Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 90

Deep-sea creatures are weirder than we ever suspected

AP

This article originally appeared on Massive.

Driving through the midwaters of the deep sea feels a lot like staring at the starting credits to the Star Wars movies — without any words or music. The darkness is broken only by what scientists call marine snow, animals and debris that slowly fall from the upper ocean, and only very occasionally by larger animals swimming quickly in and out of view.

As someone who has sat through many hours of these mid-water dives, I can tell you the monotonous scenery — hours of nothing but deep blue water — can be hypnotic, a strange way to feel when you’re exploring hundreds to thousands of of meters deep. Considering how difficult it is to find animals in the vast expanses of these sparsely populated waters, it’s amazing that wildlife filmmakers Kirsten and Joachim Jakobsen even spotted a small, globular anglerfish in the inky-black waters as they finished up a long dive off an island in the Azores.

It was unusual enough to find an anglerfish on a dive that the scientists changed course and followed this six-inch long fish for 25 minutes, capturing incredible video footage of the rare individual. While there are over 100 species of deep-sea anglerfishes, only a handful have been caught live on camera for scientists to observe. The anglerfish in this video was later identified as Caulophryne jordani, by Ted Pietsch, the University of Washington professor of fishery sciences emeritus who literally wrote the book on anglerfishes.

Following the anglerfish

This species is remarkably rare, and scientists have only been able to study it by using the mere 38 specimens that have been caught in nets and preserved for study. Unfortunately, these small, flabby-looking fishes are built for floating in the mid-waters and do not hold up well when they are dragged up to the surface — their fragile, paper-thin skin is often torn, and the long, whisker-like fin rays that can be seen in the video are often broken off and damaged. When scientists only have a few, beat-up specimens to look at, it’s hard to learn much about the anatomy, biology, and ecology of a species.

Based on the few specimens available, scientists previously speculated this fish may fan its fin rays out to make a net-like array in the water, likely to help them sense and catch food that is hard to come by in the deep-sea. But they had never seen it in action to confirm the idea. The video footage shows the fish with long, filamentous fin rays spread gracefully through the water, supporting the scientists’ hypothesis.

Light appears to glimmer off their fin rays, possibly a never-before described form of bioluminescence

The video also revealed some unexpected aspects of the anglerfish’s biology. In the footage, light appears to glimmer off the fin rays. While anglerfishes are known to be bioluminescent — they produce light from a lure on their head that holds glowing bacteria — glowing organs, or photophores, have never been observed on its fins. Pietsch speculates the glow seen in the video could very well be never-before-described bioluminescence emitted from the fish’s fins (although further evidence will be required to be certain).

The parasitic male

But perhaps the most exciting part of this video footage is that the Jakobsens didn’t just manage to film a graceful female with sprawling fins. They also captured a second anglerfish in the footage — a much smaller male parasitically attached to the female. Yes, you read that correctly — a parasitic male. In many anglerfish species, the females are much larger than the males.

The small males do not have the prominent bioluminescent lure, but are instead equipped with large eyes and noses. They use these to seek out their lovely lady anglerfish counterparts in the dark waters. When they find her, they have no intention of missing a mating possibility. The male will bite on to the female to get a firm grasp. He will remain attached, eventually fusing completely to the female so he can obtain essential nutrients. Attached to her side, the male essentially serves as a convenient source of sperm whenever the female is ready to mate.

While this may seem ridiculous, it makes a lot of sense for fishes living in the dark expanses of the deep sea, where chances of bumping into a potential mate at the right time are slim. This strategy allows the males lucky enough to find a female a much better chance of actually mating in the future. Scientists have known of this strategy for some time, based on observations of preserved specimens, but this is the first ever recording of the parasitic mating behavior in a live anglerfish, making it, Pietsch explains, a “rare and important discovery.”

Only in the last 50 years or so have scientists been able to capture footage of how deep-sea animals behave

It may seem strange that scientists are so excited by this little fish, but that’s because we simply don’t know much about how these fishes — or most deep-sea creatures, for that matter — behave in their natural habitats. While specimens are invaluable in learning about certain aspects of fish biology, there are a lot of questions that can’t be answered without seeing how an animal acts while alive in its environment.

And even relatively basic observations of deep-sea animals have been hard to come by until recently. Though the deep sea is the largest habitat on Earth, its freezing temperatures and intense atmospheric pressure, which can be 100 times higher than it is at sea level, have made human exploration at these depths challenging. Only in the last 50 or so years have scientists been able to use robotic vehicles and manned submersibles, like the one used to capture this anglerfish footage, to watch the behavior of deep-sea animals.

Luckily, recent technological advancements are continuing to make it easier for scientists to expand our understanding of the ocean’s depths. Scientists can now program vehicles like autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to explore parts of the ocean, or can manually control remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) in real time while watching high definition videos of the deep sea. Other vehicles, called submersibles, are capable of holding several people who drive and operate the deep-sea submarine while exploring the deep-water habitats.

Improvements to each of these vehicle types is making deep-sea exploration more accessible and allowing scientists to explore never-before-seen parts of our oceans. Recent discoveries of important ecosystems like hydrothermal vents, fissures in the ocean floor that spout geothermally heated water, and methane seeps, where cool methane gas bubbles into the surrounding area, are just a few of the exciting finds from our deep-sea explorations.

You can even watch discoveries happen in real time, by tuning into watch the Okeanos Explorer and explore new areas of the deep sea. This video footage is just one example of how our technological advancements and continued deep-sea exploration are instrumental in explaining the ecosystems and biology that, until now has existed in darkness.

Luckily for scientists (and those of us who are just amazed by the strange, and rather remarkable creatures living in the oceans’ depths), we are certain to learn more as we continue exploring.

Emotionally unavailable jerk or malignant narcissist? 5 powerful ways to tell the difference

Getty/Donald34/75tiks/splendens

This story was brought to you by Thought Catalog and Quote Catalog.

I often get asked, “How do I know if this person is a malignant narcissist or just an emotionally unavailable jerk?” All narcissists are emotionally unavailable to some extent, but not all emotionally unavailable people are narcissists.

Sometimes, the lines can be blurred, especially since malignant narcissists can also just put on an act and fake empathy for a short period of time. However, throughout a long-term relationship with someone, the distinctions become clearer than ever as the mask tends to slip. Here are the five key areas of difference between someone who is just emotionally unavailable and someone who is both emotionally unavailable and a malignant narcissist:

1. Lack of empathy and capacity for change

Emotionally unavailable people lack the psychological equipment that would make them likely candidates for a long-term relationship at that specific time. There is variety in this group: emotionally unavailable people can include those who are simply gun-shy and brokenhearted in the early stages of their healing, as well as garden-variety jerks and players. However, if they are not narcissists, emotionally unavailable individuals are still capable of connecting and empathizing with others. They will still be able to consider your point of view. They may still feel remorse or guilt for hurting someone (although it does not necessarily stop them from engaging in unsavory behavior, depending on how selfish they are). They do, however, have the ability to evolve given that they are willing to work on their relationship patterns and healing.

Narcissists, on the other hand, lack the core empathy that would make them candidates for just about any form of nourishing connection long-term. In patients diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, there has actually been research that shows gray matter abnormalities in parts of the brain related to empathy. With a true narcissist, after the honeymoon period is over, you witness an appalling, chilling indifference in response to your emotional needs and desires that borders on inhumane. They are unable to even consider anybody else’s feelings and do not care who they hurt in the process of getting what they want.

