The FDA (after a few years of debate) says that food from cloned animals and their progeny is safe to eat. Looks like this thing has been on the back-burner for a while (pun intended, I apologize, I couldn’t resist).

“This is a huge milestone,” said Mark Walton, president of ViaGen, a leading livestock cloning company in Austin, Tex. [NYT]

Well, Walton would think that, of course. I would too if I owned a leading livestock cloning company. But there’s more.

Farmers had long observed a voluntary moratorium on the sale of clones and their offspring into the food supply. The F.D.A. on Tuesday effectively lifted that for clone offspring.

Voluntary, huh? I wonder how many clones and clone-offspring have slipped into the market already? You know, now that I think about it, the beef that I bought yesterday from the grocery tasted exactly the same as the beef today. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you!

“When you buy a box of Cheerios in New York and one in Champaign, Illinois, you know they are going to be the same,” said Jon Fisher, president and owner of Prairie State Semen in Illinois. “By shortening the genetic pool using clones, you can do a similar thing.”

I knew it! And what kind of a company is Prairie State Semen, anyhow? A sperm bank? Never mind that. Getting back to the point, it looks like clone-offspring can be sold, but not clones.

…the Agriculture Department, asked farmers to continue withholding clones themselves from the food supply, saying the department wanted time to allay concerns among retailers and overseas trading partners.

Well, it looks like Walton doesn’t seem perturbed by that, though.

“That doesn’t cause me any particular heartburn,” Mr. Walton said of the extended moratorium.

Heartburn! Oh lordy, lordy lord! These meat-cloners, I tell you, they’ve got some sense of humour!

No – I’m not insulting anyone here, so calm down. I suffer from the occasional migraine myself, and was intrigued by this new treatment which I read in (of all things) Men’s Health. It advocates crushing a chili in your hand and literally, rubbing it into your nostrils. There’s even an all-natural nasal spray that sprays chili into your nose! Gives a whole new meaning to ‘pepper spray’.

I couldn’t find that vignette online, but there’s a whole bunch of info on using chili peppers (and their “active ingredient” capsaicin) to cure all kinds of pain. Here’s something on spicy meals and how it all works:

The chemistry of that spicy meal is quite fascinating. Capsaicin dilates the capillaries in the mucous membranes and skin, which is why your nose runs when you eat spicy food, explains Eric Yarnell, ND, RH (AHG), adjunct professor at Bastyr University in Kenmore, Washington. The dilation of the capillaries by capsaicin permits more efficient circulation of nutrients into tissue and waste material out. This helps remove not only any superficial irritants to the nasal pathway, but also anything deeper in the tissue produced in reaction to the chronic inflammation that has been causing the sinusitis and headaches. [link] [via]

Picture Source: aaaai.org

Your Sinuses

If you’re desi, you’ve already experienced this effect. And if you’re a headache sufferer, then you’re probably wondering how opening up your sinuses will cure your migraine. It’s because they are linked:

…although different chronic headaches are diagnosed and categorized according to a particular variety, they all share many of the same main factors, and therefore they should all be preventable and controllable by the same methods.

Studies have shown that nearly 50% of diagnosed migraine sufferers also experience sinus symptoms as part of their headache patterns. The most common “sinus” symptoms of a migraine included nasal congestion and general stuffiness, clear nasal drainage, and watery eyes. However, those same patients also experienced the following symptoms of a migraine: moderate-to-severe pain, sensitivity to light, pain worsened by activity, and nausea. [link]

And that’s not all – capsaicin is even good for other kinds of pain:

For arthritis pain, capsaicin based creams have proven themselves to be highly effective, but when applied to the skin on a daily basis, the heat sensation can be too much for some people. In addition, applying a cream everyday can be inconvenient, and quite time consuming.

Recently though, manufacturers have come up with a capsaicin patch that can easily be applied in painful areas. Once applied, the capsaicin patch effectively blocks pain receptors and reduces inflammation after only a few days of use. [link]

Here’s Wayne Perry‘s story. He’s the creator of Sinus Buster – the said nasal pepper spray which I talked about earlier.

As a chronic cluster headache sufferer, I discovered this effect purely by accident when I had an experience with a self defense pepper spray in 1992.

At the time, I was a self defense instructor making the talk show rounds, and I agreed to be sprayed by real defensive pepper spray for television news segment. Shortly before I had to do the demonstration, I got one of my terrible cluster headaches. If you’ve ever had a cluster headache, you’d know they are absolutely debilitating. Figuring I’d be on the ground riling in pain anyway, I went on with the demonstration.

Within seconds after the reporter sprayed me, my headache started to disappear. I had been on all kinds of headache drugs, but nothing ever worked like this. [link]

Incidentally, the chili – which we Indians love to call our own – isn’t native to India. It was brought there by the Portuguese, who picked it up from the Spanish who, in turn, got it to Europe after colonizing the Mexicans and other South American nations (read more chili history). However, right now desis are the largest producers of chilis in the world, with Guntur in Andhra Pradesh producing the most in India.

Picture Source: benhur.wordpress.com

So the next time you have a migraine, just snort some Hyderabadi biryani. Damn, I’m hungry!

