True/Slant has been a regular part of my life for almost a year.  I became familiar with the site when the fantastic journalist, Ryan Sager, asked me to site sit for him while he was on vacation. After a week of writing for his blog, Neuroworld, I was convinced that this was a place I wanted to stay.

What stoked me the most was the fresh thinking behind what Lewis Dvorkin and his team had started here: recruit great writers and give them the freedom to build their brands and drive traffic to the site.  I hadn’t seen this concept successfully employed at any other credible news site, but one taste and I knew it was for me.

In addition to Lewis, I want to thank Coates Bateman, Michael Roston, Andrea Spiegel and Steve McNally for making my time here truly a pleasure.  I sensed the dedication of this team from the beginning, and in the months since have only become more impressed with their passion and commitment. You folks started something quite special here and I hope you are proud of it.

As for me, I’m pleased to say this is a temporary goodbye.  As some T/S writers have already mentioned in their farewell posts, we’re not exactly sure what the next chapter will look like, but we’re looking forward to contributing to it.

In the meantime, you can always find me at my home base blog: Neuronarrative, and on Twitter @neuronarrative.

(the header for this post is a quote from Garrison Keillor, in case you were wondering)

Image by GDS Digital via Flickr

Two things run strong and hard on both sides of my family: heart disease and type 2 diabetes. As a deluge of medical research tells us, the two are closely linked.  Often diabetes precedes heart disease, but in my family—particularly on my father’s side—it goes both ways.  My dad had his first heart attack when he was 48, but didn’t develop diabetes until about 10 years later.

The long and short of this is that I have to be careful.  My last blood glucose test revealed that I’m flirting with the pre-diabetic zone (defined as a blood glucose level between 100 and 124; 125 and up is considered diabetic).  So my doctor wisely directed me to consult with a dietician before the situation worsens.

I had my first consult a couple of months ago and received a docket of good advice touching both diet and exercise to rein in the sugar.  But the best advice was simply this: the best way to avoid diabetes is to think like a diabetic and act accordingly.

Basic as it sounds, I think this one-liner brilliant in its simplicity. People spend so much time fretting over the details of their diets, counting calories, reading the latest fad theories about what this or that nutrient does or doesn’t do.  How much better if we just start with what matters most: think differently.

I’m a little more in touch with this than some people because several of my family members have had diabetes and I know how they had to adjust their thinking and behavior to regulate their health.  But even if this isn’t true for you, it’s easy enough to find out. Once you do, it’s not necessarily essential that you perfectly copy the eating and exercise habits of a diabetic (though it may be, depending on your blood glucose situation), but at least get in the proverbial ballpark.

For me, it’s like this: cut way down on everything that is bleached, starchy and processed to the point of barely being food.  That includes white bread, white rice, most pasta, and any sort of processed potato or corn stuff. Those are the really difficult things for me (I’m Italian, after all, and we like our starchy carbs). Then there are the more obvious culprits: cookies, cake, candy.  Also hard, but I’ve found from past experience that once you’ve “de-hooked” yourself from those things for a few weeks, the cravings drop off.   Also take it easy on the juice.  I love juice (grape especially), but the problem is that the juicing process removes most of the fiber and leaves you with a whole lot of sugar.  And, goes without saying, stay away from soda, period.

What’s left?  Lean proteins, nuts, veggies, fruits (not juiced), yogurt (preferably Greek, and low-sugar), natural peanut butter, tea (unsweetened), lots of water, alcohol in moderation (2-3 drinks a week), whole wheat bread (I prefer pita), whole wheat pasta (occasionally), brown rice… You get the idea.   I know, this looks a lot like other diets, but the point here is that this isn’t really a diet. If you have diabetes, you’re not on a diet; you’re eating to maintain your health for the rest of your life.  That’s the way to think.

Throw in some modest exercise, and you’re there.  My latest favorite is swimming.  Just walking a few times a week will also do wonders.

What, so far, has thinking and acting like a diabetic done for me?  I’ve trimmed 16 pounds in less than two months.  Believe me, that was a hard fought 16 to lose, and I have many more to go, but I wouldn’t have lost an ounce without recalibrating my thinking. I have another blood glucose test coming up this month and hope to see a concomitant drop out of the red zone.

This is a topic I’m very close to. My dad died from the lethal combination of diabetes and heart disease, and I don’t plan on following suit.  If you have any questions about anything in this post, please feel free to tweet me @neuronarrative.

Drug information site Erowid recently posted a 1951 Disney comic where Mickey Mouse and Goofy take speed.

In the strip, ‘Mickey Mouse and the Medicine Man’, Mickey and Goofy discover a new medicine called ‘Peppo’ which is clearly meant to represent amphetamine. Their enthusiasm for the chemical pick-me-up leads them to become salesman for the product in Africa.

