The political menu of food

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

EID in Pakistan leaves unwieldy quantities of carcasses to deal with. But the world’s largest festival of ritual slaughter is held every five years in Nepal’s Bariyarpur village, mostly of water buffaloes, for the propitiation of goddess Gadhimai. On the other hand, The Indian Express reported recently that more Indians are turning to meat eating than ever before, leaving vegetarian men in the age group of 15 to 49 — who had never consumed “fish, chicken or meat” — at a faltering 16.6 per cent in 2019-21. Indian gurus cite ancient texts to suggest that meat eating makes us aggressive and vegetarianism has a calming effect.

That’s not the way it always seems to play out though. Are people who kill people in a riot or a massacre vegetarians or meat eaters? It is probably the wrong question to pose. I once ordered a bowl of thukpa at a Tibetan restaurant in Manali. It is a meat dish with noodles popular among Tibetans who are nearly all Buddhist. In the meantime, I wondered if the owner could kindly swat away the flies. There was total refusal to do anything about the pests hovering over the table. “We don’t kill,” was the clear but polite reply. What about the thukpa? It has meat. “I didn’t kill it,” the man smiled.

Within meat-eating and vegetarian groups there are further subdivisions that can be equally needlessly misleading. Giora Becker and Gershon Kedar were Israeli diplomats I came to know in India. Becker was a free-spirited Jew and didn’t hesitate to put on his plate food that was forbidden in his culture. Kedar was an orthodox Jew who turned out to be the opposite of Becker in food habits. He was unprepared, for example, to have a meal anywhere other than the Dasaprakasa, once a popular vegetarian restaurant in Delhi. There was no chance of kosher requirements being violated at the restaurant where meat of any kind was neither cooked or served.

Their different approaches to food and indeed to their religion played little or no role in approaching the Palestinian question. If blood had to flow for their country, rightly or wrongly, it would be spilt, never mind the key commandment that forbids killing of humans as a sin.

Popular belief about food misrepresents men and animals alike. Indian gurus insist vegetarians are of a calmer disposition while meat makes one aggressive. A close look would find little or no evidence for the common claim. In a similar vein, the fact that snakes don’t drink milk caves before popular belief. Sample the faulty but commonly used idiom that refuses to yield to the compelling fact. It insists that feeding milk to a baby snake is to nurture an enemy.

The Express report on the increasing number of meat eaters in India struggles against the number of vegetarian leaders the country has elected, including the current one. The three from the Kashmiri Brahmin stock — Nehru, Indira, Rajiv — ate meat and practised yoga. The other meat eaters were A.B. Vajpayee, a Brahmin from the Hindutva flank. Chandra Shekhar and V.P. Singh, the two thakurs from Uttar Pradesh, and the two gentlemen from Punjab, Inder Gujral and Manmohan Singh were regular omnivores. Gulzari Lal Nanda, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Morarji Desai, Narasimha Rao, Deve Gowda, and now Narendra Modi bring up the vegetarian cluster. Shastri and Indira Gandhi fought wars adroitly despite their different food habits.

There’s another challenge to the vegetarian and non-vegetarian debate. You may be this or that, or, after today’s fashion, even a vegan; it will not take you away from your blood-caked past. If the late Prof Kailash Nath Kaul was right, Indian languages offer a glimpse into our cannibal origins, which we share with the wider world. The common threat to drink someone’s blood in a heated moment or chew somebody raw, or make mincemeat of one’s quarry may have an unaccepted origin in our early evolution as social beings.

Movie actor Dharmendra was more popular than his contemporaries for baying for the enemy’s blood in frequent climax scenes. He was applauded, not booed for using the north Indian idiom of bloodlust. The phenomenon is evenly distributed across many nations. Militaries carry on the tradition of our headhunting past. If one remembers correctly, there was this picture of a British soldier with a bunch of decapitated heads of Malayan communist guerrillas in the 1940s. Accusations abound of Indian and Pakistani troops periodically indulging in the gore.

According to Harikishan Sharma’s report in the Express, while the country is increasingly convulsed in the vegetarian-meat-eating dispute, the truer picture remains studiously aloof from the debate.

