Where are the songs of Spring?

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Saw a sign yesterday that read, “Spring is coming soon.”  That’s something we’re all wondering about, even in Kentucky, where we’ve been having an unusually cold March, which makes it hard to believe the Kentucky Derby is merely six weeks away.  They say it may be related to melting glaciers changing our wind patterns.

But the real sign nature is about to turn generous was yesterday’s afternoon delight in seeing my goldfinch friends, busy at their feeder, newly returned from their long and distant migration.  I remember late October when suddenly they were gone, the absence of their aerial eagerness and bright collusion of yellow and black; the silence and loneliness of it, like saying good bye to a good friend who had brought abundant joy, “A quality of loss/Affecting our discontent” (Dickinson, “A Light Exists in Spring”).

I’m not a member of the Audubon Society, but I quite understand their love for birds with their bright plumage and merry song.  I think of St. Francis of Assisi whose kindness the birds reputedly reciprocated by sitting on his shoulders.  Sometimes I think they take their own measure of me in their aerial hideaways when I replenish their several feeders in our backyard.

Birds need our help these days more than ever.  I just read the other day that an estimated 100 million birds are killed worldwide each year by outdoor cats and other scavengers.

Diminishing canopy of forest and brush, draining of wetlands, and climate change add to the toll.  Squirrels and other rodents raid their nests, devouring eggs and young hatchlings.

Migration itself can be costly, with many killed and injured, caught in storms or flying into buildings, and sometimes planes.  Many are blown off course and show up in risky environs.  I feel bad that each year several of them smash themselves into our sunroom windows and I am left with their still warm bodies.

Some of them, hawks, are wantonly shot by farmers who see them as predators.  I had an unpleasant experience in New Zealand in hearing of a crusty elderly man who had nothing better to do than shoot hawks as everyday pastime in that gorgeous Taranaki countryside of lush greenery.  In Kentucky, especially in the mountains, hawk-killing takes on a compulsion.

Down the road and around the curve, I often see a sentry red tail hawk on a high telephone wire.  I like what I see when I drive past His Majesty.

I relish reading good poetry and there are poems, great ones by Keats and Shelley, Hopkins and Dickinson, that wonderfully excel in depicting the splendor of birds like “Ode to a Nightingale, “Ode to a Skylark,” “The Windhover,” “A Bird Came Down the Walk” and, sometimes their sadness as in Angelou’s moving “I know why the Caged Bird Sings.”

But I began with the subject of Spring and so Keats’ question of “Where are the songs of spring?” (“Autumn”) comes to mind and finds its answer, for me at least, in yesterday’s return of my yellow-jacketed friends.  Let Spring’s sweet song begin!

Be well,

rj

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Mindfulness and the recovery of compassion, empathy and joy

Nearly always I come upon new reads, not through lists but, unexpectedly, in the marketplace of life.  I like it this way–the surprise of it, the joy of discovery, the smack of fate rather than coincidence, like the chance finding of a new friend or bumping into wise counsel, unanticipated, in a corner; its aftermath of empowering, the mystery and the beauty of it.

It happened for me this way yesterday when I came upon Mark Williams and Danny Penman’s Mindfulness:  An Eight Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World.  Intuiting a must read, I immediately downloaded the kindle version, which also features several sound tracks for the exercises.

I’ve been suffering lately from a good deal of anxiety, largely because of health issues.  I’m not used to things being this way and my need to control makes matters worse.  The trick in life is learning how to cope with issues you can’t always resolve.  While I know the script in my head, it’s quite another thing to carry out.

I like this new way of finding yourself and the freedom it brings, not in resolving, but in coping.  Mindfulness actually isn’t new, but a bedrock of Buddhism.  What changes the scorecard for me, however, is the empirical yield of sophisticated brain-scanning methodologies affirming its effectiveness.  What’s more, it can alter brain patterns long term for the better.  Studies show it substantially reduces depression and its frequent return,  improves blood pressure, lessens chronic pain, and boosts the immune system.  In daily life, it promotes empathy, compassion and joy.

