James' World 2

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We’ve all heard that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but how true is that?

Apples are not high in vitamin A, nor are they beneficial for vision like carrots. They are not a great source of vitamin C and therefore don’t fight off colds as oranges do.

However, apples contain various bioactive substances – natural chemicals that occur in small amounts in foods and that have biological effects in the body. These chemicals are not classified as nutrients like vitamins. Because apples contain many health-promoting bioactive substances, the fruit is considered a “functional” food.

For years, I have taught university classes on nutrients such as vitamins, minerals, carbs, proteins, and fats. But recently I developed a course specifically on functional foods. The class explores the various bioactive substances in food and how some may even function like a medicine.

Functional foods defined

Functional foods are not the same as superfoods. “Superfood” is a buzzword marketers use to promote foods like kale, spinach, and blueberries. Labeling them as “super” appeals to the public and increases sales. But superfood is generally meant to imply a food that has superior nutritional value and that is high in nutrients that are beneficial for health. For example, salmon and tuna are considered superfoods because the omega-3 fats they contain have been linked to heart health.

Superfood advertisements claim that eating the food will improve some aspect of health. The problem is that most of those claims are not based on scientific research like the criteria for functional foods are.

In addition to the nutrients that our bodies need for growth and development, functional foods contain a variety of bioactive substances, each with a unique function in the body. The bioactive substances can be found naturally in foods or added during processing.

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While apples aren’t considered a superfood, they are considered a functional food. Caterina Oltean/500px Prime via Getty Images

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The term toxic positivity has gained popularity in recent years, referring to moments when people responded to others’ struggles with surface-deep assurances and clichéd phrases such as, “Everything happens for a reason,” or, “Have you tried yoga?”

But there is a similar, if lesser-known, concept that is more inner-directed: emotional perfectionism.

While we usually think of a perfectionist as someone who holds themselves to a high standard for how they look, behave, or work, emotional perfectionists hold themselves to a similar standard regarding how they feel. Rather than encouraging others to look on the bright side (toxic positivity), they expect themselves to be unfailingly upbeat.

“It’s really when you have an emotion about emotion, and you’re suppressing what you have labeled the bad emotion,” said Annie Hickox, a psychologist who also holds a Ph.D. in clinical neuroscience. “Emotional perfectionism often follows a script of: ‘We shouldn’t do this,’ ‘I shouldn’t be mad about that,’ ‘I shouldn’t be angry,’ ” added Hickox, who coined the term in 2016.

Hickox believes emotional perfectionism could be an unrecognized source of anxiety, based on experience with her patients. “They’ll say, ‘Oh no, I’m not a perfectionist.’ But you can find thoughts where they’re holding themselves up to a very high standard,” she said.

Toxic positivity and emotional perfectionism have the same underlying root cause: a discomfort with other people’s negative emotions. Vrinda Kalia, a psychology professor at Miami University who studies perfectionism and emotional expression, said that expecting life — yours or others’ — to be “awesome all the time” is extremely debilitating because it ignores reality. “This is not what life is like.”

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People who experience emotional perfectionism are reluctant to admit to negative emotions. (iStock)

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Blame others for exactly what you are doing!

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One of Donald Trump’s greatest political talents–if you can call it that–is the ability to kick up such a whirlwind of chaos that it becomes easy to lose sight of simple moral baselines. Actions and stories that would functionally end other presidencies are forgotten within days as the bright bouncy orange ball moves to the next outrage and shatters the next norm. Opponents are left wondering whether to five the next five-alarm fire or try to focus on rebuilding the crumbling foundations of governance from the last fire.

That is in part what has happened over Trump’s personal financial behavior. For years, Americans of decency have eagerly awaited the disclosure of Donald Trump’s personal and organizational tax records, knowing that they were likely to reveal massive corruption, potentially leading to a crisis of government, impeachment, resignation, or any other consequence of note. But Trump’s chaos tornado, particularly in the context of a historic pandemic, has essentially nullified the consequences of what should be earth-shattering revelations.

When the New York Times released the main story on Trump’s tax-dodging and enormous personal debts, it basically had no impact on public polling and lasted about one to two days in the national news cycle. This is in part because Trump has so debased expectations for his own behavior and public service that everyone knows he’s a crook–even his own supporters–but either they don’t care or they were already opposing him, anyway. But it’s also because who has time to worry about whether the president is a tax cheat when he is actively spreading a deadly virus at the highest levels of government, sabotaging the Postal Service, and refusing to accept the results of a free and fair election? This in spite of the fact that we absolutely must care about these things. After all, the president is $421 million in debt. Whoever owns his debt, including potential foreign adversaries, could essentially be running national policy! Even if we believe we cannot afford to pay attention to it given the rest of the hurricane winds, we still must manage to maintain our focus.

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But Mr. Ali, who lives with his wife and two children in a rented room, says he has no choice but to endure the discomfort.

