That's the title of this recent article in Scientific American:

Humans Carry More Bacterial Cells than Human Ones,
You are more bacteria than you are you, according to the latest body census

Ohhhhh, I could live on a diet of fruit and nuts!!

Early Humans On The Menu

An excerpt:You wouldn't know it by current world events, but humans actually evolved to be peaceful, cooperative and social animals, not the predators modern mythology would have us believe, says an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Until after the esophagogastroduodenocolonoscopy.1 Well, not all eating. This is tonight's dinner:

And tomorrow's breakfast too. Actually, just 4 Dulcolax. But the whole bottle, 14 complete servings of that MiraLax must be enlisted to perform the unsubtle function.

I had reservations posting this. But, well, what's a blog for? So, if you have any experience with this procedure, your comments are welcome!
________1 A combined esophagogastroduodenoscopy and colonoscopy.
Photo: Homegrown. I wish it wasn't.

I can't get over how low my blood sugars have been!

Here's my story in a nut shell...

Last summer, on a fluke, I tested my postprandial (after-eating) blood glucose (BG). It was around 140 mg/dl. I had only had some melon about 2 hours previously. I thought the reading was high. I tested it subsequently, and found both my fasting BG in the morning, and a number of after-meal tests were high ... in the range of Impaired Fasting Glucose (IFG) and Impaired Glucose Tolerance (IGT).

Famed for its wine. Wikipedia has Burgenland inhabited since the Stone Age. How many years ago that was, I can't tell. I wonder if Burgenlanders enjoyed wine back then.

Below is Willi Wetschka (right) and his friend in the barn of Wetschka's winery, 2007.

Click to enlarge.________

Or at least I thought I did. Last summer my fasting blood sugars were pushing 120 mg/dl. (100-125 is prediabetes, 126 or more is full-fledged diabetes). I went on a very low-carbohydrate, Atkins diet. My fasting sugars came down, hovering near 100.

I went off the Atkins diet when I experienced some precancer, and when others in my family were diagnosed with cancer. I went on an animal-free, high-carbohydrate diet. Now, over 70% of my calories come from carbohydrate.* And my fasting blood sugars are always in the 70s!

No, really. A comprehensive, online, free!, encyclopedia of every living thing on the planet. One page for each. Millions of pages. And it's a wiki - a collaborative, updatable effort from people all over the world. I can't think of a more ambitious project facing the internet.

And it went live on Tuesday (although it may be slow, it's getting over a million hits per hour):
Encyclopedia of Life (EOL)

Here's what the New York Times had to say:
The Encyclopedia of Life, No Bookshelf Required

Here's its official blog:
Encyclopedia of Life Blog

Here are some sample pages (clicking the image will take you to EOL's demo page):

Yeti Crab

Death Cap Mushroom

They became unstuck in time a day later.
"So it goes."
- Billy Pilgrim 1________
Photo above: Homegrown, from a couple days ago. It's frozen water in the cut-off bottom of an old gallon jug. I use it as a water feeder for birds. They, however, use it as a bathtub. There's one particular female cardinal that sits in it at night (if it's warm enough) for about 5 minutes. The water comes up to her neck. She occasionally flutters her wings.

The Swedish grocery store chain, ICA, is considered one of the most trusted retail brands in Sweden. It celebrated its 90 year anniversary this year.1

According to Wikipedia, a documentary aired on Swedish television last week that showed ICA employees:"... relabeling out-of-date ground meat, as well as grinding down other forms of meat past their 'best before' date to make ground meat (mince)."

Boy, do I get excited over new foods. Red quinoa! New for me, old for people who live in the Andes Mountains of South America, who, according to the box, have been growing it for more than 5,000 years. I wonder what they served it with. Maybe it's old for lots of you too, but I'm having fun with it!

It's a little more crunchy than the white quinoa I'm used to, if you could call quinoa crunchy at all. Otherwise, it's pretty similar in taste and cooking time.

The rusty red color of the grain blooms to a foggy purple color when cooked. (Click for larger.)

I'm convinced - there's no one diet that's best for everyone. You like cheese and I like peas. You say roast; I say toast. You like "tomato" and I like "tomahto". *

Dr. Roger John Williams agrees. (Thank you, Dave Lull, for bringing him to my attention!)

Williams (1893 - 1988) was a biochemist and author of a number of books on nutrition, as well as several widely used textbooks on organic chemistry and biochemistry. He taught at the University of Oregon, Oregon State University, and the University of Texas at Austin. He discovered the B vitamin pantothenic acid, and named the B vitamin folic acid. In fact, "More vitamins and their variants were discovered in [his] laboratory than in any other laboratory in the world."

An almond is a seed.

So are Brazil nuts, cashews, walnuts, pecans, pistachios, and pine nuts.

Wheat berries, corn kernels, oat groats, rice, barley, quinoa, buckwheat, and amaranth are also seeds. Sesame, pumpkin, sunflower, flax, poppy, fenugreek ... seeds. Lentils are seeds. Peanuts are seeds. Beans ... kidney, pinto, soy, mung, adzuki ... more seeds. Fresh peas and green beans are seeds.

Seeds sprout. So I thought I'd soak some almonds in water. Yes, indeedy, they sprouted.

Would it were that cancer in the real world could be so readily switched off.

Here's another study. On rats. After administering a carcinogen (aflatoxin), researchers fed rats a high-protein diet. The rats' cancer grew. Researchers switched to a low-protein diet, the rat's cancer regressed. Researchers switched back to the high-protein diet. The rats' cancer came back, with a vengeance.

