Has Nurse Angry lost her marbles?

What is going on? TWO posts from Nurse Angry in one day?

Well, Nurse Angry admires Dr. Jason Fung https://idmprogram.com/losing-war-obesity-type-2-diabetes-cancer/, and was moved to comment on his most recent blog post, so here it is. She was reminded of something Nina Teicholz wrote in “The Big Fat Surprise”:

“Despite his other successes, being on the unpopular side of the cholesterol debate made a bitter man of George Mann. As he approached retirement in the late 1970s, a tone of torment crept into his papers. An article he wrote in 1977 began: ‘A generation of research on the diet-heart question has ended in disarray,’ and he called the diet-heart hypothesis a ‘misguided and fruitless preoccupation.”

I guess the big fat surprise for all of us here is that nobody seems to be listening, and it’s really unclear why. When I started reading up on nutrition a few years ago I felt like an idiot. How could I not have known the things I was finding out? I’m a nurse! And I’m interested in nutrition! How embarrassing. But since then I’ve realized the enormity of the task in front of us. I’m trying not to be bitter, but it’s hard. Especially the cancer thing makes me furious. Such a waste.

Yesterday I had the good fortune to attend a very small seminar with some heavyweight speakers where the topic was “A healthier Sweden”. The first map posted here was shown and the speakers talked about the focus on DM 2-why?, an app to help people become physically active, youth in chosen areas being empowered by sport, community and taking responsibility, how much liberty a school can take in promoting health, public health seen through the eyes of national insurance and the whole insurance system, and more. It was all very interesting, but not once was diet discussed. The only times it showed up at all were in 2 single lines on sugar on the pages of 2 different powerpoint presentations which were SKIPPED OVER because of time constraints.

We can’t give up!

 

Nurse Angry remembers Lizzie Borden

Back in the day (as they say, and with that I mean the 1970s), we kids were shocked and intrigued by the case of Lizzie Borden, the woman accused of killing her father and stepmother with an axe in 1892 (she was indicted and acquitted). There were pictures. You can see them online now. These days, kids are probably not as fascinated with olde tales of grisly murder, as they seem to have death and destruction  around them all the time anyway.

Just the other day, Nurse Angry was leaving her daughter’s school and was met by a look from another parent. This is a look you may recognize: someone looks at you like you are an axe murderer. It’s a look of surprise/disgust/horror that you (thankfully) don’t see every day, and it’s always disconcerting. You have to wonder if you have something on your face or if there’s something else about your personage that someone could find offensive, but there never is.  Nurse Angry gets this look on the street every once in a while, she can be alone or with other people, and it comes most often from women, but it has happened that the axe-murderer looker is a man, and she’s always wondered what’s behind it.

Nurse Angry has a sneaking suspicion that there is, in fact, NOTHING behind it. The person who is looking at you is most probably not thinking about how they look to other people, and they’re not even really looking at you. There’s a high probability that you are simply catching them at an odd moment when they have a weird look on their face, is all. Seem reasonable?

Nurse Angry is now wondering how many people she herself  has unintentionally given the axe-murderer look TO.

Make sure to stand BEHIND her in the line for the bus if she seems stressed out.

Nurse Angry hates breakfast

So you’re not hungry in the morning and you don’t want to eat breakfast?

Nurse Angry says you’re in good company. Whoever started (and is still perpetuatuating) the myth that everyone has to eat breakfast  should be given 50 lashes with the proverbial wet noodle (they can eat it afterwards if they want) and a lesson in modern physiology and nutrition. Nurse Angry is no friend of breakfast and doesn’t eat it most of the time these days. That gives her an extra 45 minutes of sleep on workdays, and though it was (mostly) pleasant to sit with the family in the morning, she doesn’t have to pretend to enjoy her oatmeal anymore. Not eating breakfast even saves money and you don’t have to carry stuff you don’t eat home from the store, either.  What a great way to “fast”- if you’re not hungry, don’t eat!

A randomized controlled trial to study the effects of breakfast on energy intake, physical activity, and body fat in women who are nonhabitual breakfast eaters

If Nurse Angry should happen to be hungry at breakfast time, she eats. If hunger strikes at work, she eats nuts if she has any, otherwise she just waits until lunchtime.

This not eating breakfast thing is relatively new for Nurse Angry. She is a big fan of Dr Jason Fung and now thinks fasting is a great idea for allowing your insulin levels to go down and  letting your body do other stuff instead of digesting food. Digestion is time and energy consuming for your poor little body. So keep that in mind if you’re sick and really un-hungry but there’s someone telling you that you “have to eat”. Ignore them.

