How Can You Be Healthy When You Aren't Even Awake?

Dr. Janet Bond Brill, Blood Pressure Down: The 10-Step Plan to Lower Your Blood Pressure in 4 Weeks--Without Prescription Drugs

Forgive my rush to the conclusion, spilling Dr. Brill’s thesis first: Americans, and increasingly other peoples too, are just not conscious of what we put in our bodies. We eat packaged filth because it’s easier than thinking about food or paying attention to health effects. We don’t cook at home, and we don’t ask about what goes into the recipe. As a result, hypertension now sits at epidemic levels.

High blood pressure afflicts around a third of Americans. Worse, it’s a ripple effect disease. People with hypertension have higher risk of heart disease, kidney disease, stroke, and certain cancers—many of the most common causes of preventable death. Doctors habitually treat hypertension with drugs, which aren’t worthless, but don’t do everything. According to Brill, solutions and preventions exist which don’t involve costly medical interventions.

I’m old enough to remember when everyone thought they could control blood pressure by watching their salt. But Brill, a nutritionist with specialization in cardiovascular disease, collates the latest science suggesting that salt is only one part of a much larger machine. Many of us regularly consume foods that, in small amounts, keep us running, but in large quantities, bog us down. And we think we’re eating healthy.

For instance, what foods hit you with the greatest sodium content? Did you say potato chips or french fries? While nobody should mistake these foods for healthful, foods which taste salty are often a fairly low sodium risk, because sodium forms compounds besides salt. Most packaged bread and cheese contains more sodium than salty-tasting foods. Same with commercial sauces, marinades, and salad dressings. Many supposedly healthy foods are hypertension bombs.

More important than just one element, though, Brill emphasizes the interaction of complex forces on human health. Many readers flinch at books like this because authors inevitably recommend weight loss. Yes, so does Brill. She urges readers to lose five pounds in four weeks, not an unreasonable standard. Many of us can lose five pounds by using stairs rather than elevators, taking a daily walk, and biking on weekends.

Once we’ve committed to weight loss and sodium control, Brill graduates to foods she wants us to consume more. If Americans get too much sodium, we get too little magnesium, potassium, and calcium. Brill goes into the science, but the thumbnail version goes thus: human physiology is optimized (whether by evolution, God, or whatever) for environments where sodium is rare, but other elements are common. That doesn’t describe today’s society.

Less bread, more bananas. Less cheese, more yogurt. Brill’s DASH Diet—Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension—isn’t about self denial. She stresses establishing good habits, including what fresh or nutritionally packed ingredients she wants us to introduce. This includes, no kidding, red wine and dark chocolate. But it does require one sacrifice: Brill wants us to cook and eat our meals at home.

Much take-out or delivery food relies heavily on bread, cheese, and cured meat. The preparation process for these foods requires heavy infusion of sodium, including salt and baking soda, to ensure long, stable shelf life. Moreover, storage strips these foods of necessary nutrients. Many people, including me, fail to check nutrition labels on packaged convenience foods, and wouldn’t dare ask restaurants for nutrition details. Remaining unconscious to consequences is easier.

The main body of Brill’s book emphasizes the science underlying her prescriptions. She says readers can cherry-pick which chapters they want to read, but I strongly recommend reading all of them, because if we understand why we make a dietary choice, we’ll resist the desire to stray. By combining her prescription with repercussions, Brill forces readers to remain conscious of the choices we make.

Brill moves her brass tacks to the appendices and back matter. Here she gives the checklists, charts, and nitty-gritty instructions on how to live out the plan she put in the main text. She also includes fifty pages of recipes, four weeks of nutritionally rich, flavor-packed meals that help us maintain needed bodily balances. Readers with food allergies should plan substitutions, but by just reading ahead, building healthy habits should come easily.

Look around any grocery store, and notice people tossing food blindly into baskets, looking hypnotized. Before reading this book, that was me. If that’s you, and you’re happy sleepwalking through deciding what to feed your body, avoid this book. But if you’re ready to wake up, pay attention, and take responsibility for your own health, let me introduce Janet Bond Brill. She’ll guide you to the world of attentive eating.