I’ve always had great respect for the potential of meditation to promote both physical and emotional wellness.  My mind, however, works like a metropolitan airport, the runways always full.  Mindfulness meditation may thus work better for me, as instead of eliminating your thoughts, you passively observe them in conjunction with focusing on breathing.  You learn that you are not your thoughts and that thoughts can come and go like black clouds in the sky.  This gives you power to catch wrong thinking or patterns before they impact, and it lends space to help you heal.

Mindfulness is all about bringing us to our senses, and by this, I mean the sensory repertoire of touch, taste, sight, smell and sound.  We take ourselves too seriously and in doing so lose direct contact with the cornucopia of life’s potential blessedness all around us when we subjugate the sensory to the taunt reins of the cerebral.

As Williams and Penman point out, we spend our lives “on automatic pilot,” creatures of habit, oblivious to the priorities that really matter.  Mindfulness takes us out of ourselves, giving us power to discern and thus choose.

I began the eight week course yesterday with the “raisin” exercise, a simple endeavor lasting several minutes that helps rekindle the sensory, noting things like weight, texture, taste, smell and tongue movement.  Once again, I rediscovered Flaubert’s maxim that  “anything looked at long enough becomes interesting.”

I hope this exercise is a harbinger of future benefits as it delivered me from my self-concern, channeling my focus on the here and now.  I thought of other raisins to be savored:  a hooting owl in dawn’s pink-fingered rays, a mountain brook bubbling its way, a child’s innocent giggle, the sweet smell of morning cinnamon toast, the spring rose’s first blush.

I thought of Helen Keller’s eloquent wisdom:

“I who am blind can give one hint to those who see: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind.  Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Touch each object as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again. make the most of every sense.”

Selah!  I am at peace.

–rj

Further Reflections on the Mediterranean Diet Findings

Michael Milken
Michael Milken

There’s been a lot of euphoria, I think mistaken, over the recent research  findings evaluating the Mediterranean diet.  (See my earlier post, “On the New Mediterranean study:  Proceed with Caution” [March 1, 2013.])  Not only was the alternative low fat diet administered in pedestrian fashion,  e. g., inadequate counseling, but a substantial number of those on the Mediterranean diet suffered heart attacks or strokes.  We need to remember that none of the participants had a history of either at the outset of  the experiment.

But let me be fair.  We’re all different and there’s no plug-in diagnostic that’s going to yield a universal physical metric.  This applies to diet, surely, and explains the plethora of approaches which work for some, but not others.  What we do know is that following a diet that emphasizes complex carbohydrates, low sugar, minimal saturated fats, and plenty of nutrient dense fruits and vegetables along with reduced sodium intake is beneficial.

The Mediterranean diet thus moves in the right direction, but would be even more effective were it to reduce meat and dairy product content.  We might then see not only reduction in coronary disease, but its reversal, which truly low fat diets (10% consumption of total calories) have consistently demonstrated in extended government studies.

But let me bring up the Michael Milken story.  Do you remember him?  One of Wall Street’s top investors, he was indicted by the government in 1989 for racketeering and securities fraud and served 22 months in prison.  What followed is a story that moves us with its redemption.

Worse than prison, Mike was diagnosed in 1993 with Stage IV prostate cancer at just age 46.  Biopsy indicated it had metastasized and spread to his lymph nodes; consequently, his doctor advised that his scheduled prostatectomy wouldn’t save him.

Mike responded where others might have given-up, launching vigorous research, founding the CaP Cure foundation, and making major changes in his diet by adopting a nonfat, vegetarian regimen.  For Mike, a typical diet will feature mushroom barley soup, a tofu mock egg salad sandwich replete with tofu, carrots and lettuce, and a black bean and corn salad, accompanied by a soy drink.

Mike also founded and heads the Prostate foundation, working closely with Major League Baseball and matching every donated dollar.

It’s now 20-years since that fatal diagnosis.  Mike?  He’s still out there going strong and giving hope to thousands.

You’ll find many of Mike’s favorite low fat, soy-based foods, compiled with the aid of Beth Ginsberg, a grad of the Culinary Institute of America, gathered in The Taste for Living World Cookbook.  With its subtly delicious recipes, it’s a best buy.

