Health : The Atlantic

Using the Internet as Matchmaker: The Drawbacks to Online Dating

2012-02-12T14:05:27-05:00

Internet dating has become the second most used method of dating, but it creates unrealistic expectations and promotes a sense of destiny.

For many years, online dating had a stigma attached to it. Its likeness to personal ads may have been a little too close for comfort, and Americans were hesitant to embrace it. Now, a new study commissioned by the American Psychological Association, shows that it's shed that stigma, and is forging ahead as a central method for finding love. But there are some pitfalls that come with the practice.

"The Internet holds great promise for helping adults form healthy and supportive romantic partnerships, and those relationships are one of the best predictors of emotional and physical health," says coauthor Harry Reis, in a university news release. The other options out there aren't particularly useful, he added, especially after we enter the adult years, when there is no school or college to help us meet new people.

Mapping All of America's Illnesses

2012-02-12T12:03:43-05:00

A resident of Phoenix is down with the "man flu" -- the possibly mythical condition in which men experience illnesses more painfully than women.

This drippy, wheezy intelligence, possibly accurate or possibly not, comes courtesy of SickWeather, a website that attempts to crowdsource the health of cities around the world. (Motto: "Say It, Don't Spray It"). Co-founded by former U.S. Census crime-trend mapper Graham Dodge, the site presents a near-real-time map showing outbreaks of various illnesses as vast colored polygons; zoom in, and you can see the specific neighborhoods where people are kvetching about being laid out.

Hypochondriacs can spend a half hour or so filtering the results by malady. There are the usual suspects: common cold, stomach flu, pink eye, allergies, chicken pox. A few lesser-known afflictions also pop up, such as croup and "love sickness." When the terrorists finally find a way to weaponize the latter, we'll all be doomed.

How does SickWeather reach its diagnoses? Two ways. First, users can log on and pin their respective bugs onto the map. The company also uses a "patent-pending algorithm" that scans Facebook and Twitter for complaints of illness. This spider is intelligent enough to tell the difference between "I'm sick" and "Those were sick beats at the club last night." Likewise, it will pick up "The doc says I have bronchitis" but leave "Bieber fever 4ever!"

Read the full story at The Atlantic Cities.

Using Diamonds to Improve Traditional Orthopedic Implants

2012-02-12T10:05:03-05:00

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have found that nanodiamond coating limits wear and tear on the body's joints.

A Western Diet High in Sugars and Fat Could Contribute to ADHD

2012-02-11T16:03:26-05:00

There doesn't seem to be one particular kind of diet that works best for treating the symptoms of ADHD, but unhealthy food could be a culprit.

While there doesn't seem to be any one particular diet that works to treat the symptoms of ADHD in children, a review of the research on various dietary regimens suggests that plain old healthy eating may work the best.

Dr. J. Gordon Millichap, a neurologist, and Michelle M. Yee, a nurse-practitioner, both researchers at Children's Memorial Hospital and Northwestern University in Chicago, reviewed 70 studies dating back to 1976 on the use of diet and dietary supplements for the treatment of ADHD.

A Short Documentary of Doctors Replacing a Dying Man's Heart

2012-02-11T14:02:24-05:00

Drs. Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier at the Texas Heart Institute were faced with a patient last March whose heart was about to succumb to the point that even a left ventricular assist device wouldn't be sufficient to keep him alive. Described as a story of "two visionary doctors from the Texas Heart Institute who in March of 2011 successfully replaced a dying man's heart with a 'continuous flow' rotor-driven device of their own design, proving that life was possible without a pulse or a heartbeat," the film was directed by Jeremiah Zagar, whose feature-length documentary In A Dream was nominated for two Emmys in 2010.

This post also appears on medGadget, an Atlantic partner site.

Should Public Trees Bear Fruit?

2012-02-11T12:06:51-05:00

There's a block in San Francisco that will soon be blossoming with cherries, plums, and pears, but Tara Hui will not say where. That's because she's worried that backlash from city officials or unsympathetic citizens will halt the progress she and her fellow Guerrilla Grafters have made splicing fruit-bearing branches on to city trees.

Grafting trees is as simple as cutting a branch from one kind of tree and sticking it into a notch in another, securing it with sturdy tape and hoping that the new branch thrives. It's as old as the Bible and widely used today in industrial agriculture.

Hui hopes the method will help bring food to under-served parts of the city like her neighborhood, Visitacion Valley, which she says is basically a food desert.

"There's a lot of discussion about what kind of policy we need to get businesses to come to this neighborhood to sell fresh produce or even organic," she says. Over the years she's advocated for bringing fruit trees into the city's urban forestry mix. "If all goes well it might even spawn some kind of cottage industry like canning or jamming," she says.

Read the full story at The Atlantic Cities.

How the Church and Susan Komen Place Themselves Before Health

2012-02-11T10:53:37-05:00

Ultimately, Americans want the freedom to make personal health decisions on their own, without the various institutions around us.

A 20-year-old cancer foundation and a 2,000-year-old church have taken issue with twin cornerstones of women's health in this country. It's time both organizations take a lesson from the way medical professionals put our own personal views aside to deliver care. Health care is not a venue in which to exert your desire to shape the content of people's lives. Health is the default condition we need to make those choices. Life choices must be made freely, all major religions, and all legitimate political ideologies agree.

As a physician I must serve my patients' health only. I cannot attempt to direct my patients' lives. I cannot artificially constrict their choices.

When Susan G. Komen for the Cure announced it would disqualify Planned Parenthood's breast cancer screening programs from future grants, its decision was driven by Komen leaders who couldn't abide family planning. Though the Komen foundation's millions derive from the importance and popularity of its primary mission to end breast cancer, the organization compromised this mission in subservience to a baser mission: fulfilling the ideology of a few, even if it meant loss of health for many.

When the Roman Catholic Church, employer of many non-Catholics, learned that the nation's new health care law meant its hospitals, universities, and other civic institutions must provide complete health insurance coverage, outrage spewed forth, our second national conflagration over health and values in as many weeks. Mind you, many otherwise solid American Catholics use contraception despite what their church says on the issue. Still, the thought that Catholic hospitals and universities would end up facilitating family planning in their health plans seems a step too far for Catholic leaders and the political demagogues playing to them.

Really, who do they think they are?

As a physician I must serve my patients' health only; I cannot attempt to direct my patients' lives; I cannot artificially constrict their choices. Every day we treat similar patients different ways, taking our cues from diverse values. In my case, I work in brain injury medicine. Some families I counsel will choose to let a severely brain injured child or parent pass away from a pneumonia that could be easily treated. I obey, I facilitate. Other families will desire every possible treatment, elevating life regardless of current physical condition. I obey, I facilitate. I respect both choices.

