Sunday, May 31, 2009

Some pictures

I'm just gonna take a minute and promote the Canon Powershot G10. It's pretty cool. We bought it to replace our family camera and for me to use in the clinic for pictures of patients. Although after buying it we found a place online that sells it for quite a bit less. Figures.

Here's some shots I took dinking around with it. I haven't even opened the manual yet, it's pretty easy to figure out.

Ignore the dirty window glare and the power wires on this 15 second exposure of the bridge last night.



Action shot of Grace running around.


I like how well the contrast works and how sharp the pictures turn out.


Playing with the video mode. Now we can take home movies!!
Just a quit thanks to Emily's parents for letting us use one of their old cameras for the past couple years (since our first one went through the washing machine). It's done alright, but time for an upgrade.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Lonely non-poetry late at night

too tired to think straight,
i'm likely to say something i don't mean
or do i, but i'm no longer inhibited from saying it?

trying to study the brain
and all that's on my mind is you.
listening to A.I.H. and it's all me
all me thinking of you

frustrated with not getting you
my mind looks for escape
frustrated with escapes
it dwells on you contentedly

your memories are the best drug
after your presence in the room

i'd run away from this 
hot box of you
but it's dark outside
and my feet need a break
and my head needs filling

my head needs sleep
if i could, i'd dream of you
dream of your smile
your dancing
your enthusiasm

but my dreams don't listen
to what my frontal cortex says
they do their own thing
making sense of this world
that doesn't have you in it
right now

billions of nerves
and i'd say half
are focused on you
a quarter on the music
and a few on these lame words
and the rest lost in neurotransmitter noise

10 minutes until
self-imposed deadlines
take effect.
if I can fight the
inebriation of studies
i'll pray to dream of you
while memories of brain facts
sink into place

The wonder of dentistry

So, you might hear a lot from me, since my wife is out of town and I have a big test this week (which means I'll spend too much time procastinating the studying), so I'll hop on here and talk to you all.

I just left the Clinical Excellence Day downstairs in the school's clinic. Anyone that has research to present can, and anyone who wants to present a set of dental work they're proud of, they can. So there's lots of seniors showing off big complicated cases, many of the patients were there to show off their new mouths. Pretty amazing. There's one guy who does amazing work. He had two patients there and both were awe-inspiring (at least for me as a dental student). I got to pick his brain a bit. "How do you get to do such large cases? What's it take to get the patient to accept the plans?" I realize now that I should have known the answer to those and was showing my immaturity in asking them. He says simply, "I presented to the patients what I thought would be best for them and why. When they see how important it is and what it can do for them, they find the money to do it somehow. That's it." 

In watching him present to the faculty and judges, I realized, this guy seriously knows what he's talking about. All the little details they've mentioned, even if briefly, in our classes, he rattles off. Considerations of vertical dimensional overlap, centric occlusion, height of tooth contours for grinding and more. The patients didn't end up with the shiniest or most perfect looking smiles (although still very impressive), but when they smiled and showed off their teeth, you could tell that they were high quality and looked like they could chomp rocks for years to come and still keep the new stuff in their mouths (don't think you can eat rocks, I'm just exaggerating to get a point across). I asked him how much time he spent planning for his patients, he says, "Too much for a student." Lol. He's a hard worker and does high quality work, whatever it is. He even helped win a few of BYU's Men's Volleyball championship titles before dental school. 

A couple students also presented the findings of many studies they came across regarding the toxicity of composite resin fillings. Like any synthetic composites/plastics, it is made by polymerization (making small pieces into long chains) by a chemical process. In doing so, not all the little pieces get used, and "free-radical" electrons get distributed to the surrounding area. There's been a fair bit of very recent research (this year) showing the damage the unused pieces (bis-GMA monomers, which get turned into BPA's, or bis-phenol A) cause to oral tissues. The limitation to the studies is they're all done "in-vitro" or in labs on dishes and containers. There's been almost no research done on the effect in an actual person. They can't compare it to amalgam toxicity yet either, but to living cells in a lab setting, the bis-GMA monomers are deadly when used in large amounts (larger than what you'd get from having a filling done, but worth studying and researching still). 

Recommendations were to rinse with an alcohol mouth-rinse (like Listerine) or apply N-Acetyl Cysteine-- which has better antioxidant properties than vitamin C or A-- after having a filling placed. Still, this needs to be studied in real people before it holds tremendous weight, but they're off to a good start. It also should make anyone pause before going for white fillings just for looks or to avoid the mercury in the silver fillings.

It was an excellent event the school puts on every year. Now, they've set up some food for the participants, so I'ma gonna go sneak some, it smells good. 


Tuesday, May 19, 2009

holy craptastic!

Those are the real words that came out of my mouth as I watched this for the third time. Watch the original, it's worth it for the bigger size. 

