Messege from Dr Lau : Book Update

I need your feedback…

I know as regular writers of e-mails, we simply sit down at the keyboard and strike whatever comes to mind. This approach often leads to rambling thoughts. But as book writers, we have to follow logical steps of prewriting, brainstorming, writing, and organizing, revising for style, and proofreading.

That’s where I need your help. Although bounded by the content, shape, and form our writing can take, writing provides us with opportunity to alter, perhaps only incrementally, the statements we make about communication and the way in which we make those statements. I want to be able to do that with my book through your feedback and suggestions for improvement.

I think, inviting readers’ feedback for a book is the most crucial requirement. This kind of a discourse is essential to counter redundancy, discrepancy and fix issues related to flow, accuracy and consistency.

As Foucault argues in The Archeology of Knowledge (1972) and Power/Knowledge (1980) discourse generates, produces, and transforms our organizational realities. Discourse makes us and the world around us; it is a form of power and control.

Alternative Medicine Goes Mainstream

In the Wall Street Journal article linked below, Deepak Chopra explains how mainstream acceptance of what is now considered “alternative” medicine could revolutionize U.S. healthcare.

In mid-February, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences will convene a "Summit on Integrative Medicine and the Health of the Public." This could be a watershed in the evolution of integrative medicine, a holistic approach to health care that uses the best of conventional and alternative therapies.

Many “alternative” therapies are now scientifically documented to be not only medically effective, but also cost effective. To make affordable health care available to the 45 million Americans who do not have health insurance, it is important to address the real and fundamental causes of health and illness, and provide incentives for healthy ways of living rather than just drugs and surgery.

Heart disease, diabetes, prostate cancer, breast cancer and obesity account for 75 percent of health-care costs, and all of these are largely preventable and even reversible by changing diet and lifestyle.

Sources:
Wall Street Journal January 9, 2009

Sleepless Nights Means More Colds

People who sleep less than seven hours a night are three times as likely to catch a cold.

A new study supports the theory that sleep is important to immune function. Volunteers who spent less time in bed were much more likely to catch a cold when viruses were dripped into their noses. People who slept longer and more soundly resisted infection better.

Researchers tested more than 150 healthy volunteers, locking them in a hotel for five days after infecting them with a cold virus. The men and women who reported fewer than seven hours of sleep, on average, were 2.94 times more likely to develop sneezing, sore throat and other cold symptoms. And the volunteers who spent less than 92 percent of their time in bed asleep were 5 and a half times more likely to become ill than better sleepers.

Sources:
Reuters January 12, 2009
Boston.com January 13, 2009

Why Economics Drives Most Food Options You Have

Being overweight is not just a disease; it’s a symptom of many other things that are wrong with your diet. And much of the blame for the current American diet comes down to economics.

In a $10 trillion economy, $1 trillion goes to food companies and $1.5 trillion goes to medical companies. Food companies, like any good businesses, are always trying to increase the consumption of their product. But in food, there’s an unwritten law of marketing called potato chip marketing equations.

That means that 10 percent of your customers buy 90 percent of the product. You may go out and buy one or two bags of potato chips a month. But somebody else is buying one bag a day -- 30 bags every month.

When you add that extra 20 percent extra to your weight, you don’t increase your food consumption 20 percent a day. You double it to 200 percent a day. Your caloric intake to maintain 180 pounds is almost twice the caloric intake you need to maintain 150 pounds.

Think of that from the standpoint a food company. Food companies, as a result, market to people to make everyone part of their potato chip marketing equation. They spend their marketing dollars getting existing customers to buy more of their product.

At what point after two, three, four, 10, 12 bags of potato chips do they no longer taste good? How about McDonald’s French fries? All processed foods never get tiring -- they have chemically altered the food substances in that food to make sure you’re never tired of it.

The problem with obesity, which is ultimately caused by poor diet, is really an economic problem. And when people consume this terrible diet, they end up with all types of medical problems, and they go to the doctors for treatment. But the medical companies are in effect in a conspiracy of sorts with the food companies. They’ve almost said to the food companies, “We’ll treat the symptoms of this bad diet. We will never treat the cause, your bad food.”

