Ocular migraines

I had my first ocular migraine the other day. I’ve only had the one, but it was rather disconcerting. I was working at my computer and noticed zig-zag lines in my vision. It was sort of like this illustration.

 It only lasted a few minutes, which is typical, although some can last 20 to 30 minutes. Apparently ocular migraines are quite common. They’re a called a “visual disturbance” and can be accompanied by a headache, although mine wasn’t. (I’ve only had a couple of headaches in my life and certainly never a migraine—lucky me.) 

Ocular migraines are not related to the eye; they are the result of activity in the visual cortex of the brain. Scientists don’t know what causes them, but surmise it has something to do with changes in blood flow to the brain or to particularly sensitive neurons. Apparently ocular migraines can be triggered by hormonal changes, flashing lights, chemicals in foods, medications, and so forth. In my case, it seemed to be nothing.

When I had mine, I knew what it was because my husband has had a few. The first time he experienced the “visual disturbance” he was rather alarmed: macular degeneration runs in his family. But a quick call to his opthamologist assured him that he had nothing to worry about. Ocular migraines are considered harmless. Usually they are painless, cause no permanent visual or brain damage and do not require treatment. Good.

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Mirror touch synesthesia

Synesthesia is a sort of blending of the senses. For example, people with this condition often perceive letters or numbers as having certain colors. Or they may experience sounds as colors or colors as scents. Some people even experience certain tastes when hearing words: the word basketball might taste like waffles. Quite a few artists, musicians, and writers are synesthetes of various types. These include Vladimir Nabokov, Duke Ellington, Billy Joel, David Hockney, and Itzhak Perlman.

A rare form of synesthesia is called mirror touch. It’s kind of an extreme form of empathy. That is, people with this type of synesthesia can feel what another person feels. For example, one woman with this trait says she witnessed a man punch another man. “I felt it. I felt punched. I passed out.” Another says, “Just walking around every day I feel strangers hurting, and I feel it so thoroughly and completely. Crowds are overwhelming sometimes.” Kind of a tough way to live.

Two mirror touch people that I’ve read about both went into medicine; one a pediatric nurse, another a psychiatrist. Having mirror touch synesthesia when treating people can be helpful, but can also make for a tough day at work. For example, the nurse tells of caring for a child of an opioid-addicted mother: “One time when the child was really cranky, I started feeling panicky, shaky, and wanting to throw up all at once. And I thought, Oh, this is what withdrawal feels like.” 

Researchers hypothesize that mirror touch synesthesia is an exaggerated form of the mirror neuron  system we all possess. The system is a subset of our normal motor command neurons, but the mirror neurons fire when we watch another person. They perform a sort of virtual reality simulation of another person’s physical experience. It’s why watching a person fall off a bike will make us flinch or cringe as if it were happening to us. 

Empathy is a good thing, but I’m glad I have the ordinary variety.

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Eat full fat dairy for your heart’s sake

I love this: A large new study has found that eating two or more servings of whole fat dairy foods, such as milk, yogurt and cheese, reduced the risk of heart disease. The study, recently published in The Lancet, included 136,384 people in 21 countries who were followed for an average of nine years. What the researchers found was a—

• 22 percent lower risk of heart disease
• 34 percent lower risk of stroke
• 23 percent lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease

The fat in dairy products is saturated, folks. It’s butter fat. It irks me no end when people, such as health columnist Jane Brody, continue to use the phrase “artery clogging saturated fat.” As I’ve said before, saturated fat is simply a fat molecule in which two hydrogen atoms are attached to each carbon atom; that is, carbon atoms are “saturated” with hydrogen atoms. What’s so scary about that?

As Dr. George Mann, professor of medicine and biochemistry at Vanderbilt University and former Director of the Framingham Heart Program, said, “For fifty years the public has been told by officials of the American Heart Association and the National Heart Institute that this epidemic disease [coronary heart disease] is caused by dietary saturated fatty acids and cholesterol. That advice is quite wrong. It is the greatest biomedical error of the twentieth century. The advice lingers, for selfish personal reasons and commercial avarice.” My man! (He wrote the preface to my book, Fat: It's Not What You Think. Unfortunately, he died in 2013 at the age of 95.)

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Ignore nutrition studies

Recently, an oft-quoted and respected food researcher who founded the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University was booted from his position at Cornell because of “academic misconduct in his research and scholarship, including misreporting of research data.” He’s not alone with his misconduct; just a big name who was busted.

Nutritional research is plagued with credibility problems. One reason for this is something called “data dredging” wherein researchers run exhaustive analyses on data sets then cherry pick the “findings” that suit them. Another problem is incorrectly assuming cause and effect; that is, concluding that A causes B, when in fact some other factor may be causing B. To make matters worse, the press publishes the most newsworthy studies (eating a single mandarin orange will add five years to your life)! Many researchers go for newsworthy results.

For these reasons, I rarely write about nutritional studies—unless they support my own biases. Case in point: I recently wrote a post called “Eat full fat dairy for your heart’s sake.” A big study showed that eating two or more servings of full fat dairy was “associated with lower rates of cardiovascular disease and mortality.” The study was huge and went on for nine years and was controlled for age, sex, smoking, physical activity and other factors.

The journal report went so far as to state that “some saturated fats may be beneficial to cardiovascular health, and dairy products may also contain other potentially beneficial compounds.” Because the results of this study go against conventional “wisdom,” it won’t make headlines. I was lucky enough to find a brief mention of it in The New York Times.

As you can see, I cherry-pick my studies too. But I’m right!

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.