Although the idea of Disney characters taking speed seems rather incongruous these days, in 1951 amphetamine was legal and widely available over-the-counter in America, mostly in the form of Benzedrine inhalers.

It wasn’t until the mid-60s when these were made prescription only and non-medical amphetamine wasn’t outlawed until 1971.

As well as casual racism, the strip also features various characters eating ‘hash’ which knocks them out.

For those not familiar with American English, this isn’t a direct reference to hashish or cannabis resin but a reference to a peculiarly unappetising type of food of the same name which, in the story, seems to have been spiked with some sort of unidentified sedative.

However, given the rather unenlightened portrayal of Africans in the piece and the 1950s stereotype of marijuana being a drug of black Americans, I wonder if the lethargy inducing properties of the ‘hash’ are meant to be an indirect reference to the drug.

Link to ‘Mickey Mouse and the Medicine Man’.

HT: Why Evolution is True

Image via Wikipedia

The folks at Energy Fiend have developed an online calculator called “Death by Caffeine” that tells you roughly how many Red Bulls, Monsters, Rock Stars, etc you’d have to drink to keel over.  The number of drinks you can choose from on the killer-drink drop down menu is staggering, but upon closer inspection it looks like they include regular sodas like Pepsi, Coke and the like along with the amped up drinks (and even energy mints and coffee ice cream).

I’m going to enter my information, choosing Red Bull as my initial poison. Here’s the result:

It would take 204.75 cans of Red Bull to put you down.

Comparatively:

Gulp down 474.78 cans of Coca-Cola Classic and you’re history.

You could drink 297.82 cans of Mountain Dew before croaking.

It would take 109.20 cups of Starbucks Tall Caffe Americano to put you down.

If you eat 341.25 Cups of Haagen-Dazs Coffee Ice Cream, you’ll be pushing up daisies.

By the way (and I say this as a die-hard coffee drinker), imbibing caffeine to stay awake is one of the silliest things we humans do.  The reason is this: in the brain, caffeine acts as an antagonist (a blocker) of adenosine–the neurotransmitter that pushes us closer and closer to sleep until we nod off–and it’s very good at accomplishing this. The problem is that with less exposure to adenosine, we become even more sensitive to the neurotransmitter’s effects. If we reduce our intake of caffeine, or simply become more tolerant of it, we actually find ourselves becoming more tired. So then we jack up the caffeine to counteract the withdrawal, but that just increases our tolerance.

Takeaway: you can only fool your brain into not sleeping for so long before succumbing to the inevitable crash.

HT: MindHacks

Earlier, I came across a story over at BBC News about the effect of celebrity endorsements of shoes on women’s brains. A Dutch team of researchers scanned the brains of 24 women as they looked at 40 pictures of celebrities and of non-famous, but sexy, people wearing stylish shoes.

When looking at a celebrity sporting the shoes, women’s brains showed heightened activity in the medial oribitofrontal cortex (a part of the brain linked to “warm” feelings of affection). The same thing didn’t happen when they looked at pictures of sexy shoe-wearing non-celebrities.  So these women seemed to really love the shoes–in a more literal sense than usual–at least when they were modeled by celebrities.  And the impact appears to be long-term, according to the researchers; such is the emotional imprint of famous folks donning inviting footwear.

Which leads me to a related topic (well, at least I’m going to relate it for the purpose of this post)–namely, what’s going on in the brain of a foot fetishist? In the research above, the pivotal variable seems to be less the sex appeal of the shoes, or the feet wearing them, and more the emotionally potent influence of the celebrity rubbing off on the footwear. But in your common, run-of-the-mill foot fetishism, the feet and/or shoes in question might belong to just about anyone.  So clearly there’s a different dynamic at work, but what is it?

This question takes me to an illuminating graphic created by Emily Nagoski, the self proclaimed “Sex Nerd,” who believes she’s uncovered the connection. Actually, she’s illustrated a connection that was made some time ago by neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who proposed that foot fetishism is caused by the feet and the genitals occupying adjacent areas of the somatosensory cortex, possibly entailing some “neural crosstalk” between the two.

Here’s Emily’s graphic. Note that the genitalia and feet/toes are right next to each other along the somatosensory cortex (illustrated by Emily via a somatosensory homunculus–the instructive “little human” of the brain).

Emily’s explanation of the graphic warrants a direct quote:

Even though your feet are at one end of you actual body and your genitals are in the middle, as far as your brain is concerned, they’re right next to each other.

A phenomenon known in the nerd world as “spreading activation” takes us the rest of the way along this story. The foot sensation part of your brain “lights up” and lights up a little bit of the genital part of your brain along with it, or vice versa, and suddenly there’s a link between sexual arousal and foot sensations.

And so over time the guy (it’s usually a guy – not always, but usually) begins to feel sexual desire around feet, in the same way that he feels sexual desire around the genitals of his partner.

