is new as of today. 

As I think back on it, I've experienced a few days of rage in my life time.  Probably the first was the Democratic convention of 1968.  Then there were riots in Detroit.  As a family we were going to visit my grandparents and they lived in Marine City Michigan.  We normally drove through Detroit to get there.  It was a freeway and even with the "problems" we did on this occasion.  I don't remember being able to see any rioting debris as we passed through.

I remember the Watts riots, but I was living in Illinois at the time and remember no details.  I couldn't tell you the dates. 

Civil unrest seems to show up on occasion and we were probably overdue, if one thinks this stuff comes naturally as cycles in the climate.   The educational establishment is very liberal -- and not in a classical sense -- these days.  Are the current problems the outgrowth of this new (is it new?) slant to higher education.  I tend to think that higher education has little impact on society.  The academic life seems to be a strange one.  I've seen glimpses of this as I've followed the climate change debate.  Are the overly educated young a big part of the current troubles?   And is education to blame?  Maybe we will find out!

So that is the news.  Sorry for all the foreshadowing, the real stories are yet to be known or written.