Health/Miscellaneous Tips

1. Zinc: daily use as supplement = prevention re colds and respiratory infections; also lowers chemicals that can trigger cell damage and illness

Hearing: effects from the environment and culture

Quotes from “On Health” by Bernadine Healy, MD in US News & World Report, July 16, 2007 issue

• “A Harvard survey of adolescents and young adults reported that more than half had taken a hit to their hearing at loud music events,
  either tinnitus or temporary deafness.”
• “For [those] who can still hear a pin drop, it’s smart to pay attention to the health of the inner ear, the nerve center for making sense of sound.” *
• “Loud noise destroys nerve endings in the inner ear and is a common and preventable cause of hearing loss.” Decibels measure loudness:

                                                               i.      Silence is zero

                                                             ii.      A firecracker explosion is 150dB

                                                            iii.      A rock concert can get up to 140dB

                                                           iv.      A noisy bar is almost 100dB

                                                             v.      A whisper is generally 30dB

                                                           vi.      A quiet motor purrs at 40dB

                                                          vii.      Normal conversation is at 60dB

                                                        viii.      “Regular exposures to levels over 85 are toxic to the ear.”… “If you have to raise your voice to be heard above the din, you are in a toxic place.”

• “Deafening sounds are like blinding light, pointedly destroying the very organ that detects them.”
• “…(T)he hair-like, specialized nerve endings that are lined up inside a coiled, fluid-filled compartment of the inner ear can be shaken to death by loudness they were not designed to handle. These nerve endings vibrate at different rates in response to different sound frequencies…transforming them into distinct electrical impulses sent through the auditory nerve to the brain… (T)hese vibrating hair cells can be over-excited by too much noise. When forced into metabolic overdrive, the cells spin off toxic oxidation products that make them swell and sometimes slowly die off. Toxic noise also compromises blood flow to the inner ear, causing further damage. The cells that go first are those that resonate to a higher pitch, and the resulting dropout of higher-frequency sounds is what makes words seem garbled.”
• Prevention/precautions – avoidance, ear plugs, etc. – are implied. Other actions both personal and commercial:

                                                               i.      Industrial acknowledgement of the problems: “Apple filed a patent for new software designed to track a headphone user’s exposure to loud music and automatically reduce volume as needed.”

                                                             ii.      Upcoming: “a nutrient bar to fight off ear damage”

                                                            iii.      What you can do now: supplements: “a combination of the antioxidant vitamins A, C, and E and magnesium not only protects the inner ear when taken before the noise exposure but can limit damage for up to 72 hours after the insult.”

* MCBS comment: note the precise phrasing: “making sense of sound,” not “hearing” – to understand that there’s a processing factor, not just a taking-in of sensory input.