Another step towards eating ideal food

http://gettingstronger.org/2011/11/obesity-starts-in-the-brain-2/

Long article, kind of tough to read, and he's proposing a new understanding of how our bodies work, and if I had a nickel for every time someone "figured it all out"...

But it ties together a lot of things that don't make sense with existing theories of how people eat, by dividing "fat" into "subcutaneous fat" (folds around your body) and "intra-abdominal fat" (beer belly). And they're largely caused by failures of insulin or leptin or both. (either not enough, or too much resistance.) And either way, cut out bad sugars and bad fats.

This is more appealing than mainstream diet notions (i.e. low fat), which are insane, and I don't trust corporations or the government to give me honest nutrition advice. This is also more appealing than the low-carb or paleo people, because it explains how most of the world eats mostly grains and doesn't die.

Downsides: he's mostly talking about obesity, while I'm looking for "how to eat best." Also he doesn't explain how fructose (fruit sugar) got to be "bad" for us. But it's an interesting batch of ideas that seem mostly sensible.

Google Reader Sweep

I don't like to post a big list of "here are interesting things"; I'd rather formulate them into useful and easily-digested stories to make a coherent point. However, I haven't had time. So here are interesting things.

• Carbs are good for test performance. First time in a while I've heard of carbs being good for anything.
• What defines a good working life? What indeed. Maybe I'll post more about this.
• Steve Jobs's Buddhist influences. Ooh aah. What is the sound of one hand unlocking an iphone. I guess I like to be contrary, but I'm a tiny bit sick of the Cult of Steve. I mean, really, some of his advice, and some of the "wise Steve" stories we tell, are self-fulfilling; the fact that Steve said "never settle" and ended up extraordinary doesn't mean that "never settle" is good advice. It's like a lottery winner saying "play the lottery." Also, he was a terrible jerk. Again: what defines a good working life? I don't think Steve Jobs is a role model here. And if he is, he's the one in a million.
• I thought I was so clever reading this xkcd about maps, like "ooh I've got a Peters map, it's great, let's see what he has to say about that!" And then I got to the end, read up on explain xkcd, and realized I am an idiot. Hah!
• Another bit about segmented/two-stage sleep: monks who did it basically found it unnatural and hard to get used to. They did dream/hallucinate a little more though. Given the limited support for two-stage sleep (basically three people, Wehr, Ekirch, and Gamble), I'm not so interested anymore.
• Wow, Facebook is good for you. Or at least, it provides social support like people hoped it would, and doesn't isolate you like critics say.
• We keep taking risks up to age 50. 50! I used to think that interesting life was over at 25, or 30, or 35, but I guess we keep on being awesome for a lot longer. (not to say that post-50 is not-awesome. indeed, 50 seems to me a good age to settle down a bit. spend more time improving or enjoying what you've got, rather than trying new stuff.)
• Women are becoming the dominant sex, basically because we don't need men to lift heavy things or fight people so much anymore. Women are better at college. Furthermore, the numerical gender balance is tipping towards women too, and marriage is taking a hit. Fewer desirable men means men screw around and women don't want them. But this is okay: rather than "destroying marriage" or whatever, maybe we're returning marriage to a reasonable level of importance, down from the 1950s nuclear family obsession.
  "the cultural fixation on the couple blinds us to the full web of relationships that sustain us on a daily basis. We are far more than whom we are (or aren’t) married to: we are also friends, grandparents, colleagues, cousins, and so on. To ignore the depth and complexities of these networks is to limit the full range of our emotional experiences."
• Tangentially relatedly, but interesting on its own: obesity is caused by snacking. Not by poor people eating at McDonald's. Huh! This seems very counter-intuitive to me, but I can believe it. Incidentally, "only buy foods that require significant preparation" is pretty similar to "keep nothing immediately edible in my house", which I proposed a few weeks ago.

Whew! Man, I could talk about these for ages. Okay, off the computer now.

Movember; this is a great idea.

Guess I'm late to this party (sorry, I'm in Nepal!), but http://mobro.co/dantasse ... it's at least a moderately important cause to me. (and the folks running this are genius.) If you'd care to give a few bucks, all the dudes in my family and I thank you.

Note that I have to look respectable to a border guard on the 19th. Luckily, my moustache still won't be visible then, so no big deal.

(also, sorry if I'm repeating myself on all the social networks! I wonder if there is a smarter way to do this.)

Progress is a steady stream of generating more wealth and sharing it more equally?

From Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods":

"Many landowners also discovered that they sat on great seams of coal just at a time when coal was suddenly needed for industry. This ... did translate into gratifying heaps of lucre. ... All of this was in an age in which there was no income tax, no capital gains tax, no tax on dividends or interest- almost nothing to disturb the steady flow of money being banked."

Combine that with this: Americans are happier when the wealth is more evenly distributed. Not to mention, the poorest (/least "developed") countries are often the ones with the most inequality.

So why are our taxes on the rich not really high? Maybe because we fall under the last bit of that Wired article: we don't like a more even society, if we competed to earn our wealth. So our national ethical system values "fairness" too much? I guess the 53% guy (who is responding to the 99% people; btw I love this bunch of the 1%) makes this pretty clear. But as Max Udargo makes clear in his excellent response, you can say "those lazy bums don't deserve my money", but what do you gain? You just get a worse society than if you distribute the wealth more evenly. Everyone loses, because we insist on valuing fairness over harm-reduction.

I guess that's my argument for taxing the rich more. Throw it in with all the rest.

Well, besides my other argument, which is: I want to live in a world where kids don't yell "Give me money!" when I ride past.