Hello my cute little butternut pumpkins! How are you today? Do you have exciting plans? Maybe go to work and come home and eat dinner and fall asleep on the couch? That is, after all, a stellar Friday routine. Do you have any ideas about what this dinner might entail? Is it a carefully planned out affair? Or more of a I'm too hungry to cook, lemme shovel whatever I see first into my gob kinda day? Maybe you will even get up real early, way before dawn, and jump around the living room, perhaps pick up some heavy objects and put them back down again, and do all this before you go to work and come home and eat dinner and fall asleep on the couch. Let's hear all the gory details. If you want. Or if you wanna talk about something unrelated that's fine too.
As for me, I've said a couple of times that I wanted to do some stretches after having spent a week horizontal. None of that happened. It's too cold to stretch, at least not without doing some sort of warm up first. It's cold enough that the warm up would have to be at least moderately strenuous, and my respiratory system is currently out of commission. I haven't moved in a while. And I can feel it. But I also can't stop coughing, so kinda too bad. The good news though is that my house is so cold that the pot of stew I made several days ago is still sitting on my stove, unrefrigerated, and smells and tastes fresh. I've been eating from it all week, and that's tonight's dinner again. Ok I say unrefrigerated, but really...just because it hasn't been physically put in the fridge doesn't mean it hasn't been refrigerated.
Did anyone see there was an enormous study just come out from Uppsala University that found that weight doesn't much predict mortality, but diet does? They tracked something like 79,000 people over 20 years (Scandinavian countries like to and can do these kinds of studies because they have good healthcare and record keeping), and correlated rates of mortality to weight and diet. They found that folks in the overweight category who followed a Mediterranean diet had the lowest mortality overall, and that people with obesity did not have statistically lower mortality than those of health weight. And that not being fat did not protect you from death if you ate poorly. The conclusions of the study were that we really ought to focus more on diet quality (and presumably other lifestyle factors, like exercise and sleep and stress) than weight.
A couple of caveats: I only read a news article, not the actual study. Because I am a lazy git. And a hypocrite. And anyway these sorts of longitudinal studies are notoriously difficult because you rely on people's own reports of their diets, and people often, uh, bias their own diet data. But it's not too ethical to lock 79,000 people (or any people) in a hospital for 20 years, pork them up into different weight categories, feed some of them salads and others bags of chips, and see what happens. And I'm not sure if there was an underweight category, or what happened there, though admittedly that is a largely different issue than rising rates of overweight and obesity at the population level. Another thing I have questions about is how one measures risk of death. Last time I checked everyone's risk of death is 1? Regardless of weight or diet? Surely they specified risk of death over the 20 year period of the study.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting and somewhat reassuring. It reassured me for 2 whole days before I started to listening to my pants complaining at me again. It seems that it takes more than 1 article to get me to stop caring about my pants. And with that, I wish you all an easy day, very cautiously a good day, or at least a not miserable day. I'll leave you all with a sleeping dog photo.
Edit: I went to find the study and it was published 2 years ago??!!! 😳🤭🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️ Then why did it come up and tell me to read it? I think this was all an elaborate prank. Oh well, I pressed published and, being the lazy git that I am, don't wanna rewrite this thing. Well, read about it here, if you want: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003331
Perspiration Pals 22 July 2022 ⛱⛲️⛩🏺🛍
Hello my cute little butternut pumpkins! How are you today? Do you have exciting plans? Maybe go to work and come home and eat dinner and fall asleep on the couch? That is, after all, a stellar Friday routine. Do you have any ideas about what this dinner might entail? Is it a carefully planned out affair? Or more of a I'm too hungry to cook, lemme shovel whatever I see first into my gob kinda day? Maybe you will even get up real early, way before dawn, and jump around the living room, perhaps pick up some heavy objects and put them back down again, and do all this before you go to work and come home and eat dinner and fall asleep on the couch. Let's hear all the gory details. If you want. Or if you wanna talk about something unrelated that's fine too.
As for me, I've said a couple of times that I wanted to do some stretches after having spent a week horizontal. None of that happened. It's too cold to stretch, at least not without doing some sort of warm up first. It's cold enough that the warm up would have to be at least moderately strenuous, and my respiratory system is currently out of commission. I haven't moved in a while. And I can feel it. But I also can't stop coughing, so kinda too bad. The good news though is that my house is so cold that the pot of stew I made several days ago is still sitting on my stove, unrefrigerated, and smells and tastes fresh. I've been eating from it all week, and that's tonight's dinner again. Ok I say unrefrigerated, but really...just because it hasn't been physically put in the fridge doesn't mean it hasn't been refrigerated.
Did anyone see there was an enormous study just come out from Uppsala University that found that weight doesn't much predict mortality, but diet does? They tracked something like 79,000 people over 20 years (Scandinavian countries like to and can do these kinds of studies because they have good healthcare and record keeping), and correlated rates of mortality to weight and diet. They found that folks in the overweight category who followed a Mediterranean diet had the lowest mortality overall, and that people with obesity did not have statistically lower mortality than those of health weight. And that not being fat did not protect you from death if you ate poorly. The conclusions of the study were that we really ought to focus more on diet quality (and presumably other lifestyle factors, like exercise and sleep and stress) than weight.
A couple of caveats: I only read a news article, not the actual study. Because I am a lazy git. And a hypocrite. And anyway these sorts of longitudinal studies are notoriously difficult because you rely on people's own reports of their diets, and people often, uh, bias their own diet data. But it's not too ethical to lock 79,000 people (or any people) in a hospital for 20 years, pork them up into different weight categories, feed some of them salads and others bags of chips, and see what happens. And I'm not sure if there was an underweight category, or what happened there, though admittedly that is a largely different issue than rising rates of overweight and obesity at the population level. Another thing I have questions about is how one measures risk of death. Last time I checked everyone's risk of death is 1? Regardless of weight or diet? Surely they specified risk of death over the 20 year period of the study.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting and somewhat reassuring. It reassured me for 2 whole days before I started to listening to my pants complaining at me again. It seems that it takes more than 1 article to get me to stop caring about my pants. And with that, I wish you all an easy day, very cautiously a good day, or at least a not miserable day. I'll leave you all with a sleeping dog photo.
Edit: I went to find the study and it was published 2 years ago??!!! 😳🤭🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️ Then why did it come up and tell me to read it? I think this was all an elaborate prank. Oh well, I pressed published and, being the lazy git that I am, don't wanna rewrite this thing. Well, read about it here, if you want: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003331