Well, folks, we did it! 26.2 miles! My second marathon, the wife’s first. Here’s our route, freshly uploaded from the GPS into Google Earth.

Temperatures were in the low 60s with fog, which made it perfect for me and perfect for running. In fact, it was so foggy, I couldn’t see further than 100 feet ahead when we were running across the bridge. The marathon was organized extremely well, with aid stations approximately every 2.5 miles, serving Ctyomax as electrolyte (which was excellent in taste and re-hydration) as well as water. There weren’t as many spectators as New York, but the ones that were there were genuine and enthusiastic. A great experience overall. If only I could say the same for my quads, at this point.

…cycling is a lot more forgiving of body type and age than running. The best cyclists going up hills are those with the best weight-to-strength ratio, which generally means being thin and strong. But heavier cyclists go faster downhill. And being light does not help much on flat roads. [link]

Woo hoo! I’m taking up biking! Seriously though, the same thing can be said about swimming, too. I’ve seen some people considerably larger than me (yes, they exist – in small numbers, I concede – but they do exist) just whoop my ass in the pool. I mean, they swim right past me like a blue whale going in for a kill, while I’m left gurgling in the wake of the mini-tsunami that ensues.

Seems to be celluloid-blogging day here…

You better watch out. An article in today’s Times talks about a study that showed that obesity is contagious.

Obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus, researchers are reporting today. When a person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight, too.

Their study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved a detailed analysis of a large social network of 12,067 people who had been closely followed for 32 years, from 1971 until 2003. [link]

It’s not contagious in the way a cold or a flu is, but it’s more the mind-set that’s contagious.

Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a physician and professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator in the new study, says one explanation is that friends affect each others? perception of fatness. When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad.

?You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you,? Dr. Christakis said.

Family affects you less than friends. And distance doesn’t seem to matter. That is, even you move far away from an obese friend, there’s a chance that you’ll put on weight. They even give you the odds of gaining weight.

The answer, the researchers report, was that people were most likely to become obese when a friend became obese. That increased a person?s chances of becoming obese by 57 percent.

There was no effect when a neighbor gained or lost weight, however, and family members had less influence than friends.

Proximity did not seem to matter: the influence of the friend remained even if the friend was hundreds of miles away. And the greatest influence of all was between mutual close friends. There, if one became obese, the odds of the other becoming obese were nearly tripled. [link]

Now, all this talk of obesity has made me hungry. I’m going to find me a fellow overweight buddy so I can eat the burger shown above and blame my belly on him.

A company called (aptly) P.B. Loco has come out with Peanut Butter – the Asian Curry Spice edition.

Incidentally, if you go to About.com’s “Elvis Presley’s Favorite Foods” page (yes, such a page exists), in the top right-hand corner, right next to the page title, is -you guessed it- a box with a few links from About.com on ‘How to Manage Your Heartburn’, including some Heartburn Podcasts. Consider yourselves warned…

[via Boing Boing]

Generally, they have a full-page ad with a before and after picture. This one’s before/after pic is really suspect. They’re not even the same person!

An article by Alec Wilkinson in last week’s double-issue of the New Yorker is about parkour – the art of running up walls, going down the rails (as opposed to the stairs) and jumping across rooftops. As it says in the magazine:

Parkour, a made-up word, cousin to the French parcours, which means “route,” is a quasi commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever lies in his path a vocabulary, that is, to be employed in finding one’s way among obstacles. Parkour goes over walls, not around them; it takes the stair rail, not the stairs. [link]

Parkour has a cousin – free running, seen in this ad for Nike.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

The performer (and inventor of free running) is Sebastien Foucan. You may remember him from the opening scene of Casino Royale.

While the sport is fun to watch with its daredevilry, what caught my eye was its connections with India.

David Belle

The inventor of parkour, David Belle, went through a period of confusion in his life. His father was a fireman, and he became one too. But he found that the life did not suit him. So he joined the Marines. That didn’t work out, either. So where did he end up going? None other than apna des.

David was briefly a fireman recruit, until he hurt his wrist. While he was recuperating, he started thinking things over and saw that the life of a fireman had too many rules, and not enough action, and he decided to join the Marines, but he didn’t find the same values among them, the “traditional values.” He left the Marines and went to India, where he stayed for six months. [link]

Parkour took off after his return. When he got back, he began to get involved with his performances of parkour and creating videos, which eventually led up to a demonstration (which also included Foucan, incidentally, a childhood friend), that resulted in widespread publicity for the sport, and him getting several invitations to perform.

Belle’s inspiration for parkour was monkeys. And not just any monkeys – it was Indian monkeys. Including the one and only monkey god himself. That’s right, I’m talking about Hanuman.

Here’s what Belle did in India:

“I just kept training,” he said. “I was training in the trees.”

[...] “I was at a waterfall one day,” David went on, “and..in the trees were monkeys…I went…and played with the monkeys…learning how they climbed. All the techniques in parkour are from watching the monkeys.”