2. The origins of their behavior

Emotionally unavailable people may have become emotionally unavailable from a wound incurred from a past relationship or a recent break-up. This wound can usually be addressed with professional support and appropriate grieving methods. Or, they may just not be the commitment type; some are just naturally perpetual bachelors (or bachelorettes) and nothing you can do can change that.

Narcissists suffer what is known as a “narcissistic wound” in childhood. There is still no clinical verdict as to what causes their disorder, but there are some theories: one of which suggests that they may have suffered maltreatment by their parents and anotherthat shows that being taught an excessive sense of entitlement at an early age can lead to narcissistic traits. As a result, a narcissist’s behavior is hardwired and very difficult to change in adulthood because they never outgrew their infantile sense of egocentrism.

If they are high on the spectrum and are malignant to the point where they also have antisocial traits, they are also unlikely to evolve because their behavior rewards them. Many malignant narcissists may not derive benefits from traditional talk therapy because they are unable to admit that they have a problem in the first place. Their lack of willingness to change may result in only further manipulation in the therapy space.

3. Why they create "harems" and love triangles

Emotionally unavailable people can create “harems” unwittingly, in the sense that they may date multiple people at once to keep themselves safe from commitment or rejection. This doesn’t make their behavior justifiable, but their reasoning is different from that of a malignant narcissist. They may have a hard time committing to one person or to commit to anything besides a casual arrangement because they’re scared of being hurt or because they are not at a stage of their lives where they want to be with just one person. Any deception that is involved on their part is still wrong and shouldn’t be tolerated, but it doesn’t bear the same intentions as a narcissist who manufactures love triangles.

Narcissists create harems and manufacture love triangles because it gives them a sense of power and control. The different members of their support network, which are usually made up of their primary partner, exes, so-called “friends,” – all of them serve as sources of narcissistic supply — objects from which they can obtain praise, admiration, resources and an infinite number of ego strokes. They gain excitement from their different admirers competing for their attention. Making their various “fangirls” or “fanboys” jealous of each other makes them feel desirable and on top of the world. They enjoy provoking their harem members and getting unlimited attention from all of them; it’s all just a big game for them.

4. Their level of malice and sadism

Emotionally unavailable people usually aren’t out to harm others, though they very well can do so despite their best intentions. Many believe that by managing expectations early on, they are doing their “fair share” of telling the truth and not leading people on (though those on the receiving end may not feel so). Others, however, obscure the truth deliberately to get what they want in the immediate moment (for example, using someone for sex while pretending they want something more). Regardless, when you express to an emotionally unavailable person how much they’re hurting you, they are usually able to leave you alone, move onto someone else or distance themselves due to guilt. They may boomerang back occasionally, but it’s usually out of selfishness rather than outright malice.

On the other hand, malignant narcissists on the high end of the narcissistic spectrum gain pleasure from taking people down. Research has shown that those who are high in dark triad traits (such as narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) actually take pleasure in seeing sad faces. It all feeds into their grandiose sense of power and superiority. They use “cold” or cognitive empathy to assess the weaknesses and strengths of their victims, but their empathy does not extend to affective empathy, which would allow them to consider or care about the harm they inflict. According to researchers Wai and Tiliopoulos (2012):

“Individuals high on the dark triad traits appear to exhibit an empathic profile that allows them to retain their ability to read and assess others’ emotions, and subsequently utilize this sensitive information to formulate strategies with which they can acquire what they want, while their lack of affective empathy may lead them to overlook or ignore potential harm inflicted to others in the process.”

Hurting someone is like emotional fuel for malignant narcissists, especially since they “suffer” from perpetual boredom. Like sadistic puppeteers, they enjoy pulling the strings of their loved ones and warping their reality. It’s actually a fun sport for them to demean, criticize, blameshift and aggravate someone. A relationship is never “over” for them, because they never like losing any of their toys. They’ll get bored with their new source of supply and go on the hunt for more, or they’ll reach into their toybox and find an older toy to play with (in other words, you!).

5. The idealization, devaluation and discard cycle

Emotionally unavailable people idealize you because they want to fast-forward you into getting what they want (usually sex) or, sometimes they’re not even aware of the extent of their own emotional unavailability. For example, an emotionally unavailable person who is still in the midst of heartbreak may be so enthusiastic about finding someone else after a break-up that they overestimate their interest. When they withdraw, it’s not so much as a manipulative tactic as an indicator of their inability to be emotionally intimate with you, and a recognition that perhaps they aren’t ready for a serious relationship after all.

Malignant narcissists, on the other hand, idealize and love-bomb their victims deliberately to groom, manipulate, and control them. They feed their victims empty flattery and excessive praise at the onset to ensure that their victims trust them. They are the types that will declare their love for you within the early stages of dating.

Once their victims are sufficiently hooked, they take great pride in devaluing their victims and mistreating them, subjecting them to put-downs, rage attacks, gaslighting, verbal, emotional, and sometimes even physical abuse. They also eventually discard their victims in horrific ways – that is, unless their victims discard them first, in which case, it becomes an elaborate power struggle to hoover them back in so they can devalue them further. The cruelty of the discard is staged in such a way that it is used to diminish the victim completely. They are also known to stalk, harass and bully their victims even after the ending of a relationship. As usual, it’s about power and thrill-seeking for them. They enjoy the ability to make their victims pine for their affection. They like the effect of intermittently feeding their victims enough crumbs to keep them longing for the whole loaf of bread. Meanwhile, they’re satiating all of their desires with other partners on the side and feasting on your resources.

The bottom line

Emotionally unavailable people have the ability to evolve and the capacity to empathize. Malignant narcissists, on the other hand, often do not, and some of them actually enjoy putting others down to derive a sense of power. At the end of the day, however, if these types of toxic individuals are not treating you with respect or engaging in any form of abusive behavior, neither one is a good candidate for a relationship. Unless an emotionally unavailable person is willing to work on his or her own behaviors, they won’t be satisfying you in the long-term either. It’s time to become more emotionally available yourself by cutting off contact with anyone who isn’t giving you the happy, consistent and healthy relationship you deserve.

This article has been adapted from a chapter in Power: Surviving And Thriving After Narcissistic Abuse by Shahida Arabi

Corporal punishment lives on: Students nationwide are being paddled, restrained

This article originally appeared on Truthout.

Immediately following the massive student walkout to protest gun violence on March 14, I was stunned to read an article about three students who had been paddled — literally smacked on the backside with a wooden bat — for participating in the protest. All three were enrolled in a public high school in Greenbrier, Arkansas, and according to the brief news account, they had "chosen" this punishment over in-school suspension so that they would not miss class or lose eligibility to participate in team sports.

Can this be legal, I wondered?

Turns out that the answer is yes, at least in the 19 states that explicitly allow a teacher, principal or other school staffer to penalize students with physical force. These states — Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming — say that physical punishment is a tried-and-true technique to maintain order and discipline in the public schools.

However, this does not tell the full story since even though 31 states have ostensibly outlawed corporal punishment, the federal Department of Education allows school authorities to use "physical restraint or seclusion in situations where a child's behavior poses an imminent danger of serious physical harm to self or others."

Donald E. Greydanus, professor of Pediatrics and Human Development at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, further outlined the potential damage caused by corporal punishment at a congressional briefing. Typical after-effects, he testified, can include depression, low self-esteem, magnified feelings of guilt, drug and alcohol abuse, and anxiety disorders. "The use of corporal punishment in the school environment falsely and perfidiously reinforces physical aggression as an acceptable and effective means of eliminating unwanted behavior in our society," he told federal lawmakers. "Our precious children should not be subjected to hitting, slapping, spanking, punching, kicking, shaking, shoving, choking, use of objects including wooden paddles, belts, sticks, electric shocks, excessive exercise drills, or prevention of stool or urine elimination."