Sources:
AdvantEdge Newsletter

Coca-Cola Sued for Marketing Vitaminwater as Healthy

A class action suit contends that Coca-Cola is illegally marketing its “Vitaminwater” line as a healthy product. The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is one party to the suit, which cites California consumer-protection laws.

According to the suit, "Vitaminwater is not a healthy beverage. Rather it is sugar water -- just like soft drinks -- with a few added vitamins."

The suit cites the labeling of Vitaminwater with flavors such as "defense," "rescue," "energy" and "multi-v" as proof of its health claims. The suit asks that California consumers of Vitaminwater be awarded actual and punitive damages.

Sources:
Advertising Age January 15, 2009

Messege for Dr Lau: Book update

My writing was different from my talk

I have given many talks, but I realized that writing is a different ball game altogether. Writing is more rigorous. It is also more precise and thorough. You have to check and cross-check all your facts and make sure that facts are treated as sacred. They cannot be twisted out of context, nor there any hidden slant to your writing.

Also, a talk covers less material a book. A talk reinforces meaning, notation, and direction, because a listener cannot pause or review earlier slides. But this is not possible with a book. You can relax some formal English rules to make your slides terser; but you cannot ever afford to do that with your book.
Within reason, you can write imprecisely, incompletely and even incorrectly for your slides. But your editor or publisher will NEVER allow that with a book. That would be simply blasphemy!

Messege from Dr Lau : Book Update

Naming my baby
This was the most important time, the time when I had to christen my book.
I’d read somewhere that for every person that reads the whole text, 500 read only the title!
Therefore, I knew that my title must balance two objectives:
• Catch my readers’ attention
• Provide a terse summary of the content
Personally, I have always preferred short, working titles. I don’t like unnecessary word trappings. I am all for simple links and fixed sets.
This boiled down my selection to one catch phrase: Help in Your Hands.
I thought it was short, sweet and immensely practical.
It froze it immediately.

Hormone Therapy Shrinks Your Brain

The use of postmenopausal hormone therapy can accelerate the loss of brain tissue in women aged 65 and older, well beyond the loss that normally occurs with age.

Initial study results indicate that treatment with estrogen, with or without progesterone, increased the risk of dementia and overall cognitive decline in women 65 years of age or older.

Imaging studies conducted on roughly 1400 participants showed that women who had taken hormone therapy had slightly smaller brain volumes in two critical areas -- the frontal lobe and the hippocampus. Both areas are involved in thinking and memory skills, and loss of volume in the hippocampus is a risk factor for dementia.


Sources:

* Reuters January 12, 2009

Cancer May Not Be a Cell Mutation After All

In 1931, German scientist Otto H. Warburg earned the Nobel Prize for his theory on the origin of cancer. He believed that that cancer starts from irreversible injury to cellular respiration.

His work eventually fell out of favor, as genomic mutations became the standard model for the cause of uncontrolled cell growth. But seventy-eight years after Warburg received science's highest honor, researchers report new evidence in support of the original Warburg Theory of Cancer.

Healthy cells generate energy by the oxidative breakdown of a simple acid within the mitochondria. Tumors and cancer cells generate energy through the non-oxidative breakdown of glucose, a process called glycolysis. Warburg argued that cancer should therefore be interpreted as a type of mitochondrial disease.

Recently, bioinformatic models were used to compare the lipid characteristics of the normal and the tumor mitochondria samples. Major abnormalities in the content of a complex lipid called were present in all types of tumors. Those results suggest that cardiolipin abnormalities can underlie irreversible respiratory injury in tumors and link mitochondrial lipid defects to the Warburg theory of cancer.


Sources:

* Eurekalert January 12, 2009

Can Chocolate Disrupt Your Sleep?

Chocolate contains caffeine, but in varying amounts depending on the type. A 1.5-ounce Hershey’s milk chocolate bar contains nine milligrams, about three times as much caffeine as a cup of decaffeinated coffee. But a dark chocolate Hershey’s candy bar has far more: about 30 milligrams, the same as a cup of instant tea.

Chocolate also has other stimulants. One is theobromine, which increases heart rate and causes sleeplessness.

In other words, eating chocolate at night can potentially keep you awake.


Sources:

* New York Times January 12, 2009