Somewhere along the way we got the idea that being hungry was a dangerous state.  And maybe it was, long ago when most of us didn’t have three or four 7Elevens within walking distance.  One situation many people might recognize as slightly horrifying is when they are not be able to provide their child (or worse, somebody else’s child) with a snack the minute said child was hungry.  Don’t starve the children!

Nurse Angry read a weight loss tip recently in a women’s magazine. It was to never allow yourself to get hungry between meals, because that’s when you might eat something you’ll regret.  Nurse Angry begs her readers to reflect upon the wisdom of this strategy.

She would instead recommend making friends with real feelings of hunger and eating when hungry, making sure to eat enough fat and protein for good nutritional value and a feeling of actual satiation and satiety that will last until the next meal.  Nurse Angry has personal experience of this and she much prefers the relationship she now has with food.

Breakfast is the meal where it’s easiest to load up on carbs (especially in the form of sugar). So take a look at what you’re giving to the kids, and maybe adults giving breakfast a miss if not hungry  isn’t such a stupid idea after all.

All that being said, Nurse Angry does love a nice bowl of steel-cut oats, just not in the early morning, please.

This was too good for Nurse Angry not to pass on.

Pete Ross writes about bad health recommendations from our beloved health authorities in the Observer (and on Nurse Angry’s birthday. Awww.)

Happy reading!

Health Authorities Continue to Fail Us

Nurse Angry likes a good debate!

And in the end, she’s still inclined to root for Gary Taubes.  Looks to Nurse Angry like Stephan Guyenet and Yoni Freedhoff are mighty annoyed because Mr. Taubes is more intelligent (and certainly less pompous) than both of them put together, even though he’s (shame on him) not a medical doctor.

So here’s a little sugar debate to wish everyone a Happy Valentine’s Day. Don’t eat all your chocolates (or flowers) in one go if you can possible control yourself!

https://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/january-2017/sugar-state

Är det verkligen bra för hälsan att äta mycket frukt?

anthropocene

Vi får ständigt höra mantrat att vi skall äta mer frukt och grönt för att det är bra för vår hälsa. Det är bara ett problem. All frukt och vissa grönsaker innehåller ofta mycket sockerarter. Genom växtförädling (och då inte bara GMO) har därtill sockerhalten i frukt och grönt successivt blivit allt högre. Vi väljer hellre söta frukter än sura. Skalade apelsiner innehåller idag ca. 9% socker, bananer ca. 14%, vindruvor ca. 15% och morrötter och ärtor ca. 6%. Det är samma sockernivåer som finns i läskedrycker, Coca Cola innehåller ca. 10% socker.

Livsmedelsindustrin använder tillsatt socker i nästan alla bearbetade livsmedel och man väljer då oftast high fructose corn syrup som är billigare och sötare än vanligt vitt socker (sackaros) och som innehåller mest fruktos. Sackarosmolekylen består av en glukos- och en fruktosmolekyl som är sammanlänkade.

När lätt förbrända kolhydrater som sackaros och vitt mjöl kommer ner i vår matsmältning kan…

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Make your own damn appointment. Happy New Year from Nurse Angry!

Ringing in 2017 with some slightly irritated curiosity rather than anger for a change.

Today’s Nurse Angry question is: how on Earth did it get to be that people 20+ years old (dare Nurse Angry write the word millenial?) have their mothers (or occasionally fathers) call to make doctors’ appointments for them?

Nurse Angry cannot judge whether someone should see the doctor today, this week or in a month when the information she needs is filtered through Mom. When Nurse Angry says this, Mom will explain that her grown up baby has given her permission to call, and is often unable to understand that the gatekeeper needs to speak with the person with the symptoms.

For a greater understanding of the millenial phenomenon there is this entertaining article from the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/08/generation-y-curling-or-maybe-what-the-world-calls-millennials

Or check out Dana Carvey’s Netflix special Straight white male, 60. There’s a short but priceless impression of a helpless millenial and the rest of it is pretty darn funny too.

In Nurse Angry’s experience there are a few more unfair but funny descriptions for this group.

“The convenience people”: they come to the ER with their foot blisters or hangovers because it’s open 24/7, or because they were walking by, or because they haven’t bothered to figure out that blisters are not life-threatening. Or because they think they ARE life-threatening.

“The people who almost never leave the house”: (also known as “the people who sleep during the day and play games or watch random stuff on YouTube all night” or “the people who can’t get up in the morning”). These folks will actually tell you that they can’t come to the doctor before noon because they have to sleep. They appear to live their lives almost exclusively through their various devices and don’t seem to have many actual friends to meet up with. And they can never actually decide on a time and place to meet up anyway, so why bother? On the plus side, they are super fast at writing with both their thumbs.

“The people who think everyone else should care about their personal problems”. Nurse Angry assumes this needs no further explanation. They are closely  related to “the people who would rather take a pill than make the necessary changes in their life/lifestyle to regain/improve their health”.

