• Tyler Pratt, IMDb

    Faith in film: Why science-fiction movies abound with religious themes

    In "Man of Steel," the most recent Superman film, when Superman's parents send their son away from their dying planet to save his life, his mom worries he will not be accepted on Earth because he is an alien to the planet.

    "He will be an outcast. They'll kill him," his mother says.

    "How? He'll be a god to them," says his father, Jor-El, who believes Superman will be an ideal Earth's inhabitants will strive to reach.

    Some might see Christian symbolism in this scene, but it's not the only religious reference in the film. “Man of Steel,” which some call a "soft" science-fiction film (along with other superhero movies), is replete with religious allusions. And superhero films do not have a monopoly on religious metaphors. In fact, religious and spiritual themes are woven into the plots of many popular science fiction films, TV shows and novels.

    "We have so many TV shows and movies where you see the same type of archetypal characters, plots and problems that you would see in religion (and) in religious texts," says Barna Donovan, who teaches classes about the relationship between science fiction and religion at St. Peter’s University in Jersey City, N.J.

    Science and religion converge

    The strong ties between science fiction and religion may seem odd; after all, some religious fundamentalists and a number of atheists constantly pit science and religion against each other.

    But Dr. James McGrath, who teaches in the Religion and Philosophy Department at Butler University in Indianapolis, Ind., says a convergence between the two is natural.

    "Humans have wondered about our place in the universe even before we had modern science to help provide some answers about the physical form and nature of that universe. We've envisaged our cosmos as full of powerful beings who come from the sky, and select human beings as having rare opportunities to travel up there," says McGrath, adding that science-fiction authors today can explore questions that religions throughout history have attempted to answer.

    Arthur Doweyko, a scientist and award-winning author of sci-fi short stories, agrees that science fiction allows authors to explore humanity’s pressing questions about existence.

    "In creating a world, a civilization, at any time and place, the author necessarily needs to consider the manner in which the people of that time and place have dealt with the question of existence," says Doweyko. "Without that view expressed either directly or cleverly insinuated through the story, the characters will lack the moral and ethical motivation for their actions."

    Religious metaphors in sci-fi

    Religious concepts are commonly portrayed figuratively in science fiction, explained Doweyko. He said religious ideologies in the long-running series "Star Trek" coincided with an earthly belief system.

    Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, a science fiction and fantasy writer who has co-authored three Star Wars novels for LucasBooks, says religious commentary is prevalent in the Star Wars film franchise (which includes some of the highest-grossing movies of all time).

    "The main theological subtext ... is about the nature of good and evil and the nature of the Force," says Bohnhoff. "The Force, in that context, becomes a proxy for God (or both Satan and God in some circles, she explains), and informs the debate about good and evil in the (galaxy far, far away)."

    Donovan believes many apocalyptic TV shows and movies contain Judeo-Christian religious symbols. For example, he indicates "World War Z" (which he classifies as science fiction as opposed to horror because there is a scientific explanation for zombies, rather than a supernatural explanation) reminds him of biblical plague stories.

    Superhero films are also rife with religious symbolism, particularly savior figures, according to Donovan. He explains that in the 2002 version of "Spider-Man," Peter Parker selflessly saves the city while some revile him and the city’s major newspaper calls for his arrest, which is similar to the way Christ was treated in biblical accounts. Furthermore, the Green Goblin tempts Spider-Man and tries to persuade Peter to join in his evil cause, much like Satan tries to persuade Christ to leave the path of righteousness in the New Testament.

    Other science fiction films and TV shows have overtly religious themes. McGrath says media that features "ancient aliens" often directly addresses religion. In the 2012 film "Prometheus," for example, a group of explorers travel to space to meet their alien creators. One of these explorers believes in a higher power and does not see a conflict between science and her religion.

    "Ancient alien" scenarios help science fiction writers convert human religions and myths into science fiction, McGrath says.

    "And so (alien stories allow) the same questions — Who created us? Why are we here? — to be asked in as close a manner as possible to the way the questions have historically been asked and yet within the sci-fi genre," McGrath says.

    Why sci-fi authors include religion

    Science fiction authors include religious themes in their writings for a plethora of reasons. One of these reasons is authors use science fiction to present ideas in a way readers wouldn’t accept in a real-world setting, Bohnhoff says.

    "Like music, fiction can worm its way past prejudice, bias and dogmatism and cut straight to a reader’s intellect, heart and soul," Bohnhoff says, adding that she uses science fiction to help readers examine a subject (such as race or religion) in a different way.

    Bohnhoff explains that religious or spiritual themes allow her to study humans and cultures in greater depth in her novels. "Without faith that spiritual constants exist, I think, it is tempting to view mankind as a lost cause, or a product of his genes, or just another animal," she says.

    Bohnhoff also strives to include religion in ways that seem authentic as she builds fictional worlds. She said she does not try to portray religion in a "glib or shallow way — as if religion were a garment or a pair of shoes that one wore and could peel off at the door," but in a manner that helps the reader understand the characters and society.

    "Religion — or more importantly, the divine principles of religion — not only give me grist for the fictional mill, but also help me build a richer culture that seems more real to the reader," Bohnhoff says.

    Doweyko, whose novel "Algorithm" (which examines the purpose of humanity) will be published later this year, included themes that could be considered religious to establish metaphors and add a sense of seriousness to his novel.

    "There are a number of revelations in the tale which include a probable interpretation of what DNA controls in all life, including our own — instinct versus rational thought. If such control is imbedded in DNA, then the question becomes 'who or what put it there?' To the point of the tale, we could also ask 'when was it put there?'" Doweyko says.

    He adds that the answers to the questions in "Algorithm" are "unique and plausible" and add a "level of gravity" missing from many other novels.

    Doweyko explains he included a creation myth in the story about an earth mother who has an evil son and a good son that serves as a metaphor to another argument in the story.

    Why we enjoy religious allusions in sci-fi

    Reading or viewing science fiction stories with religious allusions allows humans to escape to a place where our deepest questions have an answer, according to Doweyko.

    "I think we all realize that as a race we will be eternally disallowed the knowledge of the how and why of the universe," Doweyko says. "And it is this emptiness we long to fulfill even if it's just a science-fiction tale, because for a fleeting moment we are embraced in the arms of enlightenment, and that feeling is beautiful."


Disney is turning "Star Wars" films into an annual summer ritual.

Walt Disney Co. chairman Alan Horn announced Wednesday that the studio would release films set in a galaxy far, far away every year starting in 2015.

The parade of films will start with "Star Wars: Episode VII," directed by J.J. Abrams.

Horn said the studio will then alternate films in the new "Star Wars" trilogies with spin off films drawn from the same universe.

He made the announcement during a presentation at the movie theater convention CinemaCon in Las Vegas.

Disney announced plans to reboot the space franchise after buying Lucasfilm Ltd. last year.


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As a teacher for adults, I am often surprised to see that my students have forgotten how to study. So, here are some pointers for people who want to learn French to speak and communicate, not only to pass exams.

Study French with audio

If you are familiar with my site, you know how much I emphasise that written French and spoken French are like 2 different languages.

So if you want to be able to speak French, you must train with audio. But not any audio: the speed is essential, and should be adapted to your level, as should the content. Never train with something too challenging.

Choose a text you understand mostly, maybe something you already studied some time ago, so the vocabulary is mostly known to you. You can guess some words out of the context, but the idea here is not to train your understanding capacity, but train your speaking ability: work on your pronunciation, memorize common sentences and expressions, get the courage to speak out loud.

