10 body myths debunked by science

Myth 1: Calories Counting Is All That Matters for Weight Management – Calories are the energy content as measured by complete combustion of the food. But, our bodies don’t burn food, they digest, ingest and metabolise it, so different foods even if they have the same “calories” can have a very different effect on our bodies.

Myth 2: Body Hair Grows Back Thicker When You Shave It – Nope. It doesn’t.

Myth 3: You Need Eight Hours of Sleep Per Day – Well, some people do, others need more and some kind survive on half that or less with no apparent ill effects.

Myth 4: Reading in Dim Light Ruins Your Eyes – it can “strain” your eyes, tiring them, but there’s no permanent damage to vision or the structure of the eye even from nightly reading in dim light.

Myth 5: Urinating on a Jellyfish Sting will Sooth the Pain – You should rinse with vinegar or seawater. Ammonia solution, urine and alcoholic preparations can cause the nematocysts (stinging cells) embedded in your skin to fire, making things worse.

Myth 6: Your Slow Metabolism Makes You Fat – It’s obviously not true. The bigger you are the more calories you burn to keep going, that’s a higher basal metabolism than someone lean who burns fewer calories and so has a lower basal metabolism.

Myth 7: You’ll Catch a Cold from Cold (and Wet) Weather Conditions – Nope. Colds are caused by viral infection not by snowballs and wet feet.

Myth 8: More Heat Escapes Through Your Head – Heat does escape through your head, but the rate of heat loss is the same as from any other area of your skin, it’s just that unless you usually wear a hat it’s the bit most often uncovered and so putting a hat on will reduce total heat loss.

UPDATED Myth 9: High Cholesterol Causes Heart Disease – The picture is complicated, there is some evidence that a raised level of an entirely different compound, homocysteine is a better indicator of risk. Of course, deposits of the waxy cholesterol and other lipid within the lining of the arteries that supply the heart does cause heart problems. Actually, it’s not strictly true to say that cholesterol doesn’t cause heart disease. You can be perfectly healthy with high cholesterol, but if waxy deposits form on the inside of the arteries supplying your heart and elsewhere then that’s not good, but this is not a given. if you’re arteries are chocked with lipids then that will raise your blood pressure. But not all hypertension is caused by that. Blood pressure can be higher than “normal”, just because that’s your body’s operating pressure.

Myth 10: It’s Dangerous to Wake a Sleepwalker – The reverse is probably true as a sleepwalker is more likely to trip and fall downstairs or wander off. They might get a shock when you wake them, but a shock isn’t likely to do much harm.

Adapted from a recent Lifehacker post: 10 Stubborn Body Myths

Goats have smaller feet than cows

Could you switch from cow’s milk to a healthier, environment friendly alternative? Like ewe’s or goat’s milk?

Ruminant milk synthesis involves pre-gastric fermentation of plant cells into mainly volatile fatty acids (VFA), peptides, ammonia, and microbial mass. Sounds delicious. Most Westerners use cow’s milk, but goat and ewe’s milk are commonly used in many other parts of the world and have been throughout our agricultural history. All have similar nutritional profiles, but the cost per litre in terms of energy and land use is far greater for cattle than for sheep and goats. Moreover, there are problems for some people who cannot digest cow’s milk, but cope perfectly well with those alternatives. Of course, it might be argued that past infancy we shouldn’t be consuming milk products at all, but that’s a non-sequitur as many of us really cannot do without the milk on our breakfast cereal…or our milk chocolate fix.

Sheep’s milk has high levels of solids and fats and is well suited to making cheese, good quality yoghurt, and ice cream. It is richer than cow’s milk in riboflavin, thiamine, niacin, pantothenic acid, vitamin B6, vitamin B12 and biotin. Goat’s has more calcium, potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, manganese, vitamins A and D, nicotinic acid, choline, and inositol than cow’s milk. It is, chemically speaking, closer to human breast milk than cow’s milk and is thought to be less commonly associated with allergies, although not necessarily as a consequence of that similarity. Add buffalo milk to the choices and you have a type of milk richer in total solids, fat, proteins and vitamins, that is also lower in cholesterol than cow’s milk.

There are thus, many potential health benefits to educating the public about alternatives to cow’s milk. Whether or not the great behemoth that is the cattle industry would move under pressure from goats and sheep is a different matter of course.

Research Blogging Icon Nikkhah, A. (2011). Milk of sheep, goat, and buffalo: a public health review International Journal of Food Safety, Nutrition and Public Health, 4 (2/3/4) DOI: 10.1504/IJFSNPH.2011.044566

You are getting nothing from me!
Goat versus cow’s milk

1 kilogram of milk

Cow 40 g of fat (24 g saturated)
Goat 45g of fat (23 g saturated)

Cow 34 g of protein
Goat 38 of protein

Cow 140 mg cholesterol
Goat 100 mg cholesterol

Cow 930 mg phosphorus
Goat 1110 mg phosphorus

Betelgeuse Star

Every now and then, I spot a sudden influx of new readers searching for a specific topic on the website, today there seems to be a lot of you looking for “betelgeuse star”. I assume, an astronomy or science class asked a question on the subject or set a homework assignment and that Sciencebase comes up in the search engines as a place to go for more information.

Betelgeuse (Alpha Orionis), is the eighth brightest star in the night sky and second brightest star in the constellation of Orion, outshining its neighbour Rigel (Beta Orionis) only rarely. It sits at the point you might consider to be Orion’s right shoulder assuming he’s facing Earth, as it were. The star has a distinct reddish-tint (mentioned by Ptolemy the first century AD) and its apparent magnitude varies from 0.2 to 1.2 (the most variable brightness for a first magnitude star).

