Missouri highways are encrusted with nasty-ass billboards from border to border. Our claim to shame. Yesterday we spotted a board for PlasticSurgery.com When I got home I got curious and clicked around a bit until I found a list of procedures. A few that caught my eye:

• Body Contouring – Removes loose, hanging skin from the body, after gastric bypass surgery, stomach stapling or gastric banding (gastric bypass).
• Buttocks Augmentation – This procedure is designed to enhance the size of the buttocks. Buttock augmentation can be done by using silicone implants or fat from a person’s body, known as fat transfer (or “fat grafting“).
• Eyebrow Lift (for the person who questions everything)
• Fat Grafting – This procedure will remove a patient’s own fat to re-implant it where needed.
• Jaw Implant – sounds painful
• Forehead Lift – This procedure softens the angry or tired look caused by a wrinkled brow. Most forehead lift patients are between ages 40 and 60 years old.
• Threadlift – Although a threadlift can raise droopy areas of the brow, cheeks, jowls, and neck, it will not produce the same dramatic results as a facelift or brow lift.

“The survey asked people to choose the activities that they find the most restful. The results show that the top five most restful activities are those often done alone:”

• Reading (58 per cent)
• Being in the natural environment (53.1 per cent)
• Being on their own (52.1 per cent)
• Listening to music (40.6 per cent)
• Doing nothing in particular (40 per cent)

More than 18,000 people from 134 different countries took part in the Rest Test, an online survey to investigate the public’s resting habits and their attitudes towards relaxation and busyness.

“The physician population is aging even faster than their patients, a lot faster, in fact. Fifty-two percent of orthopedists, 54% of cardiologists, 60% of psychiatrists, and two-thirds of oncologists are 55 or older. This will be the first year that more doctors retire than start practicing. […] The Association of American Medical Colleges projects that by 2025, the U.S. will face a shortage of up to 90,000 doctors, and a dearth of specialists will account for most of the shortage.”

“On average, family doctors got a $27,000 raise in the past year, from $198,000 to $225,000, for a 13% increase. Doctors in the two other primary care categories, internal medicine and pediatrics, also had great years. Each garnered 15% bumps to $237,000 and $224,000 respectively.”

Full story at Fortune Magazine

In Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat, science writer Marta Zaraska does a great job of exposing these claims as myths.

“Vegetarian animals ranging from gorillas to water deer, she reports, have bigger, sharper canines than we do; our canines aren’t specially meant for processing meat. What we lack dentally is more important, in fact, than what we have. Gently open a (calm) dog’s jaw, and there at the back will be the carnassial teeth, “blade-like and sharp and perfect for slicing meat.” Lions and tigers, racoons and house cats — all carnivores — have them too. We don’t. All the high-quality amino acid proteins we require are readily available in plants, Zaraska says, listing soy, buckwheat, quinoa and potatoes as examples.”

“Neal Barnard of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine even notes that when people switch from meat-eating to plant-eating, their intake of vitamins and other nutrients improves.”

Full story from NPR

I’ve never had a serious illness. I had most of the childhood stuff (measles, chickenpox, etc) but never more than a bad case of the flu as an adult. Three or four days of feeling shitty.

In November (2015) I came down with some kind of upper respiratory thing and after a week I went to see a doctor who said I had something called parainfluenza. Different from garden variety flu and not prevented by my annual flu shot. This dragged on for a few weeks before an X-ray showed I had “a nasty case of pneumonia.” They gave me a serious antibiotic which helped but a followup X-ray two weeks later showed I still wasn’t out of the woods. New/different antibiotics did the trick and as I write this I believe I’m out of the woods. Feeling much better.

Seven weeks. Better part of two months. According to Wikipedia, it can take as long as 12 weeks for folks over 65 to fully recover from pneumonia. That is a long fucking time to be sick. I like to think there is something to be learned from every experience, especially the bad ones. But it’s too soon for me to say what that might be with this one. I’ll let you know.