Every day folks in similar medical circumstances receive similar counseling from their doctors, yet end up making different choices. It is not their employer's place to intervene. It is not a non-profit foundation's right to intervene.

Organizations that wish to interject themselves into the private health decisions of Americans, take note. Komen backed off. Catholics are taking a compromise. Ultimately, Americans want the freedom for themselves alone, not for the various institutions that have grown up around us, all trying to push us their own way.

Health foundation board members and legions of faithful alike can believe whatever they wish to be true. They may freely conduct their own lives as they choose. But nobody has the freedom to tell my patient what to do about her condition, her body, her life. Not her doctor, not a non-profit foundation, and not somebody else's church.

Image: Reuters.

My Husband, Alzheimer's Patient

2012-02-11T10:06:16-05:00

Like millions of people in this country and around the world, my 61-year-old husband, Steve, suffers from the nightmare that is Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's is the most common form of dementia in the United States. Many other people suffer from Parkinson's disease and less common forms of dementia and neurodegenerative conditions. These diseases take their toll not only on the victim but on their loved ones as well. No matter how young or old a person is at the onset of these diseases, the diagnosis is a devastating, life-altering blow. The future, once rosy and full of promise, takes on a different set of colors, bleak and gray.

How sad and cruel is the disease process known as dementia, that so many people finish out their lives without memories of what they have accomplished, unable to recognize the people they loved and who loved them, and finally unable to remember how to perform the simplest physical maneuver such as standing up and sitting down. How sad and cruel that people have to watch their beloved spouse or parent slowly slip away in this manner, and then worry that they will suffer the same fate.

Presently, there is no cure for Alzheimer's disease. After decades of study and many billions of dollars spent on research, the causes of Alzheimer's disease are still mostly unknown, and pharmaceutical companies have yet to find a treatment that will stop, much less reverse, its downward spiral.

A recent campaign by a national Alzheimer's organization pronounced that this disease "has no survivors," a message intended, no doubt, to promote contributions for research, but also a message that conveys a sense of hopelessness to the very real people and their families who are dealing with Alzheimer's disease now. In March 2009, Steve and I attended a conference presented by this organization in Washington, D.C., where they proudly announced the "good news" that a cure is on the horizon, probably within five years. This was not good news to us and to the many others who are dealing with this disease in the here and now. This was the same message we had heard five years prior when Steve was in the early stages of this disease. At that time, we were so very hopeful that, if he took his special medications to "slow the decline of the disease," he would survive in a meaningful way, long enough to enjoy the benefits of the promised cure.

When you are a relatively young couple such as us, it is quite a shock when it becomes apparent that we will not get to enjoy the golden years of retirement that most people look forward to. Like many others contending with the disease, we often talk about the fact that, if Steve could just stay the way he is now, we could still live with this disease. The cold reality is that neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's, are relentless, and hope fades with each passing year until it is finally extinguished. We cannot wait five more years, because we don't have five more years.

This book is about ketones -- tiny molecules of organic fuel that have been around since the beginning of life on this planet and have insured our survival as a species. These are molecules of hope for those suffering from Alzheimer's and other degenerative brain diseases. A drinkable form of ketones can be made now in the National Institutes of Health lab of Richard Veech, M.D., D. Phil., a world-renowned researcher who has been working with ketones for decades. But it will take substantial money and several years of clinical trials after the money comes through to be available to the millions who need this. Sadly, competition is fierce for research dollars, and the money to mass-produce this ketone ester has not come through as of this writing. As it often does, politics has gotten in the way of true progress.

My primary goal in writing this book is to draw attention to the existence of ketone ester, get the mass production of ketone ester funded, and get clinical trials of ketone ester on the fast track toward Food and Drug Administration approval. I hope this book will increase awareness in such a way that the powers-that-be can no longer overlook ketone ester and will be pushed to fund its production. I also hope that an explosion of ketone research will occur. For those dealing with dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases, this cannot happen soon enough.

We need this miracle now, but it is not here yet. While we are waiting, we can take advantage of a metabolic miracle that occurs in our bodies when we eat certain foods that contain medium-chain fatty acids. These fats found primarily in coconut and palm kernel oils are converted in the liver to ketones, which can be used by the brain and most other organs as fuel. The levels of ketones we can expect from consuming these fats are relatively low compared to the lab-made ketone ester; however, many people can expect a reprieve from the downward spiral of this disease. This reprieve may come in the form of improved memory, a return of personality and sense of humor, greater social interaction, resumption of daily activities, and/or relief from certain physical symptoms. These effects are very real and very meaningful, not only to the people suffering from the disease, but also to their caregivers and other loved ones who are suffering with them.

For many people, the difference after beginning this dietary intervention is readily apparent and can even be dramatic, as it was in my husband's case. For others, the reprieve may come in the form of stabilization rather than obvious improvement. For this reason, I encourage caregivers to keep a journal so that several months later they can look back to decide if this dietary intervention is helping to at least stall the disease process. How long we can expect this reprieve to last is uncertain since this discovery is so new. At the time of this writing, it has been nearly three years since we found and instituted this dietary intervention for Steve. He has often told me that the light bulb came back on the day he started consuming medium-chain fatty acids. Some of the changes were fairly obvious during the first few days, and others took many months to become apparent.

Compared to early in 2008, Steve is no longer depressed. He is happy and feels that he has a future. His personality and sense of humor are much more like the sweet husband I had 10 years ago, before all of this happened. He is sociable, laughs, participates in conversations (even in a large group), and contributes with jokes and comments of his own creation. He no longer has any of the physical symptoms that were affecting him before the dietary intervention, such as tremors, a weird gait, inability to run, a visual disturbance that interfered with reading, and sudden episodes of faintness. His ability to stay on task improved to the point that he was able to take on a volunteer job at the hospital where I work. His short-term and recent memory is far from normal, but they are much improved. A magnetic resonance image (MRI) showed considerable shrinkage in Steve's brain before we began this dietary intervention, meaning that much of his brain tissue has died. So we know there are limits to how much improvement we can expect. In April 2010, two years into this intervention, his MRI was reported as stable.

The road to recovery has not been free of some serious bumps. Steve had one major setback in the summer of 2009, lasting several weeks. He became more dazed and confused during an illness, and some new problems popped up that have not completely gone away. However, with patience and persistence, we have seen a return to his previous baseline in most respects.

This dietary intervention may offer even more hope in the form of prevention for those of us who are at risk of developing Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases. The more I learn about ketone bodies, the more I conclude that short- and medium-chain fatty acids may be essential fatty acids for some, and perhaps all, of us. If we incorporate these essential fats regularly into our diet, we may be able to avoid some of the damage to our brains and other organs related to the aging process.

