Product review: Globe Trotter luggage

The photo you see above is of my beloved Globe Trotter Cetenary roll aboard.  I took it with me on this last trip to Hong Kong and London, much to the chagrin of MD, who hates this piece of luggage with a passion.

MD is a packer extraordinaire and is totally practical.  When it comes to packing, ‘cool looking’ isn’t in her vocabulary.  Since we travel so much, we have gone through many pieces of luggage over the years, and she has found the Hartmann bags best for her particular style of packing.  She can cram more into her Hartmann bags than any one believes possible.  And when she pulls her packed stuff out, it all looks great.

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Late last night I was transferring some medical papers from my old moribund PC onto my Mac when I came across an article that infuriated me when it came out.   Now it simply made me laugh, although I have to admit to at least a tinge of annoyance still.

As I’ve mentioned before, MD and I often feel like the Rodney Dangerfields of the low-carb diet biz or, worse yet, the Victor Flemings (don’t know who Victor Fleming is?   Look him up and see what he did in 1939.   And you don’t know who he is, right?).   At any rate it seems that whenever low-carb diets are mentioned in a positive way, which, fortunately, that are more and more often these day, we and/or Protein Power never make the list.   It’s always Atkins, South Beach and the Zone.   And of those three, only one is a true low-carb diet.   The other is a quasi, pansy low-carb diet, whose author goes around denying that his diet is a low-carb diet.   The other isn’t a low-carb diet, since a diet in which 40 percent of the calories are made up of carbohydrate hardly qualifies for the modifier ‘low.’   But when it comes to attacking low-carb diets, somehow we always seem to make that list.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system (sorry for the whine), I can move on to the paper that attacks low-carb diets and in which we prominently figure. This article, published in the May 2000 issue of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition (free full text here), takes an ‘unbiased’ look at several different diets that were on the market at that time.  The title says it all. Read more »

Yesterday a reader sent me a film clip from ABC news about resistant starch. (Click here to view the video) In this film clip a young woman who is a registered dietitian (RD) spoke about the virtues of a “type of fiber” that she referred to as resistant starch. According to her, this substance can cure a multitude of ills.

There is a type of fiber called resistant starch that’s naturally found in some high carbohydrate foods.

And it’s amazing, the benefits. It ranges from helping us burn fat, helping us boost our immune system, control blood sugar, reduce the risk of type II diabetes and reduce the risk of cancer.

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Let’s engage in a sort of thought experiment. Let’s assume that way back in the early days of medicine doctors always wanted to see us cough up mucus from our lungs. Since mucus is a kind of breeding ground for all kinds of nasty bacteria, it would make sense in the olden, pre-antibiotic days to want patients to hack up as much of this stuff as possible to get it out of the body where the bacteria could no longer wreak their havoc.

Let’s assume that doctors of old–who didn’t realize that the excess mucus was the body’s way of ridding itself of something foreign, i.e., the bacteria or viruses causing the infection–started equating coughing up ‘healthy’ amounts of mucus with good health. It’s not too far a leap to imagine these doctors supposing that if they could get their patients to cough up stuff all the time, the respiratory system would stay clear of the mucus that harbors all the pathogens that cause lung problems. Druggists might come up with concoctions that would cause people to cough, even if they didn’t need to.

Now let’s imagine that the idea that coughing up large amounts of mucus-laden sputum reaches the point of a national obsession. People, especially the elderly for whom respiratory infections are much more dangerous, discuss with one another how much sputum they produce and how often. If they don’t cough as much or as productively as they perceive those around them are doing, they go to their doctors who prescribe a sputum inducing medicine for them. People everywhere are obsessed with keeping their respiratory systems clean.

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