Minnesofa inspired Minnefuton. Minnepop followed from the normal pronunciation.

Then the kids came up with tons of silly names, the best of which was Minnedodo.

Can you think of others?

We enjoyed a break in the heat two weeks ago with a visit to Blackwater Falls State Park in north-central West Virginia. At an elevation of 3,100 feet, temperatures there were in the 70s and 80s. And the scenery was beautiful. I highly recommend it.

In the past some have dismissed my dad’s condition as simply a minor form of forgetfulness associated with aging. At least having this diagnosis will prevent that.

It feels as though we’re losing him a little bit at a time. Please keep him in your prayers.

Thank goodness this didn’t happen as the moving van was unloading our stuff. The move went relatively smoothly, and we’re unpacking our things in a much older and somewhat smaller house than we had in Northfield. We’re in the town of Collingswood, New Jersey. It’s on the PATCO train line, which I take into work. More on Collingswood and Philadelphia in future posts, I’m sure.

I hope to resume posting more regularly, now that the stress of moving is largely over. Still have a lot of unpacking to do, though.

We are sad about leaving our family and friends here in Minnesota but excited by new prospects and being back on the East Coast. Since my wife and I both lived in New Jersey before, we’ve spent time in Philadelphia in the past and like it. I will be working in downtown, or “Center City,” Philadelphia, so our options for places to live are many. We may choose to live in City Center, or we may choose a suburb that is on one of the many rail lines. We may buy or rent. We will have to sell our place here in Northfield.

My long absence form the blog is due to preoccupation with the tasks around my job search and the move that will result. My apologies.

“The war on muscular work has been a remarkable success,” Bouchard comments (p. 14). But that success comes at with significant costs. Here is an excerpt from Mr. Bouchard’s introduction:

Even though individuals bear responsibility for maintaing healthy weights, national surveys in developed countries and the compendium of data around the world by the International Obesity Task Force indicate that programs with a focus on individuals are not enough…. What is needed is a series of major policies aimed at transforming our environment and the way we live. Indeed, nothing short of a paradigm shift has any chance of success in the efforts to curtail the increase in the number of people who are chronically in positive energy balance. City planning, building codes, mass transit systems, car use, safe footpaths and cycling paths, pedestrian-only city centers, school schedules and programs, and the media are among the areas that will require transformations if we are to attenuate the impact of the current “obesogenic” environment.

The challenge is enormous. Evolution has endowed humans with complex regulatory systems of appetite and satiety as well as with physiological and metabolic characteristics determining basal metabolic rates and food- or cold-induced thermogenesis. The recent past in affluent societies reveals that these biological systems cannot cope well in an environment in which palatable foods are abundant and energy expenditure of activity is low. In particular, the lesson from the last decades is that it seems to be extremely difficult and perhaps impossible for a large fraction of sedentary individuals to regulate food and caloric intake to be in balance at low levels of daily energy expenditure. The energy expenditure from physical activity is thus too low for most people to be able to eat normally without having to be on caloric restriction diets from time to time or having to be constantly restraining their food intake. It has been estimated that the current deficit of energy expenditure from physical activity compared to that of the recent past ranges from about 300 to 800 kcal/day. If this range of estimates is close to the true values, it implies that adults would have to add one to three hours of brisk walking every day to their current daily regimen to be in energy balance at a normal body weight level. This is a major public health challenge indeed! (15-16)

Another essay in the book – “The Cost of Obesity and Sedentarism in the United States,” by Graham A. Colditz and Anna Mariani, addresses the tremendous health-related costs associated with lack of physical activity:

The sum of obesity (7% of health care costs) and of inactivity (2.4% of health care costs) is here used to estimate the total direct costs of inactivity. Overall, a minimum of 9.4% of all direct costs incurred in delivering health care in the U.S. is attributable to insufficient energy expenditure…. Note that these are conservative estimates. (60-61)

Note also that these latter numbers do not include indirect costs such as lowered worker productivity