“More people are eating non-vegetarian food than ever before, and the proportion of Indian men who do so has gone up sharply in the six years between 2015-16 and 2019-21,” the Express quotes the National Family Health Survey as revealing. Women meat eaters too have increased, albeit glacially.

Eating less meat key to curbing climate change

People are more likely to back policies to curb meat eating for health and climate reasons, Chatham House survey suggests

 

Meat production produces 15% of all greenhouse gases. Photograph: Alamy


Damian Carrington in The Guardian



Taxing meat to simultaneously tackle climate change and improve global health would be far less unpalatable than governments think, according to new research.

Meat production produces 15% of all greenhouse gases – more than all cars, trains, planes and ships combined – and halting global warming appears near impossible unless the world’s fast growing appetite for meat is addressed.

The new analysis says this could be done through taxes, increasing vegetarian food in schools, hospitals and the armed forces and cutting subsidies to livestock farmers, all supported by public information campaigns.

The research, from the international affairs thinktank Chatham House and Glasgow University, involved surveys and focus groups in 12 countries and found that even measures restricting peoples’ behaviour could be accepted if seen as in the public interest, as was seen with smoking bans.

“Governments are ignoring what should be a hugely appealing, win-win policy,” said lead author Laura Wellesley, at Chatham House.

“The idea that interventions like this are too politically sensitive and too difficult to implement is unjustified. Our focus groups show people expect governments to lead action on issues that are for the global good. Our research indicates any backlash to unpopular policies would likely be short-lived as long as the rationale for action was strong.”

Increasing appetite for meat and population growth in developing countries mean global meat consumption is on track to increase 75% by 2050, which would make it virtually impossible to keep global warming below the internationally-agreed limit of 2C.

Meat consumption is already well above healthy levels in developed nations and growing fast in other countries, and is linked to rising rates of heart disease and cancer. To get to healthy levels, US citizens would need to cut the meat they eat by two-thirds, those in the UK by a half and those in China by a third.

If the world’s population cuts to healthy levels of meat consumption – about 70g per day – it would reduce carbon emissions by an amount equivalent to annual output of the US, the world’s second biggest polluter.

The UN climate change summit begins in Paris on 30 November, where the world’s nations aim to seal a deal to tackle climate change.

Most countries have already submitted pledges to cut their emissions, but they are not enough to keep warming below dangerous levels. Cutting meat eating to healthy levels would make up a quarter of that shortfall and is very low cost way of curbing emissions, according to the report, but action to achieve this is non-existent.

Previous calls to cut meat consumption, from the chief of the UN’s climate science panel and the economist Lord Stern, or to tax it, have been both rare and controversial.

“We are not in any way advocating for global vegetarianism,” said Wellesley. “We can see massive changes [to emissions] from just converging around healthy levels of meat eating.” She said raising awareness of the impact on the climate from meat production was the first step, but was unlikely to shift diets by itself.

“The level of awareness is very low, indeed in China it is almost non-existent,” said Catherine Happer, at Glasgow University. She said people in the 36 focus groups viewed meat taxes as the most effective, if unpopular, but that cutting subsidies for meat production was seen as both effective and popular.

“An awful lot of people were surprised that there were subsidies at all,” she said. “They felt, particularly in the US, that governments had propped up a very unhealthy food market.” Livestock subsidies in the 34 OECD nations alone were $53bn in 2013, including an average of $190 per cow. People also said any government action must avoid disadvantaging poorer citizens.

Prof Greg Philo, also at Glasgow University, said the key was “creating a new public understanding that industrial production of meat is not only dangerous to your own health but to human ecology as a whole.”

Animal rights organisation Peta’s climate message in Munich, Germany, aims to raise awareness of the link between climate change and the consumption of meat. Photograph: Mathias Balk/Alamy Stock Photo



Clare Oxborrow, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “Meat consumption can no longer be ignored in the climate debate – shifting diets to less meat and more plant proteins will be crucial. The government must stop using consumer backlash as an excuse for inaction”.

The reductions mapped out by the report would not reduce the size of the global meat industry, the researchers said, because rising population is pushing up demand, but it would significantly slow its growth.

