"Can you make a pet of him like a bird or put him on a leash for your girls?"

[larryhammer]

When you look at the studies, the evidence overwhelmingly shows that having a single alcoholic drink a day while pregnant has no discernable effect on the baby. Binge drinking is a problem, but not occasional or even light drinking. An econometrist goes through the studies behind the list she was given while pregnant, and found which foods/behaviors actually are risky. (via)

In pair with the book posters, it's book t-shirts. (via Kottke)

I guest-posted about a kestral, plus posted a week of poems about raptors: M, T, W, Th, F, Sa, Su.

---L.

Subject quote from Job 41:5.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Not one but three poems of Hopkins' evocation of the numinous. wow!

[larryhammer]

He wrote more, but those were the ones that seemed most appropriate to link.

---L.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know. They really were perfect.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

Re: alcohol, I suspect that there'd be discernible effect for individuals who have the acetaldehydemia problem. One'd have to distinguish amongst those with two copies, one copy, and no copies at two different genes. Two copies of what some geneticists call the "faulty" gene lets light drinking have the same subjective effect as binge drinking. There's a similar "defective" version of the gene governing how one metabolizes caffeine.

I do like the article's general implicit point, which is that there's a uselessly large amount of cloudiness in the mad rush to impose "advice" upon pregnant women.

[larryhammer]

Very good points. I was also overlooking that.

---L.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

It's easy for me to remember: were someone to have me drink 3-4 cups of decaf coffee or black tea daily for a week, I'd probably do something drastic to make it stop.

I can understand how a cannot-metabolize-alcohol-well mutation would spread across related populations; cannot-handle-caffeine is harder to see, not because caffeine is inherently more useful but because it's easier to skip by individual will power amidst diachronic social contexts of cultures whose genetic populations tend to have those mutations. *squints* I think that's all the needed qualifiers. That is, one can sip tea if in a situation where it must be drunk, whereas alcoholic beverages are sometimes for sipping, sometimes for bottoms-up. Sorry, too many thoughts. ETA Incomplete ones: I meant that there's little obvious protective effect from being required to minimize caffeine use, else suffering health woes.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I loved the econometrist's look at the risks of alcohol, etc., during pregnancy, and I really wish more people would take this approach to more studies and factoids about risks from this or that thing. Lots of studies seem to me, when I hear about them, terribly flawed in the way she describes: confounding correlation with causation when even a little thinking reveals lots of possible other factors (I laughed at the cocaine thing).

[larryhammer]

Our society does not do a good job of teaching how to evaluate statistics and risks ...

---L.