Betelgeuse is a red supergiant, which if it sat at the centre of our solar system instead of the Sun would engulf all the inner planets and beyond the asteroid belt, perhaps even stretching as far as the orbit of Jupiter or beyond. Astronomers estimate that Betelgeuse is just 10 million years old but evolved rapidly because of its high mass. You can read more on Wikipedia.

There’s a lovely video showing the stellar scale heirarchy. Betelgeuse is enormous (400 million km diameter) compared with the Sun (1,392,000 km diameter), almost as big as Antares (600 million km) but a lot smaller than the red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris, which is about about 3000 million kilometres in diameter.

Yoga. Just a good way to stretch?

The New York Times has previously obsessed about yoga, but recently it has promoted a book by one of its science writers William J. Broad entitled ‘The Science of Yoga: The Risks and Rewards” by entitling his promo article on the subject as: ‘How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body.’

Obviously, a wee bit of bias from the sub-editor or headline writer there, given that Broad’s book offers both pros and cons, but the article and its headline suggest only cons.

Next week: ‘How Running Can Wreck Your Knees,’ or ‘How Tennis Can Wreck Your Elbow,’ or ‘How Moving A Refrigerator Can Crush Your Toes, Break Your Back, and Rip Your Rotator Cuff.’

Yoga, as we know it in the West, has benefits, but it’s basically a posh way to stretch and lie down without sleeping. As with any form of exercise there are risks and benefits. You can find out more about the NYT’s double-edged yogic bias from Paul Raeburn in his latest column on the Knight Science Journalism Tracker from whence the refrigerator title came.

No kissing CPR

Yesterday, we ran the Vinnie Jones take on hands-only CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) as commissioned by the British Hearth Foundation, sorry, British Heart Foundation…

The American Heart Association (AHA) had a different approach in that they recruited two nice young ladies to call the ambulance and demonstrate the no-mouth, and definitely no-tongues approach to CPR, oh and Dr Kendrick Kang-Joh Jeong from The Hangover to shout and dance about Staying Alive.

Save the home of the first scientist

Tymperleys is a Grade 2* listed building that is a significant world class heritage asset held in trust for the people of Colchester by Colchester Borough Council. Tymperleys was bequeathed to the town in 1969 by philanthropist Bernard Mason.

The Tymperleys Community Project Ltd (TCP) was set up specifically to inspire and be a catalyst of learning visit this historic building in person and or online in Colchester’s town centre. Through the efforts and vision of TCP, in the future people from Colchester and worldwide will celebrate the life and times of Elizabethan scientist and physician to Queen Elizabeth 1st, William Gilberd. William Gilberd is recognised as “the Father of electricity”, is arguably the first modern scientist and is one of Colchester’s most famous forefathers.

Members of the Gilberd family, along with national celebrities (Queen guitarist Brian May and others) and acclaimed scientists, have expressed their concern at the proposed sale of the historic “Tymperleys” building in Colchester. It’s a tiny but important museum. If the nation can save William Morris’ Red House, then this is far more important and should be kept out of grubbing commercial hands.

People from around the world are mobilising and pledging their support to promote Tymperleys as the ‘soul of Colchester’ as passionately as Galileo and others supported Gilberd, then living in Tymperleys, promoted magnetism as the ‘soul of the earth’.

Save Tymperleys.

How to make a safer cigarette

Jove just published its 1500th video/paper for which congratulations: Video: A Protocol for Detecting and Scavenging Gas-phase Free Radicals in Mainstream Cigarette Smoke.

Sounds straight enough, analytical work for testing free radicals in cigarette smoke. The press release I was sent on this, however, hints at this work from Cornell being somehow ready to bring us a healthier cigarette. Supposedly, antioxidants in the filter would neutralize the cancer-causing free-radicals.

Hmmm…it’s not like anyone is forced to smoke is it?

No kissing Vinnie Jones

If you had a heart attack. Would you want Vinnie to (a) kiss you (b) grab your ‘nads (c) hammer your chest?

UPDATE from a medic friend: If the casualty is not breathing NORMALLY (ie agonal breaths) and he’s unresponsive then he’s in cardiac arrest. You don’t check for pulses, you go straight into compressions. Current rate is 120(!)/min, aim for 1/3 chest depth. It is now considered that there’s enough O2 on board, from patient’s last proper breath, to keep the brain alive. Ideally, if you can do effective ventilations the ratio is 2:30 – starting with compressions, not 2 ‘rescue’ breaths, as of old.

Ventilations from the passerby 1st aider assisting a casualty is likely to be undesirable and ineffective (often there’s vomit etc). However, if it is a family member/friend, and you know how to give ventilations effectively, then giving ‘the kiss of life’ along with compressions would be the ideal. If in doubt, leave it out!

The British Heart Foundation is urging people to forget “mouth-to-mouth” and to concentrate on chest compressions when performing CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation). Hands-only CPR" has previously been supported by the Resuscitation Council UK. The idea is now being promoted in a new public information campaign featuring “footballer” turned “actor” Vinnie Jones.

No kissing, just hard CPR.

CPR works for pigs – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22205006

Evidence that CPR can electrically stimulate – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22177000

Medical research doesn’t know what the optimal compression depth is (might be > 50 mm) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22202708