Lesson #4. You can always get better at something.
Back in my East Coast days I would take a bunch of guys into NY Chinatown for some authentic Chinese food. The restaurant was a classic hole in the wall, one of the places that didn’t cater to non-Chinese diners. All the menus were in Chinese and the family banquet style menus were posted near the ceiling on the wall. The group would get seated, tea was served, and I would point to the menu on the wall for our table. Sometimes I pointed to a menu I thought I had ordered in the past and the food was different from the last visit. Didn’t matter. It was all good.
My friends all got forks, spoons, and knives. The waiter would remove my silverware and return with a pair of chopsticks and one of those awkward soup spoons. I always had to ask for a fork and regular spoon because I was really bad at using chopsticks.
I still can’t use chopsticks very well. Too bad we didn’t have the internet or YouTube back then. At least I now have instructions and a video to watch.
Cranberry is associated with multiple health benefits, which are mostly attributed to its high content of (poly)phenols, particularly flavan-3-ols. However, clinical trials attempting to demonstrate these positive effects have yielded heterogeneous results, partly due to the high inter-individual variability associated with gut microbiota interaction with these molecules. In fact, several studies have demonstrated the ability of these molecules to modulate the gut microbiota in animal and in vitro models, but there is a scarcity of information in human subjects. In addition, it has been recently reported that cranberry also contains high concentrations of oligosaccharides, which could contribute to its bioactivity. Hence, the aim of this study was to fully characterize the (poly)phenolic and oligosaccharidic contents of a commercially available cranberry extract and evaluate its capacity to positively modulate the gut microbiota of 28 human subjects. After only four days, the (poly)phenols and oligosaccharides-rich cranberry extract, induced a strong bifidogenic effect, along with an increase in the abundance of several butyrate-producing bacteria, such as Clostridium and Anaerobutyricum. Plasmatic and fecal short-chain fatty acids profiles were also altered by the cranberry extract with a decrease in acetate ratio and an increase in butyrate ratio. Finally, to characterize the inter-individual variability, we stratified the participants according to the alterations observed in the fecal microbiota following supplementation. Interestingly, individuals having a microbiota characterized by the presence of Prevotella benefited from an increase in Faecalibacterium with the cranberry extract supplementation.
Today is my half-birthday on The Road to 70. The question came from my 6.5 year old granddaughter on her 6.5 half-birthday. My initial response was totally adult, something about not celebrating half-birthdays the older you get. But the more I pondered the question the more the real answer should have been why not? So for the first time in a very long time I am celebrating my half-birthday today. No party, no cake, no presents. I’m simply basking in having created the life I wanted and still being around to write about it.
I don’t feel old. I know I’m old. I felt old a few years back when this happened:
And unlike some of my relatives, I grew up.
I knew I grew up when I stopped buying/collecting guitars. I finally cured myself of the proper number of guitars equation.
(I think this one is still in a guitar bag somewhere in the house, forgotten until I saw this picture.)
Two I released into the wild that somehow ended up in Owasso Oklahoma.
After a four year hiatus due to The Great Pandemic I rejoined the Y and got back to some serious resistance training. It didn’t take long to discover various muscle groups of mine that had stopped working. Absolutely no surprises here since I sit on my butt for hours on end, working, writing, reading. So to commemorate my half-birthday and to prevent other muscle groups from withering away I started a new age-friendly exercise. Rucking.
There’s no denying rucking is an efficient workout. The added weight on your back strengthens your legs and trunk, while simultaneously giving you a low-impact cardio session. These benefits increase when you add hills to the mix. Heading uphill with a pack pushes your VO2 max, while going downhill challenges your stability and eccentric muscle control, according to longevity expert Peter Attita.
It was a short ruck, with maybe 15 pounds in my backpack and my calves are telling me I need to do this more often.
My half-birthday happened to fall on the last day of the NBA regular season. Although I wrote “no presents” it would be awfully wonderful if the Thunder finished the season with the number one seed going into the playoffs.
If any of my relatives in Oklahoma happen to read this post you can tell Tiny Human #1 I celebrated my half-birthday this year. And for the curious who would like to see a current snap of the 6.5 year old, here you go.
When you buy a huge jar of tomato paste from a Pakistani grocery store only do so when you use a lot of tomato paste in your cooking. I used maybe 2/3 of the jar and when I opened it yesterday I found a wonderful BLOB OF MOLD growing on the inside.
I am back to buying canned tomato paste and freezing the excess for future use.
I haven’t been writing much lately. My personal journal shows numerous gaps. My blogs show numerous gaps and much longer gaps in between posts. The dearth of words scares me and the Master of Overthinking starts to ask the question why? The Mojo is not as strong as it has been in the past. Maybe it’s just from getting older. Or spending more time doing other things. I’m probably not writing as much because I AM spending more time doing other things.
Recently two different people who have known me a long time delivered the same message to me. One was my barber, the other a relative.
“You look thin. You’re keeping the weight off.”
