Diet, Nutrition & Fitness: Whatever the question, the right answer is "It all depends".

The carbohydrate pendulum keeps on swinging! Bloggers keep on fighting!

Carbohydrates are good. No, they're bad. Wait, they're good again. Nope, bad again. Good again. Aargh!

See also http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/more-thoughts-on-macronutrient-trends.html
 
So, are carbohydrates good or bad? See the title. Gluten? See the title.

As Everyone is Different, whether "X" is good, bad or indifferent all depends on genes (including gender), the expression of those genes, environment (i.e. birth weight, exposure to pollutants in the womb & after birth), general diet (i.e. nutrients, anutrients & anti-nutrients), lifestyle (i.e. sunlight exposure, stress, sleep etc) and type, level & volume of activity.

How many working brain cells do researchers have? Part n+1

Once upon a time, I took the mickey out of some eejit researchers in How many working brain cells do researchers have? Guess what? I'm doing it again. A Facebook friend sent me a link to a worrying "new" study Omega-3 Supplements Linked To Prostate Cancer. Oh, dear. Things are looking bad for oily fish & fish oil supplements. Just a moment!

I did some digging on PubMed for the author and found this:- n-3 Fatty acids and prostate cancer risk. The main feature of wild oily fish & fish oil supplements is their high ratio of EPA & DHA (long-chain omega-3 fatty acids) to LA (a shorter-chain omega-6 fatty acid). It would therefore be logical to assess oily fish consumption and/or fish oil supplement intake by measuring the ratio of serum EPA:LA and/or DHA:LA and/or (EPA+DHA):LA.

What did Brasky TM, Crowe FL & Kristal AR actually do? According to the abstract, they measured only serum EPA, DHA & (EPA+DHA). They didn't measure serum LA. Therefore, if the subjects in the EPIC study ate a diet with a high omega-6 (n-6):omega-3 (n-3) ratio (i.e a Standard English Diet), subjects with a high serum n-3 level would have a very high serum n-6 level. As excessive levels of serum n-6 pufas are carcinogenic (see Completing the trine: Which are the safest fats?), it's not surprising that the study produced the results that it did.

There only one thing to do, in cases like this...

Because one palm just isn't enough!

EDIT: Here's a better analysis:- Fish Oil and your Prostate. It looks as though n-6 was measured, which makes my analysis wrong, but I'm keeping the double face-palm, as the full study is hidden behind a £30 pay-wall. Here's another good analysis:- Omega-3 Fats and Cancer.

Taking levothyroxine & overheating in hot weather - the penny drops.

Last night, I was sitting in a hot stuffy pub listening to some excellent music being played at a jam session. During the breaks (when it was quiet enough to hold a conversation), I was chatting with Jack the Rapper. As I was chatting, a thought popped into my head about why I was dripping with sweat, when everyone else in the audience wasn't. Here it is.

The Hypothalamus secretes TRH (Thyrotropin Releasing Hormone) which reaches the Pituitary via the hypophyseal duct.

The Hypothalamic Pituitary Thyroid Axis (HPTA) regulates body temperature. It varies thyroid hormone levels (T4 & T3) which varies Uncoupling Protein (UCP) expression, which varies heat production, which varies body temperature. See Minimal changes in environmental temperature result in a significant increase in energy expenditure and changes in the hormonal homeostasis in healthy adults.

"Thyroid hormones axis Compared with exposure to 24 °C, exposure to 19 °C resulted in small, non-significant increases in total triiodothyronine (T₃) and TSH AUCs and a significant increase in serum free thyroxine (T₄; P=0.03). When the analysis was performed according to the gender, a small but significant increase in serum T₃ AUC was observed in males (P < 0.05) but not in females. Similarly, while the change in free T₄ was highly significant in males (P < 0.002), no significant change was observed in females." Is this why women feel the cold more than men?

My Pituitary doesn't secrete Thyrotropin a.k.a. Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH), so I'm prescribed levothyroxine 125μg/day every day. When the ambient temperature rises, my HPTA doesn't lower my thyroid hormone level as I am running "open-loop". My UCP produces too much heat which makes me overheat. Ker-ching!