They also said efforts to make meat production greener could cut emissions by up to a third, but that this would be swamped by growing demand if action was not taken. Meat eating has plateaued in recent years in richer nations, but is growing fast in developing countries.

Previous studies have calculated that, on current trends, agricultural emissions will take up the entire world’s carbon budget by 2050, meaning every other sector, including energy, industry and transport, would have to be zero carbon, a scenario described as “impossible”.

Meat production produces greenhouse gases via the methane emitted by livestock, the cutting down of forests for pasture, the production of fertiliser for feed crops and the energy and transport used by farmers. Beef is responsible for far higher emissions than chicken or pork.

None of the report’s authors are vegetarians, but Rob Bailey, from Chatham House, said: “Having worked on this project, I have drastically reduced my meat consumption – I now eat it once a month.”

A burger in Brighton is so hot that people have to sign a legal disclaimer before eating it.

The spiciest meals in Britain

A burger in Brighton is so hot that people have to sign a legal disclaimer before eating it. And a curry in Edinburgh has hospitalised two diners. Here's a roundup of those and other extreme spicy eating challenges

How much chilli can you handle? Photograph: Alamy

It used to be that just ordering a vindaloo impressed people. Then it had to be a phaal. Then maybe eating a whole scotch bonnet chilli, once you could get them in the supermarkets. Then, around 10 years ago, things really left the rails. Bhut Jolokias and Dorset Nagas became widespread. People started extracting capsaicin, chilli's main active ingredient, to make ever-hotter dishes. Today in Brighton an otherwise unremarkable burger joint is offering customers a sauce with a reputed score of 9m on the Scoville scale. That's about two or three times hotter than police pepper spray. That's ridiculous.

Yet people eat it. Why? You might as well ask why Hillary and Tenzing climbed Everest. Because it's there. Unlike mountains, however, new chilli-eating challenges are appearing all the time.

XXX Hot Chilli Burger, Brighton

The strength of Nick Gambardella's chilli sauce seems to be rising steadily, as does his bewilderment at people eating it. In 2009, reports put the potency at around 6m Scoville units. Now it is up to more than 9m, and has hospitalised several customers. "Why [they] eat it I don't know," Gambardella told the Mail. "I have spoken to people at environmental health but they think it is hilarious." So far around 3,000 people, each signing a legal disclaimer, have tried the burger, but Gambardella isn't one of them. Only 59 have finished it.

The Kismot Killer, Edinburgh

All five of the world's hottest chillies, as rated by the Guinness Book of Records, go into the Kismot restaurant's famous "Kismot Killer". And that's not "famous" in a cute, parochial way, you understand, but nationwide, after the dish hospitalised two people and caused several others to be "very unwell" at a curry eating contest in 2011. It "felt like I was being chainsawed in the stomach with hot sauce on the chainsaw", said Curie Kim, the runner-up and one of the people taken away by paramedics. Afterwards the Scottish Ambulance Service urged organisers "to review the way in which this event is managed".

The Widower, Lincolnshire

While preparing the Widower, a chicken curry at the Bindi Indian restaurant in Grantham, chefs wear goggles and a protective face mask. The ingredients, as displayed on the restaurant's website, include 20 of their own "Infinity" naga chillies, 10 fresh finger chillies, five scotch bonnet chillies, a tablespoon of chilli powder and a drop of chilli extract. Nobody had ever finished a portion until consultant radiologist (and daredevil) Ian Rothwell managed it in January last year. "It took Mr Rothwell just over an hour," said Muhammed Karim, the restaurant's boss, "but that included a 10-minute walk down Grantham High Street when he started hallucinating."

The Fallout Challenge, Bristol

Two competitive eating disciplines come together in the Fallout Challenge at Bristol's Atomic Burger. A triple burger, with triple cheese, sandwiched between two deep-fried pizza slices, with triple fries on the side, would be too much for most people, even without the ghost chilli extract (4.2m Scoville) in the sauce. "What makes our challenge different is it's not just ridiculously hot but it's big too," says co-owner Martin Bunce. What makes it a good idea is vaguer.

