打哈欠

在我们现在的社会里，在大庭广众面前打哈欠，不但是不雅，而且是不敬的、无礼的。如果忍不住了要打哈欠，也得歪着头，掩着嘴，偷偷地打。打了以后，心里还得惭愧一番。这就是至今我们一般人对打哈欠的了解所决定的社会行为的要求。这也表示了，打哈欠是一种弱点，不能控制它是更大的弱点。

打哈欠能够控制吗？打哈欠是弱点吗？

以前在书报上看到的文章多说打哈欠是因为脑缺氧，是人困了。要避免打哈欠，得睡眠充足，得提起精神。我还因此因为早上爱打哈欠而对自己的健康发生疑问。怎么睡了一夜，早上还打哈欠呢？真的老到弱到这地步么？

今年在网上的一些研究脑神经的报告文章里，却看到一些新的说法，说打哈欠是身体自我调整的自然现象，打哈欠是因为脑细胞过热，需要降温而产生的。这一说法，给了我一些安慰，原来我早上打哈欠，不是因为缺氧，不是睡眠不足，而是用脑过度！那还不简单，少想就是了。

不久前，读了一本研究脑神经与心灵学的书，里面说打哈欠有解除压力的功能，大力提倡打哈欠。这和上面说的降温作用息息相关。

人们很久以前就知道，打哈欠是有感染性的；看到人家打哈欠，自己也会跟着打。在一个场合里，一人打哈欠可以引起一大堆人打哈欠。这种感染性，还可以应用在本身；当你做个打哈欠的姿势时，你可能就会真的打起哈欠来；如果一次不行，装多几次，不超过八次，我包你就真的打起哈欠来。不信你试试看。

除了人类，其他动物也会打哈欠，如猴子，狗之类。

打哈欠可以减压，我们齐齐来打哈欠：一、 二、 三， 赫哈————。 舒服极了！

邱

Lipid Hypothesis

The Lipid Hypothesis, manifested as "Eat a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet", has been the mantra for healthful eating for decades We are dutifully avoiding dietary fat and cholesterol which we believe are responsible for chronic disease, such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes etc. This hypothesis has been revered like a dogma for more than 30 years and your cardiologist will be repeating it to you whenever your cholesterol level rises or whenever you seek advice on dietary matter.

In the 1960s, fats and oils supplied Americans with about 45 percent of their calories; about 13 percent of the Americans were obese and less than 1 percent had type 2 diabetes, a serious weight-related condition. Today, Americans take in less fat, getting about 33 percent of calories from fats and oils; yet 34 percent of them are obese and 8 percent have diabetes, most with type 2 diabetes

No wonder many scientists are retreating from this tenet of lipid hypothesis quietly.

A group of scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health, led by Dr. Frank Hu, has in late 2000, published a review on “Types of Dietary Fat and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: A Critical Review”. The scientists, one by one, have removed practically all the supports of the hypothesis that dietary fat and cholesterol cause heart disease and obesity. The authors said, in the review, that “it is now increasingly recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health consequence”.

The Review noted only two studies have ever found “a significant positive association between saturated fat intake and risk of CHD(coronary heart disease)” and “a weak and nonsignificant positive association between dietary cholesterol and CHD” and “there is little direct evidence linking high egg consumption and increased risk of CHD”. The Review also found that “long-term clinical trials have not provided convincing evidence that reducing dietary fat can lead to substantial weight loss. On the contrary, there is some evidence that a diet containing a high amount of refined carbohydrates may increase hunger and promote overeating, which can lead to weight gain and obesity”.

Rather than simply dietary fat, the Review found that trans fat is the major culprit. “A higher intake of trans fat can contribute to increased risk of CHD through multiple mechanisms. First, trans fatty acids raise LDL cholesterol levels and lower HDL cholesterol relative to cis unsaturated fatty acids. As such, the increase in the ratio of total to HDL cholesterol for trans fat is approximately double that for saturated fat. Second, trans fat increases lipoprotein (a) levels, which are positively associated with risk of CHD. Third, trans fat raises plasma triglyceride levels, and increased triglycerides are independently associated with increased risk of CHD . Fourth, trans fatty acids can adversely affect essential fatty acid metabolism and prostaglandin balance by inhibiting the enzyme delta-6-desaturase and, as a result, may promote thrombogenesis. Finally, recent data have suggested that high intake of trans fat may promote insulin resistance in humans”.

