Since then I’ve read a fair amount about the importance of Vitamin D in cancer prevention, depression, athletic performance, osteoporosis, and a host of other health issues, and I decided that this is something that I wish one of my doctors had brought up earlier.  Realistically, I’ve probably been low my entire life and certainly for at least the last 10 years that I’ve been studying and working in the northern parts of the U.S.  When in my adult life have I ever gotten that much sun? And between November and February the sun that hits the northern U.S. isn’t potent enough to create enough Vitamin D!

The wikipedia entry on Vitamin D is pretty thorough, as was the Mayo Clinic’s information, and the NYTimes’ excellent Well Blog had a post in late September which featured many helpful comments from doctors who treat low vitamin D levels (and a variety of other vitamin D enthusiasts). My chief concern in supplementation was overdoing it, since fat soluble vitamins like vitamin D can be toxic if levels are too high.  I found a fair amount of evidence that it would be hard to make myself toxic.  Most toxicities occur when people ingest >40,000 IU/day and the human body naturally makes up to a maximum of 10,000 IU/day.  While the current maximum RDI is 2,000 IU, that guideline is apparently up for revision in 2010 and expected to be lifted to 10,000 IU.

Long story short, after reading everything I could get my hands on, I’ve started taking ~3000 IU/day and an additional 10,000 IU once/week.   One point of advice that I found particularly helpful is that once you’ve supplemented for 8 weeks you should be retested and adjust as needed – pretty logical.  I expect I’ll probably have to increase further to get to a target level of 50-80 ng/mL, but if I’ve been low for 10 years or more I figure I can wait and see.

If you live anywhere except New York state (figures!) you can order a home-testing kit for $65 if your doctor won’t test or your insurance won’t cover it.  Remember, you want to be tested for 25-hydroxyvitamin D, also called 25(OH)D, not 1,25-dihydroxy-vitamin D, which is calcitriol.

I want to see this movie.

Now I don’t remember what things were like back in 1980, but my guess is they were pretty different.  Things can’t always have been as bad as they are now, right?   I was home last month helping my parents go through some boxes in Austin just before they moved to Colorado full time and we found the receipt from my hospital stay when I was born.

I was born at Stamford Hospital in Stamford, CT 45 days premature.  I was soon transfered to Yale-New Haven Hospital for an eight day stay in the neonatal intensive care unit.  I was jaundiced and my surfactant was inadequate but a week in the incubator did me some good.  The total cost of my 8 day hospitalization?  $2964.15.  In 2008 dollars that would be $7649.39.   Yet today, that same hospital stay would be approximately $14-19,000.  And if you look closer you’ll see that my entire hospital stay was covered by my insurance.  Would the same be true today?  Luckily, I haven’t been admitted to a hospital since then and I’m hoping that doesn’t change any time soon.

It got me thinking about what life would be like if you had to avoid music – or at least choose to live without it.  What if  music couldn’t be part of your life?  I’m sure there are plenty of people for whom this wouldn’t be a challenge.  They are either disinterested or passive consumers of music.   For me it would be devastating.  Would something else replace that near euphoric high of that perfect combination of sounds?  What else could really feel so good?  Sometimes I wonder if that’s the feeling people who are athletes or runners talk about.  The release of endorphins or serotonin or dopamine or whatever feel-good neurotransmitter it happens to be that causes that high.  And does every person have that something?  I know I’ve felt it in plenty of different situations – music just happens to be the one that’s easiest to control and replicate.  I can’t make someone fall in love with me, I can’t count on excelling at any specific task.  Music, however, is always there.

In This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin discusses how music stimulates the entire brain diffusely, while most processing tasks are focused in one specific region of the brain.  I’m still working my way through the book, but this concept makes sense to me.  Music really does, more than anything else, seem to work it’s way through the entire mind; I’ve used the phrase “bathing every neuron” before.  Even better, sometimes it works its way down to your heart.  It’s a reliable high.

Today’s high courtesy of Coldplay’s “Strawberry Swing.”

Somehow I stumbled across a report of 2006′s Nobel Prize Winners a few weeks ago. C. elegans was mentioned. “C. elegans??” I said, feeling old academic thoughts shaking off dust. “I know that name.”