Sir John Major gets his carefully-crafted revenge on the bastards

Tory former prime minister's speech was a nostalgic trip down memory lane, where he mugged the Eurosceptics

• Simon Hoggart
• The Guardian, Tuesday 22 October 2013 16.46 BST

Sir John Major made a lunchtime speech in parliament in which he got his revenge on the Eurosceptics and other enemies Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

John Major, our former prime minister, was in reflective mood at a lunch in parliament. Asked about his famous description of Eurosceptics as "bastards", he remarked ruefully: "What I said was unforgivable." Pause for contrition. "My only excuse – is that it was true." Pause for loud laughter. Behind that mild demeanour, he is a good hater.

The event was steeped in nostalgia. Sir John may have hair that is more silvery than ever, and his sky-blue tie shines like the sun on a tropical sea at daybreak, but he still brings a powerful whiff of the past. Many of us can recall those days of the early 1990s. Right Said Fred topped the charts with Deeply Dippy, still on all our lips. The top TV star was Mr Blobby. The Ford Mondeo hit the showrooms, bringing gladness and stereo tape decks to travelling salesmen. Unemployment nudged 3 million.

Sir John dropped poison pellets into everyone's wine glass. But for a while he spoke only in lapidary epigrams. "The music hall star Dan Leno said 'I earn so much more than the prime minister; on the other hand I do so much less harm'."

"Tories only ever plot against themselves. Labour are much more egalitarian – they plot against everyone."

"The threat of a federal Europe is now deader than Jacob Marley."

"David Cameron's government is not Conservative enough. Of course it isn't; it's a coalition, stupid!"

Sometimes the saws and proverbs crashed into each other: "If we Tories navel-gaze and only pander to our comfort zone, we will never get elected."

And in a riposte to the Tebbit wing of the Tory party (now only represented by another old enemy, Norman Tebbit): "There is no point in telling people to get on their bikes if there is nowhere to live when they get there."

He was worried about the "dignified poor and the semi-poor", who, he implied, were ignored by the government. Iain Duncan Smith, leader of the bastards outside the cabinet during the Major government, was dispatched. "IDS is trying to reform benefits. But unless he is lucky or a genius, which last time I looked was not true, he may get things wrong." Oof.

"If he listens only to bean-counters and cheerleaders only concerned with abuse of the system, he will fail." Ouch!

"Governments should exist to help people, not institutions."

But he had kind words for David or Ed, "or whichever Miliband it is". Ed's proposal for an energy price freeze showed his heart was in the right place, even if "his head has gone walkabout".

He predicted a cold, cold winter. "It is not acceptable for people to have to make a choice between eating and heating." His proposal, a windfall tax, was rejected by No 10 within half an hour of Sir John sitting down.

Such is 24-hour news. Or as he put it: "I was never very good at soundbites – if I had been, I might have felt the hand of history on my shoulder." And having laid waste to all about him, he left with a light smile playing about his glistening tie.

-------

Steve Richards in The Independent

Former Prime Ministers tend to have very little impact on the eras that follow them. John Major is a dramatic exception. When Major spoke in Westminster earlier this week he offered the vividly accessible insights of a genuine Conservative moderniser. In doing so he exposed the narrow limits of the self-proclaimed modernising project instigated by David Cameron and George Osborne. Major’s speech was an event of considerable significance, presenting a subtle and formidable challenge to the current leadership. Margaret Thatcher never achieved such a feat when she sought – far more actively – to undermine Major after she had suddenly become a former Prime Minister.

The former Prime Minister’s call for a one-off tax on the energy companies was eye-catching, but his broader argument was far more powerful. Without qualification, Major insisted that governments had a duty to intervene in failing markets. He made this statement as explicitly as Ed Miliband has done since the latter became Labour’s leader. The former Prime Minister disagrees with Miliband’s solution – a temporary price freeze – but he is fully behind the proposition that a government has a duty to act. He stressed that he was making the case as a committed Conservative.

