Let’s go back. Sandy pink streaks coat the sky as the sun peeks over your backyard fence and shines on the peeling linoleum of your kitchen floor. The fridge murmurs and hums, oven burners wobble and pop, as you spend a quiet moment alone with a box of sugar cereal. Let’s count down ten of […]

The post #679 Sugar cereals appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

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One thing that’s been especially hard during my recent health struggles is that I’ve had some negative feelings resurface surrounding food and restriction. Those of you who’ve been reading for years may know that one of the reasons I started blogging back in 2008 was to share my journey to health. I spoke a lot […]

Read time: 5 mins

A woman in Bhubaneswar’s Mahavir Nagar slum wipes cold water over her face in an effort to cool off after coming out of her home on a day when the temperature reached 42.5 C, prompting a heat wave alert in the Eastern Indian city. (Photo: Rohit Magotra/IRADe)

How researchers are finding ways to help low-income city dwellers in South Asia adapt to urban heat stress. Part of an ongoing series of stories about innovative projects in the developing world, a partnership between the International Development Research Centre and Canadian Geographic.

Visit the Charting Change website to read “Cool solutions.”

This is an incredible paper, Many Analysts, One Data Set: Making Transparent How Variations in Analytic Choices Affect Results, saw 61 analysts (in 29 teams), be given the same data set meant to address the same research question (are soccer referees more likely to give red cards to dark skinned players than light skinned players).

The outcomes?

20 teams found a statistically significant positive effect, while 9 teams did not, and where effect sizes ranged (in odds-ratio units), despite all teams working from the same data set, from 0.89 to 2.93 (where 1.0 would be no effect).

Why so many differences?

Because results depend a great deal on any study’s authors chosen analytic strategy which in turn is influenced by the authors’ statistical comfort and choices and their interplay with the authors’ pre-existing working theories.

Now these results weren’t incentivized examples of p-hacking. The authors of this study point out that the variability seen was based on “justifiable, but subjective, analytic decisions“, and while there’s no obvious means with which to ensure a researcher has chosen the right methodology for their study, the authors suggest that,

“transparency in data, methods, and process gives the rest of the community opportunity to see the decisions, question them, offer alternatives, and test these alternatives in further research”.

Something all the more important in cases where authors might in fact have biases the would incentivize them to favour a particular outcome, and why I wish I was offered more in the way of stats and critical appraisal in medical school (and maybe less in the way of embryology for instance).

[Photo by Timur Saglambilek from Pexels]

       

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• Meta-Analysis Of Low-Carb Meta-Analyses Finds The Ones Most Excited About Low-Carb Diets Are Of “Critically Low Quality”

 

It’s like teleporting. AWESOME! Photo from: here — Check out my new podcast 3 Books with Neil Pasricha —

The post #680 Falling asleep right when the plane takes off and waking up right when it hits the runway appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

The RCGS Resolute sails toward port in Sydney, N.S. (Photo: One Ocean Expeditions)

With a dash of pomp, a dose of naval tradition and a healthy dollop of Cape Breton-style celebration, One Ocean Expeditions today celebrated the recommissioning of the RCGS Resolute, the newest addition to the company’s fleet of expedition cruise ships, in Sydney, N.S.

An artist’s rendition of the new RCGS Resolute in Paradise Bay, Antarctica. (Illustration: One Ocean Expeditions)

It’s one of the more legendary and controversial moments in 19th-century polar exploration: spring 1854, and Henry Kellett, captain of HMS Resolute, is leading his men and the crews of Intrepid and Investigator by foot and sledge across Arctic Ocean ice to distant Beechey Island.

Drew Feustel records a video inside the Kibo laboratory module on the space station in late September. (Photo: NASA Johnson)

On October 4, support crews pulled Drew Feustel and his two fellow Expedition 56 astronauts out of the Soyuz capsule on the desert steppe of Kazakhstan, after their return-trip from the International Space Station — a journey that takes a few minutes longer than the drive between Calgary and Edmonton.

AWESOME!
Photo from: here, here, and here
Want to read more? Join my book club!
The post #681 Photobombing appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

There has been much ridicule directed at Trump adviser Stephen Miller for an alleged childhood habit of drying glue on his arm, and then eating it .  Obviously, I disagree with the guy’s politics but many people don’t realize that glue i…

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Two weeks ago I gave a talk at Ottawa’s 6th Biennial Championing Public Health Nutrition Conference. I was part of a group of speakers talking about the how can it possibly not be published yet new Canada Food guide.