Injuries, of course, can also be physical. These include abrasions, bruises, broken bones, hematomas, hemorrhages, muscle injuries, pain and whiplash — conditions that sometimes require hospitalization.

And it is not only the victimized students who are harmed.

Maggie Moschell grew up in southwestern Ohio and graduated high school in 1974. More than 40 years later she still vividly recalls hearing "the crack of the board" as it hit her classmates. "We'd cringe in sympathy," she says. "I remember a boy who came back into the room grinning bravely as if it didn't matter, but there were tears in his eyes. I thought it was a terrible thing to do, but growing up in the 1960s and '70s, we somehow didn't question it."

Ending corporal punishment

Despite wide-scale support for physical punishment, many parents, student advocates and anti-violence activists have continued to push for the abolition of corporal punishment, especially when it is used to discipline disabled children. They have pointed out that children on the autism spectrum and those who are non-verbal often use behavior to communicate. In addition, instances in which students are punished for behaviors that are linked to their disabilities — a child with Tourette's Syndrome shouting random words, for example — have been widely condemned.

Current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has, to date, said nothing about corporal punishment, but her predecessor, John B. King Jr., took a different tack and urged all states to abandon it. "The very acts that are permissible when applied to children in schools under some state laws would be prohibited as criminal assault or battery when applied to adults in the community in these very same states," King wrote in a November 2016 letter to governors and school officers. "School-sponsored corporal punishment is not only ineffective, it is a harmful practice and one that disproportionately impacts students of color and students with disabilities. This practice has no place in the public schools of a modern nation . . ."

Not surprisingly, the ACLU agrees. Lawsuits have been filed in states where students have suffered egregious harm at the hands of their teachers or school security. Several, says attorney Susan Mizner of the ACLU Disability Rights Program, involve the handcuffing of elementary school children. Until recently, she reports, district schools in Covington, Kentucky, used School Resource Officers — employees of the Sheriff's office — to maintain order. In one case, an 8-year-old boy who was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was having a rough day and the Resource Officer was called. "The Officer had adult-sized handcuffs with him so he put these around the boy's biceps after the child tried to pull away from him," Mizner says. "He was so traumatized by this he had to leave the school district."

In the second case, a 9-year-old girl was wandering the halls instead of waiting in the cafeteria as instructed. Mizner reports that she was put "in a seclusion room and would not calm down so they called an ambulance to take her to the hospital. When the EMTs arrived, they found her on the ground, in handcuffs, in a pain position." She also now attends a school in a different district.

Although litigation in both cases is ongoing, Mizner is pleased that law enforcement personnel have been removed from Covington's schools — a small, but not insignificant, victory.

"These cases are very representative," Mizner says. "We know that restraint and referrals to law enforcement happen regularly to kids with and without disabilities. This tends to impact the youngest kids the most because they are often unable to articulate what happened and are less likely to fight back."

Improving teacher education

In addition to policy changes, what steps can be taken to banish corporal punishment from the classroom? Mizner says that teachers, especially those assigned to Special Education classrooms, need better training and support. "It's easy to demonize educators," she says, "and while some deserve this, many teachers have not been shown ways to react to a kid who is melting down." Learning the techniques to use when a student's behavior is escalating — such as diverting his or her attention and disrupting whatever is causing the distress — is essential. "There are many empathetic ways to help people disconnect from their emotions and get back on track," she says.

Taking police out of schools would also help curb physical punishment. However, more and more school districts are bringing police officers into the public schools, ACLU staff attorney Sarah Hinger, reports. "We know that in 2013, 24 percent of elementary schools and 42 percent of high schools had police stationed inside. We also know that 51 percent of schools that were majority African American or Latinx that year, had police on campus." Anecdotally, communities of color know that this has not only exacerbated the school-to-prison pipeline but has resulted in numerous Black and Brown students being tasered, pepper sprayed, put in choke holds, and battered with police batons. Unfortunately, Hinger says, an exact number of incidents is hard to come by since record keeping is inconsistent, in some places maintained by the school district and in others maintained by the police department.

For now, educating students and their families about their rights and discussing the negative impact of corporal punishment top the education agenda. "We need a huge cultural shift to help teachers, kids, and their families understand that corporal punishment does more harm than good and is counterproductive," the ACLU's Mizner says.

What's more, since more than 50 countries around the world have banned corporal punishment, advocates say that the US would be wise to follow their example.

Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.

Light at night can disrupt circadian rhythms in children — are there long-term risks?

Matt_Brown via iStock

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

A new scientific study shows that bright electric light exposure of preschool children in the evening suppresses melatonin production almost completely, an important addition to the growing body of research in this area. Melatonin suppression is a marker of disruption of our circadian rhythms.

Ten kids, ages 3 to 5, were exposed to bright light (~1000 lux from a light box) for one hour before their habitual bedtime, about 8 p.m. Melatonin suppression (where the body stops producing this hormone) began within 10 minutes and continued for another hour after the bright light was turned off at 8 p.m., which was well into their usual sleep period. Melatonin is a hormone that is important for healthy circadian rhythms and good sleep.

This could undoubtedly reduce sleep quality, but may also cause other serious problems in the longer term.

When seeing the light can be bad

The new study built upon a 2015 study of children and adolescents ages 9 to 16. It reported greater sensitivity to light exposure in the younger children compared to the older. That study used several different evening light levels in a laboratory setting that ranged from dim (~15 lux), to moderate (~150 lux, like a 60W incandescent lamp bulb), to bright (~500 lux) and showed a dose response; the dim light suppressed melatonin about 9 percent; moderate light about 26 percent; and bright light about 37 percent in the younger children, less so in the older kids.

Although the researchers used fluorescent room lights in their study, the authors make a point of suggesting that since smartphone use is now common in children, even preschoolers, the circadian effects from their use could be considerable because they expose children to bright light close to the face.

There are at least three reasons that too much light during the evening could matter to the health of children, and all are terrible: depression, suicide and cancer.

Excess evening electric light is part of what I call “light pollution,” which is defined as “pollution of night by electric light, whether inside at home or outside in the neighborhood and city.” It is a rapidly growing problem in the modern world.

A common response to severe depression is suicide. Well over 40,000 Americans die by suicide each year, more than from automobile crashes and close to the number of deaths from colon cancer. In addition, nearly a half million are hospitalized for self-harm, many of whom were injured in their failed attempt at suicide.

This is especially tragic when it happens to the very young.

Jean Twenge studies mental health and social adjustment in young people, particularly those born after 1995. Her research has focused on smartphones, as described in several informative and provocative recent articles published by The Conversation. The articles are based on her own studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Twenge has found links between “new media” screen time (e.g., smartphones) and risk of depression and suicide in teenagers based on two large samples of young people in the U.S.

Twenge proposes as possible causes for her findings social isolation, sleep deprivation, or both. In another recent analysis, Twenge focused on sleep duration and concluded that “increased new media screen time may be involved in the recent increases (from 35 percent to 41 percent and from 37 percent to 43 percent) in short sleep among adolescents.”

Circadian disruption could be the underlying culprit. Bright light in the evening delays transition to nighttime physiology, which should begin at dusk. It thereby degrades sleep quality.

