Utah Vacation

I can't believe that's me! I can't believe I did that! There I am surrounded by the Wasatch Mountains and all that famous Utah powder. What a trip!

Thanks Mark and Grace!

Let There Be Light

Until man duplicates a blade of grass, Nature can laugh at his so-called scientific achievements.

—Thomas A. Edison

The L.A. Times had a front page article last Saturday about a proposed California law that would make it mandatory to buy compact fluorescent light bulbs to replace old incandescent bulbs beginning in 2012. The purpose of the new legislation, authored by Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, is to save energy. They compute that the difference in energy costs per year between the incandescent bulb ($9.20) and the CF bulb ($2.50) justifies the switch. If everyone used these new low-energy, long-lasting bulbs, electricity consumption would be slashed by 75% according to the article.

All of this sounds very good but nowhere in the article did it mention the one aspect of artificial lighting that matters most to me, i.e., whether or not the bulbs provide full-spectrum lighting. Until now, I had thought that fluorescent lighting was very bad for your eyes and that you could not get full-spectrum light or "natural light" from a fluorescent tube. I was wrong.

Let me explain what full-spectrum lighting is. The sun provides light in a fairly even distribution over the visible spectrum of electromagnetic waves. This is the light that our eyes evolved to see. We were not meant to spend our lives inside a dark cave (modern office building) coming out only for small periods of sun, or staying awake for very long past sunset. Of course, the sun's spectrum changes with location, the seasons, and time of day, and our eyes were also meant to soak up the sun's rays at various times throughout the day. Sunlight also provides a small amount of mid- and near-UV light.

The best artificial lighting would try to imitate what the sun can do for us. Full spectrum lighting is better not only for our eyes but for our general health as well. How can you tell if you are getting full-spectrum lighting? There are two numbers that will indicate the color temperature and the color rendering of any light source. The Correlated Color Temperature (CCT) is a measure of a light source's apparent "whiteness," yellowness (warmth), or blueness (coolness). This number is given in degrees Kelvin (K). If you use a good camera, you have probably encountered this number already. A flash will give you a cooler, daylight exposure than without flash in low light. Indoor photos taken under incandescent light will be very yellow. In the old days, there were different kinds of film you could use to counteract this. The sun's CCT can vary from 3600K (warm/yellow), to 4870K at noon, to 7100K on an overcast day, or to 25,000K (very cool/blue) in the Northwest sky. 5500K is considered "white" light from the sun.

The Color Rendering Index (CRI) indicates how well the colors of objects are rendered (reflected), using a light source at a specific CCT. Sunlight has a perfect CRI rating of 100. Note that this number cannot be compared with different sources that have different CCT ratings. An incandescent bulb may have a high CRI rating of 95 but still appear yellow because it's CCT is only 2700K. But generally, a light with a CCT of 5000K and a CRI of 80-89 will give excellent color rendering. To qualify as a "full-Spectrum" light, a bulb or fluorescent tube must have a CCT of 5000 to 7500K and a CRI of 90 to 100. Whether or not the artificial light also includes the proper ratio of mid- and near-UV light is another issue and a very thorny one.

OK, now try and find these numbers on the box of bulbs you are considering buying. It's not easy. Phillips assumes you are not interested in these technical details or couldn't understand what they mean if they gave them to you. GE offers a glossary of terms that does explain all this very nicely, but when you go to buy a particular bulb, you can't get the specifics. After much searching on the web, I found a few companies that will give you the full details and this is when I found that you can indeed purchase compact fluorescent bulbs that fit the definition of full-spectrum lighting. These bulbs are very costly, ranging from $10 to $50 for a simple 75W equivalent bulb. They are not available at your local Home Depot, at least not at mine, you must buy them over the Internet adding shipping costs to the total. If you are interested, you can get lots of info and the names of brands to consider from the Bates Method website store.

One major drawback to these fluorescent bulbs is that they contain mercury, although not very much. To dispose of them properly, they should be taken to a hazardous waste site (which I am not sure really solves the problem. It only pushes it on to someone else). And these bulbs don't fit some sockets and cannot be used with a dimmer switch. Currently, I have several lights with full-spectrum bulbs made with neodymium oxide, a rare earth element. These bulbs contain krypton gas and a chrome plated brass base that give them an earth-friendly life of over 3,500 hours. I am very satisfied with the results but may consider the CFLs when they need to be replaced.

But I still wonder if it is good to have the equivalent of noonday sunlight at 10:00 p.m. And what about UV light which is also important for our health? Most fluorescent bulbs have coatings to absorb the UV rays and many health experts think that this is good. But again, we were meant to soak up the UV rays all day long, too. And nature has ways of making sure we do not get too much of a good thing. (See Dr. Michael Eades's blog for Feb. 16, 2007 on the subject of Folate and Fun in the Sun.)

All in all, I think the best solution may be to insist on buildings with windows or skylights and at night to turn off the lights and go to bed early.

Got Him!

I have been trying to get a good photo of the owner of my hummingbird feeder for weeks and today I finally did it. Isn't he a jewel? But don't let his looks and diminutive size fool you, he can be quite ferocious, especially if some other creature tries to use his feeder. The rufous brown coloring and green back makes this an Allen's Hummingbird. His gorget (only males have such a magnificent gorget) can be red or gold depending on how the light hits it and he has to be directly facing you in order for you to see the colors. But he can actually control the "flashing" of this gorget to warn rivals away.