I was struck, both during the other presenters talks, and during the question and answer period, how focused people were on how the Food Guide will be utilized by individuals.

In my opinion, as a direct tool, it pretty much won’t be. That’s not to say it can’t or won’t have an impact on Canadian dietary patterns (it will by way of its impact on policy), nor that a person who picked it up couldn’t choose to follow it, but rather speaks to the simple fact that education alone doesn’t seem to be enough to change behaviour. Because time and again we learn that education, even when tied to terrifying events like heart attacks, doesn’t seem to be able to consistently lead people to sustain consequent lifestyle changes, nor does genetic knowledge of specific disease risks.

The reasons why are likely myriad, but probably boil down to a combination of normal human nature and change being difficult, along with the impact of a person’s food environment and social determinants of health.

For a food related example of this, take this recent paper regarding perceptions about the consumption of fast food. In it, among many other statistics, the authors note that 73% of weekly fast food consumers reported that they believed fast food wasn’t good for them.

When it comes to behaviour change, knowledge alone does not seem to correlate particularly strongly with power.

       

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• There’s No Realistically Prescribable Amount Of Exercise That Will By Itself Lead To Useful Weight Loss, But That Doesn’t Mean You Shouldn’t Exercise!

 

This allows you to work extra hard in a quiet setting and get your projects done very quickly. Or just leave early, too. AWESOME! Photos from: here Join my book club! — Follow me on Facebook —

The post #682 When the boss goes home early appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Scope this scene. End of the meal at the back of a dimly lit restaurant, your belly bursting with bowls of bread, free soda refills, sugary salad, and half a giant stir-fry, you’re thinking twice about the waiter’s offer to wrap up your meal. After all, the thought of one more forkful of soy-sauce drenched […]

The post #683 Finding a container with last night’s leftover restaurant dinner in your fridge appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Man Booker prize winner Howard Jacobson, in The Atlantic, with perhaps the definitive piece on Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’s antisemitism.

Taimer Safder, in The New England Journal of Medicine, with a lovely read about the name of the dog (do read this one before it disappears behind a paywall).

Lisa Suennen, in Venture Valkyrie, on the conundrum of divergent ways to evaluate cardiac risk that span from biology to social determinants of health.

[photo by Alexandru Rotariu via Pexels]

       

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Do you ever see kids on the playground with their bike helmets on? Sometimes you spot them riding up to the sandy lots with heads full of steam and eyes staring forward with steely determination. They are on a mission to get some playing in, buddy. And nothing’s going to get in their way. Nope, […]

The post #684 Being so excited you leave your bike helmet on appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

What we know and don’t know about how cannabis affects us

Cannabis botany: what’s really behind the labels

Cultivating cannabis

A lab in Colorado is driving around regulations to study high potency cannabis products

Contrary to popular belief, cannabis addiction is a real thing

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Une illustration de mammifères, qui ont aujourd’hui disparu, de l’époque du Pléistocène dans le paysage de la toundra du Yukon. Des milliers de fossiles de cette région sont découverts chaque année, dont de nombreux par des mineurs et des membres de la Première Nation des Gwitchin Vuntut autour de Old Crow. (Illustration gracieusement fournie par le gouvernement du Yukon)

Au Yukon, des paléontologues cherchent la solution à l’un des grands mystères du Nord – la raison de l’extinction majeure de grands mammifères à la fin de la dernière glaciation – et les chercheurs d’or ainsi que les chasseurs autochtones les aident à recueillir les indices.

An illustration of now-extinct Pleistocene-era mammals on Yukon’s tundra landscape. Thousands of fossils from this era are discovered each year, many by gold miners and members of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation around Old Crow. (Illustration courtesy Government of Yukon)

Paleontologists in Yukon are working to solve one of the North’s great mysteries — the reason for the major extinction of large mammals at the end of the last ice age — and gold miners and Indigenous hunters are helping gather the clues.

Yukon lay beyond the reach of the massive glaciers that covered most of Canada at various times during the Pleistocene era, which lasted from 2.5 million to 12,000 years ago, and a rich diversity of large mammals — horses, woolly mammoths, ground sloths, lions, camels and other exotic animals — thrived on the territory’s tundra landscape. 

