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Health Is Wealth

One of my friends' favorite quote is "Money is not everything. But it sure ranks up there with oxygen". :-) Or something like that. I may not be the Planet's richest person, but I sure pride myself with keeping myself healthy. Many take health for granted because only when you are sick that you value health. Money, of course, cannot buy health. It took me an illness of about ten days to make me wonder if I had also taken my health for granted. The answer is "YES". I smoke cigarettes like nobody's business, never exercise, except for regular walks to the eateries near my home and another thing that many don't take seriously is that you should refrain from taking iced drinks. Iced drinks?! Huh?! Maybe it depends on what country you are in. But in my hot and humid motherland of Malaysia, almost everybody cannot resist the temptation of having some iced drinks. Well, I had a really bad sore throat so much so that somehow or rather, I managed not to drink anything cold. Yes, I continued smoking, but, eventually with the continuous intake of hot or lukewarm water, my throat sort of got better. A miracle, huh? No! No! No! In hot weather, you are advised against taking any iced drinks or any cold drinks if you can help it. You see, when you drink these, your body will give a negative reaction and the first anatomy to suffer is, you guess it right, your throat. Sorry, I don't know the exact mechanism of how the throat gets infected, but, trust me, I have been through "throat hell". Just refrain from cold or iced drinks in a hot environment if not for my sake, at least, for yours. Cheers!

Why Privacy on Facebook Is 'Virtually Impossible'

The controversy over Facebook's aggressive attempts to cash in on information about its members is heating up. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that "anti-Facebook sentiment is surfacing in highly visible places, from the halls of Congress to the blogs and podcasts of influential technology experts like Leo Laporte of Petaluma."It seems to me that ultimately their goal is to funnel all Internet traffic through Facebook.com," said Laporte, who deleted his Facebook profile during a recent podcast and donated money to Diaspora, a project to create a more open and private alternative to Facebook. Laporte was inspired to put an end to his Facebook account by a recent blog post by Jason Calacanis, chief executive officer of Mahalo, a question-and-answer Web site. He accused Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg of trading users' privacy for profit. ... Facebook convened a staff meeting Thursday to discuss the backlash, although some staff members described it as a routine gathering. ...

"Earlier this month, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and 14 other privacy and consumer organizations filed a complaint against Facebook with the Federal Trade Commission, accusing the popular social network of "unfair and deceptive trade practices" and violating users' expectations of privacy and consumer protection laws. And last month, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., asked the FTC to develop guidelines instructing social networks on how private information can be used. All of this comes in the wake of the company's launch of a new "open" social platform designed to bring Facebook features, such as its Like button, to other Web sites, and an experimental Instant Personalization feature that gives certain Web sites the ability to access a member's name, profile picture, sex and network of friends. The company also launched community pages that made topics in a member's profile more public."

Erik Hayden's article below from Miller-McCune explores the results of a new study that suggest that privacy on Facebook is probably impossible:

***

On Facebook, You Are Who You Know

Even if you do have a mostly private Facebook profile, others can glean vital information about you — just by looking at your friend list.

by Erik Hayden, Miller-McCune.com

Remember the golden days when Facebook used to be for just college students? It was a quainter site — with a much different set of rules.

Drunken party photos used to be unceremoniously splayed out in public, privacy settings were almost nonexistent, wall posts weren’t status updates and there was little need to filter regrettably off-color comments. After all, the only people (you assumed) who saw that stuff were college buddies who were also posting the same incriminating photos of themselves on the site. Now, after the Facebook explosion, users are more aware of privacy issues than ever before and the new rule of thumb has become “curb public access to your profile as best you can.”

New research suggests that this is nearly impossible.

