Lacey Brown Hairstyle

Credit: Michael Becker/FOX

Lacey Brown, I love the look, soulfoul voice, she's cute and I love her hair too.
Her rendition of "What a Wonderful World" from Hollywood round was great and very endearing and what a great attitude about not getting through last year. I really liked Megan Joy (who got thru instead of her) but Megan didn't quite deliver although she was good. I'm glad Lacey was given another chance this week. Some people say her hairstyle is called "The Suspicious Duchess".

Must Watch - What A Wonderful World

Lacey Brown - Somewhere Over the Rainbow Audition

Corn Oil and Cancer: Reality Strikes Again

The benefits of corn oil keep rolling in. In a new study by Stephen Freedland's group at Duke, feeding mice a diet rich in butter and lard didn't promote the growth of transplanted human prostate cancer cells any more than a low-fat diet (1).

Why do we care? Because other studies, including one from the same investigators, show that corn oil and other industrial seed oils strongly promote prostate cancer cell growth and increase mortality in similar models (2, 3).

From the discussion section:

Current results combined with our prior results suggest that lowering the fat content of a primarily saturated fat diet offers little survival benefit in an intact or castrated LAPC-4 xenograft model. In contrast to the findings when omega-6 fats are used, these results raise the possibility that fat type may be as important as fat amount or perhaps even more important.

The authors seem somewhat surprised and pained by the result. Kudos for publishing it. However, there's nothing to be surprised about. There's a large body of evidence implicating excess omega-6 fat in a number of cancer models. Reducing omega-6 to below 4% of calories has a dramatic effect on cancer incidence and progression*. In fact, there have even been several experiments showing that butter and other animal fats promote cancer growth to a lesser degree than margarine and omega-6-rich seed oils. I discussed that here.

I do have one gripe with the study. They refer to the diet as "saturated fat based". That's inaccurate terminology. I see it constantly in the diet-health literature. If it were coconut oil, then maybe I could excuse it, because coconut fat is 93% saturated. But this diet was made of lard and butter, the combination of which is probably about half saturated. The term "animal fat" or "low-omega-6 fat" would have been more accurate. At least they listed the diet composition. Many studies don't even bother, leaving it to the reader to decide what they mean by "saturated fat".


* The average American eats 7-8% omega-6 by calories. This means it will be difficult to see a relationship between omega-6 intake and cancer (or heart disease, or most things) in observational studies in the US or other industrial nations, because we virtually all eat more than 4% of calories as omega-6. Until the 20th century, omega-6 intake was below 4%, and usually closer to 2%, in most traditional societies. That's where it remains in contemporary traditional societies unaffected by industrial food habits, such as Kitava. Our current omega-6 intake is outside the evolutionary norm.

Lindeberg on Obesity

I'm currently reading Dr. Staffan Lindeberg's magnum opus Food and Western Disease, recently published in English for the first time. Dr. Lindeberg is one of the world's leading experts on the health and diet of non-industrial cultures, particularly in Papua New Guinea. The book contains 2,034 references. It's also full of quotable statements. Here's what he has to say about obesity:

Middle-age spread is a normal phenomenon - assuming you live in the West. Few people are able to maintain their [youthful] waistline after age 50. The usual explanation - too little exercise and too much food - does not fully take into account the situation among traditional populations. Such people are usually not as physically active as you may think, and they usually eat large quantities of food.

Overweight has been extremely rare among hunter-gatherers and other traditional cultures [18 references]. This simple fact has been quickly apparent to all foreign visitors...

The Kitava study measured height, weight, waist circumference, subcutaneous fat thickness at the back of the upper arm (triceps skinfold) and upper arm circumference on 272 persons ages 4-86 years. Overweight and obesity were absent and average [body mass index] was low across all age groups. ...no one was larger around their waist than around their hips.

...The circumference of the upper arm [mostly indicating muscle mass] was only negligibly smaller on Kitava [compared with Sweden], which indicates that there was no malnutrition. It is obvious from our investigations that lack of food is an unknown concept, and that the surplus of fruits and vegetables regularly rots or is eaten by dogs.

The Population of Kitava occupies a unique position in the world in terms of the negligible effect that the Western lifestyle has had on the island.

The only obese Kitavans Dr. Lindeberg observed were two people who had spent several years off the island living a modern, urban lifestyle, and were back on Kitava for a visit.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who has a scholarly interest in health and nutrition, and somewhat of a background in science and medicine. It's extremely well referenced, which makes it much more valuable.

