gordon.dewis.ca

I was getting caught up with a friend recently and he mentioned that he and his wife had had a bit of a scare a few days ago when their carbon monoxide detector went off. They quickly got out of the house and called the fire department who confirmed that there were elevated levels of CO in the house, particularly in the basement near their natural gas furnace and water heater.

Fortunately, no one was hurt.

A furnace guy spent three hours checking out their furnace and water heater, but he couldn’t find any problems, so the source of the carbon monoxide hasn’t been positively identified, which is a bit troubling. But they do have the carbon monoxide detector upstairs and I think they’re going to get another one for the basement.

Carbon monoxide is a colourless, odourless, tasteless gas that is highly toxic. It is formed during the partial combustion of compounds that contain carbon, particularly in internal-combustion engines. Basically, it bonds with red blood cells much more readily than oxygen molecules do, which brings on a whole host of unpleasant effects up to, and including, death. If you are poisoned, chances are that you won’t realize it since one of the effects is to make you dizzy and confused.

Purging it from your system isn’t simply a matter of getting into fresh air. Because it bonds so well to red blood cells, it takes a long time to work its way out, though breathing pure oxygen can help accelerate the process. There can be long-term effects such as memory loss, confusion or even permanent brain damage.

Sadly, six people from two different families in Ontario have died in the last month due to CO poisoning and it kills 300 people in North America every year.

Bad stuff.

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Over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that I start feeling crummy between 18 and 24 hours before a significant weather change. I haven’t kept any records to see if it’s predictable, but I suspect it is.

Well, yesterday evening around 10pm or so, I started feeling crummy, which persisted through to sometime this afternoon. Even now, I’m still feeling a little blah. I happened to see the nurse at work this afternoon and we chatted about this for a bit. She told me that I’m not the first person to mention something like this to her and described, almost perfectly my symptoms, namely feeling kind of "fuzzy" like you have a headache about to form.

So, I looked up the air pressure readings for Ottawa for the last twenty-four hours. I started feeling under the weather (sorry!) around the same time the pressure started dropping. If you click on the graph at the right, you’ll be able to see a larger version.

The graphical area forecast (GFA) for the Ontario-Quebec region for 8pm this evening (click on the image to the left) shows Ottawa sitting on the 996 millibar isobar, so it doesn’t look like the pressure is going to drop much more than it has.  (At 5pm it was 99.9 kPa or 999 millibars.)

Oh, and I just looked out the window to see the first snowflakes of the season.  Sigh.

I’ve been reading a travel-related blog called Gadling lately.  Recently, one of the bloggers there recounted his experiences on a Southwest Airlines flight and ranted about the fact that he wasn’t served peanuts on the flight.  Apparently, Southwest Airlines opted to not serve peanuts because one of the other passengers was very allergic to peanuts.  The blogger was very skeptical that there are people with allergies that are so severe that they can’t even be in the vicinity of the allergen.

Unfortunately, there are.  And there’s an increasing number of people with nut allergies. 

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Three days ago I made a comment in my entry about Campbell’s soup that the government would probably adopt legislation concerning sodium levels in Canadian food within the next year.  Well, this morning’s Ottawa Citizen has a front-page article titled Health Canada wages war on excessive salt intake.  It reports that there is now a federally appointed working group that is tasked with developing a plan to reduce sodium levels in food.  It’s expected that they’ll recommend Canada adopt the British strategy, which has seen the average daily intake of sodium by adults in Britain drop by 500mg between 2001 and 2006.  The impact on pre-packed meals has been a 45% reduction in four years and 85% have already reached the targets set for 2010, which is a more than one third reduction.

It’s about time.

Data from the Canadian Stroke Network indicates that nearly 11 000 Canadians a year die because of the effects of excessive sodium intake.  It has been linked to hypertension (high blood pressure), stroke, cardiovascular diseases and asthma, to name a few things.

So, hopefully this sounds the end of the roast beef sandwich with 2 grams of sodium in it.

Campbell soups for kids and some of their other soups are becoming healthier (story that tipped me off). The amount of sodium per serving is being lowered to 480 mg.

Sodium is found in most things you eat and particularly in processed foods. Some products, such as bagels from the Ottawa Bagel Shop have a mere 5 mg of sodium per bagel. I was talking with someone at the shop about this a couple of days ago and he confirmed that the only sodium in their bagels is that which occurs natually in the ingredients. Other bagels, particularly the mass-produced ones, are often made from dough similar to bread dough, and have a much higher sodium content.

Statistics Canada published results of the 2004 Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) last April that revealed that most Canadian consume much more sodium than is necessary or recommended. The Statistics Canada report quotes the Institute of Medicine recommended daily adequate intakes for sodium as being 1500 mg for someone aged 9 to 50. I blogged about the 2000 mg of sodium that was in a sandwich I bought on an Air Canada flight in December and how unhealthy that was.

My guess is that we’re going to see legislation on sodium levels in food similar to those in Europe introduced sometime in the next year or so.

Kudos to Campbell’s for taking the initiative and doing this voluntarily. Hopefully other food companies will follow their lead and work at making their products a little healthier.

I flew from Ottawa to Edmonton via Toronto today (Wednesday) on Air Canada. Sometime in the last couple of years Air Canada changed their fare structure and stopped providing hot meals on the longer domestic flights. Instead, they have a snack cart from which you can buy things to munch on. For sale are chips, pretzels, chocolate bars, bags of carrot sticks, and apple slices with caramel dipping sauce. Also on the menu are things like little pizzas (though not always available), and a selection of three sandwiches from Quiznos. (There are also some breakfast things that are often available on flights that start before a certain time.) I’ve been watching my sodium intake since earlier this year and paying a lot of attention to the nutrition score boxes printed on almost every food item that’s for sale these days.

Sodium intake has been linked to hypertension (high blood pressure). Hypertension has been linked to all sorts of problems including heart disease, heart attack, congestive heart failure, stroke and other things, all of which tend to lead to premature death. Statistics Canada published results of the 2004 Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) last April that revealed that most Canadian consume much more sodium than is necessary or recommended. The Statistics Canada report quotes the Institute of Medicine recommended daily adequate intakes for sodium as being 1500 mg for someone aged 9 to 50. Nationally, the typical Canadian consumes 3092 mg of sodium, with the provincial levels ranging from 3350 mg and 3300 mg in Quebec and British Columbia, respectively, to 2871 mg in Ontario, the only province significantly below the Canadian figure.

Because of the limited selection by the time the cart made it to me, I ended up buying a roast beef Quiznos sandwich. Reading the score box, I was appalled to discover that the small sandwich had 2000 mg of sodium in it. That’s one-third more than the recommended average daily intake for someone my age. It’s easy to see why Canadians have so much sodium in their diet.

Unfortunately, the elimination of meals on Air Canada, at least for economy class fares, means passengers no longer have the same selection of meals they once did. I’m not sure exactly how many meals you could choose from, but there were meals for almost everyone from Kosher to vegetarian to gluten-free to low-sodium. So, if I’m trying to keep my sodium intake below the recommended limit of 1500 mg, there’s very little on Air Canada’s snack cart that I can eat, particularly as I have yet to see the full selection available on any of the 14 flights I’ve taken in the last seven weeks.