Matt Metzgar

Sell Out

Is it me or has anyone else noticed that music seems to be more about selling products than ever before?  First, you started to see companies pay to license music for commercials and what not.  Then artists got hip to the game and started to take control.  Take Aerosmith for example.  They just negotiated an exclusive contract with "Guitar Hero" for their music.  What bothers me is the false justifications I see for things like this.  They say it's "introducing music to a new generation" or something like that.  Maybe a bit, but it's much more about the money.

More often, I would like to see major muscians or groups saying no to all the commercial opportunities.  If you're making big bucks as a musician, isn't that enough?  Why do you have to "diversify" into business?  Why not just spend more time making music and putting out albums (if this is what they supposedly love to do)? 

Here's a good article on how many rock 'n roll acts have sold out.  What's disturbing about this is that these are major acts, acts that have probably made enough money to last several lifetimes.  Yet they get sucked into these commercial opportunites that really benefit no one.  A horrible example is how Cadillac uses the Led Zeppelin song, "Rock and Roll", in their commericals.  What does Cadillac have to do with rebellion or rock 'n roll?  If anything, it's the opposite.  Either way I don't care - and I would rather listen to Led Zeppelin through my stereo than as background music for a car commercial. 

I like to think that when these acts were younger, they operated more out of a sense of authenticity - simply making music for the love of it.   And this is the best output I could hope for from a musical group: just make the music you want to make.  Don't waste your time trying to sell me a toaster, a car, or a video game.  Just make your music and more of it.

Hey Kid, Want Some Statins?

Yesterday, the American Academy of Pediatricians released guidelines that recommended statins for children as young as 8 years old.  Thankfully, many other pediatricians were highly critial of these recommendations.  Personally, I think this is just another step in the wrong direction for our culture.

First off, the effects of statins in adults is hardly clear-cut to begin with.  Statins lower cholesterol but many question if they reduce mortality at all.  Second, there is zero data to show what side effects there will be for taking statins for several decades.  Third, as the article pointed out this will allow pharmaceutical companies to start targeting children for their various products.

I actually listened to a radio interview about these new guidelines yesterday.  The person being interviewed acknowledged that diet and exercise work in clinical studies to lower cholesterol and improve health.  But he said that in the "real world", where it can be hard to get children to adhere to good eating and exercise, statins are necessary.

What terrible logic!  Since the correct solution actually requires effort (having parents guide their children to health), this should be abandoned in place of prescription drugs.  And why should doctors prescribe statins anyways?  If a child is overweight and the parent wants to be bailed out with statins, why couldn't a doctor just say no?

If a parent or doctor is looking out for the best interests of the child in the long run, they will "prescribe" proper eating and exercise - not drugs.   

The Last Time I ...

Switching from a typical American diet to a Paleolithic diet requires considerable changes.  I would think this might seem overwhelming at first, and that this may initially turn some people off.  Yet if a person makes slow, sustainable changes in eating habits, the transition can be successfully be made.

I was thinking back to my own transition to the Paleo diet, and it was a multi-year process.  I simply dropped various foods when I was comfortable doing so.  To demonstrate, here's a timeline of the last time I regularly ate certain foods.  Other than the odd occasion, the last time I ...

• Drank milk was 2001
• Ate bread was 2003
• Ate ice cream (or any other dairy product) was 2005
• Ate rice (or any other grain) was 2006

So since 2006, I have been eating pretty much pure Paleo on a day-to-day basis.  For me, there is no reason to turn back - my health and energy increased with each diet improvement I made. 

I'm sure other people have made the transition in one fell swoop.  Or if a person was facing some type of health emergency, then they would want to move quicker.  Personally, I was looking to make long-term, sustainable changes, and so I wanted to take my time and make sure the changes would stick.  They have. 

The opposite of this view is the diet culture we live in.  Everyone is looking for (and selling) the quick fixes and the pills.  How can I lose 10 pounds this week?  Or shape up for a reunion or a wedding?  But these type of superficial efforts are bound to fail.  Diets don't work.  Lifestyle changes do.

Worst Child Care Expert of the Century

I am often alarmed by the some of the baby advice from the so-called experts out there.  If a person doesn't even consider child care from a biological/evolutionary view, I am usually skeptical of their advice.

The worst of the bunch could be Dr. Brazelton.  He might set a record for the number of times an authority can get disproven in a career.  First, he decided to pronounce that cosleeping (the mother sleeping near the infant) was not proper.  Let's see, cosleeping was the norm thoughout millions of years of evolution, and has been now been shown to produce a ton of benefits.   Brazelton was eventually deluged by letters from women telling him he had no idea what he was talking about.  This led him to "reevaluate my rather rigid ideas on handling sleep problems".  

Next, Brazelton pronounced that infants are not capable of being potty-trained.  He was even featured in commercials for diapers that fit babies up to 35 pounds.  Too bad research shows that infants can be successfully potty-trained and that later potty-training probably has detrimental effects. 

Third, Brazelton endorses some type of letting infants "cry it out" philosophy (it's hard to tell because he seems to have flipped on this issue as well). But again, if you look at the research(pdf), you'll find that infants cry for a reason.  And letting them cry is not the right strategy; finding out what the problem is and fixing it is the logical solution.