After Steve improved in response to medium-chain fatty acids, I made considerable effort to get the leaders of a national Alzheimer's organization and the Alzheimer's Study Group to investigate this and make the public aware of it. I was told that extensive clinical trials are needed before they would help get the message out.

Clinical trials can take 15 years from the time the first applications are made for funding until they are completed. Most of those currently suffering from Alzheimer's disease don't have years to wait. They may not be with us in five or even three years. Oils and other foods with medium-chain fatty acids are not dangerous drugs. They are foods that have been consumed on a regular basis for millennia or longer in other parts of the world where people first evolved. These are foods that are available on the shelf in nearly every natural food store and many grocery stores.

We can take advantage right now of the metabolic miracle that happens when we eat foods with medium-chain fatty acids to try to get a reprieve from the nightmare that is Alzheimer's. I don't know how long this reprieve will last, or even if it will happen for you and your loved ones, but what do you have to lose?

Adapted from Mary T. Newport's Alzheimer's Disease: What If There Was a Cure? The Story of Ketones (Basic Health Publications)

U.K. Food Industry Successfully Fights Package Labeling Efforts

2012-02-10T18:07:29-05:00

In what is essentially an invitation to the fox to guards the chickens, the UK government has asked big food to help develop new policies.

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, London, writes that the U.K. food industry is fighting back over initiatives to reduce calories and mitigate climate change.

He sends an article from the British trade publication, The Grocer, about how the U.K. government has reneged on its "responsibility deal" with industry to reduce calories in food products.

The idea was to demand that food companies reformulate products, control portion size, and take "action to shift to lower calorie options."

But now, in response to industry protests, the U.K. Department of Health is simply inviting food companies to help in the development of calorie-reduction policies.

To this invitation to the fox to guard the chickens, professor Lang comments:

Those of us following the currently fashionable 'nudge' theory and other 'Food Policy lite' initiatives will note this leak about softening the Responsibility Deal on calorie reduction here in England with concern.... Perish the thought that sections of the Food Industry might have lobbied hard to stop any efforts to reduce portion size. Perish, indeed.

Another article in The Grocer points out that Tesco, Britain's leading food retailer, is pulling out of an agreement to put carbon labels on products because doing so is too much trouble.

Professor Lang writes:

Here is the world's 3rd largest food retailer, Tesco, apparently saying that the carbon label (a weak system for changing behavior in the first place, perhaps) takes too much time. Well, well, well.

If this is true ... the implications are considerable, not least for the planet, given that a third of European (i.e., rich consumers) greenhouse gas emissions are due to food.

He gives as sources for that statement:

Tukker, A., et al., Environmental Impacts of Diet Changes in the EU. 2009, European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for Prospective Technological Studies: Seville.
Tukker, A., et al., Environmental Impact of Products (EIPRO): Analysis of the life cycle environmental impacts related to the final consumption of the EU-25. EUR 22284 EN. 2006, European Commission Joint Research Centre.: Brussels.
Audsley, E., et al., How Low Can We Go? An assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from the UK food system and the scope for reduction by 2050 2010, FCRN and WWF: Godalming, Surrey.

So much for voluntary actions by industry. Regulation anyone?

This just in: The European Commission issued a statement of regret that the European Parliament vetoed its proposal to allow "percent less" health claims on food packages. These are statements that a product contains 15 percent less sugar, for example.

The Commission thinks such claims will encourage reformulation of food products. The Parliament believes that such claims are misleading and will promote sales of junk foods.

Which is right? Who knows?

Image: Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock.

This post also appears on Food Politics, an Atlantic partner site.

Using Low-Intensity Electric Fields as a Form of Cancer Therapy

2012-02-10T16:03:53-05:00

Bill Doyle of Novocure, a company that developed non-invasive technology to control cell division in glioblastoma tumors, spoke at TEDMED 2012 about the role low-intensity alternating electric fields can have on cancer therapy:

This post also appears on medGadget, an Atlantic partner site.

A Brief History of the To-Do List and the Psychology of Its Success

2012-02-10T14:01:47-05:00

"The list is the origin of culture," Umberto Eco famously proclaimed. (Leonardo da Vinci, John Lennon, and Woody Guthrie would have all agreed.) But the list, it turns out, might also be the origin of both our highest happiness and our dreariest dissatisfaction. So argue New York Times science writer John Tierney and psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. While the book is fascinating in general -- an unconventional self-help tome that, much like Timothy Wilson's Redirect, grounds its insights and advice in 30 years of serious academic research into willfulness and self-control -- its third chapter, titled "A Brief History of the To-Do List, From God to Drew Carey," is particularly interesting. In it, Tierney and Baumeister dissect the sociocultural anatomy of our favorite organizational tool, from the storytellers who crafted the Bible and wrote the Genesis myth with its six-step world-creation plan, to Benjamin Franklin's fastidious pursuit of virtue bound by goal-setting lists, to comedian Drew Carey's quest for supreme personal productivity.

These anecdotes and pieces of cultural mythology are interwoven with ample psychology experiments from the past century and, ultimately, distilled into insight on how to make the to-list a tool of fulfillment rather than frustration.

Franklin, for instance, demonstrated one of the greatest pitfalls of the to-do list: trying to do too much at once, letting different goals come into conflict with one another:

Franklin tried a divide-and-conquer approach. He drew up a list of virtues and wrote a brief goal for each one, like this one for Order: 'Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.' ...

When, as a young journeyman printer, he tried to practice Order by drawing up a rigid daily work schedule, he kept getting interrupted by unexpected demands from his clients -- and Industry required him to ignore the schedule and meet with them. If he practiced Frugality ('Waste nothing') by always mending his own clothes and preparing all his own meals, there'd be less time available for Industry at his job -- or for side projects like flying a kite in a thunderstorm or editing the Declaration of Independence. If he promised to spend an evening with his friends but then fell behind his schedule for work, he'd have to make a choice that would violate his virtue of Resolution: 'Perform without fail what you resolve.'

The result of conflicting goals, the authors argue, is unhappiness instead of action. But deciding on the right goals can be a daunting task.

Tierney and Baumeister recount a revealing experiment: When a psychologist was invited to give a talk at the Pentagon on managing time and resources, he decided to warm up the elite group of generals with a short writing exercise. He asked them all to write a summary of their strategic approach limited to 25 words.

The exercise stumped most of them. None of the distinguished men in uniform could come up with anything.

The only general who managed a response was the lone woman in the room. She had already had a distinguished career, having worked her way up through the ranks and been wounded in combat in Iraq. Her summary of her approach was as follows: 'First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three down.'