Werewolves In the Mist

Benjamin Percy, Red Moon: A Novel

The Lycans live among us. They could be the pretty girl at school, the quiet guy at the factory, or the person in the next seat on the plane. They are ordinary people, but they could become cold-blooded killers. Every time some isolated Lycan lashes out at the humans around them, hateful political rhetoric notches up; and with every rhetorical increase, the chance of violence grows.

Benjamin Percy won’t let readers to dismiss his werewolf novel as mere fantasy. He works hard to spotlight the political ramifications, practically grabbing readers’ lapels to demonstrate how simplistic solutions—on either side—fail to remedy a painful situation. But by keeping the focus on his nuanced, melancholy characters, he prevents it spiraling into mere drum-beating propaganda.

When Lycans attack three transcontinental airplanes, leaving a trail of dead throughout America, young Patrick Gamble survives by sheer accident. It will be the first of several times he survives by refusing to fight. But politicians don’t learn from him, and every American Lycan gets treated like a criminal because so few acted violently. Not surprisingly, previously law-abiding Lycans feel oppressed, and rebel.

One such rebel is Claire Forrester. At an age when other girls pick colleges and boyfriends, she’s on the run from the FBI, paying for her parents’ sins which she never previously knew. Now she finds herself thrust into a world of radical politics, legalized oppression, and criminal shapeshifters. She never wanted this fight, but it chose her, and she has no choice but to see it through to the end.

Meanwhile, firebrand governor Chase Williams’ knee-jerk rhetoric draws Lycan attention. One bite, and he finds himself slowly turning into the enemy he has promised to bring down. While he keeps to the old rhetoric, riding anti-Lycan sentiment into the White House, he has to take increasingly extreme measures to conceal the fact that, on full moon nights, he feels less and less like himself.

Percy juggles these three convergent narratives, and enough subplots to fuel a cast of thousands, in a mostly satisfying manner. His savage, austere language, reminiscent of Mickey Spillane or Raymond Chandler, strips away all pretense and demonstrates characters at their most raw. He manages to keep characters engaged and stories moving forward without making them feel busy.

Throughout, Percy’s story mirrors the way America has treated subsets of its population in recent years. Readers who like their political symbolism oblique may not appreciate Percy’s straight-on approach. But by removing race and religion from the limelight, Percy is able to address common, widely held concerns without having to seem pedantic or preachy.

While America deals with restive Lycans at home, American troops struggle to keep the peace in the Lycan Republic. Or, let’s say, “keep the peace,” because commanders on the ground don’t even pretend they’re there for any reason than to keep the supply lines open and raw uranium flowing back to the States. Many soldiers enter the field thinking they’re doing right, and leave with more questions than answers.

A scientist with military connections stands at the verge of inventing a cure for Lycans, a mission that gains extra urgency when President Williams needs his help to conceal his growing illness. But his own ghosts won’t let him be. And Patrick finds himself needing the professor’s help when he discovers his soldier father’s strange connection to the growing research. All society may rest on an appallingly fragile foundation.

Percy’s storytelling chops resist easy designation. Though his language makes easy reading, his non-sequential structure takes some getting used to. He may jump forward several months without warning, leaving us hanging for pages before closing the gaps in flashback. His characters’ penchant for long bouts of introspection come across as either touching or tedious, depending on your taste.

And while Percy makes a good novelist, he’s less of a fantasist. His unnecessary attempt at a scientific justification for Lycans just thuds, leading to scattered moments of unintentional comedy. It feels as though, in moments of visceral terror, he forgets that horror is as horror does. He feels that he ought to explain, which isn’t his strong suit; he’s far, far better at creating characters and situations.

These problems notwithstanding, Percy creates a smart, engaging allegory that rewards attentive audiences. His structural complexity does not let us read this as a “mere” novel, demanding we read with our critical faculties engaged. Diligent readers will find plenty to like in this book that reads smoothly, but refuses to let readers down easy.

Who Are U?