He then showed us, on a computer, a documentary called “Warriors of the Monkey God.” It was about a tribe of monkeys who live on the rooftops of Jodhpur. The people regard the monkeys as holy. We watched them leaping from rooftop to rooftop and through the trees.

[...] When it was finished, he said that after coming home he had just continued perfecting what he had learned from the monkeys. He had plans, he said, to make a movie with them. [link]

The Upshot
Interesting. So Belle was inspired by monkeys from the motherland. Notwithstanding his undoubted preconceptions of India being “exotic”, “spiritual”, and a place where one can “find oneself”, I have to admit, the stunts are damn cool.

In this one, Belle avoids rush hour to catch the evening line-up on the BBC.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Also, I realized a few things this week: I’m getting much more comfortable in doing the longer weekly runs (for weekdays, “longer” is 5+ miles). This may be because I am getting used to the distance, or because I have learned to breathe much better while running.

Initially, I was a little concerned about going over five miles on any given weekday. When I was training for New York ’05, I didn’t really do more than five miles on any given weekday, and that too, it was mostly indoors. This was primarily because I had torn my ACL in the summer of ’04, and wanted to take it easy. It’s still torn, but now my leg has somewhat adapted and I feel much more comfortable running in the outdoors. The leg operates at around 65-70% capacity compared to my good leg, and there are complications like plantar fasciitis that occur in the bad leg, but overall no serious problems. However, I digress.

I also realized the importance of regular breathing while running. When I started swimming regularly many, many years ago, I could not complete even one length. As I swam more, I realized that while I was fit enough to do several lengths, it was my lack of proper breathing technique that was getting in my way.? Having figured that out, these days, I do close to a 100 lengths (or 50 laps). Regular breathing to make sure that your muscles have enough oxygen really helps. It’s really that simple. Compared to your resting state, when you can get by with fewer, shallow breaths, you really need to take deep, fuller breaths when running. If you breath regularly, then you can avoid those feelings of mild suffocation from not breathing enough. This may sound simple, but I know that I had a hell of a time (and plenty of coughing fits) from not breathing.

The way I do it is exhale hard on one step, inhale on the other. I read somewhere that it’s important not to exhale on the same foot all the time, because that makes that particular leg prone to injury, and gives one side-stitches. So I alternate every once in a while – sometimes I breathe out on the left foot, sometimes on the right. If I do it regularly enough, I feel I can run much more comfortably, and for significantly longer periods of time. There are other patterns which people also advocate. This one works for me, so I’m going to stick with it.

The bottomline? Remember to breathe! It makes my Thursdays so much more tolerable…

Apparently, running when you’re injured is good for you. An article ($) in January’s NYT talks about running through injuries and how it helps them heal faster. Now, before you naysayer couch-potato-types jump on me, it’s not like you should run with shattered kneecaps and fractured tibias, but you can run with certain not-so-serious (that’s a technical term) injuries. In fact, it may help them heal. The bottomline, of course, is that you should use your common sense.

It sounds almost like heresy. The usual advice in treating injuries is to rest until the pain goes away. But Dr. Weinstein and a number of leading sports medicine specialists say that is outdated and counterproductive. In fact, Dr. Weinstein says, when active people consult him, he usually tells them to keep exercising.

The idea, these orthopedists and exercise specialists say, is to use common sense. If you’ve got tendinitis or sprained a muscle or tendon by doing too much, don’t go right back to exercising at the same level. [link]

Weinstein is an orthopaedic surgeon at Dartmouth College. He should know. Not just because he’s in the business, but because he himself has run through several injuries, including lower back pain.

[He] was stretching to lift a heavy box and twisted his back. The pain was agonizing. He could not sit, and when he lay down he could barely get up.

”I took an anti-inflammatory, iced up, and off I went [for a run],” Dr. Weinstein recalled. When he returned, he said, he felt ”pretty good.” [link]

Picture Source: National Library of Medicine

The running is particularly good for inflamed tissue, but only when they are at a particular stage of inflammation.

…painful conditions that are essentially inflammation — arthritis and chronic lower back pain — actually improve when patients keep moving.

…

First, forceful stretching of tendons elicits the production of molecules that are involved in inflammation. But small repeated stretching of tendons that are already inflamed leads to the production of molecules that heal inflammation. That suggests moderate exercise can actually speed healing.

And now, their [Dr. Freddie Fu, a sports medicine expert and chairman of the orthopedic surgery department at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and a colleague, James H-C. Wang] preliminary results suggest that the usual treatment for tendinitis — taking drugs like aspirin or ibuprofen — can help reduce inflammation when the injury begins. But after inflammation is under way, they can make matters worse. [link]

Picture Source: National Library of Medicine

The best advice comes from Dr. Mininder Kocher, a sports medicine specialist and orthopedic surgeon at Children’s Hospital Boston:

His rule of thumb, Dr. Kocher said, is that if the pain is no worse after exercising than it is when the person simply walks, then the exercise ”makes a lot of sense.”

It also helps patients psychologically, he added. ”If you take athletes or active people out, they get depressed, they get wacky,” Dr. Kocher explained. [link]

Hear, hear. Now get out there and start running. All that sitting around isn’t going to get you anywhere.