This is so easy and so good.

1. Dice fresh cabbage. The inner leaves are crunchier and sweeter.
2. Peel and grate carrots.
3. Toss cabbage and carrots with red wine vinegar (or apple cider vinegar) and salt.

Notes:

• I use about half-and-half cabbage and carrots.
• Besides taste, the salt helps draw out fluid from the vegetables to create a brine.
• I leave it on the counter for about a half hour and toss every few minutes while adding a bit more salt and vinegar until the brine starts to pool at the bottom. Then in the refrigerator it goes.
• It’s better after a day, after it marinates and the sweetness of the carrots flavors everything.

It’s surprising how so few ingredients create such flavor. Here’s me grating in the sunlight:

Shaun drew my attention to this study. It points to an association between diet composition and sleep:

Fiber and Saturated Fat Are Associated with Sleep Arousals and Slow Wave Sleep, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, January 2016

Conclusions: Low fiber and high saturated fat and sugar intake is associated with lighter, less restorative sleep with more arousals.

Here’s the press release:
Study Suggests That What You Eat Can Influence How You Sleep, American Academy of Sleep Medicine, 14 January 2016

A new study found that eating less fiber, more saturated fat and more sugar is associated with lighter, less restorative, and more disrupted sleep.

“Our main finding was that diet quality influenced sleep quality,” said principal investigator Marie-Pierre St-Onge, PhD. “It was most surprising that a single day of greater fat intake and lower fiber could influence sleep parameters.”

Participants were fed a “healthy” diet for 4 days. On the 5th day, they were given $25 to purchase any food they wanted for the day. The 5th day’s self-selected food was analyzed in their lab.

Now, on the 5th day, they slept just as long as the other days, an average of 7 hours, 35 minutes. (These were relatively young, normal weight, healthy volunteers who didn’t have sleep problems.) But the 5th day’s sleep was more disrupted than the sleep on the 4 days prior.

I was confused by their comparisons. Maybe you can help me out. Were they saying that the 5th days’ sleep was worse because the food on the fifth day was different than the food on the other 4 days? Or were they just looking at people’s food on one day, the fifth day? If it was the former, I can imagine several factors that could disrupt sleep other than diet composition: The 5th day was an unusual day. They had to find food, and it was restricted in cost. There may have been more food preparation. The time that they ate the food, and who they ate it with, could have been different. And, of course, diet composition other than the items highlighted (fiber, saturated fat, sugar) could be playing a role, e.g. they did eat more calories, on average, on the 5th day.

If they were just looking at one day, the 5th day, to determine how nutrients affect sleep, that might make more sense. But it was only one day.

My criticisms and confusions aside, I think that nutrients can and do affect sleep. Dietary fat is digested slower, leaves the stomach more slowly, and may slow digestion of a whole meal. That effort could delay sleep. Fiber – all types: soluble, insoluble, resistant starch – affects gut flora which in turn affects all sorts of nerve-related functions including mood and sleep. I think there’s something to this study. It would be nice to see something larger and more controlled.

Nathan Yau, on his site Flowing Data, posted this great interactive graph to help visualize the CDC’s Underlying Cause of Death data. Below is just a static graph, but if you click it, you’ll end up on his interactive graph which changes as you select those categories along the top row or the causes of death in the body.

Do you see anything? There’s a lot of data represented here.

One thing I noticed, we’re much less likely to die of cancer as we age. Look at that downward slope! That could be, as Yau suggests, that it’s not that we get cancer any less as we age, but that something else kills us before the cancer does.

However, it could also be that we do get cancer less as we age, that the cancer incidence rate levels off. This article supports that:

Dynamics of Cancer: Incidence, Inheritance, and Evolution, Frank SA, 2007

Many of the common cancers show declining acceleration with age: cancer incidence rises with age, but the rise occurs more slowly in later years.

Figure 2.1

When is the peak? According to Frank, about age 50:

The age-specific acceleration for males in Figure 2.1e shows that cancer incidence accelerates at an increasing rate up to about age 50; after 50, when most cancers occur, the acceleration declines nearly linearly. The acceleration plot for females in Figure 2.1f also shows a linear decline, starting at an earlier age and declining more slowly than for males.

Why do you think? Here’s what I think. But you guessed that, right? Aging cells just don’t reproduce and grow like they used to. That includes cancer cells. I was excited to read that in a research paper:

Individual Aging and Cancer Risk: How Are They Related?, Demographic Research, October 2003

Ukraintseva and Yashin say…

Age-associated changes in the organism may contribute not only to the rise, but also to the deceleration and the decline in cancer risk at old ages.

As we age, there are forces that act both in favor of cancer development, and against it. Forces that act in favor of it include greater exposure to harmful substances, a weaker immune response, chronic inflammation, and a slowing of DNA repair activity. Forces that act against cancer development include a slowing down of cell division and a slower metabolism (both can operate pro and con though). Old cells that don’t divide much anymore also don’t become cancerous that much: “Non-proliferating cells have low or no probability of malignant transformation.” The net of those pro and con forces, for some people, can favor the suppression of cancer.