In conclusion, what really matters is the type of fat in the diet, not the total amount of fat. Trans and saturated fats increase the risk for certain diseases. Monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats,do just the opposite. They are good for the heart and most other parts of the body. And as far as dietary cholesterol is concerned, for most people, the mix of fats in the diet influences cholesterol in the bloodstream far more than dietary cholesterol.

Laymen are always at the mercy of the experts. But we all are laymen, though some of us are experts in certain fields, but never in all fields. Laymen (that means all of us) just have to hear from the experts with a critical mind and take the risk for listening or otherwise to the experts. Some experts are telling us now what the authorities have been advising us are wrong, what many experts are advising us are wrong: dietary fat and dietary cholesterol are not the culprits, trans fat and may be saturated fat are the culprits for CHD, over-eating refined carbohydrates is the culprit for obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Who do you want to listen to?

Compiled by Hiew may 2008

How old are you?

We are often asked this question in one form or other and we habitually give an answer which is the difference between the current year and the year we were born without further pondering about the aptness of the answer we gave as if that is without doubt THE answer.
But there are times we do expressed double about such answers such as when we exclaimed “you don’t even look 50!” when someone gave 60 as his/her age.
There are also times when we comment that someone is not acting his/her age. An 18 year old may try to act as if he/she is 30 or a 50 year old may talk like a 17 years old student.
All these point to a fact that there are different kinds of ages though we may not always realize it.
The commonly given age is the chronological age which is the calendar age. This age is fixed and easily determined but is not reliable. A person who is 60 years old chronologically may look youthful and healthy. Another person who is also 60 years old chronologically may look old and sick. The chronological age, in this sense, does not really tell how old we are in so far as our physical functions and vigor are concerned.
The age generally based on physical look may be labeled the Biological/physiological age whereas the age based on how old a person feels/thinks may be labeled the psychological age.
The biological age, I was given to understand, is determined by how our critical organs function. These organs age in accordance with how we treat them. Each organ of a person may age according to different time-table. My heart may be 50 years old but my bones could be 60 and my muscles 40. The tissues or cells that made up an organ may also age differently. As such, determining our biological age is a very complex matter.
Our body, as I learned, is at its prime when we are about 20 years old when our critical organs have fully developed. Everyone this age looks and functions much the same. After 30, our critical organs start to deteriorate at rates depending on how we treat them. As of this era, they deteriorate at about 1% a year for a normal person. It will take 70 years to deteriorate down to 30% maximum capacity beyond which the organs may breakdown. By then we would have been 100 years old. But some serious diseases are likely to crop up and disrupt our live along the way and most of us are more likely to die of disease rather than of old age.
Unlike Chronological age, Biological age is changeable; it can go forward fast, slowly, or even reverse, depending on how we treat ourselves. Our life style has different effects on our different organs. Our sleeping, eating and drinking patterns and habits, our postures, and the way we walk…constitute part of our life style and they all have some effects, positive and /or negative, on our various organs and determine how effective they function at any given time.
Biological age is also affected by psychological age, which is something even more flexible, fast changing and personal. Psychological age can switch forward and backward at any chronological age.
So, how old are you? It is difficult to assign a single figure. Your chronological age is a poor measurement of how old you are. Your biological age is a better indicator but as we have learned, it is difficult to determine as each of your critical organs may function at different efficiencies at any given time after age 30. Your psychological age nearly can change from moment to moment and affect your biological age.

Feb 2008 Hiew

One meal to good/bad health!

If you try to emulate me on your diet and you think you will be benefited even if you occasionally indulge in “good, delicious food”, you must read what I read after I have posted “My Diet”. You will be delighted and benefited from reading it.

‘Just one high-fat, high-sugar meal can trigger a biochemical cascade, causing inflammation of blood vessels and immediate, detrimental changes to the nervous system, according to the paper, published in the 7th week of 2008 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. And just one healthy meal helps return your body to its optimal state. "Your health and vigor, at a very basic level, are as good as your last meal," says lead author James O'Keefe, head of preventive cardiology at the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo.

