Link Banana

(I tried for five minutes to come up with a better title, I couldn’t.) Pamela Paul has an interesting article in tomorrow New York Times Magazine about the difficulty of fighting cancer — which seems to be made more likely by pregnancy — while still protecting the health of the fetus. The basic dilemma:

“She was afraid not to be treated for cancer, but she was afraid to expose her fetus to drugs,” Cardonick recalled when I spoke to her recently. It was perhaps the ultimate maternal conflict: choosing between the biological imperatives for self-preservation and procreation.

If I were ever to get serious about getting into shape, I’d probably start with this BuzzFeed page.

Before making the liberal’s argument against it — “restricting options in low-income neighborhoods is a disturbingly paternalistic way of solving the problem” — William Saletan puts Los Angeles’s fast-food-restaurant ban in perspective:

What we’re looking at, essentially, is the beginning of food zoning. Liquor and cigarette sales are already zoned. You can’t sell booze here; you can’t sell smokes there. Each city makes its own rules, block by block. Proponents of the L.A. ordinance see it as the logical next step. Fast food is bad for you, just as drinking or smoking is, they argue. Community Coalition, a local activist group, promotes the moratorium as a sequel to its crackdown on alcohol merchants, scummy motels, and other “nuisance businesses.” An L.A. councilman says the ordinance makes sense because it’s “not too different to how we regulate liquor stores.”

Darshak Sanghavi makes an interesting point:

The greatest medical advances depend mostly on small but consistent improvements in the use of old drugs.

Thanks to Mr. Zawodny, this has sucked an hour out of my morning. Interesting stuff.

Adam Sternbergh has an interesting piece in New York about how shoes may be the reason that Americans have so many foot problems. Be warned that reading this article may make you want to (1) throw away all the shoes you own, and/or (2) buy some Vivo Barefoots or Vibram Five Fingers. A snippet:

The study examined 180 modern humans from three different population groups (Sotho, Zulu, and European), comparing their feet to one another’s, as well as to the feet of 2,000-year-old skeletons. The researchers concluded that, prior to the invention of shoes, people had healthier feet. Among the modern subjects, the Zulu population, which often goes barefoot, had the healthiest feet while the Europeans—i.e., the habitual shoe-wearers—had the unhealthiest. One of the lead researchers, Dr. Bernhard Zipfel, when commenting on his findings, lamented that the American Podiatric Medical Association does not “actively encourage outdoor barefoot walking for healthy individuals. This flies in the face of the increasing scientific evidence, including our study, that most of the commercially available footwear is not good for the feet.”

I’ve been hearing a lot recently about how beneficial marriage is, so I was somewhat gratified to see that it’s not always good for you.

On average, the unhappily married had higher daytime and 24-hour blood pressure readings than single people. Having a wide social network had no effect on the trends for either married or single people. But marital satisfaction was significantly associated with satisfaction with life, lower stress, less depression and lower waking blood pressure.

“Just being married per se isn’t helpful,” Dr. Holt-Lunstad said. “because you can potentially be worse off in an unhappy marriage. So choose wisely.”

I’ve been meaning to figure out — after seeing it in a conspicuously high number of foods — why MSG’s so bad. This article didn’t really answer my question — though it offered a lot of scary allegation about how it’s killing us. It also said this:

Even after “No MSG” signs began appearing across the United States, “most Chinese restaurants, honestly, kept right on using it,” Ms. Hsu said. “And at home most Chinese cooks will sprinkle in a little bit at the end, especially if the ingredients they had to cook with were not that great.”

I was rather surprised to hear that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has detractors. After examining their claims, however, The Economist decides that they’re (mostly) meritless.

Therein lies an irony. The WHO, one of whose captains now calls the Gates Foundation monopolistic, used itself to hold a monopoly in the fight against malaria, and it did a lousy job as a result. Indeed, Dr Kochi himself has been refreshingly frank about the WHO’s poor record in fighting the disease. The agency has also been criticised for accepting poor data from member countries which may downplay bad news. As Dr Chan says candidly, that charge “is a reality”. It is not her role, she says, to “name and shame” countries; she prefers to exert private pressure. But she acknowledges that some public pressure is essential, and applauds the role played by the media and charities in “shining the light” on previously obscure places.

A big new non-government organisation, crashing into the jungle like a young elephant, is bound to cause resentment, and perhaps bound to have unintended ripple effects. But without this elephant’s input of new money and ideas, the battle-front against malaria and other deadly diseases might present an even worse picture, especially if the field were left to governments and inter-governmental bodies.

Despite my reservations about infographics, The Economist had a too-interesting-to-ignore one yesterday about postmortem organ donation. What’s really interesting is that the United States is second to Spain, which requires people to opt-out of donations.