The experiment is still on: How long into the winter will I succeed to keep up my daily twenty-one laps in the pool?
So far, so good. The water is much colder now, but the days have been sunny and friendly – the fog lifted while we were at the East Coast.
Truthfully, lately it has been harder to face the pool: I am still battling a minor cold, and every day I have to decide if it is prudent to swim with the cold, or if I should just snuggle up in a warm blanket. But the exhilarating feeling after my daily swim – I seem to be addicted to it. I look full of vigor. My posture definitely is straighter. I am building up muscles where I never had any – on my back and my arms. Plus, the tiny belly I had is getting smoother (not smaller).
On the negative side is my skin. No outright rash or itching yet, but I have the suspicion that my skin looks a bit older, notwithstanding the coconut oil I slab all over me after each bath.
For a few days, I had been getting extremely cold after each swim, and couldn’t get warm at all. If you ever read my water book, you know that staying cold after water exposure is not a good idea. But with my inborn stubbornness (which might just get worse with age …) and medical curiosity, I kept doing what I should not have done: go swimming. And got colder and colder. In spite of the knee bends, blankets and hot tea with fresh ginger. Two nights in a row, I didn’t get warm all night – certainly not a healthy state!
Until yesterday. Shortly after I went swimming, had taken my short cold shower to get rid of the chlorine, had done my exercise, had rolled up in my blanket and imbibed the tea, I got really warm. Even my hands felt tingling with warmth. This lasted all night, and is still going on. I suddenly had the feeling that, for the first time in my life, that I was getting on the warm side in life. Like, where my husband always is.
Looking around for an explanation, I stumbled onto brown fat. Brown fat gets activated by cold. Brown fat is supposed to be healthier than yellow fat that just stores superfluous calories. Babies have more brown fat because it protects them from hypothermia – a constant threat for newborns.
Brown fat is not so much fat but is related to muscles. Brown fat is brown from the mitochondria and their iron contents; mitochondria are tiny energy factories. Brown fat has also more blood vessels for better oxygenation and is metabolically more active than yellow fat – it actually burns calories instead just storing them.
So, by swimming in the cool pool, I must have tapped into my brown fat – I can’t come up with any other explanation. And did you know? Brown fat is implemented in weight loss. Yes! Brown fat can make you lose weight – IF you have enough brown fat.
Sebastian Kneipp, the father of the Kaltwasserkur (Cold Water Cure) is famous for jumping into the wintry Danube River to cure his tuberculosis. Later, he modified his approach because he observed that some weakened patients were not able to withstand the bitter cold he himself had applied to his body. One could say he watered down his original approach … I had always repeated what I had been taught: that too much cold might be hazardous to your health. Which still might be true for frail people.
But I might be onto something here … I will let you know how this will work out.
P.S. After today's laps, I have very warm hands. Read More
Blog: On Health. On Writing. On Life. On Everything.
The Egg and I - Revisited
February 9, 2011
In Vermont, at our friends house, I stumbled upon an old book that had been big in the fifties – I saw my mother read it: “The Egg and I.” My mother usually was not a reader (she also was unhappy that she had given birth to this little bookish, red-haired girl that could neither dance nor sing). Our friends generously send the book home with me as a present. And what I found is that her books have aged gracefully; I am still laughing out loud.
“The Egg and I” tells how Betty MacDonald as a child bride follows her taciturn husband to the Waof no running water, neighbors miles away, cooking, baking, cleaning, washing without modern amenities – and the dreadful chore of feeding and watering the chicks every three hours around the clock, all the while bears and cougars lurking behind in the woods. The book was a huge success. Because he describes her utter loneliness with a wonderful humor. No self-pity there (or let’s call it: hilariously disguised self-pity).
By the next book “Anybody Can Do Anything,” Betty has left her chicken-farmer husband, predictably, and returns to her fun-loving but poor family: a doting mother, three sisters and a brother. This happens during the Great Depression, and they make do. They sing and scrimp and suffer, Betty as a working girl in an office – and all those pains make another sidesplitting novel.
