On Daddy's Watch

My child is sleeping now, but the evening was long. On the way home a clichéd advertisement sprang to mind. One dime swallowed by a two-year-old: ten cents. Visit to an ER for X-ray: $250. Sleeping, safe child, well, we all know the cliché. I was planning to post about something else tonight, but life intervenes.

I learned tonight that the clinic near my house closes at 8:00 P.M, and I was thirty minutes too late. I learned that you can't get stitches on a wound if it has been more than eight hours since the injury due to an increased risk of infection. I learned, too late, that Urgent Care Plus, which is also nearby, closes at 9:00 P.M. We learned that lots of kids swallow objects, but even sharp objects are not as dangerous as disc and button batteries. I learned that the doctor in the ER wears exactly the same model of Seiko Kinetic watch I wear, and I learned that people can fracture their wrists in interesting and "unusual" ways trying to play follow-the-leader on their motorcycles.

update: The dime's out.

Update on Diet Foods

Time has published a new article, "Do Diet Foods Lead to Weight Gain?", on an experiment using rats who are fed diet foods that is related to a previous story I linked about diet sodas being linked to obesity. When rats ate diet foods and non-diet foods that tasted the same, this tricked their bodies into not being able to eat the right amount of food to get the calories they needed.

Diet Soft Drinks Linked to Obesity

As reported from a study at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, diet sodas are worse than regular sodas. I'm assuming so far that the "regular" sodas are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, which has it's own metabolic issues, rather than sucrose cane sugar.

In fact, when the researchers took a closer look at their data, they found that nearly all the obesity risk from soft drinks came from diet sodas.

"There was a 41% increase in risk of being overweight for every can or bottle of diet soft drink a person consumes each day," Fowler says.

Antibacterial Products Can Help Breed Superdiseases

According to this Scientific American article, triclosan and chemicals like it help select for resistant bacteria because they have specific targets in bacteria that are shared by some antibiotics, and antibacterial products leave behind a weaker residue that contributes even more to resistance selection because it is not as effective at killing. Products like alcohol and bleach, on the other hand, evaporate leaving less residue, and they do nonspecific damage to the bacteria, so the risk of bacteria developing cross-resistance with antibiotics from traditional cleaners is less.

We are harming ourselves and our children by continued, widespread use of antibacterial products by breeding more resistant forms of bacterial diseases and by the contamination of our crops, streams, food, and water with these products. If this is true, none it should really be surprising despite the SciAm article's title. It makes sense, and the concern has existed for several years.

The War on Christmas

Several people I know seem distressed by what is sometimes called "the war on Christmas". One of the claims of this war is that many retailers do not wish their customers a "Merry Christmas" during this season. I've even seen lists of retailers who do not use the word "Christmas" to promote their seasonal shopping festival. As an adult Christian why should I think that retailers should use the word "Christmas" in their marketing? Maybe we should rather be upset that a store would profane the holiday by using it as a marketing gimmick to sell more stuff.

We can ask ourselves why we are concerned that Christmas remain associated so strongly with shopping.