Here's how it works. When you eat, your body breaks down the food into a stream of nutrients, including glucose (sugar), lipids (fats), and amino acids (the building blocks of protein). If your meal happens to be junk food the rush of sugar causes something called "post-prandial hyperglycemia": a big spike in blood-sugar levels. Poor diet in the long-term leads to hypertension and build-up of gunk in blood vessels that increases heart-attack risk. But there are short-term effects too. Tissue becomes inflamed, just as it does when infected. Blood vessels constrict. Free radicals, unstable molecules that cause cell damage and are thought to contribute to chronic disease and aging, are generated. The body's stress response has a bigger effect on blood pressure, raising it higher than normal. People may notice they feel crummy a few hours after eating junk food. And the sudden surge and drop in insulin — the hormone that spurs your body to store energy — also leaves them feeling hungry again soon after eating, despite having had plenty of calories.

The good news is that these blood-sugar spikes and crashes are easy to regulate. Blood sugar will rise and fall quickly if, for example, a person eats an easily digested meal of only white bread. The common denominator of all these slow-release foods, says O'Keefe, is a generally high nutritive value with low calories. The healthy foods are exactly the ones you would expect, all that stuff your mom (and your doctor) told you to eat: lots of fresh vegetables and fruits, lean proteins like fish and legumes, and high-fiber whole grains. All of them blunt the post-prandial spike..

"You can improve your health, basically, from hour to hour," he says.’

I keep on saying that we are limited by our personal knowledge and our personally knowledge is in turn limited by human knowledge of our time. The above piece of human knowledge is new and is not yet widely possessed and its validity is not widely tested. I quote it in my blog as an attempt to propagate it so that, in time, it will be more widely known and tested.

If this research result is not falsified in time, then, what we eat does more than just directly affecting our physical conditions by being part of our physical constituent; it affects us also by stimulating our nervous response to generate biochemicals from our body which affect our physical conditions. What we eat that is not excreted is absorbed and/or stored; what is absorbed will be part of us physically. Now this research is telling us in addition, what we eat stimulate us to generate biochemicals from our body that will have tremendous effect on our body, at least in the short term.

I can’t help asking the next question: how does our volition come into play in such a case since our volition may override our response to physical stimulation in some cases? If our volition does play a role here, then, for the some person when he takes the same food at different times in a different state of mind, or with different attitude towards the food he eats, the effect of the food on his body will be different since different nervous responses will be effected to generate different biochemicals. I tend to believe in this speculation and do advise that you have good mental attitudes towards your food every time you eat. Be grateful to the providers and enjoy your food, and get more benefits out of it, why not?

Further more, even if when we are not eating, that is to say, when there is no physical stimulation, can our volition trigger nervous responses that generate biochemicals in our body? Again, I tend to think it can. One way to do this is by visualization. Do you want to try it? If so, do be “positive”! "Negative" thoughts may be harmful.

By Hiew Jan 2008

My diet

I am now taking a simple diet which I think is healthy though I am limited by my dietary knowledge which is in turn limited by human knowledge of our time.

Being born into a poor farmer’s family at the end of the Second World War(1944), we, for years, barely have enough to eat for survival. We normally ate three simple, small meals a day of similar food: white rice, vegetables of various types grown in the farm, fish bought from neighboring fishermen, eggs from chicken reared by my mom. Pork and chicken were only available on festive days when these were first offered to deities and ancestors that my family used to worship.

My parents held fast to their belief that rice is the only main food that we need for survival; other foods are appetizers or supplementary or condiments to go with rice and fruits are kids’ junk food that are harmful. We grew up till adolescence based on this dietary philosophy. In those days, instead of plain water, we drank plenty of a brand of green tea called White Monkey(白毛猴) which is still available in the market. At times of coconut harvesting, as we have to work laboriously the whole day, we also have morning and afternoon tea which normally consisted of coffee, biscuit or boiled banana, to give us enough energy. The water we used was either well water or harvested rain water from the roof. The cooking oil was home made coconut oil. This is a counter example to common belief that poly-saturated oil is harmful as my cholesterol and triglyceride have been low despite more than 15 years consuming coconut cooking oil.

