Water Requirements

Most studies will tell you that the human body needs about 2-3 litres (2000-3000 ml) of water a day. Most people read that figure and forget the rest of the material. Your body is amazingly adaptable. It doesn't have to be obviously fluid water — it can be in coffee, vegetables, fruit, fish, meat; overcooked or oil-fried stuff tends to have less water.

In fact, it's actually possible to not drink any 'water' water for days as long as you have a reasonable wet diet. This isn't necessarily a good thing, but just as most herbivores in arid regions can survive on plants and occasional liquid water, so can you.

Some charlatans out there are touting electrolysed water and stuff like that. It makes no difference except that the processes involved tend to filter out some less-useful components in potable water. The fact is, your body specialises in homoeostasis, and it will compensate within reason.

This all adds up to one more reason why we need to be a little bit more forgiving of our diet and lead a balanced (and more fun) lifestyle. Have a nice wet day!

Mucus

Mucus is what lines your mucous membranes, just as phosphorus is the element which makes compounds phosphorous. It is a simple rule — the -us ending is normally a noun; the -ous ending is normally an adjective. A person who uses the word 'humerous' is referring to something about, of, or related to the humerus.

That said, I was mulling over the colours of mucus. I am quite sure it would make a perfect artistic medium if it wasn't normally full of the plagues of humanity.

Clear, colourless mucus is the norm. I've seen yellowish mucus, which indicates contaminants, perhaps infection; brown mucus, the darker variant, almost certainly means infection. Green mucus, the greyish-green iron(II)-coloured variety, is pretty serious. Mucus with red streaks is often the product of coughing or sneezing too violently; if you have dark red clots in it, this is probably either life-threatening or indicative of some sort of nosebleed.

I've seen brown mucus from heavy coffee-drinkers which simply meant that they hadn't washed out their mouths after drinking. I've also seen wine-coloured sputum from other drinkers.

Why did I think of all this? Why am I writing about it? It's a long story.

I was actually thinking about my students' writing skills and how irked I was with their inability to spell phlegm or phosphorus correctly. Bad pH readings, I suppose.

The Gospel of Food

I'm sitting for my allotted 45 minutes in the storm-darkened shadow of my small room, reading the latest Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Volumes 1190 and 1191 have just arrived in the mail. It is Volume 1190, Foods for Health in the 21st Century: A Roadmap for the Future, that has my attention now.

One of the papers is by de Vere White, Hackman and Kugelmass. It's about the belief that about 33% of all cancers can be prevented with a healthy lifestyle and appropriate diet. And it points out that there is largely no specific evidence, despite many claims, that a particular food will help with a particular cancer. Worse is the tendency to extract what is seen as the key chemical compound and consume pills of it — a reductionist practice that can actually lead to bad outcomes.

Here is what we do know: don't be overweight, don't be sedentary, eat a low-calorie diet with especially low amounts of fats and sugars. Here is what else we know: human genetic backgrounds are hugely varied, a healthy diet costs 10x more than an unhealthy one, humans like pills because they're less troublesome than lifestyle changes.

We also know that dietary supplements are mostly untested, that the studies testing them are poor, based mainly on correlation rather than mechanism of causation. We know that what is good in a raw fruit can turn deadly when concentrated in a pill minus the fruit's other contents. Lastly, we know that what reduces the risk of one cancer can raise the risk of another.

So what should we do?

The Good Book says, "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? ... Who of you, by worrying, can add a single hour to his life?"

That is very good advice, and looking better each day.

Silly Food Ideas

I first studied food chemistry in detail when I was a third-year undergraduate. This created a foundation from which I developed a certain perspective on food claims, based on chemical analysis.

I'm just going to take a quick look at some food decisions people are passionate about:

1. honey vs refined sugar
   
2. sea salt vs industrial salt
   
3. 'organic' food vs normal food
   
4. 'processed' food vs raw food
   
5. monosodium glutamate vs 'natural' flavours
   

I am going to spend the rest of this post discussing the science behind making a rational choice to eat any of these things or not. Honey is a vastly favoured food, and quite often, it is spoken of in the same breath as 'royal jelly'. The ideas here are that a) honey is a natural sugar, and that b) stuff the queen bee feeds to baby bees to make them grow large fast will work for humans too. I think it's nonsense to say that honey is 'better' than refined sugar in any significant biochemical way.