Play a very short passage, a short sentence, then repeat. Don’t read the transcript; just repeat, trying to imitate the speaker as if you were an actor. Repeat as many times as necessary.

Once you have the pronunciation down, then, and only then, you can look at the transcript and translation if you need to figure out the meaning of a word or two.

If you are more advanced, read out loud over the voice that is reading, and study how your pronunciation differs. Pay close attention to the word grouping, where the reader breathes, and don’t forget to respect the liaisons and the eventual glidings.

Practice with questions/answers out loud

A great way to practice speaking is to ask short questions on a text and answer them. First of all, that will give you good training on question building, which is an essential part of conversation.

Then you can answer the questions and practice your speaking ability. Use the companion workbook I developed to accompany my audio novel “Une Semaine à Paris, a traveler’s guide with a novel twist“.

Go from English to French

When memorizing new vocabulary, remember that it’s not because you understand the French word that you could come up with it. I have seen people approach lists of vocabulary by looking at the French and seeing if they can understand the English; this is good to build your understanding, but not your speaking ability.

Au contraire, you need to look at the English, and see if you can come up with the French. Making your own French Flashcards are a great way to memorize a lot of vocabulary. Don’t forget to always have an article to go with a noun so you learn the gender as well as the noun.

Find someone to correct your French pronunciation

But then, you need someone to listen to you and correct your mistakes. No software or recorded lesson can do that. It needs to be a real person.

This investment in a couple of private French lessons (maybe by phone or Skype?) can change your French accent for the rest of your French speaking life.

Visualize the object, the situation, don’t link to English

Avoid linking the French word to the English word as much as possible.

When you learn the word “le chien”, picture a dog in your head, and link the French word to this.

Going through another language is a waste of time and effort, and will cause trouble when the French and English don’t follow the same pattern.

You cannot avoid French grammar

Not in French. Sorry. French is a very structured language, and you need to understand this structure. Then you can move on to acquiring reflexes, and have the words come naturally to you. But at one point, you need to understand how it works, how you must arrange the words to build a sentence. And that is what grammar is.

Don’t learn your verbs “in order”

Typically, French verbs are taught from “Je” to “Ils”.

The problem is that when you memorize something in order, your brain memorizes the order as well. And then you have to go through the whole list to get to the “ils” form…

Repetition is the key

When you spend time memorizing something, your brain will store it in its short term memory.

Only experience and repetition will store the info in your long term memory.

So it’s better to work on your French regularly, for say 20 minutes per day and do a lot of repetitions, than spend 3 hours on it once a week.

Ultimately you need to get faster

Once you are at an intermediate level, you need to make the transition from “thinking” the language to speaking it automatically. Build reflexes.

That is where sentence learning can be useful, especially ones with pronouns.

Make lists of common yet complex sentences: “il m’a dit”, “je lui ai donné” etc… and memorize them.

Also, train on saying things that are relevant to you, and likely to come up in conversation: what you like to do, your job, your family situation…

If you liked my tips on the best way to study French for speaking, you may also like my tips on the best way to study French for listening and understanding.

I also suggest you read: Top 12 tips to learn French efficiently and How to pick the very best learning method and avoid scams

    Une Semaine A Paimpol French Audio Novel

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    Une Semaine à Paimpol French Audio Novel and Travel Tips

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    This intermediate level French audio novel tells the story of a young couple and their young daughter spending a week in the beautiful harbour town of Paimpol on the North Coast of France. Find dialogues that are lively, up to date, realistic, and adapted to your level and cover many everyday real life vacation situations.

    The companion questions and answers audio workbook gives you the spoken practice you need to feel confident in your next interaction in French.

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Not all polyquats cause problems, it is a huge family of ingredients with different properties - some are completely water soluble, some not.

CO-wash: Inecto coconut/ Elvive Volume Collagen
Styler: Umberto Giannini jelly, Au Naturale styling gelee
Flour sack towel, pixie diffuse or air dry.
Experimenting with: benign neglect


Just out of Reish | Published in October 2010

Too Safe Is Too Bad

Safe investments may not be safe…for fiduciaries

By PLANSPONSOR staff | October 2010

Let me explain but, first, let me define. For fiduciaries, safe means that they are protected from lawsuits either because they complied with the law or because they have a legal safe harbor. Safe—for most participants—means an investment that has very little, if any, volatility. In the investment world, volatility measures how much the value of an investment fluctuates. For example, stable value or money market accounts are intended to have a fixed principal that does not fluctuate in value.

Another important definition is time frame. When the market is highly volatile, as it was last year, people tend to measure their investment results in weeks or months. However, that is inconsistent with ERISA’s approach, which would measure investment results over years, or decades, or working careers.

With that in mind, how can safe be risky for 401(k) fiduciaries, and vice versa, particularly for default investments?

Risky can be safe for 401(k) fiduciaries when selecting qualified default investment alternatives, or QDIAs. As a quick primer, QDIAs are the investments that can be used for participants who default, i.e., who fail to direct their investments, as a fiduciary safe harbor under ERISA section 404(c)(5). While there are three categories of QDIAs, this column discusses only target-date funds, or TDFs.

By legal definition—and common application—QDIAs, and therefore target-date funds that qualify as QDIAs, must have a material allocation to publicly traded stocks and, therefore, are volatile when compared with, for example, stable value investments.

The first step of our analysis is that risky or volatile investments in equities are safe for fiduciaries when used in QDIAs even though they seem less safe—or more volatile—to participants.

However, what about the use of safe investments, such as stable value and money markets, as default investments? In that case, what feels safe for participants is risky for fiduciaries. The DoL explained its reasoning in the preamble to the QDIA regulation. Succinctly stated, the DoL viewed the riskiness of inadequate benefits at the end of a working career as being more important than the riskiness of stock and bond market volatility in the short term.

If you accept the DoL’s view on this issue, or if you want the fiduciary safe harbor protections for QDIAs, the prudent course of action is to invest default money for the long term. Based on conventional investment thinking, that means that fiduciaries should place defaulting participants in diversified portfolios consisting of, at the least, stocks, bonds, and cash.

Yet, what if an employer wants to avoid possible employee criticism for investment losses? Isn’t that permissible?

It may be permissible based on the demographics of a particular work force, but only after the fiduciary has engaged in a prudent process and reached an informed and reasoned decision that a long-term investment in stable value or money market vehicles is likely to produce equivalent or superior retirement benefits. However, in that case, the fiduciaries have lost the safe harbor and, as a practical matter, the burden will be on the fiduciaries to prove their case—that is, to overcome the common belief that is expressed in the DoL language.

Even there, is it possible that there could be a lawsuit where participants have small gains, but no losses?

Yes, it is. In 1986, the DoL filed a lawsuit against a union pension trust and subsequently entered into a settlement of that lawsuit. In the press release regarding the settlement, the DoL stated, “The department has charged that the trustees caused the plan to sustain financial losses by investing virtually all of its assets in ordinary savings accounts during the period of time covered in the suit.” To help you understand the quote, ERISA considers insufficient gains to be losses. So, there you are. Risky is safe and safe is risky.

Fred Reish is Managing Director and Partner of the Los Angeles-based law firm of Reish & Reicher. A nationally recognized expert in employee benefits law, he has written four books and many articles on ERISA, IRS and DoL audits, and pension plan disputes. Fred has been awarded the Institutional Investor Lifetime Achievement Award and the PLANSPONSOR Lifetime Achievement Award. He is also one of the 15 individuals named by PLANSPONSOR magazine as “Legends of the Retirement Industry.”