Today I tried my first Beyond Meat product (Beyond Chicken!). Sautéed in a little oil. I was impressed. Look, smell, texture, flavor… damned close to chicken. I gave it an 8 out of 10 (close enough). I decided to give it a try after reading an article in Wired that talked about reverse engineering “animal flesh” in the lab.

“Replicating the flavor of animal flesh is just a matter of gathering certain amino acids, especially the yummiest acid of all, glutamic acid, the key component of monosodium glutamate, or MSG. (In the brain and nervous system, glutamate is a critical neurotransmitter; its taste, umami, is one of only five we know of that the tongue can perceive.) Any decent flavorist can whip you up a brew that tastes like roasted chicken with little more than hydrolyzed vegetable proteins and yeast extracts, using equipment from a high school chem lab.”

A (hypothetical) question for meat eaters. What if someone could create a product that was indistinguishable in every way from animal flesh. Something that could fool you in a blind taste test. And let’s say it cost the same (or less) and it was less harmful to the environment that traditional meat production. Would you eat it?

When I started eating plants (instead of critters) a year ago, I pretty quickly lost about ten pounds (from 155 to 145). Friends still comment from time to time but my physician is fine with my weight and I feel good so I don’t give it a lot of thought. But this post on the Personal Capital blog made (what I thought were) some interesting points.

If you take a look at the weight for the top tennis players, they pretty much all fit in the weight chart ranges above. And if you look up 6 foot tall NBA guards such as Allen Iverson, Aaron Brooks, Luke Ridnour, Sebastain Telfair, and TJ Ford, they all weigh between 155 – 167 lbs as well. Of course none of us are world class professional athletes, but at least we know the charts have veracity.

According to a Gallup Poll, American men are weighing in at an average of 196 pounds today — 16 pounds more than in 1990. The average weight for women jumped 14 pounds to 156 pounds over the same period (neither sexes have gotten much taller since). Given the average height for an American man is 5′ 10″ and the average height for an American woman is 5′ 3″, Americans on average are 20-35 pounds heavier than the ideal weight.

According to the “ideal weight” chart in the post I’m on the low end for my body type (146- 157). Some might consider those ten pounds “head room,” but I prefer to think of them as “ass room.”

Yesterday I concluded my 30 day experiment of eating only plant-based foods. No meat, no poultry, no dairy. I’ve tried to avoid the word vegan because it’s something of a loaded word. A big turn-off to a lot of people. I thought I’d share my reasons for trying this and a few of my experiences over the past four weeks.

The spark for this little adventure was my nephew, +Ryan Mays. He’s followed this life style (it’s more than just diet for him) for a couple of years and his enthusiasm was infectious. I didn’t eat a lot of meat anyway so I decided to see if I could eat plants only for a month.

I had a vague awareness of the health benefits of cutting out red meat but I’ve never been overweight and I’m in good health, so I wasn’t especially motivated by health considerations.

As I began this project(?), I discovered the ethics of eating animals was an important consideration for me. I feel better knowing I’m not (knowingly) contributing to the suffering of other creatures. I’ll hasten to add, this is a personal decision and I make no judgements about how others eat and live.

I’ve lost about 8 pounds since starting this but have more energy and a heightened sense of well-being.

I’ve found it surprisingly easy to find plant-based alternatives to meat, poultry and dairy. I’m eating lots of fruits, fresh vegetables and nuts. I was never a big milk drinker and now have soy milk or almond-coconut milk on my cereal. I made some vegan cornbread that was delicious and some oatmeal cookies that were not.

If I strayed, it was rare. Some bread or pasta that contained some dairy product. I didn’t sweat those much and don’t intend to going forward. And I’ll get smarter about how to eat.

Two weeks in I was thinking, “I can do vegetarian but not vegan.” But by the third or fourth week, I started thinking I could make this a permanent change. To the extent anything is permanent. So, now I can stop counting.