NYT: What is a Healthy Diet?

A Healthy Diet’s Main Ingredients? Best Guesses

By CLYDE HABERMAN JAN. 3, 2016

First doctor: “This morning for breakfast he requested something called ‘wheat germ, organic honey and tiger’s milk.’”
Second doctor: “Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.”
Fans of Woody Allen may recognize that snippet of dialogue from his 1973 comedy, “Sleeper.” The main character, a health-food store owner somehow frozen in 1973, has been thawed out 200 years later. He awakens to a world he can barely fathom, down to the kinds of food now said to constitute a sound diet. Everything that nutrition specialists once said was good for you, or really bad, turned out to be wrong.
First doctor: “You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or hot fudge?”
Second doctor: “Those were thought to be unhealthy — precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.”

Moviegoers laughed. They recognized how they were whipsawed by contradictory expert pronouncements about what they should or should not eat to stay healthy. On this score, not much has changed. How many times have Americans read about a study damning this or that food, only to then hear the revisionist opposite? Avoid eggs, we were told; they clog your arteries. Wait, we then heard, eggs have nutritional value. Coffee can give you cancer. Hold on, coffee can improve brain function. Butter is terrible. Well, not really. Again and again, yesterday’s verity becomes today’s punch line.

Single course of antibiotics can mess up the gut microbiome for a year

In a battle against an infection, antibiotics can bring victory over enemy germs. Yet that war-winning aid can come with significant collateral damage; microbial allies and innocents are killed off, too. Such casualties may be unavoidable in some cases, but a lot of people take antibiotics when they’re not necessary or appropriate. And the toll of antibiotics on a healthy microbiome can, in some places, be serious, a new study suggests.

In two randomized, placebo-controlled trials of healthy people, a single course of oral antibiotics altered the composition and diversity of the gut microbiome for months, and in some cases up to a year. Such shifts could clear the way for pathogens, including the deadly Clostridium difficile. Those community changes can also alter microbiome activities, including interacting with the immune system and helping with digestion. Overall, the data, published Tuesday in the journal mBio, suggests that antibiotics may have more side effects than previously thought—at least in the gut.

alignment and yoga

by Sam Berlind

I’ve been thinking about the concept of alignment lately, how it’s understood and used in teaching and practicing yoga.

Some people think about it this way:

‘In yoga, the main focus of touch is on bodily alignment and improvement.

Teachers touch students to help them align better. We all know that. What many practitioners don’t realize is that sometimes they’re so out of alignment that they might actually hurt themselves.

Posture alignment refers to how your muscles are integrated and bones are aligned to support your body for optimal movement during exercise. The aim of good posture alignment is to establish a solid foundation with your body, so you can support your limbs, back, and head while you exercise.’

And from the other end of the yoga theory spectrum:

‘Instead of postural forms (static asanas), it is the individual animating spirit that should motivate our yoga practice. Energy-based, spontaneous yoga is like the developmental movements and perpetual stretchings of infants. This is action of the body in which reason takes no part, and which does not originate as an idea. Yogis perform actions with their bodies like the movements of children.’

When we ‘correct’ the alignment or posture of a yoga student through touch or word, we are implying that there are universal principles of yogic alignment that we ‘know’ and should be teaching others. It’s as if the goal of yoga practice is to achieve some kind of ideal symmetry or balance, as if a perfect pose awaits our mastery.

Really?!