There is also evidence that circadian disruption can cause depression and other adverse mood changes.

Light pollution and cancer in children

In 2012, I was invited to speak at a conference on causes of childhood cancer sponsored by the charity Children with Leukaemia UK. My charge was to discuss possible mechanisms by which excessive exposure to electric light at night might increase a child’s risk of cancer. I wrote a scientific paper on the subject that was published just before the conference.

This charity has a tragic origin story. The son of a very wealthy man in Britain, Eddie O’Gorman, died of leukemia in 1987 at age 14. His name was Paul. Before his death, Paul asked his parents to help other children with cancer. With the determined assistance of his sister Jean, his parents, Eddie and Marion, began fundraising.

Jean then died of breast cancer at age 29, only nine months after Paul’s death. Princess Diana heard of the tragedy, and offered to charter the charity in 1988. She remained involved with the activities of the charity until her own death in 1997.

The charity was renamed Children with Cancer UK a few years ago.

The basis for concern about cancer in children is the fact that ill-timed electric light can disrupt circadian rhythms, and circadian disruption has been implicated in cancers in adults, although few if any studies have directly examined cancer in children. The evidence for an effect in children is indirect, but the issue is critical.

Leukemia is the most common childhood cancer. It is a disease of uninhibited growth of white cells in the blood. These white cells are generated by stem cells, which when behaving normally produce just enough white cells for a healthy immune system to function as it should. When the stem cells go haywire, the result is leukemia. Recent studies have shown that the proliferation of stem cells is under circadian control. Thus, too much light at night could destabilize stem cell growth.

Children with Cancer UK will host its next scientific meeting in Westminster, London, in September of this year. I will focus on these new results of evening light-induced melatonin suppression in children for my presentation.

Too much light at night early in life, even in utero

Early life, including in utero, is a particularly vulnerable period. The establishment of circadian rhythms begins early in gestation but is not fully established at birth, as any new parent becomes acutely aware.

For these reasons, research attention should be directed to the effects of ill-timed electric lighting on pregnant women, such as alterations in hormone production that could then affect fetal development. Scientists who study this also need to focus on developmental effects in young children and adolescents.

For example, it is unknown the extent to which night lights in the nursery alter the consolidation of circadian rhythmicity in infants, and whether toddlers exposed to highly lit evenings at home are at risk. I believe this is an urgent issue because adverse effects could launch a child on a lifetime trajectory of ill-health and early death.

Richard G. "Bugs" Stevens, Professor, School of Medicine, University of Connecticut

Three things doctors say should be part of your weight loss efforts

Getty/ShotShare

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Imagine that you are running a company, but you cannot get to your goal because all of your good workers keep quitting.

For 30 years, your response to this problem has been to criticize the workers and say they are stupid and weak for quitting. As a result, you never reach your goal. You don’t change your formula or alter your plan, just keep blaming and shaming the workers for quitting.

If you did this, your failure rate would remain unchanged over time, of course, and you would never reach your goal.

In the same way, hundreds of thousands of people fall short of their dieting and weight loss goals every year, and the incidence of obesity continues to rise. The fitness industry’s answer to this has been to continue on as planned and blame the soaring failure rates on the people themselves, creating a culture of overt and subtle fat-shaming.

Now, imagine that you do some research at your company, and you find out that folks keep quitting because the carpet smells like garbage, the office is way too hot and the desks are in disrepair. If you hope to eventually get to your goal, you would almost certainly address the factors that are leading to attrition of our workers, right?

The same thing goes for weight loss in 2018. Science has shown us why “workers” are quitting. They quit because their ability to perform exercise is limited, they don’t sleep enough and they don’t eat for change. Just as your company needed to stop ridiculing the workers for quitting and instead change the carpet, furnace and desks, the fitness world should resist the urge to fat-shame and instead focus on exercise capacity, sleeping and recovery.

I have studied weight loss and obesity for many years. The issue of overweight and obesity grows more pressing each year, as 84 million people are now considered pre-diabetic. While they are in a pre-diabetic condition, they can still avoid the debilitating consequences of the disease. But once they become diabetic, health problems cascade as a result of this serious disease. The same is true for heart disease, arthritis and many other obesity-related conditions.

Exercise

People must exercise enough not only to burn calories for weight loss but to keep weight off. Simply put, if a person can walk for only five minutes today, he or she cannot expect to be successful on a program that calls for four days of exercise beyond that amount each time, tomorrow. Thus, the initial goal of any intended weight loss transformation should be to first increase one’s exercise capacity to a critical point, called the catching point.

Once this capacity is reached, food preferences will change, metabolic rates will increase and patients will have a real chance to follow an exercise regimen that results in a significant amount of calories burned.

An “in-shape” person is much more likely to be successful with a new diet and exercise program than a sedentary, overweight person. As a result, step one must be to increase this capacity and to get there.

The other two tenets of recovery are equally critical: sleep and diet.

Sleep

Thousands of articles and many books have been written on sleep as it relates to brain function, brain waves, thinking, memory, mood, etc. The role of sleep in physical metabolic change, though, is missing from most diet attempts.

Simply put, sleep is the time that the body changes. Structurally, our bodies are making molecules during sleep that follows exercise which will do useful things for us such as strengthen our muscles, lower blood pressure, neutralize inflammation and increase our metabolism.

Sleeping enough will also make us eat less. Functional MRI scans of the brain show that people are far more interested in eating when they are sleep-deprived. Moreover, sleep-deprived people are more driven toward unhealthy foods when given the option. They also have increased levels of gherlin, the hormone that makes us feel hungry, and decreased levels of leptin, the hormone that makes us feel full. And, in multiple studies people have been shown to actually eat more food and actually gain more weight when sleep-deprived, and population-based studies have shown increased BMIs in people with fewer sleep hours.

Eating for change

Often, people err when they try to lose weight by restricting calories at the beginning of their efforts. Restricting calories leads to a host of responses from the body that induce food-seeking behavior and cause people to “quit” their diets. A recent study of a large group of people suggests that people should not count calories at all but instead pay attention to the quality of the food they eat, refraining from sugar and processed foods and instead eating lots of fruits and vegetables.

We can’t make changes in our body’s structure without the appropriate nutrients on board. If, while we are sleeping, our bodies set out to make the changes we want and there are no nutrients with which to do so, there will be no transformation. The specific nutrients necessary for recovery and optimization of our microbiome have been well-described during recent years and should be added to our intake (vs. restriction) until a critical point of clean eating is reached.

In summary, the three things missing from most diet attempts are the appropriate exercise capacity, the right amount of sleep and a plan to eat for recovery and change. Implementing these elements to most plans will allow folks to stay engaged long enough for healthy habits to “catch.”

David Prologo, Assistant Professor, Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Emory University

Stellar effort: Chart of the Milky Way includes more than 1 billion stars

Wikimedia via www.forestwander.com/the-sky

This article was originally published by Scientific American.

In an eagerly anticipated development, astronomers have created the largest and most precise 3-D map of the Milky Way galaxy. The European Space Agency’s $1-billion Gaia mission released its newest data set in April, detailing the positions and motions of more than a billion stars.

The Gaia spacecraft, launched in 2013, scans the entire sky from its orbital parking spot above the side of Earth opposite the sun. Its unprecedented map is based on 25 separate observations of individual stars and their movements over about two years and contains a representative sample of 1 percent of the Milky Way’s orbs. The data, described in a series of papers to be published online Wednesday in Astronomy & Astrophysics, can be extrapolated to simulate the galaxy’s past and future.