Tag Archives: technologies of resistance

The Great Disintermediation

The Most Important Issue of the 2012 Election? TacoCopters

The election is in full swing, and both sides are trying to make it sound like there’s a lot at stake. But the truth is, on many of the issues that divide the country, there are not as many degrees of freedom as politicians claim. The government can’t keep running trillion-dollar deficits forever, so at some point that will stop. There will be some mix of tax increases and spending reductions regardless of who is elected. Many issues have already been decided cumulatively, over the last decade, and merely await congressional or presidential acceptance of reality.

But there are some important and under-appreciated issues that will genuinely be decided in the next four years. Chief among these is that the FAA is scheduled to make its first rules for the commercial use of drone aircraft by September 2015. Under current rules, such use is illegal. But the cost of drone components is plummeting so quickly that widespread use of drones is now an option. As Dan Shapiro notes, “A single high-quality gyro used to go for a thousand bucks.  Now, you can get 3 gyros, 3 accelerometers, and a nice CPU to manage the whole thing for under a sawbuck.”

When most people think of commercial drones, they think of TacoCopter, the fake-but-delicious-sounding taco delivery service. The idea is simple. Download an app, place your order, upload your location, and within minutes, a small unmanned quadrocopter shows up with your tacos. If the FAA makes good rules, such a service is likely to emerge. In fact, thousands of such businesses might even get started. FoodCopter services will be more convenient than food trucks, and more able to withstand local regulatory efforts provided that federal rules are well designed.

Other local delivery services will also suddenly become possible. Farhad Manjoo has written about how Amazon is making a push into same-day delivery. But package-delivering drones greatly reduce the logistical costs of the same-day delivery business, to the point that quite possibly most companies will offer same-day drone drop-off. Drones could change not just the way we shop, but the way our cities develop—we could live more densely, and with narrower streets, if we did not need to drive to the store so much, and if trucks did not need to make deliveries.

The use of commercial drones in long-distance delivery might be even more important. Chris Anderson says that FedEx founder Fred Smith is extremely interested in switching their fleet to unmanned aerial vehicles.

He says that they’d like to switch their fleet to UAVs as soon as possible but that this will have to wait for the FAA, which has a tough road ahead in figuring out the rules of NAS integration. Unmanned cargo freighters have lots of advantages for FedEx: safer, cheaper, and much larger capacity. The ideal form is the “blended wing” (example shown). That design doesn’t make a clear a distinction between wings and body, so almost all the interior of both can be used for cargo. The result is that the price premium for air over sea would fall from 10x to 2X (with all the speed advantages of air).

Reducing the cost of air transport by a factor of five and making it competitive with post-shipping container ocean transport would be an astounding achievement. It would increase the number of mutually-beneficial trades that are possible, which is pretty close to the definition of economic growth. And think also of the fuel savings and environmental gains.

Making air transport competitive with ocean transport would have additional benefits. When I was in Rwanda last year, a number of officials and business leaders that I talked to cited the fact that Rwanda was landlocked as an obstacle to growth. Even though there is little corruption in Rwanda, the corruption in neighboring countries is cutting Rwanda off from trade. As I reported with Rohac and Shah,

A study by the Rwandan Ministry of Trade and Industry reveals that in order to reach the port in Mombasa, Kenya, some 900 miles away from Kigali, a lorry driver needs to pay an average of USD 864 in bribes, and stop at 36 different road blocks and 10 weighbridges. The representative journey used for the study, using a tea shipment of two containers, took over 93 hours to reach the destination.

If the price of air transport fell to only twice the cost of ocean transport, corruption in neighboring countries would not disrupt the flow of goods. Rwanda would have a shot at more exports. Drones are a technology of resistance for Rwanda viz. its neighbors.

But of course, Rwanda is not where drones are going to be further developed, at least not any time soon. A lot of commercial drone development is going to happen—or not happen—in the US in the next several years. And the “not happen” possibility worries me. After all, consider that commercial use of the Internet was unnecessarily delayed for decades:

This doesn’t have to happen to drones. Instead of delaying the introduction of drones while the FAA writes tons of safety regulations, we should use the existing tort system to enforce safe operation of drones. Regulatory agencies are not well suited to managing highly dynamic sectors of the economy. The tort system, on the other hand, because it addresses cases and controversies after the fact, would be more capable of setting efficient safety guidelines for drone operators. And if we adopted a common law approach rather than a regulatory approach to drone safety, we could have our TacoCopters now, not several years down the road.

To my knowledge, no one has asked the candidates about this important issue. But I hope someone will. The American people deserve to know which one is more committed to opening up urban airspace to commercial use.

Technologies of Control and Resistance: Making Sense of our Stagnant Dynamism

I’ve just read Race Against The Machine, a new Kindle Single by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, which argues contra Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation that we are witnessing not a slowdown, but a positive acceleration of technological change. Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that the fast pace of innovation is creating mismatches between humans and new technology, which has resulted in a lot of technological unemployment. The jargon is skill-biased technical change (SBTC). All recessions bring unemployment, but recent recessions have resulted in “jobless recoveries” that are the result not of cyclical forces but of deep structural change in the economy.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee are not wrong, but I think a better picture emerges if we attempt to reconcile their argument with Cowen’s rather than viewing them as contradictory. As Tyler argues, we have not had the kind of growth we might have expected 40 years ago if we had extrapolated based on the prior 40 years. See this chart on total factor productivity by David Beckworth. I think McJolfsson’s view and Cowen’s view are complementary if viewed from a sufficiently “big picture” perspective; the slowdown in TFP and the speedup in SBTC are, after all, decades-long trends.

Now, postulate some background rate of innovation. How many resources will be devoted to technologies of control and how many to technologies or resistance? The answer is that it depends on how invasive the state (or other monopolies) are. When the state is invasive, at the margin the incentive is to find ways to circumvent the points of control; a greater proportion of resources will go into technologies of resistance. When the state is non-invasive, at the margin the incentive is a purer maximization of production; a greater proportion of resources will go into technologies of control, which results in higher growth.

What determines how invasive the state will be? Call me a cynic, but I think it correlates strongly with the availability of points of control. When factors of production are fixed, when demand for government supplied public goods is inelastic, when there are lots of points of control, the government will exercise more control. When the opposite is true, when there are few points of control, the government is unable to act invasively.

As you can see, there is a system of feedback. But the countervailing forces need not push outcomes to a stationary equilibrium. As we all know, time-to-build can result in cycles. Since technologies take time to change direction and develop, and since politics is slow to adapt, we should expect a non-stationary equilibrium. I think this is consistent with the broad facts. A hundred years ago, at least as it concerns white males living in the US, the government was relatively non-invasive. As a result, they developed centralized technologies that created a lot of growth, technologies of control. As new points of control were introduced, the government became more invasive. The modern state was born. At some point, innovation gradually increased toward technologies of resistance. The low-hanging fruit from the prior era eventually petered out, and sometime around 1974 we began to see lower TFP growth. As technologies of resistance improve relative to technologies of control, I can’t say exactly what will happen. A lot depends on whether government becomes gradually less invasive as points of control disappear or whether it continues to overreach; if the latter, we could observe some kind of interesting political turmoil.

So far, I’ve been pretty general about technologies of resistance, but I want to tie it back into McJolfsson’s story about rapid skill-biased technical change. The key point is that labor is extremely regulated; firms that use labor are subject to intense government control. In part this is because policies that give labor a “bigger piece of the pie” are popular with voters, and in part it is because labor can complain and enforce its rights in a way that machines cannot. If you own a business and you are subject to intense government control, you are going to invest resources in circumventing the points of control. In our economy, that means getting rid of lots of labor as cheaply as possible, which means skill-biased technical change. As Arnold Kling has said, “if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced.” But it’s because there is so much control exercised in the labor market that the incentive to automate and outsource is so high.

