SPRING, STATINS, RICE AND ARSENIC

Today is the first day of spring, and if you want to learn about the science, click on Vernal Equinox.  This is never the day when there is as much sunlight as not.  In Honolulu, the twelve hour transition from sunrise to sunset occurred a week ago.

And, in case you missed it, and many in Arizona and Hawaii did, daylight savings time occurred two Saturday nights ago, really on Sunday, March 11.  The time difference between Honolulu and D.C. or New York City is now 6 hours, and 3 hours from San Francisco and Los Angeles.  The shift back to normality occurs at 2AM on Sunday, November 11.  No the clock above has nothing to do with DST.  It is the Doomsday Clock. 

By then Obama will have been elected to a second term.  Mitt Romney, incidentally, got 50% of the Illinois tally today.  I can share with you my hypothesis on what will happen at the Republican Convention in Tampa.  All three opponents will hang in to the bitter end.  Romney will not get 1144 votes going into the gathering, but Ron Paul will give his total to Romney for a major concession.  Let's see, now, what would a Libertarian ask of a Mormon?  I'll need to come up with a punch line.

This is one of those days when nothing much is happening if you're not into March Madness.  So here are some other points of interest for some of you.

I read with initial amusement the experience of a doctor who began to show symptoms of Alzheimer's, then read that statins taken for cholesterol magnified memory loss, so he stopped taking Zocor, and his memory returned. But, yikes, imagine my surprise when I just googled Simvastatin, which I am taking, and finding out that it is the generic of Zocor.  A lady suffered from Transient Global Amnesia four months after taking Lipitor.  (Tom:  by any chance, are you  on any cholesterol pill?)   These statins to reduce low density lipoprotein (LDL) in your blood are gaining a nasty reputation.  One can only wonder if Pfizer  (Lipitor, just lost protection) and Merck (Zocor, lost it in 2006) are only now leaking out these details.

Look, this is a one person study, me, but my LDL increased when I stopped drinking alcohol for a week.  Makes drinking now all that much more enjoyable.

On my final subject today, this one dealing with rice, let me ask if you have any nerve problems, plus, perhaps, some minor skin irritation?  Are you among those who got caught up in the goodness of ingesting fiber?  More and more people are consuming brown rice, and here are eight reasons why.  Somehow, for me, it just didn't feel nor taste the same, so I stuck to that toxic staple, white rice.  Well, data is beginning to be released on the arsenic content of rice.  It hasn't been clarified if the worse danger is from the soil or arsenic pesticides.  California rice, apparently, is less terrible,  Southeast Asian rice has very high arsenic levels.  You can almost expect another warning:  don't eat rice from China.  

On a relative basis, white rice is safer, while brown rice might be deleterious to your health.  It's not a matter of some rice having no arsenic.  All rice naturally contains some arsenic, but the outer layer of the grain contains most of this toxic metal.  I guess those Japanese drinking Junmai Daiginjo sake, where only less than 50% of inner portion of the rice is fermented, knew what they were doing.

Organic brown rice syrup fed to babies are especially of concern, particularly those that contain 25 times more arsenic.  And those energy bars?  Watch out!  Energy shots?  Arghhhh!  Up to seventeen times the daily max.  Click on my 5-Hour Energy posting.  Now I need to also worry about arsenic in my liver.

So should we stop eating rice?  Nah, the FDA reported they don't know enough about this possible problem yet.  However, this sounds very similar to many Republican lawmakers and corporate officials saying don't worry about global climate change because it hasn't yet been confirmed to be absolutely and truly dangerous.

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The Dow Jones Industrials fell 69 to 13,170, while Europe tumbled 1.5% and rest of the world also mostly decreasing.  Gold fell $14/toz to $1650, while the WTI crude is at $106/barrel and the Brent Spot at $125/barrel.  Not sure what this really means, but the Chicago Mercantile Exchange has petroleum at $91/barrel in December of 2020.

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