A detail of the Snuxyaltwa totem pole at the ancient village site of Talyu on South Bentinck Arm near Bella Coola, B.C. The pole was raised in 2009 by the Snow family, former residents of Talyu who were evicted in the 1930s, as a way of reclaiming their hereditary right to the place
. (Photo: Julian Brave NoiseCat/Canadian Geographic)

On a May morning in British Columbia’s Bella Coola Valley, Clyde Tallio, a long-limbed 31-year-old Nuxalk intellectual, and I walk a dirt road that gives way to a forest path up a bank from Thorsen Creek, swollen with spring melt. As we slip beneath the forest canopy, we move between worlds: from rural Western Canada to sacred Nuxalk territory—the lands of Tallio’s people, who are emerging as the protagonists in an Indigenous epic unfolding on this unconquered expanse of Pacific coast.

Coming out of the subway, heading to the airport gates, or moseying back to the office after lunch, you occasionally walk with a friend and hit this classic fork in the road. On the right is a smooth-moving escalator with a bit of traffic and on the left is a wide-open set of stairs. As […]

The post #685 Taking the stairs beside somebody taking the escalator and going faster than them appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

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Artist and author Douglas Coupland stands in the midst of Vortex, his radical new art installation about ocean plastic on now at the Vancouver Aquarium. (Photo: Ocean Wise)

Guest blogpost from reader Jim Owens. ******** Had I remembered to pick up tinfoil the other day, I might have escaped the latest emanations from the mind of Stephen Harper, as radiated by his book excerpt in yesterday’s National Post….

Nathalie Lasselin recently completed a 70-kilometre dive along the entire length of Montreal Island, part of her Urban Water Odyssey expedition to explore the St. Lawrence, test for pollutants and raise awareness of the critical importance of the river. Read on to see what a few of the Society’s other Fellows have been working on this year. (Photo: Nathalie Lasselin)

Putting the ‘Canada’ back in Canada jay

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Oh they’re out there.

Tunnel vision physicians who believe that everyone should be vegan, or be intermittently fasting, or in ketosis, or on an incredibly low-fat diet, or vegetarian, or low carb high fat, – and I’m sure the list goes on.

It’s a head scratcher for me because a physician’s training ought to have them know better.

Why?

Because for virtually every medical problem, multiple therapies and therapeutic modalities exist. And because physicians know that some drugs work better than others with different patients – sometimes predictably, and sometimes unpredictably, and that sometimes people have adverse reactions to certain drugs that require them to try alternatives.

Diets are the same.

Whether for weight management, general health, or the treatment of particular medical conditions, certain patients, sometimes explicably and sometimes not, will do better with different diets, both in terms of the impact that diet has on whatever they’re trying to treat, but also on their ability to enjoy that diet enough to sustain it long term.

And so even if there were a scientifically proven best diet for a particular issue (and for weight, plainly at this point, there isn’t), there’ll still be some people for whom it fails, and some people for whom its adverse effects on their lives leads to its discontinuation, and if they happen to be on that diet because they’re following or seeing one of those MDs who is so stuck on there being only one diet to rule them all, I guess they’re just out of luck.

So what drives those MDs? I think the answer varies. For some it’s likely the extension of their own personal experience and success with a particular dietary approach. For others, it may be the consequence of literal or intellectually sunk costs. And finally some may not have sufficient background to evaluate much on their own and instead simply parrot an eloquently delivered diet zealot’s talking points (perhaps especially in the cases of MDs converted by other MDs). But regardless of why one thing’s for sure, the promotion of one right or best diet isn’t good medicine, it compromises patient care, provides oxygen to the fire of fads, serves as catnip for publishers, the media, and the public, and solidifies the notion that there are dietary demons and deities, all of which in turn torches the hope of improved nutrition related scientific literacy in society.

Nutritional populism is a bad look irrespective of which diet it happens to be promoting.

[Photo by Anthony DeRosa from Pexels]

       

Related Stories

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• New Intermittent Fasting Study: No Magic Weight Loss Benefits. Hungry Making.
• Motivated To Change Your Lifestyle And Have Diabetes? Virta (And Maybe #Keto) Could Be Right For You

 

OMG. AWESOME! Photos from: here — Follow me on Twitter —

The post #686 When you open your cell phone and there are a bunch of new texts from your friends appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

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Hey, it’s not like you can play outside, go swimming, ride your bike, or walk to the store. So just flick off the lights, yank open the blinds, and stare out the window at the majestic streaks of bright lightning cracking down all around you. AWESOME! Photo from: here Join my book club! — Follow […]

The post #687 Turning off all the lights and opening the blinds during a thunderstorm appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Read time: 3 mins