Not drinking alcohol can kill you

Just when you thought it was safe to get on the wagon, new research by people in White Coats suggests that people who abstain completely from alcohol are more likely to die early from heart disease and diabetes than moderate drinkers.

The report, Late-Life Alcohol Consumption and 20-Year Mortality by Charles J. Holahan, Kathleen K. Schutte, Penny L. Brennan, Carole K. Holahan, Bernice S. Moos, and Rudolf H. Moos (with an acknowledgment to the friendly barkeeps at O'Dooley's Pub), published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, shows that moderate drinkers age 55 to 65 had significantly lower mortality rates than tea-totalers, and much lower than car-totalers. The findings held true even when adjusting for socioeconomic factors and other variables.

Apparently, the effect holds true regardless of what your, um, poison (?) is, according to an article in Slate.

I knew all those years of clean living would be the death of me.

Just one really scary word: Plastics

Plastics were the future, but they sucked. Okay, Bakelite was cool, but now you can only find it on stuff in yard sales and Ebay.

Now of course, thanks to the Internet, we know that plastics are truly evil and will destroy us all. Or something like that.

Honestly, I'd been trying to avoid thinking about this too hard because Cinderella uses plastic cups, eats with plastic utensils, and we wrap her up in Saran Wrap when she's naughty. I thought I'd wait until the people in white coats had figured out if this was something I really needed to worry about or not.

Turns out I do (and you should too).

As you've probably heard, the problem is with plastics that have bisphenol A, otherwise known as BPA. Some people in white coats did a really big study on humans and found that people with high levels of BPA had higher levels of heart disease, diabetes, and liver abnormalities.

Of course, like all scientific debates, there are two sides to this. On one side are researchers like the authors of the study and Frederick vom Saal, a reproductive scientist at the University of Missouri at Columbia who commented that the findings of the study were "the nail in the coffin" (hopefully he was referring to plastics and not us). Also on this side are people like Patricia Hunt, a geneticist at Washington State University who is researching possible links between BPA and birth defects, miscarriages, and other nasty stuff.

On the other side are chemical industry funded scientists who claim that there's absolutely nothing to worry about. The FDA apparently rests its claims that BPA-laden plastics pose no danger based on two chemical industry funded reports.

As worried consumers we can stop using BPA-laden plastic baby bottles, eyeglasses, DVD's, water bottles, and food containers. Or we could bug our government (or elect a new one) to force companies to get rid of this stuff.

NY Times follows up on my Vitamin D story

The New York Times did a follow-up story to my earlier post about the dangers of too little vitamin D.

According to the Times, medical types have noticed an increase in the number of babies with problems they suspect are the result of too little vitamin D, including rickets, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and cancer.

Doctors suspect multiple causes, including exclusive breastfeeding (since the mothers are vitamin D deprived themselves), children drinking soda and juice instead of milk, and not enough time spent outdoors in the sun. Because we know that exposure to the sun will cause instant death, the recommended solution is to feed your baby vitamin supplements and cod liver oil.



But wait! According to Sydney Spiesel, a pediatrician and professor at Yale University School of Medicine, too much cod liver oil will actually do damage to your bones. Overdo the cod liver oil and you're likely to get too much vitamin A, which can lead to "liver damage to nervous-system symptoms that resemble the effects of a brain tumor," as well as bone mineral loss leading to osteoporosis.

Well, that certainly clears things up.