Day of Reckoning

There's a link between diet and acne. Adolescence can be difficult. Yes, it's genetic, but diet is major. Stay away from dairy. And as with cardiovascular disease, it turns out to have a major inflammation factor,  Omega-3 is important.

Keeping track of what you eat is easy, if your tastes are simple. Easy to plot out the glycemic load.  Take those Trader Joe's granola bars for example.  No sugar, all natural ingredients. Lots of "fruit juice" -- lots of "cane syrup". Plenty sweet. Tiny little bars, five or six to a box. It would be easy to eat the whole box, those six tiny little itty bitty bars.  

The glycemic load: 23 grams of digestible carbs. A glycemic index value of aprox 70 -- estimated from other granola bars with posted values. We don't have to be too precise ... but a GL of about 95. That is. A lot. A boxload. A whole day's worth of GL -- aday's worth typically ranges between 60 and 180, with the mean a tad below 100, say, 95.

So it's a GL of 16 per bar. That's a bowl of rice. Or take a bag of microwave popcorn.  No one eats a single serving. There are 2.5 "servings" in the bag -- but that's a crafty marketing trick. "See? A serving of our wonderful popcorn is only a mere inconsequential 160 calories!!!"  True. But the bag has two and a half "servings" -- 400 calories. Lies lies lies. The bag has a glycemic load, then, of 26. Adds up.

A berry smoothie might have a GL of about 8. A whole big blender full of nutrition, for free, in terms of insulin. That's the easy thing about it. The really nutritious food is free. It's the boxed treats that costs so much, metabolically.  

It's not hard, estimating glycemic load. Most people only eat 10 different meals. The meat doesn't count, or the fat. Protein certainly does count, re insulin, but NOT re blood sugar.  That's a different discussion.)  For blood sugar, it really is just the industrial carbs, and the hardcore starches -- potatoes and rice. After that it's a matter of estimating the serving size, and that's simple too. About the size of your palm? (Palm, without fingers or thumb or wrist.) About the size of your fist? (Palm, with fingers and thumb -- twice as much.) 

So it's a little bit of figuring, and then you know it. It's like writing a check to pay a bill -- a bit of a hassle, having to spell out those words and know the date and sign your name. Then again, it's the price you pay to pay the price you have to pay.

A can of coke has a GL of 15. At least granola bars have a nutrient somewhere in there.


FW

How Things Work

 It's so interesting,  how the brain works, or the mind-body connection, or the CNS-PNS,  central-peripheral .  Afferent and efferent nerves -- the same as sensory and motor nerves. Only two sorts of neurons, inward and outward, to the brain or away. Inward is sensory, information about everything other than the brain, whether within the body or from the great wide world. Outward is motor, to get things done, either muscles or organs, somatic or autonomic. Neuron axons bundled in the peripheral nervous system are nerves; axon bundles in the CNS are called tracts. 

The brain communicates with the body in only two ways -- through motor nerves or through hormones. Nerves are a direct line, like telegraphs. Hormones float through the bloodstream hoping to be picked up by cell receptors -- something like fish and nets.  Why does exercise make muscles grow? An exercised fiber becomes more receptive to hormones. Hormones are released when enough fibers are exercise. So it's central nervous system, and it's endocrinal. 

And the way the CNS develops -- the brain and spinal cord. It starts as a sort of looped tube, eventually with six parts, spinal cord and the five parts of the brain. A tube.  It's not an addition thing, this development, not one part of the brain developing, then another one, more advanced, then yet another, and so on.  It's all there, inherent in the beginning.  It all happens all at once, with all vertebrates, the way you'd blow up a plastic bag. There is no fish brain and lizard brain and mammal brain. There are just bigger and smaller parts of the brain, depending on class. A fish's cerebrum is smaller than its eyeball. A rat's cerebrum is the size of its ear. Humans' fill up everything behind the eyes and up. But it's all the same basic plastic bag -- just different shapes.

That's the body, and the brain. Not quite the same as mind, or soul. Think of it as music. Flute music. What makes it? The breath of the player? The shape of the instrument?  Both, but not only both. Music is not breath and flute -- that might very well be just noise. We are made by genetics and shaped by experience -- but we are not breath through a flute, not experience acting through genes. We are music, inspiring as well as respiring.


FW