“You’ve lost weight.”
The Master of Overthinking once more started to think. What changed? My weight is stable and fluctuates between 173 and 175. I’ve tweaked my diet many times but haven’t tweaked in quite some time. So what changed?
Towards the end of last year The Boss felt I needed to get out of the house more. She knows all too well I could go 100% hermit at this point in my life. The Boss posed a simple question:
“Why don’t you rejoin the Y?”
The Master of Overthinking thought about this. Too much togetherness? Does she need more alone time? Was I becoming a hermit?
Well, I guess I could use more exercise. So I signed up at the Y and started getting back into my old routines at the beginning of the year. Four years ago I cancelled my membership due to the Covid pandemic. I didn’t want to keep paying monthly dues for something that wasn’t going to be used. I had always intended to rejoin at a later time. But one month came and went followed by the years. It was time to get back to old ways.
Due to the long layoff I focused first on resistance training. I had been doing resistance work at home with light weights and bands. I convinced myself that was enough to keep what was left of my muscle mass from shrinking to nothing. But adding a circuit of resistance machines has made a difference. I weigh the same but Mr. Muffin is smaller. After three months the changes are noticeable. When your barber notices the change…
To make a short story long I’m spending more of my time going to the Y. I’ve also been reading more and writing less. But I feel the Mojo returning. I’m back.
From 2019 to 2023, the all-food Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose by 25.0 percent—a higher increase than the all-items CPI, which grew 19.2 percent over the same period. Food price increases were below the 27.1-percent increase in transportation costs, but they rose faster than housing, medical care, and all other major categories. Food price increases in 2020–21 were largely driven by shifting consumption patterns and supply chain disruptions resulting from the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. In 2022, food prices increased faster than any year since 1979, partly due to a highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak that affected egg and poultry prices and the conflict in Ukraine which compounded other economy-wide inflationary pressures such as high energy costs. Food price growth slowed in 2023 as wholesale food prices and these other inflationary factors eased from 2022.https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending/
I had just turned 65 when my contract was terminated. At the time I was working for a company that outsourced people with my skill set to companies that needed people with my skill set. I was fairly confident I would be placed with another client. During the call where I was told about the contract ending my boss asked,
“Are you going to retire or do you want to keep working?”
I was in reasonably good health and enjoying my job so I said I wanted to keep working. If my reasonably good health held up along with a willing employer I hoped to work until age 70 and defer collecting social security to achieve my maximum monthly retirement benefit. The promised 8% increase to my monthly benefit for each full year I delayed benefits beyond full retirement age was quite attractive. Plus if I expired first you know who would get this higher monthly payout until her expiration.
Well guess who’s turning 70 this year? So far, so good. And in all honesty I never factored inflation into my keep working until 70 strategy. But with most things costing more nowadays I’m twice as glad I made the decision to not retire. Now I’m crafting my work until 75 strategy. It focuses on diet, nutrition, exercise and other lifestyle issues. This is a food blog, after all.
Can you imagine how much you could save each month if you just subtracted your cellphone bill, internet, and cable/streaming subscriptions? Probably enough to cover the grocery bill and then some.
Plus, more young people have student loans than ever before, and everyone pays more for healthcare than in the past. I think this is one of the reasons higher food prices are so painful for so many households. There are so many other budgetary line items these days that an increase in grocery store prices becomes even more painful.
Food is another key component of healthy living in blue zones, says Buettner. People there tend to consume unprocessed foods, beans, legumes, fruits, and vegetables—often following traditional recipes that have been passed down through generations. That style of eating is good for heart and cognitive health, says Linda Hershey, MD, PhD, FAAN, professor of neurology at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City. “Numerous high-quality studies support the benefits of the MIND, DASH, and Mediterranean diets, which emphasize green leafy vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, fish, poultry, oil, and whole grains, and discourage fried food, processed meat, snack foods, and sweets,” Dr. Hershey says.
Researchers used the portfolio diet score to rank the participants’ consumption of plant proteins, nuts and seeds, viscous fiber, phytosterols and plant sources of monounsaturated fatty acids. After up to 30 years of follow-up, those with the highest portfolio diet score had a 14% lower risk of coronary heart disease and stroke compared to those with the lowest score. The findings were published Wednesday in the American Heart Association journal Circulation.
“We’re always looking at ways to reduce the risk of heart disease, and one effective way to do that is to lower blood cholesterol levels, particularly LDL cholesterol,” said Dr. Kristina Petersen, an associate professor of nutritional sciences at Penn State in University Park, Pennsylvania.
Petersen, who was not involved in the research, is well-versed in how diets can affect heart health. She co-authored an AHA scientific statement published in April that scored 10 popular diets for their heart-health benefits. The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension – or DASH – diet was the only eating pattern to get a perfect score, with the Mediterranean and pescetarian diets rounding out the top three. The portfolio diet was excluded from the assessment “because it’s not particularly common,” she said.
garyskitchen.net 