In a study conducted by Alan Mislove of Northeastern University and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, researchers tested an algorithm that could accurately infer the personal attributes of Facebook users by simply looking at their friend lists. The research culled profile information from two detailed social-network data sets: one from a sample of almost 4,000 students and alumni on Facebook at Rice University and another from more than 63,000 users in the New Orleans regional network. Researchers developed an algorithm to see if they could accurately infer attributes like high school or college, department of study, hometown, graduation year and even dormitory by dissecting these users’ friend lists. The study cut to the core of the debate surrounding the social-networking site: Is your personal profile your own or, to paraphrase anti-Facebook crusader Leif Harmsen, is it the site’s profile about you? “The current privacy debate that’s going on concerning Facebook is essentially covering explicitly provided attributes [i.e. information uploaded by you onto your profile],” Mislove wrote. “We see our work as pointing out that there exist many implicitly provided attributes that aren’t even being discussed.” Namely, that your friend’s profile can usually divulge more information than you think. According to the study, only about 5 percent of users in each network had changed their privacy settings to make their friend list inaccessible. (To hide it, enter your Facebook profile, click on the edit icon above your friends and unclick the blue box marked “Show Friend List to everyone.”) In the New Orleans network, personal profiles remained largely accessible to researchers. Some 58 percent of users disclosed university attended, 42 percent disclosed employers, 35 percent disclosed interests and 19 percent gave the public access to their location. Because of this information given, Mislove explained that it was relatively easy for his algorithm to accurately pinpoint attributes such as geography (dormitory or hometown) or education background (which high school or college users attend) for a specific user. In the New Orleans regional network, the algorithm unsurprisingly found that users were 53 times more likely to share the attribute of the same high school with those on their friend list than with other random users in the network. At Rice, the algorithm accurately predicted the correct dormitory, graduation year and area of study for the many of the students. In fact, among these undergraduates, researchers found that “with as little as 20 percent of the users providing attributes we can often infer the attributes for the remaining users with over 80 percent accuracy.” While marketing companies who specialize in targeted advertising may rejoice, these results may be troubling for those who’ve held out hope that Facebook could provide adequate privacy controls. Not to seem alarmist (“privacy” on the Web has always been overrated), but if these researchers could develop a limited algorithm that can infer rudimentary attributes off locked profiles, the possibilities seem endless for others to harness advanced software that could render current privacy controls completely useless. “The privacy story on these sites is more complicated that we like to think, as your privacy is not just a function of what you provide, it’s a function of what your friends and community members provide as well,” Mislove elaborated. Researchers concluded that it wasn’t “sufficient” to just give users access to privacy controls for their own profiles; the option to censor friend lists should be given to make sure that private information cannot be inferred.

As the title of the study states, on Facebook, you are who you know.

Erik Hayden recently graduated from Pepperdine University with a B.A. in Political Science and a minor in Religion. He is currently a fellow for Miller-McCune and regularly contributes for a variety of publications including the Ventura County Star and the alt-weekly, VCReporter.

My 5th Payout From Neobux

A fortnight ago, I was all smiles when I received my 5th payout from Neobux. Presently, Neobux has paid over $20 million to its clickers and I intend to get larger slice of the cake. If you only want to join one, and only one Paid-To-Click (PTC) program, then, Neobux is it. You would not regret it. Do join free of charge by clicking on the banner above. Long live Neobux!!

