Athlete at Age

At 85, More Peaks to Conquer and Adventures to Seek

The New York Times reports on Fred Beckey - 85 years old and going strong.

SEATTLE — He had been called a vagabond, a recluse and a schemer, a cantankerous mountain man hiding his little black book of secret climbing techniques from the world. In seven decades, he had claimed more virgin ascents than any mountaineer alive. Some ascribed his feats to vengeance of a long-ago slight, others to the murder of his own fears. He was said to howl at tourists. His past was the stuff of lore, his plans the stuff of mystery.

Then, this fall, word of his next expedition spread among the worldwide network of contacts whose telephone numbers he kept scribbled on notecards wrapped with rubber bands in the gearbox pocket of his station wagon. The plan was announced in disarmingly casual fashion.

“Hi everyone, Fred Beckey called yesterday and he is going to northern Spain in early to mid-December,” began one posting this autumn at an online rock climbing forum. “Might be a long shot, but he’s looking for a partner to hook up with in Barcelona.”

Quoting Fred himself:

“You’ve got to be physically pretty strong to be any good at it at all,” Beckey said. “You’ve got to have a hard-core mental attitude. You’ve got to have the right mantra. You’ve got to have dedication, a sense of security, safety and sensitivity with your partners, and a good sense of balance. It’s a combination of many, many things. You need to have the capability or desire to accept a certain amount of risk. A lot of it is maybe spiritual, not a religious type, but you have to have an affinity with the outdoors.”

I'll follow his exploits with interest.

Alpha^2

Research on mice links fast food to Alzheimer's

Reuters reports that Research on mice links fast food to Alzheimer's:

LONDON (Reuters) - Mice fed junk food for nine months showed signs of developing the abnormal brain tangles strongly associated with Alzheimer's disease, a Swedish researcher said on Friday.

The findings, which come from a series of published papers by a researcher at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, show how a diet rich in fat, sugar and cholesterol could increase the risk of the most common type of dementia.

No surprise to readers of this (or many other blogs), but then we get what seems like an ingrained and not particularly scientific comment from the researcher:

"On examining the brains of these mice, we found a chemical change not unlike that found in the Alzheimer brain," Susanne Akterin, a researcher at the Karolinska Institutet's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, who led the study, said in a statement.

"We now suspect that a high intake of fat and cholesterol in combination with genetic factors ... can adversely affect several brain substances, which can be a contributory factor in the development of Alzheimer's."

Whoa!  What happened to sugar?  Where did the refined carbohydrates go?    TheScientist.com reported:

Alzheimer's: Type3 Diabetes?
Neurodegeneration research turns to insulin for answers

In 2005, while testing the effects of impaired insulin signaling on the brain, Suzanne de la Monte at Brown University and her colleagues observed several unexpected phenomena in her experimental mice. Hallmarks of neurodegenerative disease had surfaced: oxidative stress, amyloid fibrils, and cell loss. "It was the craziest thing," de la Monte says. Glucose metabolism and Alzheimer's had been linked previously, says de la Monte, and perhaps her findings explained why.

I grant that someone should ban transfats (Mayor Bloomberg in NY has started to do so), but the problem looks more like insulin regulation than it does cholesterol intake.

One wonders about how little researchers in the same fields pay attention to what others have discovered.

Alpha^2