Waiting in line at Tokyo immigration control, I met a woman from North Carolina who’d come to Japan for an organized tour of Japanese baseball parks (17 of them). She learned about the tour from a friend. In America, she’s visited 117.
I told her I was a psychology professor and had a theory of evolution in which connoisseurship played a big role. She was a baseball-park connoisseur, I said.
Here are the details of my two heart scan scores, one recent, the other one and a half years ago.
February 2009:
August 2010:
To give some context, this group of patients given a whole bunch of treatments (”statin therapy, niacin, the American Heart Association Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes (TLC) diet, omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D-3 supplementation”) meant to improve these scores managed, on average, about a 0% change in scores after 1-2 years of the treatments. Which is better than the usual 25%/year increase, but not as good as what happened to me.
From Thursday Sept 2 through Sunday Sept 6 I will be in Tokyo. If you’d like to meet, let me know.
Please enjoy the dinner of the chef recommendation adhering to a “place of production”, “freshness”, a “season”, “health”, and “beauty” as a menu of a season.
Exactly. Words such as freshness, season, and so on in restaurant descriptions are indeed quotations but usually the quotation marks are missing.
My recent heart scan results were 50% lower (= better) than predicted. Apparently I am doing something right.
You might think that my lipid values would reflect that. Not quite. They were measured twice in the last two weeks, first with a Cholestech LDX machine (instant results); second, ordinary lab tests.
Here are the scores (first test, second test). Total Cholesterol: 210, 214, which is “borderline high” (borderline bad) according to the Cholestech LDX quick reference sheet. HDL = 17, 36, which is “low” (bad). TRG = 62, 75, which is “normal”. LDL = 180, 163, which is “high” (bad).
There is no hint in these numbers that I am doing the right thing! If anything, they imply the opposite, that I’m doing the wrong thing. This supports all those people, such as Uffe Ravnskov, who say the connection between cholesterol and heart disease is badly overstated.
In The New Yorker (25 January 2010), David Owen wrote about his father’s mother:
Gaga lived to be ninety-two, despite never having had much conventional health care. . . . She made foul-smelling yogurt . . .