Unscrupulous, perhaps, but the authors argue this is a simple version of an important to-do list strategy for reconciling the long-term with the short-term, or "the fussy with the fuzzy."

Comedian Drew Carey took a different approach to mastering his to-do list -- he outsourced his strategy to productivity guru David Allen, author of the cultish, modern Bible Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, who taught him how to adhere to specific next steps rather than abstract larger goals. The latter loom in the back of our mind like a nagging mother, never fully silenced until specific actionable steps are taken.

In fact, our brain appears to be wired to nag about unfinished to-do list items as uncompleted tasks and unmet goals continue to pop up into our minds. This is called the Zeigarnik effect and explains phenomena like earworms -- when you hear only a portion of song, the song is likely to run through your mind at odd intervals as your brain struggles to finish it. Originally, the Zeigarnik effect was believed to be the brain's way of ensuring goals are eventually accomplished, by prodding you into urgency until they are. But recent research has shed new light on the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious in our cognitive to-do lists.

[It] turns out that the Zeigarnik effect is not, as was assumed for decades, a reminder that continues unabated until the task gets done. The persistence of distracting thoughts is not an indication that the unconscious is working to finish the task. Nor is it the unconscious nagging the conscious mind to finish the task right away. Instead, the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan. The unconscious mind apparently can't do this on its own, so it nags the conscious mind to make a plan with specifics like time, place, and opportunity. Once the plan is formed, the unconscious can stop nagging the conscious mind with reminders.

The moral, then? Unless you are Woody Guthrie, keep your to-do list to a few very specific, actionable, non-conflicting items, then go fly your kite in peace.

This post also appears on Brain Pickings, an Atlantic partner site.

Spending 1 Month in Beijing's Smog Is Like Smoking 5 Cigarettes

2012-02-10T12:06:15-05:00

Crazy bad days [in Beijing], according to [Dr. Richard] Saint Cyr, are the equivalent of 75 percent of one cigarette a day. "So if you don't smoke and you are really healthy, it is something to think about," he admits, although he argues that the health effects of being overweight and inactive are far worse than a little air pollution. "My overall theme is that people, if they're freaking out about air pollution and they're five or ten kilograms overweight, they're really missing the point about their relative risks, what they're gonna die of," he says.

At the same time, Saint Cyr acknowledges that mortality from air pollution is a problem in Beijing. Lung cancer, heart disease, and strokes all rise in polluted cities like Beijing. In China, the individual risk might not be significant but because of the size of the population, the pollution could mean that "hundreds of thousands die prematurely," he says.

Air quality in Beijing isn't expected to improve any time soon, but the transparency of reporting took a great leap forward just before the lunar new year, when the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center started to publish its own 2.5 particulate matter readings. On his website, Saint Cyr compared the readings from the U.S. Embassy and the Chinese, and found that the numbers were comparable. That's a dramatic improvement over the city's earlier monitoring system, which limited itself to a daily report on larger particulates of 10 micrograms and had the audacity to claim that there were 286 "blue sky days" in 2011.

Read the full story at The Atlantic Cities.

Who Bullied the Susan G. Komen Foundation Into Cutting Funding?

2012-02-10T11:30:20-05:00

Karen Handel, the recently-departed Komen VP contradicts her organization in explaining the reasoning for defunding Planned Parenthood.

Karen Handel, the former VP of Susan G. Komen for the Cute who recently left after being outted as the architect of their decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood, sheds some light on the fiasco in an interview today with the Daily Beast. At one point in the interview, she insists that the decision was made because "Komen regulations not to fund organizations that have been barred from receiving government funding. Planned Parenthood has been barred from receiving funding in some states" This echoes the argument made by Komen leaders throughout the ordeal.

But elsewhere in the interview, she says:

It's no secret that for some years -- long before my time -- Komen was dealing with a controversy regarding Planned Parenthood grants. The issue would flare up, then die down, then flare up again. It was fairly cyclical. But over the summer, it intensified. More donors said they were pulling out. The issue was ratcheting up. It wasn't dying down. Two dozen Catholic bishops were saying not to support Komen. ... We needed to find some options for moving to neutral ground.

So did Komen stop funding Planned Parenthood because of the spurious Congressional investigation launched against it, or because the group was getting pressured by outside groups? Handel implies it was the latter, while the former seemed to provide some pretty good cover.

Also in the interview, she describes Planned Parenthood as a "gigantic bully" -- but according to the quote above, it seems like it was someone else who bullied Komen into the decision to defund the organization in the first place.

Image: Getty Images.

The Link Between Obesity and the Early Mother-Child Relationship

2012-02-10T10:57:50-05:00

We talk about exercising more and eating less, but to truly fight obesity we must also consider attachment, the early bond with one's mother.

The standard advice for weight loss is to eat less and exercise more. Although a sound approach, this strategy appears to be falling short in the war against obesity, particularly among children. A recent study proposed a very different take on overweight prevention starting in early childhood. Instead of focusing on the body's energy balance, the researchers suggest improving the mother-toddler relationship, often called attachment.

The researchers explored the effect of maternal-child bonding during the preschool years on the likelihood of obesity during adolescence. Their results were striking.

Professional Help: 5 Tips for Senior Citizens on Simple, Healthy Living

2012-02-10T10:02:24-05:00

When it comes to their well-being, older adults shouldn't act like victims to aging. They should be active—physically, socially, and spiritually.

To slow down the physical and mental decline that comes with age, drugs and exercise aren't enough. According to a study out of the University of Southern California, a lifestyle makeover is necessary.

This week on Professional Help, professor and occupational therapist Florence Clark shares five tips for seniors on sustainable, successful aging from her Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health paper (PDF). Thankfully, her method, while backed by rigorous research, is also surprisingly simple: walk outside, meet up with friends, go to church, and just be as active as possible.

It's never too late to go healthy. Anybody, young or old, can successfully redesign the way they live to be healthier. While we don't have a say in our own genetic makeup, greater than 50 percent of our mental and physical health status is related to lifestyle. You can even start small: ride public transportation, reconnect with a long-lost friend, join a ballroom dance class, or follow guidelines on how to safely move around the community. The point is, try something new and be willing to learn.

Take control of your health. Appreciate the relationship between what you do, how you feel, and their impact on your well-being. Our research suggests that social and productive activities are as important as physical ones for staying healthy. As we age, even deceptively simple or downright mundane pursuits like reading the newspaper, cooking a potluck dish, walking the dog, or going to church have a powerful influence on our physical and mental health.

Know thyself. The guiding principle of Socrates rings just as true today as it did in ancient Athens. Lifestyle changes are most sustainable when they fit into the fabric of your everyday life -- your interests, schedule, and self-concept. Identify supports on your journey that are strong enough to counterbalance the obstacles you face. Set goals that are challenging but still realistic enough to be achieved.