From now on, I will adjust my levothyroxine dose to a value where I feel comfortably warm at all times. According to http://www.drugs.com/pro/levothyroxine.html, the half-life of levothyroxine is 6-7 days. Any change in levothyroxine dose will take about a week to get half-way to its final effect on internal heat generation. This could take quite some time!

Continued on Taking levothyroxine & overheating in hot weather - the penny bounces back up.

Sunday Smörgåsbord: liberty, the internet, worry, health & Lyle McDonald.

Five items this time, not necessarily related.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smörgåsbord

By liberty, I mean personal liberty. I believe that individuals should be free to do whatever they want, provided that they don't harm another individual. However, collections of individuals should not be free to do whatever they want, as collections of individuals (i.e. businesses) usually try to profit from individuals, so the welfare of the individual isn't of importance. Businesses obviously don't want to instantly kill their customers, as that's obvious and will probably get them sued. However, "killing them softly" isn't obvious!

In the EC, just about everything has a CE kite-mark in order that it may be sold in the EC. Standards include EMC (Electro-Magnetic Compatibility) to ensure that:-
a) Devices don't emit excessive levels of RF "radiation", which may interfere with other devices.
b) Devices don't respond to excessive levels of RF "radiation", which may interfere with their operation.
I put "radiation" in quotes, as it's TEM (Transverse Electro-Magnetic) radiation i.e. Radio Waves.

In the US, who knows?

This is about "Smart Meters" - again! I've recently seen a surge in Facebook statuses about Smart Meters. I posted a technical article about these devices in Smart meters. Even after I posted a link on Facebook to my article, links to alarmist pages still appeared. The latest one is The Great “Smart Meters” Hoax. Electromagnetic Fields Are Real And Dangerous To Our Health, where Sam Milham, MD, MPH epidemiologist & researcher tells us how things really are.

Unfortunately, he's talking shite. The problem with people talking alarmist shite on the internet is that people who read alarmist internet shite and who are ignorant of the subject, believe it! This causes Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt (FUD), which in turn causes chronic worry. Chronic worry causes chronic hypercortisolaemia, which isn't good. A placebo (e.g. wrapping aluminium foil around your Smart Meter or paying for a "proper" solution to the non-existent problem) alleviates the chronic worry, which improves health.

I don't know about US Smart Meters. For all I know, some eejit has designed them to transmit 1,000W of RF (I'm just being silly), to get an outdoor range of >100miles. As these devices are designed for short-range communication, they probably transmit up to 100mW (about the same power level as WiFi) to get an outdoor range of ~150m. 1mW is one thousandth of a Watt. Transmitting more power than is necessary increases the probability of interference to other electronic devices.

100mW is a lot lower than the power transmitted by mobile phones (up to 2,000mW for the 850/900MHz Vodafone/O2 network), which need to be able to reliably communicate with the nearest mast, which may be miles away. As mobile phones constantly transmit occasional bursts of RF (to let the network know that they are on) and they are either in a pocket or are held against the ear/in front of the face to make/receive calls etc (while transmitting regular bursts of RF) and they are safe to use, how can a Smart Meter which is transmitting a much lower power level at a much greater separation be harmful? It can't.

With WiFi, Equivalent isotropically radiated power (EIRP) in the EU is limited to 100mW. Dunno about the US. Bluetooth is very-low-power (~1mW for Class 3 devices).

So stop worrying! Chronic worry (also, reading alarmist internet shite) is bad for your health.

Finally, I noticed that Evelyn Kocur "liked" an article that I'd read and completely forgotten about. It's Evidence From the Metabolic Ward: 1.6-2.4g/kg Protein Turn Short Term Weight Loss Intervention into a Fat Loss Diet. Interestingly, the protein intake for optimum body recomposition is 1.6-2.4g/kg LBM. This is equivalent to ~1g/lb LBM, which is the protein recommendation given by Lyle McDonald in his Rapid Fat Loss Handbook. Yup, Lyle was right all along. That amount of protein isn't bad for the kidneys (even 50% more protein than that, isn't bad for the kidneys).