There was a full moon last night. It will be visible tonight too, and according to NASA, it will be the brightest full moon you'll see for the next 16 years:"That's because it's the highest-riding full moon until the year 2023."

Every day, a little bit of my faith blows away ...

Cancer Docs Profit From Chemotherapy Drugs
Situation begs the ethical question: Are they overprescribing?"The significant amount of our revenue comes from the profit, if you will, that we make from selling the drugs," says Dr. Peter Eisenberg, a private physician who specializes in cancer treatment.________

I'm still wondering ... is cultured meat living?

A group of artists from the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TCA) in Australia grew this steak for their exhibition "Disembodied Cuisine".

Click to read captions, and to see some cultured meat up close.

Well, how about that. Mark Bittman has a blog. (Thank you, Melinda.)

Bitten: Mark Bittman on Food

It doesn't look like he posts often. Although he did make a few comments yesterday about his recent article that appeared in the New York Times, the one we discussed on my post, Got Vegetables?:

Eating Meat Is Only Human, Bitten, 5 Feb 2008

He lamented (I think he was lamenting), that he "got only two comments [on his original article]: one from a cattle rancher with some smart reasoning, and one from someone who was a little more emotional."

An NPR commentator asked a dairy farmer how Daylight Savings Time affects his cows. I thought it wouldn't, because cows live by a biological clock. That was my knee-jerk reaction.

The farmer said, "It's tough getting them up early!" *
(So, they make the cows live by man's clock.)
"And they don't produce as much."
(...)
"But it's not as bad as in the fall when we gain an hour!"
(Oh, no...)
"The cows get health problems in their udders because their milk builds up!"
(Why don't we just schedule people to work around the cows' cycle?)
________* I'm paraphrasing.
Photo: Dr. Baker milking cow, circa 1900, Texas.

Just for the fun of it, and because I've been reading studies like my previous post, I looked to see how much casein is in typical dairy foods.

Modification of Bovine β-Casein to Improve the Characteristics and Manufacturing Properties of Cow's Milk

I was digging through the FAO's data files and saw some numbers I thought would look better on a chart than in a few columns on Excel.

Click for larger.
There are 172 countries included in this graph. I couldn't fit all their names on the x-axis but you can go to the Excel file to see the intake for a particular country. Protein intake ranges from 25 grams/person/day in the Democratic Republic of Congo to 136 g/p/d in Israel. (Israel?) The US consumed an average of 133 g/p/d. Intakes are for the years 2002-2004.

You can find the raw data at:
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, Food Security Statistics (Under Food Consumption / Nutrients).
________Chart and image of chart: Homegrown.

Here was Part 1.

I'm surprised by what I'm discovering about the possible carcinogenic effects of meat. I'm also surprised that these points weren't raised in any of the literature I read so far surrounding low-carb diets, which almost universally promote meat consumption. I've been experimenting with low-carb diets as a way to manage my blood sugar. But with the recent diagnoses of cancer in my family, I'm revisiting their safety.

Sometimes pointing to where it hurts doesn't give the best clue as to what's wrong. It doesn't help that human anatomy can vary so much.

Below are two images of the large intestine. There are 3 sections visible ... the ascending colon on your right side (left in pictures), the transverse colon that goes across the top, and the descending colon on your left side (right in pictures).

Coincidentally, Tara over at the New York Times' Well Blog just posted this:
Low-Fat Diet May Cut Prostate Cancer Risk, NYTs Well Blog, May 16 2008.

It's based on this study:
Effect of Low-Fat Diet on Development of Prostate Cancer and Akt Phosphorylation in the Hi-Myc Transgenic Mouse Model, Cancer Research, April 2008

Where mice were fed:

• High-fat diet (HF: 42% of calories from fat)

You may not know about, or you may know and may not agree with, the conclusions drawn by the data presented in the recently released book, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health. On the other hand, maybe you've already embraced them.

Sherri, where's Sherri? Sherri (the other one) this is for you. And for Melinda. And anyone else with a garden. I planted some herbs yesterday.* I know, this is a far cry from squash and tomatoes. But I'm limited by space and sun. And the deer, oh dear. (It's in the 40s here this morning, I hope they don't wilt.) This is my garden.

I'd love to experience your gardens vicariously. So if you (or others) have food-growing photos you'd like to share, I'll post them.

Do you have an old computer or monitor lying around that you don't know how to dispose of? An ancient laptop, keyboard, cell phone, or television? (I'll bet there'll be a glut of old TV's when the country makes the switch to full digital broadcasting next February!)

We had an old CRT monitor. I went to Earth 911, selected "Monitor", entered my zip code, and it returned a number of locations where I could drop it off.

Staples charges a fee for monitors (the one near me wanted $10), but takes smaller peripherals like mice, keyboards, and speakers free of charge. The Goodwill near us took our monitor for free.
________

Some sad irony here:
Rising Food Prices Are Likely To Worsen US Obesity Rate"... she lives on public assistance and eats junk food because it's cheap and more readily available in her Philadelphia neighborhood than carrots and apples."

Ronald's comment reminded me of this.

Libby's Ingredients: Mechanically Separated Chicken, Partially Defatted Cooked Pork Fatty Tissue, Beef Tripe, Partially Defatted Cook Beef Fatty Tissue, Vinegar, Salt, Spices, Sugar, Flavorings, Sodium Erythorbate And Sodium Nitrate.

Paul Krzyzanowski posted this photo of his collection: