American G.I. You Die!

continuing to post blogs that didn't make it to the Herald website because of a computer glitch

 

     National Public Radio has been a haven of calm, rational discussion and objective reporting, but recently they put out a piece on high-fructose corn syrup that must have had the big food processors and corporate corn farmers cheering. They noted that many people remain highly suspicious of this common food additive, thinking it contributes to obesity and obesity-related ailments. But according to the American Dietetic Association, this is an urban myth, NPR said. Fructose is just another kind of sugar-the food industry wants to re-label high-fructose corn syrup as "corn sugar"-and people don't need to fear. You must remember this, a calorie is just a calorie, as it were.

 

     I wrote in to the program, pointing out that in February, the Princeton University Department of Psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute had published in the journal Pharmacology the results of two experiments investigating the relationship  between the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup and obesity.

 

     In the first, male rats were given a standard diet plus either water with sucrose (table sugar) in the same concentration as commercially available soft drinks or water with high-fructose corn syrup in a concentration about half that as in soft drinks.

 

A Yahoo health news summary of the results said, ". The rats in the Princeton study became obese by drinking high-fructose corn syrup, but not by drinking sucrose. The critical differences in appetite, metabolism and gene expression that underlie this phenomenon are yet to be discovered, but may relate to the fact that excess fructose is being metabolized to produce fat, while glucose is largely being processed for energy or stored as a carbohydrate, called glycogen, in the liver and muscles."

 

     Sucrose is glucose plus fructose, but not all fructose is equal. "As a result of the manufacturing process for high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized."

 

     The second experiment was the first long-term study of the effects of high-fructose corn syrup consumption on laboratory animals. For six months, some rats were fed standard rat chow, while others had access to high-fructose corn syrup. The latter gained 48 percent more weight. The experimenters monitored fat deposition and triglyceride levels as well as weight, and found that the weight-gain rats were exhibiting "metabolic syndrome," the complex of weight-gain-related symptoms that in humans is often the predecessor of adult-onset diabetes (diabetes 2).

 

     Princeton psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight, and sugar addiction, was quoted as saying, "Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn't true, at least under the conditions of our tests. When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese -- every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight."

 

Visiting research associate Nicole Avena, at that  time with Rockefeller University and now a professor at the University of Florida, put it plainly: "Our findings lend support to the theory that the excessive consumption of high-fructose corn syrup found in many beverages may be an important factor in the obesity epidemic." (And it isn't just beverages: read the labels on food products and sometimes it's as hard to find processed food without high-fructose corn syrup as it is to find gasoline without added ethanol.)

 

The previously mentioned news report cited some well-known statistics about obesity in America. Back in the 1970s, when high-fructose corn syrup was introduced as a cost-effective sweetener, about 15 percent of Americans were obese; today, according to the National Centers for Disease Control, more than 30 percent are obese.

 

Hoebel and Avena had teamed up to do research before. Looking at sucrose-table sugar is sucrose-they found that sucrose can be addictive, having effects on the brain similar to some drugs of abuse. 

 

The Mayo Clinic's online health advice site said, "So far, research has yielded conflicting results about the effects of high-fructose corn syrup. For example, various early studies showed an association between increased consumption of sweetened beverages (many of which contained high-fructose corn syrup) and obesity. But recent research - some of which is supported by the beverage industry - suggests that high-fructose corn syrup isn't intrinsically less healthy than other sweeteners, nor is it the root cause of obesity."

     Hoebel and Avena's research on high-fructose corn syrup was supported by the U. S. Public Health Service.

     We have seen how those who stand to lose a lot of money if the theory of human-induced climate change is right have promoted "expert" statements that the evidence is mixed and the issue was still in doubt. That view has been resoundingly rejected by the vast majority of responsible researchers. Before  that, claims that pesticides and herbicides and fungicides were damaging the environment in general and human health in particular met similar "expert" opposition-while the average American sperm count plummeted. Probably the high-fructose corn syrup issue will go through the same weary, predictable pattern, while thousands meet unnecessary deaths.

     Meanwhile, we will continue to be disposal units for whatever kinds of garbage factory farming generates. I would say "lab rats," but lab rats are treated better.

     A month later, I haven't heard back from National Public Radio, other than an auto-reply that my email had arrived there.

     The title of this commentary quotes a war cry heard by infantry soldiers in the Pacific Theater in World War II. But the "G.I." in this case actually is the American gastro-intestinal tract.

 

Virtuous Virtual: Go Ahead, Open That Box

 

 

Amidst all the dispiriting news about things that don't work, things that work but don't do very much, things that do too much by doing something else at the same time that you don't want them to do, and things that can't be repaired, it's a pleasure to report on something that works, works better than it did a year ago, and is free. In a word, I speak of the online radio service Pandora.

     In Greek mythology, as you may or may not remember, Pandora was the first woman. Zeus commanded Hephaestus to create her, which the master smith and fabricator did using earth and water. Aphrodite bestowed beauty upon her, Apollo gave her a talent for music-the complete package.

She was destined for Prometheus, but when Prometheus stole the secret of fire from the gods, Zeus sought to punish him by giving Pandora to his brother Epimetheus. Along with her went a jar that she was not to open under any circumstances, because it contained all the evils of the world. But just as Zeus expected, Pandora could not hold back her  curiosity (does this remind you of a story from the Old Testament?) and had to take a peek inside-and here we are. To tell the whole tale, the box held Hope as well, and Pandora put the lid back on long enough for Hope to remain.

     The name suits the radio service because they ask you to select a group or a piece of music, then they open their box of connections with the rest of that genre, and create a personal "station" with the name of that group. Assuming you have registered (have a username and password), that "station" can be played for you no matter what computer you are using, after you log on. If it's just your home computer, you don't have to log on each time, they recognize you and bring up your list of "stations."

     As Pandora plays music that might be part of what you're seeking, it shows buttons that you can click to say "no, that isn't what I was looking for," or "yes, I like that." Using these, you can fine tune your station, adjusting it to your preferences.

     Naturally this web business needs to make money to pay its expenses, so from time to time your music may be interrupted by a very short, tastefully presented advertisement. Lately they have been touting an online computer backup service; if you don't have someone like Steve L'Heureux, the Mac Doctor, my New Haven, Vermont computer genius to devise a daily backup system from your startup drive to a reserve drive, this sounds like a reasonable proposition.

     Also, Pandora acts as a purchasing service. If they play something that's in line with your tastes, they will show the CD cover while they're playing it, and give you a chance to click "buy it." Whether this is a real service or not depends on whether the site's collective knowledge of musical genres goes deep enough to uncover things you might not have thought were available.

     I  was a good test case for this because I have an very deep knowledge of and love for folk music, including some genres you will never hear except on WVPR's "All the Traditions," where folk musician host Robert Resnik is a fountain of revelations. But so in Pandora. Putting the group "Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers," I was thrilled to see them linking to Stokes & Sane, the Beale Street Sheiks, and to Frank Hutchison, another great talent of that era. Beale  Street in Memphis, Tennessee was in its heyday one of America's musical glorylands, a place where the immense pool of talent of the Deep South found freedom of expression. One of my upcoming essays, titled "Listening Down In," leans on a piece recorded along Beale Street. You might not think Memphis would have much to do with North Carolina, but the Ramblers repertoire includes a number praising the musical mecca, which at one point says

     "I'd rather be here (Beale Street) than any place I know.

     I'd rather be here than any place I know.

     And it's going to take a Sergeant (police) for to make me go."

     I've now opened a separate browser so I can activate Pandora at any time and not have it go off because I navigated to another website to do something else. I've activated a "Spike Jones and the City Slickers" station, which is branching out to all sorts of whacko stuff. A "Jim Kweskin Jug Band" station accesses another kind of mental comic relief. Finally, after being interested and frustrated for two decades, I'm using Pandora to explore hardcore techno, which I have always loved as dance exercise music. And probably the day will come when I use their music buying service-though that Pandora's Box I don't want to open too soon. Not with Middlebury College's music library available.

     But if you don't have some such resource in your neighborhood, you could do a lot worse than spend  time on Pandora. From there, if you haven't realized the power of online radio, worlds await-for anyone who creates an online station in Vermont as well as for people in rural areas looking out at the world. When a Vermont Public Radio pledge drive brings a caller from someone who now lives in Georgia but uses VPR to stay in touch with the old home state, I can't help thinking that Hope isn't just in Arkansas.

 

 

What I Did Last Summer

--continuing update after computer glitch. This was first posted in September

 

     Logging onto the blog, I couldn't help noticing a big gap between Wrapping Up May and here it is September 5. What have I been doing that accounted for the gap?