We are all just prisoners here, of our own device.

If you don't recognise the words in the title, here's the classic song from which they came.


An increasing number of people are becoming like birds in gilded cages. See The perfect crime.
"What's fascinating is this: the marketing is so powerful that some of the people being hurt actually are eager for it to continue. This creates a cultural feedback loop, where some aspire to have these respected marketing jobs, to do more marketing of similar items. It creates a society where the owners and leaders of these companies are celebrated as risk-taking, brave businesspeople, not as the modern robber barons that they've become."

Did I ever mention?...

Saturday silliness: Astrology & Abuse.

Now there's a curious mixture of subjects.

Piss-keys or Pie-sees?

John Cassis said:- "It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice."

I'm Piscean and Pisceans don't believe in astrology ;-) My logical brain tells me that it's a load of cobblers, but when I read an astrological assessment for my birth date, my mind was blown by how it had my personality down to a T. I asked a friend to read a print-out. When she'd finished reading, I asked her what she thought. She said that it was accurate in terms of personality and likes. How does that work?

A Piscean trait manifested itself last Wednesday. A blogger (who I'm not going to name) posted a status on his blog's Facebook page, calling a female science blogger a fat c*nt, along with a link to an edited sound file of an interview she did years ago in which she was nervous, lampooning her.

I commented, saying that he wasn't qualified to judge people on matters of science and that the woman's physical characteristics were irrelevant to science (the ad hominem fallacy). He commented, telling me to f*ck off. I commented, saying that he was funny when he was drunk. A while later, he blocked me from leaving further comments on his Facebook page. Hmph!

To cut a long story short, I de-liked his Facebook page, blocked him personally on Facebook, blocked all email addresses containing his website name or surname on my ISP's email server and blocked him from leaving comments here. I removed him from my life.

This time, it's forever. No hard feelings, it's how I roll.

Update: The offending post has been removed. If you ever read this, thank you for doing that.

It's not Friday the 13th, but... Part 2

In It's not Friday the 13th, but..., I had a picture of my then new Solar PV installation.

1.35kWp Solar PV using Kyocera 135W panels + 2kWp Solar thermal using 100W Thermomax tubes.

As the Solar thermal tubes were no longer heating the hot water much (they were installed in 1991), I decided to upgrade my system. It now looks like this...

3.5kWp Solar PV, using Hyundai 250W panels.

Of the twenty 100W Thermomax evacuated heat-pipe solar collector tubes, only one still worked.

The limescale-coated bulb at the bottom is very hot!

Hot water is now heated by the immersion heater in the tank in the airing cupboard, using spare electricity that's been generated but not used. This is controlled by a gizmo called an immerSUN. See below. The immerSUN is at top left. The inverter is at bottom right.

The current-sensing transformer is the black thing around the red wire, sitting on the black fuse.

The water from the hot tap is now hot enough to make instant coffee!

As the company that installed the upgrade had previously only installed systems to properties previous without Solar PV, they thought that I would receive the current Feed-In Tariff rate, which is 16.56p/kWh, including 50% export Tariff. This is much lower than the Feed-In Tariff rate that I was receiving for my 1.35kWp installation, which was 47p/kWh, including 50% export Tariff. They suggested that I phone ScottishPower (my energy supplier) for clarification.

The good news is that I will receive 47p/kWh for 1.35kW and 16.56p/kWh for the additional 2.15kW, making a net Feed-In Tariff of 28.3p/kWh, including 50% export Tariff. That's 71% more than I thought I'd get.

Based on PVGIS data (postcode-dependent), the system should generate 3,210kWh/annum. That's £908/annum in Tariffs + ~£240/annum in saved electricity consumption + ~£50/annum in saved gas consumption = ~£1,198/annum. The system cost £7,700 including VAT, so ROI is 15.6%. Feed-In Tariffs increase by ~5%/annum and energy prices increase by ~14%/annum, so the system should pay for itself in ~5 years.