I stayed in hostels from Senior Middle one to Upper six. In Senior Middle school I ate bread with jam and tea with milk for breakfast and similar lunch and dinner as before. In the two years in Form Six, I have similar breakfast as in Senior Middle School and an improved lunch and dinner which were prepared more in line with the food pyramid of the 1960s. In my 4 years studying in an Australian University, I have bread with butter or jam, or fruits only for breakfast, Australian dishes for lunch in the cafeteria, and I cooked my own dinner mainly consisting of vegetables and beef or mutton or pork or chicken and sometimes fish. Up till then, I knew little about food pyramid or dietary values. From the age of 15 to 25, my body weight remained more or less constant at 57 Kg, despite the Sydney winters and some fatty Australian diets and that fact that I ate as much every meal as my contemporaries during this phase of my life.

From the early 1970s, I have my own family and diets of our choice. But our dietary knowledge did not go beyond the popular food pyramid posters on the walls of private clinics in town. In the early 1980s, we started to read Western dietary books and started to pay more attention to our diets as we started to put on weight and feel fatigue due to age and workload. But there were not without controversies in these dietary books. Shall we eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a queen and dinner like a pauper? Or shall we skip breakfast, eat light lunch and heavy dinner? Shall we emphasize on carbohydrate or protein? These were unsettled questions that bothered us.

In 1992, I started to take up Yoga and follow somewhat faithfully a “Yoga diet for office worker”, a term I coined for my diet since 1992. This diet consists of fruit for breakfast, carbohydrate and vegetables for lunch and protein and vegetables for dinner; no supper, no snack, no coffee, no red tea and no refined sugar. When I first started this diet, within a month, I loss some 5 Kg extra weight that I didn’t need and I felt my health has improved. I more or less maintain this diet most of the time till date. I do take snacks and tea with milk at times in coffee shops though but not really very often. My weight is now 70 Kg with a height of 178 cm to match.

I mainly eat vitamin A and C-rich papaya for breakfast. Other fruits include pineapple, banana, guava, star fruit, pomelo, local orange, apple, dried prune, imported orange, mandarin, jackfruit, Kiwifruit, dragon fruit, grapes, avocado, water melon. I eat fruit breakfast generously. Sometimes I do take bread mostly whole meal bread, dim sum, oatmeal for breakfast. I hardly use butter or margarine to spread on bread. Yoghurt is a recent addition.

For lunch, I eat rice, now mostly unpolished local rice or rice noodle soup. Vegetables are either raw or cooked, mainly green leafy vegetable like kale, broccoli or spinach, tomato, cucumber, beet root, carrot, radish, cabbage, long bean, capsicum, pumpkin, bean sprout, garlic, onion, yam, egg-plant, lady’s fingers, Chinese cabbage, bitter gourd , sea weed, lotus root et cetera. Vegetables are steamed or stir fried or boiled in soup. Cooking oils are vegetables oils and are used sparingly. Very little salt is added to my food which is strictly free of MSG (Monosodium glutamate). Meat is consumed for lunch sometimes, but in small quantity.

For dinner, I eat fish, prawn, poultry, egg and pork meat or liver with vegetables. I seldom take beef or lamb or duck. Mostly the meat is steamed or braised; seldom do we fry or grill meat. I eat no rice or very little rice for dinner.

I also take soup that contains both meat and vegetable, and sometimes herds too during lunch and dinner. The other item I take is nut, such as almond, walnut and some seeds, mostly for breakfast. For each meal taken at home, we have soup and two other dishes, normally one vegetable and one meat dish. The meat dish may be meat fried with vegetable. No dessert is taken after lunch or dinner at home, whether it is fruit, sweet, cake, sweetened tea or coffee. The quantity of each of my main meal is small compared to what most of my friends are taking. Processed food such as canned, pickled, dried and preserved food is avoided almost totally.

I drink plain unboiled water mostly, green tea daily and sometimes a few pegs of red wine after dinner. Now I seldom drink Coke or other similar sugared drinks except iso-tonic drinks like 100plus occasionally.

The list is by no means exhaustive but it covers the main items I usually take. I try to eat what my body needs and avoid what is harmful to it. Based on my dietary knowledge, I eat more anti-oxidant food, low caloric food, wholesome, nutritious food with plenty of fibers to help cleansing and I eat about ¾ full each meal.

By Hiew Jan 2008