Site Updates

I've been receiving a small amount of regular traffic lately (for me, at least).  As such, I thought I should mention that you shouldn't be surprised if you notice a few changes to Verbatio. 

I've added 2 new pages: About Me and Bookshelf.  The About Me page is pretty self explanatory, and the Bookshelf is where you can go to see a list of what I'm reading, planning to read, and have already read.  I'll also be experimenting with the design of the site in general, so don't be surprised if you come here and see some crazy new theme or layout.  I'll try to keep it from ever looking too awful, and I apologize for some of the silly Google ads you see on here.  I blog about how worthless homeopathy and other forms of pseudoscience are, and yet my brother told me that he often sees Google ads for those very same products!

So please, enjoy the site and hopefully I can find the time and energy to post often enough that you have a reason to keep coming back!

Dr. Paul Offit on NPR's Talk of the Nation

Dr. Paul Offit was a guest on Talk of the Nation last week to talk about vaccines.  He talked about his new book, Deadly Choices, which discusses the anti-vaccine movement.  I've already ordered it on my Kindle, but I haven't read it yet.  I'm hoping I can use it as a break from GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire series soon (I'm ~65% through the 3rd book, A Storm of Swords). 

I had a chance to listen to the podcast while I was at the gym today, and it was enjoyable but immensely frustrating.  I think what people forget is that sometimes medicine doesn't make logical sense until you spend years studying the subject.  One of the callers refused to accept Offit's argument that having 5 vaccines in a single doctor's visit still isn't even a blip in the radar compared to what your immune system (or a child's) encounters every day.  When you see a child scream while getting stuck with a needle a few times, I can understand how it would seem that it's a bigger deal to your immune system, but factually it simply is not.

I could spend hours talking about vaccines and the anti-vaccine movement, but instead I'll have you check out the podcast yourself.  It's ~18 minutes long so you can listen to it while you're driving to class/work or while you're at the gym.  If you have a podcast application on your phone, you can subscribe to Talk of the Nation as well, which makes finding and listening to stuff like this much easier.  Hopefully I'll find some time to read Deadly Choices soon.  Based on what I heard on the podcast, I'm sure it'll be worth the time!

The [boring] truth about rBGH and milk safety

A while back, I posted about some concerns brought to my attention by my sister-in-law, several of which dealt with cows and dairy products.  In particular, she had asked about:

1. rBGH/bST (recombinant bovine growth hormone, or bovine somatotropin):  They give this to cows to increase their growth and milk production.  What if it's still in the products we consume?
2. IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor 1):  There are questions about IGF-1 being responsible for some cancers, and rBGH is supposed to elevate IGF-1.  Can it cause cancer in humans who drink milk from these cows?
3. Can antibiotics given to cows show up in our food supply, and are they increased or more harmful due to the hormones we give the cows?

I did a lot of searches on PubMed trying to find information about rBGH, and most of what I found dealt with animal trials or the public's perceptions of rBGH.  After all, if you've read some of the pro-organic websites out there, you might have seen something about the dangers of these chemicals, or even that the FDA has never studied the effects of these chemicals in milk consumed by humans.  Well, it turns out there's a very good reason why you don't find these studies anywhere -- it's because they're not necessary.  Medically.  Scientifically.  At all.

Why? Because well... Science.  It works, bitches!

College upperclassman fail at scientific reasoning

Ars Technica has a nice article on how many college upperclassman in science majors still suck when it comes to scientific and/or formal reasoning.  When we're children, we come up with simplified explanations for observed events that fit our experiences and/or expectations, but those explanations are often incorrect.  But hey, nothing against our 5-year-old selves, what else can you expect without a more formal science education!  The hope is that we'd shrug off these inaccurate, inadequate explanations as we progress through our science education.  Unfortunately, that's not happening nearly as often as we'd like.

I'll let you read the article on Ars for some of the details, but one thing in particular caught my eye (emphasis mine):

What's the root of this problem? The authors ascribe a lot of it to language. It's quite common to hear people describe fat as just melting away or vanishing, which doesn't encourage anyone to try to balance the books on where all those atoms actually go to, much less get them thinking in terms of their release as carbon dioxide and water vapor. The same problem persists in the language commonly used by biologists. We frequently refer to energy as "lost" when it's no longer available to an organism, but that doesn't mean it's not still there, typically in the form of heat.

Very similar to what I discussed about Cryolipolysis, right?  I've heard cryolipolysis's effects described as "melting away" the fat, but melting it away in one area doesn't do anything if it only comes back to the same area or somewhere else to take up residence again!  Some scientific reasoning is all that is needed to know that cryolipolysis can't deliver on all of the promises described by some of its proponents.  Better scientific reasoning skills could save people a lot of money and disappointment on procedures like that!

Kindle now available for Windows Phone 7, but still no WebOS love

It appears that Amazon was able to release Kindle for Windows Phone 7 less than 2 months after WP7's release in the US.  That's great for WP7 users and all, but what about WebOS users?  What the hell, Amazon?

I've moved onto Android 2.2 (soon to be 2.3, or "Gingerbread") with my HTC Evo 4G, but 1.5 years ago I absolutely loved my Palm Pre when I got it!  It was a great phone.  WebOS development hasn't quite progressed like I'd hoped (hence my move to Android), but I still find it hard to believe that a Kindle app for WebOS would take very long to make.  I don't mean this in a conspiracy theory kind of way, but I wouldn't be too surprised if Microsoft had some part in getting the app out quickly.  After all, WP7 supposedly has at least a $500 million marketing budget, so I don't think it's out of the question.