On the other side of the labor market, I wonder if post-materialism is not also part of an attempt to evade control. A lot of talented people are scaling back their labor efforts, and while surely not all of this is due to taxes and regulations, some of it may be. And other innovations which seem truly new, such as the development of autonomous vehicles, are the result of control of which we may not even be aware; for instance, how profitable would it be to develop autonomous vehicles if Pareto-improving trade with immigrant drivers were not made impossible by immigration and labor restrictions?

The Internet has been somewhat insulated from the kind of political control that I am claiming leads to the cycle of control and resistance. As a consequence, I think we observe an epicycle there. Internet technologies can be centralized at the company level or standardized at the protocol level. Email is an example of a technology that is standardized at the protocol level, and it was developed in the early days of the Internet, when market power was a serious concern. Today, there are so many competitors in the online messaging field that market power is not a real problem. Consequently, we observe services like Facebook and Twitter, which are centralized and can provide “higher production” by reducing spam, for instance. If Facebook and Twitter ever abuse their market power too much, that is when distributed, protocol-based substitutes such as Diaspora and Status.net will take over. And when the government starts exerting more control over the Internet, we’ll observe the adoption of new technologies to circumvent that control, such as encryption and mesh networking.

In a strange way, this theory is a partial vindication of Ayn Rand; the only problem is that she was too literal. The productive people do not go on strike when they are over-controlled. Instead, they innovate around the points of control. They go on strike at the margin. And it doesn’t take a big, dramatic exit. A little bit cumulatively over decades is sufficient to both be noticeable in the data and to reduce the amount of control that can be exercised.

At the risk of being accused of now-more-than-everism, I’ll point out that the problems associated with a greater focus on technologies of resistance and with skill-biased technical change could be much ameliorated by a government that dramatically reduced its control over its citizens. Stick to supplying public goods and providing a small safety net. It won’t fix everything overnight—technology has momentum—but it will make things better than it otherwise would be. However, I think there is little chance of this happening. It requires out-of-equilibrium political play. Instead, if my theory is correct, we will find out what happens when large, invasive governments overextend and are forced to shrink.


Cirque Club

Cirque Club

Cirque du Soleil

すべてはケベックシティ（カナダ）の近郊の小さな町、ベ・サン・ポールで始まりました。1980 年代の初め頃、ベ・サン・ポールでは色とりどりの衣装をまとったキャラクターの一団が街を練り歩き、竹馬、ジャグリング、ダンス、火吹き、音楽などの芸を披露していました。彼らこそ、ジル・サンクロワが組織したストリートパフォーマンスのグループ、Les Échassiers de Baie-Saint-Paul（ベ・サン・ポールの竹馬乗り）でした。すでに街の人々はこの若いパフォーマーのグループに心を動かされ、魅せられていました。パフォーマーの中に、後に Cirque du Soleil の設立者のひとりとなり、CEO となるギー・ラリベルテもいました。

Daniele Finzi Pasca

Creator and Director

For Daniele Finzi Pasca, Corteo represents a kind of full circle, a bringing together of all the threads of his professional career. As a young man growing up in Switzerland he was a competitive gymnast. He went on to work in circus, and eventually established a reputation in theater as a writer and director.

Daniele was born into a family of photographers. "Then my mother became a painter," he says. "I grew up surrounded by images and imagery. And I put them into motion."

Perhaps the most formative event in his life was a trip he took to India, where he worked as a volunteer looking after terminally ill patients. On his return to Switzerland, he founded a company called Sunil's Clowns, which changed its name to Teatro Sunil in 1986. Teatro Sunil is still "home," but Daniele also travels the world, with his own productions and as a guest director with other theater and circus companies.

A prolific writer, Daniele does not restrict his creative output to the stage. He has also published Come acqua allo specchio, a collection of short stories. (The show Passo Migratore is based on one of the stories from this collection).

Daniele's lifelong fascination with clowns and clowning took root at the famed Circus Nock, where he performed in an acrobatic clown number. He has since developed a personal approach to the tradition which he has presented in courses and workshops for companies and organizations all over the world, including Canada's National Circus School and Cirque du Soleil. He also directed the highly-acclaimed Cirque Eloize shows Nomade - La Nuit le Ciel est Plus Grand and Rain - Comme une Pluie dans Tes Yeux.

Corteo is inspired by the death and funeral of a clown, and draws on a clown figure from a past long before the existence of circus—a time when clowns were not the stereotypes we know now, but far more complex characters. Daniele says the show is "situated at a strange level between heaven and earth, where the gods and humans can interact through the medium of circus."

The show's environment takes its inspiration from many architectural sources, especially Chartres cathedral and its labyrinth, which for Daniele Finzi Pasca symbolizes the journey of life. "The labyrinth is a great voyage: To find yourself you have to lose yourself," he explains.

Daniele Finzi Pasca was born in Lugano, Switzerland in 1964.


Hornberger's Blog

Put the Postal Service Out Of Its Misery

In an era in which politicians of both liberal and conservative stripes trip over each other in a desperate attempt to prove they’re not “socialists” and that they are instead red-blooded American “free-enterprisers,” why is it that they all remain committed to the Postal Service?

After all, the Postal Service is as socialistic an enterprise as one could ever find. Oh sure, they’ve organized it to appear as a corporation but that’s just a sham. Nobody can buy stock in the Postal Service. It is a government operation, no different in principle from those found in communist China, North Korea, and Cuba.

And it’s been given a legal monopoly privilege to deliver first-class mail.

What does a monopoly actually mean? It means that no private business is free to compete against the Postal Service in the delivery of first-class mail. What happens if a private business does try to compete? Postal Service officials immediately contact the Justice Department, which hurriedly sends an attorney to a federal judge in the District of Columbia, who immediately issues an injunction against the private firm. If the private firm ignores the injunction and continues to deliver the mail, the federal judge will cite it for contempt and jail its officials until they confess the error of their ways and promise to never again commit such a dastardly crime.

How can liberals and conservatives justify all this given their purported commitment to “free enterprise”? They can’t. They just continue to support this socialist enterprise, in large part no doubt because it’s been with us for so long.

Most everyone acknowledges that the free market produces the best of everything — the best goods and the best services. That’s precisely why the Postal Service insists on its monopoly. After all, theoretically the Postal Service could be permitted to operate without its postal monopoly. That would enable private firms to compete freely against the Postal Service. The reason the Postal Service has long opposed the repeal of its monopoly is that its officials know that it could never survive in a competitive market, one in which the Postal Service was facing the high quality of goods and services provided by private firms.

One of the popular refrains issued by the Postal Service for decades has been that without the Postal Service, people in the mountains wouldn’t get their mail. Somehow or another, they get their bread, milk, gasoline, and other essential items but, according to the Postal Service, a highly competitive free market in the delivery of first-class mail wouldn’t be able to get mail to people in the mountains. How ridiculous is that?

The Postal Service is an anachronism, a dinosaur. It needs to be put out of its misery. Canceling Saturday mail delivery is not enough. It’s time to cancel the Postal Service itself. We need to rid our nation of this socialistic scourge and let the free market reign.

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Is Excess Calcium Harmful to Health?

