Dr Ken Sikaris is a chemical pathologist at Melbourne Pathology. He is a
Senior Fellow of St Vincent's Clinical School and a Clinical Associate
in Biochemistry at the University of Melbourne.
A graduate of the
University of Melbourne, Dr Sikaris trained at the Royal Melbourne,
Queen Victoria, and Prince Henry's Heidelberg Repatriation Hospitals. He
obtained fellowships from the Royal College of Pathologists of
Australasia and the Australasian Association of Clinical Biochemists in
1992 and 1997 respectively. Dr Sikaris was Director of Chemical
Pathology at St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne between 1993 and 1996. A
NATA-accredited laboratory assessor, Dr Sikaris specialises in Prostate
Specific Antigen, cholesterol and quality assurance and is currently
chair of the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry Committee on
Analytical Quality. His expertise is highly sought and he has
presented extensively at national and international symposiums. Dr
Sikaris is a Senior Fellow of St Vincent's Clinical School and a
Clinical Associate in Biochemistry at the University of Melbourne. He
joined Melbourne Pathology in 2003
This dish has been my saviour throughout January – I mean who could
say no to a bowl of creamy pine nut and basil pesto tossed with peas,
brown rice pasta, wilted spinach and then finished with lots of lemon
and black pepper?! I’ve made it a few too many times but still can’t get
enough of it. It’s the simplest thing to throw together, it really does
just take ten minutes to make and doesn’t require any fancy ingredients
at all. I love the simplicity of it though, I think that’s why I keep
coming back to it, as I know that no matter how tired or hungry I am, I
can whip it up quickly and feel so nourished and satisfied afterwards.
All the ingredients are so delicious too and they come together
perfectly, you’re going to love it! Serves 4
For the pesto
– 2/3 of a cup of pine nuts, 100g
– 2/3 of a cup of olive oil, 200ml
– a big handful of fresh basil, 30g
– 2 cloves of garlic
– 2 lemons
– salt
For the pasta
– pasta, I use brown rice pasta
– half a bag of frozen peas, 300g
– a bag of spinach, 200g
– 1 lemon
Tear all the basil leaves off their stems, juice the lemons and peel
the garlic. Then place all these with the other pesto ingredients into a
food processor and blend until smooth and creamy. Leave this to one
side while you make the pasta.
Place the pasta and the peas into a saucepan with boiling water and
cook until the pasta is ready. Drain the pasta and the peas, then place
them back into the saucepan along with the pesto and spinach. Cook
everything together on a low heat until the pesto is warm and the
spinach has wilted. Finally squeeze the juice of the last lemon over the
pasta, sprinkle it with salt and add lots of black pepper before
serving and enjoy!
Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts,
pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information.
Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is
exhausting. At the same time, we are all doing more. Thirty years ago,
travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, salespeople helped
us find what we were looking for in shops, and professional typists or
secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most
of those things ourselves. We are doing the jobs of 10 different people
while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents,
our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favourite TV shows.
Our smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that
include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy,
appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster,
GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook
updater, and flashlight. They’re more powerful and do more things than
the most advanced computer at IBM corporate headquarters 30 years ago.
And we use them all the time, part of a 21st-century mania for cramming
everything we do into every single spare moment of downtime. We text
while we’re walking across the street, catch up on email while standing
in a queue – and while having lunch with friends, we surreptitiously
check to see what our other friends are doing. At the kitchen counter,
cosy and secure in our domicile, we write our shopping lists on
smartphones while we are listening to that wonderfully informative
podcast on urban beekeeping.
But there’s a fly in the ointment. Although we think we’re doing
several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical
illusion. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world
experts on divided attention, says that our brains are “not wired to
multitask well… When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually
just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time
they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.” So we’re not actually
keeping a lot of balls in the air like an expert juggler; we’re more
like a bad amateur plate spinner, frantically switching from one task to
another, ignoring the one that is not right in front of us but worried
it will come crashing down any minute. Even though we think we’re
getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less
efficient.
Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress
hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline,
which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled
thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop,
effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly
searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the
prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be
easily hijacked by something new – the proverbial shiny objects we use
to entice infants, puppies, and kittens. The irony here for those of us
who are trying to focus amid competing activities is clear: the very
brain region we need to rely on for staying on task is easily
distracted. We answer the phone, look up something on the internet,
check our email, send an SMS, and each of these things tweaks the
novelty- seeking, reward-seeking centres of the brain, causing a burst
of endogenous opioids (no wonder it feels so good!), all to the
detriment of our staying on task. It is the ultimate empty-caloried
brain candy. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from
sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing
a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.