Anticipate how chronic conditions may affect your plan. Over 70 percent of seniors age 65 and older have a chronic condition, such as hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, COPD, or cataracts. Don't let these impede your progress. Before a big game, elite athletes visualize their performance in their minds' eye. So too should you be prepared for the potential ways you might have to adapt or improvise. And, of course, consult your physician in advance about any new activities.

Living longer can also mean living better. Our research demonstrates that maintaining a mix of productive, social, physical, and spiritual activities as you age can lead to increased vitality, social function, mental health, and life satisfaction, along with decreased symptoms of depression and self-reported bodily pain. Even better, activity-centric lifestyle interventions to ward off illness and disability may also be more cost-effective and have fewer negative side effects than prescription drugs.

Image: Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock.

Mindful Eating and Fast-Food Buddhism

2012-02-10T09:54:12-05:00

"Mindful eating" has officially entered the memosphere. An article about it reached the very top of The New York Times most-emailed list this week, and two days later it's still hanging in there at number three.

What is mindful eating? The Times piece gives step-by-step instructions. "Chew slowly. Stop talking. Tune in to the texture of the pasta, the flavor of the cheese, the bright color of the sauce in the bowl, the aroma of the rising steam."

And what is the point of the exercise? For one thing, it's a kind of fast-food form of Buddhism. If you don't have time to go off to a monastery and sit in silence for a week, you can still get little tastes, here and there, of what such a retreat might be like.

And when I say little tastes, I mean little tastes. The Times story says of Jan Chozen Bays, a pediatrician and meditation teacher:

Sometimes, even she is too busy to contemplate a chickpea. So there are days when Dr. Bays will take three mindful sips of tea, "and then, O.K., I've got to go do my work," she said. "Anybody can do that. Anywhere."

Even scarfing down a burrito in the car offers an opportunity for insight. "Mindful eating includes mindless eating," she said. " 'I am aware that I am eating and driving.' "

It may sound like I'm about to make fun of the mindful eating movement--and that last quote is certainly a tempting springboard--but instead I'm going to spring to its defense. First, though, I have to disclose something about myself.

Three times over the last nine years I've gone on one-week silent meditation retreats at a Buddhist retreat center. Seven days of no talking, no reading, no phone calls, no email, no news whatsoever from the outside world. Five and a half hours of sitting meditation each day, five and a half hours of walking walking meditation each day. And, more to the point, three meals a day.

But the term "meals" doesn't do justice to these experiences. When I got to my first meditation retreat, I didn't understand why so many people in the dining hall were eating with their eyes closed. Three days later I was just like them--eyes closed, eating in slow motion, totally absorbed in the taste and texture of foods that, a few days earlier, I would have dismissed as offputtingly wholesome and lacking in sex appeal. (None of the food was even made of dead animals!)

Now that I've established my credentials, I just want to make two points:

(1) If you dabble in mindful eating as prescribed in the Times piece, do not be under the mistaken impression that this is anything like the real thing. The level of sensual emergence in food that I reached would not have been possible without getting totally off the grid and using intense meditation to fundamentally alter my frame of mind.

(2) Do not be under the impression that this sensual indulgence is the ultimate point of the exercise. Because meditation can involve a lot of inward focus, it is sometimes belittled as egotistical or solipsistic. But the overall effect is supposed to be roughly the opposite, and that held true for me. The retreats made me way more open to other people and less judgmental of them. I felt a true kinship even with non-human animals (even non-canine non-human animals!). That this was intertwined with a much deeper sense of aesthetic appreciation--of both food and non-food items--certainly made the whole experience gratifying, but it was a paradoxically selfless kind of gratification.

The transforming effect that a silent meditation retreat can have doesn't magically last forever, though you can hang on to an appreciable part of it if you practice daily meditation and mindfulness in a disciplined fashion after the retreat is over (which is way easier said than done). So I'm not the wonderful human being I so briefly was at the end of my first meditation retreat. But I think I'm better than I was before I went on it (leaving aside the question of how high that's setting the bar).

Anyway: Yes, by all means, read the Times piece and experiment with mindful eating. But don't think that, amid the hubbub of your daily life, you're going to get more than a taste of what mindful eating can be like. And don't think that even full-fledged, mind-blowing mindful eating is more than a taste of what Buddhism can be about.

[Postscript: Judging by early commenter reaction, I've written this in a way that makes it seem like I'm denigrating everyday mindful eating, or looking down on people who haven't been on meditation retreats. I plead innocent! Here's my alibi.]

Death by Flavored Vodka

2012-02-10T09:05:42-05:00

If spirits writers and apocalyptic cults are right and the world actually ends in 2012, it will be because of the new wave of flavored vodkas that evoke a stream of childhood memories.

According to the Mayan calendar, 2012 may well be the end of the world. Spirits writers and apocalyptic cults seem to converge on this point. Of course, we'll all have to wait and see. No one can truly predict the world's demise. But, if we can't predict the end of the world, perhaps we can suggest the means by which the end will come.

While most people likely picture the end as a series of catastrophic events -- meteorites crashing into earth, John Cusack racing his limo over rupturing fault lines, or even streaking missiles staring down nuclear annihilation -- my prediction is, perhaps, a little less theatrical: death by flavored vodka.

We're currently awash in a new wave of flavored vodkas that evoke an endless stream of childhood memories: gummy vodka, cookie dough vodka, bubblegum vodka, chocolate milk vodka, and so on. In fact, this is among the most prolific trends facing alcohol consumers today. It also happens to be one of man's oldest pyschological states: nostalgia.

Whipped cream vodka tastes like, well, whipped cream vodka, which mostly tastes like whipped cream.

Referencing a similar trend in pop music, Frank Zappa wrote in his memoir, The Real Frank Zappa Book, "It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."

Formerly thought of as a medical disease -- according to the man who coined the word in the 17th century, Johannes Hofer -- nostalgia is taken from the Greek to indicate the pain of longing for a place, generally the place of one's birth. However, its present day incarnation is just as likely to reference a clothing or music fad from one's youth, or even an ingredient, which is exactly what manufacturers are counting on with these new flavored vodkas.

They're also counting on nostalgia as pandemic. When we face diffcult or trying times, our thoughts naturally turn to things that posses some inheritance of a simpler era. Thoughts, ideas, and objects imbued with an innocence that we, ourselves, can no longer obtain in the current fractious order. That makes it one hell of a marketing device.

What it doesn't do well, or promise to do well, is taste good. It may well taste like something candied, spicy, syrupy, or sweet, but the entire product is a ruse. Flavor or authenticity are less important than the emotional impact of the product.

