Beer and inflammation

Does anyone else get inflammation from drinking beer?  It’s pretty typical to wake up with a swollen face after a six, seven, eight beer night.  Puffy cheeks, eyes, nose looking back at you in the mirror.  But how about even after a beer or two?  I’ve noticed for a long time that even after one beer I feel inflammation in my sinuses, clogging up my breathing and making my voice sound a bit more nasal.  Sexy.

I'm going to be posting more about alcohol this week, so stay tuned.

Why I love (people who love) grass-fed beef

Because once you understand why cattle are healthiest eating their natural diet, it’s hard to turn around and say the same isn’t true about humans.  It’s just a debate over what foods are natural to humans.

Media hysteria on tanning beds and melanoma

A recent study on tanning beds and melanoma has been making the rounds: "Indoor Tanning and Risk of Melanoma: A Case-Control Study in a Highly Exposed Population".  The WSJ, Time, NPR, and USA Today have all covered it.  The big statistic that everyone is throwing around is that "people who tanned indoors had a 74% higher chance of developing melanoma than those who hadn’t."  Note that the reason this paper is such a big deal is because there has never been strong evidence that using tanning beds caused melanoma.

Well, I had the great pleasure of meeting Dr. Michael Holick today, and we discussed this very paper.  You can view the full text here.  Let's go the actual science and see what it says.

The 74% number comes from Table 3, second row, in the last column called multivariate adjusted OR (odds ratio).  You'll see a 1.74 (hence, 74% more likely), plus a confidence interval.  (This interval, or error bounds, simply indicates that if you ran this experiment 100 times, 95% of the time you'd expect this value to fall between 1.42 and 2.14.)  The odds ratio for hours spent in a tanning bed increases to 3.18 (218% more likely) with duration of tanning bed use.

Well, from all the media hysteria, you'd expect that tanning beds would be the primary risk factor uncovered in the study.  And you'd be wrong.  Flip up to Table 2 and let's take a look at the odds ratios of other factors.

Hair Color

What color is your hair?  Redheads have an OR of 3.53 -- which means red heads are 253% more likely to get melanoma.  Compare that to the 74% number associated with ever having gone to the tanning salon.  And even blondes are 117% more likely (2.17 OR).  Having blonde hair or red hair has more to do with your risk of melanoma than whether you've ever gone to the tanning salon.  

Skin Color

Having very fair skin increases your chances of melanoma by a whopping 450% (5.50 OR).  Fair skin is 263% more likely, and even light olive skin is more important than having gone to the tanning salon.

Moles 

Moles!!!  If you have a bunch of moles you're 1,281% more likely to get melanoma.  Having lots of moles is nearly 20X more important than whether you've gone to a tanning salon.

Lifetime Sun Exposure

Three measure of sun exposure show that high lifetime sun exposure decreases risk of melanoma (ORs of .85, .95, and .84).

Sun Burns

Sun burns, on the other hand, do increase your risk of melanoma, comparable to tanning salon usage.  

Mean Lifetime Sunscreen Use

Get this -- THE SAME STUDY THAT CONNECTS TANNING BEDS WITH MELANOMA ALSO CONCLUDES THAT HIGHER SUNSCREEN USAGE INCREASES YOUR RISK OF MELANOMA.  Medium or High mean lifetime sunscreen usage increases your chances of getting melanoma by about 30%.  But somehow "Sunscreen usage causes melanoma" is a less catchy headline than "Tanning beds cause melanoma".

My point is not that there are no risks to tanning beds.  My point is that the biggest risk factors for melanoma are NOT tanning bed usage and are NOT sun exposure.  It's having moles.  And red hair or blonde hair.  And fair skin.

So how about we do some science that actually tries to understand what's going on, instead of attention-grabbing headlines that confuse and scare people. 

College

I'm on a bus on my way up to Cambridge, Massachusetts for my 5th year college reunion.  So what better time than now to bore you with reflections on my past five years and with my answer to the age-old question: "If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?"

If I could change one thing about my college experience, I would have been healthier.  Number one.  Better food, less drinking, more sleep, more sun, more exercise.  Did I mention less drinking?

I'm sure my four years were a lot like others' when it came to food.  French fries, pizza, and Dr. Pepper were the foundation of my food pyramid.  The cafeteria did have a few healthy options, and I would often make a little side salad.  But most people have this wierd notion that eating healthy is additive -- that if you add a few healthy items to your meal, like vegetables, you're eating healthy.  For most of us though, the first step to eating healthy is subtractive -- avoiding a lot of the worst foods out there.  And four years of all-you-can-eat is a bit more conducive to the additive approach to nutrition than the subtractive one.

I drank a lot too.  I mean, not particularly more than any other extroverted guys at school (okay, maybe a little more), and Harvard isn't exactly known for prowess in drinking (though saying that might be a calculated decision to get you to underestimate us in a drinking competition, a dangerous mistake). But I remember losing ENTIRE DAYS to hangovers.  Big night out, to bed in the wee hours, and not being able to crawl out of bed (except to the bathroom) until dinner the next day.  And this was normal.

For me, being healthier wouldn't have been about weight.  I didn't gain much weight, if any, during college.  First and foremost, it would have been about mood and outlook.  My mood and energy was up and down, up and down.  My senior year, one of my good friends once called me "The happiest sad guy he knew."  What the hell type of commentary is that?  My mental state has improved to where I have difficulty remembering the types of negative thoughts that can enter a college student's head.  More on that later.

The second area would have been complexion -- my complexion is drastically improved and I rarely, if ever, get pimples or zits anymore.  This is a big deal.

And third, I would have been able to get more done.  See: "Hangovers, 12-hour".

Anyhow, it will be interesting to see how people turned out.  There's always a few that put on 25 pounds and look like they're 40 years old.  Who are the unlucky ones?

(Also, something to look forward to -- I'm dropping by Dan Lieberman's lab, where they've done all the cool work on barefoot running.  The bad news is that they're busy doing experiments and so can't do any gait analysis.  The good news is that they're running experiments on RAW MEAT!)

The origins of corn

Corn, or maize, now accounts for over 20% human caloric intake.  But the exact origins of corn were in doubt until recently.  Early genetic experiments (before genetic testing) pointed to teosinte.  And newer genetic experiments (proper sequencing) suggest that teosinte was domesticated starting about 9,000 years ago:

"In order to trace maize’s paternity, botanists led by my colleague John Doebley of the University of Wisconsin rounded up more than 60 samples of teosinte from across its entire geographic range in the Western Hemisphere and compared their DNA profile with all varieties of maize. They discovered that all maize was genetically most similar to a teosinte type from the tropical Central Balsas River Valley of southern Mexico, suggesting that this region was the “cradle” of maize evolution. Furthermore, by calculating the genetic distance between modern maize and Balsas teosinte, they estimated that domestication occurred about 9,000 years ago."

And it was probably a slow process:

"It is estimated that the initial domestication process that produced the basic maize form required at least several hundred to perhaps a few thousand years."

Read the full New York Times article here.

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