Love me tender?

Love me tender?

-          By Elephant . Published April 21, 2013

If you love me, tell me the truth–tender or not.

Ah, criticism.

No one wants to hear he has screwed up. You get flustered. Maybe even blush. You feel like a little kid who’s been called on the carpet for doing something naughty or making a mistake. You want to start swinging away at whoever is dishing out the criticism. It sucks. Can’t we just skip over this part where I’m wrong and move on to where you like me again and everybody’s happy? Please? Nope.

Criticism is like going to the dentist. You know you need it. You’re afraid it’s going to hurt. You get that knot in your stomach when you see it coming. You want the end result where you are better, stronger–but you don’t want to go through it.

Culprit in Heart Disease Goes Beyond Meat’s Fat

By GINA KOLATA

Published: April 7, 2013

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It was breakfast time and the people participating in a study of red meat and its consequences had hot, sizzling sirloin steaks plopped down in front of them. The researcher himself bought a George Foreman grill for the occasion, and the nurse assisting him did the cooking.

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In a study, meat eaters who ate steak showed a burst of a chemical that increases risk.

For the sake of science, these six men and women ate every last juicy bite of the 8-ounce steaks. Then they waited to have their blood drawn.

Dr. Stanley Hazen of the Cleveland Clinic, who led the study, and his colleagues had accumulated evidence for a surprising new explanation of why red meat may contribute to heart disease. And they were testing it with this early morning experiment.

The researchers had come to believe that what damaged hearts was not just the thick edge of fat on steaks, or the delectable marbling of their tender interiors. In fact, these scientists suspected that saturated fat and cholesterol made only a minor contribution to the increased amount of heart disease seen in red-meat eaters. The real culprit, they proposed, was a little-studied chemical that is burped out by bacteria in the intestines after people eat red meat. It is quickly converted by the liver into yet another little-studied chemical called TMAO that gets into the blood and increases the risk of heart disease.