I don't believe that nostalgia is without merit. I can certainly understand the use of nostalgic elements in food and drinks. For instance, Christina Tosi's famous cereal milk from Momofuku Milk Bar, or cheeky references to drinks from our childhood in cocktails. The difference is that these references are a kind of phrasing. The same thing that happens in jazz when muscial phrases from other songs are transposed and improvised within an original work. Nostalgically-flavored vodkas are more likely to apply a literal interpretation of flavor. Whipped cream vodka tastes like, well, whipped cream vodka, which mostly tastes like whipped cream.

This literal interpretation of flavors from our childhood undermines conventions of drinking, which began as medicinal and not a medical condition. The point is that while cocktails and spirits may express a diversity of flavors and levels of complexity, those that sit at the bottom rung for me are those that express very little complexity and seek to deliver the package (intoxication) without asking for the toll. Alcoholic beverages shouldn't necessarily taste good to both children and pets.

I may seem like the proverbial grizzled old man who beckons the end of the world while wearing a sandwich board and shouting prophetic epitaphs. But, even if we do escape armageddon, drinking such nostalgic flavors as Atomic Fireball vodka will certainly make one feel like the end is near.

Image: bogdanhoda/Shutterstock.

Do Mothers Matter?

2012-02-10T08:07:28-05:00

How surrogacy and egg donation, which first gained national attention in the 1980s, are bringing into the world a class of children beset by confusion, depression, and loss.

Do mothers matter? Having no mother was -- at least until recently -- widely agreed to be a tragedy. Psychiatric case studies, Disney movies, and well-known spirituals such as "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" have testified to the importance of mothers and the pain of mother loss. But such views have not meant that every child has lived in a society that affirms the importance of the child's bond with his or her mother. Children have been denied their mothers because of class biases (see, poor); racial and ethnic biases (Indian, Aborigine); as part of severe civil conflict (Argentina, Dirty War); amid widespread, institutionalized human rights abuses (slavery); or because their mothers were rightly or wrongly perceived to be unfit (see: history of adoption, good, bad, and ugly).

Yet even as the broad history of helping ourselves to other people's children continues to be probed and largely condemned (except in the case of adoption, where most reasonable people agree that such an institution must exist in order to find loving homes for children in need of them), a newer and notably deliberate form of mother loss has sprung up, one that receives relatively little debate and is often presented as benign or even good, without question. I am referring, of course, to the practices of surrogacy and egg donation.

Most sperm donor-conceived persons strongly object to anonymous donation of sperm. Nearly half feel troubled by the role of money in their conception.

When surrogacy and egg donation first gained national attention in the 1980s the children in question usually had a social mother, a woman, herself infertile, married to a man and seeking to achieve pregnancy with the use of another woman's body. Today we are witnessing an equal opportunity run on deliberately conceiving motherless children. Men, alone or in pairs, can buy eggs and rent wombs, too. A child can be denied knowledge of and a relationship with his or her generally fit mother simply because other adults -- the child's prospective legal parents -- wish it to be so, and are willing to pay to make it so. These transactions occur with the aid of doctors, lawyers, and clinics licensed by the state, and thus with tacit approval from the state.

I wrote about some of these new single fathers by choice in my recent report, "One Parent or Five: A Global Look at Today's New Intentional Families." There is Ian Mucklejohn, father of three. In 2001, at the age of 54, the British citizen became the father of triplets conceived with an egg donor and a gestational surrogate mother, both living in the U.S. Mucklejohn soon became a hero for other single fathers-to-be when he won British citizenship and birth certificates with a blank in the space for "mother" for all three children.

Or look to in India where, in 2005, a middle-aged accountant, Amit Banerjee, became that nation's first known single father by choice. His doctor enthused that the new father "was a perfect candidate for ART. As a physician I could not deny him the available technology that hundreds of childless couples are opting to fulfill their dreams of a family." A reporter asked, what about the child's loss of ever knowing his mother? The doctor replied with a question: "What about a child whose mother dies on the delivery bed?" In other words, some children already begin life under the gravely tragic circumstances of their mother dying in childbirth. Is it not the right of would-be parents intentionally to create such children -- and is it not the obligation of doctors to help them do it?

Single fathers by choice are found in the U.S. too. Andy Abowitz, a "successful, single gay man living in Philadelphia," twice paid a 25-year-old doctoral student to donate her eggs and a gestational surrogate to carry the pregnancy, resulting in a girl and, 20 months later, twin boys. The egg donor enthused, "I think it's really fantastic when children are born into situations where they're wanted that much." And while it's true that Abowitz seems to want the children very much, how will the children make sense of an egg donor and surrogate mother who did not want them? How will they even make sense of what "mother" means when they have a genetic mother and a separate birth mother, neither of whom are in their daily lives?

Sometimes it is two men rather than one who conceive this way. Picking an egg donor and a surrogate, gay couples from the obscure to the wildly famous -- examples include Elton John and David Furnish, or Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka -- can do this too. Generally moneyed and armed with a team of baby nurses, nannies, and house cleaners, most of these fathers probably do fine in providing material comfort, opportunity, and a loving home for the children. But what about the children? Do their mothers matter to them?

We are now learning more than ever before about the experience of an arguably similar class of children, those deliberately denied their biological fathers via sperm donation. In studies such as "My Daddy's Name is Donor: A New Study of Young Adults Conceived Through Sperm Donation," which I co-investigated with University of Texas sociology professor Norval Glenn and donor-conceived adult Karen Clark; or in stories posted at the popular AnonymousUs.org website; or found in a newly-released documentary, Anonymous Father's Day, we are hearing that being deliberately denied your father can be both painful and bewildering, especially in a society that says your loss should not matter.

Based on a representative sample, in "My Daddy's Name is Donor" we reported that most sperm donor-conceived persons strongly object to anonymous donation of sperm. Nearly half feel troubled by the role of money in their conception. Most want to know about their biological father's family, and they wonder if that family would want to know about them. Compared to their peers raised by biological parents, sperm donor-conceived persons are more likely to struggle with delinquency, addiction, and depression.

Clearly, at least some of these kids are not really all right. It seems entirely plausible that at least some conceived never to know their mothers might share the feelings of the sample in our study. For decades we have debated whether fathers matter. Must we now debate whether mothers matter, too?

Image: Essl/Shutterstock.

Study of the Day: Gene Therapy Can Restore Vision One Eye at a Time

2012-02-10T07:00:00-05:00

New research shows promising results for the cure of congenital blindness and suggests that our eyes may be "immune-privileged."