Prescription malpractice: widespread and deadly

Good doctors are hard to find and when you’ve found one, you’re still not out of the woods, as even the better ones can often impose undesirable outcomes, especially when it comes to medications.  With IV drugs and the sensitivities involved, the mistakes can prove irreversible and even kill.  According to the Institute of Medicine, up to 5% of medications are faulty.  Each year, some 2000 die.

Frankly, you need to have your wits about you to intuit when to say no to your doctor’s prescription.  Despite the ritual of your supplying their office with your prescription and medical history, doctors rarely review your medications for potential interactions with the new prescription. They may also prescribe an excessive dosage or promote an antibiotic too often or for too long, or lack sensitivity to the special needs of the elderly patient.

You may rightly want to ask your doctor to review your present medications to filter out  potential interactions and side effects of your new prescription, only to be disappointed.  I asked my urologist about the side effects of her recent prescription, only to get a “You’ll have to check with your pharmacist,” this from a physician rated as a “best doctor” at her university online site who has presumably been prescribing this medication throughout her long career.

Just the other day, my GI prescribed librax to help relieve my occasional stomach cramps.  Lo and behold, it’s a benzo with a strong addictive history and you take it three times daily.  It’s also contraindicated, meaning don’t take it if you have BPH, which seems the ultimate fate of most of us men.  He’s a good doctor, but he didn’t get it right on this, simply because he prescribed, like most physicians, off the top of his head.

It makes me wonder, by the way, as to how many doctors stay tuned to the latest research.  I like Dr. David Agus’s own observation in his informative The End of Illness:  “I implore you to ask your doctor, How do you stay current?  Ideally, you want someone who stays up-to-date with the latest literature and technology.  Asking this question isn’t a threat . . . .Playing nice won’t result in you being treated better or your disease being diagnosed sooner.  Much to the contrary, playing too nice and not challenging your doctors when they need to be challenged can leave you in the dust—literally.”

While it’s true your pharmacy always gives you an FDA spec sheet with each of your prescriptions,  too few of us read the fine print.  This begs, the question anyway, since each of us is different and one person’s cup of tea is another’s poison.  Because pharmacies dispense only what a doctor prescribes, this means doctors need to scrutinize medications carefully to maximize healing and/or maintenance while minimizing side effects, some of which can prove profoundly dangerous.

Often there’s no right answer and there may even be several for what ails us.  This means you and I play a key role in researching creditable sources, many of them now available online.  I recommend the prestigious and objective Cochrane database as a best source (http://www.cochrane.org/about-us/evidence-based-health-care/webliography/databases).  Ask your self,  given my medical history and age, what new relevant studies have appeared?  I also recommend drugs.com for tracking drug interactions and, for just $15 a year, Best Pills, Worst Pills (http://www.worstpills.org/) for its no nonsense approach.

The bottom line is that drugs are latent with side effects and tradeoffs.  Should I take androgel for low testosterone to minimize osteoporosis and a hip fracture, knowing it may increase my risk for prostate cancer?

Aspirin has shown itself a potent cancer and heart disease preventative, but is it wise to take it if I have chronic gastritis?

All the more why you and your doctor, in tandem, need to exercise a thorough cautiousness in finding the best fit.  Just a short while ago, our health establishment gave a rich endorsement of the analgesic rofecoxib (Vioxx), which has now been found to double the risk of a heart attack.

If I were reduced to giving one maxim for medical safety, it would come down to this:  Be your own doctor first.

–rj

Additional:  See state seeks to suspend medical licenses following 12 deaths linked to doctors’ prescriptions

http://www.jconline.com/article/20130319/NEWS03/303190027/State-seeks-suspend-medical-licenses-following-12-deaths-linked-doctors-prescriptions

Thoreau’s Walden: a splendid friend

In a recent post, I mentioned how books can become special friends. Across the years, I’ve been entertained, inspired, comforted, and made wiser by many of them.  One special friend has been Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, a book I came upon early as an eager,  wide-eyed student in an American literature survey course way back when. Unfortunately,  Walden was dispensed in highlights, or teaspoon portions, which is like omitting the spices needed for a well-flavored soup.