Yet the proposition offends the ideological souls of those who currently lead the Conservative party. Today’s Tory leadership, the political children of Margaret Thatcher, is purer than the Lady herself in its disdain for state intervention. In developing his case, Major pointed the way towards a modern Tory party rather than one that looks to the 1980s for guidance. Yes, Tories should intervene in failing markets, but not in the way Labour suggests. He proposes a one-off tax on energy companies. At least he has a policy. In contrast, the generation of self-proclaimed Tory modernisers is paralysed, caught between its attachment to unfettered free markets and the practical reality that powerless consumers are being taken for a ride by a market that does not work.

Major went much further, outlining other areas in which the Conservatives could widen their appeal. They included the case for a subtler approach to welfare reform. He went as far as to suggest that some of those protesting at the injustice of current measures might have a point. He was powerful too on the impoverished squalor of some people’s lives, and on their sense of helplessness – suggesting that housing should be a central concern for a genuinely compassionate Conservative party. The language was vivid, most potently when Major outlined the choice faced by some in deciding whether to eat or turn the heating on. Every word was placed in the wider context of the need for the Conservatives to win back support in the north of England and Scotland.

Of course Major had an agenda beyond immediate politics. Former prime ministers are doomed to defend their record and snipe at those who made their lives hellish when they were in power. Parts of his speech inserted blades into old enemies. His record was not as good as he suggested, not least in relation to the abysmal state of public services by the time he left in 1997. But the period between 1990, when Major first became Prime Minister, and the election in 1992 is one that Tories should re-visit and learn from. Instead it has been virtually airbrushed out of their history.

In a very brief period of time Major and his party chairman Chris Patten speedily changed perceptions of their party after the fall of Margaret Thatcher. Major praised the BBC, spoke of the need to be at the heart of Europe while opting out of the single currency, scrapped the Poll Tax, placed a fresh focus on the quality of public services through the too easily derided Citizens’ Charter, and sought to help those on benefits or low incomes. As Neil Kinnock reflected later, voters thought there had been a change of government when Major replaced Thatcher, making it more difficult for Labour to claim that it was time for a new direction.

The key figures in the Conservative party were Major, Patten, Michael Heseltine, Ken Clarke and Douglas Hurd. Now it is Cameron, George Osborne, Michael Gove, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Oliver Letwin and several others with similar views. They include Eurosceptics, plus those committed to a radical shrinking of the state and to transforming established institutions. All share a passion for the purity of markets in the public and private sectors. Yet in the Alice in Wonderland way in which politics is reported, the current leadership is portrayed as “modernisers” facing down “the Tory right”.

The degree to which the debate has moved rightwards at the top of the Conservative party and in the media can be seen from the bewildered, shocked reaction to Nick Clegg’s modest suggestion that teachers in free schools should be qualified to teach. The ideologues are so unused to being challenged they could not believe such comments were being made. Instead of addressing Clegg’s argument, they sought other reasons for such outrageous suggestions. Clegg was wooing Labour. Clegg was scared that his party would move against him. Clegg was seeking to woo disaffected voters. The actual proposition strayed well beyond their ideological boundaries.

This is why Major’s intervention has such an impact. He exposed the distorting way in which politics is currently reported. It is perfectly legitimate for the current Conservative leadership to seek to re-heat Thatcherism if it wishes to do so, but it cannot claim to be making a significant leap from the party’s recent past.

Nonetheless Cameron’s early attempts to embark on a genuinely modernising project are another reason why he and senior ministers should take note of what Major says. For leaders to retain authority and authenticity there has to be a degree of coherence and consistency of message. In his early years as leader, Cameron transmitted messages which had some similarities with Major’s speech, at least in terms of symbolism and tone. Cameron visited council estates, urged people to vote blue and to go green, spoke at trade union conferences rather than to the CBI, played down the significance of Europe as an issue, and was careful about how he framed his comments on immigration. If he enters the next election “banging on” about Europe, armed with populist policies on immigration while bashing “scroungers” on council estates and moaning about green levies, there will be such a disconnect with his earlier public self that voters will wonder about how substantial and credible he is.