I love Amazon and I love my Kindle, but this is still pretty ridiculous, and borderline insulting for the many WebOS users out there who would love to read Kindle books on their phones (my brother included, who isn't eligible for an upgrade until this summer).

Cryolipolysis: What is it and does it work?

In the last couple weeks, I've realized that if I still lived back home, I'd probably be blogging a lot more often.  Talking to my family always gives me great ideas for new topics to cover on here!

This time, we have cryolipolysis (I think I've heard it called "cold lipo" as well).  This procedure involves exposing fat "problem areas" (like love handles) to intense cold.  It's non-invasive, and may seem like a nice alternative to people who are put off by the somewhat disturbing, violent procedure that is liposuction.  For people who are in good shape but still have some remaining problem areas they'd like to get rid of, it can be tempting.

The low temperature forces your adipocytes (fat cells) to undergo apoptosis (programmed cell death).  The idea is that killing these adipocytes will get rid of the fat they contain and thus reduce the amount of fat in the area.  A study from July 2009, entitled Clinical efficacy of noninvasive cryolipolysis and its effects on peripheral nerves looked at the procedure.  A search in PubMed for cryolipolysis didn't bring up any more recent studies for its efficacy in humans, which leads me to believe that this may have been something of a dead end (1.5 years and no larger trials to test the procedure?), but it's worth looking into. 

Before getting into the results of the study itself, let's consider what happens after an adipocyte undergoes apoptosis.  When an adipocyte dies, it releases its contents (fat) into the surrounding tissue.  From there, the fat can be taken up by the surrounding surviving adipocytes or picked up by the lymphatics and returned to the blood. From here, the fat has a few options:

1. Stay in the blood.  This would be bad.  What use is reducing your love handles if you give yourself high cholesterol instead?
2. Be "burned" for energy/calories.
3. Be transported throughout the body for storage, including back to the original site.
4. Excreted from the body.

Now it can get a little more complicated than that considering what else needs to happen to the released fat (lipids) before they can be stored or used for energy, etc., but that's enough for a general idea of what's going on.

Organic Manifesto

[Update:  I've done some research on rBGH and some of the concerns about hormone/antibiotics exposure in dairy products in a more recent post.  Refer to that if you're looking for more information about some of the topics mentioned here.]

No, I haven't "gone organic."  Over the holidays, I found out that my sister-in-law had read Organic Manifesto by Maria Rodale, and now she's been buying organic milk and other food products (peanut butter, fruits and vegetables, etc.).  She's an intelligent person, but she doesn't have a science or medical background.  She works as an accountant, but I'm not sure how well she knows statistics.  This can make it difficult to find, sort through, and understand the wealth of research on a topic such as organic food.

I thought it might be helpful to try to understand what specifically led her to make the switch. A lot of this is familiar to what I've read and heard elsewhere, but I'll list some of her main reasons here anyway:

• Preservatives.  She doesn't like all the preservatives in many foods today.  I told her that while we do use a lot of preservatives, many organic foods use them too (they're just "organic preservatives" that have a chemical formula observed in nature).  I also reminded her that preservatives are somewhat necessary if we want to avoid food-borne illnesses and live in societies like we do (food shipped across the country, available year-round, not have to grow your own food, etc.).
• Pesticides.  She doesn't like the idea of pesticides being used on her produce.  I told her that organic produce are grown using pesticides too, but that they are "organic" pesticides.  These are newer pesticides, and thus have a smaller body of evidence in support of their safety and efficacy.  Also, just because you ingest trace amounts of any pesticide does not mean you'll actually experience any health consequences from it.  Lastly, the best thing she can do is to wash her produce before she cooks/eats it if she wants to reduce pesticide exposure/ingestion.
• Antibiotics and hormones.  Cows are "pumped full" of antibiotics and hormones, and she doesn't want milk from these cows.  I told her I'd seen some research showing reduced rates of eczema in infants from pregnant mothers who consumed organic dairy products, but that I wasn't sure how large that decrease actually was -- i.e. if it's a 50% reduction, but only from .02% of infants to .01% of infants, it's really not that huge of an effect.
• Nutrition.  She didn't list this as a specific reason, but I reminded her that nutritionally speaking, organic and conventional foods are essentially identical.  One isn't healthier or richer in vitamins/antioxidants/joojoo than the other.
• "The Dirty Dozen."  These are 12 fruits and vegetables that supposedly have the highest rates of contamination by pesticides.  She said she specifically tries to buy these as organic products.

Overall, I got the sense that most of her complaints had come from this book and what others (I remember her mentioning Jillian Michaels specifically) had said about eating a healthier, more natural diet.  Let me be clear, there is a lot to be said about the benefits of eating a healthy diet that includes more fruits and vegetables than most Americans eat.  But "organic" does not mean "healthier" and "synthetic chemicals" do not automatically equal "toxic."  I wouldn't rely on Jillian Michaels to give me advice on medical science, and I wouldn't trust an organic farmer or salesperson to tell me why organic food is the greatest thing since sliced [organic] bread.  In the same way, don't come looking to me for advice on sculpting, playing in the NBA, or starting a KISS tribute band.