Years later, I found my “friend” again, and this time read it all the way through in connection with filling in for a colleague on sabbatical.  I had my students read it in full as well, for Walden transcends the classroom in its call to take time out, reassess our values, and set our priorities straight.  It gets at the great Tolstoy question, “How ought we to live?”

One of the splendors of Walden is not just its message, but the succinct, aphoristic way it’s written, demonstrating Thoreau’s cultivation in his classic studies at Harvard.  I’ll share some of the passages that have made Walden so memorable for me and may encourage you to your own luxuriant read.

On temporal space:  

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

On individual responsibility:

“What a  man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates his fate.”

On living life simply:  

“Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation  of mankind. . .I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I did then, thieving and robbery would be unknown.  These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.”

On having goals:    

“In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.”

On societal reform:  

“Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.”

On technology:  

“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides on us.”

On time:

“Time is the stream I go a-fishing in.”

On solitude:  

“Why should I feel lonely.  Is not our planet  in the Milky Way?”

–rj

A new rhythm that imperils: reflections on global warming

We owe our existence to it, yet we give it little heed, since it’s always there for us.  In my science classes we called it natural law, the material rules of nature that lie behind the structure and behavior of our universe.  Our earth, for example, rotates on its axis, allowing for alternations of light and dark.  It circles the sun with a mathematical precision on which we base our calendar.  There is the partnership of sun and moon exerting a gravitational force on a rotating earth that lifts and lowers its ocean waters with cyclic surety.  Like a camera lens set on infinity, the examples have no limit in their envisioning.

In sum, there exists a rhythm to the universe, which some have argued evidences a Mind at work, bestowing design and flowing with purpose.  Others, however, contend these laws are merely interplay of cause-effect mechanisms, devoid of intent and ethical regard, as reflected in Japan’s devastating tsunami in 2011, taking 20,000 lives. What we define as tragic is more likely our not heeding their operations.  It’s not wise to build on seismic faults or close to ocean shore.

As you may surmise, I draw comfort from these cosmic rhythms despite their indifference to our human schemes.  I know that tomorrow brings the dawn and, with it, the promise of new beginning.  In our human world, such fidelity is rare.

I find a discordant note, however, in our thoughtless disregard of those laws that sustain us, providing clean air, dependable rainfall, and abundant harvest.  In doing so, we’ve acerbated climate change, a crisis largely of our own making rather than merely cyclical change.  We’ve poisoned our air and water, slashed and burned our way through virgin forest, plundered our fellow animal species and squandered our water resources. Tomorrow’s wars are more likely to be waged over water, not oil.

In ten years, the African elephant, once a million, will vanish into memory along with the rhinoceros, all for the sake of trinkets and aphrodisiacs.  Today I saw the BBC news that sharks may soon become extinct, 100 million already killed, in a fishing industry that preys upon their fins to flavor Asian soup.

In our misdeeds, we’ve set other laws into motion that now imperil rather than sustain, generating melting glaciers that are raising sea levels and a warming tundra with potential for massive release of methane, a toxin deadlier than CO2.

Meanwhile, there was the media’s startling failure in last fall’s presidential debates to question the candidates on our generation’s most perilous challenge.  Locally in  places like Kentucky where I reside, cars sport “friends of coal” license plates and “environmentalist” suggests extremism.  Nationally, and globally, corporate interests prevail to uphold waste in the guise of growth.

As for the public’s response, I see its numbing indifference perhaps most vividly at grocery store checkout.  Though I provide my own cloth bags, I’m virtually self-conscious in my singularity amidst a sea of plastic supported by custom.

We are makers of a new rhythm, but this one brings no comfort.

rj

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What if: Reducing chronic worry

We worry about a great many things:  How will my interview go? What will people think of me?  Will I pass the test?  How will I pay this bill?  Will I get the loan?  Do I have cancer?  When worry becomes chronic, it can be debilitating, souring our relationships, triggering illness, and fostering pessimism.

Worrying is always an exercise in control.  It prospers because it temporally gives us a fix, falsely giving us a sense we’re in charge, only to reach an inevitably higher threshold to keep our anxieties in check.

One lasting memory I have of my father was his spending long hours in his favorite chair looking out the window, deep in thought, most of it worry.  In doing so he lost a great deal of life’s joy.  It’s what worry does in overdrive. If he had been paid for every worry he’d have been very rich.