Scene Hair with Side Bangs

Scene Hair with Side Bangs

Scenesters can be seen all over the popular downtown malls and coffee joints wearing bumpy and stylish hairstyles and colorful headbands. Scene hair with side bangs covering one side of the face or slightly falling over the forehead is a little new trend among the scenesters. In fact, it was one of the most popular fad in emo boys and girls. However, scene boys and girls have also started to develop a liking for scene hair with side bangs.

Scene girls sporting scene hair with side bangs look more beautiful and hip as compared to emo girls, maybe, the scene girls know how to make their bangs and fringes more stylish and more colorful. Scene girls often try out different variations of bangs including short bangs with blunted ends and bobs with bangs, which makes it possible for them to look awesome and gorgeous. Scene hair with side bangs is more popular among scene girls and therefore, scene kids and scene boys with side bangs are less common on the streets.

Scene Hair with Side Bangs

Dissolve Away those Pesky Bones with Corn Oil

I just read an interesting paper from Gabriel Fernandes's group at the University of Texas. It's titled "High fat diet-induced animal model of age-associated obesity and osteoporosis". I was expecting this to be the usual "we fed mice industrial lard for 60% of calories and they got sick" paper, but I was pleasantly surprised. From the introduction:

CO [corn oil] is known to promote bone loss, obesity, impaired glucose tolerance, insulin resistance and thus represents a useful model for studying the early stages in the development of obesity, hyperglycemia, Type 2 diabetes [23] and osteoporosis. We have used omega-6 fatty acids enriched diet as a fat source which is commonly observed in today's Western diets basically responsible for the pathogenesis of many diseases [24].

Just 10% of the diet as corn oil (roughly 20% of calories), with no added omega-3, on top of an otherwise poor laboratory diet, caused:

• Obesity
• Osteoporosis
• The replacement of bone marrow with fat cells
  
• Diabetes
• Insulin resistance
  
• Generalized inflammation
• Elevated liver weight (possibly indicating fatty liver)
  

Hmm, some of these sound familiar... We can add them to the findings that omega-6 also promotes various types of cancer in rodents (1).

20% fat is less than the amount it typically takes to make a rodent this sick. This leads me to conclude that corn oil is particularly good at causing mouse versions of some of the most common facets of the "diseases of civilization". It's exceptionally high in omega-6 (linoleic acid) with virtually no omega-3.

Make sure to eat your heart-healthy corn oil! It's made in the USA, dirt cheap and it even lowers cholesterol!

Scene Hairstyles Trends 2010

Scene Hairstyles Trends 2010

Razor cut scene hairstyles that were very popular in 2009 have lost its charm in the year 2010. On the fashion radar of scene hairstyles in 2010, you can notice newer trends that are very much bold catching attention of scenesters as well as other fashion forward crowds. Some of the latest scene hairstyles trends in 2010 display similarities with the growing trends of short hairstyles in the celebrity world.

Once upon a time, it was said that regardless of the season or year, scene girls hairstyles reflect the same styles and trends year over year. However, the reality is different from the rumors and speculations. That is why, don't be surprised if come across a scene girl wearing cutest medium long curly scene hairstyles with pink and chocolate colored streaks on their hair. Yes, the year 2010 is witnessing enormous changes in the world of haircuts and hairstyles fashions of scene girls as well as scene boys and scene kids.

Scene Hairstyles Trends 2010

Scene Hairstyles Trends 2010

Scene Hairstyles Trends 2010

Scene Hairstyles Trends 2010

Scene Hairstyles Trends 2010

Scene Hairstyles Trends 2010

Scene Hairstyles Trends 2010

The Emo Subculture

Emo, is a term which is given to the subculture of hardcore punk and pop, which originated from the Washington DC area, but which later spread like wildfire to the rest of the US and also to other parts of the world. Emo has since evolved into a musical and fashion experience which is embraced by quite a number of young adherents.

The word “Emo” actually originated from the term "emocore" which refers to the hardcore punk music scene which started in the mid-1980s. The term is a variation of the word "emotive hardcore", which is what the bands in the DC area sounded like. They have developed a unique punk-rock style of music, which blended the characteristics of the electric guitar with smooth sounded mellow tracks, which are typically screamed from the top of the lungs, hence the term emotive hardcore. Amongst the bands which pioneered this genre were groups such as One Last Wish, Embrace, Fire Party and Moss Icon.

