Flannel Shirt

Indian Summer in San Francisco

The rains came

As you can see, things were pretty dry last year around April. Things have greened up quite a bit with this winter's rains. The water inside the Bay itself is now brown from all the runoff of the rivers running into it.

If you've got an extra $24 million burning a hole in your pocket

If you've got $24 million here's a little place in San Francisco you might want to pick up.

On Pacific Avenue. 

It's raining in the SF Bay Area

 

 

Okay, the last one was from the 1920s, but the rest are what the San Francisco Bay Area is going through this week. That would be rain and its consequences.

Giants win, again!

 

One step closer.

Gazpacho

It's good for your heart.

A regular consumption of gazpacho can contribute to reduce hypertension, according to a scientific study published in the journal Nutrition, Metabolism & Cardiovascular Diseases, by the researcher Alexander Medina-Remón, from the Department of Nutrition and Bromatology of the Faculty of Pharmacy and the Food and Nutrition Torribera Campus of the UB, as its main author.

Hypertension is a major public health problem; it affects about 25 % of the adult population. It is also the main risk factor of myocardial or cerebral infarction, which is a leading cause of death in western population. This new publication has analysed the effect of gazpacho consumption in 3,995 individuals of the study PREDIMED, which analyses the effects of Mediterranean diet on the population at high cardiovascular risk to prevent cardiovascular diseases.

To improve diet, to improve health

"Previous clinical and epidemiological studies associate the consumption of gazpacho's main ingredients (tomato, cucumber, garlic, olive oil, etc.) with an arterial pressure reduction," explains Alexander Medina-Remón. "This new scientific study," he continues, "states for the first time that a regular consumption of gazpacho is as beneficial as the consumption of its ingredients individually; so gazpacho can reduce hypertension."

According to the professor Rosa M. Lamuela, in charge of the Research Group on Natural Antioxidant of the UB and coordinator of the study, the protecting effect of gazpacho on arterial pressure has been a finding "an unexpected one, as it contains salt, one of the restricted ingredients to maintain arterial pressure levels. Despite this, the results of the study describe that arterial pressure of gazpacho consumers is lower than the one of non-consumers. The reason may be that bioactive elements of gazpacho counteract the effect of salt ingestion."

Carotenes, vitamin C and polyphenols

How can these results about gazpacho consumption be explained? According to the researcher Alexander Medina-Remón, "Gazpacho highly contains carotenes, vitamin C and polyphenols. The final balance of the bioactive elements of gazpacho and its salt content makes it to be cardio-healthy; in other words, at the end, the positive effect of all the ingredients that contribute to the reduction of arterial pressure prevails over salt's effect." Experts have also used statistical techniques of logistic regression to know to what extent the consumption of gazpacho can reduce the risk of suffering hypertension. As Medina-Remón remarks, "the risk could be reduced up to 27 % in some profiles of consumers."

Researching on the mechanism of action

The research groups of the following institutions have also participated in this multi-focus and interdisciplinary study: the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona, the IDIBAPS, the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM), the University of Navarra, the University of Valencia, the Rovira i Virgili University, the University of Malaga, the Instituto de la Grasa-CSIC, the San Pablo Healthcare Center, the University Research Institute on Health Sciences and the University Hospital of Álava. In the future, the research group will promote some study lines on the mechanisms of action that associate the consumption of food rich in polyphenols with an arterial pressure reduction, a process that probably is related to an increase of nitric oxide, a molecule with vasodilation properties on cardiovascular system.

At the Giants World Series victory parade in San Francisco

Sergio Romo, who pitched the bottom of the tenth inning and saved the final victory for the Giants:

The Panda does it three times!

The San Francisco Giants' Pablo Sandoval, The Kung Fu Panda himself, made a little history Wednesday in the first World Series game this year by hitting three homers in powering the Giants to an 8-3 win over the Detroit Tigers. 

And Barry Zito outdueled the Detroit ace, Justin Verlander, the best pitcher in baseball during the regular season this year. 

Sandoval's three-homer night ties the record for most homers in a World Series game, with Albert Pujols, Reggie Jackson and... Babe Ruth. Not bad. And like The Babe, The Panda is the kind of guy who never saw a buffet line he didn't like. 

So it was also a victory for fat guys. 

On to the World Series

Last night we were flipping around on the TV, between the final Presidential debate, the Monday Night Football game and the game seven playoff between the S.F. Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals. 

The ballgame started at five p.m. West Coast time, the debate at six, and the football game sometime in between. By the time the debate started the Giants were well on their way to creaming the Cards 9-0. There wasn't much to the debate except to discover that Romney's knowledge of geography is on par with Gerald Ford's. Mitt's foreign policy is apparently the same, only louder. The football game didn't get much traction in my brain. Joan and I had salads with our drinks, but there really wasn't all that much tension to require self-lubrication. It was fun to watch the crowds at AT&T, the people wearing panda hats, panda heads and all the other paraphrenalia that the fans there display. 

In the top of the ninth there was an epic downpour, this is the start of the rainy season on the West Coast, and if this were any other game it would have been called for rain. But with one out to go, the infield an indefinite rectangle of brown mud, Romo, another one of those bearded Giant relief pitchers, got the last Card to pop up to Marco Scutaro, an old vet the Giants picked up in the Summer as insurance, and that sealed the deal. Scutaro won the MVP for the series. He deserved it.

Wednesday is the mayoral debate here in Portland. It plays opposite the first game of the World Series. I'm presuming similar television dynamics.

In my old neck of the woods

Some guy riding a mountain bike went off a cliff not far from where I used to have a house on Westline Drive, in Daly City. Not smart but apparently nothing broken.