“The helpless people”. A cold, a bad grade or getting dumped by their partner will knock them out of commission for a few months.

There are plenty of people Nurse Angry meets through work who she seriously wonders how they manage in life. Happy New Year to them, and to all the rest of you, and please: make your own appointments.

Kolesterolmyten hålls vid liv av globala storföretagsintressen

Nurse Angry Recommends…
This is worth reading (if you can read Swedish!)

anthropocene

Myten om högt blodkolesterol som en orsak till hjärt-kärlsjuklighet grundlades för hundra år sedan av ryssen Nikolai Anitchkovs experiment på kaniner. Han matade dessa gräsätare med en onaturlig kost på äggulor och fann då att de utvecklade arteriosklerotiska plack innehållande kolesterol. När han prövade samma kost på köttätande djur blev resultaten de motsatta. De fick inte arterioskleros (åderförkalkning). Trots detta kom bilden av de åderförkalkade blodkärlen från hans kaniner att sätta sin prägel på synen på kolesterol i över hundra år.

Myten om kolesterolens negativa hälsoeffekter cementerades 1953 av forskaren Ancel Keys som rapporterade att han funnit att kostintaget av fett var signifikant korrelerat till serumkolesterolnivån och incidensen av kardiovaskulär död i sex länder. Problemet med Keys rapport var bara ett det rörde sig om forskningsfusk, han hade valt ut de sex länder där det fanns en korrelation, bland tjugotvå som studerats. Det fanns ingen korrelation alls om alla länderna…

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Why I’m Angry and You Should Be Too

Nurse Angry is reblogging Kristina’s Krazy Adventure because Kristina is angry. Nurse Angry is equally angry.

NA started reading up on nutrition because she wanted to know why (if it really is so) people of Asian descent seem to more easily get type 2 diabetes, because her daughter was born of Indian parents. Nurse Angry is not overweight but suspects that the “healthy” low-fat vegetarian diet she was eating caused fertility issues. At this point she’s gone through a bunch of books starting with Ann Fernholm’s “My Sweet Heart” (original Swedish title is Ett sötare blood- A sweeter blood, but available in English as an e-book), and another one of hers about children and sugar, John Yudkin’s classic “Pure, White and Deadly” Robert Lustig’s “Fat Chance”, and she just recently finished Gary Taubes’ “Good Calories, Bad Calories”. Obesity, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, fertility problems, acne… the carbohydrate content of our diets seems like it’s killing us and worst is sugar and refined carbs. At this point Nurse Angry feels like we are all living in a parallel universe where government information on nutrition and a healthy diet is worthless at best and cannot be said to be based on science but more on big money, mistakes and prestige. She is convinced that what she learned about nutrition and a healthy diet in nursing school was wrong and is trying to figure out how she can help put things right again when she next switches jobs. Let her know if you have any bright ideas.

Kristina's Krazy Adventure

I have been thinking about how much I’ve learned since I started blogging and it actual amazes me the knowledge I’ve gained since January. I considered myself quite knowledgeable in the area of food and nutrition just as a person who likes to be well informed and enjoys learning. However, I have never learned so much about food and nutrition so much as I have just in the past nine months alone. I considered myself one of those people who knew what I should be doing but just wasn’t doing it. I was too lazy or my willpower just wasn’t good enough to compete with “healthy” eating. I have felt that way since the beginning of high school when I saw a doctor as they were concerned that my thyroid may be under active and that my numbers were a little bit under what was considered normal. I vividly remember…

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Nurse Angry ignores the election results and focuses on important stuff like plastic booties

In Sweden there are often these little blue plastic  booties at the doctor’s office. They’re intended to keep the floor clean and many Swedes will put them on even if the weather is fine, if you just put them out in the waiting room. Shoe candy, so to speak. 

Swedish design at its best?

They may promote cleanliness, but  if you forget to take them off and go outdoors in the winter, they’re potentially deadly. Once when Nurse Angry’s mother was visiting, we saw two people walking around at a mall who had forgotten to remove their protective footwear. In that environment they weren’t dangerous, just funny. It’s also super cute to see a waiting room full of people all wearing the same booties. They’re a kind of cheap and cheery equalizer. 

But here’s the thing. Very often you put them on and you still sit in the waiting room in your personal godawful mess of a filthy puddle, which you then track into the examining room, then on to the lab, back into the examining room… etc. 

Nurse Angry has often wondered why. Could it be that they try to recycle already used ones? Little plastic bags should just do their job and keep the water and dirt on the inside, right?

Wrong.  Because this is what Nurse Angry found when she unpacked some brand spanking new ones.  Mystery solved. And she avoided writing about the election. 

Not one but TWO holes in this beauty