Running at the Mouth

The NYT: Your Source for 20 Year-Old Science

The Grey Lady has just gotten around to noticing that it is not lactic acid that causes muscle fatigue, contrary to the common shorthand.  This is nothing new; coaches and exercise physiologists have known that for a long, long time.  As a bonus, not only is the material dated by at least two decades, the NYT's Gina Kolata woefully misrepresents and misinterprets it as well, which I'm sure comes as a complete shock to anyone familiar with the NYT's sterling reputation for honest, balanced reporting.

Kolata attempts to prove two conclusions:  (1) that the presence of lactic acid in the muscles has nothing to do with fatigue; and (2) lactic acid is actually good, since muscles can use it for fuel.  She fails miserably on both accounts. 

Coaches and personal trainers tell athletes and exercisers that they have to learn to work out at just below their "lactic threshold," that point of diminishing returns when lactic acid starts to accumulate. Some athletes even have blood tests to find their personal lactic thresholds.

But that, it turns out, is all wrong.

Actually, it isn't.  The presence of lactic acid in the muscles has very much to do with muscle fatigue.  Granted, lactice acid isn't the cause of muscle fatigue, but it is so strongly correllated with muscle fatigue as to be the best measure of the proper training pace.  We can easily measure lactic acid build-up.  It's not the cause -- some scientists hypothesize that the build-up of hydrogen ions or calcium during exercise causes fatigue, but we don't know.  What we know for certain is that lactic acid builds up, and we get tired.  Lactic acid is simply a convenient, easily measured marker for a process that we really don't know much about.

The understanding now is that muscle cells convert glucose or glycogen to lactic acid. The lactic acid is taken up and used as a fuel by mitochondria, the energy factories in muscle cells.

Mitochondria even have a special transporter protein to move the substance into them, Dr. Brooks found. Intense training makes a difference, he said, because it can make double the mitochondrial mass.

It is clear that the old lactic acid theory cannot explain what is happening to muscles, Dr. Brooks and others said.

Yes, it can.  And it does, at least in a shorthand way.

As for the idea that lactic acid is fuel, it is.  It's just not very good fuel.  This piece doesn't get at the relative usefulness of lactic acid as fuel v. glucose.  I am fairly sure that muscles will burn lactate in the absence of glucose, but muscles are much more efficient when burning glucose.  That's why training at the lactate threshold is so useful -- beyond stimulating increase in mitochondria, it teaches the body to operate more efficiently at higher speeds.

Gina Kolata is an ignoramus who needs to stay on the society page and away from all forms of science, which she clearly cannot get her tiny pea-brain around.

My Dog's as Smart as Your Toddler

Dogs understand people language, and may also "fast map" (forming a fuzzy idea about what an unfamiliar word means), according to German researchers:

A clever border collie that can fetch at least 200 objects by name may be living proof that dogs truly understand human language, German scientists reported on Thursday.

The dog, named Rico, can fetch a newly introduced object when asked, even if he has never heard the name of the object before, the researchers say.

The findings, reported in the journal Science, may not surprise many dog owners. But they are certain to re-ignite a debate over what language is and whether it is unique to humans.

"We wonder what prevents animals from speaking. The limitations are not their capacity to hear or understand," Julia Fischer of the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig told a news conference in Berlin.

Rico's abilities seem to follow a process called fast mapping, seen when young children start to learn to speak and understand language, they report.

This seems to be pretty big news. I saw the story on Drudge, the WaPo, the LA Times, and Yahoo. (Two friends also sent me links, one with the rye wry comment "This just in: Border collies are smart." Heh.) Probably has something to do with the fact that we Americans spoil our dogs to an embarrassing degree (myself included, of course). We treat them like children, so we want to think of them as being as smart as children.

I always thought my dogs understood limited English; my beagle (who loves the car) always reacts the same to the question "Wanna go for a ride?", whether I shout it, say it in a conversational tone, or whisper it in her ear, so I know it's not my tone of voice. Same thing with the words "cookie," "walk," "outside," "bed," "deck" and "toy." It's nice to have some research to assuage my fear that I'm not anthropomorphizing my furry buddies (at least on this score).

"Doody!"

Reminiscent of probably the most famous scene from Caddyshack, the NYT explains, at length, why swimming in a pool in which someone has defecated is hazardous to your health:

As Dr. Michael Beach (his real name), an epidemiologist in the parasitic disease section of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said, "A lot of these bugs just live in the wild and we get in their way."

Dr. Beach is involved in the healthy swimming campaign for the agency. The seashore and rivers, ponds and lakes are part of its concern, because they can certainly contain health hazards, even if they are not polluted. But the current focus is on pools and a parasite called cryptosporidium.

Discussing the way it is spread is a really unpleasant job. But, the agency has decided, somebody has to do it. Here is something from one of their warning brochures. "Think about it!" the big type blurts. "You share the water with everyone in the pool. If someone with diarrhea contaminates the water, swallowing the water can make you sick."

* * * *
And then there are pools. They have chlorine, which kills almost everything, but not immediately. It takes the chlorine in a pool six or seven days to kill cryptosporidium.