Cameron faces a very tough situation, with Ukip breathing down his neck and a media urging him rightwards. But the evidence is overwhelming. The one-nation Major was the last Tory leader to win an overall majority. When Cameron  affected a similar set of beliefs to Major’s, he was also well ahead in the polls. More recently the 80-year old Michael Heseltine pointed the way ahead with his impressive report on an active industrial strategy. Now Major, retired from politics, charts a credible route towards electoral recovery. How odd that the current generation of Tory leaders is more trapped by the party’s Thatcherite past than those who lived through it as ministers.

Sleep: Weird things people do in their sleep

By Denise Winterman

BBC News Magazine

Increasing numbers of people are asking for help with sleep disorders and some of them are doing rather strange things during the night.

Specialist sleep clinics are treating more people with sleep disorders than ever before.

It's not surprising. More than 30% of the UK population currently suffers from insomnia or another sleep disorder, according to the Mental Health Foundation. This can have serious mental and physical consequences.

Clinics say they are getting up to 50 new referrals a week. It's a fivefold increase in just a decade for some. This big rise has been put down to raised awareness of sleep disorders and more people reporting them.

The clinics are also dealing with some strange new sleep behaviour, while other rather odd sleep disorders are becoming more common. So what are the weird things people do?

Texting

Technology now plays a huge part in our lives so it's no shock that sleep experts are seeing new kinds of sleep behaviour related to it.

More people are reporting sending text messages during their sleep, says Dr Kirstie Anderson, who runs the Neurology Sleep Service for the Newcastle Upon Tyne NHS Foundation Trust. Considering the number of Britons who now own a mobile phone - 92% according to Ofcom - it's not surprising. Many people also take them to bed.

"It is very common for people to do things in their sleep that they do repeatedly during the day," says Anderson.

This is largely down to sleep disorders called parasomnias. These are unwanted behaviours that occur during sleep.

They can be as small as opening your eyes while asleep or, at the very extreme end, driving a car while sleeping. Anderson has even treated someone who carefully dismantled grandfather clocks while asleep.

What happens in our brains during such episodes is still something of a mystery. Not much research has been done, largely due to the fact that gathering data is very difficult.

"The problem is people rarely do such acts under controlled conditions at a sleep clinic," says sleep specialist Dr Chris Idzikowski, director of the Edinburgh Sleep Clinic. "But this area of research is going to really move forward in the next few years because we now have the necessary equipment to record people in their own homes."

Reassuringly, the texts people send when asleep often make no sense. While it is common for people to do things in their sleep that they do during the day, they do them more clumsily or inaccurately, says Anderson.

Eating

Unexplained empty food wrappers and a messy kitchen are what some sleepwalkers face when they wake up. Often snacking in your sleep is not a big problem, but in more extreme cases it is classed as Nocturnal Eating Syndrome (NES). Again, increased awareness of the sleep disorder means more people are being referred to sleep clinics with it.

Sufferers can raid the kitchen several times a night but have no recollection when they wake up. Not only do they lose sleep but they can put on an excessive amount of weight, causing a whole range of problems mentally and physically. Other concerns include choking in their sleep.

Like other strange nocturnal behaviour, sleep eating often happens when people experience parasomnias, which half a million Britons regularly do, according to Anderson. When it comes to eating in your sleep often it is related to what happens before bedtime.

"Sleepwalkers will often do simple things that make some kind of sense, like eat when having gone to bed hungry or dieting during the day," says Anderson.

In more complicated cases, where someone might cook a meal, the person is actually awake but will have no memory of what they have done. It's a type of amnesia, says Prof Jim Horne, from the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University.

"They are basically in a confused awake state. In these more extreme cases you can't attribute the problem to sleep itself. Often it's a case of stress, for example, affecting sleep."

Sex

Sexsomnia, a condition where people have sex in their sleep, has only really been brought to the public's attention in recent years. As yet very little research has been done into it, say sleep experts, but more cases are being reported.

It can become more frequent during times of stress or under the influence of alcohol or drugs and ranges from minor behaviour to full sexual intercourse, in some cases with serious consequences.

Idzikowski gives expert evidence at trials that involve serious sexual assaults and rape.

