I don’t know about you guys, but I like these link-o-rama posts because they let me get rid of a bunch of tabs on Firefox and disseminate info that probably isn’t worth an entire post.

First, let me start out by linking to one of my wife’s recent posts.  We’ve had a spate of people writing us through the website asking about cookbooks, of all things.  She did a post a couple of months ago about her favorite cookbooks.  In case you missed it, here it is.

Second, I’m going to start using these link-o-ramas to link to some of my older posts that I think would be of interest to a lot of people now.  One that I thought was pretty good on how to dissect a scientific article didn’t get many readers since I wrote it back when maybe three people read this blog.  The notion that it didn’t get many readers is evidenced by the fact that there are zero comments on it.  So, without further ado, here is Baboon Business.

After all the recent posts about the savagery of the nature, I thought I would throw this item into the mix just to show that nature can be tamed, at least in the short run.  There is a guy who is a fixture in downtown Santa Barbara who has a dog, a cat and a rat as pets.  He is always down on State Street, the main street running through town, with the cat riding on the back of the dog, and the rat riding on the back of the cat.  Here is the YouTube, so you can see for yourselves.

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I’ve got about a hundred (93 to be exact) tabs up on my Firefox browser, many of which are filled with articles about which I would like to post.  But these articles either keep getting displaced by something more timely or more blogworthy or even more substantive.  Many are interesting, but not worth an entire long post.  So, I decided to do one of those sort of potpourri linkfest things like so many bloggers do and be able to close a bunch of these tabs.  Plus it gives me a chance to indulge in my interest in the political situation without having to devote an entire post to it.

First and foremost, I want to link to the latest post in MD’s blog.  When I posted earlier about our meals in Mexico, I mentioned this great Andalusian gazpacho recipe she had.  A bunch of people asked for it, so she put it up.

Richard Feinman sent me a link to an annoying Mayo Clinic nutrition blog by a couple of ignorant dietitians.  Reading stuff like this that is written with such certainty always makes me think of a couple of lines from Shakespeare’s’ Measure for Measure: Read more »

My friend Tim Ferriss asked me to post an up to date version of my thoughts on intermittent fasting. I wrote a post about a year and a half ago on intermittent fasting that generated numerous comments and questions. Between then and now I’ve received many emails from readers who have gone on intermittent fasts, some with success, others with not so much. The early animal studies that looked so good prompted a number of researchers to look at intermittent fasting as a potential therapeutic tool for humans. I figured it was time for an update.

You can find my two part post on Tim’s blog.

Part I

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I’ve posted on the health benefits of intermittent fasting (here and here) and on my thoughts on the inflammatory properties of food and overnutrition. These posts, particularly the one on inflammation, inspired a host of questions on whether intermittent fasting decreases inflammation. Based on my knowledge of the medical literature on inflammation and intermittent fasting I’m pretty sure that it does. A recent paper presents data indicating that it indeed does.

The April 2007 issue of Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism includes an article on the positive changes in inflammatory markers brought about by the intermittent fasting Muslims undergo during Ramadan.

As the authors put it in the introduction: Read more »