Saying good-bye to my old address book

I've updated my Christmas address book. The paper one, bought in 2008. I had so many cross outs and referrals and scribbles, it was unreadable. I know I bought a few extra at the time because they were only .99 cents, but I can't find the others. Some of the younger folk are just e-mails--not even a phone number. My first and second degree living relatives are much harder to track than my 6th cousin twice removed in my genealogy--those folks from the 1800s stay put!

First, I ran a copy of my 2021 x-mas labels for our Christmas cards. Then I ran a 2nd copy for 2022 because I'm changing computers in a few days and doubt this very old database program will work on Windows 11. Then I ran a 3rd copy for a new address book. I put those in a new notebook, neon pink so I can see it. However, many of the old scribbles were important, like phone numbers and e-mails, so then I hand wrote those in. At one point, spread out on the dining room table, I had my old address book, our condo address list, our Lakeside directory, and the old UALC directory (which is now on line and very inconvenient).  Then I went through the old one and counted those I've crossed off due to death. 65. Then I was sad.

No one in the Q's or X's on my list, but the S's are bursting their seams. Should have allowed more pages for S--is your address book like that?

How to read the new nutrition label

This is the final week of programming at Lakeside, and the director of education uses our own Lakeside "experts" who present fine programming. Yesterday was Wendy Stuhldreher a retired professor of nutrition and public health explaining the new labeling for food (she used a one page FDA graphic issued Jan. 2018 which I've been unable to find). My take away was, "just eat your vegetables." She said it many times, especially at Q & A. Her point was that although vegetables may not be high in protein or calcium, they perform with other nutrients as an orchestra, and all play their part.

She also stressed that vegetarians must find compensatory nutrition because they don't eat red meat. The audience was definitely in the osteoporosis/bone loss age group, so she also stressed calcium, but added that it was an investment we needed to make when we were young because the body starts making withdrawals from the bank of our bones by middle age. For a cheese good for protein and calcium, she recommended cottage cheese.

My mother's generation started that 2% and 1% milk trend (she was 5'1" and always watched her weight), and now my generation is probably low on the calcium reserves that needed the fat content for our bones. I think I continued with the 1% and skim until a few years ago.  Don't give young children skim milk as a replacement for whole.

When I first decided to attend Wendy’s lecture, I thought I knew how to read a label, but there have been significant changes, and we found out why, like Vit. D is now listed, but Vit. A & C have been removed because deficiencies in those are rare. Sugar is sugar on the new label. Fat is fat, and "calories from fat" has been removed. Potassium need has been added. (You can't get enough by eating a banana, which most of the audience believed).

The public health concern about sun damage and advertising about sunscreen has been so successful, we now don't get enough Vit. D and today's children don't play outside as much as the boomers and Gen-Xers. She gave the new thinking on sodium/salt--because more of us are eating out, we're not eating as many vegetables--and it's not the sodium, it's the lack of vegetables.  One woman (very thin) in the audience commented about addiction to sugar, and Wendy said that has not been proven and commented on the difficulty of using control groups for nutrition studies.  But one she did recall concluded sugar was less harmful than other sweeteners.

I know how we all love to read those organic and health food websites, but when doing an initial search, I add USDA or FDA to check the research, aka bibliography/footnotes.

Obesity as a disease and a label

The Cleveland Clinic began calling obesity a disease in 2008, and AMA in 2013. Supposedly, this was to reduce discrimination and increase insurance coverage and government funding for research. Changing the label hasn't changed the problem. In 1991 approximately 12% of the US population was obese, and it was 38% in 2014 (CDC figures) with no single state having a rate lower than 15%, not even those with super active, outdoorsy populations that surf and climb mountains. Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans all have different rates, with Native Americans the highest and Asian Americans the lowest.

Now obesity is called a pandemic. I can't exactly find the right figures to compare, but in 1976 the median weight for adult males and females was 170 lbs. and 137.8 lbs. In 2014, the last I could find in CDC the average (not median) weight for adult males and females was 195.7 lbs. and 168.5 lbs. In 45 years the height for men increased 1/10 of an inch; and no gain at all for women (I could have sworn women were getting taller just from watching sports.)

We seem to be victims of our own achievement. Whereas for millions of years, most of the globe except for the very rich, didn't have enough calories and had to do physical labor to survive. Now we have far more calories than we need with food waste being a huge problem, and technology from automobiles to television to computers to moving from farm to city the last 100 years have conspired to create this new disease, never before known to humankind. We don't even have to get out of a chair to answer the phone or change TV channels.

Here's some librarian trivia. The 1987 report (DHHS 87-1688) used 1976-80 data, and the word "obesity" didn't even appear, except in the Library of Congress cataloging data for the report. The words used were "overweight" and "severely overweight."

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/body-measurements.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_11/sr11_238.pdf

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/2013/06/obesity-is-now-considered-a-disease/

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/192036

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1614362#t=articleTop

More diversity in management language

English is a rich language because it has borrowed so heavily from other languages--has over a million words. The President is leaning too heavily on the Russian/Ukranian/Serbian word for Caesar-- monarch, supreme ruler or king--Czar, or Tsar (царь). The blog at Heritage suggests the President needs more diversity:

"To start, let us refer to Mr. Feinberg as a pay Shogun. A shogun was a military leader in Japan serving the Emperor, so that seems fitting. Similarly, Steve Ratner could be retitled the car Kaiser. Carol Browner could be called the environmental El Supremo, befitting the supreme importance President Obama places on destroying our economy in the fight against global warming. To emphasize the warmth of his feelings toward the Arabs, the President could title his middle east envoy, Senator George Mitchell, the peace pharaoh.

A basic rule of economics is that things obtain value through scarcity. In contrast, excess, like an excess of currency, devalues an object. The proliferation of czars has debased the label. The President needs diversity in his labels. History is replete with titles for dictators great and small."

Speaking of diversity in language, it isn't enough these days to have someone on your medical staff who can speak/translate/interpret Spanish. This could create some new jobs under Obamacare. Isn't he promising that with all the money he's going to save with universal health care that there will be more for jobs? OK, maybe not in your town, or your field. So what if you were a Chrysler dealer creating jobs for 150 people in Cleveland--go learn some Spanish medical terms and be a translator at a hospice in Peoria. Unfortunately, the doctor pointing this out in the June 10 issue of JAMA, wasn't much of a linguist.

"It is equally important to appreciate various forms of Spanish dialect. Even in Spain, where Castilian Spanish is spoken, there are Basque, Catalan, Galician, Valencian, and many more variants of the language. There are major differences among dialects from South America, the Caribbian, or Spain." (p. 2327)

Basque, Catalan, Galician, and Valencian are not even Spanish, but are different languages. Basque isn't even a Romance language. Some Caribbean islands use English, French, Creole, Dutch, Portuguese or patois. Oh well, it's the thought that counts, right?

Things I wonder about--the tomato

Every morning I drink 6 oz. of tomato juice with a Tbsp. of vinegar. Very tastey. It's much lower in calories than orange juice and has 90% of the daily requirement for Vit. C, plus a bunch of other good stuff you won't even notice. Cold tomato juice gives me a stomach ache so I buy the little unbrand 6 packs and don't refrigerate them. What puzzles me is why a 1/2 cup of spaghetti sauce or a 1/2 cup of stewed tomatoes is so much lower in percentage of vitamin C. I've read labels of tomato products that have virtually zero vit. C listed.