Vitamins+exercise=bad? Since when?

May 15th, 2009 • education
Tags: chemisty, exercise, science

I came across this article at Corante detailing how “vitamins counteract benefits of exercise”. Now, I may not have done much exercising lately but 10 years ago, I was a trainer and nutritionist and I heavily preached taking vitamins to supplement exercise. Hell, all trainers, dietitians, doctors, nutritionists, and supplement companies do too! And have been for decades. What I want to know is why this new revelation might be important. I, frankly, think it’s a load of bollocks because the test subjects didn’t take recommended values of two specific vitamins, which were no doubt specially selected for the test.

Participants took 10000mg of Vitamin C (yes, a full gram) and 400 IU of vitamin E. Now, the post ends up not talking about vitamin E’s effects whatsoever for some odd reason and instead focuses entirely on vitamin C. The paper and the author — an organic chemist — suggests that vitamin C is inhibiting muscular firing and muscular oxygen production/consumption. Now, is this going to be true when someone takes the recommended value of vitamin C? The patients were taking 1000mg which is actually 1667% RDV. Truthfully, I have a feeling that this much vitamin C was the cause of the observed effects and not the fact that vitamin C itself is the sole cause. Less than 100mg is the RDV of vitamin C and while incredibly difficult to get under doses of a few hundred milligrams, I think focusing on 1000mg was overkill for the entire experiment. Scientists and trainers know that once your body can no longer absorb something, it simply excretes it. In this case, excess vitamin C would simply be sweated out or urinated out.

However, Dr. Lowe didn’t see any of these issues with this study and instead went on to say that the findings were seemingly correct and in fact validate another paper from last year regarding — again, suspiciously — vitamin C inhibiting vascular capacity and growth. I find all of this suspect given that the ingested vitamin is taken in a much higher capacity than our body is known to be able to process. Many of these points are also brought up in the comments without reply from the author. I think this type of experimentation is excellent for understanding exactly what we need and what we should be doing but not when its entire premise is flawed from the beginning. I find it also quite specious that a chemist is backing this up entirely without seeing these same flaws.

Better Place demos their fancy battery swapping station

May 14th, 2009 • environmentalism
Tags: better place, electric car, ev

I just read about Better Place and their special EV cars and battery packs, along with their plans to gleefully roll out charging/swapping stations across the world (hopefully) in the latest GOOD Magazine (GOOD015). While the entire plan was very optimistic, from the article, that’s all it had going for it: optimism. And possibly butterflies. But one thing that stood out to me in the article was that they had no working prototypes at the time. That has now changed as they have a single working prototype out in the wild in Yokohama, Japan. Green Inc over at NYT (amongst places) has the newly released YouTube video from Better Place along with a nice write up about the whole process.

However, the video brought up more questions than it answered for me. Originally, I suspected that the charging stations would just do a battery pack swap, which is still what they do. But what I had not anticipated was that Better Place is essentially swapping out the entire electric drivetrain of the vehicle for one that’s fully charged. If you ask me, that’s highly inefficient and certainly lends itself to a longer swap time. What I had envisioned was simply dropping the butt out of the vehicle and replacing it since that is where the batteries resides in other EVs/hybrids (OK, they’re in the trunk but I think butt is more descriptive). This would certainly be smaller than what they’re doing now and could certainly be done more quickly. A quicker turnaround time would save everybody both time and money.

What is going to be done to keep the cost down? Currently, each station costs a cool half a million dollars. And does that price include the station, charging bays, and batteries or will extra batteries incur an extra cost? Will any of the charging technology be used to feed back into the grid in order to lower monthly utilities bills? Really, I could probably think of a dozen more questions but then my coworkers may start to wonder why I’m not working instead.

I like Better Place’s idea, it’s been bandied around for years but nothing has really come of it and with the West’s new found enthusiasm about caring about the environment, it may actually come to fruition and sweep the globe. We’ll know much more in 2012 or 2013 after their Israeli test stations work out the bugs.

Beardy wonderment…sort of

May 13th, 2009 • beards
Tags: beards

As I was skimming through a buttload of RSS feeds that I sore need to catch up on, I came across this “hierarchy of beards” thing. I don’t remember where I found it but I thought it was mostly neat. It would have been a lot cooler if it was a real display of beards with their actual names and not cutesy things like the “Hyneman” (after Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters) or the “Comic-Con” (San Diego Comic Con) and other silly names like that. I have no idea why they came up with such absurd names but I do like the overall design of the poster, very Victorian. This has fed my beardy desires for today.