Snack:
• It is tough to find low carb foods that do not require refrigeration or preparation. Duke’s sausages are low carb, no sugar, jerky style snacks. They have no nitrites, so none of the issues that accompany cured meats (cancer risk, inflammation, etc). They have tons of flavors now. And they are at almost every store and gas station, a rare exception to the rule that any food from a gas station is a bad idea. Jerky is great too but usually has a good 6-8 grams of sugar per small serving. Not so with Duke’s.
Reading hormesis:
• My brain is sore after reading Scale, an expansive book on the physics of organisms, cities, and companies. The 496 pages replete with exponents and logarithmic scales was taxing to digest. But the information was appealing enough and the author skilled enough that the book was totally worth it. We can all appreciate the benefit “getting through” a tough book like that. You feel accomplished, you learn some interesting stuff, you didn’t give up. • But something I had forgotten was the relative ease of reading the very next book. After Scale, The Resilience Factoris a piece of cake. So there you go, the book that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. If you think you don’t like reading, read a boring medical article, then jump over to that novel you have been wanting to start.
• Geoffrey West is a physicist who is very familiar with the quest for a theory of everything. But in the afterword to his book, he surprises the reader by claiming that one single theory can hardly be expected to describe our complex, fascinating universe. He moved away from the very big and very small of physics to the study of organisms, cities, and then companies. As a complexity scientist, West works at the Santa Fe Institute, which is like Tuxedo Park or Bell Labs: just a bunch of super smart scientists, no hierarchy, and funding to study whatever they want as long as it is cross-disciplinary.
• In the book, West gives one of the best descriptions of fractals that I have ever encountered. He hits (not enough) on the idea of emergence: “when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own.” The universal scaling trends he has studied in all living things are remarkable. Most animals have one billion heart beats in a lifetime: so if your heart rate is 450 beats per minute (hamster), life is short. Don’t worry, humans have more like 2.5 billion, we are an exception to the rule.
• He talks about economy of size: the larger the animal, the more efficient the metabolism of the animal. The networks of our blood vessels scale almost identically to the water system supplying New York city.
• He goes into longevity and the possibly fixed 125 year human lifespan. He then looks at cities and how they scale super linearly. The larger a city becomes, the faster it grows. And unlike companies and organisms, cities do not seem to “die,” especially once they reach a large size.
• If you aren’t scared of the power of big data, and the eery underlying order to basically the entire planet, check out this book.
EAT-Lancet Diet:
• News on the animal product bashing EAT-Lancet diet. Apparently the WHO dropped their support, led by Gian Lorenzo Cornado, Italy’s ambassador and permanent representative of Italy to the international organizations in Geneva. He pointed out the possible unintended consequences of the Lancet diet:
“A standard diet for the whole planet” regardless of the age, sex, general state of health, and eating habits “has no scientific justification at all” and “would mean the destruction of millenary healthy traditional diets which are a full part of the cultural heritage and social harmony in many nations.”
Wellness Think Tank:
• Academic Life in EM is a solid resource for academic and pragmatic emergency medicine tips. But their wellness think tank newsletter veers away from clinical medicine to give tools for personal wellness. Check out what they have to offer and consider subscribing.
Quote:
“I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
Mark Twain
