Art De Vany: January 2006 Archives

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Bonnie De Vany, November 24, 1938--January 22, 2006

January 22, 2006 08:02 PM

Snapshot 2006-01-23 08-46-21.jpg

Bonnie died today, just one day after my mother. It was a welcome event for the vasculitis had taken everything from her. She died peacefully with me and her son Brandon and his wife Christine and their children close by. Her son Jeff had seen her the week before and her daughter Stacy, with her daughter Kylee, had left only hours before.

The image is Bonnie's drawing of her Vogue (1955) cover as an interior design class exercise. She never liked the picture and was even more beautiful than it shows. People stopped her on the street and in stores just to tell her how beautiful she was. When they saw her gentleness and sweet smile, they were charmed even more.

Our homes were always lovely and it was a great pleasure to come home to her each night after work. We ate nearly every dinner together and walked most evenings with one another. That is the moment of the day when I shall miss her most.

I had all that love and beauty beside me for nearly 50 years. It was a privilege and a great responsibility to care for this fragile beauty and our deep love. I know I did it well; she told me with her eyes, those lovely eyes, and the few words she could find as the end neared.

You can never be too serious. Bonnie was frustrated when she thought my mother would outlive her. I am not sure she heard me, but I told her in those last hours that she had done it; she had beaten my mother by a day. I hope she got a last laugh out of it, not at all bitter for that was never her, just a small triumph on the grounds that a wife should surely outlive the mother of her husband.

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Ella G. De Vany, February 7, 1916--January 21, 2006

My mother passed away yesterday in the presence of her oldest son, Arthur, two grandchildren, Stacy and Brandon, her granddaughter in law, Christine, and great grandchildren, Corey, Kylee, Ashley, Brook, and Leighton.

She was a remarkable and generous lady who missed her husband, Arthur De Vany, Sr., greatly during the 20 years she lived beyond his death. It was her time years ago so there was little sadness; we all were prepared for this moment and she welcomed it.

Her passing made Bonnie's grandchildren insist on seeing her that afternoon, lest they miss a moment with her before she goes. It will be soon.

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Permissions

January 18, 2006 07:31 PM

I gave my wife permission to die yesterday. She need not stay alive for me or anyone but herself.

I promised to be there for that passage to her final destination.

We had 50 years together. More than most are given or choose.

I thank you for your kind comments.

I grant permission to anyone to archive or otherwise preserve the blog content.

You know the way that I will follow from this point forward.

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An Empty House

January 16, 2006 01:44 PM

Home to an empty house.

I placed my wife in the hospice today. It was one of the hardest things I have ever had to deal with, including my son's diagnosis of diabetes at the age of 2 in the dead of a harsh Chicago winter or my daughter's first epileptic seizure.

But, with hard things come sweet things and moments to cherish. As they were testing my wife's memory they pointed to various people or things and asked what are they, who are they.

They pointed to me and asked Bonnie in a kidding way, who is this guy? You could see her big smile even with her bowed head and she said with so much sweetness and joy, "He's my love."

I almost broke up right there, but I was so happy at her joy and obvious love for me that I smiled through the sadness of it all. She has loved me so completely and with such complete trust that I could never fail her.

This is a fitting moment to end the blog. Good health and good wishes to all of you.

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Its the Ice Cream

January 13, 2006 07:32 PM

I spent the larger part of the day looking for a place to care for my wife. She has progressed to a state beyond my capabilities to manage. I found one and came home feeling kind of depressed and a bit like a traitor. I had determined to keep her at home as long as I could. Now, after months of little sleep and a loss of about 15 pounds (not a big deal, as my stress response is to eat less and that is good for it triggers repair and maintenance, just what I need). But, I caught my first cold in more than 20 years going into the hospital late night after night. And staying up most of the night to keep her from falling when she got up.