You would think if you proclaimed yourself an expert and were wrong about such major issues that you would just hang it up, or go into hiding.  But alas, that doesn't seem to be the case with Brazelton.  I don't know who in their right mind would consider this person to be an expert.  Maybe he should have started with something simpler, like seeing if he could master cooking the fries at Burger King before he started giving advice to parents about how to raise their children. 

Happy 4th!

Smells Like Teen Spirit

I read where many, many students are now applying to colleges in New Orleans.  Applications at Tulane skyrocketed from 17,000 to 34,000 this year.  The school even had to turn off their application page because of the massive amount of applications coming in.  Loyola and Xavier are also showing large increases in the number of applications.

You would have to assume that most of this interest is coming from students wanting to help rebuild the city.  For a college student, New Orleans could turn out to be an interesting place to spend their college years - a place where they could have an immediate impact.  It's good to see so many young people wanting to help.

Sugar and Depression

I came across this older study that looked at sugar consumption and rates of depression.  The study used data across six different countires.  The research showed an extremely high rate of correlation (0.94) between sugar and depression.

The study notes that correlation does not equal causation, and that other factors may be at play.  It could be that industrialized areas with high sugar consumption also have other negatives - high refined flour consumption, low levels of physical activity, etc.  Still, this overall relationship between sugar and depression is quite startling and deserves further study.

More on Aerobic Capacity

Here's a new study that looks at aerobic capacity and mortality.  The study tracked patients with coronary artery disease.  For each level of increase in peak aerobic capacity, there was a 15 percent decrease in risk of death.  This relationship held even though the majority of patients were taking statins and other drugs.

Instead of prescribing so many drugs, doctors need to prescribe more exercise!  A 15 percent drop from a free treatment (exercise) sounds a lot better to me than medicines with unknown side effects and unproven benefits.

Low-Carb, Aerobic Capacity, and the Metabolic Syndome

It has been interesting to see the results of people experimenting with low-carb diets.  Here's one scenario I've read about over and over: went on low-carb, lost weight, fell of the wagon and gained weight.  Then a person repeats the cycle.

Usually when people fall off the low-carb wagon, the blame is placed on carbohydrates: carbohdyrates are addicting, carbohydrates are everywhere, etc.  And while this may be true to some degree, it doesn't tell the whole story.

Aerobic capacity is a key variable which I believe undelies this whole relationship.  Many people talk about a beneficial switch to a more aerobic, "fat-burning" system when they switch to low-carb.  This is somewhat true because when carbs are restricted, the body has to rely on protein and fat (or stored carbohydrate) for fuel.  But it misses the ultimate point about what fuel an aerobic system truly runs off: oxygen.

There are tons of studies linking aerobic capacity and metabolic syndrome.  When a person is in better shape aerobically, they can more efficiently use oxygen/fat to fuel body functions.  In effect, they need less carbs to function.  I also think the opposite is true: if a person has a low aerobic capacity, they may have a greater desire for carbohydrates.  This is because their body runs more on sugar, and they will feel better (at least for a few hours) if they consume more sugar.

Take a person who is elderly and has a low aerobic capacity and put them on a low-carb diet.  With no change in exercise levels, I highly doubt you would see any difference in quality of life.  But if instead you put them on a program to increase aerobic capacity, they will improve (as studies have shown).

Making the body a better fat-burner requires working both sides of the equation: feeding the body less sugar and exercising in a way that encourages the body to burn fat.

Make Believe

I just finished the book, "The Case for Make Believe", by Susan Linn.  I saw a review of this book in the newspaper, and it seemed to be worth exploring.  The premise of the book is that technology and commercialization are hampering children's development. 

In general, the book's conclusion is this: screen time (consisting of tv, computers, and video games) is generally bad in terms of a child developing properly.  Screen time in small doses may be okay, but the overload of screen time that many kids face has detrimental consequences.

I agree with this conclusion, but it doesn't seem very ground-breaking to me.  If you look at it in evolutionary terms, I think you get a clearer picture of things.  In hunter-gatherer tribes, children had no screen time but instead were immersed in two things: people and nature. 

The book also points out that many modern toys are "scripted" and limit imagination.  In comparison, nature is open-ended.  Kids can do what they want in nature, and in addition, nature is always changing with the seasons.

The lack of social interaction that some children have is also abnormal from this perspective.  The most complex interaction a child can have is with a person, not a toy.  A child with no toys but lots of human interaction will still develop properly; a child with the most advanced toys in the world but little human interaction will be lacking.

In many ways, I feel fortunate that I was a child before the internet became established.  I imagine it is a black hole of sorts for many children and adolescents.  I would bet that in children, the increase in time spent on the internet has lowered the amount of person-to-person interaction they have.  I also wonder if tv, when it became prevalent, had a similar effect.

The morale of the story is that kids need people and nature more than anything else to develop properly.  The book makes these points, but doesn't add much beyond this.  This issue doesn't seem to be that much about information as it is changing the behavior of parents.  If parents replace their children's screen time with people and nature, society will have happier, healthier kids.