Larry Page & Sergey Brin hopefully getting enough sunlight and vegetables?

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Larry Page's recent (hopefully minor) health issues (loss of voice) are
currently in the news, and Sergey Brin's has previously expressed
published concerns about Parkinson's disease.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/06/ff_sergeys_search/
http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/larry-page-says-nothing-seriously-wrong-with-health/

I can wonder if, like so many indoor-types people in the technology
field, those two hard working guys are both at risk from sunlight
(vitamin D3) deficiency and vegetable deficiency disease? Or possibly
some other nutritional issues (omega 3 deficiency, iodine deficiency,
etc.) that can be caused by "The Pleasure Trap" and easy access to
"Supernormal Stimuli"? (Both the names of good books BTW related to 20th
and 21st-century health challenges.)

I still feel Google has a lot it could do to live up to its
post-scarcity potential. And, I feel Google is more likely to do so if
these two guys (as well as Eric Schmidt) have lots of energy and great
health. So, here are some health links I have put together which I hope
could help these guys or anyone still reading this list; I've collected
them in a few places, but I'll put a copy of them below. These ones I
put as a comment to my entry here:
http://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sensemaking

BTW, It's sad to hear about the discontinuing of "Google Health" as an
initiative.
http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/health/faq.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Health

I hope Google is still active in health sensemaking in general,
nonetheless. But even if not, I could not have put together so many
pieces of the health puzzle together for myself, family, and friends
without using Google... So, thanks for all the good health via good
search results, Google! See also: :-)
"Dilbert on the Google Health Plan"
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2007-02-18/

And, in general, it would be useful for Project Virgle (or OpenVirgle)
to have a good understanding of human health, because bad health on the
space frontier is probably even harder to deal with then bad health on
Earth.

== Excerpted from my comment here:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

... By the way, here are some key useful health related links, and these
are some of the issues I'd like to use such a [health sensemaking]
system to discuss, refine, rebut, or promote.

On healthy diet (likely mostly based around vegetables, fruits, and
beans and some other whole foods):
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/Food-Revolution-Your-Diet-World/dp/1573244872
http://www.amazon.com/Diet-New-America-John-Robbins/dp/0915811812

Knife and blender skills for eating better:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RhfAE6McrM
http://greensmoothierevolution.com/

On medically supervised fasting (both water and juice) and health:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/healthy-food-dr-fuhrman-on-fasting.html
http://www.healthpromoting.com/why-water-fasting
http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/

[Added to the list just now for Google-ites:
Scientific Studies Show Angioplasty and Stent Placement is Essentially
Worthless:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
Lack of DHA linked to Parkinsons
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/lack_of_DHA_linked_to_Parkinsons.aspx
]

And on getting enough vitamin D (in decreasing levels of recommended
supplements):
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/how-to-get-your-vitamin-d/vitamin-d-supplementation/
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/vitamin_D_recommendations.aspx

On vitamin D and pregnancy:
http://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20100504/high-doses-of-vitamin-d-may-cut-pregnancy-risk
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/introduction/

On autism and health care in general:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html

And the same for overcoming Multiple Sclerosis (MS) with improved
nutrition and vitamin D and avoiding junk:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/12/23/overcoming-multiple-sclerosis-through-diet.aspx
http://www.terrywahls.com/up-from-the-chair

Understanding about good and bad fats:
http://peakperformance.runnersworld.com/2011/05/may-9-the-great-fat-debate-does-the-total-fat-in-your-diet-matter.html
http://nutsci.org/2011/05/04/the-great-fat-debate/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21515108

Omega-3 fats in particular are important for lots of reasons:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/oct/17/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime

Iodine can be an issue too sometimes (involved in preventing infection
and eliminating cancer):
http://www.iodine4health.com/

Mental health:
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-us-happy/7439/
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/dobbs-orchid-gene
http://www.anwot.org/

Treadmill workstations for computer users (but be sure to get vitamin D
being indoors so much):
http://www.engadget.com/2005/06/08/the-treadmill-workstation/
http://www.squidoo.com/walkingwhileworking

Community level ideas for health:
http://www.bluezones.com/
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART03075/Dr-Weils-Book-Why-Our-Health-Matters.html

Sadly this is how the USA feels about the health of its craftspeople,
artists, and so on:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/21/mocking-the-dying-profiting-off-the-work-of-uninsured-artists/

As the book "Where There Is No Doctor" points out, substantial
peer-to-peer health advice is needed both in the underdeveloped and
overdeveloped world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_There_is_No_Doctor

So, we need to look out for each other in places where there is no
health care such as for many tens of millions of people in the USA. Here
is an example of people having to line up in places usually reserved for
livestock (a state fairground) to get a bit of medical care in Oklahoma
from volunteers:
http://www.ramok.org

So, even if medical care is just inaccessible for millions in the USA,
and maybe billions globally, we can at least help people make sense of
the information that might prevent, say, 70% of medical problems through
things like better nutrition or healthier lifestyle choices.

While a SmartPhone may never be as good as a real doctor, it can at
least help you stay healthier through providing high quality information
which has been developed and refined collectively. And a billion of
today's Android SmartPhones will no doubt be discarded in a couple years
for something better, and could go to people around the globe full of
information about health care. Someday a SmartPhone may even help with
medical testing, too, and such tests might also be developed by open
source methods and the results might be organized and crowdsourced
through a collective Sensemaking system, integrating real test results
with other discussions:
http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_a_lab_the_size_of_a_postage_stamp.html

Naturally, the bigger and more personalized such a system gets, the more
there are privacy issues. And the more we might want desktop or
peer-to-peer software where people can collect personal information
locally and decide how much they want to share with others to be part of
a collective sensemaking process.

So, we are just beginning to see what is possible with applying
technology collectively to the problems of health. This proposal is just
one more step in that direction. I can hope the [ideas] in it are at
least useful to others.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.