Okay, so soon it will be a lot easier to qualify for weight-loss surgery in the United States. An advisory panel to the federal Food and Drug Administration, that embodiment of public good and nutritional betterment under whose oversight in the past thirty years the sheer size of the per capita per capita has ballooned to such crisis proportions that no less than Michelle Obama has chosen childhood obesity as her chief First Lady cause to address, into the teeth of opposition from Sarah Palin (Ah ha! A Palin notice; my blog hits are sure to go off the grid!) and assorted tea partiers accusing plans to sweep Coke and Pepsi machines from school cafeterias as unAmerican, but no matter, the FDA weighs in with a vote this month that
according to the New York Times, “would pave the way to double the number of Americans who qualify for weight-loss surgery.” Goodie. Bring on the soda drinks, (Factoid: Mad Av cola execs talk in terms of “stomach share,” not market share. They devise schemes to maximize the daily stomach share per capita, that is, one-third Coke, say, and two-thirds the food and drink competition. What, only 33%? We want 50%! Why not 65%! Give me 65!!!!) and ramp up the schools for special surgery. Or at least private-equity-backed education to perfect the surgery for the millions more insertions of the Lap-Band stomach-restricting device, and certainly other innovations to come. The change, if approved by our foundation of flab-fighters, the people’s palate-setter, the FDA, a person who is 5 feet, 5 inches with hypertension who weighs 180 pounds will qualify. Now that person must be 210 pounds.
Or take dialysis. Here’s a beaut from the December Atlantic, off newsstands now. In the good ole US of A, and I quote from Robin Fields/Pro Publica, “Taxpayers spend . . . about $77,000 per patient (on dialysis care), more, by some accounts, than any other nation. Yet the U.S. continues to have one of the industrialized world’s highest mortality rates for dialysis care.” Oh, and in the US, “the incidence of kidney failure has increased by more than 90 percent since 1990.”
Obesity and its scourge, diabetes, would classify as simply sobering, if they didn’t find little or no place in the ad and Hollywood culture,* the streams that come to our mobile-entertainment pockets, but the dual crises in our current consumption-obsessed climate – and as I say elsewhere on RFYL, if you’ve got the dough and the info, you can load up on fresh fruits and veggies, homemade pastas, but if you don’t, then the ad landslide of processed foods, the-only-lunch-I-can-afford is sodium-loaded Cup of Soup channels you into the one and only industry more morally repugnant than the speculator-driven financial services biz, the medical product and hospital care businesses, and yes, their let’s-turn-more-profit! overseers, the Food and Drug Administration, which for want of a little insight in the darkness would better be known as the Full on to Death Adminstration. Or so I say for emphasis . . .
* Consider this doozy about choices made by our “entertainment” culture from “Because We Could,” a London Review of Books piece by David Simpsion, reviewing, “None of Us Were Like this Before: American Soliders and Torture:”
After World War Two, Hans-Joachim Scharff, a believer in non-violent investigative techniques and one of the most successful interrogators during the war, “was invited by the US Air Force to lecture about his experiences, and what he taught them should have found its way into the manuals. A number of other interrogation experts agree that non-violent procedures are by far the most effective way of obtaining information. But no one has made a movie about them.”
*
So much for barbs. Carbs. In a recent item from CBC Radio's "Quirks and Quarks" - no, not the piece about the barnacles' penis, known for being ten times as long as their body, but a study shows their shape varies depending on certain circumstances (but well worth checking out on its Web site .¤.¤.) - listeners learned of research in the endurance runners' obsession, the topic of carbohydrate-loading. It seems in this case - if not, arguably, in the "Barbs" rant - there is cause to be obsessed.
The Harvard-MIT scientist (and 2:55 Boston-finisher) Ben Rapoport has come up with a Running Endurance Calculator. Here's the link for that. http://endurancecalculator.com/. And for wonks curious enough to vet the research itself, visit the PLoS Computational Biology journal Web site and search for Endurance Running.
Rapoport, like an estimated 40 percent of marathoners, "hit the wall" during the 2005 running of the New York City Marathon. (I hit the wall too, in the 1988 Detroit-Windsor Marathon, and didn't finish because my body literally felt like it was breaking down.) All marathoners have seen it, if not experienced it; usually after the mid-point of the race, a runner will lose speed, and the pain and fatigue becomes excrutiating.
In med talk, what happens is your stored carbohydrates are gone, and the body starts burning fat, produces “Ketones” (sounds like a WHSS band from the Sixties), the byproducts of fat metabolism, which start building up in the body. (And that can’t be good; Imagine a “Ketone” hanging out in your bloodstream.)
Rapoport’s advice: Set a target pace and stick to it and make sure you carbo-load.
Nothing new there. But here’s where it gets interesting. The scientist isolates two key factors that seem to set apart the wall-hitters from the non-wall-hitters: aerobic capacity and the ability of the leg muscles to store carbohydrates as glycogen. (More jargon: Most carbs used in strenuous exercise come from glycogen, a form in which body fuel is stored, in the liver and the leg muscles.)
Now check out the calculator: Using it, Rapoport says any runner training for a marathon can puzzle out a range of paces that he or she can shoot for, along with a carbo-loading target that his research shows will result in you joining the ranks of the non-wall-hitters. (Believe me, a group you want to be in!)
In my case, based on my aerobic health, a conservative best marathon performance of 3:17:09 (I can only dream) requires 1,476 kcal of carbo loading, and my NYC Marathon qualifying target of 3:25, 1,390 kcals of carbo loading.
Leg mass also comes into play because the larger the leg muscles the more glycogen that be stored. Consider this: For men looking to hit Boston-like times, leg muscles make up, on average, 14 to 27.5 percent of body weight, and in women, 18 to 22.5 percent. (Beats me how you carve up these percentages .¤.¤. I imagine standing naked on the bathroom scales before the mirror, M with a clipboard. “Yep, L, I’d say your total leg muscle weight is about 19.4 percent of your body mass. They have specialists you can go to who can parse weight of your muscle groups ??)
Oh yeah, and what outside of course terrain, is also a defining factor, according to Rapoport? Mental toughness. Which sounds a lot like my previous post!
Next: Running for Your Life: Why Run?
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