Linkfest March 15, 2017

Watch a professional cyclist's carbon wheel melt before your very eyes:


Some people think going gluten-free may be risky for diabetes. Hmmm. Gluten-free diets are, for the most part, a waste of time and effort unless you have celiac disease. And whole grain intake is generally associated with a decreased risk of diabetes, which is consistent with the alleged findings of this study. And this paper (not yet published) comes from Harvard, which gives it a certain cachet, but I'm always skeptical of big, splashy pronouncements like this when they're made ahead of publication. Too many of these studies end up having fatal flaws.

Bikes now officially outnumber cars in Copenhagen. "When Copenhagen first began manually counting cars and bikes in 1970, there were 351,133 cars and 100,071 bikes on the roads—a ratio of about 3.5 to 1. That's important, because it means not only are more people riding—about 150 percent more over 46 years—but also, fewer people are driving."

How the world's heaviest man lost it all. "The only thing that gave him comfort in life was food. It was a drug of abuse, freely available, heavily marketed."

Is loneliness the biggest threat to middle-aged men? Well, Vivek Murthy is definitely qualified to say so, and I think we're self-isolating ourselves with suburban homes and gadgets, but "biggest" is a stretch when we still have tobacco and obesity/diabetes to contend with...

Big pharma is very nervous about possible Trump FDA deregulation. This one cuts both ways. On one hand, I'm afraid that ineffective drugs are going to start coming to market if deregulation goes too far. On the other hand, any deregulation that is opposed by big pharma is inherently attractive.

The ADA 2017 Standards of Care in Diabetes are out. "To help providers identify those patients who would benefit from prevention efforts, new text was added emphasizing the importance of screening for prediabetes using an assessment tool or informal assessment of risk factors and performing a diagnostic test when appropriate." It's a start.