Then it all came back at once. Worms. Little petri dishes of worms. Reproducing hemaphroditic worms. Watching their little spawning babies. Following the genetic traits. There were dumpy worms (DUMPY) who were short and fat. There were uncoordinated worms (UNC) who couldn’t really move. There were little worms who glowed in the dark (GLO). And some worms were both DUMPY and UNC. Poor little worms.

A little refresher course courtesy of wikipedia reveals that C. elegans is no mere worm. Nobel prizes in 2002 and 2006 and survived the Columbia disaster?? That’s more than you can say for a wimpy Drosophilia.

Milk cancels health benefit of drinking tea: study

The study is Addition of milk prevents vascular protective effects of tea. by M. Lorenz, N. Jochmann, A. von Krosigk, P. Martus, G. Baumann, K. Stangl, V. Stangl from European Heart Journal. 2007 Jan 9. Abstract here.

Of course, right now I’m not drinking any black tea, but the idea of doing so without milk? Atrocious.

Update!!
From Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism. 2005 May-Jun;49(3):189-95.
Addition of milk does not alter the antioxidant activity of black tea. by V.C. Reddy, GV Vidya Sagar, D. Sreeramulu, L. Venu, M. Raghunath. Abstract here.

Okay non-biology geeks, so maybe you’ve never gotten excited about anything bio-related before, but if there were ever anything that was gonna get you going it’d be this video.

tRNA!!!!!

They played this during my first year bio class at Dartmouth (wayz back in ’99) and for the rest of my miserable bio classes I found myself wanting to shout out “tRNA!!!” during the excrutiatingly painful moments. Classic.

Like this ad? I do.

Guinness is really good with hard cider (a Black Velvet). Especially through a straw.

But then about three weeks ago I actually stopped and thought about it. The water you drink enters your gastrointestinal tract (i.e. stomach, intestines, etc) whereas the urine you produce is a result of filtration of your blood. So really, for the water to get from your GI tract out through your urinary system it definitely has to be absorbed. Not to be too gross about this, but if that whole absorption theory were true you’d actually poop out the water. Gross.

So then I thought about it some more and came up with this… Maybe it means that most of the water is absorbed through the large colon into the bloodstream where the increase in blood volume turns off the ADH in the collecting ducts of the kidney allowing you to excrete the excess free water. Likely there isn’t enough time for redistribution of the fluid throughout the intracellular and extracellular spaces since derangements in overall blood volume would be correctly quite rapidly.

Yeah. That makes more sense. So to some extent the “non absorption” theory probably is true, just not in the way I’d been thinking about it all these years.

With the dishwasher, it’s unloading the clean dishes. I don’t like dirty dishes, so once they’re in there, I’ve got no problem running it. And if the dishwasher’s empty, I’ll load the dishes as they come. The sticky step is unloading the clean dishes – I mean, can’t I just use those dishes as I need them? The answer is most decidely no. Because the dirty dishes that start to accumulate in the sink as the clean ones take up residence in the dishwasher generate a intolerable mess (and sometimes stink after about two afternoons of full sunshine).

With laundry, likewise, it is folding and putting away the clean clothes. I don’t leave wet clothes in the washer and dirty laundry sits neatly in a hamper. It’s the piles of clean clothes to be folded and put away that live like displaced soldiers around my room. Sometimes I’ll leave the pile on the other side of my bed and sleep next to them (it’s comforting to feel their weight next to me). Other times I’ll have various staging areas for different loads in the folding process. A month or so ago, I finally buckled down and folded all of them – it took an hour of nonstop folding. A sure sign that I have too many clothes.

Vacuuming doesn’t so much seem to have a rate limiting step as it does a boiling point. Not having any pets, I tend to let the dust accumulate until I just absolutely can’t stand it anymore and then I’ll go on a vacuuming spree at midnight one night (I’m sure my neighbor loves this).

Sinks, toilets, showers, and mopping are done when necessary – which pretty much means whenever someone else is going to see them besides myself. I seem to have inherited the gene that requires me to clean my house before anyone else sees it – friends, family, and strangers alike.

All right. Enough stalling. I’ve got clothes to fold.