Chirp! 

March 8, 2004

I Put on Weight
    Last Friday morning, my weight unexpectedly hit 127.5 pounds. I was a little surprised, and decided that I would hold my weight for a few days to find out what it takes to settle into a maintenance diet rather than a weight loss diet. 
    I didn't exercise Friday or Sunday, although I ran two-and-a-half miles on Saturday. Saturday, I had a "blah" day... the first in months  Saturday night, my stomach even felt a little queasy... in retrospect, probably because of the three-week-old salmon salad I ate. (It had been refrigerated, and it smelled Ok and it tasted OK, but it probably wasn't OK.) So Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I ate a little more than I've been eating... not much, just a little. This morning, when I weighed myself, I weighed 131.5 pounds! Part of it may have been my water table, but part of it may well have been weight gain. What's significant about this is the extremely low calorie intake that it's going to take to maintain weight.
    Today, I've resumed a weight-loss diet, at least until I can determine where things stand.
Does This Mean That the Resveratrol Is Working?
    This raises the question of whether or not the resveratrol is causing a caloric-restriction metabolic response independently of the fact that my weight is about 30 pounds below my natural "set point". I would have thought that I wouldn't have put on weight again until I ate significantly more than the minute number of calories I've been eating., but maybe the resveratrol is enforcing this low-caloric intake requirement.
    Today, I received in the mail a free copy of a new book entitled, "The Anti-Aging Pill:  Is the 125-year Life Span About to Become Common?   Scientists Find the Genetic Switch for Longevity and a Natural Molecule that Turns it on.", by Bill Sardi [Here and Now Books, 457 West Allen Avenue #117, San Dimas, CA 91773], price: $19.95. It's an interesting book, with a lot of factual information. Mr. Sardi is a health writer who published an article about the Sinclair/Howitz paper in the August, 2003, issue of Nature describing the role of resveratrol as a caloric-restriction mimetic. He then contributed to the founding of the company, Longevinex, which is packaging and selling the new, biologically active resveratrol capsules. I was among the first 1,000 customers for these new resveratrol capsules, and Mr. Sardi graciously sent us free copies of his new book.
Problems?
    Three weeks ago, when I began jogging, I developed some discomfort in my left shoulder. By now, it's acting like arthritis in the shoulder joint. I developed this problem in 1992 when I was swimming a mile a day, and it soon went away after I quit swimming, so maybe this problem will also clear up, but I need to mention it. 
    Something I've been taking has been giving me intermittent diarrhea. It disappears when I change my diet. (Right now, it's gone.) It's looking as though it may be caused by eating too much fruit. (With a low caloric intake, "too much" can be somewhat less than it is on an "eat-everything-that-doesn't-get-out-of-the-way diet.)
Jogging
    Today, I jogged two-and-a-half miles again. I didn't push, and it was almost ho-hum easy. I'm running every other day because, as healthful as exercise is, it boosts your metabolic rate, and generates a lot of free radicals. Running hard every other day should maintain cardiovascular fitness, and at the same time, shouldn't be too counterproductive.
    My temperature today, just after jogging, was 94.1, or about 4.5 degrees below 98.6.
    So that's the latest word from Starvation City. (Just kidding! I'm not hungry.)

Chirp, Chirp!

    This morning, I weighed in at 130.5 pounds, so I really did add a few pounds when I walked past food last week.
    Here's an article by Ben Treadwell at Juvenon about vitamin D. What it adds to what I've said about the importance of vitamin D as a cancer fighter is:
A.  Vitamin D is very-potent defense against multiple sclerosis, and
B.  the recommended daily allowance (RDA) for vitamin D is way too low. The RDA is set to ward off rickets in children, and osteomalacia (softening of the bone) in adults.
    As Dr. Treadwell observes, this RDA was set years ago, before the current roles of vitamin D had been discovered. He observes that fair-skinned prehistoric natives would have produced about 4,000 IU of vitamin D a day! (The safe upper limit recommended by "the US Standing Committee on the Scientific Evaluation of Dietary Reference Intakes (1997), is in the range of 2000 IU/day.") He mentions the possibility of vitamin D hyper-elevating the levels of calcium in the blood, which can cause kidney stones, so he  recommends the monitoring of serum calcium levels.
    Other excellent articles by Dr. Treadwell may be found here.
    Juvenon is a company established to provide a source of acetyl-l-carnitine and alpha lipoic acid.
News Items
    In news that will show up next Monday, a new Alzheimer's vaccine is showing promise. Previous Alzheimer's vaccines have failed in human trials. Perhaps this one will be different. Two other articles concerning climate change are Will The World Just Chill Out? - SpaceDaily and Climate Has History Of Fast Changes - SpaceDaily. The first of these articles considers what might happen when enough Arctic sea ice melts to break yup the Gulf Stream and disrupt the North-Atlantic-Pacific "conveyer belt"system, lowering European temperatures by 9º to 18º F (5º to 10º C), and plunging northern Europe and the British Isles into a "Little Ice Age" while bestowing southern Europe the kind of climate found in the northern U. S. This could happen in as little as 20 years, if it happens at all.  












    Other articles in the news discuss just-completed studies of statin-type cholesterol-lowering drugs, concluding that LDL levels well below 100 (<62) will become the new goal for cholesterol-lowering therapy (Striking benefits found in ultra-low cholesterol - Washington Post, Intensive Cholesterol Lowering With Atorvastatin Halts Progression Of Heart Disease, Cleveland Clinic-Led Study Shows - Science Daily)   
    Another interesting news item concerns a new sunscreen that uses a DNA fragment to trick DNA repair mechanisms to go into action, providing protection against the sun Sunscreen could be made of DNA   - BBC  (like Dimericine). Of course, like Dimericine, it will take many years and a billion dollars before this new skin repair approach can receive FDA approval.