She came out of the bedroom with the help of her aide and hugged my neck. We had a moment like when we were first dating. I even got a bit weepy, one of the first moments I have had since her first hospitalization in April, one of five. I am walking a tight line in her care. If I give her too much insulin, she could have an insulin shock reaction and die. If I give her too little, and the steroids she is on make her insulin resistant (body builders beware, it is true) so that she requires more than usual, she will become keto-acidotic. Both are lethal conditions. Either way, I could become a Carol Chessman (I may have the name wrong, but a doctor accused of killiing his wife with a lethal injection of insulin) kind of case. If I make a mistake or poor choice and she, in her weakened condition dies, it could leave me vulnerable to either charge. Better to have her where this is not an issue, though it is not an issue as I have managed her insulin expertly and faithfully for over 20 years. And my son's too.

But though this may weigh on me, not her. She is totally grounded in the here and now. I should have been more of a realist, as she is.

I prepared a dinner of Minestrone soup for her and a big dinner for myself. But, the only thing that kept her at the table and got her attention was the Ice Cream I promised her after dinner. I had spent the dinner trying to tell her that she was going into a nice place not far where she could be taken care of. But, that didn't get her attention. All she could focus on was the ice cream.

I thought, what kind of economist are you to not recognize the power of the tangible and immediate relative to memories of the past or possibilities of the future. So, it became, for me, a lighter moment than it had been. And a further recognition of the power of economics and the narrow focus of one who is so near death.

I am determined to be more responsive to her here and now. That is all she has and all any of us have. Why is that so hard to see?

In a weak moment, I lost track of my wallet, something I have done no more than a couple of times in our years of marriage and dating, almost 50 now. It turned out that I dropped it in meeting the hospice person in a place near a remote off ramp on the way to look at the place I chose to put her. I was just going to call credit card companies and such when I got a phone call from a man who found it. He is driving all the way back from Hurricane to meet me, 9 miles, from his way to Hilldale, the Mormon community about 30 miles out of town. Another moment that I will value from this day. It was a relief not to have to deal with the lost wallet on top of it all. A great young man returned it just for the pleasure of helping someone. I have some issues with the Fundamentalist Mormon treatment of women and young men, but not with Mormons in general or any religion for that matter. This young man was a gift to me at a time when I had so much to deal with.

To top off a remarkable, sad and surprisingly pleasant day, my collection of Laurel and Hardy films arrived late today. My movie for tonight, A Chump at Oxford. I had the European version sent from the UK because I heard the quality was superior to what is sold here. The quality is superb when seen on my computer. I can't say anything about the domestic version except that its reviews were not good on the video quality.

Like I said, its going to be a great and sad year. Today was a perfect example. My excessive sadness over what is likely the last weekend with my wife when what mattered most to her was the ice cream. And a fine young man going out of his way to return my wallet. A day I will remember and value.

I should have known; its the ice cream, stupid.

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Fear of Food; Epidemiology Gone Wild

January 8, 2006 08:57 PM

I glanced at the extended discussion of My Diet entry and various points that seem to be an uremitting recitation of poor epidemiological research, partial, but uncomfirmed experimentally, mechanisms that cause ill health in various populations around the world that center on their food.

None of it stands up to hard standards. None of the points made are even refutable and thus do not qualify as science in any strict sense.

Epidemiology is at the heart of most of these fears of various foods, saturated fat, unsaturated fat, mercury, and so on. Even the most basic facts asserted by the casual comparative results on heart disease, stomach cancer, pick your concern of the moment, are far from established. With Dr. Le Fanu, I am of the opinion that departments of epidemiology should be disbanded. The work is shoddy and the data are too often tortured to give a result.

None of the controls are sufficient to have a result stand for long and they are often reversed in subsequent research, though this is seldom reported. If you get your health news from main line media, then expect to be scared every few weeks with some other finding that will later fall apart.

The research deals primarily in averages, small samples, and non refutable hypotheses. These are the conditions that make every result suspicious. Nearly all statistical distributions in living systems are not normal. The average is dominated by a few or even one observation; it is largely meaningless.

The standard deviation often does not exist, though this is seldom seen as the distribution is not estimated or investigated. Results that are meager are recast as relative risk in order to inflate the health consequences. And the list goes on.

What is the perfect food?

A human being. As a food source it contains inarguably all the essential nutrients. Moreover, even with the excess concern for diet variation among cultures and areas of the world, homeostasis and omnivory mean that virtually all humans would exhibit highly conserved biological structures and nutrients.