Crazy Weather

My birthplace, Kuala Lumpur, has been experiencing "crazy weather". One day it would shine throughout the morning, only to experience a heavy downpour in the early evening. These downpours would happen at any time of the day and I must confess that I have been a victim of circumstances. You see, a week back, I developed a high fever, probably due to my lack of sleep. The fever subsided only to be continued by a sore throat where I even have problems swallowing my saliva. Well, the indicators show that I would be all okay by Tuesday. On this day, I had a meeting outside. And like I anticipated, there was a heavy downpour that lasted almost four hours. Call me foolhardy, but I decided at 6.15 p.m. on Tuesday to brave the downpour as I got really bored waiting for the rain to stop. I got back home soaked to the bone and took a shower. And, hey presto, my fever came back. I thought I could sleep it off. Therefore, I spent the whole of Wednesday on my mattress, hoping everything would turn out all right when I woke up. Woe and behold, the fever did subside a bit on Thursday, but my sore throat grew worse. So, I decided to see my local doctor at his clinic. Yes, he confirmed that my throat was red and sore, revealed that my body temperature was slightly above normal. He, then, prescribed me an expectorant for my phlegm that was coming out like nobody's business, a set of lozenges to help me with my throat and some antibiotics. I spent Thursday afternoon on my mattress again and had some light food when I woke up a few hours later. I hope to get well really soon as my illness is disrupting my daily routine. On the other hand, my religion believes that sickness is God's way of forgiving our past sins. Yes, please forgive me my Lord.

Poop Is the Most Important Indicator of Your Health

Like it or not, our bowels are the ID cards of our bodies, charting our recent histories with terrifying accuracy. So, how do we ensure a healthy gut?

According to a lawsuit filed this month, Ron and Sarah Bowers bought their son a Subway sandwich in Lombard, Illinois on February 27. After eating it, he had agonizing cramps and diarrhea. According to the suit, what the couple really bought was a shit sandwich. It had been contaminated with Shigella sonnei, a bacteria transmitted via the fecal-oral route and can cause vomiting, dysentery and death. Over 100 people claim to have been sickened at Lombard's Subway, according to attorney Drew Falkenstein, whose firm has filed suit on behalf of Ron and Sarah Bowers and two other customers. We don't want to think about excrement. We don't want to see it, smell it or touch it. We definitely don't want to eat it with chicken teriyaki, on toast. Yet intestinal goings-on are in our faces everywhere these days, whether the news is about probiotics and prebiotics appearing in new food products or yet another outbreak of norovirus -- the painful gastroenteritis that is spread via fecally contaminated food, water and surfaces and has sickened thousands of cruise-ship passengers in eight unprecedentedly massive outbreaks so far this year. And "poopular culture" is upon us: Witness Slumdog Millionaire's outhouse-plunge scene. Witness Oprah's "Everybody Poops" episode, in which Dr. Mehmet Oz avows that excrement should enter the toilet with not a plop but a swoosh "like a diver from Acapulco." In a scene from the forthcoming film Life As We Know It, a young mom portrayed by Katherine Heigl is interrupted by visitors while changing a diaper. "Sweetie," one of the visitors tells her, "you have shit on your face." In a dirty, crowded world where germs are outsmarting drugs by leaps and bounds and our health care options may or may not be mired in red tape for years, we're being forced to face feces. Which is kind of a good thing. They're the ID cards our bodies issue, charting with terrifying accuracy where we've been and what we've done. The bowel knows.

Good Bugs vs. Bad Bugs

"A gram of feces can contain 10 million viruses, one million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts and 100 worm eggs," asserts Rose George, author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters (Metropolitan, 2008). She despairs over the fact that 2.6 billion people "have no access to any latrine, toilet bucket or box. ... They do it in plastic bags and fling them through the air in narrow slum alleyways." Four out of every 10 human beings, George laments, "live in situations where they are surrounded by human excrement." In the developed world, our relationship with our bowels mostly entails controlling the flora that live in them. Lactobacillus. Peptococcus. Streptococcus. A hundred trillion microbes belonging to as many as 1,000 different species coexist at any given time in a single gut, which measures over three yards. What are they doing down there? Battling it out, rendering us well or ill.

Over 70 percent of the human body's immune cells are found in the gut's mucosal lining. A healthy gut means more immunity, and a healthy gut is a gut in which good bacteria outnumber bad. And they're all hitchhikers that rushed in from outside, mounting an invasion that began the instant our placentas broke. "We're all bacteria-free until then," says Emory University School of Medicine associate professor Andrew Gewirtz, the senior author of a study released this month on the effects of imbalanced gut flora. Once the placenta breaks, Gewirtz says, "the colonization begins." Garnering such headlines in the mainstream media as "You can blame bacteria in your stomach for those unwanted pounds" and "Germs are making you fat," his study found that mice whose guts contained too many of the class of bacteria known as Firmicutes ate much more than other mice, experienced metabolic changes and became obese. This finding undermines the assumption that obesity is driven by laziness and easy access to cheap fattening foods.