PROBLEM: A few years ago, researchers behind a gene therapy trial on a form of inherited blindness reported partial success in deterring its progression into total blindness by adulthood. Half of the patients whose worse-performing eye was tested on improved their vision enough to no longer be classified as legally blind. Can the same remedy work on their other eye without triggering a vaccine-like immune response?

METHODOLOGY: Scientists led by the University of Pennsylvania's Jean Bennett and Manzar Ashtari injected a virus that carried a normal version of a mutated gene associated with inherited blindness into the untreated eyes of three subjects in the previous trial. They measured this vector's effect through standard eye tests and neuroimaging.

RESULTS: The procedure did not prompt any adverse reactions. The patients became better able to see in dim light, and two were able to navigate obstacles in low-light situations. There was also an unexpected benefit. The functional MRI results showed improved brain responses not just in the newly injected eye, but in the first one as well, possibly because the eyes were better able to coordinate with one another.

CONCLUSION: Gene therapy can restore vision one eye at a time without eliciting an immune response.

IMPLICATION: Our eyes have a natural ability to tolerate foreign substances and may be "immune-privileged."

SOURCE: The full study, "AAV2 Gene Therapy Readministration in Three Adults with Congenital Blindness," is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Image: Science/AAAS.

Today in Research: A Rehab App; How Female Fertility Affects Men

2012-02-10T05:56:39-05:00

Discovered: 150 billion tons of glaciers melt each year, the fourth warmest January recorded, a rehab app, female fertility changes the way men speak, the benefits of a normal name.

A rehab app? They have dubbed it the oh-so-original iHeal. And iHeal will incorporate "biosensors," which will measure "arousal" levels. "When the software detects an increased stress or arousal level, it asks the user to annotate events by inputting information about their perceived level of stress, drug cravings, and current activities," explains the study. "iHeal's ultimate goal is to identify, in real-time, drug cravings and deliver personalized, multimedia drug prevention interventions precisely at the moment of greatest need." This is one of those things that sounds good in theory, but we imagine won't work too well in real life. Drug addiction is probably strong enough to out will a computer program, unless the app involves some sort of shock therapy. [Journal of Medical Toxicology]

Female fertility makes men talk different. Romantic partners who spend a lot of time together tend to talk alike, unless the woman happens to be ovulating and the man wants to implant himself into her body, finds a new study. Weird, right? That a woman's internal, biological goings-on can have such a profound effect on a man's speech pattern. We wonder what it has to do with reproduction, though. Perhaps it's sexier than hearing an echo of oneself, drawing the couple together? Just a guess. [PLoS ONE]

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire.

Will Walmart's New 'Great for You' Initiative Get People to Eat Better?

2012-02-09T18:06:03-05:00

Walmart has announced a new FOP labeling program.

The logo will go on Walmart's in-house brand products that meet the company's nutritional criteria. These criteria are similar (but not identical) to those recommended by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in its recent report advising the FDA about what should be included in front-of-package labels.

Because the FDA has not yet acted on the IOM report, Walmart -- like other retailers -- is jumping the gun in doing its own thing. Its thing, however, is a substantial improvement over the Facts Up Front scheme put in place by the Grocery Manufacturers Association and Food Marketing Institute.

In general, strict nutrition criteria for salt, sugar, and saturated fat exclude most supermarket products.

Walmart's criteria are pretty strict. They exclude 80 percent of Great Value products.

In the cereal category, for example, only these Great Value items qualify:

Extra Raisin Bran Cereal
Raisin Bran
Bran Flakes
Crunchy Oat Squares
Frosted Shredded Wheat
Crunchy Nugget Cereal
Toasted Wholegrain Oat Cereal

But these Great Value cereals do not:

Cocoa Cool Cereal
Cinnamon Crunchy Oat Squares Cereal
Apple Blasts Cereal
Sugar Frosted Flakes Cereal
Toasted Corn Cereal
Crisp Rice Cereal
Fruit Spins Cereal
Fruity Puffs Cereal
Crunchy Honey Oats Cereal
Vanilla Almond Awake Cereal

OK, but I wish the company had waited for the FDA to decide on a plan for FOP labeling (and I wish the FDA would get busy on that plan).

All of these schemes are ways to avoid putting negative information on package labels. No seller or retailer wants a red traffic light -- "don't buy me" -- on its products, especially because research shows that stop signals work. Customers tend not to buy products marked with red traffic lights.

The IOM report concluded that negatives ("don't buy") worked better than positives ("buy me") in guiding consumer choice. A more recent study confirms that finding.

Companies much prefer green-light systems like the one Walmart is doing.

The Walmart press release explains:

Walmart moms are telling us they want to make healthier choices for their families, but need help deciphering all the claims and information already displayed on products.... Our 'Great For You' icon provides customers with an easy way to quickly identify healthier food choices ... this simple tool encourages families to have a healthier diet.

But does it? Will Walmart customers buy more of the items marked with the logo instead of the other kinds? The company says it is doing the research. Will customers who buy products with the logo be healthier as a result?

I can't wait to find out.

This post also appears on Food Politics, an Atlantic partner site.

Building a Better Heart Stent

2012-02-09T16:03:56-05:00

Can We Achieve Perfect Health?

2012-02-09T14:53:00-05:00

We can't evolve or engineer our diseases away. And besides, the arms race between viruses and our genes may mean health is a moving target, one that would be dangerous to reach.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on research suggesting why natural selection hasn't succeeded in eradicating our susceptibility to disease, and why breeding other animals for health or productivity also has a dark side.

You'd think that evolution would weed out the bad seeds. People who carry them get sick and die, while those with good genes thrive and have more children -- shouldn't their genes crowd out the bad ones? But no. Instead, there is an astounding diversity of those genes, which belong to a group called the Major Histocompatibility Complex, or (luckily) MHC for short.

"There are hundreds of varieties of MHC genes in most vertebrate species," says Wayne K. Potts, a professor of biology at the University of Utah. "One gene has 2,300, which holds the record." And since the weaker varieties persist, so does vulnerability to disease.

But when researchers transferred viral particles among strains of mice that had developed different genotypes to resist them, they found that, in each strain, some of the viruses were able to penetrate defenses and infect the mice. If all the strains had developed identical defenses, this could not have happened. But the mice would then be more susceptible to a devastating new supervirus that could wipe out all the strains.

The mouse and human species are thus protected by genetically diverse responses -- but it's imperfect protection. And a continuing arms race between viruses and MCH genes may mean that health is a moving target, and one that would be dangerous to reach even if we could. By breeding cattle, pigs, and other animals to resist disease and administering antibiotics, we are also reducing diversity and increasing the likelihood of diseases that may jump to human beings.