Nutrients 2010, 2(6), 586-598; doi:10.3390/nu2060586

Mario J. Soares 1,* and Wendy L. Chan She-Ping-Delfos 2
Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute, Program of Nutrition, School of Public Health, Curtin University of Technology, GPO Box U 1987, Perth WA 6845, Australia
Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute, Curtin University of Technology, GPO Box U 1987, Perth WA 6845, Australia; Email:
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed: Email:.
Received: 16 April 2010; in revised form: 26 May 2010 / Accepted: 27 May 2010 / Published: 28 May 2010

: There has been much interest in the mechanisms by which calcium may attenuate weight gain or accelerate body fat loss. This review focuses on postprandial energy metabolism and indicates that dietary calcium increases whole body fat oxidation after single and multiple meals. There is, as yet, no conclusive evidence for a greater diet induced thermogenesis, an increased lipolysis or suppression of key lipogenic enzyme systems. There is however convincing evidence that higher calcium intakes promote a modest energy loss through increased fecal fat excretion. Overall, there is a role for dietary calcium in human energy metabolism. Future studies need to define threshold intakes for metabolic and gastrointestinal outcomes.
postprandial; calcium; thermogenesis; obesity; fat oxidation; fecal fat; lipolysis

1. Introduction

Body weight and body energy content remains quite stable in most adults for long periods of time; despite daily fluctuations in energy intake and energy expenditure. This requires the presence of regulatory processes able to match fuel supply to energy requirements. The maintenance of a physiological set point for body weight is complex and includes aminostatic and glucostatic controls of feeding, metabolic or nutrient partitioning, input from the sympathetic nervous system, signals from adipose tissue as well as additional behavioral influences. Genetics, the environment and psychosocial factors also impact on these regulatory processes [1,2,3]. That a substantial proportion of people in the world suffer from obesity argues for a sustained dysregulation in the processes that otherwise serve to keep the system in check.

A role for calcium in the regulation of body weight has gained much interest since the early observation that increased intakes of calcium (as yoghurt) increased the loss of body fat and favoured a redistribution of fat away from the abdomen [4]. Based primarily on studies with the agouti mouse model, Zemel et al. [5] proposed that intracellular calcium (iCa2+) held the key to fat deposition and obesity. According to this early scheme (Figure 1) increases in dietary calcium would, via PTH, chronically lower iCa2+ in the adipocyte. Directly, or possibly via insulin, iCa2+ would then act to reciprocally regulate; a reduced expression of fatty acid synthase (FAS)—a key enzyme regulating lipid deposition—while stimulating adipose tissue lipolysis. An increased fat oxidation and thermogenesis through up-regulation of uncoupling proteins (UCP) was also suggested.

We now know that dietary calcium may also act at the level of the gastrointestinal tract to increase energy loss, through increased fecal fat excretion (Figure 1). Tordoff [6] has hypothesized a ‘calcium appetite’ as an innate drive for calcium-rich food sources when faced with calcium depletion. This view highlights the importance of ascertaining links between calcium intake, subjective hunger/ satiety ratings and free living food intake. Whether such potential roles for calcium are mediated through the adipokine, leptin [7], or more locally via GI tract hormones also requires study (Figure 1). Other authors have hypothesized that the long term suppression of PTH may instead hold the key to obesity prevention [8]. A reduced activation of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) has long been implicated in the weight gain of both animals and man. Chronic lowering of PTH would stimulate the SNS to allow greater thermogenesis and lipolysis. As argued by McCarty & Thomas [8], validation of such a pathway would be important to obesity management, since there are other approaches to suppressing PTH, besides increasing dietary calcium.

Figure 1. A calcium-body weight model describing potential anti-obesity effects of dietary calcium.
Nutrients 02 00586 g001 1024

2. Body Weight Regulation

In the main, energy balance is determined by the matching of macronutrient intake to energy expenditure and the ability to channel nutrients into oxidative versus storage pathways (nutrient partitioning). Most individuals reach a state of approximate weight maintenance in which the average composition of the fuels they oxidize matches the nutrient distribution in their diets [9]. Acute increases in protein and carbohydrate intake elicit powerful auto-regulatory increases in protein and carbohydrate oxidation respectively, leading to near zero balance. In contrast, the ability to stimulate fat oxidation to offset recent increases in fat intake is less accurate, and hence fat balance is more likely to be disrupted [9]. Hence fat balance, rather than the balance of other macronutrients, is equated to energy balance. The latter principle forms the cornerstone of obesity prevention programs whereby reductions in fat intake and increases in fat oxidation through voluntary physical activity, are advocated.

There are three main contributors to total energy expenditure (TEE) of man: basal metabolic rate (BMR) has the largest energetic demand accounting for 60–70% of TEE in sedentary individuals, diet induced thermogenesis (DIT) is a variable 10% and physical activity makes up the remainder. BMR is determined by fat free mass (FFM) to a great extent (80–85%) and by fat mass (FM) if the person is obese. Smaller contributions are made by age, habitual physical activity and genetics. DIT is traditionally calculated as the change in postprandial energy expenditure from fasting and expressed as a percentage of the energy content of the meal. DIT has two components: an obligatory process of energy expenditure that is strongly related to meal size, composition and the physiological characteristics of the individual, and a regulatory component that is strongly influenced by the SNS. A higher DIT for a given meal would imply that less energy is available for storage, and hence such a meal would be less conducive to weight gain. Abdominal adipocytes are particularly sensitive to SNS mediated lipolysis; a process whereby stored fat is broken down and mobilized.

3. Calcium and Postprandial Energy Metabolism

This paper focuses on the potential postprandial events that would contribute to an anti-obesity effect of calcium based on the model in Figure 1. These would include: (i) an increased 24 h energy expenditure and thermogenesis, (ii) increased whole body fat oxidation, (iii) decreased fatty acid synthase expression and activity resulting in decreased de novo lipogenesis, (iv) increased lipolysis, and (v) increased energy loss from decreased fat absorption. There are only a few published human studies from 2,000 onwards that have employed a randomised design, and have conducted postprandial measurements that focus on these aspects [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]. These studies have been ordered on study duration as acute (<24h-1week), short term (weeks to 3 months) and long term (6 months or more) (Table 1). The subjects have been normal weight to obese, and authors have examined the effects of both dairy (D) and non-dairy (ND) calcium. There were variations in the formulations of ND calcium used, and in the absolute differences in calcium intake between control and experimental arms. These aspects would affect the consistency of final outcomes between studies designed for a particular purpose.

Some methodological considerations are pertinent to the overall discussion on calcium and postprandial events. It is accepted that the previous evening’s meal composition affects the next day’s glycaemic response and macronutrient oxidation [21]. Since postprandial studies begin after an overnight fast, it would hence be necessary to control for any potential confounding across each participant on each occasion through standardization of the dinner meal. Further, differences in weight and volume of meal based challenges are known to affect gastric emptying, and hence postprandial metabolism. Differences in palatability of the test meals employed, is another consideration in study design. Sawaya et al. [22] observed that highly palatable meals acutely stimulated insulin and changed substrate utilization to favour carbohydrate oxidation. Ensuring that participants rate each test meal equally would be critical to making valid conclusions. Except for two [14,18], none of the other studies in this review provide any information on palatability of the different test meal employed.

The absorption of calcium is not straight forward and is highly variable between subjects. There are many factors that may confound its absorption [23]. After standardisation of previous food intake (usually dinner) and test meal characteristics, two factors that deserve attention in study design are calcium bioavailability and the initial vitamin D status of the participant. As the calcium load increases the percent absorption declines exponentially, such that at very high single loads the percentage absorbed is very low [24]. Secondly even within the normal vitamin D range, there is a large variability in absorption making individuals at the lower end of the range more susceptible to poor absorption [25]. Single meal studies hence need to be more careful than dietary studies. In the latter, when 3–4 smaller doses are advocated to fulfil the prescribed intake, then net absorption of calcium over the day would be enhanced. We labour these points, because the ability of calcium to influence postprandial metabolism may well depend on the difference in absorbed and retained calcium between study diets, together with other methodological factors discussed above. On the other hand the non-absorption of calcium is not necessarily a negative outcome and may have other benefits within the GI tract.

