Monday’s Activities Include book group, Dutch, walk

I had a Dutch lesson today! So fun that FC Emmen is doing well and thus in the news. My instructor had never been to Emmen, and wasn’t really sure where it was, but of course I’ve been more than once on various trips. The difference between having a city perspective on the Netherlands and a Friesland / Drenthe / Groningen perspective, I guess.

My phone call with K. was rescheduled because my walk with M. was rescheduled. The walk with M. was pleasant, altho by 2 p.m. it was about 80 degrees.

I DNF _Before They’re Gone_. I had a lot of trouble trying to read it; I kept getting hung up on my feelings about bringing kids _that_ young on trips that far off the beaten path. My compatriots in book club felt like I was being overly risk averse; I think they don’t really have any sense of the kinds of risks involved. But isn’t that always how this kind of difference in perspective works!

I cooked the chilequiles for lunch, but deviated a long ways from the Plated recipe. I more or less skipped the assemble the casserole part, since I wasn’t going to be able to melt the cheese anyway (I can’t have cheese). I would never have expected red sauce with a diced poblano in it to taste so different and so good; I’ll do that again. The tortillas turned into chips turned out very nice.

We cooked the salmon lettuce cups with lentils and chermoula for dinner. They were supposed to send a container of roasted red peppers but instead sent a red bell pepper with instructions on how to roast it. That’s the first time I’ve done that myself; the skin peeled off nicely. I’m still learning things.

I called my cousin J. It was nice to talk to him. We don’t ordinarily have phone conversations, but we had been texting and emailing back and forth, and it had reached a point where I felt like it would be really nice to have a ear-to-ear convo. And it was.

Link Fu: dementia and smoking

We know that smoking has all kinds of unpleasant health effects. Is there any kind of connection between smoking and dementia? Once upon a time, some commenters floated the idea that smokers would die of other things before developing dementia and thus be cheaper in terms of total health care — I somehow suspect that was never actually true.

Finland has a really high dementia rate.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28687259

But even with such a high background rate of dementia, heavy smoking in midlife makes it twice as likely.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101025161034.htm

Other studies concur, that smoking increases risk of dementia; a lot of those studies are optimistic about how much the risk drops if the smoker stops smoking:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4357455/

In China, women don’t typically smoke, but are typically exposed to heavy second hand smoke. And it increases their risk of dementia:

https://journals.lww.com/epidem/fulltext/2013/07000/Second_Hand_Smoke_and_Dementia.24.aspx

While an aging population is going to present us with a lot of challenges providing care for (and paying for care for) lots of people with lots of problems, hopefully, over time, our public health efforts to encourage people to stop smoking, and to reduce exposure to second hand smoke will result in a lower burden of dementia care (along with the other many benefits of reducing exposure to tobacco smoke).