     Well, friends, I've been fighting for my life. Not against cancer or some infectious disease, but against chronic conditions that can do you in just as surely-as they already did with my younger brother Walt.

     Since my last entry, leaving aside something I just posted on Niger and overpopulation and climate change, I've been occupied recovering from two total hip replacements, with a colonoscopy thrown in for good measure (during which everything looked about as good as it can where colonoscopies take place). But it wasn't as clear and simple as that. Before the first operation, I was diagnosed with a serious heart rate problem, atrial fibrillation; fortunately, the situation responded well to a newly approved drug. Getting to sleep was a problem because the left side hip replacement put a lot of stress on an injured left shoulder; fortunately, a steroid injection worked to resolve that one, at least for the time being. Then there was my old bedtime nemesis, foot pain, made worse by putting on about 15 pounds due to the forced inactivity of recovering from the two major surgeries,

     But that wasn't the worst. Before the first hip operation, I had gone to a sleep lab run in Middlebury by Dr. Gorman, who had pioneered sleep treatment in the area by setting up a lab at the Rutland Regional Medical Center. I had gone there, partly to do a story, and found I had very, very serious sleep apnea problems. Basically, when you're awake you can keep your throat open by controlling muscles in your neck, but when you're asleep, those muscles relax and soft tissues block the airway. Either you force air through them (snoring) or you wake up gasping for breath. I'm told by my remaining brother that Walt didn't just snore at night, he cut down rainforests-information that suggests to me that one of the two great sleep apnea dangers (those being heart attack and stroke) felled him. My surgery team said I should do another sleep study to make sure I could handle anesthesia properly.

     That I could do, and the two operations went well as operations. But when I did get in to discuss my sleep study results (you have wires attached all over your to monitor heart rate, breathing rate, muscular activity, oxygen, etc. etc.) I learned that the throat operation I'd had after the first sleep study hadn't solved the problem. My oxygen level was dropping into the 80 percent range of normal, due to dozens of breathing stoppages per hour.

     By the time of that visit with Gorman, I had come to recognize the apnea episodes, and was waking up rather that continue to fight for breath-sometimes with horrible muscle cramping. At best, I would get three hours of sleep at a stretch, and more likely an hour and a half, after which I would stay awake doing office things until I started to fall asleep at the keyboard. A third reason sleep apnea can be fatal: losing control of a vehicle from falling asleep at the wheel. Do you know the statistics on how many people in this country are sleep-deprived? Be very, very scared of what might happen in the other lane, if not in your own car.

     I have an appointment Sept. 14 to get fitted with a mechanical solution to sleep apnea: a mask connected with a device that continuously pumps in air, forcing the throat passages open. I tried one of these after the first sleep study and just couldn't tolerate it. Now, I'm told, the devices have been improved like just about everything else electronic, and the point of that night's work will be to get my CPAP (continuous positive air pressure) machine adjusted to my personal circumstances.

     Assuming it works, Dr. Gorman said, getting enough sleep could help with all kinds of chronic conditions I'm now wrestling with. At the root of it all is having lost my pituitary gland to a tumor back in the 1980s, after which the replacement hormones didn't add up to a normal metabolism, and I put on a lot of weight, and am in the "metabolic syndrome" zone of diabetes 2, and have had neuropathic damage in one eye and probably in the feet. So the breathing mask could represent a big turnaround point.

     Meanwhile, I want to thank the Rutland Herald for being very patient about hosting a blog titled "Out and About" by someone who was definitely nothing of the sort. Not even properly out, most of the time.

     So for the next week I'll be up and down at odd hours, glad each time I wake up that I've done so. A race to the crossing with that big black train they sing about in gospel songs. I welcome anyone's hopes, wishes and prayers.

 

NIGER? WHERE'S THAT?

 

Due to a computer glitch, blogs I've been posting for the past half year or so haven't actually made it to the Herald website. So for a while I'll be reposting these to catch up,

NIGER? WHERE'S THAT?

     The flooding in Pakistan seizes the imagination. Valley after valley is threatened, militants might take advantage of the chaos to win people's hearts and mind by supplying aid, nuclear weapons might begin circulating to terrorists if refugees rose up against the current government, and as a matter of universal humanitarian concern, millions of lives could be lost.