What the Centers for Disease Control suggests to combat the parasite is increased vigilance by pool staffs and swimmers. Thus the agency's brochure "Fecal Accident Response Recommendations for Pool Staff: What Do You Do When You Find Poop in the Pool?" and its poster that looks like an eye chart. It poses the question, "Can you read this?" The letters of the chart say: "Have diarrhea? Don't swim."

The reason for the campaign, Dr. Beach said, is that diarrhea outbreaks caused by cryptosporidium - though still rare, considering the hundreds of millions of visits to pools each summer - are 10 times as common as they were 15 years ago.

I always joked that a trip to the community pool (or, for that matter, to Wal-Mart) is a guaranteed case of pink-eye. Comparatively speaking, pink-eye would be a delight.

We're Getting Outsourced

Researchers are apparently determined to make men superfluous. Example: the Orgasmatron, a spinal cord stimulator that induces the female orgasm and that has been approved by the FDA. Operated, I swear to God, by remote control. It's pricey, though, to the tune of $3,000 for a 10-day model and $17,000 for a permanent device.

Second example: chocolate that will do the same thing, for far less cost and hassle. The rub (heh) is that it won't be available for five years. (Chocolate link via Suburban Blight, who got it via Dave Tepper.)

There's already a robot that mows the lawn. Once scientists invent a robot that can kill spiders and open jars, we're done for.

The Horrors of Gastric Bypass

An alarming piece in the NYT about gastric bypass surgery, the procedure for the morbidly obese that closes most of the stomach and shortens the small intestine. The popularity of this surgery has increased seven-fold in less than ten years. Because the demand -- and presumably the reimbursement for the surgery -- are so high, hospitals and medical centers are doing the procedure without adequately-trained surgeons and follow-up care facilities.

Basically, patients who are not careful about their surgeon have a good chance of ending up with Dr. Nick Riviera:

Researchers also express concern that the operations are being performed on children and teenagers with scant evidence about long-term effects. In addition, although the surgery is supposed to be limited to people who are 100 pounds or more overweight, Dr. Jensen and other experts said some doctors had actually encouraged obese patients who were not heavy enough to gain more weight so they would qualify.

* * * *

Dr. Barry Schwartz, a vice president of the Florida plans, said: "Folks now doing them and the hospitals doing them I think are questionable. The physicians are increasingly folks with little experience and remarkably little training, down to and including weekend courses." (Emphasis mine.)

A botched operation is not the only risk. According to the article, the high incidence of post-op complications is caused in large part by inadequate counseling on how to take care of one's modified digestive track:

Dr. Jensen said, "One of the key things we're seeing and find quite disconcerting is that a lot of the places where the programs are popping up don't have the evaluation and education components in place pre- or postoperatively."

At the Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston, Dr. Scott Shikora, an obesity surgeon, said he had seen one or two dozen patients with complications in the past few years, referred from other centers, usually smaller hospitals. "If you ask any major medical center, you'll hear the same story," Dr. Shikora said. "They are receiving patients who were mismanaged."

Weight-loss operations are challenging even for the best surgeons, and the enormously obese who seek them are often high-risk cases because of diabetes or heart or lung problems. Because the surgery makes such drastic changes in the digestive system, patients need extensive counseling about how to eat and take vitamins, or they risk malnutrition or weight gain.

The good news is that folks thinking about having this procedure will have a resource for determining where to have it done:

The National Institutes of Health has also begun a study of the surgery. And the professional group for doctors who perform weight-loss surgery, the American Society for Bariatric Surgery, has begun a program to identify "centers of excellence" for the operations, collect information on their results and use it to help others adopt the best surgical techniques.

Finally, this caught my attention:

Dr. Ostroff said many patients had been misled into thinking that their bypasses would solve their weight problems forever without any effort on their part. That is not true, he said. Over time, the pouch stretches, and if people do not exert some self-control, they will regain weight.

"We feel the majority of individuals will gain the weight back over about 20 years," he said, noting that a gain of 5 pounds a year was not uncommon.

This probably goes back to the adequate pre-op screening alluded to above by Dr. Jenson. A gastric bypass patient must have the resolve to change his eating habits after surgery by staying away from certain foods and not eating as much. My question, directed to folks who have this done for cosmetic reasons as much as health reasons (naturally, anyone who's 100 pounds overweight is going to have some health problems, though they may not be severe), is whether there can actually be such a patient; if Dr. Ostroff's assertion is correct, it appears not.

The Eighth Wonder of the Modern World

If this doesn't get NASCAR fans to cast aside their beer cozies emblazoned with slogans like "To hell with the mountains, show me your Busch!", nothing will: The Self-Cooling Beer Can

A SELF-cooling can that uses a vacuum to chill beer is set to be a big hit with the lads across Britain this summer.

Scientists say the temperature of the drink drops 16.7°C (30°F) in three minutes and stays cold for up to an hour.

They work on the same principle of evaporation that makes you feel cold when you step out of the shower.

The beer is surrounded by a watery gel which drains off when the bottom of the can is twisted.

The bottom itself also contains an insulated heat-absorbing gizmo.

That makes the temperature of the ale drop and creates a vacuum which should keep it cold for an hour.

(Link via Wizbang!)