“We are measuring a map in a moment in time, but we can also go backward and forward,” says Jos de Bruijne, Gaia’s deputy project scientist.

Gaia released its first data set in September 2016. But because of limited observation time and reliance on prior knowledge of celestial positions, it tracked the distances and motions of only two million stars. The second data set contains similar details on 1.3 billion of them — 650 times as many as the initial trove.

The telescope can accurately observe stars in the galactic center, up to 30,000 light-years away — equivalent to a person on Earth spotting a penny on the moon. “The precision of the proper motions measured by Gaia is what really makes it so revolutionary,” says Allyson Sheffield, an astrophysicist at LaGuardia Community College, who was not involved in the project.

Gaia’s two optical telescopes and three scientific instruments can also measure stellar brightness, temperature and composition. The new data set includes stars’ colors, which can reveal crucial details about their surface temperature and age. Such diverse observations make the spacecraft a “one-stop galactic-structure shop” for astrophysicists, Sheffield says.

The data also include the radial velocities — the motions toward or away from Earth — of seven million stars. Such measurements allow scientists to calculate the speed of these orbs with respect to our sun, which in turn reveals more about how the galaxy may have evolved. As a bonus, the data set contains observations of 14,099 asteroids orbiting within the solar system.

Precise knowledge of stellar motions will not only improve scientists’ understanding of galactic history and evolution, it could also offer clues to the nature and distribution of mysterious “dark matter” and could test alternative theories of gravity, says Amina Helmi, an astrophysicist at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in the Netherlands and a member of the ESA’s Gaia mission.

She studied brains. Then she almost lost hers

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In January 2015, Barbara Lipska was working at her computer when suddenly her right hand disappeared. Having spent nearly 40 years studying the human brain as a neuroscientist, she knew such a Houdini move could herald something serious, perhaps a brain tumor. After ordering an emergency MRI, she learned that she had three. One of them was bleeding, which meant it could be metastatic melanoma. At the time, Lipska had already survived breast cancer and melanoma.

Fortunately, Lipska, the director of the Human Brain Collection Core, can add the metastasized melanoma to her list of cancers she has outlived — thanks to an an immunotherapy clinical trial. However, her journey to hold on to life included a “brush with madness,” as she calls it, which she outlines in her book, “The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery.” Due to swelling in the brain, Lipska slowly began to lose her grip on reality, exhibiting behavioral changes similar to what someone with schizophrenia or dementia might experience — including a lack of awareness (as to how close she was to death), and a lack of judgement, empathy, tolerance and more.

Salon spoke with Lipska about her work as a neuroscientist and how her spell of mental illness changed her perspective in her work and on life.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What surprised you the most about your experience with mental illness?

What surprised me? I could tell you right away that I had no understanding what was happening to me. I get these questions pretty often, and people say “okay, you’re a neuroscientist, you’ve studied these diseases for your lifetime and didn’t you expect that if you have tumors in the brain that you will lose it in such a way,” and I didn’t know. I didn’t.

I lost insight. I lost awareness that I am not behaving normally, which is the most frightening thing now and it will be probably until I die because when it happens again, if it happens again, I will not be able to recognize it.

You’re still working at what you refer to as the “brain bank.” For those who aren’t familiar with it, who haven’t read the book, can you share with them what you do there?

Human brains are very important to be able to do molecular studies. We bring the brain to our lab and then we dissect it into slices. Almost all the brains that we get we freeze, and then when we have an investigator or we, ourselves, want to investigate a particular brain region for particular project, we cut out a small brain region which is anatomically corresponding to our interest. We slice it into very, very thin slices or pulverize it. They look like flour after we do, and we might to do sequencing, [such as] RNA [ribonucleic acid] sequencing and DNA [deoxyribonucleic acid] sequencing.

Why are you studying these brains?

We want to take groups of people with a particular diagnosis of mental illness and compare them to [the] control, so we’re also interested in collecting brains from people who don’t have mental illness.

Has your perspective changed at your job now, since you’ve experienced a mental illness firsthand?

My perspective changed in the sense that I feel more urgency toward understanding the mechanism underlying mental illness — because we don’t yet. Many people are studying it, not only us, but we still are far away from understanding what changes in the brain are associated with schizophrenia and depression, bipolar disorder, and even dementia.

What makes it so difficult for a neuroscientist to study mental illness and get a better understanding of it?

One of my most important messages that I want to send to people [is] that I got first-hand evidence that mental illness is a disease of the brain. Mine was caused by tumors in my brain. [Some] people, of course, don’t have tumors or don’t have even anything that can be observable with the microscope. For many decades, people tried to find these differences and they found some, but they were not replicated. They were disputed. The difference [could be] at the level of gene expression, or the type of proteins that these brains of people with schizophrenia or other mental illnesses make, but we don’t know yet.

So, we will learn more about mental illness when we understand more about our genes?

Absolutely, yes. We have to keep in mind that a human genome was sequenced in 2003 and it was not really sequenced completely. We learned with years passing that there is very little junk in the genome and that everything serves some purpose, and we’re trying to decipher what this purpose is. We’re just learning in the recent years that there are so many transcripts, RNAs that are expressed by every gene. It is very rare that a gene expresses just one RNA.

There are all kinds of RNA depending on the age of a person or the circumstances or maybe on different factors, maybe not one million but a lot. When we know more about the genome, about molecules, we’ll understand better what happens in our brains, normal brains, through development or aging. There’s [a] huge question for aging also: “What happens in the brain that we lose it?” It is said that people lose their cognitive abilities with aging and at a relatively young age [such as] 50s and 60s.

In your opinion, how would you describe the difference between a human’s brain and mind?

Well, as we know, there can be a brain, but without the mind, like in my case, I didn’t know that I had lost my mind. For myself, I thought a lot about it and what that means. The brain can be something that is not functional, right? An extreme example is that it can be a brain of a dead person, but anywhere from dead to completely normal. That’s a brain. That’s infrastructure, and there is a mind which is, of course, in the brain. It is the product of the brain. It’s all this functionality.

I call it [the mind] function of the brain. But there’s been so many philosophical discussions about it and what it means to be conscious and where consciousness is. We don’t know answers to these questions. But I am a scientist in the lab; I am not that much of a philosopher.

You’ve mentioned the stigma that still remains in America regarding mental illness. In your opinion, how can that stigma be erased?

Again, if we understand, we are more tolerant. I understand it a lot more now, although I have spent my life studying it, but I’ve been there. I’ve experienced it. Of course, I am not proposing that everybody experience it before understanding because that would be cruel and impossible. But at least if people read about it like on the web, or in my book, they may get a better understanding. I think that cancer carries less stigma because there is much stronger advocacy for cancer.

What you think society generally misunderstands about mental illness?

As I said, random people, if you ask them, they think that it has to do with the so-called mind or something a little more metaphysical or mystical, depending on culture or the person you’re talking about. It doesn’t. It has to do with the brain. If I held this piece of flesh in my hand and I said, “It does everything that we are. It dreams. It allows us to dream, to run, to plan, to have inhibition, to love, and to be angry. Everything. And to remember.” It does everything.

According to my beliefs and my scientific mind, will we be able to break that code and know what it means to love someone on a molecular level. I hope we will, but I don’t know.

I’m curious from your perspective what would be the most significant discovery that could be made about the human brain to give us a better understanding of who we are and how we operate as human beings?

I think it has to start with understanding what genes do — at different periods of the human lifespan — and then maybe try to understand what happens if this normal, what I call normal, cycle is broken.