     So I went looking for articles about Niger, and found nothing. Nothing on Yahoo news, nothing on CNN. This was disheartening, but not surprising: on other occasions I have expresses my contempt for my supposed colleagues in the national press, who settle on misleading versions of things that will make their jobs easier by being simple to repeat, and who seem to have that same amazing instinct that lets a huge flock of pigeons veer to a different course and in moments take over some unexpected location, which their slimy effluvia will soon befoul.

     At last, using Google, I found something from Georgia Public Radio, which had subscribed to the reporting of National Public Radio and had put it online was well as broadcasting it on Aug. 20. From time to time, the British Broadcasting Corporation news hour program to which Vermont Public Radio subscribes mentions the situation in and around Niger as well.

     That's right, Public Radio, those barely American socialist subversives who have JUST NOT GOT IT YET that Fox News is right about GETTING ANGRY, REALLY ANGRY as the indispensable foundation for righteous change. Public Radio, which speaks with calm voices and leans on facts. Those intellectuals, who are so carried away promoting their hidden liberal agenda that they don't have any common sense.

     No, I'm not wasting your time by saying that. I'm repeating what must be repeated again and again until it sinks in: like the Dunkin Donuts pledge, "because it can never be said enough, I will make my donuts fresh every four hours."

     Let's see, what were we talking about?

     Niger. Which is pronounced nee-JAIR, not like the N word, and is not the same country as Nigeria. The Niger River slices through the far southwestern part of Niger, on its way from Mali to Nigeria, providing the only fertile land in a country the New York Times in 2005 called the world's second-poorest. For the record, this inland sub-Saharan nation, about four-fifths the size of Alaska, shares boundaries with (going more or less clockwise) Mali, Algeria, Libya, Chad, Nigeria, Benin and Burkina Faso.     

     News from Niger is almost always bad. The country was making headlines and generating front page photos in 2005 because a massive famine and locust invasion threatened to kill millions. Prior to the Iraq War, a trumped-up account that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy "yellow cake" uranium from Niger ignited a huge controversy; the sensationalistic aspects of the situation kept news outlets from emphasizing that uranium mining had once been one of Niger's main economic supports, but it was in steep decline, worsening other problems for the country.

     Worst of all, one of the most reliable predictions regarding global warming is that the tropical zone will expand, and that will push the arid bands on both sides of the tropical zone farther to the north and south. Niger, whose northerly portions are desert and whose more inhabited areas are part of the sub-Saharan Sahel region, has proven to be a classic case. As one information atlas put it, "The largely agrarian and subsistence-based economy is frequently disrupted by extended droughts common to the Sahel region of Africa."

     While Pakistanis fight for their lives against flooding, inhabitants of the desertifying sections of Niger quietly starve. The drought is so bad that in addition to losing main agricultural crops like millet, the agricultural regions are losing the forage needed to maintain their animals-which in that culture constitute the main form of wealth. And because climatic events are no respecters of borders, nearby parts of Chad, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Nigeria are suffering the same plight. In Niger alone, according to United Nations sources, nearly 8 million people, or about half of the country's population, are at risk.

     In the capital city of Niamey, the Oxfam relief organization's representative Caroline Gluck was reported as saying, "They have had to sell what few animals they had remaining in order to buy food stocks, but the food prices are rising, and tens of thousands of livestock have actually starved to death," she said. "So people are in a precarious situation, and they're desperate."

     It would be easy to chalk all this up to the First World's chronic neglect of Africa, but the problem may be donor fatigue rather than donor inattention. Too many graphic pictures of babies suffering from malnutrition have a way of making viewers think "Too many babies" as well as "Too little food."

     Sooner or later, two or more major crises in the Third or Fourth World will coincide in a way that brings, without anyone exactly intending it, the deaths of millions. Amidst worsening weather due to climate change, a worsening economy that can't grow out of its stagnation because there is no longer the global habitat for such growth, chronic corruption brought on by generations of inopportunity, the prevalence of literally suicidal violence as a terrorist tactic, wild card threats like invasive crop pests and resistant human resistant diseases, crushing pollution, embattled resources, and First World revulsion at the size of the deficits brought on by those countries own gluttonous indulgences, the moment will come when urgency collapses in exhaustion and good will is too weak to bring urgency back to its feet. Factual matters of logistics will dictate, as pitilessly as mathematical calculations, that the long-awaited global triage has begun.

     But if all it does is send more souls to Heaven, who cares?

 

Virtuous Virtual: USGS Earthquakes

 

Virtuous Virtual: USGS Earthquakes 

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/

 

         One of the best uses of your tax money is funding the U. S. Geological Service. These guys keep track of what lies beneath the nation, and they have created some very interesting Internet sites to report the results.

