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.

Sitting will kill you

According to the latest study by people in White Coats at the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences (inventors of the Swedish Bikini Team), people who sit in chairs all day die faster and more gruesome deaths than people who don't. According to lab rat Elin Ekblom-Bak, "After four hours of sitting, the body starts to send harmful signals." She explained that genes regulating the amount of glucose and fat in the body start to shut down. People who sit, whether at home, in the car, or at work, are more likely to be fat, have heart trouble, and die early deaths than those who don't sit.

"No problem!" you say. "I often get up from my chair and walk to the water cooler to discuss the latest happenings with my office chums. I must be in the clear!" Sorry pal. You're still dead. Even a twenty-mile jog to the office won't do you any good. According to the Swedes, you'll just have a more muscular corpse as you lie decomposing next to the other ex-desk monkeys.

Interestingly, the inscrutable ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld may have had a key breakthrough about this problem years ago. In the wake of the revelations about US-military torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Rumsfeld was widely criticized for pooh-poohing one particular practice -- forcing prisoners to stand for hours at a time. According to declassified documents, Rumsfeld wrote on the margins of one torture memo "I stand for 8-10 hours a day," Rummy scrawled. "Why is standing limited to four hours?" Who knew he was just looking out for their health?

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.

Too little vitamin D will kill you

Something else to worry about.

According to a report by people in white coats, people with too little vitamin D in their bodies will die horrible, horrible deaths. In a study following 13,000 initially healthy men between 1994 and 2000, those with low levels of vitamin D were 26% more likely to die. Insufficient vitamin D was also linked to higher rates of breast cancer, depression in the elderly, and possibly to cardiovascular disease.

The somewhat shocking thing is that, according to the reports, all you need to get the required amount of vitamin D is to get 10-15 minutes of sunshine a day, however 50% of adults age 50 and over, and a large share of younger people, are under-D'd.