Jeffrey J. Selingo, College (Un)bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

Let us start with a statement college professors, homeschool advocates, and Jeffrey Selingo can surely agree upon: American higher education is too expensive. Budget cuts have jacked tuition, schools spend scarce resources outside the classroom, administrative roles have become patronage plums, and deregulated loans put many working-class students in debt they may never beat. The question becomes: what do we do about it?

Books like this one matter, not because they attempt to answer the question, but because they advance the debate. No 250-page book can truly address all the options. Believe me, several noble attempts have crossed my desk. But they inevitably reflect the authors’ preferences for what American education should resemble. Therein, maybe, lies the problem, that American higher ed has become perilously homogenous.

Selingo, a respected educational journalist, addresses the question from multiple angles, gathering diverse sources with divergent views, reflecting real trends in recent debate. Because he addresses so much, I find myself swinging wildly. At one moment, I pump my fist and shout “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Then the next moment, I palm my face and mutter “No! No! No!” Then I ask myself the real question: why do I feel so strongly?

Education, Selingo says, has suffered in the last decade from a “race to the top” that involves little actual educational content. Highly groomed campuses and pricey sports championships attract new enrollees and alumni donations. But colleges, particularly private colleges, have offset these expenses by hiring adjunct instructors, concentrating efforts on grant-earning grad students, and packing undergrads into lecture halls of questionable pedagogical value.

We could reverse such trends by re-evaluating what education is for. The emphasis on defined disciplines and mandatory curricular trajectories is cost-effective and requires little effort from professors. Prestige majors with putative professional applications lock students into career tracks early. Instead, we should recall that employers, and society, love college grads not for their subject mastery, but for their wide-ranging ability to face new and unprecedented challenges.

I’ve made similar claims myself. But where the rubber meets the road, Selingo has a frustrating tendency to get giddy over unproven options. He especially shares contemporary reformers’ uncritical love for technology. Selingo writes: “Every new study of online learning arrives at essentially the same conclusion: students who take all or part of their classes online perform better than those who take the same course through traditional instruction.”

That’s just not true. Earlier this year, Selingo’s own magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, wrote: “Online Courses Could Widen Achievement Gap Among Students.” The more online courses students take, the greater their dropout risk. This especially applies to minorities, men, and students less prepared for the rigors of self-guided education. Multiple studies in multiple sources confirm this.

Consider: Selingo praises Thrun and Norvig’s celebrated 2011 online Stanford course that attracted 160,000 enrollees worldwide. But according to his own numbers, this class had a completion rate of only 13.75%, barely a third of Fairleigh-Dickinson University’s graduation rate, which Selingo calls “dismal.” Sure, a thousand students got job referrals, but would you pay to enroll in such a class for a one-in-160 chance of professional advancement?

In fairness, Selingo repeatedly ventures in the right direction, but not far enough. He drops a one-sentence reference to St. John’s College of Annapolis and Santa Fe, which is one more sentence than I’ve seen elsewhere. Schools like St. John’s, Deep Springs, and Reed College, which soften or eliminate disciplinary divisions, graduate high numbers of desirable employees. Why not more in this direction?

Similarly, Selingo makes a fleeting reference to competencies earned through “internships outside of the classroom.” I’ve often suggested students could benefit from non-classroom education, particularly vocational students who could learn their fields faster through old-fashioned apprenticeship. I know research exists on this, because I’ve read it in authors like John Taylor Gatto. But Selingo just name-drops it and walks away.

Don’t mistake me. Despite my critical tone above, Selingo says plenty I think educators could stand to hear. We need to remain responsive to our students, providing personalized education that works around especially working-class students’ needs. And we must eschew discipline-based “skillz drillz,” instead empowering students’ higher reasoning ability. I may dispute Selingo’s details, but his thesis is spot on.

On balance, I do recommend this book as part of a balanced library on what necessary reforms await American higher ed. We may embrace his principles while rejecting his brass tacks. I simply encourage any would-be readers to approach this book with their critical thinking cap on.

