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Saturated Fat Intake Linked To Abdominal Fat Accumulation BY MARTHA RAIDL
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here are two ways fat is distributed and stored in the body. The first is called subcutaneous fat, which is distributed evenly over the body surface and is stored directly under the skin. The second is called ectopic fat and it accumulates in the abdominal area (belly), liver, muscle tissue, including the heart, and the pancreas. Now it appears that the type of fat you consume in your diet affects where the fat will be stored, as either subcutaneous or ectopic fat. Swedish researchers at Uppsala University randomly divided 39 young adult male and female subjects, of normal weight, into two groups, and had them consume 750 extra calories daily for seven weeks. For the first group, the extra calories came from polyunsaturated fat (sunflower oil), while the second group consumed the extra calories from saturated fat (palm oil); both groups consumed the same amount of protein, carbohydrate and fat. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs) were used to measure subjects’ body fat distribution at the beginning and the end of the
study. The results showed that subjects who ate excess saturated fat gained significantly more: (1) total body fat and (2) fat in the liver and abdomen (especially surrounding the organs). Conversely, those who ate excess polyunsaturated fat gained significantly less total body fat, and gained three times as much muscle mass. This effect may be potentially very helpful for elderly individuals who have difficulty maintaining muscle mass as they age. Researchers theorized that the excess polyunsaturated fats were turning on genes involved in muscle metabolism. One of the researchers, Ulf Riserus commented, “This is of great interest, as we lack preventative treatments for fatty liver and visceral fat (abdominal fat) today.” He suggest individuals replace saturated fat from meat, butter and palm oil with unsaturated fats from plant oils and fatty fish. Martha Raidl is a nutrition education specialist at University of Idaho. For more information about the University’s Blaine County Extension, visit extension. uidaho.edu/blaine or call 208-788-5585.
Holiday Lights Costs Less Than Before BY IDAHO POWER
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ome folks may see higher electricity use during the holiday season, but all those twinkly lights may not be the reason. That’s because the LED lights in most newer displays use far less energy than their predecessors. Consider these numbers, based on a 100-bulb string of lights, operating eight hours per day for 30 days. For C7 incandescents (the big, older-type bulbs), the rough cost for a residential customer in Idaho Power’s service area is $13.73 per month. For C7 LED bulbs, the cost is $1.97 per month, so folks are saving almost $12 per string by replacing C7 incandescents with equivalent LEDs. For the mini bulbs, the incandescents run about $0.85 per month, and the mini LEDs are about $0.15 per month. There are other sizes of bulbs, of course, so actual savings vary. But It’s easy to see why lighting your home for the holidays costs a lot less than it used to. We encourage folks to use myAccount on our website (www.idahopower.com) to easily track their previous usage and their month-to-date and projected monthly usage. It helps to avoid surprises, and they can better manage their electricity use. brief
Hailey Holiday Raffle Will Be Dec. 13 The Hailey Chamber of Commerce will hold the second of three popular Hailey Holiday Raffles this Saturday, Dec. 13, starting at 11 a.m. at the Hailey Holiday Square. Raffle prizes this week will include five lucky winners of $200 each in Hailey Chamberbucks and prizes from Hailey restaurants, shops, service providers and more. The prizes this year are fantastic!
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Jolly Cowboys BY TONY TAYLOR
On December 9, 1996, a Douglas DC-3, operated by Emery Worldwide, crashed at Gowen Field in Boise. The crew reported an engine fire shortly after the Salt Lake City, Utah,-bound flight took off. Sadly, the two people onboard did not survive. The aircraft and its crew are known to many members of the local aviation community. I wrote this poem in 1996 in memorium. I’m presenting it to our community this week to commemorate the 18th anniversary of the accident. Jolly Cowboys By Tony Taylor
She was the sweetest sister, the fairest of the fair, Born a C-FOUR-SEVEN and bred for stormy air. She’d flown the war in England and then out of Valdez, she set her course “dead reckon” over endless Arctic seas.
A Douglas C-47, the military variant of the DC-3. Public domain photo via Wikimedia Commons
It was sad and wet and windy, like Boise gets to be: The tower cleared the runway for DAKOTA-CHARLIE-THREE. McIlvain was pilot, Archie sat right seat; ten thousand hours between them, And stories they’d repeat— of Northern Lights and rivers or runs with Arab goats, of strips in deepest Africa and guns beneath their coats. It was sad and wet and windy before we heard the nell, a sorry scene at Gowen when Rescue rang the bell. She lost a starboard engine before she found her speed and though those “buckos” spurred her and marked her changing leads, history was against them and all the facts provide, with only eight more seconds they’d have made that stormy ride. No more birds like Goonies will make that midnight flight and no more jolly cowboys flying through the night.
Tony Taylor is a longtime Hailey resident and local history buff. He enjoys skiing on soft snow and training horses in his free time. tws
peaks & valleys
The Lotus Flower BY DICK DORWORTH
On the east wall of the Spirit Room, upstairs in the YMCA in Ketchum, is a large—about 8 feet by 12 feet—lovely painting of a lotus flower. I spend a few hours each week under that painting in one of Richard Odom’s yoga classes. The lotus, Richard and the practice itself are inspiring and nutritious; they are daily reminders that the exquisite, organic growth of anything—a lotus flower, for example—is literally rooted in the mud from which it grows. That is, beauty is the culmination of a natural process that is not always pretty. Everything in life—the perfection of a flower or the catastrophe of war—is part of a process, and the lotus is an ancient symbol in several religions and cultures of the process leading to beauty, fertility, prosperity, spirituality and eternity. I like this Hindu description of one aspect of the lotus: “As a lotus is able to emerge from muddy waters un-spoilt and pure, it is considered to represent a wise and spiritually enlightened quality in a person; it is representative of somebody who
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carries out their tasks with little concern for any reward and with a full liberation from attachment.” The lotus represents the purity and beauty of life that rises out of muddy waters. Think of that. Six months ago, the east wall of the Spirit Room was dark-blue blank and—when lights were low during yoga classes, uninspiring. The south end of the Spirit Room has windows that overlook the YMCA swimming pool and sometimes the reflections from the pool create a rippling of light on the east wall. One of Richard’s students, local artist Deborra Bohrer, was observing the undulations of light on the wall during class and had the inspired thought that the lotus grows from water and one needed to be painted upon the wall. Deborra approached YMCA CEO Jason Fry with the idea and spent the next several weeks working on the painting. “We needed to add some personality to the Spirit Studio,” Fry said of the result. “The lotus is known to help connect us to nature and our true selves. Deb’s beautiful work has added a wonderful new energy to the studio and the practice for
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our instructors and members.” And so it has. The lotus flower inspired Confucius to say, “I have a love for the lotus. While growing in the mud it still remains unstained.” In Buddhism the lotus is similar to the path of a person’s life—from seed, to emerging from dirty water, to fully blossoming into a fully awakened person. The ancient Egyptians associated the lotus with the sun, which disappeared each night and re-appeared each morning—representative of the cycles of life itself. Every person has days that seem closer to the bottom of the pond than to the fully blossomed lotus flower floating upon it, and, of course, vice-versa. For me, every day in the Spirit Room practicing with Deborra’s lotus flower and Richard is an encouragement and inspiration to persevere, keep growing, let go, learn liberation. Thanks Richard. Thanks Deborra. Dick Dorworth is a Blaine County resident, author and former world record holder for speed on skis. Visit his website and blog at dickdorworth.com. tws