“I need to work because we are poor,” he said.

Mr Ali works eight-hour shifts every day in Gulshan, an affluent district in Dhaka which houses fancy apartments, sprawling corporate offices and several foreign embassies. To be even allowed into the area, he has to wear a jacket over his shirt – a uniform of sorts – which makes the heat even more uncomfortable.

The grueling heat in the country has been made worse by fuel shortages- a consequence of the Ukraine war – which has led to frequent power cuts.

Millions of people across the world, including in North America and Europe, have experienced blistering heat this year.

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Mohammad Shukkur Ali, 50, a Bangladeshi rickshaw puller, says the heat this year has been extreme

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We share the planet with some 7.7 million species of animals. And every day, they confound us. Take the orcas (i.e., killer whales), for example, that have taken to ramming human vessels. Despite the tens of thousands of academic papers that have been written about them, the best any researcher can do to explain why they have been bludgeoning ships is shrug, and make some guesses.

Animals tease us by sharing the world with us, but by also withholding many of their secrets. “We don’t know what it’s like to conceive of the world as a killer whale or as a cat, or a nonhuman primate, or any individual that doesn’t have language really,” Jennifer Vonk, a cognitive scientist who studies animals at Oakland University, tells Vox’s, Byrd Pinkerton.

On Unexplainable — Vox’s podcast that explores scientific mysteries, unanswered questions, and all the things we learn by diving into the unknown — we routinely return to stories about animals. The people who study them have enviable jobs: involving playing with puppies, or diving deep into the dark parts of the sea, or thinking through what the roar of a long-dead dinosaur might have sounded like.

And their works in turn provoke deep, fascinating questions. Questions about the interior lives of animals, but also about how humans are changing the world, about how wildlife is responding to those changes, and about how many forms of life depend on one another.

We might not be able to understand why animals do what they do. But we can at least understand how important these creatures are.

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Shortly after his sixty-seventh birthday, Ernesto Chavez retired from his job at a Los Angeles food warehouse. Sara, his wife of forty-five years, told me that he meticulously took his medications for high blood pressure and cholesterol, hoping to enjoy his time with his grandchildren. But one morning in January 2021, Ernesto burned with fever, his chest heaving as though he were once again lifting heavy boxes. At the hospital, he tested positive for COVID-19. His oxygen levels plummeted, and he was quickly intubated. Ten days later, his lungs were failing, his face was bloated from liters of intravenous fluid, and his hands and feet had begun to cool. As his chances of survival waned, I arranged to speak with his family about a subject inseparable from death itself: cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR.

For decades, physicians have debated whether CPR should be offered to people who suffer from the final blows of incurable illness, be it heart failure, advanced cancer, or dementia. Although CPR has become synonymous with medical heroism, nearly eighty-five percent of those who receive it in a hospital die, their last moments marked by pain and chaos. The pandemic only deepened the risks: every chest compression spewed contagious particles into the air, and intubation, which often follows compressions, exposed doctors to virus-laden saliva. Hospitals in Michigan and Georgia reported that no COVID patient survived the procedure. An old question acquired new urgency: Why was CPR a default treatment, even for people as sick as Ernesto?

As a palliative-care physician, I help people with serious, often terminal, illness consider a path forward. During the pandemic, this involved weekly Zoom meetings with each family whose loved one was in the I.C.U. with COVID. We discussed how the virus could damage the lungs irreversibly, how we gauged a patient’s condition, and what we would do if, despite being on life support, that patient died.

On a gray afternoon, I logged on to Zoom to speak with Ernesto’s family. I would be joined by Sara, her daughter Nancy, and Neal, an internal-medicine resident covering the I.C.U. Before the meeting, I asked Neal whether he’d been taught how to have these conversations. “Nope,” he said. I asked him what he might say to Ernesto’s family. “Unfortunately, he still needs the ventilator for his lungs, and he’s not showing signs of improvement. We want you to know that he is very sick,” he said, his expression solemn. “Because he is so sick, his heart could stop. If that happened, would you want us to do CPR to revive him?” He used his hands to simulate chest compressions on a phantom body.

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Photograph by Ashlee Rezin Garcia / Chicago Sun-Times / AP

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If you were told to do more exercise to lower your blood pressure, you might think you’d need break out you running gear or hit the weights. But one of us (Jamie) recently published research that found exercises that you hold in a static position, such as planks and wall sits, are actually the best way to reduce blood pressure.

This kind of “isometric” exercise involves contracting a specific muscle or muscle group and holding it, so the length of the muscle doesn’t change throughout the exercise.

But lower blood pressure is only one of the benefits of doing this type of exercise.

1. They improve heart health

Jamie’s recent work looked at 270 randomized controlled trials involving a total of over 15,000 participants. It found that the best way to lower blood pressure was to perform an average of three isometric sessions per week.

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