Mark Conner's Space

Evaluating Vitamins and Supplements

Ok, so how many vitamins and/or supplements do you take each day? Personally, I take a few tablets with my breakfast each morning - fish oil, vitamin D, and a men's multi-vitamin. The fish oil (Omega 3) helps to keep my cholesterol down a bit and the Vitamin D gives me a little extra energy, especially since I work mainly indoors and don't get a lot of sunshine. A few years back I took some supplements but found them so expensive to buy and I didn't really notice that much difference in my energy levels. 

So do they make a difference? Are they worth the cost?

An interesting article recently appeared in the October 10th edition of TIME magazine, telling the story of John Cloud who took 3,000 supplements over five months (22 pills a day), then took a battery of tests to see what really happened. A total of 31 measurements were taken - before and after. Remarkably, only two of the values on his blood report had changed significantly. There was a 75% vitamin D increase (due to a vitamin D3 supplement he had been taking) and an increase in the level of his good cholestoral - HDL (due to the 2,000 mg fish oil concentrate tablet he had taken). Absolutely, nothing else had changed!

Amazingly, John felt different - healthier and more robust. But his blood hadn't changed, meaning that a strong placebo response had occurred. This resulted in a licensing effect (which nutritionists call 'compensation') which caused him to change his routine. Because he was feeling a little better and woke up with more energy, his eating habits took a bit of a dive, as did his exercise routine.

The conclusion of the study was that a normal diet with adequate exercise is all that the average person needs to be healthy. Good health is not a series of tablets to take but rather is a series of responsibilities to meet - water instead of soda, a piece of fruit instead of chips, and real fish instead of a giant fish-oil capsule.You can take vitamins on the faith that they will make you better - and if you have a real vitamin deficiency, they will. But there's more science behind another way of getting your vitamins - eating right.  

Some interesting facts:

• It is estimated that Americans spent $28 billion on dietary supplements last year. The figure was only $11 billion in 1995.
• No government agency catalogs (let alone tests) dietary supplements. Since 1994, the FDA has not approved the safety or efficacy of even ONE supplement.
• Safety isn't the real problem with nutraceuticals, most of which are harmless. Instead, effectiveness is the issue: many supplements may not do enough to be worth the money. 
• The nutraceutical market is growing fast amongst aging boomers. Usana made $565 million in revenue last year, GNC made $1.93 billion and Pfizer earns $68 billion annually.
• In the 1940s, Dr. Ernst Boas, a famous Columbian University cardiologist, called the vitamin business, "the damnest racket every perpetuated upon the public."
• Whether nutraceuticals improve health - and how - is a matter of enormous scientific enquiry. Click here to read one a recent article on this hot topic.

Stephen Hawking Ridicules Belief in Life after Death

Stephen Hawking, popular British physicist and author, recently dismissed the notion of life after death (Time Magazine - May 30th, 2011 - p.5). He said, "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers. That is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark." 

My response: maybe rationalism is a fairy tale story for those people who are afraid to believe in God because he may hold us accountable for our lives, meaning that our choices have eternal consequences.

Star Gazing

I have always loved the night sky. The array of stars and planets, and even our own moon, make for fun gazing. I remember as a kid driving out in the country and being stunned at how bright the sky can be.

David wrote about this in Psalm 8 ...

When I look at the night sky and see the work of your fingers — the moon and the stars you set in place — what are people that you should think about them, mere mortals that you should care for them? Yet you made them only a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor. [Psalm 8:3-5. NLT]

A few years ago my wife bought me a telescope from an on-line auction and I'm just getting into using it a bit more. We live a little further out of town now so the night sky is brighter than what it is in suburbia. You can even see a great deal with the naked eye and even more with a basic pair of binoculars.

There is an excellent computer program called Stellarium for those who like to learn a bit more about the night sky. You can download it here for free. Click here to access a web site which is a good beginner's guide to astronomy.

The Lord counts the stars and calls them all by name. How great is our Lord! His power is absolute! His understanding is beyond comprehension! NLT [Psalm 147:4-5]

 

The Amazing Human Body (Pt.2)

Here are a some more interesting facts about the human body ...

42. There is more bacteria in your mouth than the human population of the United States and Canada combined.

43. Every square inch of the human body has an average of 32 million bacteria on it.

44. A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months

45. You sit on the biggest muscle in your body, the gluteus maximus a.k.a. the butt. Each of the two cheeky muscles tips the scales at about two pounds (not including the overlying fat layer).

46. The tiniest muscle, the stapedius of the middle ear, is just one-fifth of an inch long.

47. The average human head weighs about 10 pounds.

48. The average human brain weighs three pounds.

49. The DNA helix measures 80 billionths of an inch wide.

50. Your eyeballs are three and a half percent salt.

51. Head lice actually prefer to live on clean heads, not on dirty ones.

52. If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33. She would stand seven feet, two inches tall and have a neck twice the length of a normal human's neck.

53. It takes about 20 seconds for a red blood cell to circle the whole body.

54. An average human drinks about 16,000 gallons of water in a lifetime.

55. Beards are the fastest growing hairs on the human body. If the average man never trimmed his beard, it would grow to nearly 30 feet long in his lifetime.

56. Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour - about 1.5 pounds a year. By 70 years of age, an average person will have lost 105 pounds of skin.

57. It only takes 7 lbs of pressure to rip your ear off.

58. When you sneeze, all your bodily functions stop - even your heart.

59. Human teeth are almost as hard as rocks.

60. You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching T.V.

The Amazing Human Body (Pt.1)

In one of my favourite Psalms, David says this to God:

"You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother's womb.
Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous — how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed." [Psalms 139:13-16. NLT]

A friend of mine sent me these interesting facts about the human body ...

1. The average red blood cell lives for 120 days.

2. There are 2.5 trillion (give or take) of red blood cells in your body at any moment. To maintain this number, about two and a half million new ones need to be produced every second by your bone marrow. That's like a new population of the city of Toronto every second.

3. Considering all the tissues and cells in your body, 25 million new cells are being produced each second. That's a little more than the population of Australia - every second !

4. A red blood cell can circumnavigate your body in under 20 seconds.

5. Nerve Impulses travel at over 400 km/hr (25 miles/hr).

6. A sneeze generates a wind of 166 km/hr (100 miles/hr), and a cough moves out at 100 km/hr (60 miles/hr).

7. Our heart beats around 100,00 times every day.

8. Our blood is on a 60,000-mile journey.

9. Our eyes can distinguish up to one million colour surfaces and take in more information than the largest telescope known to man.

10. Our lungs inhale over two million litres of air every day, without even thinking.

11. We give birth to 100 billion red cells every day.

12. When we touch something, we send a message to our brain at 124 mph.

13. We exercise at least 30 muscles when we smile.

14. We are about 70 percent water.

15. We make one litre of saliva a day.

16. Our nose is our personal air-conditioning system: it warms cold air, cools hot air and filters impurities.

17. In one square inch of our hand we have nine feet of blood vessels, 600 pain sensors, 9000 nerve endings, 36 heat sensors and 75 pressure sensors.

18. We have copper, zinc, cobalt, calcium, manganese, phosphates, nickel and silicon in our bodies.

19. It is believed that the main purpose of eyebrows is to keep sweat out of the eyes.

20. A person can expect to breathe in about 40 pounds of dust over his/her lifetime.