We need some technology -- I don’t know what that would be -- that would allow us to look at these billions of neurons in the human brain and understand what they do when we move, when we love, when we dream. It will be incredible to see it on a kind of plane scan, or how a particular cell in a particular brain region reacts if we do this or that, but the resolution of that is not appropriate yet.

You’ve experienced so much through surviving cancer multiple times, and mental illness. Has your perspective on life changed at all?

I’ve always been a very strong-willed and energetic person. I’ve been an athlete most of my adult life and I particularly like endurance sports, so I’ve actually been trained to survive this, what was thrown my way, because it is not that different from a marathon or a super-long triathlon. You just go on and go on and hope that pain will someday be over.

I’m very busy and I’ve always been like this and it didn’t stop. It actually increased tremendously with this book. It gave me perspective on life such that every day counts. Every single day I just squeeze as much in as possible. Don’t moan and complain about being tired or being not in a good mood — if you can.

What the history of math can teach us about the future of AI

deimagine via iStock

This article was originally published by Scientific American.

Whenever an impressive new technology comes along, people rush to imagine the havoc it could wreak on society, and they overreact. Today we see this happening with artificial intelligence (AI). I was at South by Southwest last month, where crowds were buzzing about Elon Musk’s latest hyperbolic claim that AI poses a far greater danger to humanity than nuclear weapons. Some economists have similarly sounded alarms that automation will put nearly half of all jobs in the U.S. at risk by 2030. The drumbeat of doomsaying has people spooked: a Gallup/Northeastern study published in March found that about three out of four Americansare convinced that AI will destroy more jobs than it creates.

My reading of the history of technology and my decades of work on its frontiers make me skeptical of such claims. Major shifts in technology — and AI does have the potential to be that — inevitably take longer than people typically imagine to transform our jobs and lives. So societies have time to apply regulations, cultural pressures and market forces that shape how that transformation happens. We’re making those kinds of adjustments today with social media technology, for example.

The long history of automation in mathematics offers an even more apt parallel to how computerization, in the form of AI and robots, is likely to affect other kinds of work. If you’re worried about AI-induced mass unemployment or worse, think about this: why didn’t digital computers make mathematicians obsolete?

The word “computer” was, for centuries, a job title. From the 1600s onward, human computers did calculations — initially by pen and paper — to create navigational tables, accounting ledgers and the like. By the 1960s, the workers had slide rules and mechanical calculators to help them, but these jobs were still around. NASA relied heavily on flesh-and-blood computers, like Katherine Johnson and her team of African-American women, to do calculations for the early space missions, as recounted in the 2016 feature film Hidden Figures.

Today, a smart watch can add and subtract numbers billions of times faster than any human being. So you might assume that NASA has no need for human computers in the 21st century.

But you’d be wrong. The programmers, mathematicians and computational physicists working for NASA now far outnumber the human computers employed at the agency in the 1960s. Despite a billion-fold increase in the capability of the machines, human jobs weren’t lost — they multiplied. The reason that happened tells us a lot about intelligence, both human and artificial.

It turns out that human intelligence is not just one trick or technique — it is many. Digital computers excel at one particular kind of math: arithmetic. Adding up a long column of numbers is quite hard for a human, but trivial for a computer. So when spreadsheet programs like Excel came along and allowed any middle-school child to tot up long sums instantly, the most boring and repetitive mathematical jobs vanished.

But mathematical problems come in many varieties, and many of the most economically important problems are very difficult and time-consuming for even the most advanced computers. To tackle problems like that, you need lots of clever mathematicians and computational scientists who can think up ways to program computers to do those calculations as efficiently as possible.

This situation is a classic example of something that the innovation doomsayers routinely forget: in almost all areas where we have deployed computers, the more capable the computers have become, the wider the range of uses we have found for them. It takes a lot of human effort and jobs to satisfy that rising demand.

A general rule in economics is that a big increase in the supply of a commodity causes prices to fall because demand is fixed. Yet this hasn’t applied to computer power — especially for mathematics. Huge increases in supply have counterintuitively stimulated demand for more because each boost in raw computational ability and each clever new software algorithm opens another class of problems to computer solution. But only with human help.

Theorists have proved that some mathematical problems are actually so complicated that they will always be challenging or even impossible for computers to solve. So at least for now, people who can push forward the boundary of computationally hard problems need never fear for lack of work.

This tells us something important about AI. Like mathematics, intelligence is not just one simple kind of problem, such as pattern recognition. It’s a huge constellation of tasks of widely differing complexity. So far, the most impressive demonstrations of “intelligent” performance by AI have been programs that play games like chess or Go at superhuman levels. These are tasks that are so difficult for human brains that even the most talented people need years of practice to master them.

Meanwhile, many of the tasks that seem most basic to us humans — like running over rough terrain or interpreting body language — are all but impossible for the machines of today and the foreseeable future. As AI gets more capable, the sphere of jobs that computers can do faster or more accurately than people will expand. But an expanding universe of work will remain for humans, well outside the reach of automation.

The great gut flora war: Why the bacteria in your gastrointestinal tract matters

Getty/ChrisChrisW

Excerpted with permission from Food Pharmacy: A Guide to Gut Bacteria, Anti-Inflammatory Foods, and Eating for Health by Lina Aurell and Mia Clase. Copyright 2018 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

Without getting ahead of ourselves, we can start by noting that the key to staying healthy and free of inflammation and chronic illness is a well-functioning intestinal flora. Simply put, this flora is the bacteria and microorganisms that exist naturally in the intestine. In an adult, this is between 3.3 to 4.4 lb of bacteria. The intestine is a huge ecosystem containing several hundred different types of good and bad bacteria, which is an amount at least ten times greater than the number of body cells we have—approximately a hundred trillion. So, in that respect, you’re actually more bacteria than human. Most of your immune defense (or immune system, as it is also called) is in the gut (gastrointestinal tract), a truly fascinating system that’s built on a close collaboration between immune cells in the intestinal wall and your army of good intestinal bacteria. To fight inflammation, it is vital that only the good bacteria hook onto those immune cell receptors in the intestine. If the bad bacteria latch on to the receptors instead, you will have inflammation and lesser resistance against infection.

Even though the atmosphere in the gut is so influential to how we feel, it is still one of the most unchartered areas of our body. You might think it’s a bit odd when you realize that 70 to 80 percent of our immune system is situated there. But in recent years, interest in gut and intestinal flora has positively skyrocketed. Scientific research shows that bacteria in the colon not only affects a long list of illnesses and other conditions, such as diabetes, allergies, asthma, MS (multiple sclerosis), autism, cardiovascular disease, and some cancers, but also that they communicate with the brain and can drive our body weight, personality, and even our behavior. There are far more links between our gut and our brain than we first knew, with some scientists going so far as to call the gastrointestinal tract “our second brain.”

For example, it isn’t simply too little exercise and too much food that makes us fat: research shows that obesity can just as often be caused by inefficient gut flora and inflammation. Some studies even suggest that intestinal bacteria can influence our feelings of hunger and push us to crave certain foods that make their specific strain stronger than other bacterial strains in the gut. Studies have been set up where slim subjects were given intestinal flora from overweight donors, the outcome being that the slim subjects became overweight. This demonstrates that bacteria can sway us and make us fat by tricking the brain into believing that we’re hungry.

