License! License!

Good news everyone! It doesn't matter if you try to live a healthy lifestyle or not!

The NYT Well blog reports that a study of centenarians found they were no more likely to eat a balanced diet, exercise regularly, or avoid smoking than were people who did not live to be 100 years old.

This, good people, is serious license for extremes of behavior. Go wild! Smoke, drink and carry on! If you have a combination of genes that supports a long life, you may live to be 100 regardless.

Of course, if you don't have that combination of genes you may not live to be 60, but whatever. Don't let that stand between you and your license.

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Frozen Desserts for Charity

Let's talk about one of my favorite subjects: license for extremes of behavior.

As we know, one common form of license is wild misinterpretation of results from scientific studies (wine has antioxidants, which are healthy, so you should drink several bottles a day!).

Another form of license is "buffet," or "I paid for the all-you-can-eat, so I'd better eat more right now than I would normally consume over the course of a week."

This is especially potent when combined with "a good reason," as in Boston's storied Scooper Bowl, where, for the bargain price of $8, which benefits the Jimmy Fund (supporting cancer research and particularly associated with children's cancers) you can get all the ice cream in the world that you can eat.

It's a worthy cause! Won't someone please think of the children and go stuff themselves with more ice cream than a rational person would contemplate?

I mean, we could just donate $8 to the Jimmy Fund, if we were really dedicated to supporting cancer research, but that wouldn't involve a license to ingest extremes of ice cream. Smart fundraisers know that most people are secretly (in my case I guess not very secretly) selfish and horrible and are much more deeply moved by sweet treats than by sick children.

Dreadful, isn't it? I'm disgusted with myself and my entire species. Present company excepted, of course.

Now that I've totally depressed the mood here, I'm inclined to think that making use of the occasional bit of license for extremes of behavior is a delicious part of the complete life, so I'm pleased to report that I stuffed myself with considerably more ice cream (and gelato and sorbet) than a rational person would contemplate.

For the sake of the children.

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License?

Today in License for Extremes of Behavior, we have a report from Well that making small adjustments to diet and exercise habits--like the much-recommended switching to skim milk, taking the stairs, etc.--are unlikely to result in long term changes.

Numerous scientific studies show that small caloric changes have almost no long-term effect on weight. When we skip a cookie or exercise a little more, the body’s biological and behavioral adaptations kick in, significantly reducing the caloric benefits of our effort.

You know what that means, right? Obviously, we should eat all the cookies we want and lounge around playing video games all day!

“I’m not saying throw up your hands and forget about it,” Dr. Friedman [a molecular genetics researcher] said.

Oh. Well then, shut up.

Ignoring my petulant outburst, he then goes on to say,

“Instead of focusing on weight or appearance, focus on people’s health. There are things people can do to improve their health significantly that don’t require normalizing your weight.”

Leaving alone the issue of what normalized weight is when we're constantly hearing that everyone in the whole country is morbidly obese and on the verge of death (I mean, if that's the whole country than isn't that normal?), I actually like this advice, even if it does deprive me of license for extremes of behavior.

Hey, just move around as you can, and eat a variety of foods as you can, because it's healthy for bodies to move and eat foods, not because it burns or saves x number of calories.

What We've Got Here Is...Communication

I was reading my January Library Journal of an evening, and I became inclined to ruminate a while upon the idea of professionalism.

More importantly, there's an argument going on here, and I want in!

John N. Berry says in his editorial, Don't Muzzle Librarians,

It is utter hypocrisy to label any communication—anonymous, ad hominem, or otherwise—as “unprofessional” in a profession for which the primary core value is freedom of expression.

Really? Any communication? Of any kind? In any context? That's a broad, broad statement.

And you know what that kind of broad statement gives us? License! License, good people, for extremes of behavior!

The following immediately occurred to me:

• So if I start peppering my interactions with med students at the reference desk with random obscenities, that's professional communication?
• Or, say, what if I decide to start opining about faculty members' choice of research topics with comments like "You're writing about that? You're a total quack, you know that, right?"
• I might also just derail every conversation about book purchases by talking incessantly about my own awesomeness and/or how hard my life is: this is totally professional?
• And what if I make a habit of telling the library's users, and some of my favored colleagues, that others of my colleagues are incompetent layabouts (which is not only irrelevant to most users, it's a dirty lie)? Still good?