Makes sense.  A little cross-wire activity bridges parts of the brain that are already neighbors, and there you go. Why, however, would this necessarily be a predominantly male phenomenon?

That will have to remain a question for another day. Many thanks to the Sex Nerd for a great little graphic that sheds light on one of the more peculiar twists of the noggin.

Image via Wikipedia

Consistent across the big three Western monotheisms is a theme notable only for its inconsistency: God is love, except for when he’s a belligerent tyrant with an unquenchable bloodlust.

Ask most people in the big three if their God condones cruelty, and you’ll get a definitive “no!” But anyone can flip through the sacred texts and find line after line that illustrates exactly the opposite.  Ask believers if theirs is a God of war and you’ll probably get another “no,” though passages aplenty make clear that the God(s) of Western religions are wholly committed to war as a means to get what they want, or what they want their chosen people to have.

What explains this disconnect?  If you ask a Christian if his/her God condones sexual violence, and the response is a likely “no”—you might ask for an explanation of a passage like this one:

When you go out to war against your enemies and the LORD, your God, delivers them into your hand, so that you take captives, if you see a comely woman among the captives and become so enamored of her that you wish to have her as wife, you may take her home to your house.  But before she may live there, she must shave her head and pare her nails and lay aside her captive’s garb.  After she has mourned her father and mother for a full month, you may have relations with her, and you shall be her husband and she shall be your wife.  However, if later on you lose your liking for her, you shall give her her freedom, if she wishes it; but you shall not sell her or enslave her, since she was married to you under compulsion.    (Deuteronomy 21:10-14)

Or you could allude to God’s cavalier attitude toward rape with a passage like this one:

If a man is caught in the act of raping a young woman who is not engaged, he must pay fifty pieces of silver to her father.  Then he must marry the young woman because he violated her, and he will never be allowed to divorce her.   (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)

Or his general attitude toward women as mere spoils of war with a passage like this one:

They must be dividing the spoils they took: there must be a damsel or two for each man. (Judges 5:30)

My point here is less about exegesis of sacred texts, and more about why people choose to focus on that which supports their positions and ignore, or rationalize, that which doesn’t.  We know this tendency by its psychological moniker: confirmation bias. And we also know this bias’ partner in crime that fuels the mental myopia: selective perception.

But I think there’s something else going on here as well.  One of the chief tenets of Western religion is that God made humans in his image.  If you read the sacred texts and take to heart the passages above and the many like them, then you’re left with an uncomfortable conclusion about who you are.

Try, for example, to imagine yourself as someone who would applaud this sort of unequivocal declaration of horrific violence against children (and more sexual violence as well):

Anyone who is captured will be run through with a sword.  Their little children will be dashed to death right before their eyes.  Their homes will be sacked and their wives raped by the attacking hordes. For I will stir up the Medes against Babylon, and no amount of silver or gold will buy them off.  The attacking armies will shoot down the young people with arrows.  They will have no mercy on helpless babies and will show no compassion for the children. (Isaiah 13:15-18)

Hard to do, isn’t it?  And yet, if we’re created in God’s image, then are we not manifestations of this same cruel nature–of the “For I will” nature underlined above?

So to undermine that conclusion, we have to mentally shelve those illustrations—the ones that make any reasonable person cringe—and focus on those that don’t short circuit our brain’s need for comfort and stability. We don’t believe in God and participate in the social support network of any given church or temple because we want to become even more stressed and confused than we are in our day-to-day lives. Much the opposite. We’re there to rein in the blood cortisol levels that drive us to the brink at work, in traffic and all too often at home.

If all we did in church was talk about God’s penchant for violence, that wouldn’t make for a very psychologically reassuring atmosphere. If we are going to talk about it, then we need to clarify that all of that rage and sexual cruelty is directed against God’s enemies.  That feels much better, because if we’re believers, then God’s enemies are also our enemies. Babies, whatever—they had it coming.

This balancing act, I’d argue, is what allows sane, intelligent people (note that I am not talking about unbalanced militants here) to focus on that which edifies and push from immediate view that which alarms.  Around that which edifies, we build a public-facing persona of tolerance and love. We can then build into that persona all of the attributes we deeply value. The rest—those dark, awful corridors of our belief—we avoid, or venture into only when we need to show our enemies what the dark side of our God looks like, or remind ourselves what could happen to us if we wander.

Another way of saying this is that to fully embrace the notion that God created us in his image is actually a very frightening thing to do.  But our brains are exceptionally clever and know how to work around discomfort to preserve stability. Gods of war and conquest, no matter how explicitly cruel, are simply no match for our powers of cognitive navigation.

Image via Wikipedia

The latest buzz in science blog circles–and quickly spilling out into more mainstream venues–is that SEED magazine, owner of the well-regarded ScienceBlogs network, has stepped in a steaming pile of marketing dung.

