Don’t hold your breath waiting for any significant changes in the government’s nutritional guidelines due to come out in 2010.  The members of the ‘scientific’ committee have just been announced, and it is stacked with all the usual suspects.

Here is a copy of the press release:nutritional-guidelines-press-release

Take a look at the names and resumes of those on the committee, and you’ll see that they are all lipophobes and carbophiles of the deepest dye.  Based on this cast of characters, it doesn’t look like much will change over the next five years. God help us all.

Let’s take a quick look at just one member of this illustrious panel that will decide how over 50 million people per day will be fed between 2010 and 2015.

Read more »

For the second time in as many days I’ve been inspired by a New York Times column.  Everywhere you turn it seems, you hear people lamenting that we could reduce health care costs so much if only we were more in tune with preventative care.  Everyone pays it lip service, including the two candidates for president who both pride themselves on straight talk.  Writes Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, professor of medicine at Dartmouth in today’s paper:

Senator John McCain argues that “the best care is preventative care,” and his health care reform plan claims that “by emphasizing prevention” and other measures “we can reduce health care costs.” Senator Barack Obama’s plan says, “Simply put, in the absence of a radical shift towards prevention and public health, we will not be successful in containing medical costs or improving the health of the American people.”

It may sound like common sense. But it is still a myth.

Read more »

I’m putting this post up today and leaving it throughout the weekend because I believe it is so important that everyone watch the videos at the bottom.

These long must-watch videos are in two parts: the first part is by a defense attorney discussing the unbelievable complexity of the law, especially federal law, and the difficulty of simply going through life without knowingly or unknowingly breaking some kind of law.  And he discusses the dangers of talking to the police without a lawyer present.  The second part is a talk by a police detective confirming everything the attorney says and, fascinatingly, discussing his own tricks, learned in over 25 years of police work, to get people to talk to him and even to confess to crimes.

I’ll probably alienate any readers who are involved in law enforcement, which isn’t my intention.  I’m sure that if any law enforcement officials were suddenly under investigation, they wouldn’t say a word without their lawyer present.  The rest of us need these same protections.

I’m not presenting these videos for any criminals who may be reading, but for the average citizen who happens to get crosswise with the police.  Every single police officer I know (and I know a half dozen or so) are hard working, dedicated, responsible, and even kind-hearted folks, but they can make mistakes.  I make mistakes, so I figure they can too.  The officer speaking on the last part of this video says that he doesn’t really interrogate people that he doesn’t think are already guilty.  So, you are basically assumed guilty if you’re under investigation for whatever.  And if the officer is mistaken, you can be in real trouble.  You can’t talk your way out of it; you can only make it worse.  When you watch these videos, you’ll see what I mean.

Read more »

I’ve posted a great YouTube video below that shows in excruciating detail how to deal with a hostile interrogator in the media. The only thing is that this interrogator wasn’t hostile; she was very nice, just not very smart.

I was once told by Reid Buckley (William F. Buckley, Jr’s younger brother and a famous debater in his own right) that the most potent force one has in dealing with a hostile interrogator on TV or radio is silence. Silence is death to them. Silence makes them keep on jibbering and end up looking the fool. But most people fall into the trap of the much more experienced talking heads and end up looking the fools themselves. In the clip below, you can see what I mean about the silence and one word answers. Watch the poor woman conducting the interview struggle.

MD and I have been on many, many TV and radio shows, and what we’ve learned from it all (plus from talking to a lot of people in the biz) is that it’s all entertainment, pure and simple. Bill O’Reilly, Anderson Cooper, Chris Matthews, all of them, are entertainers. If their shows aren’t entertaining, they lose ratings, and they ultimately go off the air. Many people think of these folks as hard news people, but they’re not, they’re entertainers. So they’ve got to be entertaining. And the way most of them are entertaining – especially the Sean Hannity types – is by attacking their guests.

Most guests who go on these shows are experts of some kind and they know their stuff, so they figure they can hold their own with O’Reilly, Hannity or any of the rest because the expert knows that he/she knows way more than the interviewer about the subject in which the experts are expert. What the experts don’t count on, though, when they walk into the lairs of O’Reilly, Hannity, Matthews et al are that they are experts in doing live TV and in savaging guests whose opinions they don’t like. And the guests pay the price for their hubris.

Read more »

When I took my parasitology course in medical school I was exposed for the first time to all the loathsome diseases that are unheard of here but are a part of daily life in other parts of the world. Here people go nuts and rush to the emergency room if they find pin worms in their kid’s stool; there having a Loa loa worm creep across your eye is a common occurrence and only a minor bother.

I was fascinated with my study of liver flukes, roundworms, tapeworms and all the other parasites afflicting primarily those in tropical areas. The most vile yet amazing of these creatures was to me Dracunculus medinensis, the Guinea worm. This parasite causes untold misery to those it afflicts, and is now, as this BBC piece relates, on its way to extinction. For people living in areas the Guinea worm infests, I’m sure this is wonderful news.

What the BBC neglected to mention is that the eradication of the Guinea worm has been effected in large measure by none other than our former president, Jimmy Carter. Carter, in my opinion, wasn’t much of a president, but he has been a terrific ex-president when he avoids politics and sticks to humanitarian issues. This Carter Center he and his wife founded has been instrumental in educating people in areas where the Guinea worm is common to take the needed steps to intervene in the parasite’s life cycle and disrupt its ability to reproduce. The BBC reports: Read more »