The trick is to keep cancer cells from growing without harming or in any way compromising healthy cells. Restricting animal protein does that. It lessens levels of growth hormones and limits available amino acids. These two effects of a vegan diet (among others such as lessening inflammation), have been shown to slow cancer growth without interfering with necessary processes or harming healthy tissue. This may be one reason vegetarians live longer and enjoy lower rates of cancer.

If you want to keep eating a lot of meat and dairy, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Granola fresh out the oven cooling on parchment paper.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups old fashioned rolled oats, “extra thick” if you have them
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 cooked apple. Use these instructions. Or use about 3/4 cup applesauce.
• 2 tablespoons maple syrup
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 1/8 teaspoon vanilla

Instructions:

1. Mix oats, salt, cinnamon. Set aside.
2. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.
3. Preheat oven to 240 degrees F convection. If not using convection, preheat to 300.
4. Cook apple, if using. Use these instructions: Spiced Apple In 5 Minutes, omitting any salt and spices.
5. Heat cooked apple (or apple sauce), maple syrup, honey, and vanilla gently for one minute.
6. Combine apple mixture and oats in a large bowl. Mix until all oats are moist.
7. Spread evenly and thinly on a lined cookie sheet.
8. Cook for about an hour, stirring every 15 minutes, until golden brown.

Notes:

• I created this recipe in an effort to use up a bag of extra thick oats. They actually work better for granola than regular old fashioned oats. Bob’s Red Mill makes them.
• You can add more salt, spices (e.g. nutmeg, ginger, cloves), sweeteners, nuts, raisins, etc. This is just basic recipe. (Raisins should get mixed in after the granola cools because they burn.)
• Using convection bake instead of regular bake allows you to use a lower temperature which helps the granola get dry and crispy before it gets brown, a benefit when you’re not using oil. The movement of air aids crispness too. Fine Cooking has a great little video that explains how a convection oven works. I’ve added a link below.
• You’ll regret not using parchment paper. I did!
• I store it in a brown paper bag at room temperature to keep it crispy.

How a convection oven works (click the picture and it will take you to the video):

I don’t normally do this but the entire article is so good that it didn’t feel right to break it up. So, here, in its entirety is Richard Gunderman‘s essay:

Our Health Comes Through Commitment to Others, The Atlantic, 24 December 2012

Above physical factors, health is primarily a byproduct of how we relate to each other.

Mens sana in corpore sano — a sound mind in a sound body. Many of us take this to mean that the soundness of the mind depends on the soundness of the body. But when the Roman poet Juvenal first coined this phrase, almost 2,000 years ago, he seems to have had the opposite in mind: the health of the flesh depends on the excellence of the thinking and feeling part. The purpose of developing virtues such as moderation is not primarily to enable us to lead longer, healthier lives and spend fewer of our days in a state of sickness or discomfort. Instead we aim first to become better people. Goodness is its own reward, and one of the byproducts of goodness is better health.

In the spirit of Juvenal, we should beware the temptation to think too much about the body, especially if it leads us to neglect what he would have called the needs of the soul. Health is not just the absence of disease. Nor is it merely the sum total of a battery of biological metrics, such as our waistlines, blood pressures, serum chemistry values, and an appropriately balanced mix of neurotransmitters. To be sure, it is a good thing when such values are in the normal range, but no amount of attention to getting the numbers right can guarantee the flourishing of mind and character.

As everyone is talking of the “holiday spirit,” remember that it means waking up each morning with the conviction that we are on a mission to enrich others’ lives. Isolation, mistrust, resentment, greed, and fear are all bad for us, not primarily because they render us more likely to develop cancer or suffer a heart attack or stroke, but because they undermine our capacity to live. The interests of the body are best served not by designated drivers and rigidly enforced diet plans, but by organizing our days so that each of us brings more humanity into the world. Health is not the most important thing in life. It is primarily a byproduct of the pursuit of the most important things life has to offer.

Health is also not something that we can hoard up for ourselves. Its value is realized not in its accumulation, but in its spending.

If one day we wake up in full possession of our bodily faculties and feeling our best, our best course of action is not to down a fruit and vegetable puree or go for a jog. Health achieves its fullest expression in connection, trust, gratitude, and a habit of rejoicing in the flourishing of others.

Our Darwinian age tends to see life as a struggle against scarcity to survive, but in fact life for most of us life is characterized less as survival of the fittest than flourishing of the wisest. Health is not just what is happening inside the body of any particular person. Instead it is also what is going on collectively. How aware are we of one another? How committed are we to one another? How much of our hope and ambition for every day is bound up in an ongoing commitment to make a difference in the life of another person?

This is, of course, the essential lesson learned by Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. A physician might encourage him to take more exercise, to eat a more varied and balanced diet, perhaps to take medications to control his blood pressure or blood sugar. Seeing that he never smiles, we might even suggest that he consider an antidepressant. But all our prescriptions would be for naught, because Scrooge’s disorder is not primarily bodily but spiritual.