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

Fructose and sugars

Here's an update: We saved up and bought nice running shoes from a running store. I've gone twice now. Yesterday, I took surf stuff and running stuff and drove down to the parking lot at the south end of Ocean Beach and watched the sloppy surf for 10 minutes before deciding that a run would be better. Ran two miles on the paved pathway and ran/walked (mostly walked) back on the sand past the thousands of broken sand dollars and dead-crab pieces 2 miles back. Pleased with myself, I reported this to Emily this morning and asked her if she'd been running this morning. She tells me yes, and where she went. I mapped it out to 5.5 miles. Haha. I tell her she HAS to do a 5k this weekend during a family reunion. She doesn't like it when I tell her she HAS to do something. She says, no she doesn't :-) (I gotta figure out how to manipulate this to my advantage: "You HAVE TO stop giving me back rubs!!")

The other day, my mother-in-law asks me what's the deal with High Fructose Corn Syrup. Some friends of theirs just visited the mid-west where they saw posters and signs and billboards everywhere touting the greatness of HFCS (in response to the negative attention it's been getting) sponsored by the corn growers associations.

I only knew of speculation and personal preference so I decided to look it up. Starting with wikipedia, I checked a couple of the sources and ended up spending some time at the Journal of Nutrition's site which had lots of articles on HFCS.

Here's the lowdown (probably too much low-down, but consider yourselves educated), there's lots of sugars in the world and we can use lots of them for energy. The most abundant is glucose. Stick a bunch of glucoses together into various chains and you get different things: plant and animal starches (which we can digest), wood/fiber (which only bacteria can digest), and lots more. Starches are blobs of stored energy consisting of chains of glucose, the human body holds enough for about a day, or an hour of hard exercising. Once it runs out, it uses other energy sources, likes fats and protein (there's always a mix of all of them being used and made, but it's primarily like this). Glucose is very highly regulated by the body.

Fructose is another abundant simple sugar. Before glucose can be used, it must be converted by enzymes into fructose. Fructose is found naturally in lots of places. It's very sweet tasting (much sweeter than pure glucose), probably because it is such an immediately usable energy source that the body is designed to take any fructose it can get (being a body developed in times when food was scarcer and harder to come by). Glucose is easily missed by the liver and takes a couple circulations through the body to get all picked up, whereas fructose all gets picked up on the first pass, generally (I'm sure it can be overloaded at some point).

What people have found in studying fructose vs. glucose is when there is lots of fructose in the diet, there are higher amounts of fats and cholesterol (which does lots of things in relation to the processing and storage of fat) in the blood. This gives cause to believe that high fructose diets have a strong relationship to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. (The authors of one of the studies said that the fructose levels from fruits and vegetables is not high enough to do this in a normal diet)

This would make sense: "Lots of immediate usable energy, but can't use it right now? Store it!! Save what you can!! You never know when the famine will hit!"

That's what the body does.

Now, what exactly is High Fructose Corn Syrup? Plain ol' regular Corn syrup comes from (can you guess it?) CORN!! It's nearly all glucose. Using enzymes and chemicals (on the scale we make it, I'm sure it qualifies for the title of "Industrial Processes" as scary as that sounds) they can convert corn syrup to 90% fructose, which is then used to mix with pure corn syrup to varying strengths of fructose concentrations. In most foods you buy, its in a 55% glucose to 45% fructose combo of free sugars, ready for bodily use.

Compare that to cane, beet, and other plants that give us normal table sugar, aka "sucrose". Sucrose is a two-sugar combo with one glucose, one fructose stuck together. When broken down to simple sugar form, it's pretty close to HFCS chemically. But, importantly, the body can regulate how much sucrose it will absorb and how much of it it will break down. There's quite a bit more control over the body's use of sucrose. It also tastes quite a bit different, and there's some evidence that the brain can distinguish caloric intake and satisfaction based off of the type of sugar ingested. (I would think with all the other things the body can do, distinguishing the fine details of important energy consumption would be easy). Granted, lots of sucrose isn't much better, but it is at least significant.

I thought it was funny that the wikipedia article described "opposing studies" done that show HFCS has the same effects as sucrose and shouldn't be treated any differently or receive negative press. The study cited in the article, and elsewhere by the corn associations, is not a study, but a "review" done by "White Research Associates" or something like that, written by one man with the last name White basically stating the chemical sameness between HFCS and sucrose. Sure, it's true, but at least slightly misleading and to me it seems purely a marketing ploy to help out the corn association dispel the hate for HFCS.


As an extra note on the topic of sugars: lactose is the sugar in milk. It's a glucose and a galactose sugar stuck together. Not the body's first choice for energy and cells are not normally in a state to use it, but lactose in the cells actually binds onto DNA and changes what the cell is going to make. So when there's enough lactose the DNA gets scanned and churns out the enzymes to use galactose and lactose. Way cool, huh? This makes for easy study of genes: stick the gene you want to study onto the lactose-using gene, stuff it into a bacteria, and feed it only lactose. When the lactose-using gene gets read and enzymes made, the extra genes stuck to it also get read and their proteins/enzymes get made too. Then analyze the proteins and figure out what the gene does. People and ethnicities who historically didn't have dairy in their diets tend to be lactose-intolerant, meaning the gene for using lactose as energy is faulty (this gives the bacteria in your gut lots of sugar and they cause lots of gases and digestive troubles)

Also, malt, like in barley malt, or malted drinks, comes from maltose (or did maltose get named for the malting process??) is two glucoses stuck together and is basically plant starch with some of the breaking down done for you.