On a similar topic:
Living For the New U
The Next University

The Perils of Unsanctioned Thought in School

Kiera Wilmot

By now, you probably know Kiera Wilmot’s story. This past Monday, Wilmot, 16, and an unnamed peer combined aluminum foil and toilet bowl cleaner in a closed bottle to see what happens. This is called a “works bomb,” for obvious reasons, and when the bomb worked, Wilmot got escorted off school grounds in handcuffs. Now the former straight-A student has been expelled, though her expulsion remains eligible for appeal.

Mere days later, Wilmot has become a cause célèbre, attracting attention especially for the way schools treat seemingly minor infractions from minority students. A well-liked student at a middle class Southern high school, Wilmot was treated like a criminal for reproducing a chemical reaction so simple that it’s often used as demonstration fodder in classrooms. But the racial aspect may be this story’s least interesting implication.

Nobody should deny that Wilmot’s experiment was dangerous. Garage scientists have been grievously harmed building similar devices. But all learning carries inherent risk. I once sloppily took the push block off a sheet of plywood I’d just cut in shop class, letting the wood kick backward across the circular blade, right into my groin. Half an inch to the right, and my dreams of starting a family would have ended before they began.


I care more about the attitude some, including the school, show regarding this incident’s pedagogical value. Where I see a classic teachable moment, when teachers and administrators could discuss the value of safety management and personal protection, many jump straight to seeing this as a crime. One Facebook friend commented: “Her blowing up a water bottle had nothing to do with any class she was in. To blow stuff up at school, out of curiosity, that's ok?”

I find the presumption in this comment telling. To this person, “science” happens in Science Class, under credentialed supervision. “Experiments” should not be undertaken unless outcomes are predictable. “Curiosity” has nothing to do with learning, unless teachers can channel it into approved curriculum. Students should essentially sit down, shut up, and receive information from on high.

Thank God this killjoy didn’t govern the schools I attended. I attempted many experiments that, under today’s Zero Tolerance regime, could have gotten me jailed. I remember multiple occasions, under teachers’ watchful gaze, when I literally mixed two chemicals grabbed at random in a corked test tube over a Bunsen burner. I only quit my childhood dream of becoming a scientist when I realized it’s damned hard to explode a test tube.

America today suffers an epidemic of Magical Thinking. Far from a mere buzzword, Magical Thinking is a technical term describing what happens when people see events as essentially disconnected, happening without cause. They refuse, for instance, to acknowledge links between cigarettes and cancer, or between burning hydrocarbons and climate change. We project our thoughts onto the world, rather than subjecting thoughts to evidence.

This manifests most prominently in a form of religious conservatism that rejects empirical evidence which does not accord with beliefs. Some Christians, for instance, wholly discount evolutionary biology, because it differs from the Genesis creation. To bolster these positions, Magical Thinkers mine scientific texts for evidence of any contradiction whatsoever. For such people, science is not a process, but the words which dribble from scientists’ mouths, or pens.

Richard  Feynman

Scientists, by definition, doubt. That does not mean they disbelieve, but they want someone, possibly themselves, to subject any position to tests before accepting it. While about half of American scientists say they subscribe to some religious creed, they do not receive beliefs passively; they examine texts, evidence, and lived experience to the point where, as Richard Feynman puts it, they reduce doubt to the smallest possible level.

Feynman made his name on the Manhattan Project. While there, he determined—against majority opinion—that nuclear flash blindness was manageable, not necessarily permanent. To prove it, though his evidence was not absolute, he sat in the cab of a pickup truck, shielded only by the tinted windscreen, to watch Operation Trinity, the first nuclear explosion. He thus became the only person to look directly at a nuclear fireball without going blind.

Kiera Wilmot, like Richard Feynman, wanted to know. So, though her evidence was incomplete, she made an effort. And for such unsanctioned curiosity, she may have a permanent black mark on her record. But American education has something far worse. It now has an open confession, on the public record, that mandatory schooling isn’t about learning, it’s about obedience. Learn without permission at your own risk.


