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!

…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]

Buzzwords and hype notwithstanding, if you’re a runner then you’ve bonked at some point in your running career. So what the hell is bonking you ask? Well, basically, it’s when you hit the proverbial ‘wall’ during one of your long runs or long races. If you’ve seen that Gatorade commercial where the athlete has his legs start to wobble and then he collapses, then you’ve seen one of the extreme cases. [The athlete, incidentally, was Chris Legh, an Australian triathlete, who was competing in the 1997 Ironman championships at the time.]

According to today’s NYT article, there are three kinds of bonking, based on their respective cause:

Number One: Fluid bonking is plain old dehydration. You know, when you don’t have enough fluids in your body. Perhaps you should think of sipping some tea on your next run?

Number Two: Energy bonking is when:

[you] feel as if your legs are mired in quicksand or as if your brain suddenly says “no more,” like Forrest Gump did at the end of his cross-country trek. [link]

This happens because your blood sugar is low and Lisa Dorfman, the sports nutritionist for the University of Miami, and who the NYT has quoted throughout the article, advices that you can prevent energy bonks by:

drinking a sports drink, or eating a citrus slice or banana, to boost glycogen and increase blood sugar. [link]

And, Number Three: Electrolyte bonking occurs when you have a depletion of electrolytes such as sodium and potassium. When you suffer from electrolyte bonking you usually:

see dots, feel nauseated, cramp up or have persistent headaches. [link]

Now, I don’t know about you, but I am painfully familiar with this type of bonking. To add to that, I also suffer from postural hypotension, which has even caused me to pass out a couple of times, particularly after an intense workout.

Needless to say, bonking is no fun. So how do you prevent it? Well, for me, a bottle of Gatorade in my hand while running has solved most of my bonking problems. But other than that, you should also watch what you eat, as well as when you eat it.

Most elite athletes today realize that what they eat and when they eat affects not only race-day performance but also how quickly they can recover from workouts.

It’s the rest of us who have been slow to catch on. [link]

So drinking Gatorade while running is good, but it’s better still if you load up on those glycogens a little before running:

“Taking in glucose during exercise will help offset muscle glycogen depletion,” said Monique Ryan, the author of “Sports Nutrition for Endurance Athletes” and a registered dietitian. “Studies have shown if you start doing it earlier on, you can prolong exercise.” [link]

As for me personally, I like to load up on the carbs starting the day before a long race, eating healthy whole-wheat carbs in small doses throughout the day, rather than all at once at night. That’s worked pretty well for me, so far. That’s for the day before a race. What about during the race? In the marathon, I ate half a power bar (not the Powerbar brand, which I hate, but another one) some time between the 16th and the 17th mile. I found that this really perked me up.

But everything in moderation. The middle-path of the Buddha. So eat during the race to avoid bonking, but don’t eat too much, either. Otherwise you’ll end up like Dennis Meeker, a 35-year-old triathlete from Boulder, Colo. who:

polished off extra PowerBars on the bike because he thought the heat would prevent him from eating during the last leg. Thirteen miles into the foot race, with little water in his system, he had caught the man in second. Then, Mr. Meeker said, “I just couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. There was cement in my legs and gut.”

… Comparing past successful triathlons to this gut wrencher, he calculated that the difference came down to a common problem (too little water) and a surprising one (too many calories, which sat like a lump in his stomach). Next time, he plans to ease off the PowerBars. [link]

An excellent decision, I might add.

Other than that, be smart and don’t run like a maniac in the beginning of a race, especially a marathon or a half-marathon. It’s easy to get caught up in race-day excitement. In fact, I consciously run slower in the first mile of a long race, taking around a minute or two more than my fastest anticipated race pace. Then I start running at my normal pace. The best gauge of whether you’re running too fast is your mental and physical state in the last couple of miles. You should be able to smile and sprint. If you can do that, then you’re doing good.

On the other hand, if you find yourself cursing all the innocent bystanders and wishing you had never signed up for the damn race (and believe me, I’ve been there a few times myself), then there’s a good chance that you’re running low on sugar, ran too fast through the race, or just plain didn’t get enough rest beforehand.

So here’s to running without bonking. And here’s also to bonking without running. In the latter’s case, I do mean the Hugh Grant-Andie MacDowell variety!

They say that tea is much more beneficial to one’s health than was previously thought. Of course, these days almost everything either causes cancer or a heart attack. Everything except butter, that is. Tea, on the other hand, actually prevents both:

Some studies suggested tea consumption protected against cancer, although this effect was less clear-cut.

They found clear evidence that drinking three to four cups of tea a day can cut the chances of having a heart attack. [link]

Now the skeptic in me started to surface. I thought, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s all well and good, but isn’t tea bad for your teeth?

Other health benefits seen included protection against tooth plaque and potentially tooth decay, plus bone strengthening. [link]

Tea good for your teeth? What next? They’ll say it’s hydrating! Ha! That’ll be the day! Says Public health nutriotionist Dr. Carrie Ruxton who, along with colleagues at Kings College London looked at published studies on tea and health:

[I]t was an urban myth that tea is dehydrating.

Studies on caffeine have found very high doses dehydrate and everyone assumes that caffeine-containing beverages dehydrate. But even if you had a really, really strong cup of tea or coffee, which is quite hard to make, you would still have a net gain of fluid. [link]

Damn! That’s news to me. Judging from my own hydration levels after drinking coffee or tea, I always thought that the whole caffeine-dehydration relationship was a little exaggerated. So this confirms it. Anyhow, so now what? Do we replace drinking water with tea? Says, Dr. Ruxton:

Drinking tea is actually better for you than drinking water. Water is essentially replacing fluid. Tea replaces fluids and contains antioxidants so its got two things going for it. [link]

Well, that works for me. And it’s definitely going to make a certain Chaiwallah very happy. Meanwhile, I’m off to, you guessed it, have a cup of tea. Hey, what can I say? I’m thirsty!