An odd correlation?

I don't have proof, just anecdotes, and perhaps confirmation bias...

Do conservatives more often flaunt their middle name? While reading through forum comments, I feel like conservative opinions are more often attached to names like William James Hobart or Mary Jean Louise-Kay.

If true ... why is this?

Is it a tie to formality?
Is it pride in individuality?
 

Is medicine our species' cancer?

Medicine is used to fix cancer, stupid, what ARE you talking about?

Bear with me here for a second.

Assuming you believe the theory of evolution, we've arrived at each new iteration (species) by selectively breeding for traits that help us pass those traits on to the next generation. There's a key here: the traits really only need to benefit our ability to make more offspring. After the new generation is born and independent, there's questionable benefit to the parents staying alive. In practice, all the selective breedings are really accidental combinations of two people's genetic goo. The selector is the external environment (in much the same way that a dog breed is hostile to the un-cute puppies).

Medicine has improved by leaps and bounds over time. Not that long ago, being born diabetic would have been an early death sentence with a very low odds of that person having kids. Assuming diabetes has a genetic link, those exhibiting the issue would have been pruned from the gene pool  by, effectively, our species' immune system. Go back just 500 years and people with bad eyesight would likely have met the same fate.

At the species level, we self-correct failures. Testing against the real world validates which people will lead to stronger branches of descendants. Medicine counters all this. We are now able to manage poor eyesight, diabetes, mental retardation, many cancers, etc. Socially we've accepted that it's unfair to let people who lost the gene pool lottery die. This is a statement of fact, which leads to the inevitable conclusion that these people will reproduce, adding more and more defects to the species gene pool.

I'm not advocating eugenics here, just drawing conclusions from the state of the world as I see it. But, what's the outcome? Medicine should, in effect, keep pace with increasing rates of disease. After all, it was that effectiveness that leads to previously unfit people surviving. However, it feels like a fragile end-game. Will we reach a state where each individual has to many flaws that they require constant attention to survive? And then the next flaw causes it all to come crashing down?

In short, medicine allows our unproductive divisions to survive, and possibly take over the whole system.

A week without sugar*

* - Actually, with limited added sugar. I'll explain.

Marisa and I watched the documentary Fed Up. The premise is: something's wrong! We have more and more people going to the gym than ever, but we're fatter than ever! Wtf?

In the end it was an interesting take on the role of sugar in the American diet. The general argument is that we concluded that fat was bad, so processed foods became low-fat. However, removing fat removes taste, so the processors just dialed up the sugar content to compensate (and our agricultural policies lead to unbounded cheap sugar being available). Unfortunately, sugar is a serious toxin to your body over the longterm and a) is immediately processed by your liver into body fat and b) causes metabolic disease (like diabetes). Added sugar is particularly bad because it gets absorbed so fast, all hits the liver, causes massive insulin release that leads to blood sugar swings, etc. Sugar in fruits, however, is not bad because all the other fiber and so on keep it from being digested super fast.

I've been hearing elsewhere that the particular "sugar" in the above is actually fructose. But, the two most common sugar sources either immediately break down into part fructose (sucrose = fructose+glucose) or have even more excess fructose (high fructose corn syrup). However, the documentary asserts that all sugar is equally bad. For the purposes of this discussion, let's go with that.

The documentary also introduces a few key pieces of circumstancial evidence, most notably a WHO study and recommendation to lower total calories from sugar to 10% of daily intake being squashed by a threat to revoke US funding. From our side, the recommendation evidently is to eat at least 20 or 25% of our calories from sugar. Our canonical balanced breakfast is cereal, orange juice and all sorts of other sweetened stuff. I'm always a touch leery about what really happens in these situations, sometimes documentaries like to oversimplify or understate certain aspects of things. Certainly in this case, the information is out there, so it's not like the report's content completely disappeared. The fact remains that the recommendation exists, and our nutrition labels say nothing about added sugars. In addition to the total sugar number, they recommend no more than 6 teaspoons (24g) added sugar per day for women, and 9 (36g) for men.

Fed Up meanders into some tangents about other unhealthy eating (high fat, high calorie) that seem nothing to do with sugar, but it's easy to pile on when discussing an obesity epidemic. So let's just ignore that.

The documentary ends with a challenge to meet their added sugar recommendations. We've decided, why not? The recommendation isn't something drastic, doesn't seem like it can hurt. The first step was to look through our fridge and see what foods were safe and what were not. Sugar as a total is broken out in the carbs section of nutrition labels, but there's no distinction for added vs not. Even if there were, it's dicey, depending on how that would be defined technically (I've heard that some products add grape juice because it's not "added sugar" but is pretty much as sweet). We both had an unexpected culprit: yogurt for Marisa and protein bars for me.

Marisa's favorite Yoplait fruit-flavored 6oz yogurts have 26g sugar. 12g is the baseline amount that should be in that much yogurt from the sugar content in milk. The other 14g are sweeteners and one yogurt uses over half her daily budget. My Clif Builder bars contain 21g each. It's not clear from the label where those come from, but rice syrup is a top ingredient so I'm going to go with that and assume it's the bad stuff. And of course I enjoy regular Pepsi. At 40g per can, it's not an option. Otherwise we're largely good.

There are some tips throughout: any amount of fruits are fine, if you mostly cook your food at home you're probably fine. We're semi good about this; I'd estimate about 50% of our meals are home-cooked. We used to be a lot better about taking our food for lunch, but have fallen out of that habit.

So how has it been going?
Day 1: I felt like serious crap. I had breakfast like normal, but by 11am I was getting symptoms of hypoglycemia: mostly lack of concentration and feeling slightly like blacking out. Lunch helped a lot, but I was feeling it again by 3pm. I went scouring for a snack and ended up with some Clif Mojo bars. 9g sugar each, assume it's all added. Ate one of those, felt better. Overall the day was a success.

Day 2: Similar to day 1. I used the Mojo bar again in the afternoon.

Day 3: I felt ... great. All the weird symptoms were gone.

Day 4 and 5: Still all great. Day 5 was probably the worst cheating since I had a half a Pepsi with lunch. I didn't have anything else with added sugar all day though, so the ~20g is still well under my recommended limits.

Aside from the above, I've noticed I feel better hydrated. My muscles feel firmer. And that nagging little fat pad on my lower abdomen (I'm in overall great shape, but this is something that's never gone away) seems to be shrinking. So far so good! We're headed to festive events so I'll have to avoid all the cupcakes and stuff, but I can manage. I think the week has proven what I already knew: drinking less soda is definitely good. It may have proven more: that drinking (basically) none might be even better.

Think for yourself.... right?

Thinking for ourselves is the great hallmark of independence. No one will the wool over our eyes and whatnot! Everyone should strive to think for themselves all over the place.

Or not?

Unfortunately, many people come to very bad conclusions when left to their own devices. In fact, everyone has stuff they just don't know very much about, lack the background to deduce, and therefore have no reliable way of coming up with reasonable conclusions for.

Ironically, an important aspect of thinking for yourself is being aware of when your own conclusions aren't likely to be correct and in those cases, thinking for yourself that you should not think for yourself, but instead reference the consensus conclusion.

So you know, think for yourself, except when you're unlikely to get it right.

How do you know when you're unlikely to get it right? Looking at the general population, I think we're fucked here.