Presently, I am reading “The Plague and I,” her third novel, about the time she is diagnosed with tuberculosis – she calls it t.b. - and spends a year in a sanatorium. Hardship and scrimping have made her sick – don’t forget, this was the time before antibiotics, and many people were coughing and hacking and spreading deadly tubercle bacilli. Only in the fifties, the first tuberculocidal (meaning: able to kill tubercle bacilli) drug arrived: INH or isoniazid. Before, they had streptomycin which could not kill the bacilli, but at least helped to wall off the disease. I remember getting twice daily a HUGE syringe full of that stuff in one of my buttocks, until I could not lie on my sides any longer. Many children and adults still died, especially in Europe after World War II, when food was scarce. Out of this gruesome material Betty MacDonald shapes another highly amusing novel. Nowadays, tuberculosis is rare> But at that time, it was a big threat.
The year I spent in a tuberculosis sanatorium as a young girl, and my experiences of the disease, went into the Nora character in “Sebastian Kneipp, Water Doctor.” In the nineteenth century, when Kneipp lived (1821 to 1897), they called the disease consumption. The list of writers, artists, composers who died of consumption seems endless: Laurence Sterne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe, Paul Gauguin, Amedeo Modigliani, Frederic Chopin, Igor Stravinsky were among them.
Betty MacDonalds last novel “Onions in the Stew” shows her finally having reached some normalcy: a husband, a house, and not any longer the constant struggle for survival. Perhaps for that reason I don’t find it all that interesting – but she milks the rainy weather of the northern West Coast for all the laughs she can get out of them.
Critics have argued with her description of Native Americans in the book – and I cringed some, too. She seemed unrepentant and said: ”Drunk and dirty is drunk and dirty.” Yet in “The Plague and I” she describes lovingly Oriental and black characters – a making-good of sorts, it seems to me.
Wikipedia shows Betty MacDonald on its long list of tuberculosis victims, but most sources report that this mirthful writer died of cancer – at age 49. Nobody got as much fun out of hardship as she did. And did you know that she is also the author of the "Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle" children's series? Read More
Dairy III: Raw Milk
June 7, 2010
Raw, organic milk might be the last chance the dairy industry still has. Milk is an unnatural, adulterated and inflammatory agent that should not be eaten. Consuming raw milk, without adulteration, might redeem milk and milk products at least a little – it’s last stand, so to speak.
Let me say it again: Dairy is a highly inflammatory, hormonal, mucus-producing, allergenic food that adds to the burden of asthma, hay fever, chronic sinusitis - not to mention obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, depression, arthritis, autoimmune disease. I certainly would not give raw milk to infants and toddlers.
We are neither cows nor calves, and cow milk is an unnatural food for children and grown-ups. But the industry does not want us to talk about it. Dairy adds nothing to bone health - on the contrary. The simple truth is that calcium occurs abundantly in vegetables, fruit, nuts and whole grains - PLUS, plants contain the other minerals that are needed for strong bones like magnesium, manganese, iron, zinc, phosphorus, boron, copper, etc. and which are lacking in dairy.
"Organic" milk is ultra-high pasteurized for longer shelf-life. That is lamentable. But at least organic does not contain bovine growth hormone, antibiotics and pesticides. Pasteurization and homogenization, on the other hand, change the milk molecules and make them less recognizable for the body – hence have higher inflammatory potential.
So what is it about raw, organic milk that makes it - slightly - better? It is less processed. Which means it contains less antibiotics, pesticides and no added hormones. Therefore it is less inflammatory, less allergenic and probably causes less cancer. Since the cows are healthier, the milk contains less pus and fewer bacteria. On the other hand, without pasteurization, diseases can be transmitted through and extreme cleanliness and chilling are required for the whole process. With E. coli found repeatedly in lettuce and burgers, we know that we are susceptible to widespread epidemics from contaminated foods. Listeriosis is a real threat for pregnant women and their unborn children; the different strains of tuberculosis transmitted by cattle cannot be talked way. Still, I think that raw milk is probably not as dangerous as some people are telling us.
I discourage the consumption of milk (see my earlier blogs). But if you insist - at least, have raw milk.
So, if you have milk – which are the healthiest products? Top, in my opinion, are yogurts because they provide healthy bacteria for bowels – but the yogurt has to be plain, without sugar, fruit or any other additives – you might serve it with freshly cut fruit, of course. By definition, skim milk contains, relatively, more proteins and less fat, and since the proteins (eighty percent of which is the glue-like casein that is, chemically, related to gluten) are the inflammatory agent in milk, I would think that whole milk is better. Along that line of argument – and that might come as a surprise – cream and butter are the healthiest. In moderation, of course.
Moderation is one of the problems: Casein breaks down in opioid-like substances, making all dairy addictive. Read More