3.1. Calcium, Fat Oxidation & Thermogenesis

The rise in insulin in response to mixed meal ingestion drives thermogenesis and promotes an increased carbohydrate oxidation rate (COR), with a suppression of fat oxidation rate (FOR). Circulating free fatty acids (FFA) and glycerol are also suppressed. Cummings et al. [14] tested whether increasing dietary calcium influenced DIT and FOR and whether this varied by source of calcium. In a single blind 3-way crossover design, overweight and obese subjects were given single breakfast meals that varied in both dairy (D, 532 mg) and non-dairy (ND, 575 mg) calcium. Relative to control (174 mg), FOR was significantly less suppressed following both higher sources. Some trend for a better effect of ND was seen but did not attain statistical significance. These data were accompanied by higher FFA and glycerol following both higher calcium intakes with no difference in glucose or insulin. It is accepted that variations in the glycaemic index of a meal have important metabolic effects on the next meal eaten in sequence [26,27]. The design commonly employed to study this phenomenon has manipulated breakfast meal composition and tested its effect on lunch [26,27,28]. We questioned whether calcium would have similar effects and conducted a crossover trial of two breakfast-lunch combinations in lean and obese subjects [18,29]. We observed that higher D calcium at breakfast (548 mg vs. 243 mg) modified postprandial FOR, DIT, FFA and glycerol with carry over effects to a standard lunch, low in D calcium (48 mg). Overall, there was a greater DIT and FOR after the higher breakfast-lunch trial [18,29]. This was accompanied by greater circulating FFAs and glycerol despite similar glycaemic and insulinaemic responses following these meals [30]. Together, these acute meal based studies provide some confirmation of the calcium-body weight model and suggest that calcium may not need to act via insulin, to change postprandial metabolism (Figure 1). Such second meal effects of calcium would auger well for dietary interventions where several meals are ingested over the day, as they would act to potentiate the effect of calcium in each subsequent meal.

There are four crossover trials that manipulated calcium intake over a week and measured postprandial DIT and FOR (Table 1). Boon et al. [11] achieved intakes of ~1,260 mg/d from D and ND sources and compared them to a low calcium diet (349 mg/d). 24 h measurements of energy expenditure and FOR were made in a whole body calorimeter (WBC) on the 7th day. There was no effect on total 24 h energy expenditure or its components, i.e., rest, sleep and exercise. Similarly postprandial 24 h FOR was not statistically different between treatments but a clear rank order (D > ND > control) was evident with a difference of ~8 g/d between high D and control diets. The authors calculated that such a difference could account for a loss of ~3 kg body weight if extrapolated to a year. Interestingly these trends for a greater 24 h FOR were paralleled by a similar trend for a greater negative fat balance across trials. In fact we note that in this study there was a significant negative fat balance following high D (−16.1 ± 6 g/24 h, paired t = 2.68, p < 0.05) but not after the other two. The study utilized high protein diets from either dairy or non-dairy sources, and also provided more dietary fibre than habitual consumed by the participants. Both components would be expected to influence calcium absorption and retention [31,32], but whether postprandial energy metabolism was affected is debatable at present. Overall the trends for greater 24 h FOR and more negative fat balance following high D offer rather encouraging data; especially since these were obtained during strict energy balance in a whole body calorimeter.

Using a similar design, Jacobsen et al. [16] varied D calcium (1,800 mg/d) at two protein intakes (15%E vs. 23%E) for a week, and compared them to a control diet (protein 15%E, 500 mg/d). Whole body calorimetry (WBC) measurements at the start and end enabled the calculation of change over that week. There was a small but significant drop in weight across all 3 diets; accompanied by a significant drop in RQ. However, there were no differences in 24 h EE, energy balance or FOR. A closer examination of their results indicated that the change in 24 h COR adjusted for energy balance, favoured a greater suppression on the two high calcium diets. Reciprocally, the change in 24 h FOR showed a greater increase (~ 35%) on the high D (15%E protein) diet relative to control [16]. The small sample sizes would have precluded the detection of differences and is an issue that the authors have acknowledged [16]. In another study, normal and overweight subjects were studied twice on a low (~500 mg/d, 1 serve of D) and twice on a high calcium diet (~1,440 mg/d, 3 serves of D) [17]. On the 7th day of each trial (four trials in total), participants entered a WBC and were randomly subjected to conditions of 24 h energy balance or 24 h energy deficit (mainly through increased exercise). Higher D calcium increased 24 h FOR during conditions of energy deficit but not energy balance. This was ascribed to a greater FOR during exercise, rather than at rest or sleep, during the 24 h residency in the calorimeter. To the best of our knowledge this is the first demonstration of an augmentation of FOR during exercise by dietary calcium, and should auger well for future combined diet and exercise interventions for obesity.

St-Onge et al. [19] studied 14 normal children with low calcium intakes. They were randomized to either a milk supplementation group (3 serves/d ~1,400 mg/d calcium) or a fruit beverage group (4 serves/d ~665 mg/d calcium) for a 1 week period, and after a washout were crossed over to the alternative treatment. Postprandial measurements were made at day 1 and on day 7 in response to a standard beverage of that treatment. BMR and DIT rose slightly, but did not change significantly on the milk treatment. In contrast the fruit group showed a significant fall in these two variables leading to significant phase x day interactive effects. Further RQ was lower and FOR higher after milk supplementation. It is of interest that the fruit flavoured beverage resulted in an intake of ~115 g/d of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). We are unaware of studies relating changes in BMR, DIT or substrate oxidation to acute HFCS supplementation in humans. However the direction of outcomes obtained indicated a greater drop in BMR and DIT of the control group, rather an increase in the milk group. So the evidence for an effect of calcium is not direct.

Ten obese men and women with calcium intakes <800 mg/d completed a double blind placebo controlled crossover study of 5 weeks. Calcium was provided as a milk mineral sachet twice a day to increase calcium by ~800 mg/d, over and above habitual intake. The control group received a placebo (malto-dextrin). This elegant study used tracer isotope technology, indirect calorimetry, micro-dialysis of sub-cutaneous fat and fat biopsies for gene expression. The authors reported no statistical difference in DIT or FOR over the 6h postprandial period [12]. In this protocol the calcium sachet or placebo was used as the meal challenge. The investigators also co-administered either caffeine or a placebo with the meal in a crossover design. Caffeine stimulated EE and FOR on the placebo arm of the study, but showed no difference on the high calcium diet [12]. One potential explanation may be that caffeine ingestion acutely suppressed calcium absorption from the sachet [33], and so nullified the expected interactive effect. In contrast, indirect calorimetry measurements in the postabsorptive (fasting) state without caffeine, showed that 5 week calcium supplementation increased FOR relative to the placebo arm by ~6.0 g/d. This difference was not significant, possibly due to the low power of the study for this effect.