The Emo subculture is also heavily influenced by the Indie scene, with the likes of people such as Fugazi heading off the first wave of Emo, with bands which included Far and Texas Is The Reason, which pumped Indie music into the Emo subculture.

The sound feels more like a chaotic blend of instruments laced with emotional singing which emanates deep inside the lungs. This attracts crowds of young people. Their chants and raves have become characteristic as far as Emo concerts are concerned. These concerts have in turn become some of the most vibrant in the entire rock industry.

The Emo culture is not all about music however. There are fashion statements and stereotypes associated with the Emo subculture which spread to other facets of culture. Black is considered the color of choice in the Emo universe and it permeates almost all aspects of the Emo dress code. The hair is typically dyed jet-black, and in some instances it is spiked and can contain other colors as well. For the ladies, black nail polish is also widely used. In the Emo world, make-up is utilized by both males and females.

There is now a wide range of products which cater to the needs of the Emo subculture. Cities such as Austin have fully embraced it and have great places which have an Emo theme such as restaurants, record stores and other joints. It is now common to even see special clothing lines, merchandise, toys and even TV programs and movies. Today, the Emo subculture has caught influences from both pop and rock and is beginning to be accepted as a lifestyle choice.

Saturated Fat and Insulin Sensitivity

Insulin sensitivity is a measure of the tissue response to insulin. Typically, it refers to insulin's ability to cause tissues to absorb glucose from the blood. A loss of insulin sensitivity, also called insulin resistance, is a core part of the metabolic disorder that affects many people in industrial nations.

I don't know how many times I've seen the claim in journal articles and on the internet that saturated fat reduces insulin sensitivity. The idea is that saturated fat reduces the body's ability to handle glucose effectively, placing people on the road to diabetes, obesity and heart disease. Given the "selective citation disorder" that plagues the diet-health literature, perhaps this particular claim deserves a closer look.

The Evidence

I found a review article from 2008 that addressed this question (1). I like this review because it only includes high-quality trials that used reliable methods of determining insulin sensitivity*.

On to the meat of it. There were 5 studies in which non-diabetic people were fed diets rich in saturated fat, and compared with a group eating a diet rich in monounsaturated (like olive oil) or polyunsaturated (like corn oil) fat. They ranged in duration from one week to 3 months. Four of the five studies found that fat quality did not affect insulin sensitivity, including one of the 3-month studies.

The fifth study, which is the one that's nearly always cited in the diet-health literature, requires some discussion. This was the KANWU study (2). Over the course of three months, investigators fed 163 volunteers a diet rich in either saturated fat or monounsaturated fat.

The SAFA diet included butter and a table margarine containing a relatively high proportion of SAFAs. The MUFA diet included a spread and a margarine containing high proportions of oleic acid derived from high-oleic sunflower oil and negligible amounts of trans fatty acids and n-3 fatty acids and olive oil.

Yummy. After three months of these diets, there was no significant difference in insulin sensitivity between the saturated fat group and the monounsaturated fat group. Yes, you read that right. Even the study that's selectively cited as evidence that saturated fat causes insulin resistance found no significant difference between the diets. You might not get this by reading the misleading abstract. I'll be generous and acknowledge that the (small) difference was almost statistically significant (p = 0.053).

What the authors decided to focus on instead is the fact that insulin sensitivity declined slightly but significantly on the saturated fat diet compared with the pre-diet baseline. That's why this study is cited as evidence that saturated fat impairs insulin sensitivity. But anyone who has a basic science background will see where this reasoning is flawed (warning: nerd attack. skip the rest of the paragraph if you're not interested). You need a control group for comparison, to take into account normal fluctuations caused by such things as the season, eating mostly cafeteria food, and having a doctor hooking you up to machines. That control group was the group eating monounsaturated fat. The comparison between diet groups was the 'primary outcome', in statistics lingo. That's the comparison that matters, and it wasn't significant. To interpret the study otherwise is to ignore the basic conventions of statistics, which the authors were happy to do. There's a name for it: 'moving the goalpost'. The reviewers shouldn't have let this kind of shenanigans slide.