My boss is going to love this.

I mean, yeah, I get that in a very important way, it's the work of the profession to respect, preserve, and promote access to all kinds of communication. As Mr. Berry continues,

We are justifiably proud of the record of librarians as fervent and effective defenders of free expression. Librarians have upheld and collected obscenity, anarchy, dissent, and certainly every kind of personal attack. This is not “unprofessional,” it is our professional duty.

True, true. I'm all over the freedom of expression. Love it! Defend it! But is it the work of the profession--and thus, professional behavior--to also engage in all kinds of communication?

Not necessarily, I would argue.

Further, this editorial comes after David Rothman apparently said that the Annoyed Librarian blog was "unpleasant" and "unprofessional."

There's nothing detailed in the piece beyond those two words, so I'm not really sure where the 'muzzling' of the title comes in. Perhaps David Rothman has the awesome power to make other bloggers quail and stop typing merely through disliking them. And, I guess, telling other people that he dislikes them.

Which must still be completely professional to do, since it's communication, but is bad because he used the forbidden word "unprofessional." I guess.

I'm also pretty sure the Annoyed Librarian has said worse about someone at some point. Probably many people at many points. That's kind of the AL's thing, if I remember from when I used to read it.

These points, as well as others, are entertainingly covered in this video response from Mr. Rothman. Others have addressed this issue as well: see Agnostic, Maybe for more good points.

I really just wanted to chime in when I recognized the license for extremes of behavior. (I'm telling you, this 'license' theme is a winner for me. I'll make something of it yet.)

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You Can Do This

For those of us who are not scientists, I recommend this referral from Bad Science to a helpful post by Dr. Alicia White on How to read articles about health and healthcare (PDF).

It's got good tips on evaluating the stories one reads, which tend to be full of exciting claims that grant license to drink beer until we're silly (I'm sticking to my theory that it's all about people wanting license for extremes of behavior).

It turns out that if you read carefully, the research usually does not support sweeping generalizations. (See how I nimbly avoided making a sweeping generalization about how research never supports such things? That's accuracy for you.)

But it's OK: I give you license to eat cake until you're silly. Go ahead! Have at it!

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Good News for Beer-Drinkers

At least, not bad news. When you break it down, it's actually pretty much the same thing that research usually gives us: moderately interesting news that is not a license for extremes of behavior.

But that's not the stuff of headlines! No one wants to hear that something moderately interesting has been learned.

You can blame a sensationalist media with a fondness for grand sweeping statements if you like, but my new theory as of two minutes ago is that we all (sweepingly! and without exception!) want a license for extremes of behavior, and unless you promise that, you got nothin' in terms of public interest.

Anyway, the story is that researchers in Spain got some volunteers to exercise until they were about to fall over (as so many of us do so often), tested "their hydration levels, motor skills, and concentration ability," and then gave them either water or beer.

Upon further testing, they found that beer was slightly better at rehydrating the volunteers. Yeah, it even says "slightly" right in the news item, which means that in practical terms the results may not even have been statistically significant, but whatever. That's boring talk that does not lead in the direction of license for extremes of behavior.

Beer drinkers are celebrating, but obvious questions arise. For example, the study involved "two pints of Spanish lager." How can we be sure that, say, Belgian lager would have a similar effect? Or Spanish ale? I imagine that future studies to compare the rehydration effects of different beers are forthcoming.

Inquiring minds might also want to know how beer compares to those specially formulated neon-hued sports drinks one sees, and further, how it compares to chocolate milk, which another study suggested is superior to the aforementioned sports drinks in this department.

Inquiring minds, when you come down to it, desire to know what is the King of the Rehydration Mountain, the better to make sweeping statements about how we should all go forth and drink whatever it is until we're about to fall over.

License! I'm telling you, it's about the License!

Honestly, I'm rooting for chocolate milk.