A Study on Alzheimer’s I Don’t Believe, and Other News Items
I’m not sure I believe this: Alzheimer’s preventable more than half of the time, suggests UCSF study.
Is food a drug? It is according to the “food addiction hypothesis.”
What’s wrong with President Obama’s approach to health and education: the God complex. Great video presentation by Tim Harford at TED (HT: Tyler)
In my opinion, one of the reasons that a variety of foods causes us to consume more calories is the irony of perceived scarcity. When we eat one food all the time, we don’t really worry about experiencing the taste, since we’re used to it. But, having a wide variety of choices forces us to limit the number of different flavors we experience. It’s why everyone overeats at Thanksgiving: you want to try everything that has been prepared, and taking one or two bites of 10 different dishes equates to more calories than taking 5 bites of 2-3 dishes.
I liked Tim Harford’s TED presentation. He explains why success is always preceded by failure through trial and error. You try something and it doesn’t work. You try another thing and it works slightly. You continue to try different strategies until you’ve mastered the process.
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Barnes concluded that worldwide, the biggest modifiable risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease are, in descending order of magnitude, low education, smoking, physical inactivity, depression, mid-life hypertension, diabetes, and mid-life obesity.
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This suggests that Barnes et al did a “kitchen sink” analysis of co-variance. Put a bunch of data into a statistical program, turn the crank, and read out the coefficients.
For example, we learn that lower education is associated with alzheimers at some level above complete randomness. But why? The statistics won’t say. It is laughable to infer that increasing education will prevent some alzheimers. Maybe people with better education are those with more active minds, and they are better at answering questions used to diagnose alzheimers.
As for the other factors mentioned, maybe early alzheimers causes people to overeat or become depressed. If so, putting them on diets isn’t going to help.
Obama thinks he’s God? Interesting.
By the time the dust settles, I think there will be only a few insurers left in the market.
I think for some people food is a drug.
I still can’t get over the irony of government regulations intended to create market forces.