I make my own hummingbird nectar using 1 cup of sugar and 4 cups of water. I bring the syrup to a boil and simmer it for 5 minutes. After it has cooled a bit, I freeze the syrup in feeder-sized portions, which for my feeder and bird is about 1/2 cup. I clean (rinse with hot water—no soap) and change the feeder every 5 days in winter and 3 days in summer when it is hot. This recipe will make enough for about 7 changes.

The bird is perched on a branch of my Western Redbud, Cercis occidentalis, a native California species that is just starting to bloom. Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge, CA, has a planting of several redbuds, both Eastern and Western that can put on a spectacular display in the spring. If mine is starting to bloom now, then theirs should be at their height in about two to three weeks.

Le Foulard—C'est Fini

The Foulard that I made with the yarn that I dyed is finished. I really like the way that it came out. First I soaked the finished foulard in warmish water with a little bit of Eucalan. This photo shows the wet foulard before blocking. I like the swirls and curls. Then I used my new blocking wires to stretch it out to a 40-inch square on two old mattress pads on the floor as there was no other place big enough for me to lay it flat. I pinned the wires to the pads and left the whole thing overnight, hoping I wouldn't forget it was there and walk on it in the middle of the night to get a drink of water or something.

Next morning, it was dry and ready for use. The yarn is so soft. The foulard can be worn many ways, but the easiest thing to do is fold it into a triangle and drape it over the shoulders. I tried to get a picture of this, but no luck. So here it is draped over a hanger. I think you can get the idea.

Now to finish the baby sweater. It's coming along fine. I am up to the armholes. I hope to have photos soon.

String Fever

This one is for all my music friends. A nice diversion from intense CM preparations. You won't believe it, but be forewarned, the tune is catchy.

Stringfever Bolero

Thanks, Joyce.

Food Diary

When I started on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) in 2004, it seemed so radical to me (no grains!) that I wanted to be sure that I was still getting all the proper nutrients. The USDA has a website called My Pyramid Tracker, that helps you to calculate your nutrient intake and all sorts of other things like that. And it's free! You start by creating an account and giving some basic information about yourself like age, height, and weight, and then enter all the food you have eaten in one day. You can also input all the activities you have done on that day so that they can compute how many calories you need to maintain your weight or to lose weight. You can also find out what any one food item contains or a single meal instead of the whole day.

Start by listing all the foods you have eaten at one meal or during the entire day. If you eat a lot of ethnic foods, you may have trouble finding them on the list. I couldn't find bok choy the other day, so I substituted Chinese cabbage. For something like creamed cauliflower soup which I made last night with coconut milk and not cow's milk, I had to list all the ingredients separately. Then you select the quantities. This is where you might need to be a little creative. For example, I had 2 tablespoons of blueberry juice concentrate on a sliced pear for breakfast but blueberry juice is not an option. So I calculated, from the information on the juice bottle, that there are 61 blueberries in each tablespoon and entered 2.5 servings times 50 blueberries as my quantity. You can use fractions in the number of servings box. I then had to realize that the fiber number would be slightly too high.

Once you have your quantities, you are ready to look at the numbers. Click on Save and Analyze and several choices will come up. I ignore the Meeting 2005 Dietary Guidelines option since it is based on the USDA food pyramid and many diet gurus these days think the pyramid is flawed to say the least. The numbers that matter to me are under Nutrient Intakes. These are the numbers that will tell you what you are getting in your diet. The only number that I think is way out of whack is the sodium intake. They assume that if you eat anything prepared or cooked that salt has been added. If you do your own cooking and know that is not the case, then take this number with a "grain of salt."

Again the Recommendation or Acceptable Range is based on the food pyramid, so use caution when comparing your numbers to these. What you may want to look at are your totals of calories, protein, fats, carbs, and fiber. It would be nice if they gave percentages of your total calorie intake for all of the macronutrients, but you can get the percentage of fat on the DG page. There are lots of other things you can do like comparing your Omega 6 and Omega 3 intake. On the Paleo diet, the ratio of these two fatty acids should be in the 1 to 1 or 3 to 1 range, not the 10 to 1 range the USDA recommends. I like to have my ratio of calcium to magnesium roughly 1 to 1 also.

It is a little tedious at first because of all the details that are required, but you can save your favorite foods in a Frequently Used Foods list so that the next day it is much easier to list your intake. But it is worth it to go into as much detail as possible. Just adding 1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice to your food intake can really raise your vitamin C levels. The activity list gets into great detail also, like how many minutes did you spend making the bed? But you can go for the Condensed Option which assumes you do normal daily activities but nothing extra. However, if you do exercise your calorie requirements will go up and you need to know that if you are trying to gain or lose weight.

Keeping such a food diary for about a week should tell you lots about what you are eating and ease our mind if you are trying to go low carb. And you may be surprised by what you learn.

Learning New Things

On Friday, Baby C. learned how to roll over for the first time. On Saturday, I learned how to do my own taxes for the first time. We both have a long way to go.