What’s the best way to solve our nation’s obesity problem?

Jamie Oliver, a British chef gone hands-on food activist has recently started a show on ABC entitled Food Revolution. The goal? Revamp America’s eating habits so that obesity, heart disease, and all those other deliciously disgusting metabolic ailments with modifiable risk factors are reduced. His first challenge? Huntington, West Virginia. The impetus? A report on CDC statistics interpreted by the AP which showed Huntington as the nation’s (and probably the world’s) unhealthiest city. In a nutshell:

This nascent revolution caught my attention for a very personal reason. Not only am I a physician in training encountering obesity and diabetes on a regular basis, but I grew up thirty minutes away from Huntington in Charleston, West Virginia and experienced first-hand what it’s like to have rampant obesity and poor eating standards as the norm.

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I was reminded the other day that one of the main reasons I decided to commit to a math major was also a book! One of my friends let me borrow Fermat’s Last Theorem, a book about the history behind the proof to the following statement made by Fermat (as stated on Wikipedia):

“If an integer n is greater than 2, then the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ has no solutions in non-zero integers a, b, and c.”

So basically, when n = 2, we have all the Pythagorean triplets such as 3-4-5 and 5-12-13, but for n > 2, there exist no such triplets for which the equation works out. It seems deceptively simple to show, but the proof took centuries of mathematicians and many advances in the field of mathematics itself before it was proved that the theorem is true.

It was fascinating to me that this problem was simple enough to be understood by anyone who had taken pre-Algebra, but that the solution had stumped many of the greatest minds throughout history. And when I say the solution stumped them, I don’t mean that there isn’t an answer, because it was found 357 years after the problem was posed by a Princeton mathematician, Andrew Wiles, in 1995.

The book (and a documentary by the same name) goes through the history of the theorem and the stories of the mathematicians who tried to solve it. It inspired me to pursue the field because there is a sort of magic and beauty to how mathematics works. Math is a product of the human mind but can be manifested in many practical applications. Each field of it ties into other fields in unexpected ways, giving one the suspicion that there really does exist an underlying structure to the universe. The journey to solving the math problem is far more cumbersome than the answer itself, many times the answer seems obvious once stated, but the proof of it may take weeks to understand. It is this sort of feeling that answers to complicated problems exist out there and that man can figure them out that convinced me I wanted to study the field.

Some other interesting “get you excited about math” books I’ve found since then include (in increasing order of mathematical sophistication):

• A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper
• One, Two, Three… Infinity
• Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics
• Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometry: Development and History
• All the Mathematics You Missed: But Need to Know for Graduate School

I recommend them all, especially for the “armchair mathematician.” I figure, why bother doing Sudoku puzzles as you grow older when you can just learn new maths?

I read on Jason’s blog about how he became interested in biology for the first time, and it brought back fond memories of my own. Why, I was at the Borders in the Huntington Mall in WV during the senior year of my high school days… and I was browsing some books until Genome by Matt Ridley hit me as an interesting title. In 23 chapters he covers the range of topics in and issues surrounding the field of genetics. He goes from the science (in a very layperson friendly manner) to clinical issues to even larger issues such as eugenics and free will.

I was blown away by this book back then, and I realize, it’s still quite an impressive work now (granted some of it is outdated now). It made me want to be a geneticist, and that eventually led me to choose biochemistry as my major. Now, going into my graduate work, I may very well end up working in that field trying to elucidate the gene networks which underlie diseases with complex mechanisms and deceptively oversimplified phenotypes. It would be a cool way to come full-circle, no?

I just got into West Virginia today (surprise Mother’s Day visit!) and hung out with my parents as well as my neighbors and some old friends who are still around. When I was visiting my neighbors, I brought up the fact that I used to despise NPR. I mean, I perceived it as this station with monotonous newscasters continuing on and on about topics that were of absolutely no concern to me. Then, somewhere along my college career I realized I had totally misperceived NPR! I believe it was actually thanks to iTunes and the ability to podcast NPR shows that really revolutionized my views.

Since then I’ve subscribe to:j

• Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me
• All Songs Considered
• World Cafe
• Fresh Air
• Health and Science News
• Science Fridays
• This I Believe
• This American Life
• Story of the Day
• World Story of the Day

You can get them all here. With all of these podcasts I am endlessly entertained by the high quality programming in addition to the richness that it adds to my life by informing me of what’s going on, introducing me to new ideas, and exposing me to new music that I can enjoy!

“Now is the time when we must break away from a society which favors mass production and mass consumption. In my view, we must develop a “new 21st Century System of production and consumption” that will be friendly to our global environment, and that make the transition to a sustainable society.”

-Yasuo Fukuda, Prime Minister of Japan at the Science and Technology in Society forum

I was talking with a friend the other day about how I felt so much of our society was not sustainable, and I recall mentioning that it is partially because we have this mass production and consumption mind-set that is primarily driven by the desire for continual growth and profit. I’d have to say I’m extremely impressed with the qualitiy of the statement made by the Japanese Prime Minister. I’ve never really heard a politician in the US suggest anything along those lines, in fact, if they did, they’d probably be dropped by all the corporations that fund them.

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