Essentially, honey is about 80% sugar — mostly fructose (fruit sugar, about 40%), glucose (30%), maltose and sucrose. The rest is mostly water. If you ate 100 grams of sugar, you'd receive perhaps 1-3% of your daily requirement of some vitamins (e.g., for vitamin B2, you'd have to eat 3 kg to meet your daily requirement). As a sweetener, honey is approximately as sweet as table sugar. I must admit however that honey tastes a lot nicer. It is the one area in which I'd say honey is genuinely 'better'. It's good for baking too; being already a sugar syrup, it's easier to use than refined sugar or even castor sugar.

But honey can be worse. Since honey production is carried out by the random acts of insects, honey is never of a uniform composition. Sometimes, it contains allergens from pollen that some people are allergic to; sometimes, it can even contain the spores of nasty pathogens. It is basically impure sugar, and it has been marketed as if that impurity is a beneficial thing. Consider this: if pure water was analogous to pure sugar, would you drink water that was the colour of honey?

The same situation is true for sea salt. Sea salt is tastier than industrial salt or pure salt, sodium chloride. That's because it contains impurities, especially potassium salts. Potassium ions are the main reason why sea salt tastes different. For example, potassium bromide can taste sweet, salty or bitter at different concentrations; sodium chloride and bromide just taste salty at all concentrations.

However, potassium ions are what we call 'antagonistic' to sodium ions. This can be good or bad. Athletes consume potassium to relax muscles and prevent cramps; the bananas that tennis players snack on between sets are high in potassium — but the levels present in sea salt are much higher than those in bananas. Potassium salts have such a well-known relaxing effect that large doses of potassium bromide have long been used to make humans sleepy and susceptible to control. It's a good thing to read more about it.

'Organic' food is an interesting term. I don't like that term, since all the food I eat is organic (carbon-based) except perhaps mineral salts and water. People who eat 'organic' food normally mean that it's food grown with natural animal faeces instead of pure salts such as ammonium nitrate. Of course, the good part is that some 'organic' foods eschew the use of artificial insecticides in their making, which is certainly a healthy thing. I have nothing much else against 'organic' food except that I'd prefer they called it 'food grown without whatever chemicals it was grown without, and using natural faeces only'. Sometimes, 'normal' food is normal.

Which brings me to this odd idea about 'processed' food. I think humans process their food a lot, compared to other animals. We are the only species that regularly subjects food to thermal shock, charring, denaturing and tool-based mechanical alteration. Why should that be? Shouldn't food fit for all the other species on this planet be fit for us too? Maybe the raw food advocates have a point.

But can you imagine not eating processed food? No cereals, no bread, no baked goods. No cooked eggs, no steamed fish, no grilled meat. No blanched vegetables, no jams, no butter. No milk unless you get it straight from an 'organic' cow. No wine, no beer, no salted dishes. No ground pepper, no cheese, no olive oil. Haha, no thanks.

And yet, some people like to add processed flavours to their food; things like cinnamon, vanilla and umami. All these require processing (often heating and/or extraction with alcohol) to bring out the taste. Which brings me to that contentious last item.

Why are people against MSG? Some people claim to be sensitive to it with resultant bad symptoms of all kinds, but we haven't actually been able to reproduce this effect. Natural MSG occurs whenever salt encounters proteins; glutamic acid is a common amino acid present in most protein sources. Let's be clear about this: without glutamate, the brain CANNOT WORK. It is the most abundant triggering (excitatory) neurotransmitter chemical in your nervous system. And MSG is the sodium salt of glutamic acid.

At that point, some people come up to me and say, "Yeah, but sodium is bad." Sodium is bad?? No, sodium is essential. You can't think or move without sodium ions. And your body contains a bit less than 1000 mg for every kilogram of your body weight; if you weigh 60 kg, you probably have 55,000 mg of sodium in there. You need to maintain this with about 1500 mg of sodium intake a day.