In a randomized parallel design, 3 groups of overweight and obese individuals were assigned to either control (~500 mg/d from 1 serve D plus placebo), high calcium (~500 mg/d from 1 serve D plus 900 mg/d calcium carbonate) and high calcium (~1,400 mg/d from 3 serves of dairy) during 12 weeks of energy restriction (~500 kcal/d). This was a sub-study of a multisite trial on the source of calcium and energy metabolism [20]. There was no difference in free living 24 h EE (from doubly labelled water) between treatments. DIT was significantly stimulated on the high D diet in response to a 30% saturated fat meal challenge, but was not significantly different from the other two. As with other studies in this area, the small sample sizes of each group (range 6–9 subjects) would have contributed to a poorer statistical power for between-group differences. However, fasting RQ was significantly lower on the ND diet. Further, change in RQ was also significantly lower on the ND (calcium carbonate) diet compared to no change on the control and a small rise on the D diet [20]. This resulted in a significantly higher estimated FOR on the ND compared to the other two. As RQs, but not COR, were reported it may be deduced that a higher COR following high D, resulted in the higher DIT on that diet. In contrast the higher FOR following the ND arm of the trial did not elevate DIT. When the data was examined independent of treatment allocation, there was a positive relationship between baseline 25(OH)D3 and change in DIT (r2 = 0.32, p = 0.004). The relationship of DIT to vitamin D status at baseline is interesting. It suggests that the ability of calcium to stimulate DIT is dependent on its absorption; a function of vitamin D status [25]. This may be particularly pertinent to this study, since all subjects were vitamin D deficient [20]. An alternative explanation is that 25(OH)D3 is linked to thermogenesis either directly or via PTH. Overall, ND calcium decreased RQ at rest and following a meal.

There was only one long term randomized parallel study conducted over a year [15]. In this study, women with low calcium intake at the start were assigned to either a control (~673 mg/d) or high D calcium (~1057 mg/d) intervention. Postprandial responses to low and high D calcium test meals was measured at the start and after 12 months. The intervention group showed a greater increase in the DIT only following the low calcium test meal challenge. In contrast FOR was significantly greater in the intervention group following both the low and high calcium test meals. The data suggest that chronic intake of calcium changes the body's capacity for thermogenesis and fat oxidation, to promote FOR even following a low calcium meal. The greater FOR following the high calcium meal challenge in the high D group indicates that an acute on chronic effect was also evident. These authors also observed a significant inverse relationship between 1 yr changes in PTH and changes in fat oxidation following high calcium test meal. Such data provide would argue the case for PTH as the key modifiable variable in the calcium-body weight model (Figure 1).

Dairy sources contain other bioactive components besides calcium and may be expected to show a greater effect. Dairy naturally contains vitamin D, which may be significantly higher in those countries that have mandatory fortification of their products. While vitamin D will enhance calcium absorption, there is some suggestion of an independent effect from the direct relation between 25(OH)D3 status and change in FOR [20] and the inverse association between ∆PTH and ∆FOR [15]. Further, supplementation with vitamin D improves insulin sensitivity [34,35] and by inference should modulate substrate oxidation. However, we are unaware of studies that have demonstrated such outcomes. In our single meal studies the higher D calcium meal had added vitamin D as well, but we observed only a trend for a better effect on FOR compared to ND [14]. A similar trend was also seen in the study of Boon et al. [11], however Teegarden et al. [20] found that the non-dairy (ND) group but not the dairy (D) group had higher FOR. Clearly, there is not enough data to make valid conclusions on the comparisons between sources of calcium.

In summary this analysis shows that in 6 of 9 randomized studies that measured macronutrient oxidation, an increase in FOR following calcium was demonstrated (Table 1). We could discount the study of St-Onge et al. [19] for reasons discussed above. However, those of Boon et al. [11] and Jacobsen et al. [16] which showed strong trends, would need to be considered. Overall, given the range of subject, the small sample sizes, potential confounders in methodology and in calcium absorption, and the duration of studies (<24 h to 1 year), this is an impressive tally of positive studies. There is, however, little consistent evidence for an increase in DIT (Table 1) following higher calcium, in part due to a counter balancing by increased COR on the control or low calcium arm of these trials. An important consideration for future investigators would therefore be the determination of threshold intakes that promote both DIT and FOR from D and ND calcium sources, and the impact of different formulations of ND, on these processes.

Table 1. Randomized controlled trials of higher calcium intake on postprandial energy metabolism.
AuthorsStudy diets & durationSignificance between treatments
↑DIT↑FOR↓Genes↑Lipolysis↑Fecal fat
Cummings, James & Soares, 2006 [14]CO (n = 8). 3 breakfast meals 176 mg and 532mg (D) and 575 ND each over 6 hr.NoYes--Yes1--
Soares et al., 2004 [18]CO (n = 11). 2 breakfast meals 248 mg and 543 mg (D), followed by standard lunch 48 mg (D) over 8 h.YesYes--Yes1--
Boon et al., 2005 [11]CO (n = 12). 3 diets of 1259 mg/d (high D), 1259 mg/d (low D, calcium carbonate) and 349 mg/d calcium, each for 1 week.NoNo2NoNo--
Jacobsen et al., 2005 [16]CO (n = 10). 3 dairy diets of 1,800 mg/d (15% protein), 1800 mg/d (23% protein) and 500 mg/d (15% protein), each for 1 week.NoNo----Yes3
Melanson et al., 2005 [17]CO (n = 19). Diets of 500 mg/d and 1,400 mg/d (D) each for 1 week and performed twice. Subjects studied on day 7 under energy deficit or in balance. NoYes4------
St-Onge et al., 2007 [19]CO (n = 14). Milk or fruit flavoured sugar drink supplemented over 1 week each. YesYes5------
Boon et al., 2007 [10]CO (n = 10). 4 diets of 2,500 mg/d, 1,200 mg/d and 400 mg/d from D and 1,200 mg/d from ND (calcium carbonate), each for 1 week.----Yes6--No7
Bortolotti et al., 2008 [12]CO (n = 10). D calcium (1,386 mg/d) or placebo (586 mg/d) over 5 weeks each.NoNoNoNo--
Buchowski et al., 2009 [13]CO (n = 34). 500 mg/d and 1,500 mg/d calcium, each for 6 weeks weight loss, in lactose tolerant and intolerant subjects.--------Yes
Teegarden et al., 2008 [20]PT (n = 24). 3 diets of 500 mg/d, 1400 mg/d (ND) or 1400 mg/d (D) each for 12 weeks of weight loss.NoYes------
Gunther et al., 2005 [36]PT (n = 26). 2 diets of low (<800 mg/d) or high D (1,000-1,400mg/d) for 1 year.NoYes------

CO = crossover trial, PT = parallel trial, DIT = diet induced thermogenesis, FOR = fat oxidation rate, Genes = genes relating to fatty acid synthase expression or those associated with fat metabolism.1 indirect evidence through higher serum FFA and glycerol; 2 but significantly lesser fat balance on high D diet;3 only on high D, 15% protein high calcium diet; 4 during caloric restriction, but not during energy balance;5 mainly due to a greater drop in the alternative treatment;6 Decreased FAS and trend for greater HSL compared to habitual;7 56% higher on 2500 mg/d D diet, but not statistically different.

3.2. Calcium, Lipolysis and Lipogenesis

One expected effect of higher intakes of dietary calcium, is the reciprocal stimulation of lipolysis and suppression of de novo lipogenesis (Figure 1). Coppack et al. [37] and Frayn [38] have argued that following mixed meal ingestion, chylomicron triacylglycerol is preferentially acted upon by adipose tissue lipoprotein lipase. While re-esterification into triacylglycerol does occur, much of this FFA fails to be ‘trapped’ within adipose tissue and finds itself back in circulation. Raised FFA may then serve to drive fat oxidation. Does higher calcium intake somehow amplify this process and account for the acute responses seen with a meal challenge? In our studies with mixed meal challenges, increases in FFA, glycerol and FOR show a close parallelism following calcium [14,18,30]. We acknowledge that measurements of circulating glycerol are not the best index of lipolysis. The raised FFA and glycerol observed here and in studies by Zemel et al. [39,40] are only suggestive of greater lipolysis. Interestingly, Boon et al. [10] observed a trend (p = 0.078) of a greater inhibition of hormone sensitive lipase on a high calcium diet, providing some support for the model. Calcium dependant SNS activation has also been described [37]. A role for the SNS in postprandial events cannot be discounted as it contributes to meal-induced thermogenesis, and is a potent stimulator of adipose tissue lipolysis [37]. Recent evidence using abdominal subcutaneous microdialysis indicates that calcium supplementation (1,400 mg/d as milk mineral) for 5 weeks did not stimulate lipolysis, glycerol turnover or fat oxidation (Table 1) [12]. No differences in 24 h catecholamine excretion were also noted.

