Upcoming presentations

Thursday June 6, 10:30 a.m. at St. Paul’s Plaza, 1420 E Palomar St, Chula Vista. Keeping your wits: ten ways to prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Most forms of age-related dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, can be avoided or delayed by following a prudent lifestyle. Ten simple measures will preserve brain function and even improve it. Sponsored by OASIS. To register see their web site at http://www.oasisnet.org.

Friday, June 7th, 9:30 a.m. at the Oceanside First Presbyterian Church, 2001 S El Camino Real, Oceanside. Osteoporosis: Calcium Is Not the Answer. Osteoporosis is not an inevitable consequence of aging and taking calcium will not delay its onset. Learn the single most important thing that you can do to maintain a healthy skeleton. Sponsored by Osher Lifelong Learning Center. To register see their web site at http://www.csusm.edu/el/olli or call 800-500-9377.

Thursday June 13th, 1:00 p.m. OASIS Grossmont Center, La Mesa. Restoring a squandered legacy. Considering the remarkable medical advances of the past century, human life expectancy should be steadily increasing. Instead, we are burdened by diseases that didn’t exist at the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution. This presentation describes a blueprint to reverse the epidemics of obesity, diabetes and other causes of premature mortality. Sponsored by OASIS. To register see their web site at http://www.oasisnet.org.

Friday June 28th at 1:00 p.m. at the Temecula Learning Center.  Osteoporosis: Calcium Is Not the Answer. Osteoporosis is not an inevitable consequence of aging and taking calcium will not delay its onset. Learn the single most important thing that you can do to maintain a healthy skeleton. Sponsored by Osher Lifelong Learning Center. To register see their web site at http://www.csusm.edu/el/olli or call 800-500-9377.

In the news

Tick season has arrived.

It’s more important than ever to take special precautions to avoid tick bites and summer is high season. These critters are responsible for several diseases of which Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted fever are especially serious. Lyme disease alone attacks about 40,000 persons a year; Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (which is more common outside of the Rocky Mountains) is sometimes fatal, largely because it goes undiagnosed until too late. Ticks love grassy fields but they can thrive in any type of wooded or brushy area.

The best insect repellent is still DEET but it should not be applied to infants and not on the hands of children. Apply it to their faces with YOUR hands.

Wearing long sleeves and slacks with the cuffs tucked into the top of your socks doesn’t sound very comfortable in warm weather but it does prevent tick attachment. Toss your clothes into the dryer with the heat on high for a cycle after coming home from your hike to kill the ticks you can’t see. (Some are mighty small!)

Check yourself, your kids and your dogs after the hike. The scalp is a favorite hiding place but no part of the body is safe; don’t overlook the groin, the armpits and skin folds – even the bellybutton!

The key word in removing any tick that you find is S-L-O-W. Use sharp-pointed tweezers close to the skin and pull it up slowly. Don’t waste time with Vaseline, any chemical or heat from a match or cigarette. Clean the area with a vigorous soapy scrub. You can follow that with alcohol if it makes you feel better, but alcohol is second best to soap.

Antibiotics are not usually prescribed if removal of the tick has been accomplished in less than 36 hours.

Lifestyle

The Naked Sandwich

John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich would be surprised to know that his invention – if the legend is correct – has invaded nearly every menu in the Western world. The 18^th century First Lord of the Admiralty, after whom the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands are named, reportedly asked for a helping of meat between two slices of bread to keep him going during marathon gambling sessions. Some historians are less generous to the Earl and claim that the sandwich goes all the way back to the 1^st century B.C.

Two slices of bread contribute about 140 to 200 calories to our daily meal plan. A tablespoon-sized glob of mayo or butter adds a hundred more. A naked sandwich – no bread, butter or dressing – thus trims 300 calories off your lunch. If you can resist the temptation to make up the difference with a sweet snack or dessert you could lose a pound about every two or three weeks.

How do you hold the stuff together? A large leaf of lettuce. If you Google lettuce wrap you’ll find enough information to overload your recipe box, especially the BetterBytes site. Most varieties of lettuce don’t provide much nutrition except for small amounts of folate, vitamins A and C and potassium but a good sized leaf has almost no calories either. Lettuce provides what nutritionists call mouth feel to offset the relative dryness of bread.

It’s alright to add another slice of turkey or other lean meat to your naked sandwich. Those 50 or 60 calories will give you a boost of protein that will quell your appetite a lot longer than the bread you left behind.

If you’re making your own lunch, get creative with condiments. Sweet relish, chutney, cranberry sauce and mustard add plenty of flavor and not many calories. Try a little vinaigrette, soy sauce, salsa, chili sauce or a spoonful of capers to wake up your taste buds.

Need a bridge to the lettuce-wrap lunchstyle? You might find a soft tortilla easier to handle and it adds only about 60 calories more than lettuce. Pita bread makes for a nice variation but it has about as many calories as a couple of slices of white bread.

There’s more to this than cutting back on calories. Almost all sandwich breads are made from refined grains that are digested quickly and that boost our blood sugar. Several servings a day of quickly absorbed carbohydrates contribute to the current epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Whole grain breads are not much better but they do bump up our fiber intake.

Tens of thousands of years ago humans had no grain-based products at all and our bodies haven’t yet become completely adapted to them. If we’re going to eventually get back to the kind of diet that nature intended for us the naked sandwich is a sensible place to start