Assorted Links

  • how to self-experiment with resistant starch. See comments.
  • A list of health benefits of honey says nothing about sleep
  • Someone says “I told you so” about the demise of Better Place, the Israeli car-battery-swap company. Better Place raised an insane amount of money, something like $1 billion.
  • Behind the New York Times series on health care costs. “The social media team analyzed the remarks and discovered that there were deep frustrations about the cost of inhalers and medications for asthma, the most common chronic condition affecting people of all ages.” There should be deep frustration that anyone still has asthma. The notion that figuring out what causes asthma is possible — and will cost about a million times less than continuing to buy inhalers and medicine — has not occurred to enough people.

Thanks to Tuck.

9 thoughts on “Assorted Links

  1. Unfortunately the New York Times article is paywalled :(

    Seth: Sorry, I didn’t realize the paywall varies from country to country. I was in Korea when I read it.

  2. you can see most NY Times articles, including this one, by opening them in what Chrome calls “incognito window”. Firefox has something similar.

  3. that’s odd, because I read it using incognito mode.

    More: The NY Times paywall varies from place to place. Using incognito mode, I can read it in Korea but not in America (and Australia).

  4. Nancy, potatoes that are cooked and cooled will contain a small amount of resistant starch, but not much. If you are shooting for a certain intake target, it is much easier to take pure resistant starch in the form of potato starch than to get it from whole foods.

  5. Nancy, it has to do with cooking the potatoes. When you cook potatoes to a certain temperature (I think it’s about 140 F) the starch granules burst and become regular starch which your body digests as such. Cooked and cooled potatoes, green bananas and other food that contain undigestible resistant starch which then feed the gut bugs in your lower digestive tract. Lots of info at Mark’s Daily Apple which ran the self-experiment post (which I thought had a nice outline of how do do your own self-experimentation). Also there is a lot of info at Free the Animal blog.

  6. At the end of the Honey health benefit article there is a link to •10 uses for honey outside the kitchen.
    “#9: Fight insomnia: If you don’t have much trouble falling asleep, but tend to wake up in the middle of the night, it could be totally natural (for centuries many people had a two-sleep schedule) or it could be due to stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, being out of tune. A bit of salted honey (you need both sweet and salty) can help reset these hormones and get you back to sleep. You only need a small amount (this shouldn’t be a snack!), so use a teaspoon or egg spoon to keep yourself from overindulging.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *