It just happened to me these days that I was entangled in a weird mess of communication and misunderstanding. Everything around me started boiling, it was amazing how a molehill became a mountain. It is interesting that exactly today I discovered this talk of Temple Grandin on TED, and it helped me to regain some peace in my mind, because I had started doubting myself in a way that was not constructive anymore.

As I see it, one of the major handicaps in communication is that we are jumping to conclusions, that we are concerned about the similarities among us by neglecting, ignoring or even discriminating the differences. We prefer the alliances and condemn the other. I think this is so very wrong and it is so very prejudicial to our interactions with all kind of living beings. Temple Grandin gives a thrilling insight into her autistic mind. We don’t have madness, and we don’t have psychiatric cases in the world, we have a continuum of differently wired minds with different ways of thinking and behavior respectively emerging from these different structures. There are all transitions between visual to pattern to verbal thinking/working minds. Difference thus is not a domain of philosophy and social science only but “hard-wired” natural science.

Since I am working with biestmilch I feel it under my skin everyday what it means to walk on another path because of a mind that ticks the way it does, a mind that forces me to work the way I work … and I am told every other day how I could do better, but I can’t … and I learned to smile regardless

Currently Ross Tucker is writing about this topic on the Science of Sport blog. I want to pick up this topic very briefly, because as we know even among lean athletes weight is a crucial issue of discussion all the year through. The gossip around training your metabolism to burn more fat is fairly noisy, controversial and not very profoundly based on evidence. This has got to do with the fact that reliably measuring parameters of energy consumption and moreover to measure the kind of energy used is not trivial. While the procedures are very time-consuming and possibly invasive (e.g. muscle biopsies), the results for the individual are volatile, and contribute more to statistics than giving you advise on a very personal level. The data you get on an individual basis depend so much on your training, your diet regimen, the actual time of measuring that results can only give a rough guideline and may vary from individual to individual and intra-individually as well.

Energy use and loss follow the rules of macro-physics, at least we don’t know any better until now. The thought concept behind still seems to be applicable: you only lose weight, if your energy balance is negative regardless of the energy source your body uses. Of course, this does not indicate that you cannot train and optimize your metabolism. It only may say that low-intensity workouts don’t make you lose more weight than high-intensity ones. If you burn fewer calories than your intake may be then weight loss remains a dream, and weighing a shear frustration.

It is known that athletes have more effective fat burning capacities compared to sedentary individuals. This I think is easy to explain. Sedentary people are reaching the point, at which the energy contribution from carbs becomes greater than that from fat a lot earlier than well-trained athletes. This cross-over point (named by George Brooks, a very famous exercise physiologist) is relative to a person’s training condition. The conclusion is straight forward: If your body is well trained, you enter the zone in which mainly carbs are burned later than an untrained person.

Therefore workout and increasing your muscle instead of your adipose tissue brings about burning more calories and more fat. Obese persons are often disappointed, that they don’t lose weight despite reducing the calorie intake. Maybe they don’t have the muscles that help them burn more fat? Therefore one advise among thousand others may be to work more on an intensity program than remaining in the cardio or fat burning zone as many coaches and machines in gyms recommend.

For figures and scientific details please, have a look on Ross Tucker’s series about exercise and weight loss.

As I already indicated I started working on some skin publication. Why… ? Of course, I got some reason to do so. We are currently developing handmade soaps with biestmilch. Biestmilch has got a wonderful soothing effect on skin. To stress this without giving you some scientific background is definitely not good enough, therefore I plunged myself into some new science stuff, and I found very interesting publications on itching.

Everybody knows how it feels when some body parts start itching, it can be more than annoying, it can drive people into suicide. Now researchers elucidated some very new and interesting aspects of itch. Itch can be a symptom of local skin diseases as it is the case in allergies or local irritations. But they may as well be a symptom accompanying systemic diseases like tumors or infections. Some of you may also have experienced that itching can be a stress reaction. So, itch is not only caused by inflammation but also by stress. Stress stimuli, be they emotional or physical can cause itching. About the relation between stress and inflammation I shall write in a later chapter (they are also interdependent). (more…)

Since one century scientists try to find out about the cause of inflammatory bowel diseases. New techniques make it possible to examine whether there exist specific genetic profiles that cause chronic diseases. For Crohn’s disease we know today that genes only make a minor contribution to its development.
The trend in nature science, and that really makes me happy to observe, is to recognize that most of the chronic diseases cannot be explained by one cause only. The same applies to Crohn’s disease (CD). Genetic studies proved this clearly.

I want to raise the topic of CD because biestmilch proved to be a very good therapeutic agent in Crohn’s disease. Of course, I ask myself why this is the case, where is the scientific evidence that gives us a reasonable explanation? Now, a group of scientists from the University of the City London, medicine department presents an interesting concept about the multi-causal roots of CD.

In all CD patients examined scientists found abnormalities that indicate minor defects in a bunch of genes and not a single one. Probably they will discover many more of this kind. We must know that various genes contribute to the creation for example of signal transduction molecules etc. Defects on the level of molecules are called phenotypic, on the level of genes science speaks about ontogenetic defects.

Okay then, various phenotypic failures in CD have been detected recently: a mucosal barrier dysfunction, innate immunodefiency states, and the propagation of a chronic inflammatory state. This vicious circle is perpetuating. (more…)