In the old days, if the phone rang and we were busy, we either didn’t
answer or we turned the ringer off. When all phones were wired to a
wall, there was no expectation of being able to reach us at all times –
one might have gone out for a walk or been between places – and so if
someone couldn’t reach you (or you didn’t feel like being reached), it
was considered normal. Now more people have mobile phones than have
toilets. This has created an implicit expectation that you should be
able to reach someone when it is convenient for you, regardless of
whether it is convenient for them. This expectation is so ingrained that
people in meetings routinely answer their mobile phones to say, “I’m
sorry, I can’t talk now, I’m in a meeting.” Just a decade or two ago,
those same people would have let a landline on their desk go unanswered
during a meeting, so different were the expectations for reachability.
Just having the opportunity to multitask is detrimental to cognitive
performance. Glenn Wilson, former visiting professor of psychology at
Gresham College, London, calls it info-mania.
His research found that being in a situation where you are trying to
concentrate on a task, and an email is sitting unread in your inbox, can
reduce your effective IQ by 10 points. And although people ascribe many
benefits to marijuana, including enhanced creativity and reduced pain
and stress, it is well documented that its chief ingredient, cannabinol,
activates dedicated cannabinol receptors in the brain and interferes
profoundly with memory and with our ability to concentrate on several
things at once. Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from
multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from
pot‑smoking.
Russ Poldrack, a neuroscientist at Stanford, found that learning
information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the
wrong part of the brain. If students study and watch TV at the same
time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the
striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills,
not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes
into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a
variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve. MIT’s Earl Miller adds,
“People can’t do [multitasking] very well, and when they say they can,
they’re deluding themselves.” And it turns out the brain is very good at
this deluding business.
‘Asking the brain to shift
attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and
striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay
on task.’Photograph: Alamy
Then there are the metabolic costs that I wrote about earlier. Asking
the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the
prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same
fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual
shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel
so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short
time. We’ve literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to
compromises in both cognitive and physical performance. Among other
things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of
the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to
aggressive and impulsive behaviour. By contrast, staying on task is
controlled by the anterior cingulate and the striatum, and once we
engage the central executive mode, staying in that state uses less
energy than multitasking and actually reduces the brain’s need for
glucose.
To make matters worse, lots of multitasking requires decision-making:
Do I answer this text message or ignore it? How do I respond to this?
How do I file this email? Do I continue what I’m working on now or take a
break? It turns out that decision-making is also very hard on your
neural resources and that little decisions appear to take up as much
energy as big ones. One of the first things we lose is impulse control.
This rapidly spirals into a depleted state in which, after making lots
of insignificant decisions, we can end up making truly bad decisions
about something important. Why would anyone want to add to their daily
weight of information processing by trying to multitask?
In discussing information overload with Fortune 500 leaders, top
scientists, writers, students, and small business owners, email comes up
again and again as a problem. It’s not a philosophical objection to
email itself, it’s the mind-numbing number of emails that come in. When
the 10-year-old son of my neuroscience colleague Jeff Mogil (head of the
Pain Genetics lab at McGill University) was asked what his father does
for a living, he responded, “He answers emails.” Jeff admitted after
some thought that it’s not so far from the truth. Workers in government,
the arts, and industry report that the sheer volume of email they
receive is overwhelming, taking a huge bite out of their day. We feel
obliged to answer our emails, but it seems impossible to do so and get
anything else done.
Before email, if you wanted to write to someone, you had to invest
some effort in it. You’d sit down with pen and paper, or at a
typewriter, and carefully compose a message. There wasn’t anything about
the medium that lent itself to dashing off quick notes without giving
them much thought, partly because of the ritual involved, and the time
it took to write a note, find and address an envelope, add postage, and
take the letter to a mailbox. Because the very act of writing a note or
letter to someone took this many steps, and was spread out over time, we
didn’t go to the trouble unless we had something important to say.
Because of email’s immediacy, most of us give little thought to typing
up any little thing that pops in our heads and hitting the send button.
And email doesn’t cost anything.
Sure, there’s the money you paid for your computer and your internet
connection, but there is no incremental cost to sending one more email.