Worry is a bully you need to standup to, not indulge, to make it go away.

It’s also a habit and in this case, needs undoing, and like all bad habits, can be unlearned.

The good news is that its remedy may be less difficult than you may have expected, or a matter of getting a handle on it by changing the way you think about life’s inevitable stresses.

The vast majority of our worries fall into three categories, each with its own remedy:

1.    The unimportant:  So much of what we worry about turns out to be trivial if you apply the test of time.  You’re having trouble with a neighbor. That can be unpleasant. Or what about the deadline for getting that assignment done at work?  Or that you may not get that job or promotion you had your heart set on?  Or that Nancy or Bill may not return your affection?  For perspective, ask yourself what would something like this matter a hundred years from now?  

 2.   The unsolvable:   Common sense should tell us the futility of worrying about fixed verities like death and taxes that can’t be changed no matter how we try.  I know such things can be scary, but we lessen our anxiety when we accept life’s randomness and adopt coping strategies to keep ourselves reasonably safe, and pile-up while we can, the nows of life around us as in fostering good relationships, doing what we enjoy, and thinking positively.

3.   The uncertain:  This category may include what we worry about most.  Will I still have a job?  How can I pay my bills?  Is it cancer?  If we could predict the future, we’d invest wisely and profit immensely in the best stocks, bonds and real estate. But even here, the experts at this sort of thing often predict wrongly and fail miserably. The consolation is that most of the uncertainties we worry about never happen or that we”ve simply squeezed out alternative possibilities with one scenario conclusions, making ourselves miserable.  As Montaigne in his inveterate wisdom once put it, “My life has been full of miserable misfortunes, most of which never happened.”  The trick is to accept uncertainty by not reaching conclusions you’ve no way of knowing are inevitable. It’s always a good thing to question your assumptions and consider alternative outcomes.

Summary:  Worry has a positive role when it alerts us to take action as a preventative. It’s why we save for retirement, buy life and health insurance, limit our indebtedness, change our diet, etc.  It becomes a weight when we wake to it, carry it throughout the day, and take it to bed with us at night.  It can harm relationships and affect our physical and mental health.  Remembering the three primary worry types and putting their coping strategies into daily practice can help you retrieve the happiness you mislaid.

Be well,

rj

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Reflections on Spring’s delicate weave

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.         

What is all this juice and all this joy?
   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Spring,” Poems and Prose [Penguin Classics, 1985])

photo_20Karen reminded me this morning that come bedtime tonight we’ll need to move our clocks one hour forward. And I’m thinking, can it be that time again?

Actually, it’s something I should welcome, a kind of herald, if you will, of spring’s approach and our soon deliverance from winter’s long night.

I do love its entrance. For one thing, there’s the pleasure of working outside again, hoeing away winter’s scattered debris. They say we’re having temperatures in the high fifties here in Kentucky this weekend and already, in excited revery, I’m planning my priorities for making the weekend count, beginning with haircuts for the shrubbery, a few dead tree limbs to trim, and mulching the rose bed into weedless blackness.

I notice the box stores and gas stations are getting ready, too, witness the potted pansies peeking over their rims that I saw at Walmart today and the high piled bags of mulch when I pulled in for gas this morning.

As a former student and teacher of myth, I can understand the archetypal reverence for this season, mirrored in story, music, and dance celebrating regeneration, or earth’s greening. And there’s that beautiful story the Greeks loved to tell of Persephone’s return from the Underworld in consort with every spring, rekindling a dormant landscape into verdant tapestry. Spring is Easter and Passover, celebrations of passage from death and bondage to new life and future hope. Universally, the egg is its symbol.

But I’m also cognizant that spring isn’t always kind and sometimes lashes its way into entrance, forsaking sweet whisperings redolent of incipient blessedness. In Kentucky, for example, it brings not only the Kentucky Derby, but tornado sirens and, on occasion, flooding, reminding us of the delicate weave of life and death, sorrow and joy that has always defined our destiny.