He says sexsomnia is a parasomnia. It is most likely to occur in the "deep sleep" stage when the thinking and awareness part of the brain is switched off but not the part of the brain responsible for basic urges like having sex.

"It is instinctive behaviour, people are not conscious at the time," says Idzikowski.

"When you are in a deep sleep moral and rational decision-making do not occur.

"It constantly surprises me the type of sleep problems people live with for years. Often they don't realise they can get help ."

Stop breathing

When sleepers stop breathing this is often caused by a sleep disorder known as Obstructive Sleep Apnoea (OSA). While it is not a new sleep disorder, an increasing number of people are being referred to sleep clinics with it. As obesity is a contributing factor, experts expect numbers to keep on rising.

Usually accompanied with very loud snoring, OSA occurs when the throat muscles collapse and block the airways and stop people from breathing - the apnoea. After recently undergoing tests as part of the new BBC One series Goodnight Britain Paul Asbury, from King's Lynn, found out that he regularly stopped breathing in his sleep for up to 26 seconds at a time.

"I was really scared when I was told," he says. "It made me panic to think I regularly stopped breathing and for that long. I thought I had a snoring problem but it was much more serious."

These breaks in breathing woke the 47-year-old lorry driver up to 50 times an hour during the night. In extreme cases it can be up 80 times, says Idzikowski.

"The sufferer will often not remember waking up. This is because the brain does not quite connect with the body, so the person is awake but doesn't know it. It can take up to a minute for the brain to connect with the body causing people to be conscious of waking up.

"The result is that sufferers get very little deep sleep which is one of the restorative phases of the sleep cycle. In the morning they usually feel incredibly tired," says Idzikowski.

This can have serious consequences if people are doing things like operating machinery. Asbury's disorder is being treated using a special face mask, which is working so far.

Exploding head syndrome

You're peacefully falling asleep and suddenly it's like a bomb has gone off in your head. It's exploding head syndrome, when a sudden and incredibly loud noise comes from within your head.

It's another parasomnia event. Sufferers have described the loud noise as sounding like a bomb explosion, a thunderclap and lightning or a gunshot. It is painless but can leave the person distressed. There are reports of people running to their windows to look out as they think a bomb has gone off nearby.

Some sleep experts say it is very rare but Anderson says cases have been referred to her in recent years. It is really the sensory equivalent of the motor start [the hypnic or sudden jerk accompanied by a falling feeling] we all sometimes get as we are going off to sleep, she says.

"People hear a really loud bang or explosion as they are drifting off to sleep, and then work out that it can't be external as no-one else heard it. Sometimes people get bright flashes of light.

"It is entirely benign, but can be alarming and mostly we simply reassure sufferers. Sometimes medication is used if people are very bothered and therefore worry about falling asleep and make it worse."

Often there is no pattern to episodes, but they can go on for years and be a significant disruption to quality of life.

A low-carb diet may help clear your complexion

Relaxnews
Wednesday, 10 August 2011

 

While a low-carb diet is credited with providing a slim waistline, it may also improve acne.

On August 8, WebMD News reported that low-carb eating can help clear up acne by controlling glucose levels, which can promote a healthier complexion.

People with acne may have what is called hyperinsulinemia, which is characterized by excess levels of insulin in the blood. "Foods that are low in the glycemic index (GI) may contribute to the hormonal control of acne," said Alan R. Shalita, MD, chairman of the department of dermatology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in New York in an interview with WebMD.

"I would encourage patients with acne to moderate the amount of carbs that they eat and not to overdo dairy," which can also cause acne, he added.

Selecting foods lower on the glycemic index means avoiding blood sugar spikes with white rice, sweets, and white flour breads and opting for fresh foods, such as vegetables, meat, and fruits.

Shalita also debunked the myth that chocolate triggers blemishes, noting that for people who do react to chocolate, it is more a result of the sugar and fat in the candy.

If you have mild to moderate acne, Shalita recommends applying an over-the-counter salicylic acid cleanser followed by a benzoyl peroxide leave-on product to help dry the skin.

"If you don't respond, see a dermatologist," he said.

Other treatments for more severe acne include some oral contraceptives and oral or topical antibiotics.