So what's bad about MSG? Is it the glutamate? Is it the sodium? Can't be either. The only thing bad is consuming too much of it, just as it would be bad to drink too much water or eat too much salt or beef. It would be fatal to eat nothing but lettuce, for example. The key is moderation. I'll be honest with you. If you eat large tennis-ball sized lumps of MSG every day, you might get very sick. Then again, I can think of many other food substances of which this might be true too.

I can only believe that bad PR skills have led us to this point. The reason why MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) is called that in hospitals but called 'Nuclear Magnetic Resonance' (NMR) in chemistry labs is that nobody wants to imagine being 'nuked' even though the 'nuclear' in NMR has nothing to do with radioactivity. MSG just sounds too much like a 'chemical', by which humans mean something awful and artificial, like plastic.

If we had stuck to calling MSG 'umami' from the beginning, everyone would have lauded it as an exotic oriental ingredient. But it was not to be.

All food is made of chemicals, and all cooking is chemistry. It is good for students to study food chemistry, so that all the nonsense that they read in advertisements and on boxes and labels can be purged, filtered, eliminated. Then there'll be fewer silly food ideas to go around.

Dreaming Unwell

I normally sleep like a log. Yes, well, a snoring log at times, and often a log with the uncanny ability to fling out a spare limb or two and wallop unwary passers-by.

I suspect that when I sleep, I complete my sleep cycles so thoroughly that my dreams are almost completely unremembered—there is no 'dream residue' on awakening. This is my normal mode of operation (or lack thereof).

It therefore also provides a convenient and rather direct test of whether I am well or not. If I remember my dreams, or at least large chunks thereof, then my sleep cycles are being interrupted and I am not well.

The last few nights have been a bit like that. I dreamt I had written an article about vampires in 1529 (it was so real that when I awoke I went online to search for this), was savaged by some bitchy online entity claiming to know more about it than I did, had to penetrate a top-secret base of some shadowy imperialist organisation, and was made to write testimonials for hundreds of students using nothing but the power of my mind.

That the last part seemed real (and continues to seem real even as I am typing this) is a scary thing. I must be really unwell. Actually, I can tell that also from the fact that my throat is swollen up so big I have difficulty swallowing, that I'm running a fever, and that my sore throat is keeping me from resting comfortably.

Maybe that's what is disrupting my sleep. Hey, I'm not even sure that I'm awake as I post this.

Ageing Population

Last night's reunion dinner was hilarious. It all began when one of my uncles somehow failed to realise that he was a senior citizen. A man of the diving-camping-roughing it out kind, he isn't particularly frail. But he is a septuagenarian. Of course, Eldest Aunt, into her rather vibrant and active 80s, laughed at him with all the aplomb of someone who looks sub-60 and feels even younger (apart from the wisdom of ages). At one point, she made the crack, "So I don't get to go (camping) anymore because you think it's too tough for the old lady eh?"

The discussion meandered through multiple strands of medical lore and the high politics of the Atlantean priesthoods, chiefly because we eventually figured out who his camping partners were. Through it all, I was thinking, "If this is old age, I should be preparing to carry a reasonably high level of physical and mental fitness into my next forty years or so."

Meanwhile, however, I'm nursing some sort of deep tissue upper arm injury. There's a certain point (Eldest Aunt says it's 40) at which the human body naturally develops all kinds of random susceptibilities. Arrhythmias, bad eyesight, odd fluctuations of the senses and the metabolism, that kind of thing. This injury probably comes from acting like you're in your 20s when you are actually a lot older.

I've also been reading a lot of Kurt Vonnegut. He's entertainingly agnostic and one of the most humane writers I know. He writes like Ray Bradbury, but with less of Bradbury's sometimes poisonous sting. I began reading Vonnegut in my teenage years, and books like Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-5 were an integral part of my adolescent experience. It was partly from him that I've developed a remarkable level of sanguinity about my infirmities. They don't matter as long as I'm not a parasite and I can help others be happier than they'd otherwise be.

Sleeping Too Much

Yes, I know it's possible to get too much sleep. Your lifespan and prospects actually go down once you cross the ten-hour mark for sleep sessions. Unfortunately, I've done that two days in a row and am feeling the ill effects. Sigh.