"You can't ask the mice" why they ate more, "but how much they ate was clearly not affected by price or marketing schemes," Gewirtz says. Instead, bad bugs can promote excessive appetite and fat storage. They can also make us sick in a million other ways.

The Business of the Gut

"Good bugs form an invisible barrier preventing pathogenic bugs to take root and multiply," says Ann Louise Gittleman, a doctor of holistic nutrition who has appeared on "Dr. Phil" and authored over 30 books including Fat Flush for Life (Da Capo, 2009). She urges us to wage "the new germ warfare" that optimizes "the balance of power in what amounts to a huge fungi kingdom. We have to, because in our bodies we have more bacteria than we have cells." Because of their crucial role in immune function, the bad ones "can turn into a source of bad health that can affect us from head to toe," creating not just irritable bowel syndrome, colitis and Crohn's disease but conditions such as nasal congestion, itchy skin, bleeding gums, acne and depression that we might not think had anything to do with our bowels, Gittleman says. Online, she sells stool-sample testing kits that come with vials and a discreet white box printed with the address of the lab that does the analysis. "The intestine is an unappreciated organ. It's a beautiful membrane," asserts vegan physician Michael Klaper, who appeared in the PBS documentaries Diet for a New America and Food for Thought and has served as an adviser to NASA. "Think of all the intestine does while supporting a population of alien organisms. Miraculous things happen on our gut linings."

At True North Health Education and Fasting Center in Santa Rosa, California, Klaper and his fellow doctors supervise patients undergoing water-only fasts that can last up to 40 days. "Like other organs, the gut could use a rest. We're talking about 22 feet of small intestine. Its lining is a very active membrane and it needs a holiday sometimes, too. "The body is perfectly capable of going for weeks without food as you burn off your fat stores. Of course, it's no picnic. In the first few days, people are very energetic, as all the energy that would have been used to digest food is put to other purposes. At the end of the second week, they get very quiet, meditative. They're in a different space," said Klaper. When it's over, "they're very light and clean, and we very gently re-feed them on highly diluted fruit juices and steamed vegetables." However long the fast lasted, refeeding takes half that long. "There's an art to it, of course," Klaper says.

How did we get so messed-up?

"In the old days, our ancestors drank water out of streams and wells. They ate fruit and vegetables harvested in gardens. They lived in close connection with the natural world, and part of the natural world would set up housekeeping in their intestines," he said. Traditional diets lacking chemical additives kept their gut bugs in balance, "but modern life is an assault on our normal bacterial flora. We put five or six majorly disruptive substances down there every day." The first of these is chlorine, found in tap water. "Okay, so we don't get cholera or typhoid. That's great. But every time you drink this water, you're drinking a chlorine-dilute solution," he said. That kills good bugs along with bad. Ditto phosphoric acid, a key soft-drink ingredient. "We're a nation of tea and coffee drinkers. What happens in your gut when you're constantly sloshing down a known bactericide?" Sugar is yet another villain, as are antibiotics, which wipe out nearly every bug in sight -- which saves lives but leaves guts thinking What the hell?