On a related topic:
Gatto's School of Immeasurable Meaning

The American Evolution

Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution

If 1992 sounded the death knell for global communism, 2008 and the worldwide stagnation thereafter have left many disillusioned with market capitalism. Yet for generations, media, business and education have trumpeted the socialist/capitalist coin-toss so persistently, many citizens cannot imagine a third option exists. But what if a respected economist said forward thinkers have spent years building new options, right under our noses?

Maryland political economist Gar Alperovitz wants citizens to use their imaginations. We’ve become so trapped by the past, yearning for mid-20th century prosperity, that we try to recreate long-gone conditions. But neither triumphant American postwar prosperity nor aggressive liberal reforms are likely to recur, because the conditions that existed, roughly from 1930 to 1966, will never reappear. We may praise the past, but we must look to the future.

According to Alperovitz, the spectre of failed state socialism keeps economic discussion, left and right, beholden to corporate capitalism. Whether conservatives would use money as a barometer of virtue and entrust governance to the wealthy, or liberals want government and organized labor to provide counterweight to corporate power, we nevertheless assume corporate might is somehow normal. We have let a minority narrow our thinking.

Instead, Alperovitz calls attention to maverick innovators on the edges of our economy. As early as the 1970’s, trailblazers pioneered new approaches to ownership, industry, and democratic wealth. When workers engineered an unprecedented buyout of a floundering Ohio steel mill, Alperovitz was there, helping them forge a new kind of corporate charter. Alperovitz witnessed the rise of agricultural co-ops, pathbreaking land trusts, and philanthropic investing.

Alperovitz calls this a “checkerboard strategy.” Instead of waiting for national intervention, economic innovators focus on one town, area, or economic sector. Their innovations may reach as small as one business, or as large as an interstate compact. But they share common goals of transforming the way business, government, and people respond to the ever-changing needs of a volatile globalized economy.

At first blush, such pathbreakers have a long fight ahead. Looking around, we see stagnant global economies where long-term unemployment and bleak prospects have become normal. We can say, without exaggeration, that inequality has hit medieval levels. It’s easy to wallow in our own gloom. Alperovitz admits, “All of us have a vested interest in pessimism. We don’t have to do anything if nothing can be done!”

Realistic, ambitious attempts at economic reform have repeatedly failed because activists have put their trust in politicians and policy. That succeeded during the New Deal and Great Society due to unique historical circumstances. Today, kowtowing to politicians will help little, because government policy is part of the broken, lopsided system. Politics can do little about a society hobbled by more workers than work, and massively undemocratic concentrations of wealth.

But faced with such circumstances, some individuals and communities refuse to cave. They prove the long-term viability of collaborative business models and public-private hybrids. They invest money into new industries, even during recession, and draft new business categories driven by what Alperovitz calls a “triple-bottom-line” model: people, planet, and profits. They stare in the eye of economic despair and answer, “No.”

Alperovitz doesn’t waste readers’ time with pie-in-the-sky notions of how economies ought to run. He focuses instead on how dauntless innovators have successfully built new economic models that should serve to inspire millions to seize their own futures. Looking forward, Alperovitz challenges us to imagine ways we can build upon these successes, forging a society of democratic wealth and renewed community.

These suggestions don’t come easy. Alperovitz doesn’t promise quick fixes. Quite the contrary, he emphasizes the generational nature of his suggestions. We intend to build new social nstitutions that serve the greater good, Alperovitz repeatedly avers. The biennial focus on elections permits others to control our lives. Such essential surrender has successfully stripped democracy from our treasured democratic institutions.

Instead, Alperovitz extols visionary new ways we can assert power autonomously. While nobody can predict the future, we have the choice whether we let the future roll over us, or take a steering hand ourselves. We can continue along our current path, circumscribed by the options others offer. Or we can, in small and growing ways, blaze our own trail.

America is Earth’s richest, largest, most populous nation, which Alperovitz stresses repeatedly. The experiments we undertake don’t stop at our own borders. We have the choice: a new, democratic economy, or more of the same, with the disastrous consequences we see around us. Our past does not control our future.