We found only 3 human studies that have measured the mRNA expression of genes regulating fat metabolism, of which two were conducted by the same group. In the earlier study of Boon et al. [11], D and ND sources were used to increase calcium intake to ~1,300 mg/d but no difference in gene expression was noted. In the second study using the same design, duration and type of subject, Boon et al. [10] tested a greater range of calcium. While the 1,200 mg/d ND diet lowered plasma TAGs, the 2,500 mg/d ND diet decreased fat absorption and suppressed the mRNA expression of FAS. In contrast, Bortolloti et al. [12] studied obese subjects over 5 weeks and used 1,400 mg/d of D calcium but showed no difference in expression of genes for lipogenesis. The paucity of studies in the literature does not allow firm conclusions, but it would appear that at least 2,500 mg/d of ND calcium are required to demonstrate differences in gene expression. Clearly, more work is indicated in this challenging area.

3.3. Calcium and Fat Excretion

Fecal fat excretion stems from exogenous (dietary) and endogenous sources (bile, fatty acids). Further, unabsorbed fat may be metabolised by bacteria in lower GI tract and hence not be excreted [41]. While not specific, the measurement of fecal fat serves to provide a snapshot of fatty acid absorption. Calcium may influence fat and energy metabolism by also forming insoluble calcium soaps with fatty acids. This may be particularly true for saturated fatty acids since they require a greater residence time in the GI tract for their absorption, and would be more available for the subsequent interaction with calcium. Calcium may also increase bile acid excretion and thereby decrease digestible energy of the diet.

In Table 1, all the three studies that measured this endpoint showed an increase in fat excretion following calcium [10,13,16]. A key aspect of two of these studies was the interplay between calcium and protein on fat excretion. Jacobsen et al. [16] found a higher fat excretion on the 1,800 mg/d calcium diet with a normal (15%) protein content, but not on the 1,800 mg/d diet with 23% protein. A high protein intake is expected to enhance calcium absorption and so there may less luminal calcium available for interaction with fat. This may be particularly true for a high protein, low calcium combination (31). Boon et al. [10] favoured similar arguments for their observations, that on high protein intakes there were strong trends for greater fat excretion with greater calcium intake. In fact 2,400 mg/d of D calcium showed a 56% greater effect on fat excretion relative to the 400 mg/d diet but statistical significance was not achieved [10].

The study of calcium’s effect on fecal fat excretion predates the postulation of the calcium-body weight hypothesis, and there are many older studies that document increases in fecal fat excretion following higher calcium [41,42,43]. A recent meta-analysis confirms this outcome for both D and ND calcium. Christensen et al. (44) estimate that additional calcium may account for between 2–5 g/d greater loss of fecal fat. The effect of D calcium was more consistent than ND calcium, in part due to the many formulations of ND used. A regression analysis on a small number of subjects, predicted that ~1241 mg/d of D calcium would account for ~5.2 g/d of fat excretion. The authors estimate that such effects at best, would account for a 2.2 kg difference in body weight over 1 year [44]. Interestingly, these authors could not document a dose response relationship between these variables but allude to a possible threshold of ~800 mg/d for a calcium effect on fecal fat excretion. Besides the small effects on body weight, a lesser absorption of fat would have a dual benefit in the attenuation of postprandial TAGs, LDL-C and other lipid indices of cardiovascular risk. The latter is an area of much interest [45,46] but is not covered by this review.

4. Conclusions

It is our opinion that calcium modulates human energy metabolism. There is convincing evidence that calcium increases postprandial fat oxidation after a single meal or over a day. There is some suggestion that fasting FOR may be greater on a high calcium diet. However a higher DIT is not always observed. There is convincing evidence for calcium to modestly increase the amount of fat excreted, and thereby contribute to energy loss. The effect of dietary calcium on lipolysis and/or lipogenesis is inconsistent at present, and is a fertile area for future research. Nutrition and public health recommendations demand consistent observations with a strong mechanistic basis. Defining threshold effects for metabolic versus gastrointestinal function based on randomized controlled trials with adequate power, is one way forward.

MJS acknowledges Dairy Australia, The ATN Center for Metabolic Fitness and Diabetes Australia for research grants in the area of dairy, energy balance and metabolic health. Prior approval from these organizations was not required for the submission of this manuscript. The authors also thank the reviewers of this manuscript for their insightful comments.

Conflict of Interest

None declared

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Mukesh Ambani is world's 18th richest man: Bloomberg index

Mukesh Ambani is world's 18th richest man: Bloomberg index

Indian business magnate and Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani is the 18th richest person in the world with a personal wealth of $24.7 billion in 2012, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world's 100 wealthiest individuals.

Mexican telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim remained the world's richest person last year holding a personal fortune of more than $70 billion, it said.

Ambani, 55, has also retained his position as the world's richest Indian for the sixth year in a row and increased his ranking from 19th to 18th position and personal wealth from $21 billion to $ 24.7 billion in the world, the index showed.

IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad saw his net worth rising 16.6 per cent to approximately $40 billion, putting him in fifth place the index.

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The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

The Madness of White Bear — Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (pt. 3)

The various tricks artists and scientists through history have discovered for seemingly halting the motion of things—what Renaissance alchemists called “fixing the volatile”—and then reanimating the fixed under their own power have always seemed godlike; and the aspiration to exercise this power has always seemed arrogant or even blasphemous to some. We can only speculate, but it is worth asking whether some of White Bear’s kin (see previous post on Werner Herzog’s film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams) were not so supportive of his work.

Consider: The walls of Chauvet Cave are not layered with imagery and symbols in the manner of a modern urban canvas such as a freeway underpass. Graffiti is as old as civilization, but in Chauvet Cave there is none of that exuberant transformation of blank surface into picture. There were only a small handful of artists who left their images in the cave over the many, many millennia that humans could have visited and used it, and only some sections of wall have images. This must make us wonder how important or central figurative pictures actually were to the culture of these people.

The answer could be that the inclination and the genius to create images may have been relatively rare, the product of a very unusual sort of person who may have been regarded with as much distrust or suspicion as admiration by his (or her) fellows. Art, even religious art, always has its detractors.

I am purely speculating, but could these Paleolithic melancholics, these cave Michelangelos living under the sign of Saturn, have represented a departure from the philosophy of the dark that governed the prevailing shamanic culture? Could White Bear and his fellow artists, scattered in time, have essentially misused the cave as a canvas for their madness, blasphemously bringing light into what was supposed to remain in perpetual night?

One Response to “The Madness of White Bear — Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (pt. 3)”

  • That is nice to compare graffti to the cave art :-) I wasn´t realized this before reading your article..

    But graffiti will not last for ages :)

    Stephanie D. Ward recently posted..Making Beats to Create New Songs

Stephanie D. Ward on September 1st, 2011 at 9:03 am