So we have five studies through 2008, none of which support the idea that saturated fat reduces insulin sensitivity in non-diabetics. Since the review paper was published, I know of one subsequent study that asked the same question (3). Susan J. van Dijk and colleagues fed volunteers with abdominal overweight (beer gut) a diet rich in either saturated fat or monounsaturated fat. I e-mailed the senior author and she said the saturated fat diet was "mostly butter". The specific fats used in the diets weren't mentioned anywhere in the paper, which is a major omission**. In any case, after 8 weeks, insulin sensitivity was virtually identical between the two groups. This study appeared well controlled and used the gold standard method for assessing insulin sensitivity, called the euglycemic-hyperinsulinemic clamp technique***.

The evidence from controlled trials is rather consistent that saturated fat has no appreciable effect on insulin sensitivity.

Why Are We so Focused on Saturated Fat?

Answer: because it's the nutrient everyone loves to hate. As an exercise in completeness, I'm going to mention three dietary factors that actually reduce insulin sensitivity, and get a lot less air time than saturated fat.

#1: Caffeine. That's right, controlled trials show that your favorite murky beverage reduces insulin sensitivity (4, 5). Is it actually relevant to real life? I doubt it. The doses used were large and the studies short-term.

#2: Magnesium deficiency. A low-magnesium diet reduced insulin sensitivity by 25% over the course of three weeks (6). I think this is probably relevant to long-term insulin sensitivity and overall health, although it would be good to have longer-term data. Magnesium deficiency is widespread in industrial nations, due to our over-reliance on refined foods such as sugar, white flour and oils.

#3: Sugar. Fructose reduces insulin sensitivity in humans, along with many other harmful effects (7).

As long as we continue to focus our energy on indicting saturated fat, it will continue distracting us from the real causes of disease.


* For the nerds: euglycemic-hyperinsulinemic clamp (the gold standard), insulin suppression test, or intravenous glucose tolerance test with Minimal Model. They didn't include studies that reported HOMA as their only measure, because it's not very accurate.

** There's this idea that pervades the diet-health literature that all saturated fats are roughly equivalent, all monounsaturated fats are equivalent, etc., therefore it doesn't matter what the source was. This is beyond absurd and reflects our cultural obsession with saturated fat. It really irks me that the reviewers didn't demand this information.

*** They did find that markers of inflammation in fat tissue were higher after the saturated fat diet.

Scene Hair Colored Highlights

Scene Hair Colored Highlights

If you want genuine scene hairstyles with true scene highlights that looks out of this world yet modern and extremely fashionable, you must try out new scene hair colors such as purple or pink. On the scene hairstyles, you should go for scene style colored highlights, maybe, multi-colored or maybe with black or blonde scene hair and with streaks of electric blue or copper or light red. Despite all the modern color trends, blonde with black underneath is supposed to be the most common scene hair colors and scene highlights.

Stark blonde with streaks of blue or pink and fringes covering your face is another commonly liked scene haircut styles. Nowadays, on the scene blogs and scene related social media platforms such as Bebo, you can find lots of tips, suggestions, ideas and the latest trends in vogue for scene girls and scene boys. Even the mainstream girls often look out Bebo for searching the latest fads in scene hair colored highlights and scene haircut styles.

Scene Hair Colored Highlights

Scene Hair Colored Highlights

Thank You

I'd like to extend my sincere thanks to everyone who has supported me through donations this year. The money has allowed me to buy materials that I wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford, and I feel it has enriched the blog for everyone. Here are some of the books I've bought using donations. Some were quite expensive:

Food and western disease: health and nutrition from an evolutionary perspective. Staffan Lindeberg (just released!!)

Nutrition and disease. Edward Mellanby

Migration and health in a small society: the case of Tokelau. Edited by Albert F. Wessen

The saccharine disease. T. L. Cleave

Culture, ecology and dental anthropology. John R. Lukacs

Vitamin K in health and disease. John W. Suttie

Craniofacial development. Geoffrey H. Sperber

Western diseases: their emergence and prevention. Hugh C. Trowell and Denis P. Burkitt

The ultimate omega-3 diet. Evelyn Tribole

Our changing fare. John Yudkin and colleagues


Donations have also paid for many, many photocopies at the medical library. I'd also like to thank everyone who participates in the community by leaving comments, or by linking to my posts. I appreciate your encouragement, and also the learning opportunities.

Short emo hairstyle

Short emo hairstyle like Adam Gontier.