Alas, we ourselves have been playing havoc with that balance, unwittingly triggering with our technology, fossil fuel dependence, and ravaging of our resources, whether of mineral, plant or animal, our own demise. As in T. S. Eliot’s magnificent Wasteland poem, we have springs more often associated with too little rain, or hot summers arriving too soon, suggesting spring’s own waning in the growing menace of global warming. Our earth weeps to be delivered, but there are no saviors among us to redeem and restore.

But then there are those momentary lulls when Equinox hovers in a topography of gentle wind and earth rages with the fever of life and healing and languorous days of apple and cherry blossom, lilacs, tulips, hyacinths and daffodils and we dream not of a distant heaven, but bathe in a heaven brought down to earth in renewal of Edenic splendor.

Would that this could always be. In the meantime, pile up the nows of halcyon days that sew warmth and bloom and hope.

Be well,

rj

On the sweet sorrow of parting with my books

I’ve always liked a good book, whether for information, a good story, or shared wisdom. Years ago, I met a fellow who felt similarly about them, calling books “friends. Because I was only 16, I may have heard what he said, but I didn’t comprehend its nuance. Now I can say the same thing too.

It was hard for me when I retired from teaching college classes seven years ago to part with many of my “friends,” companions over several decades and often linked to special memories of impassioned purchases or a special eloquence that my underlining makes clear. But I couldn’t possibly house all of them, and so the culling began.

Those that made the cut continue to entice me whenever I fetch them off the shelf. And yet some survivors I’ll still have to cull, since I haven’t looked at them in several years. Perhaps calling it a pruning makes the task a bit easier than a culling with its resonance of the trash man’s visit every Thursday. Is this something you do to friends, many of them orphans in a world remarkably sensate in its pursuits and capacity to commit loveless acts?

Dismiss me as a sentimentalist, but I think I understand the psychology behind my reluctance to let go of books, or anything else, given the many losses I’ve known across the years of friends, and animals, and places. Collecting is my mortal, ineffectual, finger-in-the-dike attempt to hold off time’s wash.

I’ve some books I’ll neither cull nor prune. Like my pets over the years, I know their names and cherish their memory. These are books I’d take into that proverbial island exile, tomes like Dickens’ David Copperfield; Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge; Thoreau’s Walden; the poetry of Keats, Dickinson and Larkin; Browne’s How to be Free in an Unfree World; Fromm’s To Be or to Have? Lighthouses in the cosmic night, they’ve made me think hard and live more wisely and, hence, made life better, centered in verities like love, trust, hope, and gratitude.

Ours is a time when hardbound books may vanish into an electronic sinkhole, replaced by shades of their former semblance. While I enjoy megasecond possession, I miss the excitement of purusing bookstore shelves; the feel of that new book in my hands; the ease of skimming its pages, back and forth; and, often, that serendipity discovery or new find, like a romantic love, unexpectedly and wonderfully!

This morning, while eating breakfast, I was backtracking through the late Merle Shain’s Hearts that We Broke Long Ago, a slender work teeming with observation and counsel housed in eloquence, when I came upon her borrowing from playwright Eugene O’Neill, which exemplifies why you can add Shain’s work to my island list:

“Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter?  Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love? Why am I afraid, I who am not afraid? Why must I be so ashamed of my strength, so proud of my weakness? Why must I live in a cage like a criminal, defying and hating, I who love peace and friendship? Why was I born without a skin? O God, that I must wear armor in order to touch or be touched” (from The Great God Brown, quoted in Shain, pp. 34-35).

Good books with passages like these have a way of giving life back to us, or second chance to seize the day and with quick step, live it boldly, slipping the manacles of fear. It’s not easy to part from such friends!

rj

On the new Mediterranean Diet Study: Proceed with Caution

I’ve been reading about the excitement in the medical community over the results of the first sustained clinical study of the effects of switching to the much touted Mediterranean diet for those at high risk for cardiac disease.  You can read the results in detail at the the New England Journal of Medicine website (NEJM.org).  You’ll recall that this diet abounds in olive oil, nuts, beans, vegetables and fish.  Whether participants took statins, were diabetic, or hypertensive, or overweight, the results across the board showed a 30% reduction in heart attacks, stroke, and death.