And they do think, insists Chicago colon therapist Alyce Sorokie, the author of Gut Wisdom: Understanding and Improving Your Digestive Health (Career, 2004). "The gut is always speaking to us. It has more emotional receptor sites than anywhere else in the body. The gut is filled with neurons and neuropeptides, the same things that are in our brains, so it can take in information. It can learn. It can respond to events even more rapidly that our brain does," says Sorokie. "You feel something in the gut, and the vagus nerve brings that 'gut feeling' up the spinal cord to the brain, and the brain makes up a story about it. The brain can always rationalize, but when we feel something in the gut, it's unedited. It's very primal. That's the gut's voice, and the more we don't listen, the louder it gets." And that is why Sorokie says her clients get emotional during colonics, as filtered water flowing through a hose inserted into the anus bathes the colon, bringing out with it accumulated fecal matter that can be viewed through a clear portion of the mechanism, foot by wiggly, rubbery, slippery, corn-kernel-studded foot.

Releasing stored material from digestive tracts releases stored material from hearts and minds as well, Sorokie says. "It lets everything come out. These clients say they wish they could bring the hose along with them to their psychotherapy appointments. Nobody wants to think, 'I harbor toxic thoughts and toxic waste within me,' but then there's a liberation: Here it is and there it goes. This was part of me, and now it's not," she said. Short of anal hoses and doctor-supervised starvation, we can give our bowels a break by eating prebiotics. Found in dandelion greens, Jerusalem artichokes, chicory, milk and a few other natural sources, these are soluble fibers that we can't digest, but our beneficial flora can. In other words, prebiotics (which aren't alive) fuel probiotics (which are), making them more active and fighting-fit. So, eating prebiotics is like sprinkling fish-food into a tank full of hungry fish.

"Most people are already comfortable with the idea of fiber in their diets," says microbiologist Mary Ellen Sanders, who belongs to the International Scientific Association of Probiotics and Prebiotics. "Now you can start to think of eating fiber not just for the traditional fiber effects, but to feed beneficial members of your bacterial community," she explained. These communities, which are unique to each of us, remained almost a total mystery until recently. Only in the last few years has DNA research brought the identities and functions of much of this flora to light. Up to 80 percent of the various types of human bacterial microbes have still never been grown outside the body under laboratory conditions, Sanders says. "It will be very interesting to see how all this develops in the next five years." In the meantime, she says eating probiotics and prebiotics "lets us feed the right microbes in the right way." As it would be difficult to eat enough chicory and dandelion greens to get the recommended five to eight daily grams of prebiotics, we can start looking for prebiotic-fortified food products and supplements, often identified by the presence of oligofructose and/or inulin on their labels.

We'll be seeing those words more and more, as products containing prebiotics are among the food industry's fastest-growing sectors. New ones keep popping up, such as the Jamba Juice frozen sorbet and yogurt bars that hit stores this month. The bars' marketing material promises that Coconut-Pineapple Passion Smashin' and its fellow treats-on-sticks "contain prebiotic fiber, allowing customers to satisfy their sweet tooth without feeling guilty." One hundred trillion microbes are too many to kill, so we're never out of bugs. But when they go way out of balance, a new kind of therapy lets doctors recolonize patients' bowels with what Emory University's Andrew Gewirtz calls "cocktails of good bacteria." As seen on "Grey's Anatomy" and in real life, the treatment is an extreme measure for people suffering from Clostridium difficile, a bad bacteria whose overpopulation causes debilitating intestinal infections when antibiotics wipe out the good bacteria that would normally quell it. (Clostridium difficile rates are skyrocketing in American hospitals these days.) Known as fecal bacteriotherapy, fecal transfusion or fecal transplant, the treatment entails inserting a healthy person's feces into the sick person.

Rich in good bacteria, these feces enter the patient's intestine from either end: via enemas or orally, through a tube. "These patients are at the ends of their ropes," says Gewirtz. "They're willing to try something that isn't very pleasant." So: Bad gut bacteria stay bad when Subway workers don't wash their hands after doing you-know-what. Good gut bacteria stay good even after they exit one body in feces and are more or less fed to another. And in this brave new world, eating shit might save lives.

Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, most recently The Scavenger's Manifesto (Tarcher Press, 2009). Read more of Anneli's writings on scavenging at scavenging.wordpress.com.