I was right to be positive about a negative

This morning my urologist called me.  He was pleased to tell me that there was no sign of cancer in the biopsies of my prostate.  See "The Impatient Outpatient".  However, he wants to see me again next February and his staff called me back with a specific date.

Where are my get-young pills?

Ah, this is a good place to stick in my notes about Ponce de León and the Fountain of Youth.  Ponce did not discover Florida.  "By 1513, when Ponce de Léon first arrived, so many Europeans had visited Florida that some Indians greeted him in Spanish."  The fountain of youth at St. Augustine was concocted by Washington Irving over 300 years later.  See "Ponce de León, Exposed", T. Allman, New York Times, 2013-04-01.

About the only Fountains of Youth are to pick long-lived grandparents, don't smoke, drink moderately, eat your vegetables, and exercise regularly.  I've failed at some time or another on all five, but I have followed the second for over 30 years and I try to follow the last three every day.  Plus I have Magree's push-up rule of longevity - you'll live as many years more as you can do pushups.  I have been doing between 22 and 26 most mornings.  See "The Magree Inexpensive Heart Stress Test".

Cancer, diet, exercise, and hoaxes

A relative posted an article on Facebook supposedly from Johns Hopkins saying that diet is better than chemotherapy and surgery for countering cancer.  I do believe that diet and exercise are important parts of preventing cancer or recovering from it, but this sounded "too good to be true".

Sure enough, a search for "Johns Hopkins", cancer, diet, and radiation turned up "Cancer Update Email -- It's a Hoax" from The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center of Johns Hopkins Medicine rebutting much of what it was in the email.

Emails such as this are a cancer themselves.  The Johns Hopkins article was last updated April 2009!! But the cancer of false information lives on.

Adam Smith missed on predicting a culinary trend

"It is difficult to preserve potatoes through the year, and impossible to store them like corn, for two or three years together. The fear of not being able to sell them before they rot, discourages their cultivation, and is, perhaps, the chief obstacle to their ever becoming in any great country, like bread, the principal vegetable food of all the different ranks of the people."

Little did he know that sautéd potatoes were already becoming popular in Flanders. Little did he know that huge fast food chains would be created using deep fried potatoes as one of their staples. And little did he know that those deep fried potatoes could be frozen for years.

Salt of the girth

When we came back in 1974 from six years of living in Europe, we were struck by how salty much of American food was.  Thirty-six years later, we still think most American food is too salty.

We bought some roast turkey from a deli for tonight's supper.  My wife decided not to eat it because it was too salty; she opted for her own brown rice and black bean concoction instead.  So I'll have her turkey tomorrow and she'll have my brown rice and black beans.

She is fussy about where we have pizza; a couple of pizzerias are off her list because their pizzas are too salty.

One day a week I used to have a three-egg omelet, home-made muffins, plus breakfast sausage from the local supermarket.  Then the sausage seemed a lot saltier.  I mentioned it to the meat cutters, but the salt content seemed to stay the same.  Now I just have the omelet and muffins.  I put no salt on the omelet and my wife says that she makes the muffins 24 at a time with a half teaspoon of salt for the batch.

For several years I've said that excess salt belongs in two places - on the rim of a margarita glass and on pretzels.  I can't even remember the last margarita I had, but I like to have some pretzels with wine before dinner.  Also olives.

A couple of weeks ago I had one leg swell up to a third larger than the other.  I didn't hurt much but it was an anomaly.  My wife called the nurse online who recommended I go into urgent care the next day, a Saturday.  In the morning the swelling had subsided and I decided to just watch it.  The following week it swelled up again, and I called for an appointment with my regular doctor.  By the time I saw him the swelling had gone down again.

I thought it might be excessive salt and mentioned it to him.  I said I had the wine, pretzels, and olives most nights.  He couldn't find anything abnormal, but recommended that I get an ultrasound.  He also said watch the salt.