Another thing we found very interesting is the connection between intestinal flora and depression. Your risk of being diagnosed with clinical depression increases substantially if you suffer from chronic inflammation. By now it hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that exhibiting a low level of the neurotransmitter serotonin is linked to depression and dejection. These days, the amount of prescriptions written for serotonin-boosting antidepressants (SSRI, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) is astronomical. Approximately more than one in ten Americans take antidepressants, and the rate at which those prescriptions are issued is rising faster still for young people and teenagers. Naturally, we were surprised to learn that only 5 to 10 percent of serotonin is found in the brain. Where is the remaining 95 percent hiding out? Answer: in the gastrointestinal tract. By the way, serotonin is not the only hormone made in the gut; intestinal flora is in fact a key player in the production of all the body’s hormones, providing our organs with these very important substances.

We could go on about this, but we do have to end it somewhere. All these findings are overwhelming; it’s even more head-spinning to realize that it wasn’t that long ago when medical students and budding dieticians were taught that bacteria in the body didn’t play an important function. Today, vigorous research is being conducted in that field, and new studies are continually proving how critical our intestinal flora is to both our physical and mental well-being.

There is an all-out war in your gastrointestinal tract

Almost one hundred years ago, the Danish scientist Christian Gram discovered that some bacteria absorbed color through their cell walls while others didn’t. Since then, bacteria that soak up color have been called Gram-positive (Gram+), while the nonabsorbent bacteria are called Gram-negative (Gram-). Plainly put, Gram+ are bacteria that protect against illness, while Gram- are the nasty ones, bacteria that, among other things, produce the strongly inflammatory and disease-inducing endotoxin poison. Since almost all Gram+ bacteria are benign and most of the Gram- are detrimental to our health, we thought we would keep things simple by referring to Gram+ and Gram- as good and bad bacteria.

When we are at our peak, we have about a hundred billion (and a thousand different strains of) good bacteria in our gut that work full-time to extract beneficial substances for us. Ideally, there should be about one nasty bacteria per one million (1,000,000) beneficial ones, but with today’s nutritional habits we are nowhere near this ratio. We are correct in asserting that there is war in our gastrointestinal tract—a conflict between our good Luke Skywalkers and evil Darth Vaders.

You can trust your good Luke Skywalkers—they’re always ready to defend your health, so long as you give them the right fuel. When you eat raw vegetables, they start multiplying rapidly and form an army so big and powerful that it can swiftly beat back your Darth Vaders and inhibit the inflammation reaction in your body.

Problem is, the diet most of us subsist on today is more likely to strengthen our Darth Vaders than our Luke Skywalkers, and our good bacteria die out when there isn’t enough food for them. If we chow down on potato chips and French fries all the time, we’re fueling the Darth Vaders, who mow down everything in their path, Lukes included, and as a result our intestinal flora is knocked out of balance, our immune system is weakened, and inflammation arises.

Let’s look at things from a more positive viewpoint. The advantage of good bacteria is that when they exist in an environment in which they thrive, they’re able to defend us from inflammation and disease-causing bacteria. We just need to give them enough nourishing food (vegetable fibers, antioxidants, minerals, and good fats), and they’ll quickly grow strong and multiply.

Beneficial bacteria have many important tasks besides chasing out nasty bacteria. For example, they line the intestinal wall and ensure that toxins and other waste don’t leak out into the bloodstream and into the rest of the body. Imagine that your gastrointestinal tract is like a long, winding, amusement-park water slide through your body, and that Luke’s army extracts all the antioxidants, vitamins, amino acids, and minerals that you send down the chute to release nutrients into your body. Thanks to the slide’s enclosed system, substances that Luke’s army doesn’t need or want—the debris, toxins, and dead bacteria—can simply leave the body.

Where in the body is food absorbed?

Nutrients we ingest from food eventually leave the intestinal tract and make their way into the bloodstream to be moved to the body cells. However, the question is where are they absorbed—directly from the small intestine, or a few hours later from the large intestine (colon)?

Raw vegetables are exceptionally hard to digest, and as a result they travel all the way down to the colon. Once there, they dole out nutrients to our good Luke Skywalkers and defend us from inflammation. Unfortunately, most of the food we eat today is neither raw nor slow to digest. On the contrary, most of our daily food—white bread, pasta, and rice, for instance—is already taken up in the small intestine. Food that is processed, treated with pesticides, and lacking in fiber = a real cocktail of inflammation factors.

When we consume food that gets absorbed in the small intestine, our protective bacteria in the colon don’t get any of the fiber-, mineral-, and antioxidant-rich nutrients they need. You’ll recall that antioxidants are our body’s foremost protectors against free radicals and that they guard us from inflammation, illness, and premature aging. Without those antioxidants, free radicals are free to wreak havoc. In short order, this means a lowered immune system that’s plagued by lingering colds, and in the long run it could lead to worse. Food that is absorbed in the small intestine elevates blood sugar levels too fast, and this in turn overburdens our digestive organs—the liver and the pancreas—because they are put under stress when dealing with the excess sugar in the blood (which causes inflammation) as quickly as possible.

The enemies of gastrointestinal flora

From Figure 2 below, we can see clearly how, in the Western part of the world, we have decimated large sections of our intestinal flora. Westerners (the yellow line) have lost 40 percent of their intestinal flora compared to the Yanomami, an indigenous population of the Amazon (the green line), and 20 percent compared to countries where the population consumes a diet somewhere between ours and the Yanomami’s.

The Yanomami have lived without any contact with the modern world and have thus held on to their rich intestinal flora, which means that they hardly ever suffer from inflammatory conditions. In countries that have adopted a Western lifestyle, we can see high rates of chronic illness, which is caused by inflammation and bad intestinal flora. Processed food, along with little exercise and lots of stress, has depleted our intestinal flora and disturbed the balance of good and bad bacteria. Other studies show that today’s children and young people often have difficulty building protective intestinal flora because, among other things, they don’t eat a diet that encourages its growth. Projections indicate that rates of most chronic diseases will triple or even quadruple by the year 2050. In Sweden, research has shown that every other Swede will be affected by cancer at some point during his or her lifetime (currently, the ratio is one out of three).

Another major threat to gut health: antibiotics. Aside from knocking out the good bacteria in the intestinal flora, excessive use of antibiotics has led to emerging problems with multidrug-resistant bacteria. This is called antibiotic resistance, and it is one of the biggest dangers facing our health today. Antibiotic resistance means that bacteria have developed to a point where no antibiotic can fight it. As modern-age travelers crisscross the planet, antibiotic resistance is becoming a global concern. For instance, antibiotic-resistant bacteria that develops in India could quickly affect someone in America, and ominous forecasts show that more people will die from multidrug-resistant bacteria than from cancer within the next twenty years. Scientists warn us that if we don’t turn this situation around, multidrug-resistance will be the main cause of mortality by 2050.

So, use caution with antibiotics. If you’re in a situation in which you need to take a course of antibiotic drugs, boost your Lukes with supplements of good bacteria (i.e., probiotics or synbiotics) over the course of treatment, as well as for a few days after you finish your medication. Feel free to add an extra spoonful of fermented vegetables to each meal, and eat more raw vegetables than you typically would.

How to talk to teens about dealing with online creeps

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This post originally appeared on Common Sense Media.

We might not want to think about our kids dealing with creepy people online. But for many parents, it's the scariest thing about our kids' digital lives. Although only 9 percent of kids get unwanted sexual solicitation online, and only 4 percent of predators try to make offline contact, it's important to take precautions. We're not always going to be with our kids, and — as painful as it sometimes is — we can't control everything. Instead, we need to arm them with information.