If you’re not familiar with ScienceBlogs, it’s a network of several pros from all walks of the science world who enjoy communicating the ins and outs of their disciplines with an audience that includes a hefty percentage of lay readers.  I have many friends in their ranks and think they are a fine group of writers with a genuine interest in communicating the ongoings of credible science to the public.  These folks earn a pittance for their work, derived mainly from advertising dollars.  Clearly, they don’t do it for the money.

SEED recently decided to allow Pepsi to have its own blog on the network, called “Food Frontiers”–which, of course, they would pay for, not unlike a block of continuous advertising space. Many bloggers at ScienceBlogs are not happy about this.  The standard for any credible science journalism network is that writers earn their space on merit, not because they have products to pitch. The ‘partnership’ SEED entered into with Pepsi stomps all over the merit-based model, and is frankly pissing a lot of people off. 

Among those people are Rebecca Skloot, the bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, who announced yesterday that she is closing down shop at ScienceBlogs and moving on.  This is the rough equivalent of the Lakers losing Kobe Bryant.  Another well-known writer at ScienceBlogs, PZ Myers, summed up the issues in this post, as did top-notch science journalist David Dobbs, here, who has also resigned his post at ScienceBlogs.

Aside from great writers leaving its network, SEED is taking serious heat from media critics as illustrated in this scathing slamfest in the Knight Science Journalism Tracker.  Quoting from that piece:

For magazines to be trusted by consumers and to endure as brands, readers must be assured of their editorial integrity.

Editorial-looking sections or pages that are not produced by a magazines editors are not editorial content. They should be labeled Advertisement, Special Advertising Section or Promotion at the top of every page in type as prominent as the magazines normal body type.

Advertisers should not pay to place their products in editorial pages nor should they demand placement in return for advertising.

The bottom line is that if you’re going to mix marketing with science journalism (or, really, any journalism worth its salt), then you’d better be damn sure to clarify that the commercial content is just that: PAID FOR CONTENT. Print magazines learned this lesson a long time ago and as a result “advertorials” are clearly identified as such. How was this lesson lost on the owner of one of the best known science blogging networks out there? 

As I write this, I just received an update that it seems SEED has heard the message and is changing direction. According to this post by SEED Media founder and CEO Adam Bly, it appears that Food Frontiers has been cancelled.

PepsiGate may be over, but the questions it has raised about the commingling of marketing and journalistic content are just beginning to swarm in the blogosphere. And, clearly, much damage to the credibility of SEED and ScienceBlogs has already been done.

Behold, the “Dentaphone,” which best I can tell was a mouthpiece device of some sort marketed as a cure for deafness. I like the hook line: “The deaf hear…through their teeth.”

Wow, what a deal!  If you give the wife PEP vitamins, not only will she work harder, but she’ll look cuter too!

How soon is too soon to start your baby on…cola?  ”Laboratory tests” have proven that the earlier you get your bambino sucking down the cola, the happier he’ll be throughout his entire life. You don’t want to deprive him of that, do you?

And if starting cola early results in a toothache for baby, just numb her up with a few cocaine drops!

Getting back to serious science — how would you handle a “truss rupture”?  Nothing I can say will do this ad justice…read it, and hazard a guess as to what “truss torture” is.

There’s something about a giant hand pouring chemicals onto the countryside of India that just doesn’t sit well.

Nothing to add to this one — the picture says it all.

I couldn’t do a vintage ads post without at least one cigarette ad.  In this case, smoking filterless Camels gives the user an “energizing effect.”  That’s right before it gives you the “coughing effect” and the “wheezing effect,” followed by the “dying of lung cancer effect.”

She may “look clean” guys, but…

And you make think she’s “just your gal,” but….

She’s got everything. EVERYTHING.

This projector clearly works best in the shade.

“You can’t afford to be skinny.” This sounds like reverse liposuction in a pill.

Let’s wrap this post up along with the babies, in Cellophane.

Image via Wikipedia

Courtesy of Vanity Fair (by way of USA Today), reporting on a recent FDA study of airline food safety — the news for anyone who travels is not good:

According to USA Today, the F.D.A. “found live roaches and dead roach carcasses ‘too numerous to count’ inside the Denver facility of the world’s largest airline caterer, LSG Sky Chefs. They also reported finding ants, flies and debris, and employees handling food with bare hands.” Of the 46 food-production facilities—“kitchens” seems like a misnomer—27 of them engaged in problematic provision-preparation practices. (Phew!) Such culinary crimes include: doubling as hotbeds of rodent colonization and reproduction, storing seafood at improper temperatures, undercooking meats, and being gross about ice. According to the paper, “[a]irlines say they require their caterers to provide government inspection reports, and they do their own unannounced inspections.”