Leaving aside prions and rogue proteins, a cannibal would arguably be the best fed among humans living on all possible food sources. Kind of gives a new meaning to "I think I'll have Danish for breakfast doesn't it? Or perhaps French (wash well before preparation) or Italian tonight."

The point this macabre argument makes is that humans differ so little in their basic structure and nutrient content, food cannot have a very big effect on the content of the living stuff they are made of. What I pointed to in my post was the hormone drives and the miscommunication among hormones that lead to a break down of homeostasis. These are substantially affected by excess dietary intake relative to energy expenditure and high body fat. Well fattened humans would be the prime cuts for cannibals, just as fat surfers are more likely to be attacked by sharks than skinny ones.

The problem with diet is that some diets drive the hormones far off track and set the stage for stress in the body's battle to maintain some kind of homeostasis. When you become hormone resistant, particularly in insulin and leptin, your hormones are screaming so loud the receptors become deaf.

Imagine the confusing cross talk among hormones when the large fat content in one's body cannot tell the appetite that you have had enough. And your insulin is so high, that there is all that sugar floating in your blood stream, but not in the cells where it is needed. Your body says it is hungry because the cells are nutrient deprived and you eat. The fat cannot tell your appetite you don't need more food, when you have all this fat to burn. And the body mounts this big stress responese to get rid of all that blood sugar and attacks your muscle and bone to get the sugar it thinks it needs, even while there is plenty of it in your blood stream.

Forget half-baked epidemiology and its even less baked popular expositions. Worry about your fat content and your hormones. Quiet them down and let the body respond to calm and coherent messages.

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My Diet

January 2, 2006 07:15 PM

Dave poses this puzzle: "Too many carbs are bad. Too much fat is bad. Too much protein is bad. How much is too much? It seems like limiting all of these would make it very hard to get filled up three times a day."

A question I have thought about much and for which there are conflicting points of view. My take on it?

First, there is no optimum if you are looking for a fixed point. A mixed strategy is closer to the optimum. Variety is part of any solution. So, I vary protein, carbs and fat and eat in no set ratio. I also think it is important to vary total intake, including days of no intake but water.

Second, yes too much is by definition too much. We are looking for amounts or proportions that will keep our metabolic profile healthy, build lean tissue, and keep our body mass and composition where we find it to work best.

Third, we have two respected points of view on the matter of proportions of carbs, protein and fat. Loren Cordain's fine analysis (Loren Cordain, The Paleolithic Diet) of the ethnographic data that shows the proportions of these macronutrients consumed by healthy hunter gatherers, living a life quite different from modern life. Then we have Ron Rosedale's analysis (The Rosedale Diet) of a large data set of American metabolic basket cases who he sets right on a diet somewhat different, but related to Cordain's hunter gatherer model. And we also have several fine books on the evolution of nutrition that show dramatic changes in the modern diet relative to even the recent past. (I am old enough to remember when margarine first made its appearance, not for health reasons, but during war time rationing. Sugar also fell into the rationed category during this time. Not surprising, sugar and fat scarcities during war time and price rationing that caused it.)

Sugar and fat have seen the most dramatic changes in the modern diet. Vegetable oils, hydrogenated oils, fatter animals, grain fed animals with higher fat content and more saturated fat. Fructose in nearly everything that is packaged or canned or frozen. A plethora of new sweet substances whose mechanisms are yet unknown. And transfats in large amounts. Supplements have exploded on the scene and their longer term consequences are problematics in my mind. Few of them work, though there are some that are effective. The composition of vegetables and fruits has changed; they are more sugary and contain less fiber and have lower mineral and antioxidant content.

To eat in a thoroughly healthy way is hard...

and getting harder.

For Rosedale's metabolic disaster cases clear measures of metabolic fitness establish that a movement toward the hunter gatherer profile is healthy. Low insulin, low leptin, and low stress hormones are desirable. So, there is agreement between what I take to be large samples of humans, the ethnographic index in Cordain's case and the large client base in Rosedale's case.