         My wife introduced me to one of the most intriguing sections of their site, the one dealing with earthquakes. They post maps showing all the places earthquakes have occurred, of any size, within a variety of periods. If you look at the tally for the week, you will see immediately what it means to be part of the Ring of Fire, the area around the Pacific Ocean that contains most of the world’s volcanoes. California has dozens of little quakes each week, not big enough to merit news stories and probably good news anyway because they release pressure from tectonic plates sliding past each other without allowing a Big One to build up. There’s a zone in the middle of the country that’s regularly featured in those maps—another area that’s nervous about someday having, as they have at intervals in the past, a major quake. Our neighborhood is pretty calm, but if things do happen, and any time you’re curious about something you felt or that got reported, check with the USGS. There used to be a seismograph on a building at the core of the Middlebury business district, which would suggest with squiggles in a continuously drawn line on a revolving drum what had occurred in the recent past. I used to miss it, but not now that I know another source with modern scope and speed, and nifty maps to view.

 

Small Town Basketball

 

 

        For this year’s first blog, I want to advance a proposition and make a proposal. The proposition is that Vermont  will never again see  high school basketball games as intense as those that took place in the tiny gymnasiums of small towns in the years before union schools. The proposal is that we begin a collective search for any images of such games, for some talented documentary filmmaker to edit and assemble as the basis for an evocation of that era.

       For Rutland County, I’m talking about the contests, often fierce rivalries, decided in places like Brandon High School (where my parents were teachers), Pittsford High School, Fair Haven High School, and Wallingford High School. Those who have never seen the courts in question would be amazed that games could be played there at all. Often there was no out-of-bounds to speak of, except where corridors happened to enter. Seating was limited: in Brandon, the students sat on the auditorium stage, while the faculty and community went to the same seats from which they might view a senior play; in Pittsford, almost everyone had to make do with seats in a balcony that surrounded the court, literally overlooking it. Visiting teams would typically be sent to the girls’ locker room, which in some cases delivered a dose of disorienting pheromones that created a definite home court advantage.

       I’m talking about a simpler, poorer Vermont, where in the Fifties television reception, if feasible, only offered a handful of fuzzy, mostly black-and-white channels. In the bleakness of the cold months,basketball games became important community events. This era I witnessed personally; I can only imagine the games of the Thirties and Forties, but they, too, must have been like movies in the towns lucky enough to have theaters, occasions not to be missed regardless of what, or who, was playing.

       Back then, high schools took more of their cues from colleges, pumping up school spirit in rah-rah-siss-boom-bah fashion. In Brandon, at least, games opened with ritual, the cheerleaders out on the floor exhorting students to sing the school fight song. There was a moment when the head cheerleader, all eyes upon her, yelled out the words that linked the first and second parts of that song: “Fight for old Brandon, hep hep!” It was a starring role, like walking down the aisle with your partner as Queen of the Senior Prom. When the head cheerleader went on to marry the basketball star, it seemed only right and fitting that they should be a couple.

       Any documentary should make sure to show the offensive weapons of the day, which were to change with the arrival of the modern jump shot. My own high school basketball coach, Bob Sharrow, was a master of a way that players could shoot from NBA distances: the two-handed set shot. Aimed at the backboard, which would absorb some of the shot’s energy and assist less-than-perfect shots to go in, it was sent skyward with a twist of both wrists that gave it terrific backspin. Hitting high on the backboard, it would dive through the hoop with a power very different from the lightness of touch that can give a jump shot artist a “shooter's roll,” the ball dancing around on the rim before determining it might as well drop in. I saw Sharrow work his magic during faculty-varsity games, which were popular as fund-raisers. Such a shot, taken from the side so it had to be aimed at just the right place on the backboard, was electrifying.

       A center might have a good hook shot, like Pittsford’s Bruce Hier, or a turnaround jump shot, like Brandon’s Tom Dickinson,. I don’t mean that he turned and took a shot, I mean he jump high (being tall) and twisted 180 degrees in mid-air to take an unstoppable shot. It wasn’t always possible for point guard Chuck Memoe (a future Castleton State College Hall-of-Famer) to get him the ball, but when he did, Dickinson was deadly.

       I think a lot Vermonters have such memories, and would be willing to subscribe to a film-making project that would bring them to life. It would be a Homecoming