Through the opportunity to survey his days from a superhuman perspective, Scrooge learned that his life has been utterly empty and devoid of humanity. The opportunity to follow the Socratic injunction and examine life anew enables him to chart a new course, one centered less on taking for self and more on sharing with others. What Scrooge experiences for the first time in a very long time is the best medicine we have for the human soul. It is not found in a bottle, a pair of jogging shoes, or a juicer. The highest and best medicine, the only one that can truly suffuse and elevate everything else, is joy. Joy is life-affirming, life-restoring, and life-enhancing. Joy, and only joy, brings us truly and fully to life.

Our own health, the health of those around us, and the health of the nation depends less on what policymakers in Washington do or don’t do and more on the choices each of us makes. Do we know that we are here for a reason, that we are called to important work, that the world is beckoning us to share the very best we have to offer? Undue focus on our own health makes us less than we are meant to be.

In addition to their “US-Style” or omnivorous eating pattern, the new 2015 Dietary Guidelines recommend a Vegetarian Pattern, and even a Vegan Pattern of eating. They note that these patterns are higher in calcium (even though they contain no dairy food) and fiber than the US-Style Pattern:

Appendix 5. USDA Food Patterns: Healthy Vegetarian Eating Pattern

To achieve these plant-based eating patterns, they say to simply remove animal foods and replace them with beans, nuts and seeds, and whole grains.

Based on a comparison of the food choices of vegetarians to nonvegetarians in NHANES, amounts of soy products (particularly tofu and other processed soy products), legumes, nuts and seeds, and whole grains were increased, and meat, poultry, and seafood were eliminated. … This Pattern can be vegan if all dairy choices are comprised of fortified soy beverages (soymilk) or other plant-based dairy substitutes.

You don’t have to eat soy. Soy beans are just beans. You can eat any other bean, pea, or legume in their place.

Good for them! Good for us!

These two pieces of white meat chicken breast, without skin, contain the same amount of cholesterol as a medium egg.

The following quote is from Chapter 1. of the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans

The Key Recommendation from the 2010 Dietary Guidelines to limit consumption of dietary cholesterol to 300 mg per day is not included in the 2015 edition, but this change does not suggest that dietary cholesterol is no longer important to consider when building healthy eating patterns. As recommended by the IOM,[24] individuals should eat as little dietary cholesterol as possible while consuming a healthy eating pattern.

Animal foods are the only source of cholesterol in our diet. All animal foods that contain fat also contain cholesterol. If we are to eat as little cholesterol as possible, we are to eat as little animal food as possible.

When I was growing up, people weighed less than they do today. Children weighed less. Teeneagers and adults weighed less. Why? It’s not a question that’s easy to answer. I think that’s because there are many variables. You can’t say, simply, that we weigh more because we eat more (we don’t), or exercise less (we exercise more). Part of the weight equation includes a variable for chemicals in the environment, chemicals that act as endocrine disruptors, chemicals that our parents and grandparents weren’t exposed to at the levels we are.

As I’m coming to see, there is also a variable for light. Here is just the latest study I’m reading which supports that:

Environmental Light Exposure Is Associated with Increased Body Mass in Children, PLOS ONE, 6 January 2016

The current ubiquitous social, industrial, and culturally driven manipulation of our environmental light may impact on body mass through three very broad mechanisms that warrant exploration:

Firstly, increased light duration may provide insufficient dark, and insufficient metabolic ‘down time’, for normal recuperative processes to occur. Indeed, depending on geographical location, skyglow and other artificial light at night sources are increasing at rates of up to 20% per year [50]. Children are increasingly exposed to broader spectral signatures and more diverse intensity profiles of light [51].

Secondly, chronically increased daily light duration may provide a biological signal analogous to endless summer days, with the potential to amplify any seasonally-driven metabolic processes, such as body mass acquisition.

[Thirdly], a child’s initial light state may promote some mediating phenomena such as problematic behavior, physiological or metabolic changes, which in turn, promote changes in BMI. One example of light states interacting with physiological behavior is in the case of sleep. Multiple studies document an association between short sleep duration and variability in sleep timing with increased body mass in pediatric populations.

This particular study didn’t look at wavelengths of light. But other studies have shown that short wavelength light (blue range) is excitatory while long wavelength light (red range) is calming. Computers, smart phones, tablets, televisions all give off high intensity blue-range light. They can depress the release of melatonin at night causing us to sleep for less time and not as deeply. Blue light has also been shown to impact release of other hormones, such as insulin.

I like this … “We live in a society of relatively dim days and bright nights.” We do. Dim because we’re inside during the day, and bright nights because of our devices. The authors suggest an answer: “clinical prescription of ‘dark time’.” That would entail instituting a state of shorter, brighter days and longer dark nights.

Can we turn off our devices when the sun goes down?

Science Daily covered it:
Light Exposure And Kids’ Weight: Is There A Link?, Science Daily, 7 January 2016