We can start with safeguards such as avoiding apps that make contact with strangers easy (such as Kik and Tinder), keeping accounts private, and setting limits on where and when your teen can use a device (as in, not alone in their room at night). But the most powerful tool is becoming a guiding voice in our kids' heads. Ultimately, we need to help them find the right words to say (or type) in certain situations and recognize when they need to get help. As parents we know this takes a lot of repetition, usually until our kids roll their eyes and say, "I KNOW!" Also, it can be complicated: Teens want to be liked and belong, so positive attention from someone can be really compelling. And creepy people aren't always total strangers; sometimes your kid knows them, but then things get weird — or scary.

Here are some ideas for how to talk to kids about this tricky subject. To get the ball rolling, find five or 10 minutes when your kid is receptive (in other words, don't interrupt their favorite show and demand to talk), and tell them you want to teach them skills that are similar to being able to change a tire: They can get you out of a sticky situation. You can also frame it as something like a driving test: To use social media, they need to be able to operate it safely. Make sure to acknowledge that they might already have many of these skills, so this could be a chance to show them off. Feel free to run through this script verbatim or riff -- whatever works for you!

Ask your teen: What should you do if someone you don't know contacts you online?

Best answers:

I wouldn't respond to them at all.
If they were persistent, I'd type, "I don't want to talk to you. Do not contact me again."
If they continued, I'd block them and report their user information and wouldn't respond anymore.

Follow-up: But what if they seem harmless and nice? Or what if they seem to know things about you?

Best answers:

It's easy to find out things about people online and seem to know them, so that's no reason to chat.
Some creepers ask for pictures and personal information right away, and others can seem nice at first. Either way, this is someone I don't know, so I don't have to worry about being polite.

Follow-up: What if they just want one picture, your Snapchat handle, or your phone number so you can text each other? I mean, they don't know where you live, right? How dangerous could that be?

Best answers:

When anyone starts asking for pictures or personal information, it's a red flag, and I would always say no.
If I say yes once, it just opens the door to asking for more pics and more info.
Once someone has my phone number, they can call me anytime, anywhere, and it's also easier to get more info about me, so no way.

Follow-up: What if they say they already have an embarrassing picture, and if you don't send more, they'll share that one with everyone?

Best answers:

I know I haven't shared anything too embarrassing, so that kind of threat wouldn't work.
Even if they had a picture I didn't mean for them to have, if I sent another one, the demands would never stop.
One chance for embarrassment is better than sending more pictures. That would only make the problem worse.

Follow-up: What if your friends think it's funny to chat with them just as a prank?

Best answers:

I can tell them that it seems safe and funny when we're all together, but this person might try again when one of us is alone.
Since we don't know anything about them, it's safest not to share anything, even as a joke.
We can just find something else to do instead!

Takeaways: Online predators will often feel out a situation before asking for more information. If you shut it down early, they're likely to give up. Anything you share with them keeps the conversation going; it doesn't help end it. Sometimes they'll say they already have something embarrassing to blackmail someone into sending pictures (sometimes called "sextortion"), but sending more never stops the harassment; it only increases it. And though it may seem like harmless fun in the moment, there's a real person behind that other screen whose intentions aren't good, so that's not a person you want to tease or make angry.

Ask your teen: But what if this person really seems to know you or one of your friends? What should you do then?

Best answers:

The safest approach is, if I don't know someone in real life, I don't talk to them online.
I can ask the person for his full name and then check with the friend to see if it's legit.
I can blame my parent/guardian and say that it's against the rules to chat with strangers.
If they continue, I can just stop responding. If they keep going, I can block them (and now it's confirmed that they're really a creeper).

Takeaways: Since teens often make contact online before they do in real life, there could really be a safe friend of a friend on the other end of the keyboard. It could also be that your teen is intrigued by the sudden attention. Though it could be totally safe, encouraging too much online contact without knowing who's really on the other end can lead to a lot of shared personal information and false intimacy, which can make a teen let down their guard. Also, predators will sometimes do research and get information from social media profiles to establish trust, so it may seem like they know you, but they don't. This is also a good reason for teens to think about their digital footprints and the pieces of themselves they share online. Teens who share sexy pictures or lots of personal information online are more at risk to be approached by online predators.

Ask your teen: What if the person really does know you, but you aren't really interested in being in contact online?

Best answers:

I can shut it down gently by saying something like, "Hey, I don't want to chat online, but I'll see you at school. Have a good night!"
If they keep trying, I can just stop responding, and if they won't stop, I can block them.

Takeaways: It's hard (and great) for your kid to practice setting boundaries. And while it's nice to be polite if someone knows you in real life, you don't have to be nice if they aren't respecting your limits. It's better to block than to be nice and better to be safe than to be sweet.

Ask your teen: What if the person knows you and you are interested -- but then it doesn't feel right?

Best answers:

I have to listen to my gut and say I have to go.
After I'm offline, then I can take a minute to figure out what made me uncomfortable: Were they too familiar, acting like we're best friends? Asking personal questions? Asking for pictures?

Takeaways: Sometimes, the most important and trustworthy defense is our instinct, so if something doesn't feel right, trust yourself, even if that means ending online contact with someone you like. Anyone asking for pictures (especially posed or sexy ones) is a huge red flag, and it's best to go offline to avoid the pressure so you can stop and think.

Ask your teen: What if you don't know this person, but they're super nice and show caring at a time when you really need it?

Best answers:

Even though it might be tempting to talk to someone who's separate from my problems, it's not a good idea to open up to someone who might not have my best interests at heart.
If I really need someone to talk to, I need to find someone I can truly trust, even if it's a friend of the family or a teacher. Talking to a stranger online might feel good at first but then just cause more problems in the end.

Takeaways: Tweens and teens are at a sensitive age when they want to be more independent from their parents but also crave positive attention. This combination can make them more vulnerable. Make sure your kid has positive connections outside the family and people to talk to — and get support from — during these years when they sometimes push you away.

Ask your teen: What if you feel like you've gotten to know someone really well online and they ask to meet in real life?

Best answers:

No way! I learned about "stranger danger" when I was little, and I know this isn't safe.
Getting to know someone online is different from meeting up with that person in real life, alone. They could be totally different in person.
Adults do this all the time with dating apps, so it sort of feels the same, but I know there are creepy people out there, and I don't want to get myself into a situation where I'm suddenly in danger. It's just not worth it.

Follow up: It's not safe to meet someone you don't know. But if you were going to do that, what do you think are the safest ways?

Best answers:

I don't think I'd ever feel safe doing this. — especially girls and women — get hurt, and I'd rather play it safe and just hang out with people I know face-to-face.
Meet during the day in a public place and bring a friend. Make sure other friends know where you are and who you're meeting. Share the person's name, phone number, or whatever other information I have with someone else.

Takeaways: We send kids confusing messages about talking and meeting online: We share personal information on the internet all the time and use dating apps, sites, and chat rooms to eventually meet strangers. Also, tweens and teens who are in emotional distress are especially vulnerable because they crave positive attention and connection, so if you notice your kid withdrawing, being secretive, and hiding online interactions, it's time to ask some questions. While it's fairly rare for predators to solicit contact offline, it does happen, so it's important to be aware of your kid's connections and activities.

Ask your teen: When is it time to ask me or another adult for help?

Best answers:

I think anytime things feel creepy I'll want to tell you just in case.
I know how to block and report someone if I need to, but if someone won't stop bothering me or if I feel scared, I'll ask for help.