The ultrasound was negative.  Total charge: $690!

I started thinking about my activity or lack thereof.  I have been very involved in family history research and just get carried away sitting in front of the computer looking at record after record, finding new stuff or confirming old stuff.  Maybe I'm just cutting off my circulation.  I also have the chair rather high because my computer is on a rather high table.  I've lowered the chair and try to get up more frequently.  The swelling has not come back in a big way.

I also decided to check my salt intake.  For the most part, we eat very few processed foods.  I won't bore you with a list of the salt content of various foods that I do eat, but for what I could find of sodium content for the foods I do eat, my intake was 96% of the daily value.

The sodium percentages were surprising.  For olives and pretzels, no.  But 1/2 cup of low-fat yoghurt was 3%; a few "baby" carrots, 3%.  The big surprise was a 2-1/2 inch slice of French bread was 14%!!!

If I eat French bread, I often have two servings, 28% of the daily value for sodium.  But I don't eat French bread very often, and so that gets me down to 82% of the daily value of sodium.  And my doctor wants me to watch my salt?!?

Joan D. Vinge wrote a series of science fiction novels starting with "The Winter Queen".  A persistent theme in some of the later values is when a distant super computer is asked for information, it responds with, "Ask the right question."

And that theme is something for a different blog entry.

Healthy choices equal healthy life, always?

In the last two months several letters in the Star Tribune and the Duluth News Tribune have stated that if people would make healthy choices they would lead healthy lives and we wouldn't need a health care system for all. If this were only so.

A doctor once told me the secret to a long life was to not smoke, drink in moderation, exercise regularly, and pick healthy grandparents.

Granted there are many people who don't follow the first three rules. We see them all the time. These people do make up a large portion of those who need medical care. But should those of us who didn't pick healthy grandparents and didn't pick something else important to our health be left to our fate as described by some of these letter writers.

I have a heart murmur that has raised false alarms a few times. Should my ability to obtain health insurance determine if I get care to be sure the problem was not more serious?

I just read an entry on a Caring Bridges site of a person that almost died at the age of four. Did he have a choice then of a healthy life style?

There is a lot to the "wisdom" of "picking healthy grandparents". Many conditions are genetic and may be detected at a time early enough to prevent more serious consequences. Should this detection be based on the ability to pay or obtain health insurance?

The "something else important to our health" is to pick a good environment to live in. The problem is that we may not know our environment is unhealthy until it is too late.

A school in California had an abnormal number of students and teachers getting cancer, some of who died. See "Is Dirty Electricity Making You Sick?" Prevention Magazine, December 2009. Maybe there is another cause besides excessive radiation, but did those who became ill have any way of knowing they would be in an unhealthy environment.

Minamata Bay in Japan had excessive mercury that poisoned many, including giving children severe birth defects. Did the residents know that their bay was a dumping ground for industry? Did they have sufficient knowledge to relate the health problems to the pollution? Did they have the resources to stop the pollution or to move away?

Over two hundred people contracted pneumonia while attending an American Legion Convention in Philadelphia in 1976; thirty-four of them died. We lived in the area at the time and remember how baffled authorities were. It wasn't until January of the next year that it was determined that the bacteria came from the cooling tower of the hotel. According to Wikipedia there have other outbreaks of Legionnaire's Disease in Europe with fatalities; all traced to problems with the air conditioning. Does this mean that we should all stay away from air-conditioned buildings to stay healthy?

Even if we stay outside or only in our own homes, we don't know what harmful substances may be in our environment. Doctrinaire "free enterprisers" think any control on industrial pollution is bad for business. But sick and dying customers are bad for business. Sometimes we don't know if a product we use in our home is harmful until too late.

I guess the only way to have a guaranteed healthy life is to live in a cocoon. Oh, wait a minute! What is the cocoon made of? What are the nutrients being given to us from the outside?

I guess that leaves the only way to stay healthy is to never be born.