Cordain shows that hunter gatherers consume as much as 35 percent of their calories in protein. Fat is 30 to 40 percent, but fat consumed by hunter gatherers is very different fat from modern fat. Rosedale limits protein for his clients, who are after all fat and sick and do little exercise. Yet, they thrive on his diet which is high fat. But, the fat is heathy fat, not heavy, saturated fat. So is the fat consumed by hunter gatherers and the healthy French and Italians and Greeks and Sardinians of the mediterranean. Then there is the Eskimo who consumes more than 70 percent calories as fat. Again, healthy fat with little saturation and higher proportions of Omega 3 to other fats. These groups have all been called paradoxes by American dieticians who think that fat is just plain bad. Saturated fat is not so good, but you need some. Trans fats are just plain bad. Omega 6 fats are bad when they are too high relative to Omega 3 fats. Saturated and Omega 6 fats can crowd out Omega 3 fats. So, the proportions are important.

So, on the whole, it looks like a high fat diet is quite healthy. Fat is an essential intake because humans cannot synthesize enough of it from other sources (Crawford and Marsh, The Evolution of Nutrition). Protein is essential. Only carbohydrate fails to be an essential nutrient. The body stores little and enough can be supplied from protein. The Cordain, French/Mediterranean, and Rosedale diets all have 40 percent or more calories from fat. But, this is not the Atkin's or similar diet. These diets all are low in saturated and Omega 6 fats and high in Omega 3 and olive oils, almond oils, avocade oils, and so forth.

If I kept score, I would say my diet varies up to a maximum of about 50 percent fat calories and to as little as 10 percent. About 30 percent protein, again, with a lot of variation. And 20 percent carbohydrate, all fiber and water-containing carbohydrate, i.e. plants. But, I don't really count. The averages don't mean a lot, so I am not sure what they are. I believe you need to avoid saturating metabolic pathways and, thus, vary the macronutrient percentages.

The fat calories are weighted in the Omega 3 and monosaturated fats. I eat a lot of sea food, skinless chicken, almonds and other nuts, egg whites, avocados, nut butters, olives and olive oil. There is not a lot of saturated fat as I trim fat, grill fat off the meat, and eat lean meats and game. Vegetables are for color and texture. Fruits for antioxidants and minerals and a bit of texture. Lots of fresh spices. This is not far from the Rosedale diet and also pretty close to the Cordain diet. I am a bit closer to the Cordain diet on protein because I am active, work out hard, and carry a lot of lean body mass.

One thing this diet guarantees is that I am a fat burner, not a sugar burner.

Avoid spikes in insulin or leptin by keeping meal size and portions modest. Spikes are extreme events to your cells and a sugar high can kill millions of insulin receptors. It is like binge drinking; too much of the substance at one time becomes highly toxic. It is worse to drink a bottle of Scotch in a day than to drink it in a week.

The primary benefit to frequent meals is that the individual doses are small which prevents spikes. But frequent eating brings a more modest, but continuous elevation of insulin and shuts down the variation. The spikes are worse than the continuous flow, but neither is desirable. You must interupt the continuous insulin flow by fasting over night. Eat three hours before sleeping. Fasting during sleep rests your metabolism and turns on the repair and maintenance genes to work through the night. If you eat the diet I suggest you will burn fat during the night to fuel this repair work. Sleeping on an empty stomach gives you a double hit: your GH spikes and flows will be higher and you trigger the fasting stress response that is known to promote repair. So, you double up the repair work.

The diet I suggest will leave you feeling satisfied because you will have low insulin and low leptin levels. Fat and protein sate hunger quite well. Just be sure to vary total intake. For example, it is better to eat the same total number of calories by eating one day and skipping the next than to eat them spread evenly over two days. I tend to do the spreading of intake over three days, one day lean and two plentiful. Of course, this is varied but I attain something like this over a month. This is based on the caloric restriction research and my analysis of the stochastic energy environment of the upper paleolithic (see my paper Why We Get Fat from an earlier post).

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Evolution

Evolution is in the news lately with school board idiocy and new findings.

Live Science.

And a great article in Science that shows how evolution works.

Both articles have links to more evolution science.

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