Compare this with paper letters. Each one incurred the price of the
envelope and the postage stamp, and although this doesn’t represent a
lot of money, these were in limited supply – if you ran out of them,
you’d have to make a special trip to the stationery store and the post
office to buy more, so you didn’t use them frivolously. The sheer ease
of sending emails has led to a change in manners, a tendency to be less
polite about what we ask of others. Many professionals tell a similar
story. One said, “A large proportion of emails I receive are from people
I barely know asking me to do something for them that is outside what
would normally be considered the scope of my work or my relationship
with them. Email somehow apparently makes it OK to ask for things they would never ask by phone, in person, or in snail mail.”
There are also important differences between snail mail and email on
the receiving end. In the old days, the only mail we got came once a
day, which effectively created a cordoned-off section of your day to
collect it from the mailbox and sort it. Most importantly, because it
took a few days to arrive, there was no expectation that you would act
on it immediately. If you were engaged in another activity, you’d simply
let the mail sit in the box outside or on your desk until you were
ready to deal with it. Now email arrives continuously, and most emails
demand some sort of action: Click on this link to see a video of a baby
panda, or answer this query from a co-worker, or make plans for lunch
with a friend, or delete this email as spam. All this activity gives us a
sense that we’re getting things done – and in some cases we are. But we
are sacrificing efficiency and deep concentration when we interrupt our
priority activities with email.
Until recently, each of the many different modes of communication we
used signalled its relevance, importance, and intent. If a loved one
communicated with you via a poem or a song, even before the message was
apparent, you had a reason to assume something about the nature of the
content and its emotional value. If that same loved one communicated
instead via a summons, delivered by an officer of the court, you would
have expected a different message before even reading the document.
Similarly, phone calls were typically used to transact different
business from that of telegrams or business letters. The medium was a
clue to the message. All of that has changed with email, and this is one
of its overlooked disadvantages – because it is used for everything. In
the old days, you might sort all of your postal mail into two piles,
roughly corresponding to personal letters and bills. If you were a
corporate manager with a busy schedule, you might similarly sort your
telephone messages for callbacks. But emails are used for all of life’s
messages. We compulsively check our email in part because we don’t know
whether the next message will be for leisure/amusement, an overdue bill,
a “to do”, a query… something you can do now, later, something
life-changing, something irrelevant.
This uncertainty wreaks havoc with our rapid perceptual
categorisation system, causes stress, and leads to decision overload.
Every email requires a decision! Do I respond to it? If so, now or
later? How important is it? What will be the social, economic, or
job-related consequences if I don’t answer, or if I don’t answer right
now?
this fellow has some interesting comments to folllow up later
Peter McDonald - 20 Nov 2014 3:07:34pm
The great scientist Prof Louis Kervran ( nominated
for a nobel prize in 1975) made the comment in his book" Breads
Biological Transmutations" Nutritionist' & Dieticians only touch the
surface of the benefits of Carbohydrates to the human body, I break
down every vitamin and mineral in grain and explain the benefits to the
human body both inside and out All participants on the Catalyst
programme failed to mention what type of carbohydrate they were
referring to and there is a vast difference. If they were referring to
starch carbohydrates where the bran & germ have been removed from
the grain ( called the imposter carb) and which represents 95% of all
carbs sold, they were on the money. If they were referring to complex ( complete) carbs, they couldn't have been further from the truth Bread contains more nutrients per weight than meat, milk, potatoes, fruits, and vegetables (Thomas, 1976).
In its unrefined state bread could supply 800 calories and 30 grams of
protein per person were it evenly distributed worldwide (Davis, 1981).
This amount would also supply a 25 to 49 year old man with 30% of his
energy requirements and 49% of his protein requirements (Health &
Welfare, 1990). >> Reply
Mauricio Trambaioli - 21 Nov 2014 11:27:48pm
Link for your quote http://eap.mcgill.ca/publications/EAP35.htm
Yes Mauricio and thank you, the link you posted is pretty compelling evidence on the benefits of Carbohydrates.