The study, encompassing 7,447 people in Spain, employed two diet regimens:  the Mediterranean and a low fat diet.  Up to now, evidence for the efficacy of the Mediterranean diet has been inconclusive, while the low fat approach hasn’t been shown to be effective in previous studies, primarily because many people find it hard to stay with.

Unfortunately, appearance, as in so many things, may not be the reality, given the human tendency, even in the sciences, to make unwarranted associations; for example, while the medical establishment has pummeled cholesterol as the primary villain in cardiac disease and urged us to cut down on organic meats, the truth is that only about 20% of our total cholesterol derives from our food.  That helps explain why nearly half of those suffering heart attacks have low LDL levels.  Inflammation, not cholesterol, is more likely a primary instigator.

While olive oil, a staple of the Mediterranean diet, is widely believed to reduce inflammation, thus promoting a healthy heart, it actually impairs endothelial function like most oils and should be avoided.  I have to scratch my head sometimes at the absurdity of health authorities telling us to reduce saturated fat foods, then waxing enthusiastic about olive oil, which is 14% saturated fat!  Ironically, canola and flax seed oil are better for you because of their greater omega-3 content, though still to be avoided.  (See Vogel RA. Corretti MC. Plotnick GD. The postprandial effect of components of the Mediterranean diet on endothelial function. Journal of the American  College of Cardiology. 36(5):1455-60, 2000 Nov 1).

Behind the diet’s success lies its plethora of vegetable, fish, whole grains and, yes, red wine.  In any event, the new research doesn’t halt or reverse heart disease because it doesn’t limit oils. On the other hand, low fat diets (10 % max) do succeed when consistently followed. The problem is getting people to stick with a sharply reduced fat diet ( i. e., vegan), an admitted weakness in the just concluded study. Not incidentally, those on the low fat diet were, for a time, not given the ample support those on the Mediterranean diet enjoyed, which in my view suggests bias or pedestrian methodology from the very outset.

What’s more, the study’s low fat group consumption was a mere 37%, and not the 10% of truly low fat diets shown to prevent and reverse heart disease. It should be noted, as well, that many of the study’s proponents have ties to food interests, including the Spanish government.

But let’s look at the facts about the original Lyon Heart Study (1995), which utilized the Mediterranean diet, specifically Cretan version, for its research findings, launching near universal medical endorsement along with a tsunami of new cookbooks. Mortality rates from heart disease declined by 70% among those on the Cretan diet vs those on a normally prescribed diet for reducing coronary risk.

In retrospect, the facts are that the Lyon diet actually reduced total fat consumption from the 40% in the Cretan diet to 30% and limited dairy intake and meats, while emphasizing salads, vegetables and grains.

But then why did the Cretans enjoy a lower mortality rate, considering their higher fat in-take?  For one thing, they still ate a largely plant diet and worked very hard.  For another, the study found that canola oil with its high omega-3 fatty acids was a significant  factor, not olive oil, which has a low omega-3 content.  Omega-3 fatty acids reduce inflammation whereas omega-6 fatty acids can increase it.

However, what the media ignores is that by the end of the Lyon Diet Heart Study, nearly four years after its start, fully 25% of the subjects on the Mediterranean Diet had either died or undergone a cardiovascular event.

If you’re like me, you’ve grown tired of medical flip-flops.  In some circles, physicians like Dr. Walter Willett at Harvard’s school of Public Health have been promoting unlimited quantities of so called “good fats.” The truth is that fats play a leading role in fostering heart disease through weight gain. Saturated fat can mount up and is especially dangerous.  Olive oil is rich in the latter.  The clincher for me, at least, is the Vogel study I alluded to earlier.

The bottom line, as in so many areas of life, is to be wary of new enthusiasms in medicine that have their vogue, only to fade quickly–in part, because they’ve often proven dangerous. The Mediterranean diet goes right in its emphasis on whole grains, vegetables, and omega-3 fatty acids.  It goes wrong when we misuse it to overeat or
overload with fats of any kind.

A low fat diet at 10% of total calories combined with unrefined foods and low glycemic load remains the pathway to optimal digestive and coronary health. When adhered to, its potential to reverse heart disease has been demonstrated consistently, something the Mediterranean diet per se cannot claim.

rj