Category: Rants

Rants and social commentary.

Another day, another low quality meta-analysis on red meat and cancer

As luck would have it, a perfectly good Friday draws to a close with this gem a of a meta-analysis dropped into my cybersphere titled Consumption of red and processed meat and breast cancer incidence: A systematic review and meta‐analysis of prospective studies.

It’s a bit…uh…”fun” so I’m going to go over it some detail for my science friends.

Disclosure: I follow a carbohydrate-restricted diet, and tend to eat a lot of these foods which are purported to cause cancer. I tend to view most published literature, especially non-RCT statistical analyses based on Food Frequency Questionnaires with weak strength, with an air of skepticism.
Continue reading Another day, another low quality meta-analysis on red meat and cancer

Nick’s List of Nutritional Fallacies

Anyone who has started to read into some of the controversies of nutrition will quickly find that there’s a lot we don’t know. Answering questions that appear to be trivial can end up taking 40 years and costing billions of dollars… and somehow we still don’t have an answer. Why?

A trivial example: If you take fat out of your diet by cutting out one hamburger, you may have added extra veggies or chicken or candy to your diet. Suddenly, simply determining what happens when you remove one serving of red meat from your diet becomes a multivariate matrix of macronutrients, micronutrients, fiber, and other strange considerations. And then you can repeat this for every feasible item in the grocery store and realize how futile your quest to answer simple dietary questions has become.

Beyond the universal understanding that “less processed is more better” we are left without a lot of understanding about nutrition, and for good reason: it is impossible to say definitively whether a vegan diet is more healthful overall than a ketogenic diet or vice versa.

Nevertheless, there are some basic considerations to which we can apply fairly straightforward logic. What follows are just a few of the examples of false nutritional hypotheses and general stupidity that I will address in kind. Continue reading Nick’s List of Nutritional Fallacies

What do I eat today? A discussion of food.

I’m going to take a brief detour from my usual rants and raves to blast an opinionated rant and rave about a another non-technical subject that I am under-qualified to discuss 🙂

The topic of food and dieting is very big in the old USA (no pun intended). There’s an epidemic of epic proportions, with the percentage of overweight population in the US reaching 75%, and a lot of interesting research about the causes, effects, and issues at hand.

I’m going to share a summary of my research and thoughts on the subject as part of my plan to “get fit” this semester. I’ve switched to a low carb, high fat diet over the past 5 weeks or so and I’d like to share my findings. Take it with a grain of salt (hah) but definitely read on. Continue reading What do I eat today? A discussion of food.

Why you should care about The Beatles’ mono mixes

My mono box set with cute little insert describing this mono tom foolery
My mono box set with cute little insert describing this mono tom foolery

Well the precondition to your reading this article is that you think that the Beatles are pretty cool. Why are they cool? Well, that’s a different article. This one is going to focus on the availability of their music and a little bit of a timeline here.

The year is 1963 and a bunch of yahoos named Paul, John, George, and Ringo are sitting in this studio with another man named George Martin and they’re recording some of the crap they like to sing. Continue reading Why you should care about The Beatles’ mono mixes

Marketing Madness: What does HD in HD Radio stand for?

high_hd_radio_art

You hear the ads on the radio:

“I’m in love with radio again, thanks to my new HD Radio.”

“This new HD Radio has allowed me to rediscover radio in a whole new way!”

They’ve been cropping up in cars recently. They’re slowly taking over. But one question remains unanswered: what does HD stand for? Continue reading Marketing Madness: What does HD in HD Radio stand for?