When
I eat my 100% freshly milled organic whole grain bread, made with 3
ingredients ( freshly milled organic grain, filtered water & Celtic
salt) and based on the work of Louis Kervran, I know how good I feel
and how this bread sustains me for long periods >> Reply
Jenny - 21 Nov 2014 11:33:49pm
I am confused by your reference to Kervran as he was
a little published, barely recognised scientist who did some
interesting work but was hardly 'great'.! >> Reply
Peter McDonald - 25 Nov 2014 8:50:15pm
Jenny, I think you should do more research before commenting on Kervran he was a giant in science. Just
because many of his books were written in French not English, doesn't
mean to say he wasn't well published. He was and his list of books
mentioned below are testament to that. In addition he had many papers
published as well As well as being nominated for a Nobel prize here
are some of his other credentials.He was far more informed on
Carbohydrates than any of the professionals mentioned on the Catalyst
programme Can I ask you, have you read any of his books, or used any of his transmutation methods yourself Kervran
was born in Quimper, Finistère (Brittany). He had received a degree as a
physics engineer in 1925.[2] In WWII he was part of the French
Resistance. He was a member of the New York Academy of Sciences,
Director of Conferences of the Paris University, Member of Conseil
d'Hygiene de la Seine, a Member of the Commission du Conseil Supérieur
de la Recherche Scientifique (1966). He was the recognised expert on
radiation poisoning for the French government since 1945. Corentin Louis Kervran - Selected Works Selected Works Books
•Transmutations
Biologiques: Métabolismes Aberrants de l'Azote, le Potassium et le
Magnésium (1962) Paris : Librairie Maloine S.A. (2nd ed. 1963, 3rd ed.
1965) •Transmutations naturelles non radioactives ; une propriete
nouvelle de la matiere Paris : Librairie Maloine, (1963) OCLC 21388057 •Transmutations à la faible énergie : synthèse et développements (1964) Paris : Maloine OCLC 35460556 •A
la découverte des transmutations biologiques : une explication des
phénomènes biologiques aberrants (1966) Paris : Le Courrier du livre
OCLC 30562980 •Preuves Relatives à l'Existence des Transmutations Biologiques (1968) Paris : Librairie Maloine S.A. •Transmutations biologiques en agronomie (1970) Paris : Librairie Maloine S.A. •Preuves en géologie et physique de transmutations à faible énergie (1973) Paris : Maloine ISBN 2-224-00053-7 OCLC 914685 •Preuves
en biologie de transmutations à faible énergie (1975) Paris, Maloine,
S.A. ISBN 2-224-00178-9 OCLC 1603879, (2nd edition, 1995). •Transmutations Biologique et Physique Moderne (1982) Paris : Librairie Maloine S.A.
Books in English: •Biological
Transmutations C. Louis Kervran, translation and adaptation by Michel
Abehsera, 1989, 1998 (first published in 1972) ISBN 0-916508-47-1 OCLC
301517796 (extract of three of Kervran's books) •Biological
transmutations, revised and edited by Herbert & Elizabeth Rosenauer,
London, Crosby Lockwood 1972 (reprinted by Beekman, New York, in 1998
under ISBN 0-8464-0195-9) >> Reply
pete is just a chef - 20 Nov 2014 11:52:11am
how come they didn't interview peter siddle, who
eats 20 bananas a day with no weight issues. why do you cherry pick the
one cricketer (so 1 in 11??) that is on this diet. he also can't stop
getting out lbw. maybe they are related?
jokes aside, they have
fed you one half of the story. that's not to say low-carb diets might
work, or be beneficial, but a show based on "science", should present a
balanced arguement.
also, saturated fat is still bad for you
also,
when Professor Noakes tells you that we don't need to carbohydrate
because our liver produces it, then, by his logic, our diet only need to
consist of the 6 essential amino acids, and 2 essential fatty acids
(which aren't saturated fats by the way). hardly a logical argument, but
who needs facts when you want to be famous
Serves 4
All participants on the Catalyst programme failed to mention what type of carbohydrate they were referring to and there is a vast difference. If they were referring to starch carbohydrates where the bran & germ have been removed from the grain ( called the imposter carb) and which represents 95% of all carbs sold, they were on the money.
If they were referring to complex ( complete) carbs, they couldn't have been further from the truth
Bread contains more nutrients per weight than meat, milk, potatoes, fruits, and vegetables (Thomas, 1976).
In its unrefined state bread could supply 800 calories and 30 grams of protein per person were it evenly distributed worldwide (Davis, 1981). This amount would also supply a 25 to 49 year old man with 30% of his energy requirements and 49% of his protein requirements (Health & Welfare, 1990).
>> Reply