"We could back off the antibiotics if we bred back in some MHC diversity," [Wayne Potts] says. Range cattle still have it, and could be bred into dairy herds. Of course, range-cattle MHCs may be accompanied by genes that don't produce as much milk. Farmers may be reluctant to cut their sales, and consumers may be unwilling to pay higher milk prices. That's another kind of arms race: economics and health.

When I spoke to an agricultural marketers association in the 1990s, the members were talking about PRRS -- Porcine Respiratory and Reproductive Syndrome -- an autoimmune disease of swine that is as awful as it sounds. According to my hosts, it had developed in large farms where pigs were treated with antibiotics for "enhanced health status." It had become such a threat that trucks servicing possibly affected farms had to have their tires disinfected each time they left. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) PRRS has since become a threat in Asia.

And a crucial (though not sufficient) step in the spread of human AIDS was the campaign of colonial powers in Africa to inoculate both locals and colonists. Inexpensive machine-made syringes, an innovation of the 1920s, thus became one of the most lethal as well as life-saving medical innovations in history. (See this review of Jacques Pépin's Origins of AIDS.) So the quest to conquer all disease, in humans as in the animals they have domesticated, can have tragic unintended consequences.

Over 50 years have passed since publication of René Dubos' Mirage of Health, which injected skepticism into medical discourse at the height of therapeutic optimism in 1960. Its opposite pole is the quest for human biological immortality through the convergence of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and computer science, the Singularity. Yet no matter how many practical, ethical, and even evolutionary obstacles can be argued against the goal of perfect health, there's part of the human spirit that resists reality in favor of the impossible dream. And I'm not sure it's a bad thing.

Image: Reuters

1939: The Year of Goldfish Gulping

2012-02-09T13:57:41-05:00

It started out with one. One live goldfish, swallowed up by a Harvard freshman on a dare. Three weeks later it rose to three, and four days after that it jumped to 24. By the end of April 1939, the record for the number of goldfish swallowed stood at 101. Students at colleges across the country -- the University of Michigan, Boston College, New Mexico State, among others -- had popularized a quest to see how many goldfish a single person could eat in one sitting.

As an intern in the Division of Culture and the Arts, I did not begin my research with this topic in mind. My job was to find headlines describing major news events that occurred in 1939. These would be used to border the walls for the 1939 exhibition on the third floor of the museum. But what began as a simple search for headlines ended with a collection of news titles about gulping (and in some cases, chewing) goldfish. I knew I would probably find some quirky headlines from such a momentous year, but I never expected to find this.

Of course, college crazes are nothing new. In the 1950s, students stuffed themselves in phone booths to see how many bodies they could cram inside; in the 1970s, students streaked naked across campus. But 1939 featured a trend unlike any other. Students bet goldfish as if they were poker chips, constantly raising the stakes by downing more fish than the previous record-holder. Some goldfish gulpers paired their scaly little victims with chasers or condiments. While one student doused his fish with salt and pepper before ingesting them, another accomplished his feat with the help of three bottles of milk. The originator of the craze, Lothrop Withington, Jr., actually chewed his fish before swallowing and chased it with mashed potatoes, according to a letter written 24 years later by his friend and published in the New York Times.

1939 exhibition.

It didn't take long for adults to step in and try to put a stop to the craze for various reasons. College administrators found one student's conduct "unbecoming" and suspended him. Administrators at the California Institute of Technology called off one student's attempt to set a new gulping record after animal rights activists voiced opposition to the event. Animal rights supporters in Boston even threatened to sue Boston College officials if contests continued. Doctors weighed in on the physical dangers of eating live fish, warning youngsters about fish tapeworms and anemia. A member of the Massachusetts Legislature sponsored a bill to "protect and preserve the fish from cruel and wanton consumption."

In a letter written to the New York Times, one incredulous observer wrote, "I am a believer in education -- even in higher education for those worthy of it, but I have always maintained that a large percentage of those attending our colleges should never have been admitted. Some evidence of the truth of this is evident in the present epidemic of live goldfish swallowing in some colleges. Although fish, as a food, has had the reputation of being an exceptional brain builder, I understand that this reputation has been proved false."

Yet interference from administrators and medical professionals could not put a stop to the craze. Instead, like most fads, it simply died off. A few collegiates at the University of Chicago turned to swallowing phonograph records instead of fish in the wake of the dying trend. Not surprisingly, record swallowing didn't prove too popular in the long run, but one student did manage to choke down one and a half. Soon after it began, however, the goldfish gulping contest ended with little fanfare.

The headline that wound up in the exhibit is from relatively early on that year, when the record stood at a mere 25: "Goldfish Gulping Derby Lead Taken by Penn, 25 to 24," from the March 29 edition of the Washington Post. As random and ridiculous as the activity of swallowing goldfish is, it seems somehow appropriate that it should populate an exhibit about entertainment in a year filled with economic uncertainty and the possibility of American involvement in a world war. Americans sought entertainment as a way of escaping from these concerns. Asked about the goldfish swallowing craze in April 1939, one doctor explained: "A fad that can be rationalized, that has some definite value, will stay. Those which do not will go." This was one craze that could definitely not be rationalized. After all, that was the point.

This post also appears on the Smithsonian's O Say Can You See? blog, an Atlantic partner site.

Disaster Cooking 101: The Limits of Our Changing Food System

2012-02-09T13:06:20-05:00

Editor's Note: Last year, an enormous blizzard blanketed much of the Midwest on Groundhog's Day. An estimated 46 tornadoes touched down in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Kentucky, killing nine on April 4th and 5th. A 300-percent increase in the amount of rainfall in the Ohio valley pushed the Mississippi River over 45 feet, and thousands of homes were evacuated. It was a record year for weather-related problems -- a new record was set when the 12th natural disaster to cost more than $1 billion swept across the states.

There are plenty of places across the country that weren't directly affected by the flooding, tornadoes, and snow. But we've all been affected in another way: The disasters -- and our shifting climate, in general -- have dramatically changed food production systems in the U.S.

For example, "Hurricane Irene flattened feed crops, flooded farms, and racked up over $10 million worth of damage in Vermont alone," according to the Climate Desk's James West. "They had trouble just reaching the farms because there were road closures due to the storm, so that impacted a lot of the dairy products -- and that's why Lidia had a course based on that," adds CNN's Bonnie Schneider, who is working with restauranteur and celebrity chef Lidia Bastianich on a one-of-a-kind class. "So the way is to preserve the milk in other ways -- and that is to cure it, to make cheese out of it," Bastianich says of Vermont's problem. "I remember my grandmother, she cooked it again, she took the whey, added a little bit of milk and made ricotta -- ri-cotta, re-cooked."

In the video below, West visits Bastianich and Schneider's class, which teaches students how to recycle food and work within the limits of our changing food system.